Henry Ward Beecher Totally Explained

Everything about Henry Ward Beecher totally explained

: This is an article about Henry Beecher, the American clergyman. For the medical doctor, see Henry K. Beecher. Henry Ward Beecher (June 24, 1813 – March 8, 1887) was a prominent, theologically liberal American Congregationalist clergyman, social reformer, abolitionist, and speaker in the mid to late 19th Century.
An 1875 adultery trial in which he was accused of having an affair with a married woman was one of the most famous American trials of the 19th century.

Biography

Early life

Born in Litchfield, Connecticut, he was the son of Lyman Beecher, an abolitionist Congregationalist preacher from Boston, and Roxana Foote. Roxana died when Henry was three. He was the brother of Uncle Tom's Cabin author Harriet Beecher Stowe, and noted educator Catharine Beecher. He had two other prominent and activist siblings, a brother, Charles Beecher, and a sister, Isabella Beecher Hooker.
The Beecher household was exemplary of the orthodox ministry that Lyman Beecher preached. His family not only prayed at the beginning and end of each day but also sang hymns and prepared for other rigorous church obligations. The family members were expected to participate in prayer meetings, attend lectures and other church functions. "Undue frivolity was discouraged, so they didn't celebrate Christmas or birthdays. Dancing, theater, and all but the most high-toned fiction were forbidden." (Applegate, p. 28)
Henry was especially close to his sister Harriet, two years his senior, according to the web site of the Plymouth Church in Brooklyn Heights, New York City. "This friendship with Harriet continued throughout their lives, and she was still listed on the membership rolls of Plymouth Church when she died in 1896."

Preaching style

Thousands of worshipers flocked to Beecher's enormous Plymouth Church in Brooklyn. Abraham Lincoln (who said of Beecher that no one in history had "so productive a mind") was in the audience at one point, and Walt Whitman visited him. Mark Twain went to see Beecher in the pulpit and described the pastor "sawing his arms in the air, howling sarcasms this way and that, discharging rockets of poetry and exploding mines of eloquence, halting now and then to stamp his foot three times in succession to emphasize a point." (Twain, Letter # 9)
Beecher himself had this to say of his preaching style:
"From the beginning, I educated myself to speak along the line and in the current of my moral convictions; and though, in later days, it has carried me through places where there were some batterings and bruisings, yet I've been supremely grateful that I was led to adopt this course. I'd rather speak the truth to ten men than blandishments and lying to a million. Try it, ye who think there's nothing in it! try what it's to speak with God behind you,--to speak so as to be only the arrow in the bow which the Almighty draws." (Beecher, pp. 138-139)
"He obtained the chains with which John Brown had been bound, trampling them in the pulpit, and he also held mock 'auctions' at which the congregation purchased the freedom of real slaves," according to the Web site of the still-existing Plymouth Church. The most famous of these former slaves was a young girl named Pinky, auctioned during a regular Sunday worship service at Plymouth on February 5, 1860. A collection taken up that day raised $900 to buy Pinky from her owner. A gold ring was also placed in the collection plate, and Beecher presented it to the girl to commemorate her day of liberation. Pinky returned to Plymouth in 1927 at the time of the Church's 80th Anniversary to give the ring back to the Church with her thanks. Today, Pinky's ring and bill of sale can still be viewed at Plymouth."

Theology

Henry's father preached a form of Calvinist theology that "combined the old belief that 'human fate was preordained by God's plan' with a faith in the capacity of rational men and women to purge society of its sinful ways," according to historian Michael Kazin. "For (Henry) Beecher, sinfulness was a temporary malady, which the love of God could burn away as a fierce noonday sun dries up a noxious mold," according to Kazin.

Legacy

"He developed a passion for jewels, which he carried, unset, in his pockets, taking them out for comfort when he was tired or in low spirits." (Applegate, p. 268)
Beecher, Illinois, is his namesake, although he declined to come to the town's dedication in 1871.
Gutzon Borglum who created the Mount Rushmore memorial, sculpted a statue of Beecher that stands in the garden of Plymouth Church in Brooklyn Heights.
Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. wrote the following limerick:

The Reverend Henry Ward Beecher
called a hen a most elegant creature.
The hen, pleased with that,
laid an egg in his hat,
and thus did the hen reward Beecher.
In The Adventure of the Cardboard Box, a Sherlock Holmes mystery, Holmes' companion Dr. Watson is mentioned as being an avid admirer of Henry Ward Beecher, keeping a portrait of him (beside a portrait of General Gordon) and feeling strongly indignant about the way that Beecher was received during his visit to Britain at the time of the Civil War by "the more turbulent of our people" (see).

Published works

Seven Lectures to Young Men (1844) (a pamphlet)

The Independent (1861-63) (periodical, as editor)

Christian Union (1870-78) (periodical, as editor)

Summer in the Soul (1858)

Prayers from the Plymouth Pulpit (1867)

Norwood, or Village Life in New England (1868) (novel)

Life of Jesus Christ (1871)

Yale Lectures on Preaching (1872)

Evolution and Religion (1885)

Bibliography

Debby Applegate, The Most Famous Man in America: The Biography of Henry Ward Beecher (Doubleday, 2006), winner of the 2007 Pulitzer Prize for biography.

Constance Mayfield Rourke; Trumpets of Jubilee: Henry Ward Beecher, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Lyman Beecher, Horace Greeley, P.T. Barnum (1927).Further Information

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