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 post-Civil-War era offered different challenges for various members of the Beecher family. homas K. Beecher took his schooling at his brother Edward’s Illinois College, though he was skeptical of religion. Afterwards, he visited and helped brother Henry in Indianapolis—he told Isabella that Henry was most like their father.

THOMAS : We sawed and split wood together; sat on rail fences and told stories; raised sweet potatoes weighing five pounds each; wrote articles for the Farmer and Gardener; banked up celery till it was nearly three feet tall, white and crisp; picked blackberries as big as my thumb; and hunted squirrels, rabbits and smaller game.

NARRATOR : Tom went down to meeting every night for sixteen weeks, to laugh and sing and hear Henry talk about Jesus Christ.

THOMAS : I did not know it at the time. There were no arguments. Nothing was proved. Can you tell how the bones of the unborn babe grow in the womb? So Christ was formed in consciousness.
Like some white bird high-flying, that drops down through the smoke into a walled city fortified against all comers, carrying under its wing a message from afar, so came to me the vision of Christ, as with matchless words brother Henry told the story, without theology or dialectic.

NARRATOR : Thomas remarried in 1857, to Julia Jones, a granddaughter of Noah Webster. Thomas’s luxury was a plunge bath—on winter mornings he would break the ice with a boat hook and then jump in. Julia was a good amateur sculptor, and in some ways was as unconventional as Thomas.
Charles Beecher’s son, Lt. Frederick Beecher, was killed by Indians in a battle in Yuma County, Colorado. Frederick had been a veteran of Gettysburg.
In 1869, despite advice against publication, Harriet Beecher Stowe published Lady Byron Vindicated, based on her conversations with her friend, the now dead wife of Byron. Lady Byron’s side of the story gave a sordid portrait of the popular poet’s private life. The book ended up besmirching Harriet’s own reputation.

HARRIET : Alas! the history of Lady Byron is the history of too many women in every rank of life. The feeling which seems to underlie all English literature is that it is no matter what becomes of the woman, when the man’s story is to be told.

NARRATOR : When the Plymouth Church treasurer, Henry C. Bowen, acquired The Independent magazine, he asked Henry Beecher to be its editor. Theodore Tilton was his assistant. A little later, Beecher complained of some of the patent-medicine advertising in it, and offered to resign. After negotiation, Beecher stayed on as editor, with complete control over content, including ads—but he lost Bowen’s friendship and support.
Tilton was a brilliant young man married to one of Plymouth Church’s Sunday-school teachers, and Henry took a fatherly interest in them both. When he returned from England, it was arranged that Tilton would continue to edit, as he had in Henry’s absence, for one year more under Henry Ward Beecher’s name, and then under his own. Acclaimed as the cleverest young editor in America, the thirty-year-old Tilton began to think rather highly of himself, and to treat Beecher patronizingly. Tilton went on a lecture tour and was highly applauded.
William Beecher, the eldest son, retired in 1870 when his wife Katharine died. His last church had been in North Brookfield, Massachusetts. He went to Chicago to live with his daughters until his death. All through his career, William Beecher had faced petty salary disputes and matters of pride. His courage, honest and zeal—all Beecher traits—were no guarantee of success for William Beecher.
In 1870, Charles Beecher gave in to Harriet’s entreaties, and went south to her second home in Newport, Florida, to preach among the very poor but newly free black population.

CHARLES : I should perhaps have done them more good, but from some chance expression I believe, they had heard that I ‘‘was not sound.’’ Poor creatures!

