In the New York World of May 22, 1871, there appeared this letter to the editor:
Mrs. Woodhull was a well-known spiritualist, whose younger sister, Tennessee (her first name was commonly spelled Tennie C.) Claflin, called herself a “magnetic healer.” The two had become famous in New York as the financial advisers of Commodore Vanderbilt, who claimed that he got his market tips from them, and attributed a killing he made in railway securities to a prediction of a stock rise that Mrs. Woodhull had supplied while in a trance. The morning Mrs. Woodhull’s letter was printed, she summoned Theodore Tilton, a prominent liberal editor, author, and poet, to her office, at 44 Broad Street, where she told him, to his consternation, that one of the teachers of eminence she had referred to was Henry Ward Beecher, the famous Congregationalist preacher who was pastor of Plymouth Church, in Brooklyn Heights, and the other was Tilton himself. The woman was Mrs. Tilton. Tilton then listened to an exaggerated account of his domestic difficulties, which, even without exaggeration, were certainly acute. He was in no position to deny Mrs. Woodhull’s assertions, because in essence they were true; almost a year previously, his wife had confessed to him that she had committed adultery with Beecher, whom she had known since she was in her early teens and who had been Tilton’s closest friend. The aftermath of the revelation had been stormy, but as the months passed, the three principals had more or less drifted into an agreement to keep the affair quiet, in order to preserve Beecher’s good name, save Tilton’s pride, and spare Mrs. Tilton from moral censure. True, a few other people knew about the adultery—among them Martha Bradshaw, a deaconess of Plymouth Church and an old friend of Tilton’s, and Susan B. Anthony, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and Laura Curtis Bullard, three vigorous feminists who were friends of both the Tiltons—but they were all presumably discreet. And now here was the volcanic Mrs. Woodhull full of the news and bursting to let it out. It was not hard to trace her connection with the unhappy business. Elizabeth Cady Stanton had become annoyed with Beecher for wavering in his support of women’s rights and had circulated news of the preacher’s improprieties among the delegates to a convention of the National Woman’s Suffrage Association, in Washington. Although Mrs. Woodhull was not a member of the association, she had been in Washington at the time, filing a woman’s suffrage memorandum of her own with Congress; out of pure female curiosity, the members of the association had adjourned to hear her read it to a House committee. Overnight, she became the darling of the suffragists. Isabella Beecher Hooker, Beecher’s half sister and an officer of the association, declared that “that little woman has bridged with her prostrate body an awful gulf over which womanhood will walk to her freedom.” Miss Anthony said, “If it takes youth, beauty, and money to capture Congress, Victoria is the woman we are after,” and Mrs. Stanton said, “Her face, manners, and conversation all indicate the triumph of the moral, intellectual, and spiritual. If this present woman must be crucified, let men drive the spikes.”
As it happened, there were certain spikes that could be driven into Mrs. Woodhull’s past. Her parents were itinerant fortune-tellers, mediums, and peddlers of quack medicine in the Middle West. She and her sister had been charged with operating houses of assignation and with blackmail (and Tennie C. even with manslaughter), but they were never convicted. At fourteen, Victoria had married Dr. Canning Woodhull, a physician, but, as the Dictionary of American Biography notes, “she did not cease her career as a charlatan.” She later took as her common-law—or, as she put it, “brevet”—husband Colonel John H. Blood, a powerfully constructed Civil War veteran with Dundreary whiskers, who proved a willing foil for her as she went around the country advocating free love. Mounting the lecture platform with Colonel Blood, Mrs. Woodhull would point to him and shout, “There stands my lover, but when I cease to love him, I shall leave him.” Then she would add, “Yet I hope that time will never come,” and the Colonel would manage a sickly, hirsute grin.
The two sisters were not beautiful, actually, but they had the dash and verve that a later generation came to call sex appeal. Their compact, full-bosomed figures were topped off by mannish jackets and ties, and their skirts stopped daringly at their shoe tops. They wore their hair short and curly, under Alpine hats. Mrs. Woodhull expressed her views not only on the lecture platform but in Woodhull & Claflin’s Weekly, a sixteen-page paper that carried the slogan “Progress! Free Thought! Untrammeled Lives!” “Wherever I find a social carbuncle, I shall plunge my surgical knife of reform into it, up to the hilt! ” Mrs. Woodhull wrote in it. “I have been smeared all over with the most opprobrious epithets . . . am stigmatized as a bawd and a blackmailer. Now until you are ready . . . to suffer what I have suffered . . . do not dare to impugn my motives.” In defending her, Mrs. Stanton said, “We have had women enough sacrificed to this sentimental, hypocritical prating about purity. This is one of man’s most effective engines for our division and subjugation.”
No man could have become a more effective engine for the elevation of Mrs. Woodhull than Tilton, once he had heard what she knew about the scandal in his home. He immediately wrote of her in the Golden Age, a literary magazine of which he was editor, “If the woman’s movement has a Joan of Arc, it is this gentle but fiery genius.” He also told Beecher about the threat to their policy of silence that Mrs. Woodhull represented, and the minister agreed that she must be mollified. Beecher’s attempts at mollification were, however, somewhat less successful than Tilton’s. After a number of what Mrs. Woodhull called “friendly discussions” with the minister, she asked him to introduce her at a lecture she was to give at Steinway Hall, in Manhattan. Although Tilton urged Beecher to do it, he refused. Mrs. Woodhull claimed that the minister “got up on the sofa on his knees beside me, and taking my face between his hands, while the tears streamed down his cheeks, he begged me to let him off.” She was so incensed by his refusal that only Tilton’s last-minute offer to introduce her himself kept her from making the scandal the subject of her lecture.
Another catalyst that helped bring on Mrs. Woodhull’s explosion was the attitude of some of Beecher’s multitudinous relatives. His family—he had three brothers, three sisters, two half brothers, and one half sister living—differed violently and publicly among themselves over most of the controversial matters of the time. He and his half sister, Isabella Beecher Hooker, were always abreast of social change, but two of his full sisters—Catherine Beecher and Harriet Beecher Stowe—were more wary. In their eyes, Mrs. Woodhull was a “she-devil.” Mrs. Stowe wrote a broadside against her that appeared in the press, as did a serialized novel of hers that contained a satiric portrait of Mrs. Woodhull. Mrs. Woodhull thereupon wrote Beecher a letter that read, in part:
Beecher understood only too well.
