Trials of Intimacy: Love and Loss in the Beecher-Tilton Scandal (review)

Trials of Intimacy: Love and Loss in the Beecher-Tilton Scandal. By Richard Wightman Fox. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999. Pp. 376. $30.00 (cloth).

In trying to understand the 1870s, it has been hard to get out from under the 1920s, a time when journalists and writers took on many of the earlier period's most colorful figures and scandals as part of the project of freeing themselves from the "Puritan" shackles of America's past. There seems to have been a natural affinity between the two eras. Both experienced political corruption; both focused on cultural and moral solutions. In the modernist mood, Paxton Hibben researched and wrote Henry Ward Beecher: An American Portrait (New York: George H. Doran, 1927), a fat biography of one of the late-nineteenth-century's most famous personalities. It was then still possible to interview Beecher's younger contemporaries and the family members of those who had played important roles in his life, and they provided testimony on the scandal that shaped the pastor's final years. Currently the 1870s are being replayed--perhaps because of our own political and moral quandaries--and there is renewed interest in some of their central characters and conflicts.

The book under review is a prime example of what an imaginative and astute historian can do to breathe new life into old stories. In the 1870s, the American newspaper-reading public, especially that in New York City, was riveted by a sexual scandal that seemed at the time to threaten all Christendom. Henry Ward Beecher, minister of Plymouth Church in Brooklyn and a national celebrity, was accused of adultery with Elizabeth Tilton, first by the free lover and women's rights reformer Victoria Woodhull and then by the writer and reformer Theodore Tilton, Elizabeth's husband. A spellbinding orator, the minister had the largest congregation in the country at the time--on Sunday "Beecher boats" plying the waters between Manhattan and Brooklyn brought New Yorkers by the hundreds to fill church seats. Gossip about Beecher's extramarital affairs had surfaced before, perhaps merely an accompaniment to his charismatic appeal. This time the rumor had a special resonance. Elizabeth Tilton had grown up in Beecher's church, and Beecher officiated when she spoke her marriage vows to Theodore Tilton. The latter was Beecher's protégé and champion, his shadow and amanuensis. Beecher often visited in the Tilton home, and he had read to Elizabeth drafts of his novel Norwood. To charge that Beecher and Elizabeth Tilton had engaged in sexual relations was to threaten the Beecher business enterprise of church, periodicals, and books, all of which hinged on his moral reputation. In leveling that charge, Theodore Tilton published the letters that he and his wife had written to each other throughout their marriage, making their intimate life public knowledge.

In constructing this new study, the author has done a remarkable job. He brings to the task intellectual and literary gifts of a high order. At one level, Fox is engaged less in a telling of the story than in an inquiry into the primary sources generated by the scandal. As he works through the texts, he tells how each came to be set down. He is the intellectual historian as archaeologist, excavating source material, peeling back from the top layer to the next substratum of sources. To do this, he reverses the chronology. He tells the story backward, at least partially so. He sets a series of critical benchmarks and, beginning with the last accounts at the turn of the twentieth century, he works himself back to early stories of the 1860s and ultimately to the letters that told them. Within each section, however, the story moves forward in chronological fashion.

This narrative strategy is both the strength and the weakness of the book. As the author moves successively through the primary...