Sentimental Readers: The Rise, Fall, and Revival of a Disparaged Rhetoric

4. Henry Ward Beecher and the Fall of the Sentimental Orator

xx [83] 4 Henry Ward Beecher and the Fall of the Sentimental Orator Christie is a transitional figure on the way toward Henry Ward Beecher, whom Sinclair Lewis called “a combination of St. Augustine, Barnum, and John Barrymore” (qtd. in Hibben viii).1 From 1847 until 1887, the year of his death, Henry Ward Beecher was the wildly popular minister of Plymouth Church in Brooklyn (he was less popular after 1874), famous for his support of both abolition and the “woman question.”2 Beecher was a man who spoke from the heart and not from the head. He made his audiences cry. As his contemptuous biographer Paxton Hibben wrote, “[W]hen he raised his voice in prayer, the tears streaming down his full cheeks, he could hear the little staccato sobs of women and the harsher sobs of men from every corner of the vast house” (189). Beecher’s popularity arose out of the intensity of his feeling—or, as his detractors would have it, out of the semblance of it. E. L. Godkin, editor of the Nation during Beecher’s ascendancy and also his cousin-in-law, went from believing Beecher to be “the most remarkable preacher of his time, the most popular, the most influential” (qtd. in C. Clark 2) to condemning him during his trial, because “[w]hat he has most encouraged . . . is vague aspiration and lachrymose sensibility” (Godkin, “Chromo-Civilization” 89–90). chapter four [84] This charge sounds almost identical to later condemnatory evaluations of the “scribbling women.”3 This is no coincidence,because Henry Ward Beecher is himself a sentimental author and orator, becoming in real life what his sister Harriet could only aspire to be.4 Godkin was not the only one to revise his opinion of Henry Ward Beecher. After Beecher was accused of committing adultery with one of his parishioners, Libby Tilton, the wife of a close friend, the whole nation turned its horrified, titillated gaze on him. His trial in 1875 ended in a hung jury,with nine of the jurors supporting Beecher.Many, including Stowe, would not even entertain the thought that Beecher might have been drastically different from the way he appeared.“I cannot hear the subject discussed as a possibility open for inquiry without such an intense uprising of indignation & scorn & anger as very few have ever seen in me in these late years,”Stowe wrote (qtd.in Hedrick, Harriet Beecher Stowe 378; emphasis in the original). Not everyone felt the same.The Louisville Courier Journal called the Reverend Beecher “a dunghill covered with flowers”(qtd. in Korobkin 59). Many reveled in the thought that this paragon might have been a sinner,that Beecher’s constant references to his own virtue provided a cover for his self-serving activities.Some found the uncovering of what seemed like such massive hypocrisy delicious. We should not see Beecher as a self-righteous prig exposed. His most recent biographer,Debby Applegate,makes a persuasive case that Beecher was guilty of committing adultery (and fathering LibbyTilton’s youngest child),even though it seems impossible to find out what exactly transpired between them amid the swirl of conflicting testimony.5 The story should not end there.More interesting than whether or how many times Beecher committed adultery (which I would not deny is quite interesting ) is the way the trial produced contradictory responses.It made the public vacillate, certain one minute that he was as guilty as sin, the next that he was wrongfully accused.Laura Korobkin,who has written extensively on the trial, calls it “an increasingly undecidable interrogation of hypocrisy” (61).The trial cast doubt not just on the integrity of a revered person but on the populace’s “own methods of judgment” (Korobkin 61).The trial puts sentimental methods of judgment in doubt: ways of judging the trustworthiness of other people that novels like UncleTom’s Cabin both cultivated and reinforced.The public found that [85] Henry Ward Beecher and the Sentimental Orator what had seemed like enough evidence to judge Beecher—his ability to make them cry,the vivid picture of goodness he presented—was not sufficient.The trial of Henry Ward Beecher reproduces in miniature all the doubts that sentimental rhetoric as a method of persuasion would inspire in a large number of its future audience. The contradictory versions of Henry Ward Beecher that the trial created foretell the divergent characterizations that nineteenth-century sentimental novels have produced...