Being also annoyed at several members of the suffrage movement who had persisted in snubbing her, Mrs. Woodhull distributed a series of unflattering vignettes she called “Tit for Tat,” which raked over their private lives. Tilton had been seeing Mrs. Woodhull frequently—although his campaign of mollification included writing her biography, there is considerable doubt that all his visits were purely literary and placatory—but he was an old friend of some of the women she was excoriating, and her treatment of them enraged him. He quarrelled violently with Mrs. Woodhull, and her docility was ended. In the fall of 1872, she broke the Beecher-Tilton scandal wide open.
The scandal was of such monumental proportions that it did not break easily. Mrs. Woodhull delivered her first blow at a spiritualists’ convention in Boston, at which she represented herself as “mere nuncio to the world of the facts which have happened,” and presented a lurid version of the case. She spoke, as usual, in a trance, and later said, “They tell me that I used some naughty words upon that occasion. All I know is that if I swore, I did not swear profanely. Some said, with tears streaming from their eyes, that I swore divinely.” Whichever way she swore, Boston suppressed the story. The New York editors suppressed it, too—if it ever reached their desks. But Mrs. Woodhull was not to be put off, and in her Woodhull & Claflin’s Weekly of November 2, 1872, she printed what she said was a record of an interview she had given a Boston reporter. In it, after embellishing the facts of the case according to her own fancy, Mrs. Woodhull declared:
To Beecher, Mrs. Woodhull’s gap was an abyss.
As for the Tiltons, Mrs. Woodhull dealt more lightly with them by not hugging them quite so closely to her bosom. She simply accused Mrs. Tilton of having “the sentiment of the real slaveholder,” because she had been upset by the fact that her “reverend paramour” had been unfaithful to her with other mistresses. Tilton was dismissed as a child for having exhibited “maudlin sentiment and mock heroics and ‘dreadful suzz.’ ” Mrs. Woodhull said that she had pointed out to him that “he was not exactly a vestal virgin himself,” and had told him that he had been “humbugged all his life” by “Sunday-school morality and pulpit phariseeism.”
It was her intention, Mrs. Woodhull said in her weekly, that her article should “burst like a bombshell into the ranks of the moralistic social camp.” It did. More than a hundred thousand copies of the Weekly were printed and sold, and even then the demand so far exceeded the supply that second-hand copies went for as much as forty dollars. The deacons of Beecher’s Plymouth Church were dismayed, as well they might have been. Plymouth Church was the most fashionable church in Brooklyn, and its parishioners included many of that community’s most distinguished and influential citizens, among them Henry C. Bowen, the publisher of the Independent, which was the foremost “family” religious weekly in the country at the time, and of the daily Brooklyn Union. In a sense, Bowen was the creator of Plymouth Church; he had contributed a great deal of money toward its construction, and he had persuaded Beecher to come to it from a pastorate in Indianapolis. But while it could be said that Beecher owed all his eminence to Bowen, this debt had not prevented him from committing adultery with Bowen’s wife. Bowen was a curious sort of man. He put up a forbidding façade of piety, austerity, and rigorous Calvinism, but behind it was a scheming mind. He knew about Beecher’s transgressions with his wife—she had confessed to him before she died, in 1863—but because Beecher was a highly valuable property, and because Plymouth Church gave Bowen a religious cachet that was priceless to him, he kept quiet. So it is not surprising that he did nothing when, on the complaint of Anthony Comstock, the professional suppressor of vice, Mrs. Woodhull and her sister were arrested on a charge of sending obscene literature through the mails, and locked up in the Ludlow Street jail. They were held there for six months. The press of the nation generally protested the imprisonment and supported the sisters’ right of free speech. Still, no paper reprinted the Weekly’s story. The indictments against the two sisters were finally dismissed, whereupon Mrs. Woodhull at once set out on a lecture tour and drew tremendous crowds with a talk on “The Naked Truth.” “It’s a disgusting mess, all of it,” said the Hartford Times, speaking of the Beecher-Tilton revelations. “It shows the practical fruits of ‘free-love-ism.’ ”
The crowds at Plymouth Church were even greater now that the pastor was involved in a scandal. But while Beecher was still the benevolent, white-maned incarnation of righteousness on the rostrum, he was as imprudent as ever in his private life. He even went so far as to write Mrs. Tilton a series of clandestine letters, which eventually proved extremely embarrassing to him. In one of them he said,
He seemed unable to realize what an unhappy fix he was in. The realization, however, was soon to be forced on him. Mrs. Woodhull challenged him to sue for libel, and he dared not take her up. Then his obstreperous half sister Mrs. Hooker wrote urging him to tell the truth and support “free love” wholeheartedly and offering to come down and take charge of this phase of his teachings—because “it seems to me God has been preparing me for this work, and you also, for years and years.” By now, he was almost beside himself. He got his favorite sister, Harriet Beecher Stowe, to sit in a front pew every Sunday in order to head off their “mad” half sister if she should suddenly appear. Beecher’s inner torment was further expressed in a letter he wrote to Frank Moulton, a prosperous young importer who was a friend of Tilton’s but was doing his best, as an adviser to both men, to keep the scandal quiet for the good of the community. In the letter, Beecher offered to resign his pastorate “if my destruction would place him [Tilton] all right,” and added that “to live on the sharp and ragged edge of anxiety, remorse, fear, despair, and yet to put on all the appearance of serenity and happiness, cannot be endured much longer.”
