"The most brilliant and fertile pulpit-genius of the nineteenth century,
and the most widely influential American of his time," says John Henry
Barrows in his masterly life of Henry Ward Beecher. "To the sensitive
heart of a woman, he added a lion-like courage, and a Miltonic loftiness
of spirit. To the more than royal imagination of Jeremy Taylor, he added
a zeal as warm as Whitefield's. In him the wit of Sydney Smith was
combined with the common-sense of John Bunyan.
"In the annals of oratory his place is near that of Demosthenes. Among
reformers he need fear no comparison with Wendell Phillips, John Bright,
Mazzini, or Charles Sumner. In moral genius for statesmanship he was the
brother of Abraham Lincoln; and, in the annals of the pulpit, he can
only be mentioned with the greatest names,--Chrysostom, Bernard, Luther,
Wesley, Chalmers, Spurgeon."
Dr. Mark Hopkins, in Edward W. Bok's "Memorial Volume," said of Henry
Ward Beecher's forty years in Plymouth pulpit, "No such instance of
prolonged, steady power at one point, in connection with other labors so
extended and diversified, and magnificent in their results, has ever
been known."
Dr. Thomas Armitage of the Fifth-avenue Baptist Church, New York, his
life-long friend, gave Beecher "the first place among the preachers of
the world to-day." Dr. Robert Collyer said, "To my mind, he was the
greatest preacher on this planet.... Men will be his debtors for ages to
come."
June 24, 1891, the statue of this great American leader, by John Quincy
Adams Ward, was unveiled in front of Brooklyn City Hall. Three hundred
children from Plymouth Church Sunday-school sang his favorite hymn,--
"Love divine, all love excelling,"
accompanied by the band of the Thirteenth Regiment.
Henry Ward Beecher, the son of the Rev. Lyman Beecher and Roxana Foote,
was born in Litchfield, Conn., June 24, 1813. The father was an
eloquent, fearless, great-hearted man, the son and grandson of a sturdy
blacksmith; the mother a refined, dignified, intellectual, beautiful,
and superior woman. Her family connections were of the best in New
England. Her ancestor, James Foote, an English officer, aided Charles
II. of England to hide himself in the Royal Oak which grew in a field of
clover, and for this was knighted; the family coat-of-arms bearing an
oak for its crest with a clover-leaf in its quarterings.
Roxana, the granddaughter of General Ward of Revolutionary fame, was
remarkably well educated for the times. She was versed in literature and
history, which she studied while she spun flax, tying her books to the
distaff,--no wonder that her great son was an omniverous reader,--she
wrote and spoke the French language fluently, drew with the pencil, and
painted with the brush on ivory, sang and played on the guitar, and was
an expert with her needle.
[Illustration: HENRY WARD BEECHER.]
After her marriage with Mr. Beecher, she opened a school for girls in
their parish at East Hampton, Long Island, to eke out a living on their
four hundred dollars salary. From here they were called in 1810, eleven
years after their marriage, to the hilly, lonely town of Litchfield,
Conn., bringing their six little children with them.
Henry Ward was the ninth child, the eighth then living.
So many cares and privations broke down the beautiful mother, who died
when Henry was three years old.
A friend of the family writes: "She told her husband that her views and
anticipations of heaven had been so great that she could hardly sustain
it, and if they had been increased she should have been overwhelmed, and
that her Saviour had constantly blessed her; that she had peace without
one cloud, and that she had never during her sickness prayed for life.
She dedicated her sons to God for missionaries, and said that her
greatest desire was that her children might be trained up for God....
"She attempted to speak to her children; but she was extremely
exhausted, and their cries and sobs were such that she could say but
little. She told them that God could do more for them than she had done
or could do, and that they must trust him."
After Lyman Beecher had prayed, "she fell into a sweet sleep from which
she awoke in heaven. It is a moving scene to see eight little children
weeping around the bed of a dying mother."
"They told us," says Mrs. Harriet Beecher Stowe, "at one time that she
had been laid in the ground, at another that she had gone to heaven.
Whereupon Henry, putting the two things together, resolved to dig
through the ground and go to find her; for being discovered under sister
Catherine's window one morning digging with great zeal and earnestness,
she called to him to know what he was doing, and, lifting his curly
head, with great simplicity he answered, 'Why, I am going to heaven to
find ma!'"
The benign influence of this lovely mother was never forgotten by Henry
Ward Beecher. He said: "I have only such a remembrance of her as you
have of the clouds of ten years ago, faint, evanescent, and yet, caught
by imagination and fed by that which I have heard of her, and by what my
father's thought and feeling of her were, it has come to be so much to
me that no devout Catholic ever saw so much in the Virgin Mary as I have
seen in my mother, who has been a presence to me ever since I can
remember.... Do you know why so often I speak what must seem to some of
you rhapsody of woman? It is because I had a mother, and if I were to
live a thousand years I could not express what seems to me to be the
least that I owe to her....
"She has been part and parcel of my upper life--a star whose parallax I
could not take, but nevertheless, shining from afar, she has been the
light that lit me easier into the thought of the invisible and the
presence of the Divine."
Again her distinguished son wrote: "There are few born into this world
that are her equals. She was a woman of extraordinary graces and gifts;
a woman not demonstrative, with a profound philosophical nature, of a
wonderful depth of affection, and with a serenity that was simply
charming. From her I received my love of the beautiful, my poetic
temperament; from her also I received simplicity and childlike faith in
God."
When Henry Ward was eighteen, he found some letters of his mother to his
father. He wrote in his diary: "O my mother! I could not help kissing
the letters. I looked at the paper and thought that her hand had rested
upon it while writing it. The hand of my mother! She had formed every
letter which I saw. _She_ had _looked_ upon that paper which I now
looked upon. She had folded it. She had sent it."
The Rev. Lyman Beecher said of her, "I never heard a murmur, ... I never
witnessed a movement of the least degree of selfishness; and if there
ever was any such thing in the world as disinterestedness, she had it."
Henry Ward repeats this incident told him by his father: "One day, being
much annoyed by some hogs that kept getting into his garden, he seized
his gun and rushed to the door. My mother anxiously followed, and cried,
'O father, don't shoot the poor things!' He flashed back at her, 'Woman,
go into the house!' and when he was telling me of it years afterwards he
said: 'Without a word or look she turned, quietly, majestically, and
went in--but she didn't get in before I did. I threw my arms around her
in an agony of self-reproach, and cried "Forgive me, oh, forgive me!"
She uttered no word, but she looked at me like a queen--and smiled--and
kissed my face; my passion was gone, and my offence forgiven.' Up to the
last of his life he never spoke of her but with intensest admiration and
loving remembrance."
About a year after Roxana's death, Dr. Lyman Beecher found an estimable
woman willing to be a mother to the eight motherless children, and to
take summer boarders to help support the family, whose income was eight
hundred dollars a year. She must have been a woman of great
self-sacrifice.
Young Henry thought her saintly, but cold. "Although I was longing to
love somebody," he writes, "she did not call forth my affection; and my
father was too busy to be loved. Therefore I had to expend my love on
Aunt Chandler, a kind soul that was connected with our family, and the
black woman that cooked, who was very kind to me. My mother that brought
me up I never thought of loving. I revered her, but I was not attracted
to her.... I knew that about twilight she prayed; and I had a great
shrinking from going past her door at the time. I had not the slightest
doubt that she had set her affections on things above, and not on things
beneath."
At four years of age Henry went to Ma'am Kilbourn's school, where he
repeated his letters twice a day, and later to the district school, for
which he had in those days no affection. "In winter," he says, "we were
squeezed into the recess of the farthest corner, among little boys, who
seemed to be sent to school to fill up the chinks between the bigger
boys. We were read and spelt twice a day, unless something happened to
prevent, which _did_ happen about every other day. For the rest of the
time we were busy in keeping still.
