By Obbie Tyler Todd
The author of The Beechers: America’s Most Influential Family ponders the impact of the Beecher clan on the Lincoln presidency.
Photo of the Beecher statue and Lincoln bas-relief in front of Plymouth Church in Brooklyn, New York. Wikimedia Commons.
When President Abraham Lincoln met Harriet Beecher Stowe in the White House in December of 1862, the tall, gangly Illinoisan began his introduction with the now-famous words, “So you are the little woman who made this big war.” Lincoln was of course referring to Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852), a monumental work of fiction that sold 300,000 copies in its first year and awakened the American conscience to the evils of slavery. Although the quote is probably apocryphal, one Lincoln historian admits, “The words sound like Lincoln.” A voracious reader, the president had his own copy of Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Raised by Calvinist fathers who had taken their respective families to the frontier, the uncouth Kentuckian and the sophisticated Yankee had more in common than they perhaps realized. Then again, like most Americans in the late nineteenth century, Lincoln was familiar with the entire Beecher clan.
For starters, during her visit to the White House, Harriet was accompanied by her younger half-sister, Isabella. Where there was one Beecher, there was usually another. Although Isabella would eventually become a notable woman’s rights advocate, she somewhat resented traveling with her more famous sister Harriet, “her highness.” Lincoln’s acquaintance with the Beecher family had in fact begun during his days as a young lawyer in Springfield, Illinois. Down the road in Jacksonville, Edward Beecher, the second oldest of the Beecher brothers, was president of Illinois College and one of the region’s foremost antislavery voices. A couple months after the murder of Edward’s close friend, newspaper editor Elijah Lovejoy, by an anti-abolitionist mob in nearby Alton, Lincoln made an oblique reference to the bloody event in his Lyceum Speech. That same year (1838), Edward’s Narrative of Riots at Alton: In Connection with the Death of Rev. Elijah P. Lovejoy was published, fueling the antislavery movement.
By the time of the Civil War, however, Lincoln was probably most familiar with Henry Ward Beecher, pastor of Plymouth Church in Brooklyn and arguably the “most famous man in America.” Lincoln kept copies of Henry’s published sermons and speeches, which became a kind of bellwether for the political climate in the North. Henry played a notable part in Lincoln’s election to the presidency. Lincoln’s pivotal speech at the Cooper Institute in New York City in 1859 had been made possible by Henry, who originally invited Lincoln to speak at Plymouth Church. Anticipating the most important address of his life in the nation’s most well-known pulpit, Lincoln had even spent one hundred dollars on a new suit at Woods & Henckle in Springfield. The event was so well publicized and Lincoln’s star so ascendant in the Republican Party after the Douglas debates that the Young Men’s Republican Union eventually took over sponsorship and moved the speech to Manhattan. The address propelled Lincoln to the Republican nomination in May of that year. Nevertheless, in the years to come, Mary Todd Lincoln would attend services at Plymouth Church, where she was a “great sensation.” Remarkably, one of her cousins in Kentucky, a physician, was named Lyman Beecher Todd, after the family patriarch.
In 1863, in the middle of the Civil War, Henry Ward Beecher was sent to England as an “envoy” of the United States to muster British support for the Northern states against the cotton-rich South. Beecher was a master of moral suasion. According to Oliver Wendell Holmes, the trip was “a more remarkable embassy than any envoy who has represented us in Europe since Franklin pleaded the cause of the young Republic at the Court of Versailles.” While Holmes might have embellished a bit, Beecher became a valuable overseas cheerleader for the American president, calling him “that most true, honest, just, and conscientious magistrate, Mr. Lincoln.” At the mention of Lincoln, reported Holmes, “the audience cheered as long and loud as if they had descended from the ancient Ephesians.” Henry, who had been skeptical of Lincoln at the beginning of the war, became a key supporter. Even younger Thomas Beecher, a pastor upstate in Elmira who despised abolitionists, eventually advocated for “Honest Ole’ Abe.”
After the Union victory, President Lincoln selected Henry to deliver the address at Fort Sumter as the American flag was again raised at the very place the war began. Just as one Beecher had supposedly launched the war, another would bring it to a close. It was the first address in the South by a Northerner since the cannons rang out at the start of the war, signifying Beecher’s fame and influence as an orator. In fact, Lincoln is purported to have said, “We had better send Beecher down to deliver the address on the occasion of the raising of the flag because if it had not been for Beecher there would have been no flag to raise.” Tragically, however, the president was shot by John Wilkes Booth only hours after Beecher’s speech—on Good Friday. Poetically, one of the surgeons who operated on Lincoln in his final moments was Lyman Beecher Todd. In his oration at Sumter, Henry had compared the Civil War to Israel’s wandering in the wilderness for forty years after their exodus from Egypt. By the time he returned to Brooklyn, Henry saw the tragic irony of the comparison. In the Bible, Moses leads his people to the Promised Land but does not enter himself. A week after the assassination, Beecher delivered one of the most riveting eulogies for the president in the country. Preaching from Deuteronomy 34, Henry compared the fallen president to Moses, who would lead others to freedom but not live to see a free land.
From the beginning of his political career to the end, Abraham Lincoln encountered one Beecher after another. More than most, Lincoln understood the incalculable influence they exerted upon the adolescent nation. Harriet Beecher Stowe’s frequent quotations from Lincoln’s Second Inaugural Address, for example, helped make it one of the most famous speeches in American history. It’s fair to say that without the Beechers, Lincoln’s presidency—and the nation itself—would have looked very different.
Obbie Tyler Todd is pastor of Third Baptist Church in Marion, Illinois, and adjunct professor of church history at New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary. He is the author of Let Men Be Free: Baptist Politics in the Early United States, 1776–1835.
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The Reverend Lyman Beecher was once called “the father of more brains than any other man in America.” Among his eleven living children were a celebrity novelist, a college president, the most well-known preacher in America, a suffragist, a radical abolitionist, a pioneer in women’s education, and the founder of home economics. Rejecting many of their father’s Puritan beliefs, the deeply religious Beechers nevertheless embraced his quest to exert moral influence. They disagreed over issues of slavery, women’s rights, and religion and found themselves at the center of race riots, denominational splits, college protests, a civil war, and one of the most public sex scandals in American history. They were nonetheless unified in their “Beecherism”—a phrase used to describe their sense of self-importance in reforming the nation.
Obbie Tyler Todd’s masterful work is the first biography of the Beechers in more than forty years and the first chronological portrait of one of the most influential families in nineteenth-century America.