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CORNELL UNIVERSITY LIBRARY 
 
 3 1924 074 293 287 
 
THE CASE OF THE 
 
 KEY. E. B. FAIEFIELD, D.D., LL.D. 
 
 EXAMINATION OF HIS " REVIEW OF THE CASE 
 OF HENRY WARD BEECHER," 
 
 TOGETHER WITH 
 
 HIS "REPLY" AND A REJOINDER 
 
 ROBERT R. RAYMOND. 
 
 Also, an Appendix containing Letters, etc., bv Rossitbb W. Raymond, 
 AMD "HOR-e Tiltonian-c'* from the * WiNSTED Herald," 
 
 NEW YORK: 
 
 1874. 
 
INTRODUCTORY NOTE. 
 
 On the loth of September there appeared in the 
 Mansfield Herald, of Mansfield, O., an article, twelve . 
 columns long, entitled, " Wickedness in High Places, a 
 Review of Henry Ward Beecher's Case, by Rev. Edmund 
 B. Fairfield, D.D., LL.D." This article appeared to 
 me to be characterized by a spirit so malign, and a 
 literary and logical method so unscrupulous, that, with- 
 out regarding myself as competent to set forth and 
 expound the case of Mr. Beecher, I did feel called to 
 show this reckless assailant in his true colors to the 
 world. 
 
 This I have aimed to do in the following papers, 
 originally published in the Mansfield Herald. 
 
 R. R. R. 
 
(From the Mansfield Herald, Oct. i, 1874.) 
 
 MALICE IN HIGH PLACES. 
 An Open Letter to Rev. Edmund B. Fairfield, D.D., LL.D. 
 
 Sir : Your sermon, comprising a " Review of Henry^ 
 Ward Beecher's Case," has just been placed in my hand. 
 I call it a sermon, although it appears as a contributed 
 article in the Mansfield Herald, because it bears internal 
 evidence of having been designed for oral delivery, is 
 defended by you as a fit and proper production for the 
 pulpit, and was only prevented from appearing there — 
 as I am informed and believe — by the indomitable 
 repugnance of your people to such a desecration of that 
 sacred place. 
 
 There is no mistaking the purpose of this perform- 
 ance. It is simply a deadly blow at the good name and 
 future usefulness of Mr. Beecher. It does not even pre- 
 tend to be an inquiry into the complicated evidence 
 which has caused perplexity to so many able minds on 
 both sides of the question. This presents no difficulties 
 to you ; nor do the tremendous interests involved — the 
 happiness of families, a ministerial reputation of forty 
 years' standing, the honor of the Christian cause, and the 
 faith and love of millions of bleeding hearts — avail even 
 to give you a moment's pause. The evidence of which 
 the Investigating Committee is possessed has not yet 
 
been published. Many, too, are waiting in hopes of a 
 toofe thorough sifting of the complex testimony in 
 the courts. But for you the case is closed. "It is 
 fiow before the public for decision," you say ; and so, 
 you hasten to decide it. The most you claim is a 
 "judicial" attitude and spirit; but certainly neither the 
 Sources of your judicial responsibility nor your fitness 
 or preparation for the exercise of judicial functions 
 appear in this "Review." i 
 
 Indeed, the partisan malignity of the article is so 
 palpable in every paragraph, and almost every line, of 
 the whole twelve columns — without one redeeming con- 
 sideration, one suggestion of possible hope or doubt, one 
 word of kindness or regret, to relieve the dreary waste 
 of hateful misrepresentation — that it might well be 
 allowed to drift unnoticed on its way down to the exe- 
 crations of posterity, in company with the Tilton and 
 Moulton statements, the spirit of which it emulates, and 
 the fate of which it will undoubtedly share. Neverthe- 
 less, because I recognize in it a certain representative 
 character, as the first open utterance of a hostile power 
 which has long been at work under the surface — I mean 
 the power of Clerical Jealousy, finding its source and 
 field of operations mainly in the West — I propose to give 
 your paper some attention. 
 
 I write on my own responsibility, and without con- 
 ference with any beyond the limits of my own family;' 
 and my purpose is, not so much to follow your mis- 
 called analysis through all its countless perversions and 
 sophistries, as to show by some of its salient features 
 that, however important it may be that " Henry Ward 
 Beecher's case" should undergo a thorough and im- 
 partial review, the author of that article, by reason of his 
 evident animosity and prejudice, his careless inaccuracy 
 of statement, his gross perversion of the facts in evi- 
 
dence, and his illogical treatment of all the testimony, is 
 utterly unfit to conduct it. 
 
 And first, as to the spirit with which you approach 
 your ungracious labor. You write yourself the pastor of 
 a Congregational church. If you are indeed a Congre- 
 gationalist, you know there is nothing more fundamental 
 and vital to our polity than the equality of the brother- 
 hood. That " profession " or guild — separate, self-per- 
 petuating, and jealous of its peculiar rights — whose inter- 
 ests you seem to assert in distinction from those of what 
 you call the "laity," is unknown to the true gospel 
 church. You are not recognized in this discussion as 
 the Reverend Edmund B. Fairfield, D.D., LL.D., — rabbi- 
 ed all over to the garment's hem with vain alphabetical 
 distinctions, designed to lift you upon a higher plane of 
 privilege than that occupied by your humble breth- 
 ren. This question lies between Brother Fairfield and 
 Brother Beecher. And in this view, what has been your 
 course in the premises .' The good old Congregational 
 rule without which there can be no proper ecclesiastical 
 action against an offending brother — " go and tell him 
 his fault between thee and him alone " — how do you 
 stand with reference to this generous, fraternal provision 
 against all slander and all cold-hearted judgment ? Have 
 you ever put yourself in personal communication with 
 this man, of whom you " have been, for many years, a 
 warm admirer and devoted friend," but whom you have 
 so promptly expelled from your esteem ? Have you ever 
 looked into his clear and truthful eye, saying : " These 
 things sorely perplex me, my brother ; give me your own 
 explanation of them".? No; I'll venture you have not. 
 It is one of the burning shames connected with this scan- 
 dal, that though there has been abundant clerical cau- 
 cusing about it, and endless gossiping, from Illinois to 
 Connecticut and back again, we have yet to hear of the 
 
6 
 
 first minister who has adopted this simple expedient of 
 Christian fellowship to reach the facts and, at the same 
 time, discharge that fraternal ofi&ce to the accused, which, 
 whether he were innocent or erring, would be alike his 
 due. On the contrary, some whose volunteered partici- 
 pation had been both active and conspicuous, when 
 urged to go and " hear these things from his own lips," 
 were suddenly possessed with a dispensation of tearful 
 tenderness and " could not bear to look him in the face 
 in the hour of his humiliation./' It is instructive to re- 
 flect how many cruel misconceptions as to Mr. Beecher's 
 attitude toward this scandal might have been precluded 
 by a little Christian manliness on the part of his clerical 
 brethren at this and other periods of its history. But 
 then it is so much less trying to the sensibilities to ful- 
 minate from the editorial tripods of Chicago or to issue 
 decrees from the "judicial " pulpits of Ohio! 
 
 It might at least have been expected that one who 
 was drawn to this duty with so much "agony of soul " 
 as you profess would, before reaching the unwelcome 
 conclusion, have visited the scene of the event, and con- 
 versed with those who, knowing all the minor circum- 
 stances, could throw that light upon the entire transac- 
 tion which may best be elicited in private conference. 
 If you had done this, your paper, in its present form, 
 would never have been written ; or at least you would 
 have had the satisfaction of feeling that, having used 
 every available means of arriving at the truth, you had 
 not played the assassin rather than the judge, and " made 
 that murder which should be a sacrifice." 
 
 But this you did not do. You were more congeni- 
 ally employed in colloguing with those who could supply 
 you with rumors magnified by distance, and statements 
 distorted by the various ugly motives which dominate 
 poor human nature at such times. The whole tone of 
 
your article, the ill-concealed bitterness it betrays, and 
 the curious perversity with which it misstates the facts of 
 evidence and wrests all the testimony to a foregone con- 
 clusion, can only be accounted for on the theory of some 
 outside influence, some presumed knowledge of facts, 
 unknown to your readers, on which your mind was made 
 up before you began to examine the published evidence. 
 Traces of this, indeed, crop out here and there ; as when 
 you say of Mrs'. Tilton's confession, " she made it to at 
 least one other person whose name I withhild. It will 
 come to the public by-and-by, I think." Again, of Mr. 
 Beecher's advice about the separation : " When we come 
 to know all the facts in the case, we shall find out that he 
 himself never gave that advice at all." That Mr. Tilton 
 in his recent statement supplies this hitherto missing link 
 is a striking coincidence, and indicates the general di- 
 rection of that subterranean conduit through which you 
 receive exclusive information of the "facts in the case." 
 How convenient it must be for a " judicial " person, when 
 the testimony falls short, to have a reservoir in his pocket 
 from which he can draw for the emergency ! 
 
 This prejudgment of the case accounts for your 
 eagerness to get before the public while part of the evi- 
 dence still remains unpublished, and to contribute an 
 early missile to the stoning of the accused. In your 
 usual manner, in which confident assertion is- made to 
 supply the lack of more solid foundation, you affirm that 
 "the whole charge of improper treatment of her (Mrs. 
 Tilton), by her husband previous to four years ago, is not 
 only unsupported by any evidence, but contradicted by 
 the most irrefutable proofs." The "irrefutable proofs" 
 of the Tiltonian domestic harmony consist, I suppose, 
 of the assurances of the Tiltonian confrires. Carpenter and 
 Moulton, and the absurd array of connubial correspond- 
 ence which Mr. Tilton, having full possession of his 
 
wife's letters, could cull and arrange with that masterly 
 knack at compilation in which he has no rival. But as 
 to proof of a contrary state of things, besides the cir- 
 cumstantial and evidently truthful testimony of Mrs. Til- 
 ton, corroborated by Bessie Turner, there is further 
 evidence, yet to be published, at which even you will 
 find it impossible to cavil. But you cannot wait for this 
 evidence ; such is your hurry to convict. 
 
 Another indication of the spirit with which you ap- 
 proach thi^ discussion is seen in your absurd comment 
 on the constitution of the Investigating Committee, and 
 the action of Plymouth Church upon its report. You say 
 "the very manner of raising the committee" was a "con- 
 fession of conscious guilt;" you find fault with Mr. 
 Beecher for not calling a council instead ; you talk of it 
 as a "jury," and demand why " the accuser " was not 
 allowed some part in making it up ; you say the accused, 
 on the contrary, " picked his men, selecting only his 
 sworn friends," and so it was a '' packed " jury of the 
 worst kind, appointed expressly to " defend, vindicate, 
 and acquit." Upon the heel of this, you are of course 
 disgusted that the proceedings of the committee were not 
 conducted after the manner of other "courts;" that 
 lawyers were not allowed upon both sides instead of only 
 one; and ("unheard of and unprecedented thing"!) that 
 Mr. Beecher was allowed to be heard at all, and to tell 
 his own story "as an offset to the testimony against him." 
 This you stigmatize as " a burlesque upon civil and eccle- 
 siastical courts." Not half so much as a man who does 
 not know the difference between a formal ecclesiastical 
 trial and a preliminary inquiry by a church committee as 
 to whether there shall be any trial, is a burlesque upon a 
 Doctor of Laws. 
 
 The history of this whole transaction is a simple one, 
 and the " animadversions " upon Mr. Beecher's choosing 
 
9 
 
 his own committee are equally preposterous whether 
 received at the hands of an " impartial press " or those 
 of a single "judicial" doctor. This body was first 
 chosen at the suggestion of some friends, to meet Mr. 
 Beecher's wish and then cherished hope of preventing a 
 wide-spread scandal and general revelation of names. 
 He decided, under advice, upon these six as the best 
 men, because of their widely known character for intelli- 
 gence and for unimpeachable integrity, to receive an un- 
 reserved revelation of all the facts and, withholding the 
 detailed evidence, to give the result of their inquiries to 
 the world. That they were "friends" of Mr. Beecher 
 is true ; he would have been compelled to go very far 
 beyond the bounds of Plymouth church and congrega- 
 tion to compose a committee of any other than friends. 
 
 A few days revealed the fact that the mischief had 
 outrun all possible expedients for averting the publicity 
 which has since proved so widely disastrous. On all 
 sides arose the importunate cry, " Why does not Ply- 
 mouth Church investigate ?" and the church herself, 
 though she had looked on with quiet scorn when the 
 disreputable Woodhull was clamoring in the streets, be- 
 stirred herself on finding that irresponsible rumors had 
 taken the form of accusations from a quasi-respectable 
 source. 
 
 Mr. Beecher now informed the Examining Committee 
 (a permanent body on which the duty devolves of pre- 
 liminary inquiry in all cases of discipline) what steps he 
 had taken, and suggested the adoption on their part of 
 the same committee, since it had already commenced its 
 labors and made some important progress. As these 
 were just the sort of men the Examining Committee 
 would have itself selected, they were readily accepted, 
 and became a sub-committee to that body, and thus en- 
 forced with all the sanction and authority of the church 
 
10 
 
 itself — as much so as if they had been originally chosen 
 in a regular church-meeting. In all this the church was 
 actuated by a spirit of earnest, thorough, uncompromis- 
 ing investigation, and its committee reflected the same 
 spirit in all their honest, intelligent, and laborious pro- 
 ceedings. It was never pretended to put Mr. Beecher 
 on his trial before this body. He was subjected to a pa- 
 ternal and affectionate scrutiny in the house of his 
 friends; nobody ever claimed anything else, or pro- 
 posed any other guaranty of impartiality than the per- 
 sonal integrity of the jnen engaged, their pledge of 
 faithfulness, their abhorrence of the alleged offense and 
 their zeal for the honor of the Christian name. Their 
 lawyers were their own counsel (not Mr. Beecher's), 
 whose office was to guide their inexperience in eliciting 
 truth and protect them in their delicate task from col- 
 lision at any point with the civil law. What had such 
 an impertinence as a cross-examination by the accuser's 
 counsel to do in a body like this, engaged in a family in- 
 quiry into the conduct of a beloved brother? Ytl you 
 would have admitted the accuser with his lawyer, and 
 shut out the very brother into whose conduct they were 
 appointed to inquire ! Why, sir, you have not the re- 
 motest glimmering conception of the meaning and proc- 
 ess of discipline in a Congregational church. 
 
 But, not satisfied with a contemptuous assault upon 
 the integrity of the committee, you dare to assail the 
 church itself with the most injurious imputations. Not 
 content with hints and flings, that "nobody was sur- 
 prised at their action " — implying at the same time that 
 said action was grossly unworthy — you are so anxious to 
 impair the force of Moulton's fatal admission in a letter 
 to Mr. B., that the latter could " stand if the whole case 
 were published," as to aver without shame that Plymouth 
 Church would adhere to Mr. Beecher and retain him in 
 
11 
 
 his pastorate, even though his adultery were confessed or 
 proved upon him. It is difficult to deal with a man who 
 calls himself a Christian minister, and yet allows himself 
 to employ such language as this. What is there in the 
 character or career of Plymouth Church which can 
 justify so abominable an imputation.? Her work and 
 her spirit have been before all the churches for more 
 than a quarter of a century ; and is her history indeed such' 
 as to persuade her sister churches that she, more than 
 they, would be content, and even happy, to have an 
 adulterer and a perjurer for a pastor! Yet this is your 
 best word for a Christian brotherhood, humble, prayer- 
 ful, laborious in every good work, and bound together in 
 an almost unparalleled unanimity — because, living close 
 to the scene of this affair, and familiar with all the facts 
 and all the parties, after as careful an examination as it 
 knows how to make, and having its own very life at 
 stake, it comes to a different conclusion from yours! 
 What a source of satisfaction it must be to you that your 
 ally, the " heathen " Moulton, has set down in his last 
 statement a precisely similar estimate of the good sense 
 and purity of the disciples of Jesus Christ ! 
 
 But it is truly superfluous to cull from your article 
 single indications of that bitter and uncharitable dispo- 
 sition which pervades its every line and all its expres- 
 sions. Hardly have you commenced to lay out the plan 
 of your discussion before, most indecently and quite 
 gratuitously, you speak of Mrs. Tilton as Mr. Beecher's 
 " guilty accomplice " ; while such terms as " paramour," 
 "pettifogging," "double-dealing," and the like, fall, on 
 every possible occasion, with an evident relish from your 
 pen. You pretend to have froin Mrs. Tilton 's hand 
 " a letter too vile to find its way into a decent news- 
 paper," by copying which you will not "defile" your 
 " manuscript " — whereas no such letter ever existed, ex- 
 
13 
 
 cept in the corrupt interpretations put upon language 
 which to the pure mind is perfectly innocent. You in- 
 sult Mrs. Beecher, one of the most dignified and high- 
 spirited of women, by suggesting that, having discovered 
 an anachronism in one of her husband's statements, she 
 gave him a warning hint of which he subsequently 
 availed himself. Mrs. Beecher helping her husband to a 
 lying defense against a charge of criminal conversation 
 with another woman ! 
 
 But enough, and too much, about the animus of your 
 " judicial " performance ; let us glance at a few features 
 of it, illustrating the accuracy with which you present 
 the case. Upon this characteristic of your work, as con- 
 stituting a claim to the confidence of the reader in your 
 conclusions, you lay great stress. 
 
 You say, ''I have felt called upon to examine it 
 thoroughly. * * * Had my life depended upon it, I 
 do not know that I could have been more thorough." 
 Yet in the very outset you utter, without hesitation or 
 sign of doubt, a positive falsehood. Speaking of the 
 frequency with which Mr. Beecher visited the house of 
 Mr. Tilton, you dare to add: "Professor Raymond 
 acknowledges, in a published article, that he had heard 
 this spoken about, complainingly, long before there was 
 any charge of immorality." (The italics are mine.) 
 Now, there never was any such article published, never 
 any such word spoken, nor any such thought enter- 
 tained, by any Professor Raymond that ever lived. A 
 matter of small consequence, it is true ; but what sort of 
 a record is this for a man who boasts of thoroughness 
 and careful accuracy? 
 
 Another beautiful specimen of that circumspection in 
 the statement of facts which becomes a man who has 
 "examined" them with the good name of a brother at 
 stake: 
 
13 
 
 "How did this exposure come about?" you ask, and 
 then, with your usual air of oracular precision, you con- 
 tinue : " You remember a part of it, and I will tell you 
 the rest. In the private sessions of the Brooklyn Coun- 
 cil, Dr. Bacon said: 'Mr. Beecher is one of the most 
 magnanimous of men, and Mr. Tilton one of the most 
 contemptible. Mr. Beecher is like Sir Lancelot, and 
 Tilton like one of Sir Lancelot's dogs. Brother Beecher's 
 mistake has been in not understanding that a puppy is 
 an undeveloped dog!' That speech reached Mr. Til ton's 
 ears : he went to Beecher and said to him, ' You know 
 the facts, you edit a paper; relieve me of that unjust 
 odium, or I shall be compelled to do it myself.' Mr. 
 Beecher replied, ' I can't do it without criminating my- 
 self.' He didn't do it. Hence Tilton's letter to Dr. 
 Bacon, and hence this whole exposure." 
 
 Heaven only knows where you picked up this farrago 
 of nonsense. You must have "evolved it" from that 
 "inner consciousness" which has, in so many other 
 parts of your "Review," supplemented the scarcity of 
 evidence suited to your purpose. The real facts, patent 
 to all the world, are these : Dr. Bacon, not " in the pri- 
 vate sessions of the Brooklyn Council," but after his 
 return from that Council, in a lecture to his theological 
 students, subsequently printed in the N. Y. Tribune, refer- 
 ring to what he considered Mr. Beecher's misplaced 
 magnanimity, in suffering himself in order to screen his 
 assailants, made use of the following words (I quote now 
 from Tilton's own citation of the language in his letter of 
 complaint to the Doctor): "So of Launce, who went 
 _ jnto the stocks and the pillory to save his dog from exe- 
 cution for stealing puddings and geese. I think he 
 would have done better to .let the dog die. And I think 
 Mr. Beecher would have done better to have let ven- 
 geance come on the heads of his slanderers." 
 
14 
 
 I have no desire to emphasize the ridiculous aspects 
 of this performance — the production of a silly misquota- 
 tion from a published address as a fresh revelation from 
 the debates of a secret council, and the stupid blunder 
 about "Sir Lancelot" and "Sir Lancelot's dogs." The 
 sins of this paragraph are of a graver type. When the 
 Saturday Review, dealing with the unscrupulous mis- 
 quotations of a brilliant modern historian, said, "Mr. 
 Froude does not seem to have fully grasped the nature 
 of inverted commas," it was regarded as a terrible 
 arraignment and none the less severe for the euphemistic 
 moderation of its terms. It was virtually stigmatizing 
 the offender as a literary liar. Does a Doctor of 
 Divinity really need to be informed that to include be- 
 tween quotation-marks language invented for a purpose 
 by himself, and thereby distinctly attribute that language 
 to another, is dishonest? If, then, it is unpardonable 
 for you, by a sort of verbal metempsychosis to make Dr. 
 Bacon a donkey, is it not absolutely atrocious that by 
 putting your own words into his mouth you should make 
 Mr. Beecher a confessed criminal ? 
 
