NARRATOR : The earnest seeker and hopeful discoverer of this new world always haunts the outskirts of his or her time. Our history is written in the lives of such individuals.
The Beechers were all active during the War Between the States, or as it was later called, the Civil War. James Beecher, youngest of the brood, had run off on a clipper ship to China at a young age. When he’d returned, a ship’s officer, he said—

JAMES : Oh, I shall be a minister. That’s my fate. Father will pray me into it!

NARRATOR : He did serve at the Seamen’s Bethel in Hong Kong, and had once been held for ransom by Chinese pirates. But when war broke out in the United States, James immediately returned from the Far East to enlist as chaplain of the First Long Island Regiment, called the Brooklyn Phalanx. He soon got himself transferred to military duty, and quickly was named senior captain of the regiment, then lieutenant-colonel of the 141st New York Volunteers.
Frederick Stowe, Harriet’s eldest son, was a student at Harvard Medical School when the war brok out. The Stowes tried to dissuade him from enlisting, and so did their family friend, Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes.

FREDERICK : I should be ashamed to look my fellows in the face if I did not enlist. People shall never say, ‘‘Harriet Beecher Stowe’s son is a coward.’’

NARRATOR : Henry Ward Beecher had campaigned for Lincoln on the Republican ticket as tirelessly as he had for Fremont. When the war broke out, his eldest son Henry asked him if he might enlist.

HENRY : If you don’t, I’ll disown you.

NARRATOR : Meanwhile, the new Vice President of the Confederate States of America, Alexander Stephens, declared the purpose of the new nation.

STEPHENS : The new Constitution has put at rest forever all the agitating questions relating to our peculiar institution—African slavery as it exists among us, the proper status of the negro in our form of civilization. This was the immediate cause of the late rupture and present revolution. Jefferson, in his forecast, had anticipated this as the ‘‘rock upon which the old Union would split.’’ He was right. What was a conjecture with him is now a realized fact. But whether he fully comprehended the great truth upon which that rock stood and stands may be doubted.

NARRATOR : As preacher, editor of The Independent, lecturer, Henry Ward Beecher supported the war effort wholeheartedly. He took charge of equipping the 14th Long Island Regiment, using his house as a storehouse for military goods.
At 38, in 1862, Thomas K. Beecher joined the Army of the Potomac, as chaplain of the 141st New York Volunteers—at the same time that his younger brother James served in that outfit. Four months into his service, Thomas learned of a copperhead conspiracy to seize Lincoln and his Cabinet and install General George McClellan as dictator. Using his acquaintance with Lincoln from Illinois as an excuse to see him, Thomas Beecher presented his evidence. The plot was quicly uncovered and squelched. Thomas insisted, though, that the affair be kept private in order not to embarrass the officers in question. The incident ended Thomas’s military career, however.
Despite his respect for Lincoln, Henry also criticized the President for being dilatory in declaring emancipation.

HENRY : The President seems to be a man without any sense of the value of time. We have been made irresolute, indecisive and weak by the President’s attempt to unite impossibilities; to make war and keep the peace; to strike hard and not hurt; to invade sovereign States and not meddle with their sovereignty; to put down rebellion without touching its cause.

NARRATOR : One stormy night in 1862, a tall stranger came calling on Henry Ward Beecher, on a matter of great import. After four hours of earnest conversation that ended with a prayer, the man left. Eunice Beecher asked who it was, and Henry only smiled. After the assassination, he told her, it had been Lincoln himself.
As the war went on, Harriet wrote to Annie Fields, the publisher’s wife.

HARRIET : I am going to Washington to see the heads of departments myself and to satisfy myself that I may refer to the Emancipation as a reality and a substance, not a fizzle-out at the little end of the horn, as I should be sorry to call the attention of my sisters in Europe to any such impotent conclusion—I mean to have a talk with ‘‘Father Abraham’’ himself.

NARRATOR : Frederick Stowe, Harriet’s eldest son, was among the first to volunteer. While Harriet was visiting brother Henry in Brooklyn, news came that the 1st Massachusetts Regiment had just sailed by.