"And a time we always had of it. Our shoes always would be scraping on
the floor or knocking the shins of urchins who were also being educated.
All our little legs together (poor, tired, nervous, restless legs with
nothing to do!) would fill up the corner with such a noise that, every
ten or fifteen minutes, the master would bring down his two-foot hickory
ferule on the desk with a clap that sent shivers through our breasts to
think how that would have felt if it had fallen somewhere else; and then
with a look that swept us all into utter extremity of stillness, he
would cry, 'Silence in that corner!' ...
"Besides this our principal business was to shake and shiver at the
beginning of the school for very cold; and to sweat and stew for the
rest of the time before the fervid glances of a great iron box stove,
red-hot." Those of us who have attended district schools in New England
will recognize the truthfulness of the picture.
Henry longed for birds and flowers and books, as indeed he did all
through college, and was ever a deeper student of nature than of books.
And yet in after years he was glad for some of these school experiences.
"I am thankful," he says, "that I learned to hem towels--as I did. I
know how to knit suspenders and mittens. I know a good deal about
working in wood-sawing, chopping, splitting, planing, and things of that
sort. I was brought up to put my hand to anything; so that when I went
West, and was travelling on the prairies and my horse lost a shoe, and I
came to a cross-road where there was an abandoned blacksmith's shop, I
could go in and start the fire, and fix the old shoe and put it on
again. What man has done man can do; and it is a good thing to bring up
boys so that they shall think they can do anything. I could do
anything."
The lad was sensitive to praise or blame, and extremely diffident. "To
walk into a room where 'company' was assembled, and to do it erect and
naturally, was as impossible as it would have been to fly.... Our
backbone grew soft, our knees lost their stiffness, the blood rushed to
the head, and the sight almost left our eyes. We have known something
of pain in after years, but few pangs have been more acute than some
sufferings from bashfulness in our earlier years."
Mr. Beecher felt all through his life that he owed much to a colored
man, Charles Smith, who worked on his father's farm when he was a boy.
"He used to lie upon his humble bed," says Mr. Beecher, "(I slept in the
same room with him) and read his Testament, unconscious, apparently,
that I was in the room.... I never had heard the Bible really read
before; but there, in my presence, he read it, and talked about it to
himself and to God.... He talked to me about my soul more than any
member of my father's family."
Henry was taken to Bethlehem, seven miles from Litchfield, to the school
of the Rev. Mr. Langdon; but he seems here also to have loved the woods
and flowers so much better than books, that he was finally sent to
Hartford to the care of his sister Catherine, who taught a school for
young ladies. Though a favorite on account of his sunny disposition, he
proved a poor scholar, and was sent home at the end of six months. When
the boy was thirteen, Dr. Lyman Beecher moved with his family to Boston,
having been called to the pastorate of the Hanover-street Congregational
Church at the North End.
Here he loved Christ Church chimes, listened to their music "with a
pleasure and amazement," he says, "which I fear nothing will ever give
me again till I hear the bells ring out wondrous things in the New
Jerusalem," and studied ships as he strolled along the docks, or
lingered in Charlestown Navy Yard.
At the latter place he stole a six-pound shot, and not knowing how to
get it home unobserved, carried it rolled in a handkerchief on the top
of his head under his hat. With the greatest difficulty he brought it
home, and then did not know what to do with it, not daring to show it,
nor tell where he got it.
"But after all," he says, "that six-pounder rolled a good deal of sense
into my skull. I think it was the last thing I ever stole; and it gave
me a notion of the folly of coveting more than you can enjoy, which has
made my whole life happier."
The boy who had so loved the country among the hills of Connecticut,
became gloomy and restless shut in by the treeless city. His father gave
him the lives of Nelson and Captain Cook to read, and the lad resolved
to go to sea. He could not bring himself to run away without telling his
father, which he did. With rare tact Dr. Beecher replied that Henry
would not wish to be an ordinary sailor.
"No," said the boy. "I want to be a midshipman, and after that a
commodore."
"I see," said the father; "and in order for that you must begin a course
of mathematics and study navigation.... I will send you up to Amherst
next week, to Mount Pleasant, and there you'll begin your preparatory
studies, and if you are well prepared I presume I can make interest to
get you an appointment."
At fourteen the lad entered Mount Pleasant Institute, the father hoping
and praying that his boy "would be in the ministry yet."
With Lord Nelson and other great commanders in mind, he determined to
master his studies and be somebody. Hard mathematics became easier, and
he liked the drill in elocution. He enjoyed sport among the boys, and
the semi-military methods of the school, but best of all he liked
spending his play-hours in caring for beds of pansies and asters.
During a revival at Mount Pleasant, Henry was much moved, and wrote to
his father, who advised his coming home to join the church. He did so,
though he felt afterwards that the change in his life was not as
thorough as he could have wished. However, it obliterated the desire of
being a sailor, and turned his thoughts toward the ministry.
When he was seventeen, in 1830, he entered Amherst College. The great
beauty of the scenery always had for him an especial charm. "I used to
look across the beautiful Connecticut River valley, and at the blue
mountains that hedged it in, until my heart swelled and my eyes filled
with tears."
In college he was fond of athletic sports, ready in wit, beginning to
show his eloquence in debate, an ardent temperance advocate, a lover of
rhetoric, botany, and geology, and a warm friend to his classmates. He
cared little for the classics; but he read much, especially the old
English authors, Spenser, Shakespeare, Milton, and others.
Dr. Roswell D. Hitchcock, who was at Amherst with young Beecher, says,
"He was by all odds the best debater of his college generation. I should
be glad to know how he acquired his mastery of the English language....
The four books which probably helped him most were the Bible,
Shakespeare, Milton's 'Paradise Lost,' and Bunyan's 'Pilgrim's
Progress.'"
"He was," said Dr. John Haven, a classmate, "a great reader, and
probably had more general knowledge than any one of his classmates when
he graduated."
He necessarily used the greatest economy in college, his board costing
him but one dollar and fifty cents a week, a mile from college grounds;
and when vacation came he walked more than a hundred miles to Boston,
because he had no money to pay the stage-coach fare.
Charles Beecher, the youngest of Roxana's children, was in college with
his brother Henry. Dr. Beecher became so straitened in money matters
that it seemed probable that the sons must leave college. He and his
wife talked the matter over till finally he said, "Well, the Lord always
has taken care of me, and I am sure he always will." The mother lay
awake after she had gone to bed, and cried over it; evidently she was
not as cold at heart as the young Henry Ward thought.
The next morning was the Sabbath. The door-bell rang, and a one hundred
dollar bill was handed in from Mr. Homes, as a thank-offering for the
conversion of one of his children. The way was now opened for the boys
to continue their college course.
After Henry had been at Amherst less than a year, in the spring vacation
of 1831, he and another student walked fifty miles to the home of a
classmate, and there fell in love with the sister of the latter, Eunice
White Bullard, daughter of Dr. Artemas Bullard of West Sutton, Mass.
"After our outside work was done," writes Mrs. Beecher, years later,
"mother and I took knitting and sewing and sat down with them. I was
going to wind a skein of sewing-silk (that was before spools were
common), and, as was my custom, put it over the back of a chair. More
gallant and thoughtful, _apparently_, than his older companions, this
young gentleman insisted upon holding it for me to wind. For some
reason--_perfectly unaccountable_, if one judged only by his quiet,
innocent face, without watching the eyes and mouth--that skein became
as intricately tangled as if tied by Macbeth's witches.
"'A badly tangled skein is it not?' said he, when I had lost half my
evening in getting it wound.
"'Rather more troublesome, I imagine, than if I had kept it on the
chair,' I replied. 'It was a good trial of patience, anyhow,' was his
response to the laugh that followed."
