The physical strain while in England was great. "I thought at times," he says, "that I should certainly break a blood-vessel or have apoplexy. I did not care; I was willing to die as ever I was, when hungry and thirsty, to take refreshment, if I might die for my country."
Mr. Beecher on his return was welcomed with open arms and grateful hearts by the American people. Great receptions were given him at the Academy of Music, Brooklyn, and the Academy of Music, New York.
When the heart-breaking war was over, and General Lee had surrendered to General Grant under the apple-tree at Appomattox, April 9, 1865, and it was decided to raise over Fort Sumter, April 14, the flag that had been pulled down four years before, the great preacher and orator, who had helped to save the Union, was asked to deliver the address.
When Major-General Robert Anderson ran up the flag, it was saluted by a hundred guns from Fort Sumter and by a national salute from every fort that had fired upon Sumter at the beginning of the war.
Henry Ward Beecher's address was masterly; a review of the dreadful war, and our duties in the future.
That very night, April 14, 1865, President Lincoln was assassinated by the actor, J. Wilkes Booth. Mr. Beecher said in his sermon the following Sunday: "The blow brought not a sharp pang. It was so terrible that at first it stunned sensibility.... There was a piteous helplessness. Strong men bowed down and wept.... Men walked for days as if a corpse lay unburied in their dwellings. There was nothing else to think of. All business was laid aside. Pleasure forgot to smile.... Even avarice stood still, and greed was strongly moved to generous sympathy and universal sorrow. Rear to his name monuments, found charitable institutions, and write his name above their lintels; but no monument will ever equal the universal, spontaneous, and sublime sorrow that in a moment swept down lines and parties, and covered up animosities, and in an hour brought a divided people into unity of grief and indivisible fellowship of anguish."
Beecher took an active part in the reconstruction and readmission of the seceded States, urging that the greatest leniency be shown, now that they had surrendered; opposed the hanging of Jefferson Davis; urged the right of suffrage for the colored people:—"It is always inexpedient and foolish," he said, "to deny a man his natural rights." He did not believe that the freedmen should be cared for permanently by a military power at the South, placed there by the North. "We are to educate the negroes, and to Christianly educate them. We are to raise them in intelligence more and more, until they shall be able to prove themselves worthy of citizenship. For, I tell you, all the laws in the world cannot bolster a man up so as to place him any higher than his own moral worth and natural forces put him."
For a letter stating such views as these, written to the National Convention of Soldiers and Sailors held at Cleveland, O., in the autumn of 1866, Mr. Beecher was assailed all over the country. "The rage and abuse of excited men," he said, "I have too long been used to, now to be surprised or daunted.... I stood almost alone, my church, in my absence, full of excitement; all my ministerial brethren, with a few honorable exceptions, either aloof or in clamor against me; well-nigh the whole religious press denouncing me, and the political press furious."
He spoke boldly against the corrupt judges in New York City in the time of the Tweed dictatorship. Years later when Beecher voted and spoke for Grover Cleveland for the presidency, because he believed a change of parties wise for the country at the time, on account of "the corruption of too long held power," and did not trust James G. Blaine, the opposing candidate, the same denunciation and bitterness were shown; all of which proves that toleration for opinions differing from our own requires a very high type of character.
Beecher's liberal views in theology were likewise bitterly antagonized. The truth was that he cared little for creeds, believing that to preach Christ as the Saviour of the world was the paramount and vital need of men. He believed the theology of the future "would be far more powerful than the old—a theology of hope, and of love, which shall cast out fear." He felt with Whittier in the "Eternal Goodness,"—