 In another place you remark, " Every reader remem- 
 bers that after Tilton's letter to Dr. Bacon, Mr. Beecher 
 had a long interview with his deacons and others — three 
 hours' talking, in which the prominent thing was the apol- 
 ogy and its explanation. The next day he came out in 
 half a column with a general denial and a specific ex- 
 planation of the apology," etc. (Italics mine.) 
 
 The only possible authority for this statement is a 
 false and foolish account made up, in the dearth of 
 news, by a reporter, and contradicted on the following 
 day. That account described the meeting, named the 
 persons present, and put a speech into the mouth of 
 each. But neither those persons nor any others had held 
 any such meeting or made any such speeches. The 
 
15 
 
 whole thing was false. Nor did Mr. Beecher then, or at 
 any time previous to the appearance of Mr. Tilton's full 
 charges, come out in half a column, or any other fraction 
 of a column, about the "Apology." 
 
 I content myself with one more instance of this pecu- 
 liarity. With a great flourish of anticipated triumph, 
 you announce the discovery of an " astounding fact," to 
 which (remarkably enough !), you " have seen no allusion 
 in any of the newspapers." Mr. Beecher had adduced 
 the advice given by himself and his wife to Mrs. Tilton, 
 in her domestic difficulties, as one of the elements which 
 entered into the anguish and repentance expressed in 
 the so-called "apology." What then must have been 
 your exultation when, with an acumen that transcended 
 the malice of Tilton, the subtlety of Moulton, and the 
 skilled observation of all the lawyers and all the editors, 
 you detected the monstrous discrepancy that the obnox- 
 ious advice " was not given until the very last part of 
 July, 1 87 1, nearly seven months after that letter was writ- 
 ten!" (Italics yours.) It seems a pity to spoil the half 
 column of sarcastic comment, sharpened and driven 
 home by every known typographic expedient, which fol- 
 lows upon this announcement. I am nevertheless com- 
 pelled to declare that there is not a word of truth in the 
 statement upon which it is all founded. What imp of 
 fatuity inspired you to this unnecessary exposure of your 
 incompetence, or what remote source of knowledge or 
 secret chamber of your own brain furnished you the 
 amazing fact which proves so disastrous to its discov- 
 erer, I can scarcely conjecture. But whatever may 
 have been the source of the error, it gives a good idea of 
 the thoroughness with which you have examined the 
 case. You say it has been as great as if your " own life 
 were at the stake." This may furnish a very just stand- 
 ard of the value of your own life, but it falls rather short 
 
16 
 
 of the estimate you should place upon the character of 
 another. 
 
 As I write these words, I receive the Herald of the 
 17th inst., and notice that your attention has already 
 been called to this blunder. But you do not make man- 
 ly acknowledgment, admitting that there is absolutely 
 nothing in the case to justify your absurd misplacement 
 of an important event. No ; you say it " seemed clearly 
 proved " to you, but if any reader " prefers to accept the 
 testimony of Mrs. Tilton " (by which you ought to mean 
 the testimony of Mr. Beecher, Mrs. Beecher, Mrs. Morse, 
 and Mrs. Tilton, corroborated by the admissions of Mr. 
 Tilton on cross-examination), " so far as this argurqent is 
 concerned," you are " entirely willing to concede it." 
 The truth is that you are trying to cover with an assump- 
 tion of dignity a piece of incautious folly of which you 
 should be heartily ashamed. But you proceed on the 
 new basis to perpetrate what is worse, a deliberate sup- 
 pression and distortion of the truth. . I cannot follow 
 you through the mazes of this new iniquity; but I call 
 your readers to note that in pretending to give, " accord- 
 ing to his (Mr. Beecher's) own statement," the "new 
 light" which, coming between Mr. Tilton 's accusa- 
 tion and Mr. Beecher's "apology," had caused the latter 
 to change his opinion of Mr. Tilton and to repent the 
 advice given to Mrs. Tilton, you omit altogether two vital 
 facts : first, that Mrs. Tilton (his chief authority for be- 
 lieving Tilton to be a bad man) was represented to him 
 as having recanted the retraction given to him, so that 
 he was forced to consider her broken in mind ; and sec- 
 ond, that Moulton earnestly denied all the stories about 
 Tilton, represented him as the victim of slander, and 
 convinced Mr. Beecher that he had been lending himself 
 to the defamation of his friend. Now, sir, was this " new 
 light," or not.' Is it in Mr. Beecher's statement, or not? 
 
17 
 
 Have you omitted it or not? And will you now begin 
 to realize that^^« are on trial, and that renewed assaults 
 on Mr. Beecher will not save you ? 
 
 I had marked many passages which show with what 
 unscrupulous freedom you handle the evidence, to make 
 it accomplish the end to which you have plainly ad^ 
 dressed yourself. You seem to have thrown away the 
 whole of Mrs. Tilton's testimony, except what serves 
 your purpose, and the whole of Mr. Beecher's, because 
 in your judgment he ought not to be allowed to testify 
 at all, in a properly constituted court; while Tilton's 
 and Moultoa's you find available to the last extent — un- 
 less they are conspirators, which you do not believe ! 
 You represent the professed motive of Mrs. Tilton's 
 confessions as "fear," pure and simple; whereas it was a 
 much more subtle and complicated one. You give a 
 malicious interpretation to her act of leaving her hus- 
 band, contrary to the differing stories of both her hus- 
 band and herself. Because Tilton says she " confessed " 
 to her mother, you assume that fact as proved, though 
 the mother's testimony distinctly denies it. You pass con- 
 veniently over the great significance of the retraction scene, 
 as showing beyond question what was the charge against 
 which Mr. Beecher was then striving to protect himself. 
 In the pistol scene, where the retraction was given up, 
 you suppress the fact that a subsequent " recantation " 
 had rendered that paper comparatively useless ; and you 
 carefully omit to mention the offer of a far more prom- 
 ising method of dealing with the affair, subtly suggested 
 by the tempter at that critical point of time. The in- 
 fluence of the pistol you exaggerate, and are contradicted 
 therein both by Mr. Beecher and by Moulton. 
 
 You pervert also the facts in the matter of the "Apol- 
 ogy." You say, "And now ^^ (Mr. Beecher) begins his 
 letter," when you know very well that it was in no sense 
 
18 
 
 "his letter;" that he did not "begin it" at all; and that 
 he did not sign it as a letter is signed. His own state- 
 ment gives a natural and consistent explanation of the 
 whole transaction. But that doesn't matter; you have 
 an argument by which you reach the conclusion that 
 this paper was virtually a letter of which Mr. Beecher 
 was the author; and that has all the force of a funda- 
 mental fact with reasoners like you. 
 
 These perversions and misstatements, occurring all 
 through your discourse, are the sluice-ways through 
 which you pour an everlasting flood of contempt in ital- 
 ics and objurgation in "small caps." You belong to a 
 school of logicians who, on the inconsiderable condition 
 of being allowed to manufacture the premises, engage to 
 bring one to any given conclusion. I submit that having 
 laid down, in your peculiar fashion, what is and what is 
 Twt in evidence in this case, you might have spared your 
 readers at least ten of your twelve mortal columns, writ- 
 ten Q. E. D. at the end of a compact little demonstra- 
 tion, and rested upon your laurels. 
 
 A single additional important example of this con- 
 venient method of falsifying the evidence, to furnish 
 ground for a world of momentous inference and indig- 
 nant comment, must suffice. 
 
 A large proportion of your severest language is 
 founded upon the insufficiency of the reasons alleged 
 by Mr. Beecher for his four years' suffering — as though 
 to say : These are the causes he alleges ; but they do 
 not fully account for his fear, his remorse, his efforts "at 
 concealment ; then, if these are not enough, there must 
 have been something else ; and if something else, what t 
 WHAT.? OWHAT? 
 
 Your argument, as briefly stated by yourself, stands 
 thus: 
 
 " But what are the offenses over which he was thus 
 
19 
 
 suffering ? According to his own statement, these two 
 only : 
 
 " I. He had a great while before* advised Mrs. Tilton 
 to leave her husband. 
 
 " 2. He had counseled Mr. Bowen to secure some- 
 body else to edit the Independent." 
 
 This is the text on which you so voluminously and 
 sarcastically dilate. But this is a vital point to you, sir, 
 as well as to Mr. Beecher. If you have misrepresented 
 the facts here j if you have left out an essential part of 
 Mr. Beecher's explanation of his suffering ; if you have 
 concealed a chief reason of his remorse and desire for 
 secrecy, then your pharisaical rhetoric falls to the ground, 
 and you stand revealed as a calumniator. Your life 
 does not depend on this issue, but your reputation does ; 
 and if you value that in yourself which you are so swift 
 to destroy in another, I advise you to renew the " study " 
 you boast of having devoted to Mr. Beecher's statement, 
 and to turn your attention to the following passage, 
 taken from his description of the interview at which 
 Moulton wrote the so-called " apology " : 
 
 " The case, as it then appeared to my eyes, was 
 strongly against me. My old fellow-worker had been dis- 
 possessed of his eminent place and influence, and I had 
 counseled it. His family had well-nigh been broken up, 
 and J had advised it : his wifi had become sick and broken 
 in mind and body, and I, as I fully believed, had been the 
 cause of all this wreck, by continuing with blind heedless- 
 ness a friendship which had beguiled her heart and roused 
 her husband into a fury of jealousy, though not caused 
 by any intentional act of mine. And should I coldly de- 
 
 * This is not " according to his statement ; " but I cannot 
 pause over such small perversions. Your little errors may be unin, 
 tentional ; but they are all one way, which gives them a bad look, 
 
30 
 
 fend myself? Should I pour indignation upon this 
 lady ? Should I hold her up to contempt as having thrust 
 her affection upon me unsought ? Should I tread upon 
 the man and his household in their great adversity ? I 
 gave vent to my feelings without measure. I disclaimed 
 with the greatest earnestness all intent to harm Theo- 
 dore in his home or business; and with inexpressible 
 sorrow I both blamed and defended Mrs. Tilton in one 
 breath." 
 
 It is not my purpose here to argue the truthfulness 
 or the adequacy of this portion of Mr. Beecher's ex- 
 planation.- What I mean to do with it is to place it by the 
 side of your assertion that, " according to his own state- 
 ment, these two only " — namely, the advice to Bowen 
 and the advice to Mrs. Tilton — were the faults for which 
 Mr. Beecher blamed himself. Do you not think that a 
 minister ought to reproach himself if made to believe" 
 that he has heedlessly, though unintentionally, beguiled 
 the heart of an innocent woman from her husband.' 
 And if he frankly declares that this belief caused him 
 to feel remorse, what is your opinion of another minister 
 who omits to mention this part of his brother's explana- 
 tion — nay, gives another part as absolutely the whole ? 
 I will not ask what such a statement would be called in 
 the pulpit ; and I need not ask what name is given to it 
 by English-speaking gentlemen. 
 
 But, while on this subject of significant omissions, let 
 me call attention to an instance or two of your sagacity 
 in comparing testimony which conflicts upon crucial 
 points. 
 
 Is it not a little strange that a man examining the 
 evidence in this case as you profess to have doney should 
 have overlooked the flat contradiction between Mr. 
 Beecher's accusers on the most important point .' Your 
 convenient manner of ignoring or setting aside as false 
 
21 
 
 what Mr. Beecher says will not here avail you. It is in 
 the statement of Tilton and Moulton, which you have 
 examined with affectionate minuteness, that this fatal 
 discrepancy stares you in the face. Mr. Tilton says : 
 
 "At this interview between Mr. Beecher and Mr. 
 Tilton, permission was sought by Mr. Beecher to consult 
 with Mrs. Tilton on that same evening. This permission 
 being granted, Mr. Beecher departed from Mr. Moul- 
 ton's house, and in about half an hour returned thither, 
 expressing his remorse and shame, and declaring that his 
 life seemed brought to a sudden end." 
 
 Mr. Moulton says of the same occasion : 
 
 " Tilton remained at my house while Beecher was 
 absent at Tilton 's house, and when he returned there was 
 no conversation between them. * * * During this 
 evening nothing was said by Beecher as to the truth or 
 falsity of Mrs. Tilton' s confession. * * * j returned 
 to my house and had some conversation with Tilton, in 
 which he told me that he had recited to Beecher the 
 details of the confession of his wife's adulteries, and the 
 remark which Beecher made was, ' This is all a dream, 
 Theodore,' and that was all the answer Beecher made 
 to him." (The italics in both extracts are my own.) 
 
 Bear in mind that this is the most important piece of 
 collateral evidence in such a case — the behavior of the 
 accused when the accusation is first made. And you, 
 sir, examining the evidence as if your life depended upon 
 it, never notice this vital discrepancy! If you had 
 noticed it, your explanation would doubtless have been 
 ready. You would have said, " this is one of those small 
 points of difference which prove the truthfulness of the 
 witnesses. They are too sagacious to have left such a 
 contradiction in a concocted story!" Such, at least, is 
 your handy method with other self-revealed lies in 
 Tilton's narrative. You think absurdities, contradic- 
 
23 
 
 tions and incredibilities prove Tilton's sagacious sincer- 
 ity, while the slightest fancied inconsistency in Mr. 
 Beecher's statement, or in anything that anybody has 
 said in the newspapers in his defense is damning evi- 
 dence of his guilt! If your life, Reverend Sir, did 
 depend on such an examination of any evidence against 
 you, you would certainly be hanged. 
 
 Again, why did you overlook Mr. Tilton's declara- 
 tion that "for about a year after Mrs. Tilton's confes- 
 sion her mind remained in the fixed opinion that her 
 criminal relations with Mr. Beecher had not been morally 
 wrong, so strongly had he impressed her to the contrary : 
 but at length a change took place in her convictions on 
 this subject, as noted in the following letter addressed by 
 her to her husband " — to which introduction Mr. Tilton 
 appended the well-known letter in which Mrs. Tilton 
 declares that through the ministry of Catherine Gaunt, a 
 character in a novel, her eyes have been opened to see 
 her sin.' Why do you to omit to note Mr. Tilton's ad- 
 mission that when he published this letter he had for- 
 gotten that Catherine Gaunt in the story did not commit 
 adultery, nor dream of it — nay more, that he had an 
 impression that that was her offense.? Why do you 
 ignore the significant circumstance that the husband of 
 Catherine Gaunt did commit that crime, and that this 
 was the cause of his wife's estrangement from him, and 
 of her " sin " in seeking sympathy (iiot criminal inter- 
 course) elsewhere? 
 
 Why did it not occur to you, as it has occurred to 
 others, that if a letter which Tilton published under a 
 mistake turned out to be strong proof of his wife's inno- 
 cence, a good many letters may have been suppressed or 
 destroyed by him which would have confirmed this 
 providential evidence.? You choose not to remember 
 that Mrs. Tilton, leaving her house, left all her letters in 
 
23 
 
 it, not dreaming how their, innocent words could he 
 distorted by blackguards and misunderstood by clergy- 
 men; and that Tilton spent days in selecting and 
 arranging these papers. You choose not to remember 
 that some of Mr. Beecher's letters may have been sim- 
 ilarly kept back or destroyed by Moulton. You prefer 
 not to recognize the advantage which the confederates 
 have in this case, in the possession of nearly all the 
 documentary evidence, and the power to destroy, unde- 
 tected, such of it as would expose their machinations. 
 
 But this letter must be brought to a close. Its object 
 has not been to make out a case for Mr. Beecher before 
 a Western public ; and I have not pretended to go into 
 his defense. Your people must judge of this matter for 
 themselves. It could not, of course, be expected that 
 they would come so promptly or so enthusiastically to a 
 verdict of acquittal as have those before whom this be- 
 loved minister has gone in and out for twenty-seven 
 years. His intercourse with our families has been patent 
 to our eyes, through all that time, as peculiarly frank and 
 guileless. We are intimately acquainted with the sources 
 from which this onslaught comes, and have watched the 
 working of the motives that produced it, long before the 
 precise form in which they would openly reveal them- 
 selves could ber divined. We have felt from day to day 
 that spiritual power in the preaching and the conversa- 
 tion of this alleged criminal which, were the source in- 
 deed so polluted, would make it no longer preposterous 
 to seek for grapes from thorns or figs from thistles. I 
 repeat that people at a distance must judge this matter 
 by a careful and independent examination of the evi- 
 dence when it is all before them, and when they have 
 obtained what light they need to guide them. Good 
 men will at least not hasten to an adverse conclusion for 
 fear of a "ruinous discount " on their credit for " sagaci- 
 
u 
 
 ty;" but in that charity which "hopeth all things, be- 
 lieveth all things," will refuse to condemn while hope 
 and belief are possible. 
 
 But however they may pursue their inquiries, and to 
 whatever decision they may eventually be brought, if 
 they decline henceforward to be guided by your dingy 
 and malodorous lantern, the purpose of this paper will 
 have been accomplished. 
 
 And now, sir, I take my leave of you and of this out- 
 rageous production of your pen. The indictment against 
 you stands without a flaw in the Court of Justice, of 
 Charity, of- God. You have hurried to abet an in- 
 famous assault upon a minister of Jesus Christ, with wea- 
 pons forged out of all envy, malice and uncharitableness. 
 There is not a particle of " justice, truth and fair deal- 
 ing" (which you profess to love) — to say nothing of 
 Christian fraternity — from beginning to end of your 
 shameful tirade. And yet you were a friend of Mr. 
 Beecher. Of course; such heart-thrusts always come 
 from "friends." Tilton was Mr. Beecher's "friend." 
 You say, " Mr. Beecher was his idol." Moulton was Mr. 
 Beecher's "friend," and deplores the infatuation that 
 exchanged his benignant protection for the injudicious 
 championship of Plymouth church. But, thank heaven, 
 a winnowing time has come, and Mr. Beecher has lived 
 to learn who are his true friends. Of " how a heathen 
 can serve " him, he has had ample and satisfactory ex- 
 perience. With the full meaning of the phrase, " perils 
 among false brethren," as well as " perils among the hea- 
 then," I think he is now likely to be made acquainted. 
 Be it the task of his own people at last to show him the 
 unalterable devotion with which the family of Christ de- 
 fend and comfort an innocent brother in distress. 
 
 What action you and the clerical gentlemen who 
 sympathize in your style of doing things may take upon 
 
25 
 
 the " case of Henry Ward Beecher," though it may con- 
 cern us later, is not at present of absorbing interest. The 
 influence of our action upon the outside world has not 
 been studied so much as our duty to our Master and our 
 brother; but we are not without cheering proofs of the 
 support of good men everywhere. Conscious of the sin- 
 cerity and well-grounded reason of our course, we will 
 try to bear up under your dogmatic assumption of its 
 absurdity and wickedness. The unprincipled accusers 
 may pile statement upon statement and letter upon letter, 
 but the unimpeached and truthful story of Mr. Beecher, 
 taken in connection with what we know of the history of 
 the case, furnishes a clue to them all ; and the slanders are 
 destined, with their contrivers and abettors, to a common 
 grave of infamy. If Mr. Beecher is innocent, you say, 
 " his accusers are worthy of the direst condemnation and 
 the most withering scorn." To such retribution I be- 
 lieve, before God, they will surely come, and with them 
 all those kindred spirits who have sought by perversion 
 and sophistry to second their unholy purpose. Let me, 
 then, suggest that in your next recurrence to this theme 
 you devote your energies not so much to Henry Ward 
 Beecher as to the Rev. Edmund B. Fairfield, D.D., 
 LL.D., who needs your best offices of apology and de- 
 fense. Robert R. Raymond. 
 Brooklyn, Sept. 19, 1874. 
 
[In the same number of the Herald in which the foregoing ap- 
 peared, Dr. Fairfield indulged in two replies, one on the outside, and 
 the other on the inside, of the paper. They are here given in the 
 order of their appearance.] 
 
 From the Mansfield Herald [outside'], Oct, i, 1874. 
 
 A CARD FROM DR. FAIRFIELD. 
 