The students remained for several days, and had a merry time. One day,
after some pies had been taken out of the old-fashioned brick oven, a
few ashes falling upon one, the mother asked Eunice to get them off.
Henry offered to help, and respectfully taking the pie from her hands
carried it into the garden, where he and his two other college friends
ate it up. "There, we have cleared the plate nicely," said Henry Ward,
as he handed it back to the mother.
Dr. Bullard said of young Beecher, "He's smart. If he lives, he'll make
his mark in the world."
The next winter, January, 1832, Henry Ward taught school near the town
where Eunice was teaching. He asked, "If she would go to the West with
him as a missionary?" and was referred to her parents. Mrs. Bullard was
grieved; but Dr. Bullard was angry, and said, "Why, you are a couple of
babies. You don't know your own minds yet, and won't for some years to
come." Young Beecher was a little over eighteen, and Miss Bullard ten
months older.
About this time Henry earned five dollars for giving a temperance
lecture, using the money to buy for his future wife the unusual
love-gift of Baxter's "Saints' Rest."
Soon after, he walked to Brattleborough, Vt., fifty miles each way, gave
a lecture, for which he received ten dollars, and with a part of the
money bought an engagement-ring for Miss Bullard, which was also her
wedding-ring, and with the rest the works of Edmund Burke.
This money gave him great satisfaction. "Oh, that bill!" he says. "How
it warmed me and invigorated me! I looked at it before going to sleep; I
examined my pocket the next morning, to be sure that I had not dreamed
it. How I pitied the _poor_ students, who had not, I well knew, ten
dollars in _their_ pockets. Still, I tried to keep down pride in its
offensive forms. I would not be lifted up."
After he had bought the books, he says, "I was a man that owned a
library! I became conservative and frugal. Before, I had spent at least
a dollar and a half a year for knickknacks; but, after I had founded a
library, I reformed all such wastes, and every penny I could raise or
save I compelled to transform itself into books!" When he graduated, he
owned about fifty volumes.
Dr. Lyman Beecher having left Boston to become the President of Lane
Theological Seminary at Cincinnati, Ohio, Henry and Charles went thither
to study theology. The three years spent there were full of pathetic,
and sometimes comic, incidents. In this, at that time far West, the
fences were poor, and cattle were apt to stray at will over flower-beds
and across the gardens. One day Henry found a strange cow lying down on
the barn floor. He quickly drove her out, chased her down the street,
and, hot and tired, came to the house and threw himself on the sofa.
"There, I guess I have taught one old cow to know where she belongs," he
remarked to his father.
"What do you mean?" said the doctor, growing excited. "Well, you have
done it. I have just bought that cow, and had to wade the Ohio River
twice to get her home; and, after I have got her safely into the barn,
you have turned her out. You have done it, and no mistake." And the cow
was vigorously hunted up.
During all these years affectionate letters were sent to Eunice Bullard.
"What a noble creation E---- is," young Beecher writes in his journal.
"I could have looked through ten thousand and never found one so every
way suited to me. How dearly do I love her!"
Some of this time was darkened by doubt and disbelief; but, like John
Bunyan, after about two years of unsettled condition of mind, peace was
assured. "It came to me," he says, "like the bursting of spring. It was
as if yesterday there was not a bird to be seen or heard, and as if
to-day the woods were full of singing birds. There rose up before me a
view of Jesus as the Saviour of sinners,--not of saints, but of sinners
unconverted, before they were any better,--because they were so bad and
needed so much; and that view has never gone from me.... Never for a
single moment have I doubted the power of Christ's love to save me, any
more than I have doubted the existence in the heaven of the sun by day
and the moon by night."
The second Mrs. Beecher had died, triumphing in her faith. Dr. Beecher,
tried for heresy, was fighting theological battles, which his son Henry
learned to abhor.
"I see no benefit in a controversy," he wrote. "It will be a fierce
technical dispute about propositions, at the expense in the churches of
vital godliness.... Others may blow the bellows, and turn the doctrines
in the fire, and lay them on the anvil of controversy, and beat them
with all sorts of hammers into all sorts of shapes; but I shall busy
myself with _using_ the sword of the Lord, not in _forging_ it."
Pro-slavery riots had begun, and the printing-press of James G. Birney
was destroyed by a mob of Kentucky slaveholders. Young Beecher was sworn
in as a special constable, and for several nights, well armed, patrolled
the streets with others, to protect the colored people. He was learning
bravery early, and he had need of it through life.
Mr. Beecher graduated in 1837 from Lane Seminary, and through the
influence of a Yankee woman, Martha Sawyer, was asked to go to
Lawrenceburg, Ind., to preach. "There was a church in that place," says
Mr. Beecher, "composed of about twenty members, of which she was the
factotum. She collected the money, she was the treasurer, she was the
manager, she was the trustee, she was the everything of that church."
There were about fifteen hundred persons in the little town, situated at
the junction of the Ohio and Miami Rivers. There were four big
distilleries in the place, and a steamboat load of liquor was carried
away from it every day.
"When I went there and entered upon my vocation of preaching," says Mr.
Beecher, "I found a church, occupying a little brick building, with
nineteen or twenty members. There was one man, and the rest were women.
With the exception of two persons, there was not one of them who was not
obliged to gain a livelihood by the labor of the hands. So you will
understand how very poor they were....
"I was sexton in the church. There were no lamps there, so I went and
bought some and filled them and lit them. I swept the church, and
lighted my own fires. I did not ring the bell because there was none. I
opened the church before every meeting, and shut and locked it after
every meeting. I took care of everything in the church."
The salary was to be $300--it was raised from $250--of which the Home
Missionary Society was to give $150.
His friends in Cincinnati opposed his going to so small a field; but he
carried out the advice which he gave years afterward to theological
students: "_Don't hang_ round idle, waiting for a _good offer_. Enter
the first field God opens for you. If he needs you in a larger one, he
will open the gate for you to enter."
Young Beecher, having waited nearly seven years to claim his bride,--he
was now but twenty-four,--wrote to Miss Bullard that he would be ready
for the marriage Aug. 3. Arriving at her home on the evening of July 29,
he picked over and stoned with her the raisins for the wedding-cake,
beat the eggs, and in every way helped on the joyful event. At the hour
chosen for the ceremony, a heavy thunder-storm came on. The bride
determined to wait; and an hour after the appointed time, under a
brilliant rainbow, they were married, and started for their missionary
labors in the West.
They boarded for a short time, and then decided to go to housekeeping.
Mrs. Beecher, during the absence of her husband at a synodical meeting,
found two rooms over a stable, at a rental of forty dollars per year.
She went to Cincinnati by boat, to the home of the Beechers, and
received, to help in furnishing these rooms, a bedstead, a stove, some
sheets and pillow-cases, and a piece of carpet. Through the sale of her
cloak for thirty dollars, she obtained a husk mattress, a table,
wash-tubs, and groceries.
On Mr. Beecher's return he helped scrub the floors--the landlord
objected to their being painted, as it _would injure the wood_!
Mrs. Beecher found in the back yard a broken table and shelves, which
had been thrown away as useless; and covering the former with the skirts
of Mr. Beecher's old coat, it became quite an elegant writing-table for
the young minister. The flour-barrel and sugar-barrel--sent in by
friends--were curtained from the rest of the room by a piece of
four-cent calico.
Mrs. Beecher helped support the family by taking in sewing and keeping
boarders. Mr. Beecher soon became the idol of his people. Mr. John R.
Howard, in his life of Beecher, repeats these words of the famous
preacher: "There lived over on the other side of the street in
Lawrenceburg, a very profane man who was counted ugly. I understood that
he had said some very bitter things of me. I went right over to his
store, and sat down on the counter to talk with him. I happened in
often--day in and day out. My errand was to make him like me. I did make
him like me,--and all the children too; and when I left, two or three
years later, it was his house that was opened to me and all my family
for the week after I gave up my room. And to the day of his death, I do
not believe the old man could mention my name without crying."