Tilton’s nerves were as frayed as Beecher’s. He did not in the least want Beecher to resign on some irrelevant pretext, for that would relieve him of all accountability in the disheartening mess. What Tilton did want was to have the record set straight for the sake of his and his family’s reputation. In his dilemma, he went to see the Reverend Richard Storrs, a Congregationalist minister who, after Beecher, was the most prominent pastor in Brooklyn. He took with him a statement signed by Mrs. Tilton, which he and she had painfully worked out together. It set forth that “in July, 1870, prompted by my duty, I informed my husband that H. W. Beecher, my friend and pastor, had solicited me to be a wife to him, together with all that this implied.” Dr. Storrs, who had been a close friend of Beecher’s for many years, was shocked, and for the first time a disinterested church leader began to have real suspicions about the pastor of Plymouth Church. When Tilton told Beecher what he had done, Beecher cried, “Oh, Theodore, of all men in the world, I wish you had kept clear of Dr. Storrs!” Tilton followed up this indiscretion by writing an open letter, printed in the Brooklyn Eagle, to a friend who had asked him why he did not reply to Mrs. Woodhull’s charges:
In June, 1873, not long after Tilton’s letter of self-justification, the Eagle published another open letter—this one from Beecher, who wrote, as his friends had been begging him to do, that “the stories and rumors which have for some time past been circulated about me are grossly untrue, and I stamp them in general and in particular as utterly false.” Locally, this was quite sympathetically received; the Eagle praised its author as “one of the few who shed on Brooklyn a lustre that advances her fame throughout the world.” But elsewhere growing doubts were expressed about the pastor of Plymouth Church. The Chicago Times commented that “for years the sword of Damocles has been suspended above his platform,” and added, “Come to the front and center, Henry Ward Beecher! You are but human. . . . Let us have the truth though the heavens fall!”
That same month, some members of Plymouth Church, led by William West, a former deacon who felt that the only way “to meet the scandal was to strike it down and utterly destroy it,” started a movement to expel Tilton from the congregation for his slanders against Beecher. Beecher did his best to hold them off. It was “not a good time to bring this matter before the church,” he warned, but West, whom some people called “a pious Paul Pry,” was insistent. It was apparent that West was trying to smoke Beecher out, for he had talked to Martha Bradshaw. There was no doubt about Beecher’s guilt in Mrs. Bradshaw’s mind, and West knew it. In October, a meeting was held at Plymouth Church to hear the matter out. Just before action was taken on a motion to read Tilton out of the church, Tilton stood up and addressed the assembly. “If the minister of this church has anything whereof to accuse me, let him now speak and I shall answer, as God is my judge,” he said. Beecher rose to his feet amid a vast silence. He accused Tilton of nothing, he said, adding, “Whatever differences have been between us have been amicably adjusted.” A few moments later, Tilton was formally expelled from the church. There was great applause, but it is doubtful that it was of much comfort to the preacher. He could hardly have imagined that the end of his troubles was in sight.
It wasn’t. At the instigation of Dr. Storrs, an Advisory Council of the Congregational Churches of the United States was convened to determine whether Plymouth Church had acted contrary to church law in dropping Tilton. Beecher refused to appear before it; instead, he busied himself with the church’s annual pew sale—Beecher’s Auction, it was called. A total of $59,430 was raised, $129 more than in the previous year’s sale—a fact that led the New York Commercial Advertiser to conclude that “despite the Beecher-Tilton imbroglio . . . Mr. Beecher has advanced in the estimation of his congregation a little more than one-quarter of one per cent.” The Council eventually ruled, in effect, that Plymouth Church was wrong in expelling Tilton but that it didn’t matter, and Beecher was elated. He hurried off to the White Mountains, where he went every year for his hay fever, and, on the lawn of Twin Mountain House, in Coos County, New Hampshire, played croquet with high zest. A correspondent for the World followed him there and wrote, “To see him rushing from wicket to post, dropping on his knees to sight the shots, rejoicing over the discomfiture of his adversaries, and driving the ball along to victory, was a revelation of what can be done when man and mallet come together.” The New York Herald called the Council “an attempt to take revenge on a brother minister because the Almighty made him a genius,” and advised the Council members, “Go home, gentlemen, and let your betters alone. Quarrel with each other, if you must, but do not wear your knuckles to the bone in vainly hitting a giant. Gentlemen, find your gingham umbrellas and go home.”
The whole matter might have died there had not Beecher’s friends taken up his cause. Thomas Shearman, a prominent lawyer who was the clerk of Plymouth Church, stirred things up all over again by issuing a statement to the press that called Tilton “out of his mind” and accused Mrs. Tilton of telling tales about her pastor while in the grip of “mediumistic fits” Worse, Dr. Leonard Bacon, an even more prominent theologian who had been the moderator of the Council, told his class at the Yale Divinity School that Plymouth Church had “thrown away the opportunity of vindicating its pastor” and that “Mr. Beecher would have done better to have let vengeance come on the heads of his slanderers.” This was too much for Tilton. On June 21, 1874, he wrote a long public reply to Dr. Bacon, in which he set forth all the facts of the case, along with an apology Beecher had dictated to Moulton three and a half years before, which contained the words “I humble myself before him [Tilton] as I do before my God.”
Beecher could no longer pretend to ignore the whole controversy. After four years of evasion, he reluctantly appointed an investigating committee, consisting of six members of his congregation, all of them personal friends of his, to look into what he termed “the rumors, insinuations, or charges made respecting my conduct.” The committee quickly summoned Mrs. Tilton, who had been living with her husband in an alliance that had vacillated between the affectionate and the defiant ever since she confessed her adultery to him. She later said that she had been coached on how to testify before the investigating committee and that arrangements had been made for her to stay with friends after she had done so, on the assumption that she could never again return to Tilton. At the time of this reminiscence, she also described her actions on the morning she was to appear before the committee. “I rose quietly,” she recalled, “and, having dressed, roused him [Tilton] only to say, ‘Theodore, I will never take another step by your side. The end has indeed come!’ ” And indeed it had. The Tiltons’ marriage was finished.