NARRATOR : Charles also served for three years as superintendent of public instruction for Florida, but then he returned to Georgetown, Massachusetts for a few years.
After the War, Theodore Tilton had become a Radical Republican, calling for retribution against the defeated South. He decided to attack Henry Ward Beecher’s letter to the Soldiers’ and Sailors’ Cleveland Convention, which had called for immediate readmission of the former slave states. By so doing, Tilton established his independence from Beecher, aired his own opinions, and pleased Bowen, who was also a Radical Republican. Beecher and The Independent parted company.
In the meantime, Mrs. Tilton sent word to Beecher that she needed his advice; she had left home because of Theodore’s cruelty and unfaithfulness. As her pastor, Henry of course saw her, and then sent his wife, as one more competent in such matters. Mrs. Beecher advised separation.
Henry Ward Beecher became editor and part owner of a rival publication, the Christian Union. Tilton, meanwhile, had become more radical and erratic. He committed The Independent to free love, as taught by the Claflin sisters, Victoria Woodhull and Tennessee Claflin, leaders of the radical women’s party, and the first ‘‘lady brokers’’ on Wall Street. Henry Bowen, alarmed by the drop in circulation of The Independent accused Tilton of wrecking the paper. Tilton accused Beecher of having made improper proposals to Mrs. Tilton.
Henry Beecher denied any such actions, and concurred with Bowen that Tilton’s presence on The Independent‘‘ was not good. Bowen consequently fired Tilton.
Enter Francis D. Moulton, a friend of Tilton’s, and a political manipulator who had become rich through porkbarrel arrangements. Moulton worked on Beecher’s well-known generosity of spirit—he told Beecher that he had blighted the Tiltons by failing to perceive Mrs. Tilton’s excessive affection for him, and also had wrecked Tilton’s career by his intrusive advice, based on malicious slanders. Henry took the man’s words at face value and was amazed and remorseful that he could have been the one responsible. Moulton volunteered his good offices.
By this time, Calvin and Harriet Stowe maintained a house in Mandarin, Florida as well as one in Hartford—the big house in Hartford was too much to handle, and they moved into a modest home on Forest Street, in Hartford’s famous Nook Farm literary colony—with the Samuel Clemenses on one side and the Charles Dudley Warners on the other. John and Isabella Hooker had lived there for years.
James Beecher became Minister at Owego, New York, when he was mustered out of the Union Army. He and his wife adopted three children there. He spent another four years at Poughkeepsie, and then he bought a square mile of wilderness in Ulster County, New York, where he preached to backwoods folk, and his wife ran a school. Ned Buntline, the dime novelist, knew James Beecher in those days.

BUNTLINE : His tract of land is densely wooded. A beautiful lake of good size occupies a portion of the property, and there is in all the Catskill Range no scenery more picturesque. ‘‘Beecher Lake,’’ the natives call it. And on one of the mountain cliffs commanding a fine view of it the preacher built for himself his home, doing all the work himself.
It is a story-and-a-half structure, plain, neat and comfortable. At the time of its erection there was no wagon road within half a dozen miles; the nearest hamlet and post office was ten miles distant while it was three times that distance to the first railroad station.
There all five—James, his wife, and adopted daughters—have since remained. There is every reason to believe that there is no earthly inducement which induce James Beecher to enter again his old-time career. The few neighbors who have gathered about this lake fully appreciate him. ‘‘He is queer,’’ they admit, but for all that they love him.

NARRATOR : In 1872, Isabella Beecher Hooker was already a leader in the women’s movement. She had held her own convention for women’s rights, even supporting Victoria Woodhull in her presidential campaign. Then Woodhull and her sister Tennessee Claflin published in their magazine Woodhull and Claflin’s Weekly a long exposé article on Henry Ward Beecher’s sex life, and everything they knew of the Beecher-Tilton scandal. Woodhull also blames Harriet and Catharine Beecher for avoiding the women’s movement. Isabella was caught in the middle.
Finally, Henry Beecher broke his long silence and published a blanket denial to all rumors and charges. He asked his church to organize an investigating committee to look into the matter. After months of work, the committee completely exonerated Beecher of any wrongdoing.
At this point, Tilton felt cornered, and filed a lawsuit claiming alienation of affections involving adultery. This trial lasted for months, and took up more space in the newspapers than the Civil War, it was said. The verdict was nine in Beecher’s favor, three against.
The Claflin sisters carried on their activities with the aid of their patron, Commodore Vanderbilt. Their magazine defended free love, socialism, birth control, women’s suffrage—they objected to Henry Beecher’s affairs not because of his immorality but because of his hypocrisy.
The Claflins believed that the book of Genesis was an allegory in which the Garden of Eden was the human body, and entertained other unconventional notions. They were a special target for Anthony Comstock and his Society for the Suppression of Vice. Meanwhile, Victoria Woodhull conducted a campaign for the presidency through the People’s Party.
The Tilton affair became stranger at every turn. Tilton produced a letter written by Mrs. Tilton, an accusation of improper advances by Henry Ward Beecher.
Beecher was aghast, and confronted Mrs. Tilton, who was ill in bed. She did not answer at first, but then said she couldn’t help it. Tilton had worn her down—and that the letter was supposed to straighten things out. She then wrote Beecher a written retraction, and signed it. Later in the Tilton-Beecher trial, she retracted the retraction, and then reasserted it—so that after all she was not called as a witness by either side.
Moulton persuaded Beecher to make a statement, and then, being too excited, let Moulton do the writing—and when the dinner bell rang, and very little time until his evening service, Henry Ward Beecher signed the document without reading it. This Moulton document became the basis for Tilton’s charges. The affair became messier as it went on—a document signed by all parties agreeing to maintain silence was published in the New York Times.
When Henry Beecher was disturbed on a Sunday about the trial, he said—

HENRY : Gentlemen, we have good authority for holding that it is lawful to draw up an ass from a pit on the Sabbath day. There never was a bigger ass nor a deeper pit.