 To the Editors of the Herald: 
 
 Having, by your favor, been permitted to read the 
 proof-sheets of the article of Prof. Raymond in your 
 this week's issue, I find that it is so entirely made up of 
 personal flings and gross misrepresentations of fact, which 
 your intelligent readers will be able to detect for them- 
 selves, that I think the advice of Solomon, in Proverbs 
 xxvi. 4, applies in full force to me in reference to it. It 
 would be easy to point out the fallacies of the article, 
 and to answer every point which the writer has made. 
 But it would not be worth while for me to do it. I have 
 something else to do than to give myself to this thing. 
 I have said what I believe to be true, and in obedience 
 to an overwhelming conviction of duty have uttered my 
 voice against a great wrong. The first moment that I 
 come to entertain a single doubt of Mr. Beecher's guilt I 
 will hasten to say so, from both pulpit and press. But I 
 think the time is not far off when there will be no differ- 
 ence of opinion among all honest men in reference to 
 this matter. The future will reveal itself; and having 
 done my duty as I see it, I shall submit to all the oblo- 
 quy and all the scurrilous assaults that may come. 
 
 E. B. Fairfield. 
 
27 
 
 {From the Mansfield Herald \inside\, Oct. i, 1874.) 
 
 DR. FAIRFIELD'S REPLY TO PROF. RAYMOND. 
 
 PREFACE. 
 
 The reader will see from my card on the previous 
 page how I felt on Saturday last. It was not till the 
 close of the Sabbath's labors that it occurred to me that 
 many might be misled by the very audacity and self- 
 assumption of Prof. Raymond's article, and be ready to 
 conclude that my card was simply a cowardly retreat, 
 and a confession of the things charged; and that very 
 likely Prof. R. himself would so claim. So, upon " sober 
 second thought," I concluded that it was Proverbs xxvi. 
 5, that applied to this case. And here is my answer : 
 
 To Professor Robert R. Raymond : 
 
 Dear Sir : — Your letter to me is just received and I 
 hasten to reply. You will pardon me for my ignorance 
 in riot knowing of what you are Professor, or in what 
 college or university you hold such Professorship. But 
 as my reference to ''''Prof. Raymond" was understood 
 by you to refer either to yourself or your son, I assume 
 without questioning that you have a legitimate right to 
 such title, and will not sneer at your assumption of it. 
 No one knows better than I do the worthlessness of mere 
 titles, professional, honorary, or otherwise. But you un- 
 derstand very well- the custom of college catalogues, and 
 having been for more than twenty years connected with 
 a college in Michigan, and my name appearing in two or 
 three hundred thousand catalogues, and three times as 
 many official circulars, and my titles — worthless as all; 
 
28 
 
 titles are — having been "conferred from twelve to seven- 
 teen years ago, may account for the careless attachment 
 of them to the Review which has arrested your attention. 
 You will not offend me at all, nor either of the three hon- 
 ored universities in New York, Ohio, and Indiana, from 
 which they came, if you leave them off entirely in any 
 correspondence, public or private, which you may choose 
 to have with me. But when you suggest that this is a 
 case between " Brother " Fairfield and " Brother " Beech- 
 er, I must be allowed to say that, with my present knowl- 
 edge of the facts, I will excuse him entirely from 
 addressing me in any such fraternal way, and beg to be 
 excused from so addressing him, until he shall have 
 heeded the call of John the Baptist and brought forth 
 works meet for repentance. 
 
 Your reference to the Jewish title of "Rabbi " in this 
 connection is singularly infelicitous for one answering so 
 readily to the title of " Professor." For a Professor ought 
 certainly to know that there is no other title in our lan- 
 guage that corresponds so perfectly to the one of which 
 the Pharisees were so proud, as that which I judge you 
 so constantly hear. " I venture to say " that you are 
 "Rabbi-ed " ten times as much as I. This, it is true, is 
 a very unimportant matter, but illustrates the old proverb 
 about living in glass houses and throwing stones. 
 
 You are correct in conjecturing that my article in The 
 Herald was intended for public delivery in my own pul- 
 pit; not upon the Sabbath, however, but upon a week- 
 day evening. I am of those who believe that whatever 
 it is fit that a minister should say at all, it is fit that he 
 should say from the pulpit of a Christian church, in form 
 of lecture, if not for sermon. My article was not intend- 
 ed for r". " sermon," but for a public address. 
 
 If you "have been informed and believe" that I was 
 " prevented " from delivering it by any such cause as you 
 
29 
 
 speak of, your information and your belief are both er- 
 roneous. I voluntarily abandoned the original intention, 
 after the first part of my article was in type, for four rea- 
 sons : (i.) The very kindly suggestion of two excellent 
 brethren who thought that it perhaps would not be best, 
 because it would be understood as committing the church 
 as a whole to the view which I took of the matter. 
 There was no dictation ; no attempted dictation by any- 
 body. At the close of the very friendly talk I said, " It 
 seems to me that it will be best to deliver it; but I will 
 think it over and decide." No farther word was uttered, 
 by tongue or pen, but in deference to the judgment of these 
 brethren I was inclined to forego the delivery of the ad- 
 dress, and let the types, simply, speak for me. Indeed, this 
 had been my first thought in preparing the article ; the 
 subsequent conclusion to deliver it was the result of the 
 desire expressed by several to hear it. ' Finding that any- 
 body objected, I fell back readily to my original purpose, 
 and should have done so unhesitatingly, but for the form 
 of words which had already been printed upon the first 
 page of the Herald, to which you refer as the "in- 
 ternal evidence of its having been designed for oral 
 delivery." 
 
 My boyhood was spent in a printing office. Full 
 seven years of my life had been thus occupied. I wrote 
 nearly the whole of my article with no other thought 
 than to send it to the press. The change of words to 
 adapt it to " oral delivery " were interlineations, which 
 required the type-setter some labor to decipher. In 
 abandoning, at friendly and very kindly suggestion, the 
 public delivery, I' only carried out my original purpose. 
 You will be pleased to understand that my church are 
 not in the habit of dictating to their minister. 
 
 (2.) I the more readily gave up the delivery, because 
 I found the article long enough to occupy two full hours, 
 
30 
 
 which I deemed an unreasonable length for a short 
 evening. 
 
 (3.) I found that it would be difficult, if not impossi- 
 ble, to have it in readiness for the evening which had 
 been fixed upon, while for getting it ready for publica- 
 tion I should have two days' more time. 
 
 (4.) Lastly, it would save me the unnecessary labor 
 of delivery, as it had been already determined to print, 
 and the printing was half completed. 
 
 Pardon me for taking so much of the time of a 
 stranger away off in Brooklyn to listen to these explana- 
 tions ; but you seem to have an inquiring mind in refer- 
 ence to our strictly local matters, and by some means to 
 have fallen into a mistake in reference to them, so these 
 few rays of true daylight may assist you in your wander- 
 ings. 
 
 And then you 'begin by impugning my motives in 
 this review, and charge me with " malice " and " malig- 
 nity," with " personal animosity " and " jealousy," and I 
 know not what else. This is not unexpected. It has 
 been characteristic of much of the defense which you 
 and others have made of the pastor of Plymouth church. 
 No man escapes from these imputations and calumnies 
 who has the honesty and manliness to dissent from those 
 who insist upon vindicating this man at all hazards. 
 
 "Jealous " of Mr. Beecher ? What proof have you 
 of that ? And do you understand that it is the teaching 
 of your Christianity to utter such a charge at random? 
 Do you know that for all these years that Mr. Beecher 
 has been pastor of Plymouth church I have been known 
 as " a Beecher-man " by all who have known me at all ? 
 That I have rejoiced in his success .' — in his triumphs at 
 home and abroad.' 
 
 Is this the way of " jealousy " ? I have rejoiced in 
 this man's prosperity; I have boasted of his genius; 
 
31 
 
 everywhere and always I have spoken the best words that 
 I knew in his praise. All my congregation and personal 
 acquaintances know that until the evidence of his crime 
 became so overwhelming to my mind that I felt that I 
 must stultify myself utterly, and debauch my own con- 
 science and reason, if I stood up for him any more — 
 until that crisis was reached I was recognized as fore- 
 most in his defense. 
 
 At present there are two classes of those who 
 defend this man : (i) Those who are sincere, and 
 believe him guiltless. (2) Those who act the part 
 of the attorney, whose business it is to make the 
 best defense he can for his client, although he knows 
 him to be guilty. I belong to neither of these classes. 
 If I should say I believe him innocent, I should speak 
 falsely. If I should say I had the slightest doubt 
 of his guilt, I should speak falsely. Do you ask me 
 to be guilty of such falsehood as that? And believ- 
 ing him guilty and that those who are most conversant 
 with the case are deliberately and knowingly playing the 
 part of attorneys, to the great disgrace of religion and 
 the Christian ministry, I cannot hold my peace without 
 conscious dishonor, and complicity with a great wrong. 
 In that case I should do the very thing for which Mr. 
 Beecher's friends are now so fiercely denouncing Frank 
 Moulton: that, believing him an atrocious offender, he 
 has held his peace, and has covered up the wrong these 
 three years past. 
 
 You charge me with "prejudice." You are mis- 
 taken. My intensest prejudices were all on the other 
 side. But the overwhelming evidence has entirely con- 
 quered them. A man's prejudices, if he is honest, must 
 yield to truth. I stood by this man till the last lingering 
 doubt evanished. And now, in common with others, I 
 must be assailed with all sorts of calumnies, and charged 
 
52 
 
 with "malice," "malignity," "personal animosity," and 
 "clerical jealousy." 
 
 And in connection with this last charge, you speak of 
 "clerical jealousy, finding its source and field of opera- 
 tions mainly in the West." This is rather an unfortunate 
 mistake for a "Professor" to make. For jealousy, as 
 any English dictionary will show, implies competition 
 and rivalry. There might be some plausibility in charg- 
 ing some of Mr. Beecher's neighbors in Brooklyn with 
 jealousy, were it not that the noble company of ministers 
 resident there are men of too large soul and heart to be 
 justly obnoxious to such a charge. And yet I know 
 very well that this charge has been a thousand times 
 reiterated against the grandest men on this continent — 
 resident in your own city. But to charge clerical 
 jealousy upon ministers from 600 to 1,600 miles away, is 
 a blunder as well as a crime. 
 
 And then, I am blamed because I did not first go to 
 Brooklyn and tell Mr. Beecher his fault in the Gospel 
 way — "between thee and him alone." Is that written in 
 sincerity, or is it mere cant ? Have you been to Mans- 
 field to see me, and tell me my fault, and to say, 
 "These things which you have written sorely perplex 
 me, my brother. Give me your explanation of them " ? 
 No! I'll venture you have not! You read my article, 
 and without one word of correspondence to ask me to 
 explain, you have made your violent assault, not only 
 charging me with misstating facts, but charging me with 
 the dasesi motives for saying one word against this man. 
 And not only that ; but sneeringly you say — or your son 
 for you — "I want no private correspondence with Mr. 
 Fairfield!" Would it not be better for you to practice 
 somewhat upon your own teachings, before you preach 
 any more? 
 
 But you mistake again; for I did the very thing 
 
33 
 
 which you blame me for not doing. I waited before I 
 wrote one word for Mr. Beecher to make his own expla- 
 nations. I had read the charges and the evidence. 
 They were terrific against him. I could see no way of 
 escape. But I waited — waited patiently. The whole 
 world waited till he had given his own explanations. 
 They filled twenty columns. I read them — re-read them. 
 I never gave up my last hope till then. But when I 
 found his own explanations full of falsehood, full of con- 
 tradictions and most palpable absurdities — then I was 
 compelled to say : Whatever else he may not be guilty 
 of, he has most certainly stated a score of things which 
 he must have known to be false. For he had every 
 possible means of knowing. There could be no liability 
 to mistake ; it was a plain and palpable case of inten- 
 tional misrepresentation. It is not necessary to look 
 into a man's face to know whether he speaks the truth 
 or not. If he can assume an honest look while he speaks 
 palpable falsehood, so much the worse for him ; this but 
 shows the hardening process of years of hypocrisy. That 
 Mr. Beecher could deliberately make a statement so 
 crowded with absurdity is proof, I fear, of that adept- 
 ness that comes only of long practice. 
 
 And now as you so recklessly impugn my motives for 
 condemning this man, let me ask you. What motive can 
 you conjecture that should thus explain my conduct "i 
 
 Is it friendship for Mr. Tilton, who has made this 
 charge .' I have never had any friendship for this man. 
 I have never even seen him. My prejudices have always 
 been against him. And my friendship, all of it, on the 
 other side. Mr; Beecher's father was well-nigh my own 
 father's ideal. My attachments to the whole family have 
 been warm and strong from boyhood up. But I need 
 not dwell on this. You cannot suggest any possible mo- 
 tive that I should have for a malicious assault on this 
 
34 
 
 man. My denominational pride was against it ; my per- 
 sonal pride was against it ; my national pride was against 
 it Everything was against it. 
 
 But how about your defense of him.' Now, sir, if 
 you do not know how the outside world look at the 
 matter, you ought to. Everybody outside of Plymouth 
 church and its immediate friends sees that you have 
 every earthly motive for defending this man to the very 
 last. 
 
 (i.) Your friendship for Mr. Beecher. I know the 
 strength of that motive myself. It is hard to resist it 
 and see the truth when it militates against those whom 
 we have loved, admired, and believed in. I have heard 
 more than one man say, " If this man is guilty, I don't 
 want to know it ! " It has been publicly stated that at 
 least one of the Committee of Six said that very thing. 
 It is natural. All this power of personal friendship 
 presses upon Plymouth church to make them shut their 
 eyes to facts. And " none are so blind as those who will 
 not see." 
 
 (2.) Your prejudice against Mr. Tilton. It has been 
 very strong in Plymouth church for years. He is known 
 to have denounced Mr. Beecher, and many of your 
 church have been for a long time fostering their preju- 
 dices against this man, as Mr. Beecher's chief accuser. 
 This is a very strong motive to explain the wrong action 
 of your Committee and of the church. 
 
 (3.) All your church pride has been against a fair 
 trial of your pastor. And such pride is hard to conquer. 
 You have been the most noted church in America. It is 
 very hard to overcome such pride and see the truth in 
 spito of it. 
 
 {4.) You have been financially a very successful 
 church. Your income has been without a parallel. 
 And thus everybody sees that in defending Mr. 
 
35 
 
 Beecher at all hazards and determined to make him out 
 innocent, friendship, prejudice, pride and self-interest con- 
 spire to blind your judgment. The strongest of all 
 earthly motives press upon you to lead you to a wrong 
 decision, in upholding and vindicating him in spite of 
 the clearest proof of guilt. 
 
 You know full well that in a court of law any one of 
 these four considerations would exclude a man from 
 serving on a common jury. A blood relative of the 
 accused — even though there be no proof of friendship — 
 is excluded, because his family pride would stand in 
 the way of a fair verdict. Your family pride in your 
 pastor, and your natural vanity and ambition as the most 
 popular church on the continent, is a motive quite as 
 strong as either of the other three. And everybody 
 knows that special friendship for the defendant, special 
 prejudice against the plantiff, and pecuniary interest in 
 the result, are everywhere in courts of law deemed valid 
 reasons for excluding any one from a jury. ■ 
 
 Not one of all these motives, or any other of which 
 I can think, can operate upon me, and upon the many 
 thousands who agree with me, to induce an unfair ver- 
 dict against this man. All, except the matter of pecu- 
 niary interest, operate upon us to acquit him and not to 
 condemn him. Is n't it about time this outcry of selfish 
 motives on the part of those who bring in a verdict of 
 "guilty" should cease, when it is so entirely palpable 
 that all such selfish motives are on the other side ? 
 
 You think a "Doctor of Laws" ought to know the 
 difference between a jury to try a man and a body of 
 persons whose business it is to make a preliminary inves- 
 tigation. I agree with you. And I think the most 
 ordinary " Professor" ought to know that a Grand Jury, 
 whose business it is to make such preliminary investiga- 
 tion, is in the habit of receiving all testimony against 
 
36 
 
 the accused with the largest generosity. So that instead 
 of rejecting testimony which a petit jury would be re- 
 quired to receive, ihey give the fullest weight to the 
 evidence of the accuser. So that if even there be a 
 prima facie case against the accused, he should be 
 indicted and put on trial. 
 
 But what did your committee do in their " prelimi- 
 nary investigation '? You know what they did. You 
 or your son read their report. And you know that they 
 threw out the testimony of Mr. Moulton and of Mr. 
 Tilton entirely, although it was full and explicit. 
 
 And on what grounds .' That these men were con- 
 spirators against Mr. Beecher. And how do they make 
 that out } Simply thus : The charge which they first 
 made was only " improper advances ;" afterward " crim- 
 inal intimacy," they say. And this change of indict- 
 ment proves these men conspirators ! In my previous 
 paper I showed with sufficient clearness the absurdity of 
 this. 
 
 But what now will your Committee of Six say for 
 themselves, in view of the startling evidence of the last 
 few days? You know what I refer to: the publication 
 of a portion of your own church record, directly contra- 
 dictory of this statement of the committee ! 
 
 They declare that until very recently there was no 
 charge of anything more than " improper advances," by 
 either Tilton or Moulton ; while upon their own church 
 books stands the following : 
 
 "I, William F. West, charge Theodore Tilton, a 
 member of this church, with having circulated and pro- 
 moted scandals- derogatory to the Christian integrity of 
 our pastor, and injurious to the reputation of this- 
 church." 
 
 And then follow the specifications— three in number. 
 You will excuse me from copying from the first two, as 
 
37 
 
 they are not absolutely essential to the argument, though 
 all of them bear very hard on the committee. But the 
 third specification is sufficient. It reads thus : 
 
 " Third — At an interview with Mrs. Anna Bradshaw, 
 in Thompson's Dining Rooms, in Clinton street, on or 
 about the third day of August, 1870, Theodore Tilton 
 stated that he had discovered that a criminal intimacy ex- 
 isted between his wife and Mr. Beecher. Afterward, in 
 November, 1872, referring to the above conversation, 
 Mr. Tilton said to Mrs. Bradshaw, that he retracted none 
 of the accusations which he had formerly made against 
 Mr. Beecher. 
 
 "Witness: Mrs. Anna Bradshaw." 
 
 What will your committee be able to say for them- 
 selves.' In their report, which you or your son read, 
 they ask : " What is the proof that the charge in the first 
 instance was adultery.?" The papers report that this 
 sentence, with several others like it, were pronounced 
 with very effective elocution ! 
 
 Here is the answer in your own church record, made 
 last October, in which Mr. Tilton is charged with having 
 said three years and two months before, and repeated near- 
 ly a year before, that adultery had been committed ; and 
 yet your committee declare to the world in August, I874, 
 that Mr. Tilton's testimony is not to be received, becg,use 
 he had never until recently made any accusation of that 
 sort ! And the church clerk, Mr. Shearman, acting as 
 Mr. Beecher's counsel, and in constant intercourse with 
 the committee ! Was there ever a more astounding 
 blunder committed by any six men .' You know very 
 well that they made their whole case to rest on this arch, 
 excluding utterly Mr. Moullon's and Mr. Tilton's testi- 
 mony on this ground alone ! And yet, under this blow, 
 not only is the key-stone of their arch gone, but the 
 whole arch is ground to powder ! Would it not be well 
 
38 
 
 for some of the various professors or lawyers in your 
 church to run over a little your church records, before 
 another such suicidal blunder is committed by " a com- 
 mittee of investigation "? 
 
 Was my criticism upon your committee too harsh? 
 Is it not doubly evident that they were appointed to vin- 
 dicate, not to investigate ? They could break the force 
 of the absolutely overwhelming evidence of the two main 
 witnesses only by charging them with a conspiracy. They 
 could think of no other way to indicate that but by 
 this suggestion of their having made a stronger charge 
 latterly '^dia. formerly. And this, as I proved in my former 
 review, even were it. true, could easily be explained. 
 But now it comes out that a charge had been previously 
 presented to your Examining Committee, and by them 
 sent to Mr. Tilton, through their clerk, setting forth that . 
 Tilton had charged the full crime of criminal intimacy 
 upon Mr. Beecher, only thirty days after his wife's con- 
 fession ! And five months before he had confronted Mr. 
 Beecher himself with it ! 
 
 And so that other point, which Mr. Beecher and his 
 defenders have so persistently made against Mr. Tilton, 
 that it is impossible he should have kept this thing to 
 himself for six months — that, too, is blown to the winds ; 
 ydffr own church record proving that he did not keep it 
 to himself. 
 
 I would not speak harshly of your committee. The 
 only difficulty is that they had a most arduous task be- 
 fore them. They did as well as they could in defending 
 Mr. Beecher. But even they could not perform impos- 
 sibilities. 
 