When Mrs. Tilton, a small, intense woman of forty, faced the committee, she immediately declared that she had never been guilty of adultery with Beecher “in thought or deed, nor has he ever offered me an indecorous or improper proposal.” She explained that her husband was madly jealous and “lived to crush out Mr. Beecher,” that he had accused her of having “a sensual influence” over men, and that his sway over her was so great that “a mesmeric condition [was] brought to bear upon me,” which resulted In her writing, at his command, a statement asserting that Beecher had made advances to her. “I was pretty nearly out of my mind, and my attitude was that I shan’t be here very long anyway, and if you want me to do this, I will do it,” she said, referring to a written confession she had initialled on December 29, 1870. Continuing her testimony, Mrs. Tilton said, “The implication that the harmony of the home was unbroken till Mr. Beecher entered it as a frequent guest and friend is a lamentable satire upon the household where he [Tilton] himself, years before, laid the cornerstone of free love, and desecrated its altars . . . . I often said, ‘Theodore, if you had given to me what you give to others, I daresay I should find in you what I find in Mr. Beecher. . . .’ There was always a damper between me and Theodore, but there never was between me and Mr. Beecher; with Mr. Beecher I had a sort of consciousness of being more. . . . I felt myself another woman; I felt that he respected me.” A committee member interrupted to ask, “Do you mean to say that Theodore put down self-respect in you while Mr. Beecher lifted it up?” Mrs. Tilton replied, “Yes; I never felt a bit of embarrassment with Mr. Beecher.”
When Tilton was called by the committee, he at once charged Beecher wIth “criminal seduction” and “a crime of uncommon wrongfulness and perfidy.” He gave a detailed account of how his wife had confessed to him, how she had written a letter to Beecher telling him of everything she had confessed to, how she had written a retraction of the letter at Beecher’s dictation, and how she had retracted the retraction. The pastor’s secret courtship of Mrs. Tilton went back a long time, Tilton said. He spoke of having years before seen Beecher “very slyly” touch “her ankles and lower limbs” as they were looking at some engravings on the library floor. Mrs. Tilton, her husband said, “could only have been swerved from the path of rectitude by artful and powerful persuasions, clothed in the phrases of religion. If Mr. Beecher had held the same religious views that I hold . . . he never could have made any approach to her. I do not believe in point of actual moral goodness, barring some drawbacks, that there is in this company so white a soul as Elizabeth Tilton.” But, he went on, “for such a large moral nature, there is a lack of a certain balance and equipoise.” The committee tried hard to discredit Tilton’s testimony by questioning him about his attentions to other women, but in spite of what his wife had said, this line of inquiry didn’t get very far. Among the many friends Tilton had brought to his home on Livingston Street, in Brooklyn Heights, were prominent feminists, including Mrs. Stanton and Miss Anthony; attempts to portray him as unduly familiar with either of these ladies failed. He admitted that he had sometimes played chess with Mrs. Stanton late in the evening, but when he was asked if he had ever appeared in the ladies’ rooms before they were dressed, he replied, “No, I didn’t; I cannot imagine any reason why anybody should.”
The third major figure in the case to appear before the committee was Frank Moulton, who had preserved a large file of correspondence between the principals. Six of Beecher’s letters had been made public, but Moulton contended that he was holding the rest of the documents “in trust” for the protection of both Beecher and Tilton, and told the committee that he believed it best for them to remain secret.
On the day that Tilton testified before the committee, Beecher, in the country, took up Mrs. Tilton’s defense in a statement he sent to the New York papers.
The committee’s hearings were nearly over when Beecher came in from the country to appear before it. Completely reversing the line he had taken in his defense of Mrs. Tilton in the newspapers, he spoke of her “excessive affection for me,” which, he said, had been unsought, and referred in a hurt voice to her secret confession of adultery to her husband as “a very needless treachery to her friend and pastor.” (Upon hearing of this, Mrs. Stanton exclaimed, “With what withering cruelty his words must have fallen on her heart!”) Mrs. Tilton, he said, “seemed to me an affectionate mother, a devoted wife . . . childish in appearance, childlike in nature,” who “turned to me with artless familiarity and with entire confidence. . . . At no interview which ever took place . . . did anything occur which might not have occurred with perfect propriety between a brother and a sister, between a father and a child.” Admitting that “by blind heedlessness and friendship” he had perhaps “beguiled her heart,” Beecher explained the extravagance of the repentance expressed in letters he had written by saying that her extramarital devotion for him imperilled “the great interests which were entirely dependent on me, the church which I had built up . . . my own immediate family . . . my sisters, the name which I had hoped might live after me and be in some slight degree a source of strength and encouragement to those who should succeed me, and above all the cause for which I had devoted my life. . . . It seemed to me that my life work was to end abruptly . . . and in disaster.”
As for Tilton, the preacher said, “I can see now [that he] is, and has been from the beginning of the difficulty, a selfish and a reckless schemer, pursuing a plan of mingled good and hatred, and weaving about me a network of suspicious misunderstandings, plots, and lies, to which my own innocent words and acts—nay, even my thoughts of kindness toward him—have been made to contribute.” Beecher strenuously denied Mrs. Woodhull’s assertion that he was “a free lover” both in theory and practice. “I am not versed in the casuistry of free love,” he declared. “The circle of which Mrs. Woodhull formed a part was the center of loathsome scandals—organized, classified, and perpetuated with a greedy and unclean appetite for everything that was foul and vile.” Beecher’s appearance before the committee received the transfixed attention of the newspapers and wire services. The Associated Press alone had thirty reporters covering it.
On August 20, 1874, before the committee had issued a report of its findings, Tilton swore out a complaint in Brooklyn City Court against Beecher, charging the sixty-one-year-old pastor with having willfully alienated and destroyed Mrs. Tilton’s affections for her husband, and demanding a hundred thousand dollars in damages for having “wholly lost the comfort, society, aid, and assistance of his said wife” and having “suffered great distress in body and mind.” At the time the suit was filed, Beecher was again in the White Mountains, and he did not bother to return to Brooklyn to answer the complaint, or even to hear the committee issue its report, a fortnight later. The report gave him complete absolution. It declared that he was the victim of Tilton’s “malicious and revengeful designs,” called Mrs. Tilton’s conduct “indefensible,” because she had displayed “undue affection,” found Beecher innocent of any “unchaste or improper act,” and said that there was “nothing whatever in the evidence that should impair the perfect confidence of Plymouth Church or of the world in the Christian character and integrity of Henry Ward Beecher.” The pastor was censured in the report only for having allowed his abounding generosity and love to blind him and lead him to drop his guard with the Tiltons.