"Once," says a brother minister, "he called to a poor German emigrant
woman that if she would bring him her clothes-line, he would show her
how to get her winter's supply of fuel. She brought it, and he tied a
stone to one end, and flinging it out from the shore over the logs,
would draw them in. In a little while their combined efforts had brought
in a dray-load."
Mr. Beecher began his work modestly: "I never expected that I could
accomplish much," he said. "I merely went to work with the feeling: 'I
will do as well as I can, and I will stick to it, if the Lord pleases,
and fight his battle the best way I know how.' And I was thankful as I
could be. Nobody ever sent me a spare-rib that I did not thank God for
the kindness which was shown me. I recollect when Judge ---- gave me his
cast-off clothing, I felt that I was sumptuously clothed. I wore old
coats and second-hand shirts for two or three years, and I was not above
it, either, although sometimes, as I was physically a somewhat
well-developed man, and the judge was thin and his legs were slim, they
were rather a tight fit."
"At first," he says, "I preached some theology.... But my horizon grew
larger and larger in that one idea of Christ.... After I had gone
through two or three revivals of religion, when I looked around, he was
all in all. And my whole ministry sprang out of that."
After two years at Lawrenceburg, Mr. Beecher was called to the Second
Presbyterian Church of Indianapolis, then a place of four thousand
inhabitants, with a salary of six hundred dollars. He declined the call
twice, but finally, laying the matter before the Synod, was constrained
to accept.
Here, as at Lawrenceburg, the church was filled to overflowing to hear
the young, original, earnest preacher. During his ministry of eight
years at Indianapolis, there were three seasons of revival. In the
spring of 1842 about one hundred persons joined the church. One spring
Mr. Beecher preached for seventy consecutive nights. He loved to recall
those days. He said, "Talk of a young mother's feelings over her first
babe--what is that compared with the solemnity, the enthusiasm, the
impetuosity of gratitude, of humility, of singing gladness, with which a
young pastor greets the incoming of his first revival? He stands upon
the shore to see the tide come in! It is the movement of the infinite,
ethereal tide! It is from the other world! There is no color like heart
color. The homeliest things dipped in that forever after glow with
celestial hues."
Other churches besides his own were blessed with his ministrations. He
says, "For eight or ten years I labored for the poor and needy, in
cabins, in camp-meetings, through woods, up and down, sometimes riding
two days to meet my appointments. I had no books but my Bible; and I
went from one to the other--from the Bible to men, and from men to the
Bible."
Yet when he could be at home he was a diligent reader of other
books,--the sermons of Jonathan Edwards, of Isaac Barrow, and of Robert
South. He pored over Loudon's Encyclopædias of Horticulture,
Agriculture, and Architecture. He became the editor of the _Indiana
Farmer and Gardener_.
He loved to work among flowers and raise vegetables, which he often took
to market before daylight. He believed in manual labor. He painted his
own house, and did not hesitate to bring his groceries home in a
wheelbarrow. He said: "It is my deliberate conviction that physical
labor is indispensable to intellectual and moral health."
He was as fearless as he was industrious. One man had taken offence at
Mr. Beecher's plain-speaking about some of his brutal acts. He stationed
himself on the hotel steps, pistol in hand, to meet the pastor as he
should return from the post-office.
"Did you say thus in your sermon yesterday?" asked the man.
"I did," was the reply.
"Did you intend those remarks for me, or were you meaning me?"
"I most certainly did."
"Then,"--with an oath, "take it back right here, or I'll shoot you on
the spot."
"Shoot away," said Mr. Beecher, looking the man squarely in the face,
and passed on. The man followed for a few steps, and then went down a
side street.
Although one of Mr. Beecher's elders had said, "If an Abolitionist comes
here, I will head a mob and put him down," the brave preacher sat on the
platform at an Abolitionist meeting, and in his pulpit preached so
earnestly against slavery that it was predicted that his influence for
all time would be destroyed. He lectured as earnestly against
intemperance and other sins; and these "Lectures to Young Men" became
his first volume, dedicated to his father. The book had a wide reading,
both in England and America.
While at Indianapolis his little son George died. Years later he said,
"I remember, to-night, as well as I did at the time, the night that my
eldest son died. That was my first great sorrow.... It was in March, and
there had just come up a great storm, and all the ground was covered
with snow.
"We went down to the graveyard with little Georgie, and waded through it
in the snow. I got out of the carriage and took the little coffin in my
arms, and walked knee-deep to the side of the grave, and looking in I
saw the winter down at the very bottom of it.... If I should live a
thousand years I could not help shivering every time I thought of it."
Mr. Beecher loved the West, and expected to remain permanently in it;
but the East had learned of his earnestness and his eloquence, and
called him to Brooklyn. For a long time he refused to consider it; but
his wife having suffered much from chills and fever, he finally accepted
the call to the newly organized Plymouth Church, with twenty-one
members, in the fall of 1847, at a salary of fifteen hundred dollars. In
two years the membership had grown to over four hundred, and a new
church had been built--the other having been badly damaged by fire--at a
cost of $36,000.
A month after Mr. Beecher's arrival in Brooklyn, his little girl,
"Caty," died, and began, as he says, "her quiet march toward the
once-opened gate, to rejoin the brother."
From this time onward till Mr. Beecher's death in 1887, for forty years,
Plymouth Church became the centre of almost unparalleled influence. Dr.
Barrows says with truth, "It is probable that, except Westminster Abbey,
no other church of English-speaking nations has in this century been
visited by so many men and women of renown."
The church, accommodating three thousand persons, was year by year
crowded to repletion, often as many going away as could find
standing-room within. Everybody wanted to hear the most eloquent pulpit
orator in America.
When Mr. Beecher first came to Plymouth Church, some said he would not
please the cultivated East, but his earnestness soon satisfied all
cavillers. He had one message, as he said, "The love of Christ to men.
This, to me, was a burning reality.... Consequently I went into this
work with all my soul, preaching night and day."
The slavery question had now come to be the foremost question among the
people. By the Missouri Compromise of 1821, slavery was not to extend
north beyond latitude 36° 30´. When, in 1849, California asked
admittance to the Union as a free State, the South, feeling that the
balance of power would be on the side of freedom, bitterly opposed it.
Henry Clay, the great compromiser, brought forward his "Omnibus Bill" in
1850, the principal features of which were that California should be a
free State, and the Fugitive Slave Law should be more stringent, so that
Southerners might reclaim slaves in the Northern States, and take them
back to bondage, and it should be the duty of Northerners to help them.
President Millard Fillmore signed these measures.
Mr. Beecher wrote for the New York _Independent_ a three-column article,
entitled, "Shall We Compromise?" The dying John C. Calhoun had it read
twice to him. "The man who says that is right," he repeated. "There is
no alternative. It is liberty or slavery."
When Daniel Webster, in his fatal speech of March 7, 1850, favored
compromise, "Then it was that I flamed," said Mr. Beecher, and from that
time till the Civil War was over he was at a white heat.
When Wendell Phillips was denied a place to speak because he was an
Abolitionist, and no one dared to rent a hall for him through fear of a
mob, Henry Ward Beecher opened Plymouth pulpit. He went to every trustee
for his consent. It the man hesitated, Mr. Beecher said, "You and I
will break if you don't give me this permission," and he signed.
A great audience assembled, and men were ready with revolvers to use
them if the mob molested the speaker.
Mr. Beecher would not ride in omnibuses where colored persons were
refused. He invited Frederick Douglass to sit beside him on the platform
in Plymouth Church--he would not have a pulpit, which half hid the
pastor from his people. Mr. Beecher's sister, Mrs. Stowe, had published
"Uncle Tom's Cabin" as a serial in 1851, and in book form in 1852, which
electrified the North and infuriated the South.
