John
Brown carried one of “Beecher’s Bibles” at Harper’s Ferry, provided by a
man greatly responsible for the war that ended the republic. Upon
Beauregard’s demand for the surrender of Fort Sumter in April 1861
Beecher was to proclaim that “I utterly abhor peace . . . Give me war
redder than blood and fiercer than fire.” The abolitionists would offer
no practical and peaceful solution to slavery, only war to the knife and
a million dead.
Bernhard Thuersam, Chairman
North Carolina War Between the States Sesquicentennial Commission
"Unsurpassed Valor, Courage and Devotion to Liberty"
"The Official Website of the North Carolina WBTS Sesquicentennial"
Preaching the Everlasting Shell Game
“Henry
Ward Beecher, the most popular preacher in America, famous for his
spellbinding crusades against slavery, liquor, the secret vice and every
other evil, committed adultery with at least one woman of his
congregation, a woman who happened also to be a Sunday School teacher and the wife of an admiring protégé of Beecher’s.
The
offense itself is not so revealing as the spirit of callous
exploitation with which it was carried out and the deceit and hypocrisy
with which it was covered up. Beecher was warmly defended by the
establishment of his day. Most of the press declared his innocence and
his parishioners raised $100,000 for his legal expenses, while those who
brought the charges that we now know to be true were hounded.
The
powers that be, then as now, rush to the rescue when their most
valuable asset, their pretense of superior moral vision, is threatened.
Henry’s deceit in this episode was not merely a weakness displayed on
one painful occasion. It was a way of life to a man whose fame and
riches were built on a conveniently abstract, unscrupulously-aggressive,
politically irresponsible moralizing.
In
his memoirs, for example, Henry lied about so simple a thing as a
college debate. He recounted an occasion in which he had carried the
house against a proposal for the colonization of blacks outside the
United States. In fact, he had not participated in the debate in
question and the pro-colonization side had won. Characteristically, he
had falsely glorified his own role and distorted the historical record
to make his antislavery stand date to a much earlier and more dangerous
period than it actually did.
The
story of the Beecher’s is that of people who proclaimed themselves the
champions of freedom and morality and demonized those who disagreed,
while all the time keeping their hand in the till and their eye on the
main chance. The chief lesson we can learn is that there is something
in the American fabric that guarantees that now and then such people
will succeed outrageously.
Today’s
secular liberals will, of course, dismiss Henry Ward Beecher as simply a
typical hypocritical Protestant moralist. Yet he was one of them. He
was a leading liberal of his day, a crusader not for souls but for
political and social reform. He was an establishment figure, not a
small-town vigilante.
He spoke from a position of power and
respectability from which he safely and irresponsibly rode to the outer
limits every fad of his day.
Beecher
is not the father of the Moral Majority; he is the father of the smug
establishment figures who juggle morality and sybaritic life-styles in
an everlasting shell game.
That strange combination of Puritanism and democracy which wreaked so much havoc in the 19th
century, having done its work and reached the natural limits of its
expansion, began a retreat into narrower and less dangerous limits after
the debacle of Reconstruction. Something very similar is perhaps
happening now. If so, we can hope once again for leaders for whom
public life, as for Lee, is an arena for the exercise of private virtue
rather than, as for the Beechers, a vehicle for the social mobilization
of private greed and discontent.” (1982)
(The
Enemy Up Close, book review of The Beecher’s, Milton Rugoff, 1981;
Clyde N. Wilson, Defending Dixie, Essays in Southern History and
Culture, FAE Press, 2006, excerpt, pp. 209-210)