 You charge me by very direct implication with being 
 in confidential communication with Mr. Moulton, Mr. 
 Tilton, and their "confreres." To this it is sufficient to 
 say that I have never seen either Tilton, Moulton or 
 
39 
 
 Carpenter ; nor have I ever received a word from them 
 nor written a line to them, or to any of their clique; nor 
 have I ever had any correspondence, to the best of my 
 knowledge, with any person in their confidence. Is this 
 denial sufficiently explicit and comprehensive ? How I 
 became informed of the " name which I withhold " is of 
 no consequence to you, or to the public. Both you and 
 they will find out in due time that I was not mistaken. 
 The other remark which you quote — " that when all the 
 facts are known it will be found that Mr. Beecher never, 
 at any time, advised Mrs. Tilton to separate from her hus- 
 band " — I made, not because of any private information, 
 but from what then seemed, and what still seems to me, 
 the necessary logical inference from all the testimony 
 before the public. 
 
 I will now proceed to review that point in my former 
 paper; and I wish to begin by correcting one mistake 
 which I then made, and that was in reference to the 
 clear proof of the time at which Mrs. Beecher's advice 
 to Mrs. Tilton is said to have been given. Not Mr. 
 Beecher's. I made no mistake in regard to that, as I 
 will show pretty soon. You will see that the point is 
 one of no material bearing upon the main issue ; for the 
 question is as to the statement of Mr. Beecher respect- 
 ing advice which he gave, not his wife. But inasmuch 
 as, incidentally, I made the point, I wish to explain 
 clearly how I w^as misled; and it was simply by what I 
 have discovered was a misprint, though I did not have 
 the slightest suspicion of it at the time. The testimony 
 bearing upon the matter I read in the Detroit Tribune, 
 a paper ordinarily very well printed ; and not till after the 
 publication of my review was my attention called to the 
 point by a friend who sent me his copy of the testimony in 
 the Chicago Times j and I found that the whole seventeen 
 columns were the same in both, except in a single para-. 
 
40 
 
 graph, and that paragraph corresponded perfectly in the 
 two papers, except in the dates, and these, with the 
 names of the months printed in full, were seven months 
 apart. Since then I have obtained the New York 
 Graphic, and found that the time in that corresponded 
 with the one given in the Chicago Times. I have no 
 doubt of its correctness; and on this point I was thus 
 led astray. 
 
 I am glad always to be corrected in any mistake which 
 I have made. And the above is the explanation of it. 
 If I am to be blamed for not reading over all this tes- 
 timony in several diiferent papers, I must submit ! With 
 those who know me personally I have no need, I trust, 
 of witnesses to attest my truthfulness. Our common 
 friend, M. Day, Jr., from whom I differ entirely on this 
 subject, bears voluntary testimony to my honesty, I no- 
 tice, and you will probably accept his testimony as final. 
 But as others, as well as you, who are strangers to me, 
 may read these columns, for your perfect satisfaction, as 
 well as theirs, I have requested the editor of the Herald, 
 who has examined the two papers, to add a note at the 
 bottom.* 
 
 I am particular about this ; for your charge involves 
 both my veracity and my care in examining the testi- 
 mony. I plead " not guilty " to both charges. As the 
 testimony stood, plainly printed, I was justified in all 
 that I alleged. As it is, it still remains entirely, clear 
 that Mr. Beecher certainly gave no such advice prior to 
 January i, 1871. And that he never gave it at any time 
 
 * Having examined the two papers to which Dr. Fairfield re- 
 fers, I find tha thing to be as he states it ; that the two paragraphs 
 perfectly correspond, except that the dates given are seven months 
 apart ; and that the paragraph is one referring to the time at which 
 Mrs. Beecher gave her advice to Mrs. Tihou to separate from her 
 husband.— Ed. Herald. 
 
41 
 
 is almost equally certain. The main points of the proof 
 are as follows : 
 
 [i.] Mrs. Tilton's own letter of January 4, 1871. In 
 it she says: "I indignantly deny that I ever sought sepa- 
 ration from my husband — as I have declared it a hundred 
 times before. The story that I wanted a separation was 
 a deliberate falsehood, carried by my poor mother to my 
 husband's enemy, Mrs. H. W. Beecher. I feel outraged 
 by the whole proceeding." 
 
 You will not deny the authenticity of this letter. You 
 may find it lithographed in the Graphic of August 22. 
 And the whole style of the letter is so earnest and indig- 
 nant that it carries the conviction of its honesty ~and~ 
 truthfulness. This letter, written then, is better proof 
 than any statement she can make now on the other side. 
 This letter was not enforced. It bears date only three 
 days after the apology. And it is point blank against the 
 theory that Mr. Beecher now sets up. 
 
 [2.] Still more conclusive than this, even, is Mrs. 
 Morse's letter of Jan. 27, 1871. You remember that Mr. 
 B. claims to have given this advice in an interview held 
 with both these women jointly. So that if it were thus 
 given, Mrs. Morse would have known of it. And yet 
 this letter to Mr. Beecher, so far from implying that, 
 plainly implies the exact opposite. The following are 
 her own words : " You or any one else who advises her to 
 live with him, when he is doing all he can to kill her by 
 slow torture, is anything but a friend." 
 
 These words of reproach were received by Mr. 
 Beecher, according to his own acknowledgment, Jan. 27, 
 less than four weeks after his apology. If only six weeks 
 before he had, in the presence of Mrs. Morse, advised 
 separation, as he now pretends, would Mrs. Morse be 
 thus reproaching him for advising her to live with him ? 
 And the authenticity of this letter you will not dispute. 
 
42 
 
 for you will find it lithographed on the same date men- 
 tioned above. 
 
 [3.] After the most diligent search that I have been 
 able to make, I have not been able to find that Mrs. 
 Tilton in her testimony before the committee made any 
 statement of that kind, in reference to Mr. Beecher. I 
 do not think I could have overlooked it ; but if you will 
 send me any of your city papers, containing her full 
 statement, in which that is found, I will promptly ac- 
 knowledge it in The Herald. Until then I shall rest in 
 tiie conviction that I am correct. But I want nothing 
 but the truth. This point I know is of very little conse- 
 quence, for her letter at the time is conclusive. But if, 
 even now, her testimony agrees with that, it adds to the 
 force of it. 
 
 [4.] Mr. Moulton's testimony agrees with this. " Mr. 
 Beecher," he says, " remarked to me on the first of Jan- 
 uary that /le had been told by his wife and others that Mrs. 
 Tilton desired a separation," &c. And then he explicit- 
 ly and unqualifiedly affirms that no suggestion was made 
 by Mr. Beecher of any such reason for writing the letter 
 of apology, but solely and entirely his confessed crime. 
 
 [5.] With this agrees Mr. Tilton's statement, that he 
 never heard of this till the last few weeks. But if you 
 throw this out, as the statement of one party against an- 
 other, there still remains a four-fold cord which is not 
 easily broken. 
 
 Now, when upon the strength of all this combined 
 testimony, especially of the two women to whom the ad- 
 vice is now said to have been given — testimony given at 
 the time — given when no motive existed to falsify — tes- 
 timony given most emphatically, in writing — providing 
 that no such advice had been given by Mr. Beecher pre- 
 vious to January 27, 1871, when upon these premises I 
 find such firm footing— for you to say, " I am compelled 
 
43 
 
 to declare that there is not one word of truth in the 
 statement," and then to add, in such exultant way, "What 
 imp of fatuity inspired you to this unnecessary exposure 
 of your incompetence?" — in view of these facts I may 
 safely leave to our intelligent readers to "judge between 
 me and thee " on the question of " incompetence ! " If I 
 aspired to your sort of rhetoric, I might retort upon you 
 in the language I have quoted above. How you could 
 have overlooked all this array of evidence, " I can scarcely 
 conjecture. But whatever may have been the source of 
 the error, it gives a good idea of the thoroughness with 
 which you have examined the case!" Your triumph 
 over my " blunder " will be of short duration, if you are 
 candid enough to feel the force of an argument. And 
 now, if Mr. Beecher gave no such advice previous to Jan. 
 I, 1871, as is clearly manifest, did he ever? No other 
 time has been even hinted at, by anybody. My logical 
 inference therefore stands unchallenged. 
 
 You reiterate Mr. Beecher's repudiation of his letter 
 of apology. You tell me that I " knew very well that 
 it was in no sense his letter." And so it is that you stand 
 by Mr. Beecher in this false and absurd statement, and 
 charge me with dishonesty in not standing with you. 
 Please to turn to Mr. Beecher's statement, in which you 
 will find his remark — " If it be set forth as in any proper 
 sense my letter, then I disown it and denounce it." And 
 on the very same page, in his letter to Mr. Moulton of 
 June I, 1873, the following, referring to this identical 
 paper : — " The agreement was made after MY LETTER 
 THROUGH vou was written." Mr. Beecher had evidently 
 forgotten that acknowledgement when he made his state- 
 ment. Had you also forgotten it? He had always rec- 
 ognized this apology as his own — and here it is publicly 
 acknowledged in a letter contained in his own statement, 
 the paternity of which he confesses ! Are you satisfied ? 
 
44 
 
 You make yourself merry over a typographical blun- 
 der in a quotation setting forth Dr. Bacon's remarks 
 about Beecher and Tilton. It doesn't require a very ex- 
 tensive acquaintance with literature to make one familiar 
 ■with the famous character in the " Two Gentlemen of 
 Verona." It is true, the quotation from Dr. Bacon was 
 a little mixed. But for the time being I took it as I 
 found it, because it represented nearly enough what the 
 Doctor had said, partly at the Brooklyn Council and 
 partly at New Haven. If you want to know just the 
 form of his speech at Brooklyn I can give it to you ! But 
 it strikes me that if you felt yourself entirely equal to the 
 task of dealing with the argument of my review, you 
 would have scarcely thought it worth while to spend half 
 a column in a matter so insignificant as " Lancelot" a.'p- 
 pearing in a quotation instead of ^^Laimce." If you don't 
 find equal blunders when you come to read your critique 
 upon me, you will be a very fortunate author ! 
 
 You charge me with dishonesty because I did not 
 quote a paragraph from Mr. Beecher which you have 
 quoted above. I should have been willing to. And if I 
 wanted now to deal out upon Mr. Beecher the heaviest 
 blow I could, I would take that very passage, and place 
 it beside the facts. But I forbear. You accuse me of 
 heartless sarcasm where I have done similar things in my 
 former review. I deny the charge entirely. It was not 
 heartless. The truth demanded it. But nothing farther 
 is required of me in that line at present, and I decline to 
 do anything of the sort unless imperatively necessary. 
 
 You think the letter of Mrs. Tilton's which I de- 
 nounce as unfit for print, altogether a proper letter, rightly 
 understood. Why do you not quote it, then.' Do you 
 not know perfectly well that the quoting of it would be 
 its condemnation, and the condemnation of your whole 
 article as defiled and polluted by it.' Not one of Mr. 
 
45 
 
 Beecher's defenders professing common decency will 
 ever be found copying for print that letter of Mrs. 
 Tilton, with her own underscoring, or even without it. 
 
 In a foot-note, you accuse me in a sly way of falsify- 
 ing the record. Now you will find by examining Mr. 
 Beecher's statement that the letter from which I quoted 
 was dated Feb. 5, 1872, while he pretends to have given 
 the advice in December, 1870. One would think that 
 such an interval would abundantly justify the expression 
 — "a great while before." Why didn't you state just 
 what the facts were, instead of insinuating so palpably 
 intentional falsification? If you think that a rational 
 man would be justified in feeling the "tortures of the 
 damned" over either of these pieces of advice — in the 
 circumstances in which Mr. Beecher now claims them to 
 have been given, for fourteen full months — please to say 
 so, and then your readers will judge between you and 
 me, as to the proper expression to be applied to that 
 length of time. 
 
 And what is all that talk of yours about Catherine 
 Gaunt .' Simply this : that Mrs. Tilton's confessing that 
 she had now come to see her sin in ever even loving 
 another than her husband, proves that she never could 
 have gone farther than that ! 
 
 Marvelous! May not one who has stolen a purse 
 come afterward to confess even the sin of coveting it? 
 She had long before confessed the overt act but apolo- 
 gized for it, as the expression of love felt. Now she 
 came to see even the sin of. that love which led to it. 
 You have evidently learned a lesson from your Commit- 
 tee of Six. They, you remember, claimed that because 
 in the paper which Mr. Beecher obtained from Mrs. 
 Tilton, she acquitted him even of improper advances, 
 therefore there never could have been anything worse 
 charged ! Does n't the more comprehensive include the 
 
46 
 
 less comprehensive? If I claim that ydu owe me A 
 hundred dollars, and you deny that you owe me even a 
 hundred mills, it would be understood, I think, as deny- 
 ing my claim pretty strongly! Is it necessary that a 
 " Professor" should be taught the first elements of logic ? 
 Mr. Beecher knew well that the retraction which he 
 obtained covered the whole ground far more thoroughly 
 than for her to have simply disclaimed " criminal inti- 
 macy." The Catherine Gaunt letter is of the same sort 
 exactly ; and to all seeming you have stumbled over this 
 rock, because the Committee of Six had done so before 
 you. When Mrs. Tilton came to see the sin of even 
 loving a man not her husband, her vision was clear 
 enough certainly to include the crime which she had 
 previously confessed. 
 
 One word about "Prof. Raymond." Does John H. 
 Raymond deny the authorship of the Tribune article I 
 referred to? If so, I am glad of it, for his own sake. 
 But if he acknowledges the article, then I will give the 
 column and the paragraph in which the statement I 
 quote is found. I apprehend that the boldness of your 
 denial is, after all, simply a quibble in the matter of a 
 title. Is that your equivocation ? Is it that the proper 
 prefix to this gentleman's name is " Fres.," and not 
 Prof."? My object in quoting him, according to the 
 current statement of the papers, was to find out, if 
 possible, whether he was the responsible author of the 
 Tribune's statements, or not. I should like to know 
 that. Can^ you give the positive information, by au- 
 thority ? 
 
 You charge me with exaggerating "the pistol scene." 
 I beg your pardon. It is Henry Ward Beecher who ex- 
 aggerates that scene, not I. The whole drift of what I 
 wrote was to show the absurdity of that part of his state- 
 ment. The public have all said : " If Mr. Moulton did 
 
i7 
 
 not introduce the pistol threateningly, why does Mr. 
 Beecher speak of it at all? and if Mr. Moulton did thus 
 introduce it, why was Mr, Beecher so cowardly as to do 
 the very thing thus demanded of him ?" The writer of 
 the fiction known as Mr. Beecher's statement intended 
 to make considerable capital out of that pistol ; but it 
 has proved to be a poor investment. If Mr. Beecher 
 had brought in the pistol, and then shown that he re- 
 fused to deliver up the paper as demanded, Moulton 
 would have appeared as a desperado, and Beecher as a 
 hero. But as it is, cowardice and not heroism is every- 
 where accredited to him. 
 
 And it is your committee who also exaggerate^this_ 
 "pistol scene." You remember how they put it : "It is 
 a great pity that Mr. Moulton was not at once handed 
 over to the police !" The reporters speak of the special 
 elocution with which " Prot. Raymond " read that sen- 
 tence, and of the stormy applause which followed. Now, 
 what else, please tell me, had Moulton done at that time 
 for which he deserved to be delivered to the police.'' 
 Your committee suggest nothing else. They evidently 
 intended to make the impression of such a use of the 
 pistol as would have authorized his arrest by law. 
 
 I do not wonder that you and they and Mr. Beecher 
 are all alike ashamed of this silly story. Mr. Moulton 
 has himself given the only rational account of the matter, 
 and one which is well-nigh universally accepted in these 
 parts — namely, that when Mr. Beecher asked him what 
 he would do with that paper, if he should deliver it up, 
 Mr. Moulton replied : " I will protect it, as I would the 
 other, wi't/i my life!" at this moment taking -out his re- 
 volver, to illustrate how he was always prepared at night 
 to protect his life. And out of that entirely friendly 
 demonstration Mr. Beecher attempted to make out that 
 he was overawed by this " desperate man !" 
 
48 
 
 You and your committee everywhere speak of the 
 chief witnesses against Mr. Beecher as " conspirators " 
 and "confederates." Now, sir, the public are every- 
 where asking: "Why, then, are not these men prose- 
 cuted to the full extent of the law ?" By your laws, this 
 conspiracy which you charge is a high crime. And 
 both the religious and secular press are urging the de- 
 mand that these men should be put on trial for this 
 offense. What are laws good for, if not for the punish- 
 ment of such villainy ? 
 
 Mr. Tilton and Mr. Moulton are at hand. They 
 have not fled. They defy arrest. Day by day they are 
 adding to their libels, if libels they are. Why are they 
 not brought to justice? Allow me frankly to tell you 
 that the impression is well-nigh universal that the only 
 reason is, that j/ou dare not do it. You are a very strong 
 church ; but you cannot defy public sentiment, both in 
 the church and out of it, very long. Every day that 
 you defer the legal prosecution of-these men is intensi- 
 fying the conviction that you are utterly insincere in 
 your charges against them, and that your neglect is a 
 confession of judgment against you. 
 
 You speak of the "cheering proof which you have 
 of the support of good men everywhere.'' Do not be 
 deluded by the numerous letters which come to you 
 from different parts of the world. They represent but 
 a small portion of the whole. Within the last two 
 months or more I have had personal conversation with 
 more than half a hundred ministers, of all denomina- 
 tions, just as I have chanced to meet them, and not one 
 of them air expressed a belief of Mr. Beecher's inno- 
 cence. Forty-five of every fifty express belief of his 
 guilt ; three or four do not quite know what to believe. 
 
 You venture upon some prophecy of the future, with 
 confident tone. I am not a prophet, and I will venture 
 
49 
 
 upon no prediction ; but I have no doubt that old men 
 are now living who will yet live to see the day when no 
 man will confess that he was present and voted for that 
 report of your Committee of Six without blushing. The 
 winnowihg-time is coming, and we must all await it. 
 But who shall abide the day of its coming ? Our horo- 
 scope of the future — both yours and mine — are now of 
 record ; let the future declare who was the true prophet 
 and who was the false. 
 
 I have not hastened to declare my conclusion. I did 
 "refuse to condemn, so long as either belief or hope of 
 this man's innocency seemed possible." I fought against 
 the conviction of his guilt to the last. Fain would I 
 have stepped back with averted eyes, and thrown a man- 
 tle over this long honored man, could I have thus blotted 
 out the facts. 
 
 You mistake me, and you mistake others who agree 
 with me, if you charge us with bitterness, or malice, or 
 envy, or jealousy, or uncharitableness even. Could you 
 have looked upon us bowed in prayer, our voices choked 
 with tears, as we asked for deliverance from this great 
 blow, you could not have so dealt out your unsparing 
 epithets. They are not deserved. I know there are 
 some who have wanted him proved guilty; such are 
 worse than the accused himself, if possible. But let me 
 tell you that these same men wanted him acquitted, and 
 are now exulting over the action of your church. I met 
 one such a few days ago — a large-brained, skeptical, 
 sneering lawyer — not a citizen of Mansfield, but a man 
 whom I met on the cars, on my way to Michigan 
 " That is the way of the church ! — acquit a man who is 
 palpably as guilty a man as ever I have been called to 
 try in thirty years' practice !" And so in tones and 
 words he expressed his exultation over a guilty man's 
 acquittal, as proof of the insincerity of Christian men. 
 That, let me assure you, is the attitude of all these 
 c 
 
50 
 
 wicked scoflfers, who "rejoice in iniquity," but rejoice 
 still more in the covering it up by the church. These 
 men, with one voice, shout over the fall of your church 
 more than over the fall of your pastor. 
 
 I believe I am now through with all the points you 
 make. Every reader of my article, who, after reading 
 yours, will look it over again, will discover that you have 
 not touched nine-tenths of it, even with the point of 
 your pen. And not one break have you made in its line 
 of argument. 
 
 As to your style of rhetoric, I have little to say. My 
 general impression is that where a man is consciously 
 weak in argument, he ordinarily undertakes to make it 
 up by ponderous epithets. If the use of such expres- 
 sions as "malicious," "malignant," "envious," "unscru- 
 pulous," "farrago of nonsense," "outrageous produc- 
 tion," " shameful tirade," and many other like expres- 
 sions in your article are to your taste, you are, of course, 
 at liberty to use them. This is not a style of argument 
 or of language which I would recommend to a student 
 of mine. If your " Professorship " is in the Department 
 of Rhetoric, a little re-reading of Whately, Campbell, 
 or even Blair, will tend, I think, to the cultivation of an 
 improved style. Fewer epithets and more arguments 
 would make a better impression upon your intelligent 
 readers; and such, be assured, are the people of this 
 city and vicinity. The attention which I have thus 
 given to your letter I have not given to it because of 
 anything intrinsic in its merits, but solely because it 
 comes from a prominent member of the Plymouth 
 church. You say, however, that you have written en- 
 tirely upon your own responsibility, and I can readily 
 believe it. If you have some wise friend, " outside of 
 your own family," might it not be well to advise with 
 him before writing again 1 
 
 Yours, very truly, E. B. Fairfield. 
 
fil 
 
 [The rejoinder which ensues appeared in the Mansfield Herald 
 of Oct. 29, 1874, under a different heading, prefixed by the editor; 
 my own having been, through haste, accidentally omitted.] 
 