When Stephen A. Douglas proposed the repeal of the Missouri Compromise,
which was carried in 1854, Kansas became a battle-ground between
slaveholders and lovers of freedom. Houses were burned, men were
murdered, and all the horrors of civil war continued for four years. Mr.
Beecher's voice and pen were never silent: "Peace in Kansas," he said,
"means peace everywhere; war there will be war all over the land....
What is done must be done quickly. Funds must be freely given, arms must
be had, even if bought at the price mentioned by our Saviour: 'He that
hath no sword, let him sell his garment and buy one.'"
He took up collections in Plymouth Church and elsewhere for Sharp's
rifles, and for Bibles as well. Some of the rifles were sent, it is
said, in boxes marked Bibles, though without his knowledge, and were
therefore called "Beecher's Bibles."
When John C. Frémont was the first nominee of the Republicans in 1856,
Mr. Beecher, with the hearty concurrence of his church, spoke for the
party two or three times a week all through the State of New York. An
amusing incident occurred at Rome, N.Y., which illustrated Beecher's
graphic utterance.
He said: "My friends, in this great campaign there are but two sides,
and we must range ourselves upon one side or the other; there is no
middle ground for any of us. On the one side is Buchanan, with the black
shield of slavery, and upon the other is Frémont, with the white banner
of liberty, and with one or the other of these two you must take your
stand; but who is this that I see crawling under the fence? Oh, that is
Millard Fillmore." Immediately a little fellow in the front row jumped
up, looked under the chairs, and shouted out, "Where is he?" The people
laughed so heartily, that the lad got up and left the hall.
Mr. Beecher was always quick at repartee, either in conversation or
address. Before an audience of ten thousand people in Chicago, he was
lecturing on "Communism," and said, "The voice of the people is the
voice of God." A man in the gallery shouted, "The voice of the people is
the voice of a fool." Beecher replied simply, "I said the voice of the
people, not the voice of one man."
In one of his anti-slavery speeches he said "that it was a penitentiary
offence to teach a slave." A man in the corner of the gallery exclaimed,
"It's a lie!"
"Well," said Beecher, "I shall not argue with the gentleman in the
corner, as doubtless he has been there and ought to know."
Very stirring scenes were witnessed in these times. Two Edmonson
sisters, of light complexion, whose mother was born a slave, but whose
father was free, had been brought up in Washington. The former owner of
the mother, finding that they were uncommonly attractive, determined to
send them to New Orleans to be sold in the slave market. The girls tried
to escape, but could not.
Their heart-broken father went to New York to see if he could raise the
two thousand dollars demanded for their purchase. He was advised to see
Mr. Beecher. He reached his home in Brooklyn; but having met many
rebuffs, he feared to ring the bell, and sat down on the steps, while
tears coursed down his cheeks. Mr. Beecher finally heard his story and
arranged for a meeting at the Broadway Tabernacle. He spoke with
wonderful power, as did also the Rev. Dr. John Dowling, the father of
the brilliant Rev. Dr. George Thomas Dowling. The sum of twenty-two
hundred dollars was raised, and the girls were set free.
Mr. Beecher said, "I think that of all the meetings that I have attended
in my life, for a panic of sympathy I never saw one that surpassed that.
I have seen a great many in my day."
Mrs. Stowe became responsible for the education of the sisters, and
later raised enough money to purchase the freedom of the mother and two
other children.
Among several who were bought for liberty "on the auction-block of
Plymouth pulpit," was "Pinky," a little colored girl. "She was bought
and overbought," said Mr. Beecher. "The rain never fell faster than the
tears fell from many that were here." Rose Terry Cooke threw her ring
into the contribution box, and Mr. Beecher put it on the child's hand
and told her "it was her freedom-ring." Her expression was such a happy
one that Eastman Johnson, the artist, painted her on canvas, looking at
her freedom-ring. Later she was sent for a year to Lincoln University at
Washington, and went back to her own people to become a teacher and a
missionary among them.
In these years of incessant toil, Mr. Beecher's home was gladdened by
the birth of twin boys, Alfred and Arthur, in December, 1852. They both
died on the fourth of July in the following year, and were buried in one
grave. Mr. Beecher could not hear their names mentioned for years, so
overwhelming was the loss to the man who idolized children.
In the autumn of 1854, by the aid of friends, he purchased a farm of
nearly one hundred acres at Lenox, Berkshire County, Mass. He was a
devoted lover of trees. Speaking of a large elm, he said, "It was with a
feeling of awe that we looked up into its face; and when I whispered to
myself, 'This is mine,' there was a shrinking, as if there were
sacrilege in the very thought of _property_ in such a creature of God as
this cathedral-topped tree! Does a man bare his head in some old church?
So did I, standing in the shadow of this regal tree, and looking up into
that completed glory at which three hundred years have been at work with
noiseless fingers!... Thou belongest to no man's hand, but to all men's
eyes that do love beauty, and that have learned through beauty to behold
God! Stand, then, in thine own beauty and grandeur! I shall be a lover
and a protector, to keep drought from thy roots and the age from thy
trunk."
Though he said, "The chief use of a farm is to lie down upon," knowing
as all brain workers know, how restful it is to stretch one's self upon
the ground, yet he always cultivated flowers and vegetables, and made
the whole farm a thing of beauty.
He felt that he owed much to Ruskin's works. "The sky, the earth, and
the waters are no longer what they were to us. We have learned a
language and come to a sympathy in them more through the instrumentality
of Ruskin's works than by all other instrumentalities on earth,
excepting, always, the nature which my mother gave me--sainted be her
name."
When the slavery struggles had culminated in war, and the South had
fired the first gun at Fort Sumter, April 12, 1861, Beecher's heart was
aflame. In his pulpit he said, "Give me war redder than blood and
fiercer than fire, if this terrific infliction is necessary that I may
maintain my faith in God, in human liberty, my faith of the fathers in
the instruments of liberty, my faith in this land as the appointed abode
and chosen refuge of liberty for all the earth!"
When his eldest son--he had already enlisted--said, "Father, may I
enlist?" the instant reply was, "If you don't, I'll disown you."
After helping to fit out two regiments, Mr. Beecher took upon himself
the entire equipping of a new one, called "The Long Island Volunteers,"
afterwards the Sixty-seventh New York.
Plymouth Church parlors became a workshop, where, under Mrs. Beecher's
direction, women made articles for the soldiers at the front. By
personal solicitation large sums were raised from families and
merchants. Mr. Beecher told his wife to use all his salary except the
smallest amount necessary for family expenses. He made patriotic
addresses which were read and talked about the country over. "It is
probable," said the well-known journalist, Frederick Hudson, "that there
is not another man in the United States who is as much heard and read as
Henry Ward Beecher, unless the other man is Wendell Phillips."
The first anniversary Sunday of the attack on Fort Sumter, Henry Ward
Beecher said, "We will give every dollar that we are worth, every child
that we have, and our own selves; we will bring all that we are and all
that we have, and offer them up freely--but this country shall be one
and undivided. We will have one Constitution and one liberty, and that
universal. The Atlantic shall sound it, and the Pacific shall echo it
back, deep answering to deep, and it shall reverberate from the Lakes on
the North to the unfrozen Gulf on the South--'One nation, one
constitution, one starry banner!' Hear it, England!--one country, and
indivisible; one hope; one baptism; one constitution; one government;
one nation; one country; one people--cost what it may, we will have it!"
He urged _immediate_ and _universal emancipation_, with all the fire and
eloquence of his nature. He became the warm friend of President Lincoln,
with whom he had many confidential conferences. When the immortal
Emancipation Proclamation was issued, declaring that after Jan. 1, 1863,
the slaves "shall be thenceforward and forever free," Beecher said in
his lecture-room talk, Dec. 31: "As for myself, let come what will come,
I care not. God may peel me and bark me and strip me of my leaves, and
do as he chooses with my earthly estate. I have lived long enough.... I
have uttered some words that will not die, because they are incorporated
into the lives of men that will not die."