NARRATOR : Back in Elmira, New York, Thomas Beecher felt his congregation was too large and his church too old, and decided to hold his meetings in a larger auditorium of an opera house. The Ministerial Union of Elmira expelled him—without any stated reason. His friend Mark Twain wrote an article on it for the Elmira Advertiser. Twain’s marriage had been performed by Thomas Beecher in 1870.

TWAIN : Happy, happy world that knows at last that a little congress of congregationless clergymen, of whom it had never heard before, have crushed a famous Beecher and reduced his audiences from 1,500 down to 1,475 at one fell blow!

NARRATOR : Soon after his expulsion, Thomas Beecher held his regular Sunday services outdoors during the summer; he arranged it so that the streetcar company could run out to Eldridge Park on the outskirts of town even though it was Sunday—and he wore a white duck suit and white felt hat. His audiences grew even more.
In 1872, Harriet Beecher Stowe finally went on a speaking tour of forty cities to earn money. Her first reading in Bridgeport was a failure, but at the second, she rumpled up her hair, and galvanized herself into action—later telling her friend Annie Field that she looked like Lyman Beecher up there—and the audience was swept away with passages from Uncle Tom and from her latest book, Oldtown Fireside Stories.

HARRIET : I check off place after place as the captive does his days of imprisonment. On the whole it is as easy a way of making money as I have ever tried, though no way is perfectly easy.

NARRATOR : At the end of the tour, she was exhausted. She was tempted once more to raise money, but the second tour cured her of the practice. She went back to writing, and still was forced to sell the extravagant Hartford home for a smaller one. She wrote incessantly, light novels, poems, sketches, essays, continually interrupted by the needs of the ailing Calvin Stowe.
In 1873, Mark Twain wrote a piece called ‘‘A New Beecher Church,’’ putting these words into Thomas Beecher’s mouth. The situation was real, and Thomas’s thoughtful new ideas would result in a new kind of church by simply following the idea of Christian brotherhood.

THOMAS (TWAIN) : When I came to Elmira, the First Congregational Church was perhaps the worst church building in Elmira. That was twenty years ago. I think the building has held its own ever since. I do not think it will fall down for some time yet, although there is an apparent weakness in the roof over yonder, which I will have Brother Jones look at tomorrow and see whether it is still safe.
Several times since I have been here the question of a new church has been advocated. I have always opposed the idea, because I knew that you were not ready. I did not wish you to get subscription on the brain, and run races to see who should put down the largest sum; nor was I willing to leave a part of the cost in mortgage.
Whenever there is a mortgage on a church, the devil holds the mortgage, and the religious life in that church inevitably dies. A new church is not necessary to me. I can preach in the park in the warm weather and in a hall in the winter; or I can do as the Lord himself did—preach from house to house. What I am here for is the life of religion in your souls, and preaching is but a minor question.
Still, there are advantages in a suitable building. I have been talking with an architect, and I find that it is likely to cost about $50,000 to build such a church as I think we ought to have, if we have a new one. Therefore I am going to put it to you this morning to vote.
On the table in front of the pulpit is a box of envelopes directed to me, and in each envelope is a card with blanks. Write your name and address. Then vote on the questions: First, Do we need a new church, and are you in favor of building it now? Yes or no. Second, How much will you give in one payment toward it? Third, How much could you give in three payments toward it?
Take time to think it over, and return the envelopes to me within five weeks from yesterday. I will open them five weeks from today. If the majority decides to have a new church and the amount pledged is sufficient, we will have one. Do not tell anyone how you mean to vote; do not talk it over with anyone except your wife/husband. What I want is a vote of individuals.

NARRATOR : The vote came in for a new church, with pledges of $65,000. And the Langdon family had pledged to match whatever was raised dollar for dollar, making a total of $130,000. So, Thomas Beecher was able not only to build his church but to fulfill his ideal of a ‘‘Church Home.’’

