T may be safely said that as a pulpit and platform orator, Beecher has had no superior. Nothing is studied or artificial about his delivery. Naturalness, frankness, cordiality, fearlessness, clearness, and depth of thought, expressed in the simplicity and beauty of diction, and enlivened by a rich vein of pungent humor, were marked characteristics of his speech.
Those familiar with the public career of this great orator and reformer can scarcely conceive of him at four years of age sitting in the Widow Kilbourn’s school occupied in saying his A B C’s twice a day, and putting in the intervals between recitations in hemming towels and aprons; yet such is the story told of Henry Ward Beecher’s first school-days.
His father, Dr. Lyman Beecher, was a Congregational minister, a profound thinker and scholar, stationed at Litchfield, Connecticut, where, on the then large salary of eight hundred dollars per year, he and his wife and ten children lived. Henry Ward was born on the 24th of June, 1813—the eighth child in the family.
Beecher tells many interesting stories of his childhood. Among others are his accounts of the Sabbath-day struggles with the Catechism. He declared it was a day of terror. Once on referring to it in his Plymouth pulpit he said: “I think that to force childhood to associate religion with such dry morsels is to violate the spirit not only of the New Testament, but of common sense as well. I know one thing, that if I am lax and latitudinarian, the Sunday Catechism is to blame for part of it. The dinners I have lost because I could not go through ‘sanctification,’ and ‘justification,’ and ‘adoption,’ and all such questions, lie heavily on my memory. One Sunday afternoon with my Aunt Esther did me more good than forty Sunday mornings in church with my father. He thundered over my head. She sweetly instructed me down in my heart. The promise that she would read Joseph’s history to me on Sunday was enough to draw a silver thread through the entire week.”
Dr. Beecher received a call to preach in Boston in 1825, and removed his family there. The ships, the sea, and the stories Beecher here saw and read of Lord Nelson and other naval heroes, and of Captain Cook’s marvelous voyages and discoveries in new countries, determined him to make a sailor of himself. He was at this time a shy boy with a thick tongue and very indistinct speech. His father, while secretly opposing his project to go to sea, apparently encouraged it by suggesting that he go to Amherst College, where he would learn mathematics and navigation, preparing himself to be a commander instead of a “common Jack Tar.” Henry Ward readily consented to this.
At Amherst he studied elocution, and became not only an easy reader and talker, but showed promise of distinction. This opened a new world to him. The spirit of oratory found lodgment in his soul and he forgot his old longing for the sea. Shortly after this, during a religious revival in the college, Beecher determined to be a Christian, and, as a biographer says of him, “Made a joyful consecration of himself to the Lord. It was no doleful giving up to live a life of gloom and sadness. He believed that a Christian life ought to be of all lives the most joyful, and if he could not be a joyful Christian, he should not be one at all.” These convictions followed him through life. Mrs. Stowe, his sister, wrote of him: “He was never found sitting in solemnized meditations in the depth of pine trees like the owl.”
Dr. Beecher was elected President of Lane Seminary, Cincinnati, Ohio, in 1832, and removed to that city, whither Henry Ward followed him after graduation at Amherst in 1836, and took his theological course under his father and Prof. Stowe (who afterwards married his sister, Harriet Beecher, the author of “Uncle Tom’s Cabin”). After completing his theological course he entered upon his first pastorate at Lawrenceburg, Indiana, at a salary of three hundred dollars per annum, where, he said: “I did all the work of both sexton and pastor; in fact, everything except come to hear myself preach—that much the congregation had to do.”
One of his first steps after securing this position was to go back to Massachusetts and marry Miss —— Bullard, his boyhood’s sweetheart, to whom he had been engaged for many years. The young couple started bravely in two rooms over a stable as their first home, and it is doubtful if any young prince and princess have been more truly happy than were these poor but true lovers in their humble nest in the stable loft. Mrs. Beecher’s “Recollections of Henry Ward Beecher,” written just before her death in 1897, furnishes a most delightful description of these early days of privation and poverty, chills and ague, but withal of such cheerfulness we almost envy them. Space forbids that we dwell upon Beecher’s private life, interesting and inspiring as it was. From Lawrenceburg he went to Indianapolis, where he preached for eight years with great success and growing fame, until August 24, 1847, when he was installed as pastor of Plymouth Church, Brooklyn, New York.
From this point Beecher becomes a national figure, and until the day of his death—a period of forty years—he was ever prominent in the public eye. There was a time when the escutcheon of his moral character was sullied by scandal,—but it was only scandal—which he met boldly, his church standing by him, and before the most scrutinizing investigation he remained steadfast, and in time the world exonerated him—while his accuser fled to Paris, where he spent his life in exile. Few people in the world now believe Beecher was guilty of the charges Theodore Tilton brought against him.
Beecher early espoused the cause of the abolition of slavery and of temperance. He considered both these doctrines a part of the gospel of Christ, and preached them boldly from his pulpit. Thus Plymouth Church rose grandly to the need of the age. Wendell Phillips, who in 1847 could find no audience room in New York or Brooklyn, was cordially invited to Beecher’s church, and “from the day that Phillips made his great anti-slavery speech from that pulpit until the Emancipation Proclamation—nearly twenty years later—the Plymouth preacher became a flaming advocate for liberty of speech and action on the question of the national evil. If there was anything on earth to which he was sensitive up to the day of his death, it was any form of denial to liberty either in politics, religion, or literature.” With pen and voice he ceased not to labor until the shackles fell from the black man’s hands.