In June, 1863, worn out with continuous speaking, Mr. Beecher went to
Europe with Dr. John Raymond, then president of Vassar College. He had
been over before, in 1850, thirteen years previously. He travelled in
Switzerland, Italy, and Germany, and at the request of the United
States Minister, talked with King Leopold of Belgium, a wise and able
man, about American affairs.
The king, asking Mr. Beecher what he thought of sending Maximilian to
Mexico, he replied, "Your Majesty, any man that wants to sit upon a
throne in Mexico, I would advise to try Vesuvius first; if he can sit
there for a while, then he might go and try it in Mexico." His words
proved true for the unfortunate Maximilian and Carlotta.
Henry Ward Beecher found in England much sympathy with the slave-holding
South, and a disbelief in the ultimate success of the North, and
continuance of the Union. Going to Europe for rest, he did not intend to
speak, but was finally persuaded that it was his duty to win friends for
the North, so that England should not declare for the Southern
Confederacy.
The first meeting was held at Manchester, Oct. 9, 1863. The streets were
placarded with huge posters in red ink, and threats were heard on every
side that the speaker should never leave Free Trade Hall alive.
As soon as Beecher began to speak, there were hisses and yells by the
mob, so that not a word could be heard. Standing erect before the
howling crowd, he said, "My friends, we will have a whole night's
session, but we will be heard." When not a word could reach the people,
he leaned over to the reporters present, and said: "Gentlemen, be kind
enough to take down what I say. It will be in sections, but I will have
it connected by and by."
Finally by courage and wit and eloquence the crowd was subdued and won
over to the speaker, who discussed the dire effects of slavery upon the
manufacturing interests of the world, and stated the real condition of
America in her struggle between slavery and liberty.
He said: "If the day shall come in one year, in two years, or in ten
years hence, when the old stars and stripes shall float over every State
of America; if the day shall come when that which was the accursed cause
of this dire and atrocious war--slavery--shall be done away with; if the
day shall come when through all the Gulf States there shall be liberty
of speech, as there never has been; when there shall be liberty of the
press, as there never has been; when men shall have common schools to
send their children to, which they have never had in the South ... it
will be worth all the dreadful blood and tears and woe."
Just as Beecher was closing, a telegram from London was read that "Her
Majesty has to-night caused the 'broad arrow' to be placed on the rams
in Mr. Laird's yard at Birkenhead." This meant the stoppage of the ships
which were building for the South, to destroy our shipping as the
Alabama had done. The whole audience rose and cheered, men waving their
hats and women their handkerchiefs as they wept.
So moved were the people that a big fellow in the gallery, who could not
shake hands with Mr. Beecher, cried out, "Shake my umbrella," as he
reached it down to the platform. Mr. Beecher did as requested. "By
Jocks!" said the man, "nobody sha'n't touch that umbrella again."
On Oct. 13 Beecher spoke to an immense audience at Glasgow, telling them
that in building ships to destroy free labor in America, "they were
driving nails in their own coffins."
The interruptions, though great here, were not as bad as at Manchester.
The next evening he spoke to a packed house at Edinburgh, being lifted
over the people's heads to reach the platform. These speeches were
reported verbatim all over England.
On Oct. 16 he spoke at the great Philharmonic Hall at Liverpool, at that
time the headquarters of Southern sympathies. The meeting was a perfect
bedlam. "Three cheers for Jeff Davis" were given every now and then,
with cries of "Turn him out!" hisses and yells, till Beecher sat down on
the edge of the platform and waited for a calm. For three hours,
sentence by sentence, his voice was hurled against a threatening,
hooting mob.
Four days later Henry Ward Beecher spoke to a dense crowd in Exeter
Hall, London. With satire and pathos and burning eloquence, he spoke
like one inspired. Dr. William M. Taylor, of the Broadway Tabernacle,
New York, said, "I believe there has not been such eloquence in the
world since Demosthenes."
Dr. Lyman Abbott and the Rev. S. B. Halliday, in their life of Mr.
Beecher, say with truth, that "he changed the public sentiment, and so
the political course of the nation, and secured and cemented an alliance
between the mother country and our own land, which needs no treaties to
give it expression, which has been gaining strength ever since, and
which no demagogism on this side of the water, and no ignorance and
prejudice on that, have been able to impair."
The physical strain while in England was great. "I thought at times," he
says, "that I should certainly break a blood-vessel or have apoplexy. I
did not care; I was willing to die as ever I was, when hungry and
thirsty, to take refreshment, if I might die for my country."
Mr. Beecher on his return was welcomed with open arms and grateful
hearts by the American people. Great receptions were given him at the
Academy of Music, Brooklyn, and the Academy of Music, New York.
When the heart-breaking war was over, and General Lee had surrendered to
General Grant under the apple-tree at Appomattox, April 9, 1865, and it
was decided to raise over Fort Sumter, April 14, the flag that had been
pulled down four years before, the great preacher and orator, who had
helped to save the Union, was asked to deliver the address.
When Major-General Robert Anderson ran up the flag, it was saluted by a
hundred guns from Fort Sumter and by a national salute from every fort
that had fired upon Sumter at the beginning of the war.
Henry Ward Beecher's address was masterly; a review of the dreadful war,
and our duties in the future.
That very night, April 14, 1865, President Lincoln was assassinated by
the actor, J. Wilkes Booth. Mr. Beecher said in his sermon the following
Sunday: "The blow brought not a sharp pang. It was so terrible that at
first it stunned sensibility.... There was a piteous helplessness.
Strong men bowed down and wept.... Men walked for days as if a corpse
lay unburied in their dwellings. There was nothing else to think of. All
business was laid aside. Pleasure forgot to smile.... Even avarice stood
still, and greed was strongly moved to generous sympathy and universal
sorrow. Rear to his name monuments, found charitable institutions, and
write his name above their lintels; but no monument will ever equal the
universal, spontaneous, and sublime sorrow that in a moment swept down
lines and parties, and covered up animosities, and in an hour brought a
divided people into unity of grief and indivisible fellowship of
anguish."
Beecher took an active part in the reconstruction and readmission of the
seceded States, urging that the greatest leniency be shown, now that
they had surrendered; opposed the hanging of Jefferson Davis; urged the
right of suffrage for the colored people:--"It is always inexpedient and
foolish," he said, "to deny a man his natural rights." He did not
believe that the freedmen should be cared for permanently by a military
power at the South, placed there by the North. "We are to educate the
negroes, and to Christianly educate them. We are to raise them in
intelligence more and more, until they shall be able to prove themselves
worthy of citizenship. For, I tell you, all the laws in the world cannot
bolster a man up so as to place him any higher than his own moral worth
and natural forces put him."
For a letter stating such views as these, written to the National
Convention of Soldiers and Sailors held at Cleveland, O., in the autumn
of 1866, Mr. Beecher was assailed all over the country. "The rage and
abuse of excited men," he said, "I have too long been used to, now to be
surprised or daunted.... I stood almost alone, my church, in my absence,
full of excitement; all my ministerial brethren, with a few honorable
exceptions, either aloof or in clamor against me; well-nigh the whole
religious press denouncing me, and the political press furious."
He spoke boldly against the corrupt judges in New York City in the time
of the Tweed dictatorship. Years later when Beecher voted and spoke for
Grover Cleveland for the presidency, because he believed a change of
parties wise for the country at the time, on account of "the corruption
of too long held power," and did not trust James G. Blaine, the opposing
candidate, the same denunciation and bitterness were shown; all of which
proves that toleration for opinions differing from our own requires a
very high type of character.