The report was handed up to the Examining Committee of Plymouth Church, which, upon receiving it, underlined its findings by declaring that Beecher had been the victim of “the most infamous conspiracy known to the present age.” At a meeting of the whole congregation, one of its leading members, Professor Rossiter W. Raymond, who was a professional elocutionist, read a summary of the report, to the accompaniment of wild applause. In the midst of the proceedings, Moulton, who was not a member of the congregation, suddenly came in and took a front seat. The crowd became tense. Raymond interpolated a remark of his own, declaring that “Moulton poisoned the public with lies,” at which Moulton jumped up and shouted, “You are a liar, sir!” Several men in the congregation rushed forward, some of them brandishing pistols, and, according to one account, “struggled to get at Moulton, with the intention of chastising him.” “Put him out, put him out!” the crowd shouted. The police were called to restore order, and Raymond read some resolutions supporting Beecher’s “entire innocence and purity” and declaring “that our confidence in and love for our pastor, so far from being diminished, is heightened and deepened by the unmerited sufferings which he has so long borne.” At the close of the reading, some three thousand voices shouted “Aye!,” and only one, Moulton’s, a “Nay!” Since he was not a member of the church, his vote was not counted. The audience started singing “Praise God from Whom all blessings flow” as the meeting ended. On the way out to his carriage, Moulton had to have the protection of two policemen.
By this time, the reaction of the nation was almost as acute and emotional, if not as one-sided, as that of the congregation of Plymouth Church. In New York, most of the newspapers sided with the pastor, or nursed a pained neutrality. The Times looked down its nose at the shenanigans across the river, referring to the case as “this Brooklyn nuisance” and commenting acidly that “certainly all of these people seem to live in a world of their own.” Beecher’s statement, the paper said, “discloses a curious amount of moral cowardice and a great amount of irrational behavior . . . but we believe the impression will be general that, conceding Mr. Beecher’s character to be what he paints it, his story is not inconsistent with innocence.” The Tribune said, “The man at whose door the shameful sin is laid is a clergyman whose name has been honored wherever the English language is spoken. Over sixty years of honest life bear witness for him. . . . Unless this frightful exposition is answered promptly and fully, the most famous pulpit the world has seen since Paul preached on the Hill of Mars is silenced, the life of the greatest preacher in the world is ended. . . . If not, the pistol shot of Booth caused a national sorrow no deeper and not so hopeless.” The World, turning its attention to Tilton, said of him:
The Graphic, however, was critical of Beecher, remarking that “if the arrow of almighty justice rankles in his quivering heart, it is because he has not worn the armor of righteousness under the surplice of the clergyman, but has played the libertine while he has acted the priest.”
In other cities, editors were more inclined to take the Graphic’s position, and when Moulton, feeling himself no longer obligated to be a silent custodian, released much of the correspondence in the case, including many of the self-inculpating letters Beecher had written, the criticism of the preacher mounted. Almost every major paper in the country printed the letters, many of them in special supplements, and one editor, viewing the mountain of documents, remarked, “Everybody has made a statement about somebody else I, thou, he, you, we, they, he, she, and it have or hast made statements. There are almost as many statement-makers as there are candidates for the Vice-Presidency, and they constitute a large proportion of the population.” The Chicago Tribune, which earned a reputation for honest, probing journalism by the way it handled the Beecher-Tilton case, printed thirty-three columns of the Tiltons’ letters to each other and commented editorially, “The young woman or married woman who finds herself besieged by a Plato, especially a white-cravated one, had better betake herself to the wash-tub or some other form of labor not conducive to sentiment, if she wishes to be safe.” In Louisville, Henry Watterson, of the Courier-Journal, called the evidence of Beecher’s guilt “positive, presumptive, and overwhelming” and said the deacons of the church, no matter what they did, could not “restore the fame of the false pastor and the wicked wife.”
The Beecher-Tilton case came to trial In Brooklyn City Court on January 11, 1875. It lasted for six months, counting the recesses taken when ice on the East River stopped the ferries, making it impossible for lawyers to get there from Manhattan, and also when the heat was so intense that some lawyers and jurors fainted. Tilton’s case was presented without embellishment by a dozen witnesses, of whom the most important were Tilton himself, Moulton, and Moulton’s wife, Emma. Beecher called ninety-five witnesses in his defense. The trial was remarkable for the oratory on both sides; almost two entire months were taken up by the opening and closing statements alone, which are still regarded as classics of their kind. Beecher had six lawyers, of whom the chief was William M. Evarts, widely regarded as the ablest advocate of the day; Tilton had five, one of whom was William Fullerton, widely regarded as the outstanding cross-examiner of the day. The proceedings were the city’s principal source of entertainment. A black market sprang up, selling tickets to the courtroom at five dollars apiece, and there were days when as many as three thousand persons were turned away. Prominent politicians, diplomats, and leaders of society, along with less distinguished visitors, fought for seats and went without their lunch in order to hold them. The audience was often unruly, and the judge, Joseph Neilson, was kept busy issuing warnings against unseemly applause and hisses; there were several arrests for disorderly conduct. Both Beecher and his wife, Eunice, a formidable woman with commanding features and snow-white hair, attended regularly. Day in and day out, Mrs. Beecher, wearing a black dress and looking like a raven, sat impassively in a wooden armchair in the spectators’ section of the courtroom. Beecher, for his part, carried a nosegay of flowers; even when he was on the stand, he sniffed occasionally at a bunch of violets. Although neither of the two leading women in the case—Mrs. Tilton and Mrs. Woodhull—were called to testify, both made brief, dramatic appearances in court.