HARRIET : Immediately I was of course eager to get to Jersey City to see Fred. Sister Eunice said she would go with me, and in a few minutes she, Hatty, Sam Scoville, and I were in a carriage, driving towards the Fulton Ferry. Upon reaching Jersey City we found that the boys were dining in the depot, an immense building with many tracks and platforms. There was a crowd of people pressing against the grated doors, which were locked, but through which we could see the soldiers. It was with great difficulty that we were at last permitted to go inside.
When we were in, a vast area of gray caps and blue overcoats was presented. The boys were eating, drinking, smoking, talking, singing, and laughing. At last we spied Fred in the distance, and I went leaping across the tracks toward him. Immediately afterwards a blue-overcoated figure bristling with knapsack and haversack, and looking like an assortment of packages, came rushing towards us.
Fred was in high spirits, in spite of the weight, that he would formerly have declared intolerable for half an hour. I gave him my handkerchief, and we filled his haversack with oranges.
We stayed with Fred about two hours, during which time the gallery was filled with people, cheering and waving their handkerchiefs. Every now and then the band played inspiriting airs, in which the soldiers joined with hearty voices. While some of the companies sang, others were drilled, and all seemed to be having a general jollification.

NARRATOR : In 1862, Isabella Beecher Hooker travelled with her sister Harriet Beecher Stowe to Washington to see President Lincoln. They dined lavishly with Thomas in a tent encampment; the next day they saw James march by at the head of his regiment. When they visited a thousand freed slaves, they all hailed Harriet.

HARRIET : They sang a slow, solemn and plaintive music as wild as the free winds.
When we were introduced to Mr. Lincoln, we met a rough, scrubby, black-brown, withered, dull-eyed object. He was definitely a sincere man of feelings, but with indifferent speech and rustic manners.

NARRATOR : Congressman Henry Wilson brought her and Isabella in one day to see Abraham Lincoln. He strode across the room to greet Harriet.

LINCOLN : So this is the little woman who wrote the book that made this big war!

NARRATOR : He explained his go-slow border-state policy, and declared that yes, the Emancipation Proclamation would take effect the following month, January 1863.
She returned to her hotel to write her Letter to the Women of England. It was ten years after her visit to England, where she had been presented with twenty-six volumes of women’s signatures to a petition against slavery. Harriet’s reply, published in the Atlantic Monthly, describes the progress of the anti-slavery cause in the United States, ending with a plea for them to help change England’s pro-Southern attitude. A few months later, Henry Ward Beecher would be in England delivering the same message in person.

HARRIET : During the past year the Republican administration has proceeded to demonstrate the feasibility of overthrowing slavery by purely constitutional measures. To this end they have instituted a series of movements which have made this year more fruitful in anti-slavery triumphs than any other since the emancipation of the British West Indies.
By another act, equally grand in principle, and far more important in its results, slavery is forever excluded from the Territories of the United States.
Lastly, and more significant still, the United States government has in its highest official capacity taken distinct anti-slavery ground. By this power it has been this year decreed that every slave of a rebel who reaches the lines of our army becomes a free person; that all slaves found deserted by their masters become free persons; that every slave employed in any service for the United States thereby obtains his/her liberty.
By this act the Fugitive Slave Law is for all present purposes practically repealed. Wherever our armies march they carry liberty with them.
Lastly, the great decisive measure of the war has appeared—the President’s Proclamation of Emancipation.
Will our sisters in England feel no heartbeat at that event?
And now, sisters of England, let us speak to you of one thing which fills our hearts with pain and solicitude. It is an unaccountable fact, and one which we entreat you seriously to ponder, that the party which has brought the cause of freedom thus far on its way, during the past eventful year, has found little or no support in England. Sadder than this, the party which makes slavery the chief cornerstone of its edifice finds in England its strongest defenders.
A year and a half have passed; step after step has been taken for liberty; chain after chain has fallen, till the march of our armies is choked and clogged by the glad flocking of emancipated slaves; the day of final emancipation is set; the border States begin to move in voluntary consent; universal freedom for all dawns like the sun in the distant horizon, and still no voice from England. No voice? Yes, we have heard on the high seas the voice of a war-steamer, built for a man-stealing Confederacy, with English gold, in an English dockyard, going out of an English harbor, sailed by English sailors, with the full knowledge of English government officers, in defiance of the Queen’s proclamation of neutrality!
Our sisters, we wish you could have witnessed this thanksgiving. We wish you could have heard the prayer of a blind old negro, called among his fellows John the Baptist, when in touching broken English he poured forth his thanksgivings. We wish you could have heard the sound of that strange rhythmical chant which is now forbidden to be sung on Southern plantations—the psalm of this modern exodus—which combines the barbaric fire of the Marseillaise with the religious fervor of the old Hebrew prophet:

