Part 18

He urged _immediate_ and _universal emancipation_, with all the fire and eloquence of his nature. He became the warm friend of President Lincoln, with whom he had many confidential conferences. When the immortal Emancipation Proclamation was issued, declaring that after Jan. 1, 1863, the slaves "shall be thenceforward and forever free," Beecher said in his lecture-room talk, Dec. 31: "As for myself, let come what will come, I care not. God may peel me and bark me and strip me of my leaves, and do as he chooses with my earthly estate. I have lived long enough.... I have uttered some words that will not die, because they are incorporated into the lives of men that will not die."

In June, 1863, worn out with continuous speaking, Mr. Beecher went to Europe with Dr. John Raymond, then president of Vassar College. He had been over before, in 1850, thirteen years previously. He travelled in Switzerland, Italy, and Germany, and at the request of the United States Minister, talked with King Leopold of Belgium, a wise and able man, about American affairs.

The king, asking Mr. Beecher what he thought of sending Maximilian to Mexico, he replied, "Your Majesty, any man that wants to sit upon a throne in Mexico, I would advise to try Vesuvius first; if he can sit there for a while, then he might go and try it in Mexico." His words proved true for the unfortunate Maximilian and Carlotta.

Henry Ward Beecher found in England much sympathy with the slave-holding South, and a disbelief in the ultimate success of the North, and continuance of the Union. Going to Europe for rest, he did not intend to speak, but was finally persuaded that it was his duty to win friends for the North, so that England should not declare for the Southern Confederacy.

The first meeting was held at Manchester, Oct. 9, 1863. The streets were placarded with huge posters in red ink, and threats were heard on every side that the speaker should never leave Free Trade Hall alive.

As soon as Beecher began to speak, there were hisses and yells by the mob, so that not a word could be heard. Standing erect before the howling crowd, he said, "My friends, we will have a whole night's session, but we will be heard." When not a word could reach the people, he leaned over to the reporters present, and said: "Gentlemen, be kind enough to take down what I say. It will be in sections, but I will have it connected by and by."

Finally by courage and wit and eloquence the crowd was subdued and won over to the speaker, who discussed the dire effects of slavery upon the manufacturing interests of the world, and stated the real condition of America in her struggle between slavery and liberty.

He said: "If the day shall come in one year, in two years, or in ten years hence, when the old stars and stripes shall float over every State of America; if the day shall come when that which was the accursed cause of this dire and atrocious war--slavery--shall be done away with; if the day shall come when through all the Gulf States there shall be liberty of speech, as there never has been; when there shall be liberty of the press, as there never has been; when men shall have common schools to send their children to, which they have never had in the South ... it will be worth all the dreadful blood and tears and woe."

Just as Beecher was closing, a telegram from London was read that "Her Majesty has to-night caused the 'broad arrow' to be placed on the rams in Mr. Laird's yard at Birkenhead." This meant the stoppage of the ships which were building for the South, to destroy our shipping as the Alabama had done. The whole audience rose and cheered, men waving their hats and women their handkerchiefs as they wept.

So moved were the people that a big fellow in the gallery, who could not shake hands with Mr. Beecher, cried out, "Shake my umbrella," as he reached it down to the platform. Mr. Beecher did as requested. "By Jocks!" said the man, "nobody sha'n't touch that umbrella again."

On Oct. 13 Beecher spoke to an immense audience at Glasgow, telling them that in building ships to destroy free labor in America, "they were driving nails in their own coffins."

The interruptions, though great here, were not as bad as at Manchester. The next evening he spoke to a packed house at Edinburgh, being lifted over the people's heads to reach the platform. These speeches were reported verbatim all over England.

On Oct. 16 he spoke at the great Philharmonic Hall at Liverpool, at that time the headquarters of Southern sympathies. The meeting was a perfect bedlam. "Three cheers for Jeff Davis" were given every now and then, with cries of "Turn him out!" hisses and yells, till Beecher sat down on the edge of the platform and waited for a calm. For three hours, sentence by sentence, his voice was hurled against a threatening, hooting mob.

Four days later Henry Ward Beecher spoke to a dense crowd in Exeter Hall, London. With satire and pathos and burning eloquence, he spoke like one inspired. Dr. William M. Taylor, of the Broadway Tabernacle, New York, said, "I believe there has not been such eloquence in the world since Demosthenes."

Dr. Lyman Abbott and the Rev. S. B. Halliday, in their life of Mr. Beecher, say with truth, that "he changed the public sentiment, and so the political course of the nation, and secured and cemented an alliance between the mother country and our own land, which needs no treaties to give it expression, which has been gaining strength ever since, and which no demagogism on this side of the water, and no ignorance and prejudice on that, have been able to impair."