Moulton was the first important witness. Thirty-seven years old at the time, and dressed with an impeccable carelessness, he lived up to his reputation as a man of the world by discussing Beecher’s adultery with what one reporter called “the manner of a listless gentleman giving his verdict upon a novel brand of champagne.” At one point, there was this bit of dialogue between Moulton and a lawyer who was questioning him about a conversation he had had with a friend on the Produce Exchange:
Moulton was on the stand ten and a half days. His close identification with the case from the beginning and his peculiar role as a confidant of the principals and the custodian of their documents gave his testimony a breadth that no other witness’s had. While Beecher resorted nearly nine hundred times on the witness stand to various expressions of uncertainty, forgetfulness, or evasion, Moulton was precise and held his own through a protracted cross-examination. A typical instance of the difference between Moulton’s and Beecher’s manner of testifying occurred during a wrangle over the authorship of the famous Letter of Contrition that Beecher addressed to Tilton. This letter, which Moulton said Beecher had dictated to him, and which was probably the key exhibit in the case, contained, in addition to the celebrated words “I humble myself before him [Tilton] as I do before my God,” such equally damaging phrases as “I even wish that I were dead,” “I will die before anyone but myself shall be implicated,” and “She [Mrs. Tilton] is guiltless, sinned against, bearing the transgression of another.” The following exchange took place when Moulton was cross-examined about the letter:
Beecher, who knew Moulton only casually, at best, when the letter was written, was cross-examined by Fullerton on the same subject:
Guided by Evarts, Beecher was vehement in denying any misconduct with Mrs. Tilton:
Fullerton, sidestepping the question of actual adultery, cross-examined Beecher as follows:
Fullerton also pursued a point that had practically the entire nation puzzled—why hadn’t Beecher instantly stood up and denied the allegations of adultery if they were untrue? Using as his point of departure a letter to Moulton in which Beecher referred to “the keen suspicion” of “hundreds of thousands of men pressing me,” the attorney led Beecher through the following cross-examination:
An unexpectedly effective witness at the trial was Mrs. Moulton. A devout, quiet-spoken, timid woman, she was a member of Beecher’s church, and her testimony was in some ways more damaging than either Moulton’s or Tilton’s. Mrs. Moulton swore that Beecher had told her, “You are the best friend I have in this world . . . for you, knowing all the truth, knowing that I am guilty, still stand by me.” Mrs. Moulton’s testimony included an account of a talk she had had alone with Beecher on June 2, 1873:
Mrs. Moulton testified that Beecher had been so upset upon that occasion that she had “leaned over and kissed him on his forehead” when he told her, “I have a powder at home on my library table which I have prepared . . . and I shall sink quietly off as if going to sleep, without a struggle. I haven’t any desire to live.”
Beecher denied that this talk ever took place and said he had received the kiss in question three days earlier. “It seemed to me a holy kiss . . . as I sometimes have seen it in poetry,” he testified, adding that he had not returned it, because “it was not best, under the circumstances, that she and I should kiss.” Beecher also denied that he had called Mrs. Moulton “a section of the Day of Judgment,” and Fullerton hammered at his denial:
The defense lawyers enthusiastically explored the relationship between Tilton and Mrs. Woodhull, and the way was made easier for them by Mrs. Woodhull herself. Talking to a reporter in Chicago some time before the trial opened, she had said, “I ought to know Mr. Tilton, for he was my devoted lover for more than half a year.”
“Do I understand, my dear Madam, that the fascination was mutual and irresistible?” the reporter asked.
“So enamored and infatuated with each other were we that for three months we were hardly out of each other’s sight, and he slept every night in my arms,” Mrs. Woodhull replied. But when she got back to New York, she told another reporter, who questioned her about her Chicago statement, “Why, I am not a fool. A woman who is before the world as I am would not make such a flagrant statement, even if it were true.” It was all quite confusing, as well as titillating.
The defense called three of Mrs. Woodhull’s servants to testify. One said that Tilton was a constant visitor at Mrs. Woodhull’s house, on Murray Hill, and at her Broad Street office, and that he saw them “sitting together talking, with their arms around each other,” which he thought was “all very natural” after Mrs. Woodhull had explained “free love” to him. Another said that he saw them with their “arms and the two heads moving together in a very lover-like manner,” and the third said that she saw Mrs. Woodhull “in her night garment” and Tilton “in his stocking feet.” Mrs. Elizabeth La Pierre Palmer, an associate of Mrs. Woodhull’s, swore that she saw Tilton in Mrs. Woodhull’s bedroom four times and that they embraced and spoke to each other tenderly.
Tilton denied that he had had adulterous relations with Mrs. Woodhull but admitted that he had stayed overnight at her house once, when they were working on her biography. He declared that Beecher had thanked him “multitudinously” for flattering Mrs. Woodhull in an attempt to keep her quiet about the scandal. “I say here before God that Mr. Beecher is as much responsible for my connection with Mrs. Woodhull as I am myself,” Tilton testified, adding that he had been “less smooth-spoken to her face and less insulting behind her back” than the preacher. Tilton’s attorneys subpoenaed Mrs. Woodhull three times during the trial, but each time decided not to call her, because of the risks involved in submitting such an unpredictable witness to cross-examination. She appeared briefly in the courtroom, however, looking very prim, to deliver some letters to Beecher’s attorneys. The letters proved innocuous, and Mrs. Woodhull left immediately, as mysterious a figure as ever, if a somewhat less wicked one. As for Mrs. Tilton, her husband’s lawyers offered to renounce any legal objections to having a wife testify against her husband, but the defense, equally nervous about the effect cross-examination would have on her, quickly declined the offer. She did, however, rise one day from her spectator’s seat—“like an apparition,” one reporter wrote—and “in a tremulous voice” asked the judge to read aloud a statement she had prepared. Judge Neilson refused the request.