                  Oh, go down Moses,
                  way down into Egypt’s land!
                  Tell King Pharaoh
                  to let my people go!
                  Stand away dere,
                  stand away dere,
                  and let my people go!
      

And now, sisters of England, we say to you, you have spoken well; we have heard you; we have heeded; we have striven in the cause, even unto death. We have sealed our devotion by desolate hearth and darkened homestead—by the blood of sons, husbands, and brothers. In many of our dwellings the very light of our lives has gone out; and yet we accept the lifelong darkness as our own part in this great and awful expiation. Sisters, what have you done, and what do you mean to do?       In behalf of many thousands of American women,                   Harriet Beecher Stowe                   Washington, November 27, 1862

NARRATOR : Nathaniel Hawthorne congratulated her on the letter.

HAWTHORNE : I read with great pleasure your article in the last Atlantic. If anything could make John Bull blush, I should think it might be that; but he is a hardened and villainous hypocrite. I always felt that he cared nothing for or against slavery, except as it gave him a vantage-ground on which to parade his own virtue and sneer at our iniquity.

NARRATOR : In early 1863, Henry’s dizzy spells came back, and he was persuaded to take a vacation trip to Europe. He found many friends in England urging him to speak out, to reverse public sentiment for the cotton-growing Confederate States. England’s textile industry depended on the South’s cotton, and the working class felt the pinch directly because their factories could not get enough cotton. Beecher refused, and continued on to the Continent. He felt that the British feared most a strong United States.

HENRY : I do not mean fear of a narrow and technical kind but the shadow that the future of our nation already casts is so vast that they foresee they are falling into the second rank—that the will of the Republic is to be the law of the world. There is no disguising of this among the English.

NARRATOR : On the Continent Henry met King Leopold of the Belgians at Brussels. A statesman among the European monarchs, his opinion was widely respected.

HENRY : After some conversation in which the King plainly intimated to me that he would rejoice in bringing us to terms and peace again, all the while intimating that the South could not be overcome, and that it would be very wise for us to make a compromise, and that he would be entirely willing to render service in that direction, I said to him: ‘‘Your Majesty’’—I got it out once or twice right—‘‘if there were any ruling sovereign in Europe to whom more than to another we should be glad to refer this question it would be to the King of Belgium, a judge among nations and adviser among kings; BUT we do not propose to refer it to anyone. We are going to fight it out ourselves; the strongest will win in our conflict and so it must be settled.’’
Turning from that, he asked me what I thought of sending Maximilian to Mexico—for at that time he had not been sent to be the emperor of this new nation the Latins had established there; and, without suitable diplomacy, I said to him: ‘‘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.’’ This very soon brought our conversation to a close.