The physical strain while in England was great. "I thought at times," he says, "that I should certainly break a blood-vessel or have apoplexy. I did not care; I was willing to die as ever I was, when hungry and thirsty, to take refreshment, if I might die for my country."

Mr. Beecher on his return was welcomed with open arms and grateful hearts by the American people. Great receptions were given him at the Academy of Music, Brooklyn, and the Academy of Music, New York.

When the heart-breaking war was over, and General Lee had surrendered to General Grant under the apple-tree at Appomattox, April 9, 1865, and it was decided to raise over Fort Sumter, April 14, the flag that had been pulled down four years before, the great preacher and orator, who had helped to save the Union, was asked to deliver the address.

When Major-General Robert Anderson ran up the flag, it was saluted by a hundred guns from Fort Sumter and by a national salute from every fort that had fired upon Sumter at the beginning of the war.

Henry Ward Beecher's address was masterly; a review of the dreadful war, and our duties in the future.

That very night, April 14, 1865, President Lincoln was assassinated by the actor, J. Wilkes Booth. Mr. Beecher said in his sermon the following Sunday: "The blow brought not a sharp pang. It was so terrible that at first it stunned sensibility.... There was a piteous helplessness. Strong men bowed down and wept.... Men walked for days as if a corpse lay unburied in their dwellings. There was nothing else to think of. All business was laid aside. Pleasure forgot to smile.... Even avarice stood still, and greed was strongly moved to generous sympathy and universal sorrow. Rear to his name monuments, found charitable institutions, and write his name above their lintels; but no monument will ever equal the universal, spontaneous, and sublime sorrow that in a moment swept down lines and parties, and covered up animosities, and in an hour brought a divided people into unity of grief and indivisible fellowship of anguish."

Beecher took an active part in the reconstruction and readmission of the seceded States, urging that the greatest leniency be shown, now that they had surrendered; opposed the hanging of Jefferson Davis; urged the right of suffrage for the colored people:--"It is always inexpedient and foolish," he said, "to deny a man his natural rights." He did not believe that the freedmen should be cared for permanently by a military power at the South, placed there by the North. "We are to educate the negroes, and to Christianly educate them. We are to raise them in intelligence more and more, until they shall be able to prove themselves worthy of citizenship. For, I tell you, all the laws in the world cannot bolster a man up so as to place him any higher than his own moral worth and natural forces put him."

For a letter stating such views as these, written to the National Convention of Soldiers and Sailors held at Cleveland, O., in the autumn of 1866, Mr. Beecher was assailed all over the country. "The rage and abuse of excited men," he said, "I have too long been used to, now to be surprised or daunted.... I stood almost alone, my church, in my absence, full of excitement; all my ministerial brethren, with a few honorable exceptions, either aloof or in clamor against me; well-nigh the whole religious press denouncing me, and the political press furious."

He spoke boldly against the corrupt judges in New York City in the time of the Tweed dictatorship. Years later when Beecher voted and spoke for Grover Cleveland for the presidency, because he believed a change of parties wise for the country at the time, on account of "the corruption of too long held power," and did not trust James G. Blaine, the opposing candidate, the same denunciation and bitterness were shown; all of which proves that toleration for opinions differing from our own requires a very high type of character.

Beecher's liberal views in theology were likewise bitterly antagonized. The truth was that he cared little for creeds, believing that to preach Christ as the Saviour of the world was the paramount and vital need of men. He believed the theology of the future "would be far more powerful than the old--a theology of hope, and of love, which shall cast out fear." He felt with Whittier in the "Eternal Goodness,"--

"Yet, in the maddening maze of things, And tossed by storm and flood, To one fixed trust my spirit clings,-- I know that God is good!

And so beside the Silent Sea I wait the muffled oar: No harm from Him can come to me On ocean or on shore.

I know not where His islands lift There fronded palms in air; I only know I cannot drift Beyond His love and care."

His sermons were translated into German, French, Spanish, and Italian, and were read the world over; and men and women grew more gentle and lovable from the reading.

After the war the busy life went on as busy as ever. One volume of the "Life of Christ," rich in his wonderful imagination and beauty of language, was written. He did not live to complete the second volume. His one novel, "Norwood," a story of New England, was published as a serial in the New York _Ledger_ in 1867, Mr. Bonner giving him $25,000 for it.

In 1870, having resigned the editorship of the _Independent_, Beecher became the editor of the _Christian Union_. In 1872 he gave a course of twelve lectures on "Preaching" to the Divinity School of Yale College, Mr. Henry W. Sage of Plymouth Church having founded at New Haven the Lyman Beecher Lectureship of Preaching.

When asked by Mr. John R. Howard if he knew what he should say at these lectures, he replied, "Yes; in a way. I know what I am going to aim at, but of course I don't get down to anything specific. I brood it, and ponder it, and dream over it, and pick up information about one point and another; but if ever I _think_ I see the plan opening up to me, I don't dare to look at it or put it down on paper. If I once write a thing out, it is almost impossible for me to kindle up to it again. I never dare nowadays to write out a sermon during the week; that is sure to kill it. I have to think around and about it, get it generally ready, and then _fuse it_ when the time comes."