The summations were as much contests in classical erudition and oratory as they were legal arguments. Both sides quoted extensively from Shakespeare, Carlyle, Byron, Scott, Burns, Milton, Cardinal Newman, Dr. Johnson, Hawthorne, Saint Paul, and the Scriptures. The quotations sometimes ran to thousands of words, and the audience applauded them as if they were stage readings by well-known actors. Evarts contended that merely to believe a man of Beecher’s stature capable of adultery was “wicked, wicked as it can be, wicked in heart, wicked in soul, wicked in hate to God, to society, to human nature, wicked in everything.” And he continued, “Ah! gentlemen, that is the final stage of dissolute immorality in a man, in a city, in a community. . . . You have struck a blow not at Mr. Beecher, not at Mrs. Tilton, but at your own wives and your own daughters.” William A. Beach, one of Tilton’s attorneys, countered with some earlier examples of “clerical depravity” and declared, “Great and good as Mr. Beecher may have been, he is yet, in the eye of God and in the eye of man, a fallible sinner. . . . Are we to have a new version of the Scriptures? Are we to have new teachings in regard to the nature and the fall of man? Are we to be told that there is no sin among the apparently pure and great? Christianity,” he went on, “has stood a great many worse catastrophes than the loss of a man like Henry Ward Beecher. . . . There is no fear from the fall of Henry Ward Beecher for the progress of Christian civilization and Christian influence. The Church will survive.” Judge Neilson, in his meticulous charge to the jury, said, “In any view of the case, you may be disposed to ask why Mr. Beecher, if innocent, should have garnered up in his heart all that pain and fear so long, when he might have made proclamation to the world and trampled out the scandal as with iron boots.” It was what almost everyone was disposed to ask by that time.
Beecher had preached regularly throughout the long trial. The evening the case went to the jury, he told his prayer meeting that, no matter what happened, “the world is wide and will not be destitute of opportunities,” and that “as long as there is a champion needed for the downtrodden, so long as any need God and can’t see Him directly, they will see Him reflected in me if God gives me the power to go on.” He left the next morning, June 26th, for his Peekskill farm, but Mrs. Beecher remained in Brooklyn and kept a day-and-night vigil at the courthouse. The city was sweltering in the first heat wave of the summer. The jury, which consisted of twelve retail merchants, headed by a flour dealer, deliberated for eight days, during which it did not leave the building. The jurors took turns sleeping on two old mattresses for a few hours a night, and food and changes of clothing were sent in to them after being carefully inspected by Judge Neilson. The heat increased, and the jurors moved from one side of the courthouse to the other at noon to dodge the sun’s glare. They were scrutinized constantly from the windows and roofs of surrounding buildings, where space was rented out to the curious. By the sixth night, exhaustion had set in all around. “The jury was extremely quiet last night,” a reporter wrote. “Its members laid themselves yawningly over the tables and gaped. Half-nakedness is its condition by choice.” Judge Neilson was described as “a semi-perambulating sponge.” At 11: 17 A.M. on Friday, July 2nd, the jurors dragged themselves into the courtroom. After fifty-two ballots, they had been unable to reach agreement. At the outset, they had been eight to four in favor of Beecher, and at the end they stood nine to three for him.
As Beecher, who had returned to the city that day, entered Plymouth Church to conduct his weekly prayer meeting, he was cheered by a crowd on the sidewalk. Inside, there was hysterical sobbing as he read the hymn “Christ leads me through no darker rooms than He went through before. . . .” The following Sunday, the crowds were so great that police had to be called to keep order in the street. Red and white roses covered the church’s rostrum. Beecher preached on the language of the New Testament. A few days later, he went, as usual, to New Hampshire, where, in a corner of the lounge of the Twin Mountain House, with a framed copy of the Golden Rule hanging on a wall nearby, he entertained his “summer parish” by conducting a mock Beecher-Tilton trial.
For a great many people, however, Beecher had become a considerably tarnished idol. Charles Dana, of the Sun, declared that he was “an adulterer, a perjuror, and a fraud,” and that “his great genius and his Christian pretenses only make his sins the more horrible and revolting.” The Times, which had been pro-Beecher before the trial, swung sedately into the opposite camp and, after a detailed analysis of the case, came to the conclusion that “sensible men throughout the country will in their hearts be compelled to acknowledge that Mr. Beecher’s management of his private friendships and affairs has been entirely unworthy of his name, position, and sacred calling.” While it was “a mournful sight to see a great preacher of religion resting even under the suspicion of a dark crime,” the Times observed, the facts “tell heavily against Mr. Beecher.” The newspaper went on to assail Tilton for having continued to live with his wife after learning of her guilt, and called Mrs. Tilton “degraded and worthless.” All over the city, youngsters were chanting bits of doggerel like
This prompted the Tribune to remark, “Ten thousand immoral and obscene novels could not have done the harm which this case has done in teaching the science of wrong to thousands of quick-witted and curious boys and girls.” Watterson’s Louisville Courier-Journal now called Beecher “a dunghill covered with flowers.” Tom Appleton, a popular commentator, said that “mankind fell in Adam, and has been falling ever since, but never touched bottom till it got to Henry Ward Beecher.” The St. Louis Christian Advocate concluded that “the church is about as deep in the mud as the pastor is in the mire.” The London Times declared, “The society amid which Beecher moved in Plymouth Church is evidently one of those eccentricities of humanity which may be quite harmless in a country with so many safety valves as America, but which would run considerable risks, in this country, of offending against the practical view we take of the simpler commandments.” The London Daily Telegraph, after asserting that Beecher had “acted with an imbecility that would have disgraced an uneducated girl,” said, “We should bear in mind that he has not been convicted of adultery, but he is not the only person in the world entitled to that negative praise.” Still, Beecher was to remain pastor of Plymouth Church until he died.
