"We went down to the graveyard with little Georgie, and waded through it in the snow. I got out of the carriage and took the little coffin in my arms, and walked knee-deep to the side of the grave, and looking in I saw the winter down at the very bottom of it.... If I should live a thousand years I could not help shivering every time I thought of it."
Mr. Beecher loved the West, and expected to remain permanently in it; but the East had learned of his earnestness and his eloquence, and called him to Brooklyn. For a long time he refused to consider it; but his wife having suffered much from chills and fever, he finally accepted the call to the newly organized Plymouth Church, with twenty-one members, in the fall of 1847, at a salary of fifteen hundred dollars. In two years the membership had grown to over four hundred, and a new church had been built—the other having been badly damaged by fire—at a cost of $36,000.
A month after Mr. Beecher's arrival in Brooklyn, his little girl, "Caty," died, and began, as he says, "her quiet march toward the once-opened gate, to rejoin the brother."
From this time onward till Mr. Beecher's death in 1887, for forty years, Plymouth Church became the centre of almost unparalleled influence. Dr. Barrows says with truth, "It is probable that, except Westminster Abbey, no other church of English-speaking nations has in this century been visited by so many men and women of renown."
The church, accommodating three thousand persons, was year by year crowded to repletion, often as many going away as could find standing-room within. Everybody wanted to hear the most eloquent pulpit orator in America.
When Mr. Beecher first came to Plymouth Church, some said he would not please the cultivated East, but his earnestness soon satisfied all cavillers. He had one message, as he said, "The love of Christ to men. This, to me, was a burning reality.... Consequently I went into this work with all my soul, preaching night and day."
The slavery question had now come to be the foremost question among the people. By the Missouri Compromise of 1821, slavery was not to extend north beyond latitude 36° 30´. When, in 1849, California asked admittance to the Union as a free State, the South, feeling that the balance of power would be on the side of freedom, bitterly opposed it. Henry Clay, the great compromiser, brought forward his "Omnibus Bill" in 1850, the principal features of which were that California should be a free State, and the Fugitive Slave Law should be more stringent, so that Southerners might reclaim slaves in the Northern States, and take them back to bondage, and it should be the duty of Northerners to help them. President Millard Fillmore signed these measures.
Mr. Beecher wrote for the New York Independent a three-column article, entitled, "Shall We Compromise?" The dying John C. Calhoun had it read twice to him. "The man who says that is right," he repeated. "There is no alternative. It is liberty or slavery."
When Daniel Webster, in his fatal speech of March 7, 1850, favored compromise, "Then it was that I flamed," said Mr. Beecher, and from that time till the Civil War was over he was at a white heat.
When Wendell Phillips was denied a place to speak because he was an Abolitionist, and no one dared to rent a hall for him through fear of a mob, Henry Ward Beecher opened Plymouth pulpit. He went to every trustee for his consent. It the man hesitated, Mr. Beecher said, "You and I will break if you don't give me this permission," and he signed.