Beecher's liberal views in theology were likewise bitterly antagonized.
The truth was that he cared little for creeds, believing that to preach
Christ as the Saviour of the world was the paramount and vital need of
men. He believed the theology of the future "would be far more powerful
than the old--a theology of hope, and of love, which shall cast out
fear." He felt with Whittier in the "Eternal Goodness,"--
"Yet, in the maddening maze of things,
And tossed by storm and flood,
To one fixed trust my spirit clings,--
I know that God is good!
And so beside the Silent Sea
I wait the muffled oar:
No harm from Him can come to me
On ocean or on shore.
I know not where His islands lift
There fronded palms in air;
I only know I cannot drift
Beyond His love and care."
His sermons were translated into German, French, Spanish, and Italian,
and were read the world over; and men and women grew more gentle and
lovable from the reading.
After the war the busy life went on as busy as ever. One volume of the
"Life of Christ," rich in his wonderful imagination and beauty of
language, was written. He did not live to complete the second volume.
His one novel, "Norwood," a story of New England, was published as a
serial in the New York _Ledger_ in 1867, Mr. Bonner giving him $25,000
for it.
In 1870, having resigned the editorship of the _Independent_, Beecher
became the editor of the _Christian Union_. In 1872 he gave a course of
twelve lectures on "Preaching" to the Divinity School of Yale College,
Mr. Henry W. Sage of Plymouth Church having founded at New Haven the
Lyman Beecher Lectureship of Preaching.
When asked by Mr. John R. Howard if he knew what he should say at these
lectures, he replied, "Yes; in a way. I know what I am going to aim at,
but of course I don't get down to anything specific. I brood it, and
ponder it, and dream over it, and pick up information about one point
and another; but if ever I _think_ I see the plan opening up to me, I
don't dare to look at it or put it down on paper. If I once write a
thing out, it is almost impossible for me to kindle up to it again. I
never dare nowadays to write out a sermon during the week; that is sure
to kill it. I have to think around and about it, get it generally ready,
and then _fuse it_ when the time comes."
Beecher was a great student of the Bible, reading it on the cars as he
travelled to his lecture appointments, and, like Emerson, jotting down
in little note-books thoughts and suggestions.
He prepared his Sunday morning sermon in an hour and a half, between
breakfast and the time of service. Locked into his room, he wrote with
his goose-quill pen the headings and a few illustrations. Then in the
pulpit the eloquent words came pouring from his lips, born of the time
and place. His evening sermon he prepared after tea. When asked how he
was able to do so much work, he said it was partly owing to a good
constitution; "much, also, to an early acquired knowledge of how to take
care of myself, to secure invariably a full measure of sleep, to regard
food as an engineer does fuel (to be employed economically, and entirely
with reference to the work to be done by the machine); much to the habit
of economizing social forces, and not wasting in needless conversation
and pleasurable hilarities the spirit that would carry me through many
days of necessary work; but, above all, to the possession of a hopeful
disposition and natural courage, to sympathy with men, and to an
unfailing trust in God; so that I have always worked for the love of
working."
He never used stimulants except as a medicine. He wrote to a friend, "I
am a _total abstainer, both in belief and practice_.... I hold that no
man in health _needs_ or is the better for alcoholic stimulants; that
great good will follow to the whole community from the total disuse of
them as articles of diet or luxury; and that so soon as the moral sense
of society will sustain such laws, it will be wise and right to enact
prohibitory liquor laws.... I should as soon think of offering a well
man a dose of rhubarb as a dose of brandy."
Mr. Beecher was an earnest advocate of woman suffrage as well as
temperance. He believed in equality of privilege in the pulpit, in
medicine, everywhere, though he said, "People may talk about equality of
the sexes!... The silent smile of a sensible, loving woman will vanquish
ten men." Of woman, he said, "She is the right hand of the charities of
the church.... She is not only permitted in the great orthodox churches
of New England to speak in meeting, but when they send her abroad,
ordained to preach the gospel to the heathen, there she is permitted to
preach; and when they come home, women may still teach in a hall, but
not in a church, and dear old men there are yet so conservative that
they are reading through golden spectacles their Bibles, and saying: 'I
suffer not a woman to preach.'"
Mr. Beecher found his recreation from hard work in his love of country
life. His farm at Lenox, Mass., proving too far from Brooklyn, he
bought, in 1859, thirty-six acres at Peekskill-on-the-Hudson, and named
it Boscobel. The old farmhouse was said to have been the headquarters of
General Israel Putnam of Revolutionary fame.
He watched like a child for the first note of the bluebird and robin,
for the first arbutus, anemone, and violet of early spring. He loved
roses as fondly as Professor Child of Harvard College. He raised
hollyhocks, dahlias, geraniums, pansies, lilies, and chrysanthemums. He
said, "The wonder is, that every other man is not an enthusiast, and in
the month of June a gentle fanatic. Floral insanity is one of the most
charming inflictions to which man is heir."
He bought trees of almost every variety, chickens of various kinds,
Jersey cows and honey-bees, and a large family of dogs,--a St. Bernard,
a mastiff, an Eskimo, a terrier, and others.
He once said, "If the dog isn't good for anything else, it is good for
you to love, and that is a good deal." Speaking of those at Peekskill,
he said, "They are practically good for nothing, but I sometimes think
they are worth more to me than the whole place."
He used to say that he felt really sorry that his dog Tommy could not
talk. "If ever there was a dog that was distressed to think that he
could not talk, that dog is. I sit by him on the bank, of a summer
evening, and I say, 'Tommy, I am sorry for you;' and he whines, as much
as to say, 'So am I.' I say, 'Tommy, I should like to tell you a great
many things that you are worthy of knowing;' and I do not know which is
the most puzzled, he or I--I to get any idea into his head, or he to get
any out of mine."
Mr. Beecher finally built a beautiful house of granite and brick,
natural woods throughout the interior: first story cherry; second, ash;
and third, pine, where he gathered his valuable library. "Where is human
nature so weak as in a book-store?" he said; and in books and flowers
and works of art he found that money melted away, so that, say his sons,
William C. Beecher and the Rev. Samuel Scoville, in the life of their
father, "it was in part to meet this heavy outlay that he projected and
carried out the series of lecture-tours that ran through the last ten
years of his life."
He had learned what many another learns, that "the most profitable kind
of land-owning" is to "enjoy all that there is of beauty and
peacefulness in my neighbor's lands as much as they, without the
responsibility or the taxes." And yet people have to build once, to
learn _not_ to build again.
In 1872, Mr. Beecher having preached for twenty-five years in Plymouth
Church, a "Silver Wedding" was celebrated by his people. Monday, Oct. 7,
was the first day of the jubilee. In the sunny afternoon the three
thousand children in the three Sunday-schools connected with the church
marched past Mr. Beecher's house, as he stood upon his doorstep, and
each child laid a flower at his feet, until he stood "literally
embanked in flowers." Each day through the week had its appropriate
exercises. On Thursday, the historical day, the brilliant and learned
Dr. Richard S. Storrs of Brooklyn gave an eloquent address. "May your
soul," said the speaker, "as the years go on, be whitened more and more
in the radiance of God's light, and in the sunshine of His love!"
That soul was soon to be tested and whitened in a furnace heated almost
beyond endurance. Theodore Tilton, a member of Mr. Beecher's church,
had, through the influence of the latter, become the editor of the
_Independent_. Having lost his position, apparently by his own misdeeds,
and made his family unhappy, Mr. and Mrs. Beecher advised his wife to
separate from him. Tilton determined to drive Beecher from his pulpit,
and forced his wife to criminate the latter in character, which
statements she afterwards declared again and again were untrue in every
particular. Plymouth Church dropped its obnoxious member. He took the
case into the courts, asking one hundred thousand dollars damages. For
six months the details were read all over the world. Mr. Beecher was
acquitted by his church, by the jury, and by a National Advisory Council
of one hundred and seventy-two churches. Mr. William A. Beach, the
leading counsel for Tilton, said later, "I had not been four days on the
trial before I was confident that he was innocent.... I felt and feel
now that we were a pack of hounds trying in vain to drag down a noble
man." Judge Neilson, who had not known Mr. Beecher previously, became
his warm friend.