 CASE OF REV. E. B. FAIRFIELD, D.D., LL.D. 
 To the Editor of the Mansfield Herald : 
 
 In the few words of rejoinder which I shall offer tO' 
 the "Reply" of the Rev. Dr. Fairfield to my "Open 
 Letter," permit me to address myself to you and your' 
 readers. And in doing so, I will endeavor, by omitting 
 whatever is irrelevant to the matter in hand, to show 
 my appreciation of your courtesy in giving so large a 
 portion of your columns to a discussion which must by 
 this time have become somewhat wearisome. 
 
 Whatever is strictly personal to my opponent and 
 myself need be no further discussed. It already suffi- 
 ciently appears that he never before heard of me and 
 that I never before heard of him; from which it may be 
 fairly inferred that neither of us is likely to overweight the 
 scale of argument by the gravity of his personal reputa- 
 tion, and on this the honest reader is to be congratulated. 
 
 If the article which first elicited this discussion had 
 been really — as it was professedly — written by a friend 
 of Mr. Beecher who had, reluctantly but under a sense 
 of duty, felt called to contribute to the work of arriving 
 at the truth, in an inquiry in which all Christendom is 
 rightfully interested, there would have been present 
 such tender regretfulness over what appeared to make 
 against the accused, such deference to the opinions and 
 feelings of others, and such readiness — nay, anxiety — for 
 
32 
 
 any new considerations which might relieve the case, 
 that it would have been answered, if at all, with that 
 respectful sympathy which is due to every honest in- 
 quirer after the truth. If, on the contrary, it had been 
 severe and nntagonistic in tone, yet fair and truthful in 
 statement, it would have been met with a manly effort to 
 grapple with the argument, though of an avowed enemy. 
 But that article was so strikingly deficient in every 
 element of "fair play," and so pervaded with malignity, 
 that there seemed but one th^ng to do — to lay bare the 
 absolute dishonesty and incapacity of the author, and at 
 least to prevent his reader from taking his statements 
 without personal examination. This is all I have under- 
 taken. 
 
 I expressly disclaimed the idea of arguing the case 
 for Mr. Beecher. Had I the capacity, I have not the 
 time, to assume so important a task; and moreover, I 
 am mindful of the fact which seems to have no force 
 with Dr. Fairfield and the scheming cabal that have set 
 him on, that the time is rapidly approaching when all the 
 evidence will be sifted in the legal tribunals and argued 
 on both sides by the best minds in the country. It is 
 very true, as the Reviewer says, that a large proportion 
 of his twelve columns I did not touch at all. A very 
 cursory glance at his method will show the reason why. 
 A single false statement or some gross perversion of the 
 testimony generally serves him as text for a column of 
 comment; is it necessary, in such a case, to do more 
 than to impair the truth of his premises and knock out 
 the linchpin of his lumbering chariot .> To employ an 
 old simile, — if the first few mouthfuls show the meat to 
 be tainted, must one eat the whole joint, to be justified 
 in ordering it from the table? 
 
 I regarded it as quite within the province I had 
 chosen, refraining from the vindication of Mr. Beecher, 
 
53 
 
 the church, or the committee, to demonstrate the special 
 unworthiness of the man who had come foiward to at- 
 tack them all. If it was decorous and proper for a cler- 
 gyman to use his pulpit lo denounce Henry Ward 
 Beecher as an adulterer and a perjurer, I suppose it was 
 equally allowable for a layman to use his pen to prove 
 the Rev. Edmund B. Fairfield, D.D., LL.D., a culpable 
 blunderer and a cowardly calumniator. This I set out 
 to do ; and this I did. 
 
 I charged this man with disqualification for the un- 
 gracious task he had undertaken, on three accounts: 
 his improper- spirit ; his lack of integrity ; and his lack 
 of capacity. He does not like such language, and takes 
 upon him to lecture me on the amenities of " style." 
 He prefers his own vocabulary and the infamous epithets 
 he has heaped upon my beloved friend and honored pas- 
 tor, who is worth to-day, before God and all good men, 
 a thousand such as he, with Joab and Judas thrown in. 
 The odiousness of my terminology does not inhere in the 
 terms themselves so much as in the acts and qualities to 
 which they apply. A man once complained to his friend 
 that somebody had called him a thief: " O never mind," 
 was the comforting reply, " hard words never hurt any- 
 body." "Ah! but that wasn't the worst of it," persisted 
 the injured man, " he proved it." This, I take it, is my 
 only offense ; if I have failed to prove my. charges then 
 indeed the honest English in which they are couched 
 may return " to plague the inventor." 
 
 The argument against the spirit of the original " Re- 
 view" was one mainly intended for Christian men, and 
 among these primarily those of the Congregational faith. 
 If the Reviewer had been a member of any of those de- 
 nominations which have an established judicature, he 
 would have been instantly frowned into silence as trans- 
 gressing the prescribed order of procedure. But Con- 
 
S4 
 
 gregationalism is an attempt to substitute for a legal a 
 fraternal discipline ; for the fonnal process of the court 
 something of the spirit of the family. It is, tried by all 
 merely human rules, the loosest and most inefficient of 
 systems, and worse than useless, unless informed with 
 brotherly love and the merciful mind of Jesus. But this 
 Congregational minister, a thousand miles away from the 
 scene of action, and with imperfect access to the facts 
 of the case, ascends the judgment seat alone, and pro- 
 nounces a brother minister guilty of two great crimes 
 which contradict the whole tenor of his life. Nay more, 
 he scornfully repudiates the title of brother as applied to 
 the accused, and why ? Because he has been convicted 
 of crime .? Not so ; he has only been charged with it ; 
 he has been acquitted by the only tribunal before which 
 he has yet stood; but because he, Fairfield, has con- 
 demned him ! 
 
 Now, the only answer on the part of the Doctor that 
 we have to this arraignment is, first, a plentiful supply 
 of assertion that he is the best- of men ; an argument to 
 prove that his motives could not be otherwise than 
 pure ; and, finally, an appeal to the emotions, which is 
 at once beautifully characteristic of the man and of the 
 work in which he is engaged. " Could you have looked 
 upon us bowed in prayer," he says, "our voices choked 
 with tears, as we asked for deliverance from this great 
 blow, you could not have so dealt out your unspar- 
 ing epithets." And why not, pray ? What have prayers 
 and tears to do with this question? It is not how much 
 men pray and weep, but what they do when they get up 
 from their knees and wipe their eyes, that characterizes 
 them. If dramatic displays of emotion would sanctify 
 rascahty, the pious frauds and misdemeanors that stain 
 the pages of Church History would not be so painful to 
 the honest student as they are. 
 
65 
 
 that suddenly makes its ap- 
 pearance in a story hitherto conducted in the first per- 
 son singular? I will tell you. This sanctimonious "we " 
 is the caucus of Western ministers who, after they had 
 finished "choking" and "asking deliverance from the 
 great blow '' they were themselves about to strike, arose 
 and patted our author on the back, saying (or words to 
 that effect), " Go in, Fairfield ; you are the man to crush 
 him," — thus furnishing to the Doctor, in addition to the 
 petty impulses that were common to the crowd, that ad- 
 ditional motive of personal vanity which he is so anxious 
 I should interpret to him. And if there could be a fea- 
 ture added to this whole transaction calculated to sink 
 it from the level of contempt to that of profound disgust 
 it is the spectacle, thus unwittingly laid bare, of a junto 
 of clerical conspirators engaged in an act of perfunctory 
 devotion, for the better veiling of their true motives from 
 themselves and from each other; and all preparatory to 
 the hounding down of an innocent man, in company with 
 other conspirators, — prayerless, and of the " heathen " 
 persuasion, — who are more courageous but scarcely more 
 base. 
 
 And this illustrates what I mean by " clerical jeal- 
 ousy," which the Doctor thinks it so absurd to impute 
 to ministers " from six hundred to sixteen hundred miles 
 away." If I had charged Doctor Fairfield or any of 
 his Western confederates with any possible " competition 
 and rivalry " with Henry Ward Beecher, I should indeed 
 have been guilty of a "blunder." But there is another 
 meaning of 'jealousy," nearly synonymous with envy. 
 There is a class of small souls in the world who, how- 
 ever insignificant their own chances of honorable dis- 
 tinction, are never happy in contemplating the just fame 
 of another. They are chronically tired of hearing Aris- 
 tides called the Just ; and they ask no better reason for 
 
56 
 
 plotting the ruin of the most eminent citizen than that 
 they are weary of listening to his praises. The constant 
 and almost universal reading of Beecher's sermons, the 
 frequent and fervent acknowledgment of indebtedness 
 to Beecher for aid in attaining a higher life, and the 
 growing habit of trying all things ministerial by a Beecher 
 standard — facts gratefully accepted by the true pastor, 
 who welcomes whatever auxiliary in his arduous effort to 
 edify his flock — are gall and wormwood to such as value 
 no prosperity which does not also reflect credit upon 
 themselves. A prominent clergyman and editor once 
 told me, to justify the alienation of a .portion of the 
 clerical " profession " from Mr. B., that he was too inde- 
 pendent, that he stood too much aloof, and did not mingle 
 enough with them. This may be true, and it may be a 
 a fault, too, but it certainly is not a violation of the 
 seventh commandment, and does not call for the destruc- 
 tion of the offender by means of conspiracy and false- 
 hood. This is what I mean by " clerical jealousy :" if 
 it does not agree with Dr. Fairfield's " English diction- 
 ary," let him call it something else — the ugly fact re- 
 mains the same. That he himself and his secret abettors 
 are actuated by such unworthy motives, the publication 
 of his utterly uncalled-for attack, and all its several 
 parts, furnishes abundant evidence. 
 
 For, it may well be asked, what made it specially in- 
 cumbent on Dr. F. to take up this matter at all ? He gives 
 his own view of his duty by saying that " believing him 
 [Mr. B.] guilty," and that those who defended him were 
 " deliberately and knowingly playing the part of attor- 
 neys, to the great disgrace of religion and the Christian 
 ministry,!' he could not "hold his peace without con- 
 scious dishonor, and complicity with a great wrong. " And 
 yet here are some thousands of Congregational ministers 
 in the United States — to say nothing of the many more of 
 
57 
 
 other denominations, all equally interested in the credit 
 of religion and the Christian ministry — who have held 
 their peace, and are continuing to hold it; what have 
 they done with their consciences and their sense of honor ? 
 Of all thii mighty host, one only besides our free-lance of 
 Ohio has felt the pressure of this terrible responsibility ; 
 and he a clergyman of Chicago, who, having been tried 
 and condemned for something or other by his church, 
 felt impelled, "as the purest man in the ministry," to 
 denounce the guilty Beecher. Perhaps it is on a 
 similar principle that Dr. Fairfield feels called to the 
 same duty, .as the most truthful and profound. But 
 whatever the ground of his procedure, none can deny 
 the solitary grandeur of his position. When he solemnly 
 declares to us, " The first moment that I come to entertain 
 a single doubt of Mr. Beecher's guilt, I will hasten to say 
 so, from both pulpit and press" our feeling of satisfaction 
 at such an example of moral goodness really struggles 
 with our sense of the intellectually sublime. Imagine, 
 for a moment, the spectacle of the Rev. Dr. Edmund B. 
 Fairfield, D.D., LL.D., "hastening " up his pulpit stairs 
 to inform the attentive universe that he has " come to 
 entertain a single doubt," etc., and then trotting down 
 again to make the same announcement through the 
 press ; and up again, the next day, to proclaim that he 
 has " come to entertain " another little " doubt," or that 
 the little doubt of the previous day has disappeared, and 
 all is dark again ! Can the ministry of this great conti- 
 nent, or of the world, fail to feel that their professional 
 dignity and the honor of Christianity is safe under the 
 watchful eye of such a custodian ? 
 
 I know not, for my own part, how a minister, espe- 
 cially a Congregational minister, can look upon the as- 
 sumption of this man in putting himself forward as the 
 special trier and condemner of Mr. Beecher as anything 
 
58 
 
 but a reflection upon all the rest of the clergy for their 
 silence and supineness. Neither can I understand how 
 a Christian— especially of the Congregational order— can 
 help revolting from the air of infallibility with which he 
 pronounces a verdict of condemnation where many see 
 only innocence, and many others, ample ground for 
 doubt; to the manifest prejudice of the accused in any 
 trial, civil or ecclesiastical, to which he may hereafter be 
 subjected. 
 
 But it is not merely in the court of Christian rectitude 
 and Christian charity that I have arraigned Dr. Fairfield. 
 I have shown him to be an unreliable guide to any hon- 
 est inquirer after truth in this matter; and I have chal- 
 lenged his claims to the respect of any lover of integrity 
 and directness. Let me reiterate the charges and re- 
 affirm the proof of them. 
 
 I. The first indication of his unscrupulous readiness 
 to manipulate facts for a purpose was given in his allu- 
 sion to a " Prof. Raymond," who had "acknowledged in 
 a published article " certain things which promised to be 
 useful to the Reviewer. He well knew that, as there were 
 two gentlemen of that name and title who had been 
 somewhat prominent in the recent transactions of Plym- 
 outh Church, his assertion would be taken as meaning 
 that certain admissions had been made by Mr. Beecher's 
 friends. Indeed, why else ''''acknowledged" by Prof. R. ? 
 On being confronted with a p'rompt contradiction, he 
 first tried the contemptuous dodge. With nose very high 
 in air (though not too high for a man who informs the 
 universe from his pulpit of the slightest fluctuations of 
 his opinion on important subjects), he wanted to know 
 who were these professors that nobody had heretofore 
 heard of. Having become informed more particularly 
 upon this point, he declared that he meant John H. Ray- 
 mond, of Vassar College — a man who hasn't worn the 
 
59 
 
 title of Professor for twenty years ! But why quote Pres- 
 ident Raymond who lives in Po'keepsie, as having " ac- 
 knowledged " something about Mr. Beecher's church, in 
 Brooklyn ? and what was the force of the quotation, had 
 it been genuine ? Well, he had seen it in some Western 
 paper (where it appeared as an "interview," I believe, 
 and not, in any proper sense, a "published article "), and 
 it had been attributed by somebody to the " President of 
 a New York College!" Again confronted with the un- 
 qualified denial of President Raymond himself, he first 
 affects to believe that there is some dirty little quibble 
 over the words "Pres." and "Prof." (thus merely laying 
 bare the habitual expedients of his own style of contro- 
 versy) ; and finally falls back on the following masterly 
 parry : " My object in quoting him," he says, . . "was 
 to find out, if possible, wluiher he was the responsible au- 
 thor of the Tribune's statements or not"! There you have 
 the Rev. Dr. Edmund B. Fairfield to the life, praying and 
 weeping, and all ! Happy thought ! if this is only a 
 newly -patented method of investigation on the part of 
 the conscientious Reviewer, perhaps when he proclaims 
 Mr. Beecher guilty of horrible crimes, it is only to " find 
 out, if possible, whether he is so or not!" 
 
 2. Then came the quotation from Dr. Bacon, more 
 than, half of which was in his own words (and very 
 foolish words they were), and this he acknowledges was a 
 "little mixed." " For the time being," he says, he "took 
 it as he found it." Where? On this particular point, 
 apart from its revelation of literary ignorance, I dwelt 
 only as a specimen of the man's unpardonable way of 
 pretending to quote what had no existence except in his 
 own brain, and for the purpose of invalidating that 
 character for accuracy of which he had made a special 
 boast. All this he disposes of with ludicrous inadequacy 
 as a " typographical error." But what of the latter part 
 
60 
 
 of the same paragraph, which pretends to give a quota- 
 tion from Mr. Beecher himself, amounting to a confes- 
 sion of guilt? I repeat the infamous statement : 
 
 "That speech [Dr. Bacon's] reached Mr. Tilton's 
 ears : he went to Beecher and said to him, ' You know 
 the facts, you edit a paper; relieve me of that unjust 
 odium, or I shall be compelled to do it myself.' Mr. 
 Beecher replied : ''I can't do it without criminating myself.' " 
 
 Now, what were the facts 1 Tilton wrote this demand 
 to Mr. Beecher, and complains to Dr. Bacon that he got 
 no reply whatever. And where, then, do you suppose 
 that self-criminating and damaging clause came from ? 
 First out of the heart, and then out of the head, of Dr. 
 Edmund B. Fairfield, conscience-burdened minister of 
 Mansfield town, and special guardian of the " honor of 
 Christianity." What is your soft term for such things 
 out West? "Typographical error?" / say, " calumny," 
 and "perversion," and "manufacturing evidence:" but 
 your minister thinks my " style" does not make a good 
 "impression," on account of its harshness. I shall be 
 sorry indeed if, as he says, I make it weaker thereby — 
 for if ever a violator of all the faith and decency of life 
 needed strong things said to him, that minister is the man. 
 
 3. The next performance of this accurate and careful 
 reviewer was to reproduce the irresponsible trifling of a 
 Brooklyn reporter, who had given entirely "out of whole 
 cloth," a pretended report (speeches and all) of a meet- 
 ing which never took place ! It would be amusing, if it 
 were not for indignation at the wicked use to which he 
 puts it, to see this solemn noodle transferring from the 
 reporter's column of a daily newspaper a bogus account 
 and ranging it along with the rest of his summary of 
 evidence, without making any diff"erence— as, indeed, 
 there is very little to be made ! Hear him : 
 
 ''Every reader remembers ["Every reader remem- 
 
61 
 
 bars"! What ati air of uncontradictability is here!] 
 Crit after Tilton's letter to Dr. Bacon, Mr. Beecher had 
 a long interview with, his deacons and others — three 
 hours' talking — in which the prominent thing was the 
 apology and its explanation. The next day he came out 
 in half a column with a general denial," etc., etc. 
 
 This is not only false as to the time specified, but as 
 to every other time. No such meeting ever took place, 
 under any circumstances whatever. Fairfield either got 
 it from a loose report, or he invented it ; and surely he 
 has proved himself equal to either alternative. This 
 charge was as distinctly made in my first letter as now ; 
 but he says not a word in reply. Probably he regards it 
 as a mere "typographical error." 
 
 4. And now we come to the grand discovery over 
 which he was so jubilant in his "Review." He there 
 announced as an " astounding fact " to which he had 
 "seen no allusion in the newspapers,'' that the advice to 
 Mrs. Tilton to leave her husband, about which Mr. B. 
 pretended to have felt so bad, was not given till some 
 months after the apologetic letter ; and,, of course, the pre- 
 tense of Mr. B. to have been moved by that fact to re- 
 morse, &c., was demonstrably false. It now turns out 
 that this wonderful bit of evidence, which it was reserved 
 for Fairfield to spring upon an astonished world, had its 
 origin in a " typographical error " in a Detroit newspaper. 
 Natural and probable enough. The simple statement of 
 most men to that effect would have been sufficient, with- 
 out any bolstering from outside certificates. Indeed, I 
 had divined this explanation from the first; for even 
 Fairfield would have scarcely dared to follow it with such 
 antics of triumphant exultation and trenchant sarcasm, 
 had he not supposed it true. The error, with its half 
 column of wasted comment, were cited to show Jum) this 
 great Reviewer, with his "judicial " mind, examined evi- 
 
62 
 
 dence "as if his life depended on it." Might it not be 
 supposed that a man of average sanity, having lighted on 
 so important a piece of evidence, as yet unnoticed by any 
 other person or paper, would have been careful to verify 
 it, before rejoicing over it as an important discovery, and 
 making it the basis of extended comment, as mean as it 
 was cruel? In beating a retreat, Fairfield feebly protests 
 against being " blamed for not reading over all this testi- 
 mony 'va. several ■^s.^tx^;" but the friend who " called his 
 attention to it " had only to point out one thing in one 
 paper, to set him right. 
 
 But what did he do when his attention was called to 
 it .' Did he say, as he does now, " I am always glad to 
 be corrected in any mistake I have made," etc., etc. 1 
 No ; he sat down to write to the Herald that this thing 
 " seems clearly proved," but if anybody " prefers to ac- 
 cept the testimony of Mrs. Tilton," why, " so far as this 
 argument is concerned," he is " entirely willing to con- 
 cede it " ! No sign yet of any concession of possible 
 mistake, but only concession for the purposes of " this 
 great argument." 
 
 But the pressure is too strong, and now, at last, the 
 explanation comes. It was a typographical blunder all 
 the while ; and, surely, any man might be misled by a 
 typographical blunder — ^but, as surely, none but such a 
 man would fall into such an error, while examining " as 
 for his life," and then make that error the basis of half a 
 column of the bitterest abuse that ever came from a 
 source professedly respectable. 
 
