BROOKLYN’S STATUE OF BEECHER.
By R. H. Titherington.
“Let the sound of those he wrought for,
And the feet of those he fought for,
Echo round his bourne forevermore.”
Tennyson’s lines on the Duke of Wellington may well be applied to the monument that Brooklyn has set up to commemorate her greatest citizen and the foremost of all American preachers. The recently unveiled statue of Beecher could hardly be better placed than at the junction of two main arteries of traffic, and facing the City Hall. It stands at the heart of Brooklyn, as in another sense Beecher stood, during his life, at the heart of Brooklyn and of the nation. Its location is in keeping with the character of the statue, and with those sides of the great man’s nature which it especially typifies. It should, perhaps, have been set so as to face away from the City Hall, rather than toward it. It is certainly somewhat unfortunate that that which meets the eye of most of those who see it should be the back of the statue, draped in the folds of a heavy cloak.
THE STATUE IN FRONT OF THE BROOKLYN CITY HALL.
The monument itself, as may be inferred from the mention of John Quincy Adams Ward as its designer, is one that shows intelligent and conscientious work besides much technical skill. It is animated by a definite conception of its subject, and partakes of the character of an ideal group as well as that of an actual likeness. The subsidiary portion is of course wholly ideal; while the central figure itself is something more than a reproduction of the form and features of its original. Those who remember Mr. Beecher only in the last few years of his life may be inclined to think that the lines of the statue’s face are too deep and emphatic, that its expression has too much positiveness and strength, and too little gentleness and benignity. There is truth in this criticism, if criticism it can be called. The sculptor prepared for his task by taking a death mask of Mr. Beecher’s face; but from the more rounded outlines of the preacher’s later years he deliberately went back to show him as he was in the prime of life, in those stirring times when he led the vanguard of freedom’s forces. The statue is Beecher as he will live in the grateful memory of posterity, rather than as he lives in the affectionate recollection of surviving friends. It is the Beecher of history.
HENRY WARD BEECHER.
Indeed, the designer has struck the very keynote of Beecher’s immortality. He has given us the man who voiced the cause of emancipation in the days when it was the protest of the minority against a great wrong firmly intrenched in the possession of power; the man who faced anti-abolition mobs in New York and the prejudice of a nation in England; the man who all through his life seemed to delight in facing unjust opposition and in fighting the battle of the weak against the strong.
He was born during the war of 1812, a perilous crisis in our national history. To quote from the memoir compiled by members of his family, “he carried war in him as a birthmark, but with him it was war against wickedness and wrong.” He was an abolitionist in his undergraduate days at Amherst, where his first attacks upon human slavery were made in the college debating society. Then, as a young minister in an Ohio River town, he was brought into close contact with the institution, and saw its actual horrors. He returned east to Brooklyn to lift up in that city a voice that presently made itself heard from the Atlantic to the Pacific. He would accept no compromise, and fought with all his powers against that offered in 1850 by Henry Clay. “For every free State,” he cried, “it demands one State for slavery. One dark orb must be swung into its orbit, to groan and travail in pain, for every new orb of liberty over which the morning stars shall sing for joy.”
He knew full well the strength of the forces arrayed against him. “An Abolitionist,” he said later in life, “was enough to put the mark of Cain upon any young man that arose in my early day, and until I was forty years of age it was punishable to preach on the subject of liberty. It was enough to expel a man from church communion if he insisted on praying in prayer meeting for the liberation of the slaves. If a man came to be known as an anti-slavery man it almost preluded bankruptcy in business.”
Several times angry crowds gathered near Plymouth Church and threatened to attack it, but Beecher cared nothing for personal danger. When the irrepressible conflict between liberty and slavery was reddening the plains of bleeding Kansas, he took up a collection in the church to buy rifles for the free soilers. Some of them were sent through the enemy’s lines in Missouri in boxes marked “bibles,” and though this was done without his knowledge, “Beecher’s bibles” became a proverbial synonym for improved firearms.
When the flame first kindled in Kansas spread to blaze forth into the war of the Rebellion, none realized more fully than he the stern duties of the hour. Beecher was away from Brooklyn when the news came that Fort Sumter had been attacked. On reaching home he was greeted by his eldest son with the question, “Father, may I enlist?” “If you don’t I’ll disown you,” he replied.
He threw himself heart and soul into the work of arming for the defense of the Union. Plymouth Church became a rendezvous for regiments passing to the front, and its pastor’s house at 124 Columbia Heights a veritable storehouse for military goods. He was largely instrumental in raising and equipping three regiments for the Union army. The third of these, which he organized almost unaided, was the Long Island Volunteer regiment, afterward enrolled as the Sixty Seventh New York. In this his son, Henry Barton Beecher, held a lieutenant’s commission.