Most persons who will take the trouble to go over the testimony now,
after twenty years have cooled the passions of the hour, will agree
with Mr. Beach. Dr. Barrows says truly, "That any man should have
endured the fires which surrounded Mr. Beecher, and have come forth so
radiant, so pure, so self-respecting, and so widely trusted and beloved,
is a moral miracle, the parallel of which it would be difficult to
find."
The expenses of the trial year were $118,000; and though Plymouth Church
raised Mr. Beecher's salary for that year to $100,000, he found himself
deeply in debt. To pay this indebtedness he gave a series of lectures
during the next two or three years. "The Reign of the Common People,"
"The Burdens of Society," "Conscience," "The Uses of Wealth," "The
Ministry of the Beautiful," "Evolution and Religion," were among his
most popular lectures. Upon the last, though a deep subject, I have seen
five thousand persons strangely moved by his eloquence.
Although in some places he was jeered at by the rabble, yet year by year
he found great strength and comfort in the love of the people. He wrote
home that preaching Sunday evening in Boston, "Ten thousand people
couldn't get in. Shook hands with whole audiences. Papers next morning
with kind notices. Went to Congregational ministers' meeting on Monday
morning. Cheered and clapped when I entered. After prayer for day was
finished it was moved that I address the meeting. I did so, and closed
with prayer. All wept, and it broke up like a revival meeting."
In 1886, when Mr. Beecher was seventy-three years of age, he consented
to go a third time to England, to see his friends and lecture. Mrs.
Beecher accompanied him, with his friend and lecture agent, Major J. B.
Pond. Three thousand Plymouth Church people came to see him set sail in
the early morning of June 19. Dodworth's band played "Hail to the
Chief;" and then, as the vessel moved away, the great crowd sang,
"Praise God from whom all blessings flow." One friend had sent a basket
of twenty homing pigeons; and these in the afternoon carried back
messages to the loved ones.
Everywhere in England Henry Ward Beecher was received with a royal
welcome. There were no more meetings like those at Manchester and
Liverpool in the days of the Civil War. So vast were the crowds to hear
him preach, that the congregations had to be admitted by ticket.
Thousands were necessarily turned away. His first lecture was at Exeter
Hall, London.
"Between July 4 and Oct. 21, fifteen and one-half weeks," says Mr. Pond
in his book, "A Summer in England with Henry Ward Beecher," "Mr. Beecher
preached seven times, gave nine public addresses, and delivered
fifty-eight lectures. For the fifty-eight lectures he cleared the sum of
$11,600, net of all expenses for himself and Mrs. Beecher from the day
they sailed from New York."
It is estimated that Mr. Beecher earned by his pen and voice during
forty years in Brooklyn nearly a million and a half dollars, most of
which he gave away.
But much as he enjoyed England, the brave man was growing weary with the
work of life. He wrote, "I want to come home.... I long every year to
lay down my tasks and depart.... It is simply a quiet longing of the
spirit, a brooding desire to be through with my work, although I am
willing to go on, if need be."
He came home Oct. 31, 1886, and soon promised to complete the second
volume of the "Life of Christ." He also made a contract with a
publishing firm to have his autobiography ready before July 1, 1888.
He wrote some on each book during the winter. March 3 he went to New
York with his wife, who said, "I never knew my husband so lively,
tender, or joyous before, or not in a long time." That night he retired
early, feeling weary. The next day, Friday, he slept nearly all day,
and, being aroused to go to a prayer-meeting, said he did not feel like
getting up. A physician came in the afternoon and in the evening, and
asked Mr. Beecher to raise his hand. He could not. The left side showed
signs of paralysis. It was apoplexy.
The great man watched the faces of his wife and the doctor, seemed to
divine the result, closed his eyes, gave the hand of his wife "a long,
strong, loving, and earnest pressure. It was the realization of the
inevitable. It was farewell. He never opened his eyes again. His sleep,
thereafter, was constant.... From Saturday morning until the end were
silence, sleep, heavy but regular breathing, and unconsciousness....
Mrs. Beecher held his hand in hers continually. When the end approached
all the household were gathered.... Not one of them shed a tear or gave
expression to a sob--then and there. The supreme self-control was in
obedience to Mr. Beecher's often expressed hope and wish that around his
bed of release no tears should fall, but the feeling should prevail as
those who think of a soul gone to its crowning."
At half-past nine, Tuesday morning, March 8, 1887, the end came. He had
often said, "Provide flowers for me, not crape, when I am gone;" so at
once a wreath of pink and white roses were hung upon the door-knob.
Private funeral services were held at the house on Thursday, conducted
by the Rev. Charles H. Hall, Rector of Trinity Church, Brooklyn, who in
Mr. Beecher's time of trial, seeing him in his congregation, went down
the aisle, took him by the hand, and led him to a seat within the
chancel. Mr. Beecher never forgot a kind act, and wished Dr. Hall to
attend at his burial.
"There was no man whom I ever heard," said Dr. Hall, "or whose works I
have ever read, who inspired me so deeply with the inspiration of the
Holy Spirit. He was a man of men, the most manly man I ever met; but he
was also a man of God in the pre-eminent sense of the word."
The body was escorted to the church by Company G of the Thirteenth
Regiment--"My boys," Mr. Beecher called them, as many were of Plymouth
Church.
The coffin was laid in a perfect bower of flowers, lilies of the valley,
maidenhair fern, and smilax entirely covering it. The organ, platform,
and pulpit chair were a mass of bloom,--roses and pinks and graceful
plants.
All day long, until ten at night, the throng of people, half or
three-quarters of a mile in extent, passed by to look at the beloved
face. On Friday, only those were admitted who had tickets. Four churches
were open for services, and all were crowded. All public offices and
schools were closed, and business was suspended.
Dr. Hall made the address at the funeral. Very tenderly he said of the
dead preacher, "On his last Sunday evening in this place, two weeks ago,
after the congregation had retired from it, the organist and one or two
others were practising the hymn,--
"'I heard the voice of Jesus say,
Come unto me and rest.'
"Mr. Beecher, doubtless with that tire that follows a pastor's Sunday
work, remained and listened. Two street urchins were prompted to wander
into the building; and one of them was standing in the position of the
boy whom Raphael has immortalized, gazing up at the organ. The old man,
laying his hands on the boy's head, turned his face upward and kissed
him; and with his arms about the two, left the scene of his triumphs,
his trials, and his successes forever.
"It was a fitting close to a grand life, the old man of genius and fame
shielding the little wanderers, great in breasting traditional ways and
prejudices, great also in the gesture, so like him, that recognized, as
did the Master, that the humblest and poorest were his brethren, the
great preacher led out into the night by the little nameless waifs."
After the services the doors were opened, and one hundred thousand
people passed through the church by the coffin.
On Saturday, March 12, the body was taken to Greenwood Cemetery, and
temporarily placed in a receiving vault filled with abundant flowers.
Later it was buried on Dawn Path, near Hillside Avenue, on the
south-easterly slope of Ocean Hill, with a simple headstone.
"When I fall," said the great preacher, "and am buried in Greenwood, let
no man dare to stand over the turf and say, 'Here lies Henry Ward
Beecher;' for God knows that I will not lie there. Look up! if you love
me, and if you feel that I have helped you on your way home, stand with
your feet on my turf and look up; for I will not hear anybody that does
not speak with his mouth toward heaven."
[Illustration: CHARLES KINGSLEY.]