 But it is part of Dr. Fairfield's tactics never to ex- 
 plain or apologize for one unhandsome thing without im- 
 mediately following it with another. He now makes a 
 bold stand on the assertion that whatever advice of sep- 
 aration Mrs. Beecher may have given, " it is entirely clear 
 that Mr. Beecher certainly gave no such advice prior to 
 
63 
 
 Jan. I, 1871. And that he never gave it at any time is 
 almost equally certain." (Another of the Doctor's lumin- 
 ous flashes : nobody ever claimed that the advice was 
 given other than "prior to Jan. 1, 1871 ;" and if he did 
 not give it then, it is not " almost equally " but absolute- 
 ly " certain that he never gave it at any time.") In proof, 
 he cites (i) a letter of Mrs. Til ton's, denying that she 
 ever sought a separation ; (2) Mrs. Morse's letter to Mr. 
 Beecher, complaining of a contrary state of facts — 
 namely, that he wanted Mrs. Tilton to continue living 
 with her husband ; (3) the absence of any statement in 
 Mrs. Tilton's testimony that Mr. Beecher had given 
 such advice ; (4) Mr. Moulton's assertion that Mr. 
 Beecher gave no such reason to him for writing the 
 letter of apology; (5) Mr. Tilton's statement that he 
 never heard of such a thing till lately. 
 
 Now, supposing every word of this evidence to be 
 true, does it go to prove that " Mr. Beecher never gave 
 the advice " he claims to have given ? The most that 
 it can possibly show is that these persons never knew that 
 he had done so. But he knew it, for Mrs. Beecher would 
 never have given the advice without his approbation ; and 
 he took to himself, in his own heart, all the blame for 
 acts which Moulton afterwards persuaded him were in 
 the highest degree unjust. 
 
 But, says the reply, " you remember that Mr. Beecher 
 claims to have given the advice in an interview held with 
 both these women jointly." I remember no such thing; 
 neither does the man who asserts it. These words are 
 only the Fairfieldian dialect for something entirely differ- 
 ent. Mr. Beecher, in his statement, says that at Mrs. 
 Tilton's request he visited her at her mother's house^ 
 whither she had fled from 'the ill-treatment of her 
 husband. Thp story of her domestic wrongs having 
 been told, the' question arose "whether she should go 
 
64 
 
 back or separate forever from her husband." Mr. 
 Beecher asked permission to bring his wife into the 
 discussion. At the second visit, Mrs. Beecher indig- 
 nantly pronounced for separation. Mr. Beecher con- 
 tinues, " I felt as strongly as she did, but /tesitated, as 
 T always do, at giving advice in favor of separation. It 
 was agreed that my wife should give her final advice at 
 another visit. The next day, when ready to go, she 
 wished a final word; but there was company and the 
 children were present, and so I wrote on a scrap of paper^ 
 ' I incline to think that your view is right, and that a sep- 
 aration and settlement of support will be wisest, and that 
 in his present desperate state her presence near him is far 
 more likely to produce hatred than her absence.' " This 
 scrap of paper was preserved and produced to the Com- 
 mittee by Mrs. Beecher., Tilton, to be sure, has the impu- 
 dence to question the authenticity of this writing, imply- ■ 
 ing thereby some complicity in a fraud between Mr. and 
 Mrs. Beecher ; and it takes a clergyman of Ohio, while 
 swallowing whole the monstrosities of this man and his 
 confederate, to impute to Henry Ward Beecher, in whom 
 frankness has always been a conspicuous virtue, " a score 
 of falsehoods," induced by a " hardening process of years 
 of hypocrisy," in which, at last, he enjoys the active co- 
 operation of his own wife ! 
 
 (i) That Mrs. Tilton did seek a separation is well 
 known to many, and now confessed by her; although, at 
 various times, influenced by her husband, and after some 
 special reconciliation, she would deny that, or anything 
 else, to please him — not because she " feared " him, but 
 because she loved him to infatuation. (2) That Mrs. 
 Morse, in the latter part of January, 1871, should re- 
 proach Mr. Beecher for advising Mrs. Tilton to stay 
 with her husband, is natural enough; for it was in 
 December, 1870, that Mr. Beecher favored the separa- 
 
65 
 
 tion, because in December he thought Mr. Tilton was a 
 bad man, while in January, 187 1, under the representa- 
 tion of Moulton, he had changed his ground, having 
 come to think Mrs. Tilton broken in mind, and Mr. 
 Tilton a good man unjustly accused. (3) That Mrs. 
 Tilton never knew Mr. Beecher's participation in the 
 counsel given by his wife is very likely ; but, as I have 
 already remarked, this proves nothing one way or the 
 other about the reflex action of that counsel (which he 
 well knew he had given) on his own mind. (4, 5) As 
 to what Tilton and Moulton say, it matters little. 
 The most credulous man in the world, next to the 
 Mansfield reviewer, has no idea that either of them 
 would say anything that militated against the case he 
 desired to make. And even if their witness is true, it is 
 entirely negative, and proves nothing. 
 
 So it appears that, after all, Mr. Beecher's story is a 
 natural and consistent one. It has taken a great many 
 words to show it, but not on account of any inherent 
 difficulty in the case. It is all because Dr. Edmund 
 Fairfield could not be persuaded, or doesn't know how, 
 to tell the simple truth, in reporting testimony, but must 
 color or twist it, or manufacture it outright, to make it 
 serve his ends. 
 
 5. But one of the boldest and most inexcusable 
 frauds of Dr. Fairfield is his pretended statement of 
 Mr. Beecher's side of the question, in the matter of the 
 sorrow and remorse. A large proportion of Fairfield's 
 argument upon this point consists of inference from the 
 inadequacy of the reasons Mr. Beecher alleges for the 
 intensity of his suff'ering. There could not be a case in 
 which simple justice more imperatively demands that 
 the whole story of the respondent should be considered, 
 in forming a judgment. To pronounce that judgment 
 on a fart of the defendant's showing is unfair. To do 
 
66 
 
 so, neglecting to allude to the omitted portion, on the 
 ground that, in the private opinion of the writer, it is 
 irrelevant or worthless, is disingenuous. But to lay 
 down as a premise a part of the defense, distinctly 
 aflSrming it to he the whole, is merely infamous. (If this 
 is what the Doctor means by " scurrility," let him make 
 the most of it.) 
 
 This offense against common decency, I say again, 
 he has committed. The language in which it was 
 couched was distinctly commended to his attention in 
 my " Open Letter." I will repeat it. He is preparing 
 for a tremendous onslaught upon Mr. Beecher's false 
 defenses. He is going to show the miserable futility of 
 the man's attempts to escape his Nemesis ! His conclu- 
 sion from the whole matter is to be the exclamation: 
 " So transparent almost always are the disguises for 
 covering up sin !" And in preparing for this momen- 
 tous inference, he says : 
 
 " What are the offenses over which he was thus suf- 
 fering.' According to his own statement [mark \t\\, these 
 two ONLY : I. He had a great while before advised Mrs. 
 Tilton to leave her husband. 2. He had counseled Mr. 
 Bowen to secure somebody else to edit the iTuiependent." 
 
 This misrepresentation I pointed out, and gave from 
 Mr. Beecher's statement a passage full of pathos, describ- 
 ing those psychological causes of his trouble, which a min- 
 ister should be the last to ignore or to sneer down. But 
 the wisdom or the foolishness of the passage, the ade- 
 quacy or the inadequacy of the cause assigned, had 
 nothing to do with my complaint. Here was the heart 
 of Mr. Beecher's defense, and it had been not only 
 omitted, but absolutely stated out of existence, by one who 
 assumed to review him with a "judicial " mind. The 
 matter was not unimportant. It was not only vital to 
 Mr. Beecher's vindication, but it was vital, also, to Dr. 
 
67 
 
 Fairfield's reputation for truth and integrity. Do I claim 
 too much ? How, then, does the latter gentleman meet 
 the square issue which I thus made?' 
 
 His answer is so characteristic both of the manliness 
 and of the genial sweetness of his nature, I must give it 
 entire : 
 
 " You charge me with dishonesty because I did not 
 quote a paragraph from Mr. Beecher which you have 
 quoted above. / should have been willing to. And if I 
 wanted now to deal out upon Mr. Beecher the heaviest 
 blow I could, I would take that very passage and place 
 it beside the facts. But I forbear. You accuse me of 
 heartless sarcasm where I have done similar things in 
 my former review. I deny the charge entirely. It was 
 not heartless. The truth demanded it. But nothing 
 farther is demanded of me in that line at present, and I 
 decline to do anything of the sort unless imperatively neces- 
 sary." (The italics are my own.) 
 
 The reader may judge for himself if such a defense 
 against a square charge of dishonesty is pertinent and 
 sufficient. To me, I must confess, it seems very much 
 as though a judge should say, " Prisoner at the bar, you 
 are charged with robbing a hen-roost ; are you guilty or 
 not guilty ?" and be answered with a recitation of that 
 touching poem, "Pity the sorrows of a poor old man." 
 As for characterizing the entire performance as it de- 
 serves, I am constrained to acknowledge that the vocab- 
 ulary of abuse in which the Doctor is so kind as to con- 
 sider me proficient, entirely fails me at last, and language 
 is jinequal to the subject. 
 
 These are some of the most prominent instances in 
 which I have charged upon this Reviewer either point- 
 blank dishonesty or the grossest blundering. He can 
 only avail himself of the latter and less damaging theory 
 by correcting his errors when they are pointed out to 
 
68 
 
 him; but this he has failed to do. Many similar exam- 
 ples he passes in silence, though in all alike his intelli- 
 gence or his integrity is arraigned; while in the few 
 which he attempts to explain, he entirely misses the na- 
 ture of the charge involved. 
 
 For instance, I accused him of having omitted all 
 mention of two cardinal features in the testimony, of 
 which he assumes to give a thorough " analysis ;" a lapse 
 so palpable as to do great discredit to his capacity as 
 well as his candor. Those features were, first, the dis- 
 crepancy between the witnesses Tilton and Moulton, at 
 the critical point. What was the demeanor of the ac- 
 cused when first confronted with the accusation ? and, 
 secondly. What was the purport and bearing of the Cath- 
 arine Gaunt letter, adduced by Tilton as a crucial test 
 of the nature of his wife's transgression ? To the first he 
 makes no reply ; to the other he seeks to respond by now 
 first commencing to argue the case, as though it were a 
 new point, just raised. I do not purpose to follow him 
 into all his maundering disquisitions on these subjects. 
 The soundness or unsoundness of his present argument 
 on the Catharine Gaunt letter does not affect the truth- 
 fulness of my original demonstration of a fundamental 
 defect in his boasted "analysis," any more than it atones 
 for the other important omission, of which he takes no 
 notice at all. 
 
 But I cannot continue this enumeration. It is endless. 
 There is an entire paragraph of similar arraignments 
 containing some eight or ten, of which only two or 
 three are honored with any notice. All I ask of the 
 reader in respect to these disputed questions of fact is 
 that he will go for himself to the original sources, and 
 not trust the simple say-so of Dr. Edmund Fairfield. 
 If I have persuaded him to this, I shall be content. 
 
 Let him read the retraction scene in Mr. Beecher's own 
 
69 
 
 statement, and I will risk his receiving the impression that 
 Mr. Beecher, in getting an exoneration from the charges 
 of improper advances, was really fortifying himself against 
 a charge of adultery. Let him read for himself the his- 
 tory of the " apology " and decide if it is decently honest 
 to say, " And now Mr. Beecher begins his letter^' not- 
 withstanding his own indignant disclaimer of the docu- 
 ment the moment he discovered what its contents and its 
 real purpose were, and lost confidence in the man who 
 reported it. Let him see whether there is anything 
 strange in his simple report of the pistol scene, which 
 was introduced by him only because it had been re- 
 ferred to by WoodhuU, and talked about by everybody 
 ever since her publication ; and which may very easily 
 show the animus of Moulton, while by no means forming 
 any part of the motive of Mr. Beecher. Let him say 
 whether there is anything inconsistent with the perfect in- 
 nocence of Mr. Beecher in his prompt surrender of the re- 
 traction — without personal fear, of which all here know 
 him to be incapable — when informed that a re-retraction 
 had rendered it comparatively useless, and when a new 
 and better way of solving the difficult problem was sug- 
 gested by Moulton. I am abundantly willing, I repeat, 
 that the reader should judge all these questions for him- 
 self — as, indeed, I have no choice ; all I ask is, that he 
 should go to the original sources for his facts, and leave 
 the untrustworthy representations of the Mansfield 
 reviewer to the solitary office of edifying their in- 
 ventor. 
 
 As I have said, the end and aim of this letter has 
 been purely personal to Dr. Fairfield, and I have not 
 sought to argue the main issue except so far as to do so 
 coincided with my purpose to discredit him. There is 
 however a single feature of new matter borrowed from 
 Tilton's last statement and introduced by Dr. Fairfield 
 
70 
 
 into his reply, which, as it has perplexed some honest 
 people, I will notice ere I close. 
 
 Having adopted the convenient method of believing 
 everything that Tilton says, the Reviewer thinks himself 
 safe in^parroting that gentleman's argument against the 
 Committee, and quoting a part of Mr. West's specification, 
 to show that the Committee's statement that the charge 
 first preferred against Mr. Beecher was not adultery, but 
 " improper advances," is disproved by the records of Ply- 
 mouth Church. The "judicial mind " is invited to pon- 
 der the following truths : 
 
 1. The <:harge that in 1870 Mr. Tilton told Mrs. 
 Andrew Bradshaw that he had discovered a criminal in- 
 timacy between Mr. Beecher and his wife was,denied by 
 Mr. Tilton, who even at the present time does not admit 
 its truth, but merely pleads the document as a contradic- 
 tion of the Committee. 
 
 2. Mrs. Bradshaw has never testified to any such 
 conversation between Mr. Tilton and herself, and at 
 present declines so to do. 
 
 3. Mr. Tilton distinctly testified before the Commit- 
 tee as follows, speaking of his interview with Bowen : 
 
 " I, in a solitary phrase, said that there was a personal 
 domestic reason why I could not go there, consistently 
 with my self-respect — that Mr. Beecher had been un- 
 handsome in his approaches to my wife. That is the 
 sum and substance of all I have ever said on this subject to 
 the very few peopje to whom I have spoken of it." [Italics 
 mine.] 
 
 Now, this is one of Tilton's falsehoods, as the Com- 
 mittee knew very well. The published evidence of Mrs. 
 Tilton and Miss Turner (besides other evidence not pub- 
 lished) shows that Tilton had charged his wife with guilty 
 relations towards Mr. Beecher, and several other gentle- 
 men. Ordinary intelhgence must perceive that the Com- 
 
71 
 
 mittee could not mean to assert, in the face of evidence 
 in its own possession, that Tilton had never privately 
 dribbled accusations of adultery against his wife. Til- 
 ton's assertion to that effect could not deceive them, nor 
 did they need West's assurance that Mrs. Bradshaw knew 
 something to the contrary — they had direct evidence to 
 the contrary. What they clearly meant was that the 
 charge presented and brought to bear on Mr. Beecher was 
 " improper advances," and no more. Tilton, for the sake 
 of a rhetorical point, assumes this statement of the Com- 
 mittee to mean something else, and then meets it, not, as 
 he might, with the direct, affirmative evidence of his wife 
 and Bessie Turner, but with a quotation from West's 
 charges, which he carefully avoids endorsing as true, which 
 he has himself denied, which his recent testimony contra- 
 dicts, which nobody has ever testified to, and which, if 
 true, would have nothing to do with the argument of the 
 Committee. ' And Fairfield, hot in the chase, overlooking 
 the evident meaning of the Committee's report when 
 taken with the testimony, overlooking the flimsiness of 
 the evidence Tilton cites, overlooking the flat contradic- 
 tion Tilton gives himself, clears everything at a bound, 
 and lands in the mud, alongside of the leader he so closely 
 follows ! 
 
 One more reference, made necessary by a change of 
 circumstances since the last paper in this case. In his 
 Reply, Dr. Fairfield furnishes one of the finest speci- 
 mens of the free and easy style in which he flings about 
 his assertions and challenges the motives of people who, 
 to all external appearance at least, are as good as him- 
 self. He demands why Tilton and Moulton are not 
 indicted for libel ; and adds, with all the force of italics, 
 "Allow me frankly to tell you that the impression is 
 well-nigh universal [the Doctor seldom allows himself to 
 speak for anything less than the universe !\ that_y(7« dare 
 
n 
 
 not do it." But hardly was the ink dry on the sheet 
 upon which this tremendous arraignment was printed, 
 before Mr. Beecher, coming down from his mountain- 
 home, goes quietly before the first Grand Jury since 
 the offense which could properly take cognizance of it, 
 and has both these men indicted for libel ! How does 
 the universe of which our immense friend is the centei 
 feel on the subject of daring and not daring, now? 
 And if the " neglect" of " prosecution" was a " confession 
 of judgment against" us, may we hope that the " prose- 
 cution" itself will argue a little something in our favor ? 
 And have we not at last arrived at that infinitesimal 
 suspicion of a doult which is to send our great Arbiter to 
 his pulpit, with his promised pronunciamento to a 
 breathless world? 
 
 I now take my leave of the subject, without pretend- 
 ing to have exhausted it. My only object, I still repeat, 
 has been to discredit Dr. Fairfield with his Western 
 readers and hearers, as a safe guide, a sound reasoner, 
 an unprejudiced judge or truthful reporter of facts. If 
 I have said enough for this, I have no need to multiply 
 words. If, on the contrary, after all this showing, your 
 people are enamored of this style of criticism and retain 
 their confidence in this style of clergyman, /, certainly, 
 shall not question their right, or complain of its ex- 
 ercise.. 
 
 As to the terms in which I have expressed my con- 
 victions, they are, so far as I know, good, honest English 
 words, appropriately applied. I think they will compare 
 favorably, even on the score of politeness, with those 
 which Dr. Fairfield flings at Mr. Beecher ; but whether 
 this be so or not, they are not merely the accurate reflex 
 of my opinions (for clerical investiture does not sanctify 
 dishonesty with me), but the only ones proper to be used, 
 if my demonstrations are correct. 
 
73 
 
 I would remind our special champion of the sacredness 
 of the cloth that it is not merely from sins against chastity 
 that the pulpit needs to be purified, before it may deserve 
 the confidence and veneration of the people. There are 
 other commandments besides the seventh. Thou shalt not 
 bear false witness lies as near, I think, to the essential char- 
 acter of the soul. Thou shalt not kill : and what is the 
 murder of the body compared with that infernal stab 
 which is aimed at all that is lovely, or hopeful, or de- 
 sirable in life.? Thou shalt not steal : but who does .not 
 know that the theft of one's " purse " is nothing to that 
 robbery of the " reputation," which leaves its victim "poor 
 indeed "? Let the " profession " be purged of adulterers 
 and perjurers, by all means ; but expel from it also those 
 soulless, bloodless things, in whose esteem all ministerial 
 graces grow pale before clerical dignity ; to whom the 
 blood and dust of the sufferer on the way to Jericho are 
 interesting mainly as imperiling the purity of the Levitical 
 linen; and who are always as ready to justify unhallowed 
 means by sanctimonious ends, for sect or set, as any Ro- 
 mish Jesuit that ever lived. Rid the ministry of these; 
 and the impassable gulf that now notoriously exists be- 
 tween the average clergyman and the people's heart, we 
 may hope to see abridged. 
 
 As to the results of the near future. Dr. Fairfield is 
 mistaken in supposing I pretend to bandy "prophecies" 
 with him. My hope is simply in the immortality of truth 
 and the supremacy of the Lord God ; but the ways of the 
 great Vindicator are often mysterious and his coming 
 sometimes long delayed. The most definite " horoscope " 
 I have essayed to draw, was the reference of Dr. Fairfield's 
 reputation to posterity and his soul to the Judgment 
 Day. His prognostications, on the contrary, have been 
 definite and near. " The time is not far off," he thinks, 
 "when there will be but one opinion among honest men," 
 D 
 
74 
 
 &c. And here, at least, his sincerity is beyond ques- 
 tion. He believes in his heart that Mr. Beecher is hope- 
 lessly down ; for otherwise he would not have jumped 
 upon him with such emphasis. He must have thought 
 the old lion sick even unto death, or he would never have 
 flung his heels so recklessly into the royal face. 
 
 But let him not indulge in the expectation that any 
 possible disaster to Mr. Beecher will carry with it a vindi- 
 cation of his unwarrantable attack. The essential odious- 
 ness of this is quite independent of the character or the 
 fortunes of its object ; and the day is surely coming when 
 he will bitterly repent that it was ever made. 
 
 Robert B.. Raymond. 
 
76 
 
 APPENDIX. 
 
 [A.] 
 