NARRATOR : Returning to England before his departure for home, Henry’s friends made it clear that Parliament was soon to consider, and perhaps pass, a bill recognizing the Confederate States of America. The pro-Southern aristocracy was planning meetings in all the major industrial centers to win over the workers, who were angry at the lack of cotton to supply the mills.
Finally, Henry Ward Beecher assented—he would give five speeches in the very heart of the industrial district: Liverpool, Manchester, London, Glasgow, Edinburgh.
In Manchester, his first stop, newspapers printed lies about him and anti-Beecher posters in red immediately appeared, charging him with slurs on England, opinions ranging from extermination of all Southerners to ‘‘the best blood of England must flow.’’ These charges only made Henry all the more eager to speak, yet at the same time he was almost overwhelmed. A quarter of the hall was filled with hecklers and toughs sent in to break up the meeting. A friend describes his speech at Manchester:

MABIE : He felt as if he were surrounded by an almost impenetrable wall of prejudice and antagonism the moment he arrived in England. On the day on which he was to make his first speech, he was in an agony of depression all the morning, feeling quite unable to bear up under the awful burden of the concentrated animosity of a nation. He spent most of the morning on his knees, without any help; but finally arrived at a point where his prayer took the form of an offer to surrender everything and even to fail if that was God’s will. Gradually the depression wore off, and was succeeded by a great sense of repose. When he finally drove to the hall his peace was like that of a mountain lake.
When he entered the hall, he found it packed with an audience collected for the express purpose of silencing him. Every time he opened his mouth his voice was drowned by the clamor of the hostile crowd. This went on so long that he began to fear that he should not get a chance to say anything. In the meantime he had studied his audience carefully, and it had photographed itself on his mind.
The green baize doors were fastened together. Seats had been brought in and placed around the side walls, and in some cases against these doors. In one of these seats a large, burly, red-haired, red-whiskered man was sitting, who was particularly vociferous, shouting, clapping his hands, pounding his feet, and throwing himself back in this chair. After about twenty minutes of attempted talk, in one of these paroxysms of racket, Mr. Beecher happened to be looking at this man, when he threw himself back with great violence, broke the fastenings of the door, and went head over heels in his chair down the stairs on the outside.
The whole thing was so instantaneous and so funny that Mr. Beecher burst into a roar of laughter. The audience were astonished; turned around, following his glance, took in what had happened and began to laugh themselves.
That moment of relaxation he caught, made a witty remark which made them laugh still more, then told them a story which caught their attention, and from that moment held them without a break, as long as he chose to speak.

NARRATOR : Henry’s own account is a little different.

HENRY : As soon as I began to speak the great audience began to show its teeth, and I had not gone on fifteen minutes before an unparalleled scene of confusion and interruption occurred. No American that has not seen an English mob can form any conception of one. I have seen all sorts of camp-meetings and experienced all kinds of public speaking on the stump; I have seen the most disturbed meetings in New York City, and they were all of them as twilight to midnight compared with an English hostile audience. For in England the meeting does not belong to the parties that call it, but to whoever chooses to go, and if they can take it out of your hands it is considered fair play.
This meeting had a very large multitude of people in it who came there for the purpose of destroying the meeting and carrying it the other way when it came to the vote. I took the measure of the audience, and said to myself, ‘‘About one-fourth of this audience are opposed to me, and about one-fourth will be rather in sympathy, and my business now is not to appeal to that portion that is opposed to me, nor to those that are already on my side, but to bring over the middle section.’’
How to do this was a problem. The question was, who could hold out longest. There were five or six storm centers, boiling and whirling at the same time; here someone pounding on a group with his umbrella and shouting, ‘‘Sit down there’’; over yonder a row between two or three combatants; somewhere else a group all yelling together at the top of their voices. It was like talking to a storm at sea. But there were newspaper reporters just in front, and I said to them, ‘‘Now, gentlemen, be kind enough to take down what I say. It will be in sections, but I will have it connected by-and-by.’’
I threw my notes away, and entered on a discussion of the value of freedom as opposed to slavery in the manufacturing interest, arguing that freedom everywhere increases a person’s necessities, and what s/he needs s/he buys, and that it was, therefore, to the interest of the manufacturing community to stand by the side of labor through the country. I never was more self-possessed and never in more perfect good temper; and I never was more determined that my hearers should feel the curb before I got through with them.

NARRATOR : Finally, Henry Ward Beecher spoke without interruption for an hour, giving the history of slavery in America, and his own theory that the war was merely a violent phase of the inevitable struggle between irreconcilable principles—free labor and slavery. When he finished, the applause was tremendous, and hundreds came forward to shake his hand.
Liverpool was the next stop.