Indeed, Beecher’s enthusiasm outran the government’s unreadiness. Lack of necessary funds compelled the army authorities to delay the acceptance of his volunteers; and in the summer of 1862, after McClellan had made his fruitless attempt to reach Richmond, Beecher gave voice to his impatience at what seemed to him the inactivity of the authorities at Washington. He hated half measures, and believed that the nearest way to peace lay through a vigorous prosecution of the war.
In June, 1863, he sought to find, in a brief visit to England, rest and recuperation for bodily and mental powers exhausted by the strain they had endured. Those were the darkest days of the war. Two years of campaigning, and vast expenditures of blood and treasure, had done little or nothing to break down the rebellion. Vicksburg was defying the desperate efforts of Grant, while in the East Lee, at the head of his veteran army, was pressing forward to invade Pennsylvania and outflank Washington. All the world looked upon the United States as on the eve of splitting asunder. In England the sympathy of the laboring men was with the North, but the upper social and official classes were solidly on the other side. Even such a man as Gladstone declared that “Jefferson Davis had created a nation,” and only a few tribunes of the people like John Bright and Richard Cobden publicly pleaded the cause of freedom.
With his love of battling against unjust opposition, it is not strange that Beecher was drawn into a crusade against the prejudices that he found prevalent in England—a crusade undertaken without premeditation, but one whose results proved it to be one of his most notable services to his country. It was begun in the Free Trade Hall at Manchester, where he faced a great and hostile assemblage, secured a hearing by sheer pluck and persistence, and then, by his magnificent oratorical power and the conscious justice of his cause, won a victory that was afterward repeated in the other chief cities of England and Scotland. His speeches turned the balance of British sentiment, and warned the government from the path that might have led to intervention in the struggle.
“I believe I did some good,” Beecher himself said, in speaking of his missionary work in England. A New York journal of that time put it more strongly. “The administration at Washington,” it remarked, “has sent abroad more than one man to represent the cause of the North and press it upon the minds of foreign courts and citizens; but here is a person who goes abroad without official prestige, on a mere private mission to recruit his health, and yet we doubt whether his speeches in England have not done more for us by their frank and manly exposition of our principles, our purposes, and our hopes, than all the other agencies employed.”
The value of Beecher’s work in England was fully recognized by President Lincoln and Secretary Stanton. With these leaders, whom he had never hesitated to criticise when he believed it his duty to do so, he now entered into warm relations. It was he who was invited to deliver the address at the raising of the old flag over the regained Fort Sumter.
His active participation in public affairs continued up to his death. His part in the election of 1884 is of course fresh in the memory of readers—so fresh, indeed, that it can hardly be reviewed without intrenching upon the prejudices of present day partisanship.
Henry Ward Beecher was a great man—one of the greatest and most remarkable men of his day. His personality was so large, his gifts so varied, his mental and moral composition so multiform, that a volume would be needed to give a complete character sketch of the man. We can only attempt within the limits of this article to bring out the two main elements of his character that seem to have inspired Mr. Ward’s conception of his subject. On the one hand is the positive, almost militant expression that typifies Beecher’s fearless championship of the oppressed; on the other his universal sympathy, his unselfish kindliness, and his especial love for children, betokened by the figures beside the pedestal. His heart was as great as his brain. He was intensely human. Artificiality he hated, and dissembling and deception he could not understand. He was sometimes called a great actor, but sincerity was his very breath of life. “Some men,” he once said, “are like live springs that bubble and flow perpetually, while others are like pumps—one must work the handle for all the water he gets.” And rare indeed are such live springs of imagination and eloquence, of intellect and of affection, as that which welled in Beecher’s own heart. “He was quite as likely,” says one of his biographers, “to burst out into splendid eloquence amid a small group of chatting friends, or even to a single listener, as before a vast audience. One would as soon suspect the Atlantic of holding back a particularly grand roll of surf at Long Branch until people should come down to see it, as to imagine Mr. Beecher keeping a fine thought or a striking figure till he had an audience.”
Or again, as Oliver Wendell Holmes says in his essay on Beecher’s English speeches: “He has the simple frankness of a man who feels himself to be perfectly sound in bodily, mental, and moral structure; and his self revelation is a thousand times nobler than the assumed impersonality which is a common trick with cunning speakers who never forget their own interests. Thus it is that wherever Mr. Beecher goes, everybody feels, after he has addressed them once or twice, that they know him well, almost as if they had always known him; and there is not a man in the land who has such a multitude who look upon him as their brother.”