 {From the Mansfield Herald, Sept. 17, 1874) 
 
 123 Henry St., ) 
 
 Brooklyn, N. Y., Sept. 10, 1874. J 
 
 Rev. Edmund B. Fairfield, D.D., LL.D., Mansfield, O. .- 
 
 Sir : — In the Mansfield Herald bearing date to-day,, 
 an advance copy of which has been sent me, is an ad- 
 dress called " Wickedness in High Places," published 
 with your name as responsible author, in which occurs 
 the following statement : 
 
 "Professor Raymond acknowledges in a published 
 article that he had heard this spoken of, complainingly, 
 long before there was any charge of immorality." 
 
 "This," you declare to be the familiar intercourse of 
 Rev. Henry Ward Beecher with Mr. Tilton's family. 
 
 Your allusion is apparently to my father. Prof. Rob- 
 ert R. Raymond, or myself. We both bear the title you 
 employ ; and we are both known as friends of Mr Beech- 
 er, members of Plymouth Church, and firmly convinced 
 of the entire innocence of its pastor. 
 
 Neither of us is conscious of having made use of 
 such language as you quote " in a published article," 
 or of having published any article whatever on the 
 subject. 
 
 You will doubtless perceive the justice of our request 
 that you either produce your authority for this statement, 
 or immediately and publicly retract it. 
 
 Permit me to add, lest you should infer that the 
 
76 
 
 above contradiction leaves a loop-hole of evasion, that 
 neither my father nor myself can remember having said, 
 or thought, or dreamed such a thing as you have as- 
 cribed to "Professor Raymond." 
 
 With your attack on Mr. Beecher, and your convic- 
 tion that you understand the evidence in his case, a 
 large part of which you have never seen, we have, at 
 present, nothing to do. Before you can appear to us 
 to be a careful and conscientious (however mistaken) 
 seeker for the truth, you must clear yourself from the re- 
 sponsibility of what now seems to be a slander against 
 one of us. Yours respectfully, 
 
 RossiTER W, Raymond. 
 
 [B.] 
 
 {From the Mansfield Herald, Oct. i, 1874.) 
 
 TO DR. FAIRFIELD. 
 
 Brooklyn, Sept. 21, 1874. 
 Hev. Edmund B. Fairfield, D.D., LL.D., Mansfield, O. : 
 
 Sir : — In the Mansfield Herald of the loth inst., you 
 said: 
 
 " Prof. Raymond acknowledges in a published article 
 that he had heard this [the intimacy of Mr. Beecher with 
 Mr. Tilton's family] spoken of complainingly, long be- 
 fore there was any charge of immorality." 
 
 Being called to account for this, you explain in the 
 Herald oi the 17 th that you meant President John H. 
 Raymond, of Vassar College, who was, eighteen years 
 ago, a Professor at Rochester, and has never held that 
 position anywhere since. Your authority was an anony- 
 mous article, attributed to the President of a New York 
 College, and the " understanding " of the " public press 
 generally," together with "private information," confirm 
 this newspaper opinion. 
 
77 
 
 President Raymond, of Vassar College (who is my 
 father's brother), authorizes me to say that so far as he is 
 concerned your statement is utterly untrue. 
 
 You remark : " I might have said in referring to the 
 Tribune article, ' A gentleman, whom the Chicago Tribune 
 vouches for as President of one of the best-known New 
 York colleges, acknowledges,' etc., but I had my own 
 reasons for putting it in the briefer form." 
 
 What you call " the briefer form " differs from the 
 other " form " in two particulars : it is not true ; and it 
 suits your purpose — obvious " reasons " and peculiarly 
 your " own " ! _ 
 
 But you proceed to say : 
 
 " The point made was of very little consequence ; for 
 the Committee of Six freely admit Mr. Beecher's great 
 intimacy with Tilton's family — even having his own key 
 for entering the house, as though he was a member of 
 the household." 
 
 This is without warrant in a single word of the tes- 
 timony before the Committee, or of the Committee's re- 
 port. The only thing resembling it is the story of a key 
 which Mr. Tilton had for entering the house of a lady 
 whose name is suppressed in the evidence. 
 
 It is, indeed, henceforward "of very little conse- 
 quence" to Mr. Beecher or his friends what "points" 
 you "make" or do not -make," but the nature of this 
 manufacture of points in which you have engaged may 
 react unfavorably upon the manufacturer. If you can 
 satisfy your own conscience, and the people who regard 
 you as a moral guide, of the honesty of your purpose and 
 the legitimacy of your process, you will not be further 
 disturbed in your serene complacency by 
 Yours respectfully, 
 
 RossiTER W. Raymond. 
 
78 
 
 [C] 
 
 " NEST-HIDING." 
 (A Letter to the "Brooklyn Eagle.") 
 
 Brooklyn, September 17, 1874. 
 To the Editor of the Brooklyn Eagle : 
 
 The challenge which Mr. Francis Moulton has given 
 in his latest " statement," in calling upon Mr. Beecher 
 to explain in a sermon the term nesthiding, is of a piece 
 with the manner in which this word has been handled 
 by him and his confederates from the beginning. As an 
 illustration of several characteristics of the case, it is 
 too significant to be neglected ; and, with your permis- 
 sion, I shall put Mr. Moulton out of suspense on the 
 point he mentions, besides calling attention to several 
 other points which he does not mention. 
 
 In Mr. Tilton's " statement " this word was first' 
 brought forward, in the following phrase : " She stated, 
 furthermore, that Mr. Beecher habitually characterized 
 their intimacy by the term nesthiding." This was an im- 
 pudent attempt to fasten the use of the word on Mr. 
 Beecher, and to give it in advance an infamous meaning. 
 The game was cleverly assisted by certain newspapers, 
 which caught up and repeated the new term, making it 
 a by-word and a jest among the evil-minded. The pub- 
 lic was to be put on the qui vive about it. Everybady 
 must be prepared by previous insinuations to read it, 
 when it should be finally produced in a document, in the 
 light of preconceived notions about it. 
 
 Mr. Tilton's expedient was reinforced by Moulton, 
 through his convenient ally " Gath," as may be seen in 
 the following extract from an " interview " published by 
 the latter in the Chicago Tribune : 
 
 " Now," said Moulton, " put these letters by date in 
 conjunction with this one from Mrs. Tilton, where she 
 
79 
 
 says, ' We must soon meet, get consolation and have fiest- 
 hiding: " 
 
 The fact that the principal letter of Mr. Beecher thus 
 to be compared had no date (if we may trust the fac 
 simile since published) troubled neither "Gath" nor 
 Moulton. Neither were they troubled by the fact that 
 there was no such letter of Mrs. Tilton's to be compared. 
 Gath," equal to the emergency, made the comparison 
 with ease ; and his foul conclusions were given to the 
 public. By this time the word msthiding had got a 
 meaning, and could be relied upon to explain its con- 
 text, instead of being explained by it. 
 
 This was at the time when Moulton was pretending 
 to be restrained by honor from making his statement, 
 and prating to reporters about "not compromise, my 
 dear sir, but the removal of misunderstandings and the 
 intelligent realization of self-interest." 
 
 Having thus carefully prepared the ground, he pro- 
 ceeded, in his first statement, to print the nest hiding 
 letter. Here it is : 
 
 MRS. TILTON TO MR. BEECHER. 
 
 "Brooklyn, May 3, 1871. 
 
 " Mr. Beecher : My future, either for life or death, 
 would be happier could I but feel that you forgave 
 while you forget me. In all the sad complications of 
 the past year my endeavor was to entirely keep from 
 you all suffering; to bear myself alone, leaving you 
 forever ignorant of it. My weapons have been love, a 
 large untiring generosity, and nesthiding! That I failed 
 utterly we both know. But now I ask forgiveness," 
 
 Many thoughtless people, on the lookout already for 
 this word, doubtless considered it a great confirmation 
 of their suspicions that the term actually occurred in a 
 letter — forgetting the statements of Moulton to "Gath" 
 as to the context. And Moulton sanctimoniously re- 
 
80 
 
 marks about the letter, that its contents " are so remark- 
 able" as to make him query whether he ought not to 
 show it to Tilton ; but as he was assured that Beecher 
 had not answered it, he thought best " to retain it in his 
 own possession." He does not say that he did not show 
 it to Tilton ; and the phrase " retain in his own possess- 
 sion," is probably what Tilton calls " a strange technical 
 use of language," meaning to let Tilton have a chance to 
 take stenographic or other copies. 
 
 The meaning of the letter is clear; but before I point 
 it out, I will note that what ever nesthiding is, it is evi- 
 dently a means used by Mrs. Tilton at home, and one 
 by which she sought to bear suffering alone, and to keep 
 Mr. Beecher forever ignorant of it. The other means 
 were " love " and "a large, untiring generosity " — toward 
 whom pray, but T. T. .? 
 
 Now, what is nesthiding 1 It is hiding the nest, or in 
 more prosaic, though not a whit more appropriate lan- 
 guage, keeping home troubles secret. 
 
 Three years ago I headed a party of exploration to 
 the Yellowstone Lake, and I remember that one evening, 
 just before going into camp, some of the party fired sev- 
 eral shots at an eagle sitting upon her nest in a tall, dead 
 Cottonwood. Only her head could be seen ; but that 
 never flinched nor moved, though the marksmen felt 
 sure they must have hit the bird. At last they gave up in 
 chagrin and came to supper. In the morning, as we sad- 
 dled for the day's march, we saw the eagle still unmoved 
 upon her nest ; and two of us, resolved to unravel the 
 mystery, remained behind, climbed the tree, and finally 
 succeeded in overturning the nest, when down fluttered 
 the full-fledged eaglets alive, and the mother-bird rid- 
 dled with balls. She had taken her death-wounds in 
 silence, and covered her young to the last. 
 
 That was nesthiding, and that was what Mrs. Tilton 
 
81 
 
 tried to do, using love, forgiveness, and secrecy concern- 
 ing the wounds which were daily inflicted upon her by 
 the man whose " sworn statement" that he would cherish 
 and protect her had been a mockery, if not altogether 
 buried from his recollection by the multitude of state- 
 ments, sworn and unsworn, which he had piled upon it. 
 
 Mr. Moulton wants this expounded in a sermon. If 
 he will turn to a sermon preached by Mr. Beecher, Sun- 
 day morning, November lo, 1872 (immediately after 
 the publication of Woodhull's edition of Tilton), he will 
 find the thing pretty plainly stated, and with apparent 
 reference, to this very case. The sermon is called "The 
 Use of Ideals," and is No. 10, vol. ix., of " Plymouth Pul- 
 pit." In it is the following passage, during the delivery 
 of which the whole house was still as death and pro- 
 foundly impressed : 
 
 " There is many a woman who is heroic because she 
 can hold her tongue. Ah ! do not laugh. You tie a man 
 to a stake, and let Indians dance about him, and stick 
 slivers into him, and with torches light them ; and if he 
 bears his suffering patiently, do you not say that he is 
 heroic ? And let a woman stand where every inch of her 
 nature, which is exquisitely sensitive, is subjected to the 
 extremest torture, and let her, in spite of it all, manifest 
 a disposition which is inexpressibly lovely, and stand 
 patiently, * and having done all, stand ' — is not she he- 
 roic ? There is many and many a hero by reason of the 
 virtue of silence." 
 
 This is Tusthiding, Frank Moulton; and, shame on 
 the blackguard who can fish up from the obscene abyss 
 of his own consciousness a criminal significance for such 
 a word and such a thing. 
 
 Over against this practice of hiding the nest, I put 
 the practice of nest-fouling. Mr. Theodore Tilton, with his 
 various " True Statements," long and short, verbal and 
 
83 
 
 written, mild and strong, retailed over dinner tables, car- 
 ried about on lecture tours, slyly shown to eager people, 
 pressed upon reluctant people, tinkered, re- vamped, whis- 
 pered, suggested, oratorically pronounced, shouted, yelled, 
 placarded, printed in interviews, printed in extracts, 
 printed in full, lithographed — this Tom Tit, fancying 
 himself an eagle, is the " ill bird " I mean, who has been 
 fouling his nest until he can call with pride upon the 
 public to note how filthy he has made it. 
 
 Of course, everything that Tilton has done to publish 
 his domestic woes has been done with a bleeding heart. 
 It is always some sinful friend who betrays his sacred 
 confidence, and makes known what he had communi- 
 cated in deepest secrecy. It was a false friend who 
 printed in the Eagle a copy, accidentally preserved, of 
 the slanderous article set up in the Golden Age office as 
 an attack on Mr. Bowen ; it was that wicked WoodhuU 
 who blabbed on the street what had been whispered on 
 the housetop ; it was that awful Clarke, Chairman of a 
 lecture committee in Troy, who spoiled the market value 
 of the " True Statement " by writing it out from memory 
 and printing it in the Thunderbolt — a mean, money- 
 making trick; it was Storrs and Bacon and the Congre- 
 gational Council who dragged out of that bleeding heart 
 the secret it had taken so many friends so many months 
 to guard ; it was Mrs. Tilton who, by leaving the nest 
 she had tried so hard, and so weakly, to cover and hide, 
 forced him with anguish, but with firmness, to put away 
 the statement in which she was pronounced pure, and 
 get up another that should make her vile ; it was naughty 
 Maverick, who printed the "Sworn Statement," in spite 
 of the Sorrowful Swearer, who remonstrated all the while 
 he was correcting the proofs ; in short, it is always some- 
 body else that pinches Mr. Tilton and makes him cry 
 out. And how severely he reproved Maverick ! 
 
S3 
 
 " Mamma, mamma ! Johnny has thrown the baby 
 out of the window!" 
 
 "Oh, Johnny, how could you?" 
 
 That bleeding heart of Tilton's is worthy of a 
 poem. Everything about him reminds one of great 
 men gone, and his heart is like the heart of Robert 
 Bruce, which Douglas carried to Spain in a casket; 
 and when once the fight was sore with the Moorish 
 infidels, and the day seemed going against the Chris- 
 tians, Douglas threw the casket forward among his foes, 
 and shouting (according to the poet), "On, heart of 
 Bruce ! I'll follow thee " — or words to that effect — went 
 in and thrashed the enemy. Can't somebody do Tilton 
 in verse, pausing before every new scrimmage of his own 
 making to tear trom his bosom that old bleeding heart, 
 hurling it first into the fray, and then following it to vic- 
 tory or death ? Or Moulton might be his Douglas, and 
 play the heart for him. Douglas was " tender and true " 
 — that's one difficulty, to be sure ; but Moulton has ten- 
 der spots about him, and Tilton knows where to find 
 them ; and that will keep him " true " — to Tilton — while 
 it lasts. 
 
 On the whole, it seems to me Moulton deserves some 
 pity. Nobody knows what he suffers in being the only 
 man alive who cannot shake Tilton off. He has man- 
 aged a good many diflScult games, but this time he has 
 met his match. " Heathen " as he is, the heathen Chinee 
 is too much for him, and has beat him at his own 
 weapons. Poor Mrs. Tilton's nesthiding was all in vain, 
 while her mate filled the heavens with his wheeling and 
 screaming. If Moulton has any secrets exposed to the 
 same keen-eyed and loud-voiced bird,.he might as well 
 build a new nest sonaewhere else ; this one isn't safe. 
 
 RossiTER W. Raymond. 
 
84 
 
 [D.J 
 
 [The following article has been appended here, without any con- 
 sultation with the writer, on account of its intrinsic clearness and 
 force.] 
 
 HOR^ TILTONIAN^. 
 
 From the Winsted iCotin.] Herald of Oct. 9, 1874. 
 
 Dr. Leonard Bacon, in his admirable IPreliminary 
 Dissertation to Conybeare and Howson's Life and Epis- 
 tles of Saint Paul, narrates a story for the purpose of 
 an illustration which may be seen in the following ex- 
 tract : 
 
 " The knife and the flake of steel were passed to the 
 jury ; and as each juror looked through the magnifying 
 glass, the change in his countenance was a verdict of 
 guilty.' Such is the nature, and such may be the con- 
 clusiveness, of an argument from coincidence." 
 
 Conversely, we suppose, if the flake of steel had not 
 fitted the gap in the blade, the fact would have been — 
 ' so far as that knife was concerned — an illustration of the 
 conclusiveness of an argument from Discrepancy. The 
 following paragraphs do by no means include all, or a 
 tithe, of the discrepancies that have been discovered in 
 the deliverances of Messrs. Tilton and Moulton, but only 
 as many as our limited space will accommodate. 
 
 I. In Mr. Tilton's letter to Dr. Bacon, speaking of 
 his withdrawal of attendance at Plymouth church imme- 
 diately after July 3, 1870, he says: 
 
 " Some of the members hinted that I had lapsed into 
 a lamentable change of religious views; whereas my 
 views CONTINUED TO BE THE SAME as they had been 
 for many years previous." 
 
86 
 
 (From Tilton's last statement.) 
 "Mr. Bowen and I (mid-autumn, 1870), in a friendly- 
 conversation, reviewed our differences growing out of 
 my INCREASING HETERODOXY of rcUgious belief." 
 
 Will Mr. Tilton please to rise and explain ? 
 
 II. (From Tilton's sworn statement.) 
 
 "About a year after Mrs. Tilton's confession her mind 
 remained in the fixed opinion that her criminal rela- 
 tions had not been morally wrong; but at length a 
 change took place in her convictions, as noted in the 
 following letter: ' Schoharie, New York, June 29, 1871. 
 My Dear Theodore : To-day, through the mystery of 
 Catherine Gaunt, my eyes have been opened for the first 
 time in my experience, so that I clearly see my sin.' 
 After which Mrs. Tilton followed the above letter 
 with these : 
 
 (No date.) 
 
 " ' I would mourn greatly if my life were to be made 
 known to father. His head would be bowed to the 
 grave.' 
 
 (No date.) 
 
 " ' Do you think my ill-health is on account of my sin 
 and its discovery ? My sins and my life-record I have 
 carried to my Saviour. No; my prostration is owing to 
 the suffering I have caused you.' " 
 
 In Mr. Tilton's last statement, he gives a letter which 
 he says was written by Mrs. Tilton from Marietta, O., 
 in November, 1870, which contains the two extracts 
 without date quoted above. Will Mr. Tilton please to 
 rise and explain how his wife could follow a letter 
 dated June 29, 1871, with a letter dated November, 
 1870? Also will he tell us why he inserted those two 
 extracts in his sworn statement without date ? 
 
 III. (Moulton to Beecher, Aug. 4, 1874.) 
 
 " J/y Dear Mr. Beecher : I received your note asking 
 me to send you the letters and papers in my hands, tha^ 
 
86 
 
 you may use them in your controversy with Mr. Tilton. 
 I cannot in honor give any of them. I will sacredly 
 hold them until both parties shall request me to make 
 them public." 
 
 (From Beecher's Statement.) 
 
 " I was not allowed to know that the document (the 
 'apology') was in existence until a distinguished editor 
 in New York, within a few weeks past,, assured me that 
 Mr. Moulton had shown him t/ie original, and that he had 
 examined my signature to be sure of its genuineness." 
 
 And yet, Judge Lord, of Salem, in his examination of 
 the case — which is " unequaled for clearness and impar- 
 tiality," (if we are to take the Springfield Republican's 
 word for it) — asks, " Upon what ground is Moulton to be 
 charged with anything other than the very strongest 
 desire that publicity should not be given to the charge 
 against Beecher.'" 
 
 IV. (From Tilton's cross-examination.) 
 
 "Beecher (on the evening of Dec. 30, 1870) after con- 
 fessing to me and Mr. Moulton his criminal relations 
 with Mrs. Tilton, and then asking to see her a few 
 minutes, came back in half an hour expressing his abso- 
 lute heart-brokenness, whereas he had this retraction 
 from her in his pocket. I say it was damnable and 
 nefarious." 
 
 (From Moulton's statement.) 
 " Beecher's first confession was made on the night I 
 went for the retraction of Mrs. Tilton, Dec. 31, 1871." 
 Liars need good' memories. 
 
 V. From a letter from Tilton to Bowen, written — or 
 at least dated — Jan. i, 1871. 
 
 "Shortly after its presentation [the presentation ot 
 Tilton's letter to Beecher demanding that he should quit 
 Plymouth Church and Brooklyn— which letter was 
 handed to Beecher by Bowen on the 27th of December, 
 
8? 
 
 1870], you threatened that if I ever should inform Mr. 
 iieecher of the statements which you had made concern- 
 ing his adultery, you would immediately deprive me of 
 my engagement to write for the Independent and to edit 
 n^ ^^o°klyn Union. I told you that I should inform 
 Mr. Beecher, according to the dictates of my best judg- 
 ment." } i ^ 
 
 (Tilton's explanation of the reason why Elizabeth 
 [i^^Dec. 29, 1870] wrote the " confession" with 
 which he confronted Mr. Beecher, Dec. 30, 1870.) 
 "Mrs. Tilton thought that my retirement from the 
 papers was due to Mr. and Mrs. Beecher; and she 
 thought ar I was very indignant against Mr. Bowen, 
 unless there was some reconciliation between Mr. 
 Beecher and myself, the family secret would be ex- 
 posed." 
 
