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Reviews in American History 29.1 (2001) 78-84



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Tangled Webs (and Stories) of Love

Bruce Dorsey


Richard Wightman Fox. Trials of Intimacy: Love and Loss in the Beecher-Tilton Scandal. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999. xii + 419 pp. Illustrations, appendixes, notes, bibliography, and index. $30.00.
"I would like to tell my whole sad story truthfully." Elizabeth Tilton, 1875.

Since the earliest years of the nation, Americans have held a voyeuristic fascination with the peccadillos and foibles (whether real or imagined) of their clergymen. At one time or another, scandals have erupted over the reputed "free love" practices of Matthias the Prophet and John Humphrey Noyes, the plural marriages of Joseph Smith and Brigham Young, the pederasty accusations that ended Horatio Alger's brief ministry, the extra-marital children born to Elijah Muhammad, and the affairs of televangelists Jim Bakker and Jimmy Swaggert, to name only some of the more famous examples. If real-life scandals were not enough, Americans could read the lurid imaginings of lascivious priests in the Awful Disclosures of Maria Monk, and tales of lust and ruin in Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter, Harold Frederic's The Damnation of Theron Ware, and Sinclair Lewis's Elmer Gantry.

Yet no clerical scandal before or since can match the drama and attention generated by the trial of Henry Ward Beecher. The nation's most famous and popular preacher stood accused of committing adultery with Elizabeth Tilton, wife of his friend and protégé Theodore Tilton. Between 1872, when rumors first circulated in Brooklyn and Victoria Woodhull publicly exposed Beecher's illicit affair, and July 1875, when the civil trial ended in a deadlocked jury, newspapers throughout the country feasted on the tales of moral hypocrisy, marital love gone awry, and mutual accusations of "free love" and infidelities among the nation's elite liberal Protestant reformers. The Chicago Tribune once devoted thirty-two full columns of the paper to reprinting the personal correspondence between Elizabeth and Theodore Tilton, while the New York Times ran more than one hundred stories and nearly forty editorials about the scandal during the six months leading up to the trial. The trial itself lasted another six months, including 112 days in the courtroom, producing a [End Page 78] transcript that exceeded a million words. Henry Ward Beecher and Theodore Tilton each spent over two weeks on the witness stand. In the end, the trial ended without a verdict, and the press and populace alike were left to determine for themselves whose side of the controversy they believed.

Richard Wightman Fox turns our attention again to the scandal that symbolized for most of the twentieth century the hypocrisy of a Victorian bourgeois culture. There are many reasons for historians to remain fascinated with this episode. It spills over with topics like streams criss-crossing on their way to the sea: the displacement of Calvinism by a new gospel of sentimental love; the height of bourgeois pretensions to moral purity exposed; leading figures in the woman's rights movement (Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony) as principals in the lives and stories of the Tiltons and Beecher; spiritualist Victoria Woodhull's role in exposing the affair and using it to confirm her free-love philosophy, while Beecher's friends induced Anthony Comstock to have her arrested on obscenity charges; and finally, the meanings of love, marriage, and infidelity in an age that glorified and spiritualized matrimony.

This charmingly inventive book will not close the case or solve the mysteries behind the Beecher-Tilton scandal. From the beginning, Fox admits that he has no new insights to offer his readers into the "whodunit" mystery surrounding the scandal, confessing that he discovered no new evidence, no "smoking-gun letter or diary" that would confirm beyond question that Beecher was guilty or innocent of the adultery accusation (p. 4). Instead, Fox sets his gaze upon the stories told and retold by the persons involved in the scandal over the course of several decades in which their lives intersected and collided. It is these tales--presented in...

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