A number of slaves were sold from Plymouth pulpit, purchased by public contributions and given their liberty, Mr. Beecher himself acting as auctioneer. The dramatic scenes on such occasions have been vividly recounted in Mrs. Beecher’s “Recollections,” and some of Mr. Beecher’s auction speeches have been preserved.
When Fort Sumter’s guns announced the beginning of war, Beecher sent back the echo from Plymouth pulpit in no uncertain sounds. His church organized and equipped a regiment which he was pleased to call “My own boys.” Mr. Beecher was in such constant demand as a public speaker that early in 1862 his voice failed and his health gave way, and he went to Europe and traveled in France and Switzerland. On invitation, after regaining his health, he went to England, where he delivered speeches—though England was in sympathy with the South—at Manchester, Glasgow, London and Edinburgh. The opposition which he met in these efforts would have completely overcome a man of less rugged physique, or discouraged one of less imperious will. But Beecher—confident in his own mind that he was right and his soul afire with patriotism—faced, spoke to, and quieted the most vicious and howling mobs into which he went often at personal peril. He describes his experiences as being “like driving a team of runaway horses and making love to a lady at the same time.”
After the war was over, Beecher preached as earnestly for forgiveness and reconciliation toward the South as he had preached to abolish slavery and retain the Southern States in the Union. His actions throughout had been purely patriotic and from no hatred of the people whose institution of slavery he fought. These principles made him unpopular for a time at the North and even in his own church. But he was ever the champion of the right, and did much toward the restoration of harmony between the sections. He delivered the oration at Charleston, South Carolina, in 1865, when the flag of the Union was again raised over Fort Sumter, and in 1879 made a tour of the Southern States, delivering lectures on popular topics, one of which was entitled “The Reign of the Common People.”
Henry Ward Beecher died March 8, 1887. He retired on the evening of March 3d apparently in usual health and fell into a sleep from which he never awoke, but merged into an unconscious condition in which he lingered until the morning of March 8th, when it is said as “a ray of sunlight flashed full and strong into the room and fell upon the face of the sufferer, who was surrounded by his family, calmly and without a struggle the regular breathing ceased and the great preacher was gone.” The eloquent tongue was silent forever.
The remains of Beecher were viewed by thousands, and many came who could not see the bier for the crowds that thronged the house and streets. It is doubtful if any private citizen’s funeral was ever so largely attended. One of his admirers in writing of the occasion said: “He loved the multitude, and the multitude came to his funeral; he loved the flowers, and ten thousand buds breathed their fragrance and clad his resting-place in beauty; he loved music, and the voice of the organ rose, and the anthems which had delighted him again rolled their harmonies to the rafters; he loved the sunshine, and it streamed through the windows and was a halo around him.”
Within the beauty of this halo we would leave the memory of this great man, hung as a portrait in a frame of gold from which his benign and cheerful face shall continue to look down upon succeeding generations. And as we read his encouraging “Lectures to Young Men;” his broad and profound sermons from “Plymouth Pulpit;” his inspiring “Patriotic Addresses;” his editorials in the “Christian Union;” his “Yale Lectures on Preaching;” his “Star Papers;” his “Evolution and Religion;” his novel “Norwood,” or his “Life of Jesus Christ: Earlier Scenes,” on which he was engaged when he died (which are his chief contributions to literature), we will often look up at the picture and exclaim, “Oh! that those lips might speak again!”
PUBLIC DISHONESTY.
CORRUPT public sentiment produces dishonesty. A public sentiment in which dishonesty is not disgraceful; in which bad men are respectable, are trusted, are honored, are exalted, is a curse to the young. The fever of speculation, the universal derangement of business, the growing laxness of morals is, to an alarming extent, introducing such a state of things.