The Sex Scandal of the Nineteenth Century

Henry Ward Beecher reposes on the cover of his new biography.

Debby Applegate titles her new biography The Most Famous Man in America (Doubleday; $27.95). What makes her subject, Henry Ward Beecher, so famous? As a minister and influential public figure, Beecher weighed in on pretty much every important debate during his lifetime—and he also happened to be the main player in one of the biggest sex scandals of his time, a scandal so big that some say it generated more headlines than the entire Civil War.

Beecher, of whom this is the first major biography in decades, wore his hair long and flowing, and open-necked shirts and ill-fitting suits. He supported civil rights for blacks, equality for women, and was deeply involved in politics. He poked fun at solemn institutions, saying, “What is Orthodoxy? I will tell you. Orthodoxy is my doxy, and Heterodoxy is your doxy, that is, if your doxy is not like my doxy.” A passionate gardener, he filled his churches with flowers, and he preached to a country torn apart by a bitter war. He was a true man of the sixties. But it was the 1860s, not the 1960s.

Henry Ward Beecher was the eighth child of Lyman and Roxana Beecher. His father, a fairly famous man himself, was an intense Calvinist preacher, deeply devoted to his faith and his Lord. He demanded a great deal from his children, and many of them fulfilled his dreams. They made significant contributions to history as abolitionists, suffragists, educators, and ministers. Lyman Beecher’s most famous child, Harriet Beecher Stowe, wrote Uncle Tom’s Cabin, a book that marked a turning point in the abolitionist movement. it would have taken a strong rebellion against both nature and nurture for Henry Ward Beecher to have turned into just another Victorian.

Though he followed in his father’s footsteps as a minister, he was as different a preacher from his father as he could be. As the Encyclopedia Americana put it, he “revolted at his father’s sulphurous theology” and renounced Calvinism in favor of Congregationalism. His great gift, Applegate makes clear, was in turning grand theories, be they religious or political, into something intimate and easy to understand. As they would say a century later, he made the political personal.

He spoke of a God who was loving and kind. Applegate describes his preaching style as one that “focused less on the Lord as lawgiver and more on Jesus Christ as soul mate—‘a Christ that never was far from me, but that was always near me, as a companion and friend, to uphold and sustain me.’” Though never a consistent abolitionist, he took a similar tack with his antislavery lectures, specializing in “slave auctions” where he would whip his congregation into a frenzy, asking his listeners to picture their own children sold into slavery and vividly describing the horrors awaiting the young slaves. His efforts were very successful, always raising enough money to buy freedom for actual slaves whose plight had been placed before the congregation.

Applegate’s greatest strength is her ability to convey Beecher’s humanity, peppering the book with glimpses of the everyday man, helping his wife bake their wedding cake, toting around his toddler daughter in a wheelbarrow, and affectedly kissing all his acquaintances on the cheek, “European style.” At the same time, she is relentless about the ugliness, both external and internal, of Beecher’s wife, Eunice. The biography is filled with the snippy opinions of Beecher’s parishioners and neighbors, all of whom seem to have found Eunice jealous, petty, and annoying. As Applegate puts it, “Although she was a remarkably strong woman, she was always eager to cast herself as a victim.” Her life was, in ways that were not unusual for the time, quite difficult.

She was constantly pregnant, and she and her children suffered a never-ending cycle of illnesses, including malaria and the mumps. The Beecher family was famously industrious, and they all pursued their hobbies and professions with an intense zeal. These energies gave them an outlet for their sadness and anxieties—all of them except Eunice.

Her worries took a severe toll. Early in the Beechers’ marriage, Henry took his wife and young daughter to Massachusetts for a visit with her parents. On the train a fellow passenger said to Eunice, “How proud you must be of such a kind and helpful son.” The passenger was referring to Henry. Twenty-nine years old and married for only three years, Eunice had been taken for her husband’s mother.

Reminders of the nagging hag at home rumble through the book, setting the stage for the scandal that fascinated the whole country, which demonstrates that Americans’ love of the disintegration of celebrity marriages hardly started with the birth of People magazine.

Besides the obvious unhappiness at the Beecher home, an innocent hobby also contributed to Beecher’s downfall. As he grew wealthier he became an art collector, “acquiring so many etchings that he could not display them all, and often invited guests to sit with him on the floor as he spread them out for viewing.” The obvious and clichéd beginning of the end happens a few chapters later, when he invites Edna Dean Proctor, a young poet, to “view his collection of etchings and meet him at Brooklyn Heights soirées.” Edna Proctor was but the first in a series of probably conquests; it was the seduction of his friend Theodore Tilton’s wife that became the most controversial of the affairs. Applegate stops short of giving full credence to all of the liaisons attributed to Beecher, but she makes a strong case that most of the rumors were at least partially true.

Mrs. Elizabeth Tilton had been a classmate of Beecher’s daughter Hattie. Her husband, originally an assistant to Beecher at the Independent, a newspaper where the latter was a star contributor, developed suspicions about the relationship between his wife and her minister and badgered Elizabeth until she admitted to an affair. At this point, the book tries to lay out the complicated path of the he-said-she-said testimony and letters of both of the Tiltons and Beecher. This is a web that is difficult to untangle, since Elizabeth Tilton seems to have written a confession or a retraction or a retraction of a retraction practically every week, being pressured by both her husband and Beecher to affirm totally opposite facts. Applegate does her best to present the soap-opera-worthy twists and turns, but even she throws up her hands, writing, “Elizabeth and Theodore had contradicted each other and themselves so often that no one was quite sure what to believe . . . something to keep in mind in the pages that follow.”

The trial that ensued, Theodore Tilton v. Henry Ward Beecher, entranced the public with its tales of debauchery and drama. Though Beecher was eventually found innocent, the scandal marred his reputation for the rest of his life. Once the talk of an entire country, a person so important that Abraham Lincoln, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Mark Twain all came to hear him preach, he is now mostly forgotten. Today some may know that Sharps rifles were once called Beecher’s Bibles because of their use by antislavery forces, or that the man was Harriet Beecher Stowe’s brother, but he is hardly a household name. His fate is fitting for someone who placed so much emphasis on happiness here on earth, rather than in the afterlife. Still, Applegate’s book makes a strong case that Henry Ward Beecher’s earthly exploits deserve another look.

—Claire Lui is an editorial assistant at American Heritage magazine.