Beecher inserted himself into nearly every important drama of the era among them the antislavery and women’s suffrage movements, the rise of the entertainment industry and tabloid press, and controversies ranging from Darwinian evolution to presidential politics. He was notorious for his irreverent humor and melodramatic gestures, such as auctioning slaves to freedom in his pulpit and shipping rifles nicknamed “Beecher’s Bibles” to the antislavery resistance fighters in Kansas. Thinkers such as Emerson, Thoreau, Whitman, and Twain befriended and sometimes parodied him.And then it all fell apart. In 1872 Beecher was accused by feminist firebrand Victoria Woodhull of adultery with one of his most pious parishioners. Suddenly the “Gospel of Love” seemed to rationalize a life of lust. The cuckolded husband brought charges of “criminal conversation” in a salacious trial that became the most widely covered event of the century, garnering more newspaper headlines than the entire Civil War. Beecher survived, but his reputation and his causes from women’s rights to progressive evangelicalism suffered devastating setbacks that echo to this day.Featuring the page-turning suspense of a novel and dramatic new historical evidence, Debby Applegate has written the definitive biography of this captivating, mercurial, and sometimes infuriating figure. In our own time, when religion and politics are again colliding and adultery in high places still commands headlines, Beecher’s story sheds new light on the culture and conflicts of contemporary America.
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Background Information
Henry Ward Beecher was a Congregationalist minister, a leading abolitionist, and the brother of author Harriet Beecher Stowe. Harriet Beecher Stowe was a member of the famous literary and religious Beecher family who wrote Uncle Tom's Cabin before the Civil War. The long struggle for equal rights for women took shape in the 19th century and was resisted by conservative thinking about gender roles.