Henry Ward Beecher
Learn more about the plight of the American Abolitionist Movement
On June 24, 1813, Henry Ward Beecher was born in Litchfield, Connecticut. At the age of 26, Henry became a Presbyterian minister and served in that capacity in Lawrenceburg and Indianapolis. In the year 1847, the Reverend Beecher went to Plymouth Church in Brooklyn. He was a skilled orator and popular preacher who drew in thousands to Plymouth Church each Sunday.
His Congregationalist pulpit was a favorite place to espouse his political and social views which included abolition, women’s suffrage, Darwin’s theory of evolution, as well as temperance. It was from this pulpit that he became an outspoken critic of the Kansas-Nebraska bill and through his political activism, Henry Beecher raised money to purchase rifles that were used to oppose the spread of slavery. Armed with these “Beecher Rifles,” volunteers including John Brown and his five sons departed for the contested ground of Kansas.
As a civil war loomed nearby in 1860, Beecher exchanged his Free Soil Party membership for that of the Republican party. As the lines were drawn and sides taken, Beecher used the resources of his congregation to raise and equip a regiment of volunteer infantry. His associations, and politics throughout the war abdicated a complete end to slavery. He even went so far as to converse with President Lincoln about proclaiming an end to slavery. His abolition aims did not end there as Beecher embarked upon a speaking tour in England in order to raise opposition to further support for the Confederate South. When the war came to an end, the Reverend Beecher advocated that, “Compassion will cure more sins than condemnation.” Reverend Beecher died on March 8, 1887 and was buried in Brooklyn’s Green-Wood Cemetery.
The Beecher family included a number of political, social and abolition activists that included:
- Sister, Harriet Beecher Stowe, author of Uncle Tom’s Cabin
- Sister, Catharine Beecher, educator
- Brother, Charles Beecher, activist
- Sister, Isabella Beecher Hooker, activist
- Nephew, Edgar Beecher Bronson
Interesting side-notes:
In 1870, Henry Beecher was accused of having an affair with Elizabeth Tilton, the married wife of a family friend. The information reached the ears of women’s rights and free love activist, Victoria Woodhull, who publicly claimed that Beecher had embraced the free-love doctrine that he had denounced from his pulpit. Subsequently, Woodhull was arrested for using the mail system to send obscene material. Beecher was eventually exonerated by the Plymouth Church of any wrong doing.
Strict adherence to Calvinistic orthodoxy reigned supreme in the Beecher houshould and the family did not celebrate Christmas or birthdays in order to avoid ‘undue frivolity.”
“I don’t like these cold, precise, perfect people, who, in order not to speak wrong, never speak at all, and in order not to do wrong, never do anything.”
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