During the summer and fall of 1875, there was some talk of retrying the case, but nothing came of it, nor did anything come of a suit for criminal libel that Beecher had started against Moulton at one point in the lengthy conflict. Moulton clamored to be tried, saying that it was a matter of “pulpit or prison,” but Beecher’s lawyers knew that this time Mrs. Tilton would be subpoenaed, and they still had qualms about how well she would fare under cross-examination, so the suit was nol-prossed. Moulton then sued Beecher for malicious prosecution, but this indictment, too, was dismissed over Moulton’s protests. After Beecher returned to Brooklyn in the fall, he avenged himself on Mrs. Moulton by moving to have her name stricken from the church rolls. Mrs. Moulton requested to be tried by some tribunal other than the pastor’s chosen judges. Her request was refused and she was dropped as a member, but not before Beecher had been further discredited in the public view for running what one paper called “a clerical kangaroo court.” In February, 1876, Beecher arranged for the convening of another Advisory Council of the Congregational Churches, in the hope that it would give him an unqualified endorsement and thus put down the rumors, criticisms, and complaints that were circulating against him. More than two hundred Congregationalists and their guests descended on Brooklyn Beecher outdid himself. He put his church ushers into livery and served the Council delegates special lunches. When the show was over, the Council had not only obediently given him its endorsement but supported his expulsion of Emma Moulton. One other parishioner subsequently stood up to Beecher, and that was Henry Bowen, the man who had done as much as anyone to create Plymouth Church and its pastor. He realized that Beecher, in his hour of triumph, was going to root out everybody who might be dangerous to him, and Bowen, with his knowledge of his wife’s adultery, was certainly that. So, at a special meeting of the Plymouth Church Examining Committee, he tried to get his blow in first. Beecher, he declared, was “an adulterer, a perjurer, and a blasphemer.” He went on, “For many years, I have had absolute knowledge that he is a guilty man. My knowledge is so certain that it can never be shaken by any denials or protestations or oaths, past or future. The publisher mentioned no names, but there was no one in the church who did not know that he spoke of his wife. When he had finished, and because he still refused to mention names, Henry Bowen, like Emma Moulton, was expelled from Plymouth Church.
“When you shall find a heart to rebuke the twining morning-glory, you may rebuke me for misplaced confidence . . . for loving where I should not love,” Beecher told his flock on one occasion during the winter following the trial. “It is not my choice; it is my necessity. And I have loved on the right and on the left, here and there, and it is my joy that today I am not ashamed of it. I am glad of it.” It was the closest he ever came to a confession, except perhaps eight years later, when, in the midst of the campaign to elect Grover Cleveland President of the United States, the story of Cleveland’s illegitimate child came out. Beecher was deeply affected, and spoke to his congregation of “the gloomy night of my own suffering.” He pledged himself to help any friend “should a like serpent seek to crush him,” and finally declared that “if every man in New York State tonight who has broken the Seventh Commandment voted for Cleveland, he would he elected by a two hundred thousand majority.” Cleveland’s victory was tantamount to another Council exculpation for Beecher.
Criticism of Beecher continued, however, and in 1877, in need of a hypodermic for his flagging popularity, he hit the lyceum circuit, as he had done several times in the past—this time as a champion of the workingman, Civil Service, and the Russians in their holy war against the Turks. He was paid from six hundred to a thousand dollars a lecture, but it was not all easy going. James Pond, his lecture agent, wrote, “Often I have seen him on our entering a strange town hooted at by a swarming crowd and greeted with indecent salutations.” But Beecher was encouraged. He jotted down impressions of his tour in his diary. In Boston: “Temple full. Received me with prolonged clapping. . . . Ten thousand people couldn’t get in. . . . All wept, and it broke up like a revival meeting.” In Louisville: “Even Watterson sent for tickets. . . . I was in good trim, and for nearly two hours I avenged myself.” In Pittsburgh: “The love, the eagerness, the lingering, and the longing have been such as to fill my cup full.” In Madison, Wisconsin: “The whole slander is burnt over out here, like a prairie or an old cornfield, and will never lift itself again.”
Unfortunately for Beecher, just at that moment it did lift itself. Since the trial, Mrs. Tilton had been living in Brooklyn with her mother, supporting herself on the income from a small trust fund and by teaching in a private school. The house on Livingston Street was empty. Tilton was living alone in a room on Second Avenue, in Manhattan. On April 13, 1878, Mrs. Tilton wrote an open letter to her legal adviser, which was published in the New York Times. It read:
The letter caused a brief sensation. Nearly every newspaper in the country reprinted it. It closed, said the Times, “one of the most pitiful episodes of human experience.”
Beecher went on lecturing. In 1886, he toured England, where he was regarded more as a curiosity than a serious speaker. Mrs. Woodhull, too, went to England, where she married a wealthy London banker, and, with the help of her daughter, Zulu Maud Woodhull, started a new magazine, called the Humanitarian. Her sister, Tennie C., married a British baronet. Both of them became monuments of respectability. Tilton, on Second Avenue, found the going increasingly rough. He earned enough by lecturing to send his two daughters and two sons to school, but there were a great many Americans who never forgave him for attacking Beecher. In 1883, he went abroad and, after travelling through England and Germany, settled in Paris, in a room on the Ile Saint-Louis, and wrote poetry and romantic novels. He also spent a lot of time playing chess—often, it is said, with Judah P. Benjamin, the exiled Secretary of State of the Confederacy—at the Café de la Régence. A reporter tracked him down there on March 8, 1887, to tell him that Beecher had just died in his sleep in Brooklyn, following an attack of apoplexy. Tilton stared into space a few moments and then continued his chess game without comment. Back in Brooklyn, the mayor declared a public holiday. The New York State Legislature adjourned. The preacher lay in state in Plymouth Church, and fifty thousand people lined the streets for the funeral procession to Greenwood Cemetery. Mrs. Beecher continued to live In Brooklyn Heights, where she died a decade later. Ten years after Beecher’s death, Mrs. Tilton died and was buried in the same cemetery. She had gone blind and become a recluse, living with one of her daughters. In the last years of her life, she had joined the Christian Friends, a religious society that declared itself “skeptical as to the motives and influence exerted by regularly organized churches.” Tilton lived another ten years, and died of pneumonia in Paris in 1907. He was buried in Barbizon, next to the painter Millet. Mrs. Woodhull, who was supposed to have a weak heart, outlived all the others. In the last years of her life, she became a fanatic motorist, scorching around the English countryside in a shiny white car and firing chauffeur after chauffeur for not driving fast enough. She died in England at the age of eighty-nine, in June, 1927. ♦
(This is the second of two articles on the Beecher-Tilton case.)