THOMAS : We intend to love regardless of return and to do good, hoping for nothing; a clear, sheer, truthful, gospel investment. Gospel sermons are plenty. Gospel investments are scarce. You have heard gospel sermons for eighteen years. Now we propose to act a gospel sermon. In short, we want a family on a large scale, in which the smallest member will be the noisiest, and make the most trouble, and in which the strongest member will be the stillest and laugh at the little fool and love him/her, notwithstanding this noise and nonsense.

NARRATOR : This great building, when completed, was almost a city block long. Henry said of it—

HENRY : Tom, when I go, I shall leave behind me no such great monument to my life’s work.

NARRATOR : The church house contained, besides a church, a gymnasium, library, theater, and a romp-room/dancing room. In other rooms, people could entertain, a pool table was set up in the basement. It was the fist institutional church in the country. In his lifetime, this new type of church spread across the country, and even had imitators in Elmira itself. Institutional churches remained the major social vehicle in many cities until YMCA, YWCA, Boy Scouts, Girl Scouts, settlement houses, boys’ clubs became commonly available facilities.
In 1871, a small faction in his Illinois church forced Edward Beecher to resign, and he moved to New York where he served for two years as assistant editor on Henry’s Christian Union. Then, when the paper changed hands, he in effect retired at age 70, and moved to Brooklyn, where he served as counselor and friend to his more famous brother Henry Ward Beecher—something he had done when Henry was a mere boy.
Over the years, these two brothers had kept up a sporadic but extensive correspondence. In middle-age, they found at last that they could share mutual confidences of a deep nature over their trials of faith. When the storm over the Tilton Affair broke over Henry, Edward was beside him like a rock. When Isabella talked with Edward, he said—

EDWARD : If Henry is guilty, he ought not to make confession.

ISABELLA : That is nothing more than male hypocrisy.

NARRATOR : After the trials, Henry went on the lecture circuit to pay back the terrific costs of the trials. He would lecture, and then speak outdoors to great crowds. Audiences came to jeer but stayed to listen and to give Beecher warm applause. He spoke 232 times in 235 days, to a total of 460,000 people in seven months. Even so, suspicion of him died hard.
When Thomas was considering offers to other jobs, Henry warned him:

HENRY : Don’t leave the Park Church—they can appreciate you and endure you!

NARRATOR : And Thomas’s associate, the Rev. Annis Ford Eastman said:

EASTMAN : And it is the glory of this church that this was true. A teacher sent from God is bound to make trouble when s/he comes. Whoever denies all human authority over his/her conscience, who fearlessly examines all religious systems and social conventions, taking what is good for him/her and rejecting what is bad, who is never moved out of his/her way by popular enthusiasms—who can see both sides of every question, and bravely states them—s/he must often be a sore trial to the average sense of propriety in a community.

NARRATOR : Thomas Beecher’s church went from fifty members to seven hundred plus a Sunday school of one thousand—Sunday attendance was about 1,400, including people of all denominations, even agnostics and atheists. What was Thomas Beecher’s secret? He was not an outstanding speaker, like his brother Henry. He simply taught the teachings of Jesus, the brother/sisterhood of humans, and decided each question as he thought Jesus would have done.
A poor Irish woman’s husband had been killed, and she struggled to feed her five children and pay the mortgage. Thomas Beecher called one day and handed her the mortgage deed paid in full.

THOMAS : And here is some money from the same friends with which to buy what you need for the children. Don’t thank me, it isn’t my money. Don’t thank those who gave it to me. It isn’t their money. It’s Jesus Christ’s money and that means that it belongs to whoever needs it most. If you come across anyone who needs it more than you, you must give it to them.

NARRATOR : Thomas Beecher dressed in a faded butternut coat, and a visor-shaped cap made to his specifications, and replaced it at intervals. Jervis Langdon finally took Beecher to a tailor to be fitted for a new broadcloth suit. But weeks later, he was wearing his old worn coat again. He had given his new coat away.

THOMAS : You see I couldn’t give him the old coat because it wasn’t fit to give to anyone so I had to give him the new one.

NARRATOR : He also rode a tricycle; and he would sometimes skip while walking, out of good spirits. But he also had periods of deep depression.
Thomas K. Beecher also served variously in Elmira, as bridge commissioner, as superintendent of schools—and he ran for various offices for the Republican, Democratic, Greenback, and Prohibition Parties.
He also had an important contact during his days at school in Illinois.