When Beecher was a man, he was a man; when he was a boy, he was a boy. Brought up in the rigid atmosphere of an old time New England parsonage, there was nothing sanctimonious or unhealthy about his boyhood religion. Plain living and high thinking was the regime of his youth, but withal he was a warm blooded, high spirited lad. At school Hank Beecher, as his playmates called him, was a leader in outdoor sports, and at college he was an enthusiastic athlete. Dr. Holmes called him, later in life, “the same lusty, warm hearted, strong fibered, bright souled, clear eyed creature, as he was when the college boys at Amherst acknowledged him as the chiefest among their football kickers.” Strangely characteristic was a document that he drew up on leaving the school at Amherst that bore the high sounding title of Mount Pleasant Collegiate Institute. It was a covenant between him and his chief schoolboy “chum,” wherein Henry W. Beecher and Constantine F. Newell formally undertook, “in the presence of God and his holy angels,” to be “real, lawful, and everlasting brothers”—an agreement that was faithfully kept, in spite of long separations, until the death of Beecher’s boyhood friend in 1842. Another touch of nature that may be cited from the annals of his early career was his trial sermon at Lawrenceburg. No less than a hundred souls—an unprecedented assemblage—had gathered to hear the young college graduate, who is said to have been so nervous that his address was a total failure—rather a contrast to the flow of noble thoughts clad in impressive language that afterward held many a vast audience spell bound.
His forty years’ ministry at Plymouth Church will always remain a unique landmark in the annals of the American pulpit. It was in June, 1847, that Beecher, then in the prime of early manhood, received an invitation to become the first pastor of the newly formed Congregational church, which had indeed been organized only the day before, with a membership of twenty one. Coming to his charge four months later, the first thing he did was characteristic. He had the pulpit cut away, and a simple desk set in its place, upon a broad platform. He wanted to draw nearer to his audience—literally as well as figuratively. He wished to “get at” his hearers—to grasp them closely. He was a fisher of men’s hearts and souls. Of the wonderful powers that made his preaching so remarkable in its effectiveness and so world wide in its fame it is hard to give a precise analysis. Among the component elements were a vividly creative imagination, a mind richly stocked by reading and observation, a ripe judgment, a deep sympathy, a remarkable adaptability to occasions and situations, and an unfailing earnestness and enthusiasm. He was an accomplished elocutionist, with the natural advantages of a commanding presence and a voice of great power and flexibility.
From its small original nucleus, Plymouth Church expanded to be larger than any other similar body in the country, with a membership of fifteen hundred. Scores came to it from widely variant sects, and found in its broad and liberal Christianity a common ground whereon they could stand together and work shoulder to shoulder. It has often been said that nowadays churches are filled with women, almost to the exclusion of their husbands, brothers and fathers. Such was not the case with Beecher’s congregation. Men always flocked to hear him, and felt themselves irresistibly drawn toward the sunlight of his strong nature.
Intense as was his interest in the growth and success of Plymouth Church, it was to him a means, and not an end in itself. He sought to make not a prominent church, but one active and powerful in all good works. The success of its schools and missions, its meetings and societies, was the outward evidence of the inspiration it received from the master mind around which it was focused.
Lesser men have ventured to criticise Beecher as deficient in theology. Such criticism implies inability to understand the great preacher’s breadth. He was thoroughly grounded in theological lore by his father, who was one of the leading controversialists of the day. In Lyman Beecher’s home dogma and doctrine reigned supreme. “Of him I learned,” his son says, “all the theology that was current at that time. In the quarrels between Andover and East Windsor and New Haven and Princeton—I was at home in all these distinctions. I got the doctrines just like a row of pins on a paper of pins. I knew them as a soldier knows his weapons. I could get them in battle array.” After graduating at Amherst, he studied at the Lane Theological Seminary, of which his father had become president. He entered into Dr. Beecher’s controversy against Unitarianism in Boston, and the subsequent conflict between the so called old and new schools of Presbyterianism, of which latter his father was the protagonist.
But the more he saw of these doctrinal battles, the less he believed in their real utility and importance. “I will never be a sectary,” was a resolve that he formed very early in his independent ministry. “Others,” he once said, “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.” His religious sympathy was as wide as humanity, and his ardor for the good of mankind partook of the divine, for to quote his own words again—and the thought they express is a fine one—the love of God for man comes “not from a ‘law’ or ‘plan of salvation,’ but from the fullness of His great heart.”