HENRY : Liverpool was worse than all the rest put together. My life was threatened, and I had communications to the effect that I had better not venture there. The streets were placarded with the most scurrilous and abusive cards.

NARRATOR : Because of the danger, some of Beecher’s supporters went to the meeting armed. It took him an hour and a half to get the chance to speak at all.

HENRY : I sometimes felt like a shipmaster attempting to preach on board of a ship through a speaking-trumpet, with a tornado on the sea and a mutiny among the crew.

NARRATOR : Beecher’s wit and repartee were needed at every juncture. Here is how a newspaperman reported part of the speech.

REPORTER : Great Britain has thrown her arms of love around the Southerners, and turns from the Northerners. (‘‘No.) She don’t? I have only to say that she has been caught in very suspicious circumstances. (Laughter.)
If the South should be rendered independent— (At this juncture mingled cheering and hissing became immense; half the audience rose to their feet, waving hats and handkerchiefs, and in every part of the hall there was the greatest commotion and uproar.) You have had your turn now; let me have mine again. (Loud applause and laughter.) If this present struggle shall eventuate in the separation of America, and making the South— (Loud applause, hisses, hooting, and cries of ‘‘Bravo!’’) —a slave territory exclusively— (Cries of ‘‘No! No!’’ and laughter.)
(Interruption and uproar.) My friends, I saw a man once who was a little late at a railway station chase an express train. He didn’t catch it. (Laughter.) If you are going to stop this meeting you have got to stop it before I speak; for after I have got the things out you may chase as long as you please, you will not catch them. (Laughter and interruption.)

NARRATOR : Even without all the give and take of these remarkable meetings, a careful reading reveals a detailed knowledge of the economic and industrial aspects of slavery, and comprehension of the constitutional issues involved—and the ability to describe clearly complex American affairs to an English audience.

HENRY : When I am asked, ‘‘Why not let the South go?’’ I return for an answer a question. Be pleased to tell me what part of the British Islands you are willing to let go from under the crown when its inhabitants secede and set up for independence?

NARRATOR : At Edinburgh, there were so many people to hear him that he had to be handed along over people’s heads to get through the doors. He showed how the South had gotten their way in national policies until Lincoln was elected, at which point they rebelled.

HENRY : The day is coming when the foundations of the earth will be lifted out of their places; and there are two nations that ought to be found shoulder to shoulder and hand in hand for the sake of Christianity and universal liberty, and these nations are Great Britain and America.

NARRATOR : At Liverpool, Beecher received even more death threats—heavily armed disturbers sat in the galleries, but a large number of Beecher supporters also came armed, and announced—

MABIE : The first man that fires will rue it.

NARRATOR : The crowd didn’t quiet down for an hour and a half.

HENRY : This attempt to cover the fairest portion of the earth with a slave population which buys nothing and a degraded white population that buys next to nothing, should array against it the sympathy of every true political economist and every thoughtful and farseeing manufacturer as tending to strike at the vital want of commerce—not the want of cotton, but the want of customers.

NARRATOR : By the time he reached Exeter Hall in London for his last speech, the battle had been won. He summed up his arguments—that the only cause for the war was slavery, that the North was fighting for free labor and free people everywhere. Grant had just won at Vicksburg, and Lee had just retreated from Gettysburg.
The British Parliament did not recognize the Confederate States of America, and pro-Southern sentiment subsided in England. It was England, after all, that had been first in Europe to abolish the slave trade more than fifty years before.
Henry Ward Beecher’s five speeches made him the Union’s unofficial spokesperson abroad. He now had an international reputation. Oliver Wendell Holmes commented:

HOLMES : They were, one might say, a single speech delivered piecemeal in different places. Henry Ward Beecher has performed a more remarkable embassy than any envoy who has represented us in Europe since Franklin pleaded the cause of the young Republic at the Court of Versailles.

NARRATOR : From this point on, Henry was kept apprised of all developments by Lincoln’s government—and when he had questions, they were answered.