THOMAS : Abraham Lincoln wasn’t considered good enough to associate with a Beecher in those days, but I took a chance, and it didn’t hurt me.

NARRATOR : After all her years of travel in the cause of women’s education, Catharine Beecher finally came to Elmira, New York, to stay with Thomas Beecher and his wife Julia. She said—

JULIA : I think there are worse afflictions in the world than the care of an old Christian woman who has at least tried to do good all her life and needs someone’s kind attentions till the Lord calls her home. I am not going to worry about that.

NARRATOR : Of course, Catharine complained to sister Harriet of boredom in Elmira.

HARRIET : Catharine, you have more talents for making life agreeable than most women, you should visit and cheer some sick people at the cure and make life brighter around you.
Meanwhile the government of the world will not be going on a whit worse now that you are not doing it. I am relieved and glad to think of you at hom at last with Brother Tom. Too many years have passed over your head for you to be wandering like a trunk without a label.

NARRATOR : Thomas K. Beecher wrote lay sermons, and a regular newspaper column called ‘‘Saturday Miscellany.’’ Two volumes of his sermons were published, plus a book of children’s stories.
Asked how to get to heaven, Thomas replied—

THOMAS : My boy, you can go to New York from Elmira by the Erie, the Lehigh Valley, the Lackawanna or the Northern Central, you can walk, ride horseback or you can go by boat. One way may be somewhat more roundabout than the other, but you will get there all right if you follow the sign posts. You can reach heaven by the Catholic Church, or by the Synagogue, Universalist, or Baptist Church, and you can even reach it through the Park Church—but, whatsoever you do, do it unto the Lord.

NARRATOR : Henry’s troubles were not quickly over. After the trial, a council of Congregational churches took up the question of the behavior of both church and pastor in 1876. No new evidence was brought forth, and again Beecher’s innocence was proclaimed. So, he had victory at last, though fees for the legal trial alone cost Beecher $118,000. In the meantime, he carried on his usual load of church work and preaching.
William A. Beach, chief counsel for the other side, gradually became convinced of Beecher’s innocence.

BEACH : His appearance and utterance when he asserted his innocence on the witness stand were the most sublime and overpowering exhibition of the majesty of human nature I ever beheld. I can’t understand how anyone could resist that solemn avowal. I felt and feel now that we were a pack of hounds trying in vain to drag down a noble lion.

NARRATOR : At his church in Elmira, Thomas Beecher tried to conduct his affairs as Christ might have—just as he had tried with his school in Philadelphia. He occasionally drank a glass of beer in a saloon—but never treated anyone or accepted being treated to a beer. He occasionally played a hand of whist at a club, he played baseball, cricket, he sang and played the organ. He also set up office hours—instead of calling on his congregation, he expected them to call on him.

THOMAS : I cannot make pastoral calls. I am not constructed so that I can. But I am yours all times of the day and night when you want anything of me. If you are sick and need a watcher I will watch with you. If you are poor and need someone to saw wood for you, I will saw wood for you. I can read the paper for you if you need anybody to do that. I am yours, but you must call on me the same as you would on a physician.

NARRATOR : It wasn’t long after she came to Elmira that Catharine Beecher died. Thomas describes her last days.

THOMAS : She was like a mirror fractured, each piece like the whole. She was incessantly, yet incoherently active, going from sewing to letter writing to piano playing to metaphysics. She inherited from her father great directness and positiveness of manner, and made it always apparent that her mission in this world was not to entertain but to instruct and improve.

NARRATOR : James Beecher finally left his wilderness sanctuary only at the entreaty of brother Henry, to take charge of the Bethel Mission of his Plymouth Church in Brooklyn. The work proved finally too exhausting—and at length, he broke down completely. After four years in a sanitarium, he was cared for by a nephew, and ended up at Dr. Gleason’s water cure spa neighboring Thomas Beecher’s home in Elmira, New York.
One day in 1886, after shooting, he put the muzzle of a gun in his mouth and pulled the trigger. This youngest Beecher was buried in Elmira beside the oldest Beecher, his sister Catharine.
When Henry Ward Beecher died the next year, Thomas said—

THOMAS : In those sad days when his good name was besmirched, and thousands of people took sides, Brother Henry—my brother Henry—solemnly asseverated his innocence and his purity. Knowing him, I believed him and read no further. He cared little for logic and consistency as an appletree that blossoms bountifully in the sunshine to the song of robins and bluebirds.