 (From Mr. Tilton's last statement.) 
 
 " When Moulton brought Beecher to me that night 
 — Dec. 30, 1870 — I had no thought — not the remotest — 
 of financial difficulties, or business troubles, or loss of 
 place ; for I had not yet come to those disasters — 
 neither did J foresee them." 
 
 Truly, Mr. Tilton has badly snarled himself up here. 
 In order to furnish simple souls with the knock-down 
 argument that " where there's so much smoke there must 
 be some fire," he has made more smoke than he can him- 
 self see through. 
 
 VI. (From Tilton's last statement.) 
 
 "The key-note of Mr. Beecher's attack on me is that 
 my accusation against him originated in my business 
 troubles with Mr. Bowen. That night (Dec. 30, 1870) 
 my financial difficulties or business troubles had not yet 
 come."' 
 
 (From Mrs. Tilton's letter to Mr. Tilton, dated Marietta, 
 November, 1870.) 
 
 " With this small addition of strength my first impulse 
 
88 
 
 is to fly to you and comfort you in these new distractions 
 which come to you through .y^a;- business atid its threaten- 
 ing changes." 
 
 Did the white-souled little woman want to fly and 
 comfort her husband in business troubles that he " had 
 not had the remotest thought of"? 
 
 VII. (From Moulton's statement.) 
 
 "On the night I went for the retraction (Dec. 31, 
 1870), I told him, 'Mr. Beecher, you have had criminal 
 intercourse with Mrs. Tilton, and you have done great in- 
 Jury to Tilton otherwise.' " 
 
 Cut Mr. Tilton affirms that neither he nor Moulton 
 had any knowledge of any kind of injury done by Beech- 
 er to Tilton except the one injury alleged, until the day 
 after Beecher's apology, Jan. 2, 1871. "Their witness 
 agreed not together." — Mark xiv. 56. 
 
 VIII. (From Tilton's cross-examination.) 
 
 "I said (to Bowen, Dec. 26, 1870) that Beecher had 
 been unhandsome in his approaches to my wife. This is 
 the sum and substance of a// I have ever said to the very 
 few people to whom I have spoken of it." 
 
 In Mr. Tilton's last statement he cites evidence to 
 show that on the 3d of August, 1870, he told Mrs. Brad- 
 shaw, a member of Plymouth Church, that he had dis- 
 covered a criminal intimacy between Mr. Beecher and 
 Mrs. Tilton. 
 
 IX. (From Tilton's cross-examination.) 
 
 Q. " Was not Mrs. Tilton sick on the 29th of Decem- 
 ber, and in bed ? A. I do not know whether she was 
 sick or not." 
 
 In Mr. Tilton's last statement he says he used this 
 language as Beecher was about leaving Moulton's house 
 to visit Mrs. Tilton on the night of Dec. 30, 1870: 
 
 "Remember what I say; if you reproach that sick 
 
89 
 
 ■woman for her confession, I will visit you with ven- 
 geance." 
 
 The physician who attended testifies that Mrs. Tilton 
 suffered a miscarriage on the 24th of December, and that 
 he was in daily attendance upon her until after Dec. 30. 
 What an affectionate husband — not to know whether his 
 wife was sick, and the doctor visiting her every day ! 
 
 X. (From Tilton's cross-examination.) 
 
 " Mrs. Tilton always made me believe that Mr. 
 Beecher knew this secret, until in December, (1870). I 
 took it for granted, all summer long, that she had told 
 him what she had told me." 
 
 All summer long ! Until in December! Then thou 
 must have thought that she told him in July, or August, 
 or September, or October, or November. And wast thou 
 not curious enough, O most truthful Tilton, to inquire 
 of thy wife what effect this dreadful news had on Mr. 
 Beecher? Did the guilty man turn pale, or fly for Eu- 
 rope, or retire from Plymouth Church and quit Brooklyn, 
 for reasons which he explicitly knew.' Didst thou not 
 think that Beecher carried himself with most provoking 
 unconcern, in the pulpit and out, all summer long, seeing 
 he had ruined your house, and seeing you believed that 
 he knew that you knew it, all summer long ? We would 
 be happy to have Judge Lord of Salem bring his pro- 
 found and judicial mind to bear on this remarkable cir- 
 cumstance. 
 
 XI. (Letter handed by Bowen to Beecher on Tues- 
 
 day evening, Dec. 27, 1870.) 
 
 " Brooklyn, Dec. 26, 1870. 
 " Henry Ward Beecher : 
 
 "Sir — I demand that, for reasons which you explicitly 
 understand, you immediately cease from the ministry of 
 Plymouth Church, and that you quit the City of Brook- 
 lyn as a residence. (Signed) Theodork Tilton." 
 
90 
 
 Imagine that horrible Tuesday evening. It is certain, 
 at last, that the guilty Beecher knows that the outraged 
 husband knows it all. Darkness and devils ! A guilty 
 Dr. Storrs would have explicitly shot himself before mid- 
 night. A guilty Dr. Edmund B. Fairfield would have 
 omitted family prayers on Wednesday morning, and after 
 slyly seeing Tilton safely aboard the ferry-boat, would 
 have hied him to Mrs. Tilton and shrieked, " Have you 
 betrayed me.'"— and then gone to bed and turned his 
 own face to the wall, as he has served Beecher's picture. 
 A guilty Judge Lord would have taken poison — though 
 it would not have hurt him unless it had been more 
 powerful than his logic. But a guilty Beecher neither 
 absconds, shoots, poisons, nor seeks Mrs. Tilton for ex- 
 planation nor Mr. Tilton for mercy, nor obeys the in- 
 jured husband's command to get out of Brooklyn, — but 
 behaves just as iniiocent and unalarmed people do, all 
 through Tuesday night, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday — 
 and then is switched off the road to prayer-meeting by a 
 man named Moulton, who informs him that the man who 
 four days ago had ordered him out of Brooklyn wants to 
 see him. 
 
 XII. (From Tilton's last statement.) 
 
 " Mrs. Tilton's confession of July 3, 1870, was made 
 
 voluntarily, for I had never accused her, ncr suspected 
 
 her." 
 
 Yet Mr. Tilton says he had previously caught Beecher 
 in his bedroom with flushed face and unbuttoned vest ; 
 had previously caught him "slyly touching ankles and 
 lower limbs ;" had in the spring of 1870 had an estrange- 
 ment from his wife by reason of her absorption in Beech- 
 er ; and had previously and frequently been assured by 
 his own employer (Bowen) that Beecher had confessed 
 numerous adulteries to him (Bowen). Either he had 
 abundant reason for suspicion, or else he is a liar. 
 
91 
 
 XIII. (From Tilton's last statement.) 
 
 "The confession of Mrs. Tilton was written on the 
 29th of December, 1870. I carried it in my pocket until 
 the next evening, and then went to Mr. Moulton (Dec. 
 30, 1870) and put it into his hands, which conveyed to 
 him his first knowledge of her adultery." 
 
 (From Tilton's cross-examination, speaking of the letter 
 ordering Beecher to abdicate!) 
 
 "I signed it (Dec. 26, 1870), and Bowen carried it: 
 in a few Jiours Mr. Moulton came in and I told him what 
 I had done, and he said, ' You are a damned fool ; Mr. 
 Bowen should have signed that letter as well as your- 
 self !' " 
 
 One little question, if you please, Mr. Tilton. Why 
 was Moulton helping a damned fool to drive Beecher out 
 of church and home on Monday, when he did not know 
 of your wife's or Beecher's crime until the following 
 Friday ? 
 
 XIV. (From Tilton's cross-examination.) 
 
 " Q : You say, Mr. Tilton, that for a year after what 
 you state as Mrs. Tilton's confession, she insisted to you 
 that she had not violated her marriage vow ? Ans : Yes. 
 Elizabeth never does that which does not have the stamp 
 of her conscience at the time upon it. She was always 
 saying, ' Theodore, I do not now see that I have wronged 
 you.' " 
 
 (From Mrs. Tilton's statement.) 
 
 " The category of his heartlessness, selfishness, and 
 falsehood has its climax in this endeavor to convince the 
 world that I am, or ever have been, unable to distinguish 
 between an innocent and a guilty love. I affirm myself 
 before God to be innocent of the crimes laid upon me. 
 Never have I been guilty of adultery with Henry Ward 
 Beecher, in thought or deed ; nor has he ever offered to 
 me an indecorous or improper proposal." 
 
Mr. Tilton in his two statements and cross examina- 
 tion has managed to reiterate, not less than one hundred 
 times, the assertion of his beUef that his wife is a pure 
 minded adulteress ! This pretended belief is a necessary 
 part of his plot — for her very letters, out of which he has 
 cunningly cited passages to prove her guilt, are letters 
 that never could have been written by any other than a 
 devout, conscientious, most pure and most Christian wo- 
 man. And so, to carry his point, this unequaled villain 
 must hold his wife up to the world as a virtuous harlot ! 
 
 XV. (From Moulton's statement.) 
 
 " Mr. Beecher told me that he had in his own study 
 a poison which he would take if the story of his crime 
 with Elizabeth should ever become public." 
 
 Well, why don't he take his poison? If anything 
 further were needed to show this man Beecher's treachery 
 to his simple-hearted and confiding friend Moulton, it is 
 this diabolical refusal to take his poison. Has not Moul- 
 ton set forth " the story of his crime " to the best of his 
 and Ben Butler's ability? Has not Tilton proved it "as 
 by mathematics " — the mathematics consisting of a letter 
 written by Tilton to Bowen almost any time you please, 
 and dated January i, 1871 ? Has not the Rev. Dr. Fair- 
 field declared that Beecher's guilt is clear as the noon- 
 day to him, and taken Beecher's portrait down from the 
 wall? Has not a Salem Unitarian and Massachusetts 
 Democrat by the name of Judge Lord illustrated the an- 
 cient and well-known love of his tribe for Beecher by 
 writing such a sapient article against him that we are told 
 it made " a profound impression in Boston "? Has not 
 the Springfield Republican given its readers a panoramic 
 view of public opinion on the subject by quoting news- 
 paper extracts /w and con, in the proportion of about 96 
 
93 
 
 per cent, con to 4 per cent, pro, besides daily administer- 
 ing a very spiteful editorial kick to the distinguished ac- 
 cused? And yet he won't take his poison! What 
 unparalleled perverseness ! 
 
 XVI. In Mr. Tilton's last statement he says that on 
 the 3d of July, 1870, Mrs. Tilton voluntarily, and ivith- 
 out seme of guilt, narrated the history of her criminal in- 
 timacy with Mr. Beecher. 
 
 Elsewhere in the same statement, speaking of this 
 same narration, he says, "it was made by Mrs. Tilton 
 under an accumulating pressure of conscience no longer to 
 be resisted." 
 
 From which it appears either that Mrs. Tilton is an 
 impossible kind of woman, or else that Mr. Tilton has 
 undertaken too large a contract in the lie-harmonizing 
 business. 
 
 XVII. Plymouth Church welcomes a seducer to its 
 pulpit and its families. Evidently Plymouth Church 
 would not do so if it believed him a seducer. But he is 
 a seducer, for Dr. Fairfield and Judge Lord have demon- 
 strated that he cannot be otherwise. This seducer's 
 ability so perfectly to deceive his whole church shows 
 him to be the most crafty, cool, calculating and consum- 
 mate seducer that ever sprang from the human race. Let 
 us admit all this, out of respect to the judicial and im- 
 partial reasoning of Rev. Dr. Fairfield and Judge Lord. 
 But having got us into the woods, in all fairness they 
 ought to help us out, by answering a few simple ques- 
 tions. Will a crafty seducer confess, with his victim's 
 written denial in his pocket? Are crafty and cautious 
 seducers off their guard when their door bell rings ? Do 
 calculating seducers allow Moulton to corner them in a 
 third-story room with a pistol? Do cunning seducers 
 
give up written retractions obtained from their victims, 
 and thus throw away their only defense? Do crafty 
 seducers confess adultery to Bowen, to Moulton, to Mrs. 
 Moulton, to Tilton, to Mrs. Woodhull, to Kinsella and 
 to " several other persons," and then deny it with a solemn 
 oath before Heaven and earth.' Do cool and cunning 
 seducers write apologies and scores of letters acknowl- 
 edging their guilt, and put those letters within the reach 
 of outraged husbands.' If they da then Dr. Fairfield 
 and Judge Lord cannot possibly overestimate their own 
 wisdom. 
 
 XVIII. Judge Lord finds tremendous evidence of 
 Beecher's guilt in a letter which Tilton pretends to have 
 written to Moulton on the 7th of February, 1871. A 
 judge who does not know that a rogue can date his letters 
 to suit his own purposes may do for the Massachusetts 
 Superior Court, but his eagerness to condemn Beecher 
 would probably disqualify him from being judge of all 
 the earth. 
 
 XIX. (From Tilton's cross-examination.) 
 
 " Q. That document (Beecher's Apology) is written 
 on how many sheets — two or three ? A. Yes ; /arge 
 sheets." 
 
 (From Beecher's statement.) 
 
 " That document was written on three separate half 
 sheets of large letter paper." 
 
 We never saw so much paper used for so few words. 
 Mr. Moulton must write the largest hand of any man in 
 New York, or else he must have written on that occasion 
 with an abnormal sprawl, for some special purpose. Let 
 us try to imagine to ourselves that famous Apology which 
 
95 
 
 Moulton wrote to My Dear Friend Moulton on three 
 separate half sheets of large letter paper : 
 
 SHEET FIRST. 
 
 " BROOKtYN, Jan. i, '71. 
 
 [In trust with F. D. Moulton.] 
 
 " My Dear Friend Moulton : 
 
 " I ask, through you, Theodore Tilton's forgiveness, 
 and I humble myself before him as I do before my God. 
 He would have been a better man in my circumstances 
 than I have been. I can ask nothing 
 
 SHEET SECOND. 
 
 except that he will remember all the other hearts that 
 would ache. I will not plead for myself. I even wish 
 that I were dead. But others must live and suffer. I 
 will die before anyone but myself shall be inculpated. 
 All my thoughts are running toward the poor child 
 
 The first two sheets are every word in Moulton 's 
 handwriting. If he were a bad man he could have gone 
 to his own house and re-written them on two new sheets 
 of paper, making such alterations as he chose ; but being, 
 as he repeatedly told us, a man of honor, of course he 
 did no such thing. 
 
 SHEET THIRD. 
 
 lying there and praying with folded hands. She is 
 guiltless, sinned against, bearing the transgression of an- 
 other. Her forgiveness I have. I humbly pray to God 
 to put it into the heart of her husband to forgive me." 
 [Here endeth Moulton's writing.] 
 
 [Here beginneth Beecher's writing.] 
 " I have trusted this to Moulton in confidence." 
 
 "H. W. Beecher," 
 
96 
 
 These little, limping, bob-tailed sentences are not 
 precisely in Beecher's best style; but the Rev. Dr. Fair- 
 field says that Moulton could not have used such lan- 
 guage, because he is not a professor of religion ! But 
 with all respect for Dr. Fairfield's judicial powers, we 
 must regard that argument as inconclusive. There is 
 another non-professor of religion who once piously 
 quoted Scripture as follows ; " It is written, He shall 
 give his angels charge concerning thee." 
 
POSTSCRIPT 
 
 TO THE SECOND EDITION. 
 
 Since the publication of the first edition of this pam- 
 phlet, a copy of the new issue of Dr. Fairfield's " Review 
 of the Case of Henry Ward Beecher " has been received. 
 In this, the author, availing himself of some of the crit- 
 icisms in the first of the following papers (the Rejoinder 
 is of later date), has corrected a few small errors of his 
 former issue, and, by various other eliminations and con- 
 densations, somewhat improved his performance in a 
 literary point of view. But the same disingenuous 
 method and hateful spirit, with the same systematic per- 
 version of all the facts, are still visible throughout ; for 
 to have reformed these would have been not only to make 
 waste of his ammunition, but to deprive his work entirely 
 of its reason to be. 
 
 He still refuses to consider Mr. Beecher 's own ac- 
 count of the causes which produced his intense mental 
 agony in the winter of 1870-71 ; but continues to patter 
 his idle syllogisms: Mr. Beecher had "remorse," there- 
 fore he had committed adultery; Mr. Beecher had 
 " something to conceal," and it could have been nothing 
 but adultery. He still continues to quote as witnesses 
 people who have not opened their mouths in the case, or 
 only opened them to deny what he alleges. Whatever 
 Tilton or Moulton attribute to any third party, he still 
 directly attributes to that party, without an intervening 
 
98 
 
 question. He dilates all the way through upon the beau- 
 tiful and remarkable harmony between the statements of 
 these two gentlemen and all the documents in the case ; 
 apparently forgetting that they themselves had control 
 of all the documents, — suppressing what they chose and 
 producing what they chose, — and could make the state- 
 ments harmonious, at their leisure.* He persists in at- 
 tributing to Mr. Beecher, with the serious attestation of 
 quotation-marks, words of important bearing which Mr. 
 Beecher never uttered, and which nobody but Fairfield 
 pretends be ever uttered. He continues to assert in the 
 face of incontrovertible disproof (to which he does not 
 vouchsafe even passing notice) that Mr. Beecher never 
 gave the advice of separation till after the so-called 
 Apology ; and now he intensifies the outrage by making 
 the same assertion of Mrs. Beecher, and calling this 
 "an astounding fact, proved by uncontradicted testimony." 
 He still finds it for his interest to make Mr. Beecher re- 
 sponsible for the entire " Apology " which Moulton pro- 
 fesses to have taken down from his lips ; insisting that 
 those incoherent ejaculations constituted a signed "let- 
 ter," in the true and proper meaning of the word, and 
 quoting some subsequent unstudied expressions of Mr. 
 Beecher's as positive demonstration.! He repeats his 
 
 * A ludicrous instance of Fairfield's obtusity appears in his Re- 
 ply to my first letter, where he challenges me to print without blush- 
 ing some unspecified indecent letter of Mrs. Tilton's, " with her own 
 underscoring ;" as though these letters had not passed through the 
 delicate hands of Mr. Frank Moulton, and as though anybody could 
 not underscore anybody-else's letter just as he might choose ! 
 
 f The damning words occur in a letter to Moulton, written two 
 or three years after, and at a time when no doubt had arisen in the 
 writer's mind as to the exact contents of the paper alluded to, or 
 of the nefarious uses to which it was to be put. Here they are, 
 given with Fairfield's own formidable capitals ; " The agreement was 
 made after MY LETTER, through you, was written." This may 
 
99 
 
 insinuation about the pecuniary interest of Plymouth 
 Church in defending its pastor, having reference to its 
 " income ;" in amusing ignorance of the fact that the 
 income of the Plymouth congregation consists of what 
 it pays out, to provide the ordinances of worship and the 
 means of mission-work, for the benefit, in a large degree, 
 of strangers. 
 
 These are a few of the ugly features of what Dr. 
 Fairfield calls his ^^ revised edition;" features which 
 forbid me to modify or retract one word of the indig- 
 nant comment which I have visited upon him and his 
 work in the preceding pages. I now leave him to pur- 
 sue the congenial work to which, both by pen and Tn^ 
 person, he seems to be devoted — traveling to and fro in 
 the land with a bi-fold purpose; first, to embitter the 
 Congregational mind and heart against Henry Ward 
 Beecher, and then to institute what he calls a "trial" 
 by the tribunal he shall have thus prepared. 
 
 R. R. R. 
 
 be called a literal argument, and it has given huge delight to Dr. 
 Fail-field, as absolutely unanswerable. As the Doctor affects a great 
 love for rigid logical demonstration, let us treat him to a " short 
 method " here : This document either was or was not a letter. If 
 it was a letter, it was addressed to somebody. To whom was it ad- 
 dressed ? To Tilton ? But it begins, My Dear Moulton. To Moul- 
 ton, then ? But it says, "My letter, through you. " Letters are not 
 usually written through those to whom they are addressed. (The 
 Doctor may think he has had personal experience of such a one, but I 
 don't think he'll insist on the exception.) So the alleged " letter " 
 v;^as written neither to Tilton nor to Moulton. But as nobody else 
 is in question, it was written to nobody ; and hence was, in no proper 
 sense, a letter. It was, as it plainly purports to be, rough notes, jotted 
 down during a protracted and exciting conversation, and selected 
 and arranged to suit the annotator. That this was all, and the worst, 
 that could be made out of such a conversation, is one of the strong- 
 est indications in favor of the man for whom the snare was laid. 
 Strong web, keen spider ; but, then, a very big fly !