Beecher was a great student of the Bible, reading it on the cars as he travelled to his lecture appointments, and, like Emerson, jotting down in little note-books thoughts and suggestions.

He prepared his Sunday morning sermon in an hour and a half, between breakfast and the time of service. Locked into his room, he wrote with his goose-quill pen the headings and a few illustrations. Then in the pulpit the eloquent words came pouring from his lips, born of the time and place. His evening sermon he prepared after tea. When asked how he was able to do so much work, he said it was partly owing to a good constitution; "much, also, to an early acquired knowledge of how to take care of myself, to secure invariably a full measure of sleep, to regard food as an engineer does fuel (to be employed economically, and entirely with reference to the work to be done by the machine); much to the habit of economizing social forces, and not wasting in needless conversation and pleasurable hilarities the spirit that would carry me through many days of necessary work; but, above all, to the possession of a hopeful disposition and natural courage, to sympathy with men, and to an unfailing trust in God; so that I have always worked for the love of working."

He never used stimulants except as a medicine. He wrote to a friend, "I am a _total abstainer, both in belief and practice_.... I hold that no man in health _needs_ or is the better for alcoholic stimulants; that great good will follow to the whole community from the total disuse of them as articles of diet or luxury; and that so soon as the moral sense of society will sustain such laws, it will be wise and right to enact prohibitory liquor laws.... I should as soon think of offering a well man a dose of rhubarb as a dose of brandy."

Mr. Beecher was an earnest advocate of woman suffrage as well as temperance. He believed in equality of privilege in the pulpit, in medicine, everywhere, though he said, "People may talk about equality of the sexes!... The silent smile of a sensible, loving woman will vanquish ten men." Of woman, he said, "She is the right hand of the charities of the church.... She is not only permitted in the great orthodox churches of New England to speak in meeting, but when they send her abroad, ordained to preach the gospel to the heathen, there she is permitted to preach; and when they come home, women may still teach in a hall, but not in a church, and dear old men there are yet so conservative that they are reading through golden spectacles their Bibles, and saying: 'I suffer not a woman to preach.'"

Mr. Beecher found his recreation from hard work in his love of country life. His farm at Lenox, Mass., proving too far from Brooklyn, he bought, in 1859, thirty-six acres at Peekskill-on-the-Hudson, and named it Boscobel. The old farmhouse was said to have been the headquarters of General Israel Putnam of Revolutionary fame.

He watched like a child for the first note of the bluebird and robin, for the first arbutus, anemone, and violet of early spring. He loved roses as fondly as Professor Child of Harvard College. He raised hollyhocks, dahlias, geraniums, pansies, lilies, and chrysanthemums. He said, "The wonder is, that every other man is not an enthusiast, and in the month of June a gentle fanatic. Floral insanity is one of the most charming inflictions to which man is heir."

He bought trees of almost every variety, chickens of various kinds, Jersey cows and honey-bees, and a large family of dogs,--a St. Bernard, a mastiff, an Eskimo, a terrier, and others.

He once said, "If the dog isn't good for anything else, it is good for you to love, and that is a good deal." Speaking of those at Peekskill, he said, "They are practically good for nothing, but I sometimes think they are worth more to me than the whole place."

He used to say that he felt really sorry that his dog Tommy could not talk. "If ever there was a dog that was distressed to think that he could not talk, that dog is. I sit by him on the bank, of a summer evening, and I say, 'Tommy, I am sorry for you;' and he whines, as much as to say, 'So am I.' I say, 'Tommy, I should like to tell you a great many things that you are worthy of knowing;' and I do not know which is the most puzzled, he or I--I to get any idea into his head, or he to get any out of mine."

Mr. Beecher finally built a beautiful house of granite and brick, natural woods throughout the interior: first story cherry; second, ash; and third, pine, where he gathered his valuable library. "Where is human nature so weak as in a book-store?" he said; and in books and flowers and works of art he found that money melted away, so that, say his sons, William C. Beecher and the Rev. Samuel Scoville, in the life of their father, "it was in part to meet this heavy outlay that he projected and carried out the series of lecture-tours that ran through the last ten years of his life."

He had learned what many another learns, that "the most profitable kind of land-owning" is to "enjoy all that there is of beauty and peacefulness in my neighbor's lands as much as they, without the responsibility or the taxes." And yet people have to build once, to learn _not_ to build again.

In 1872, Mr. Beecher having preached for twenty-five years in Plymouth Church, a "Silver Wedding" was celebrated by his people. Monday, Oct. 7, was the first day of the jubilee. In the sunny afternoon the three thousand children in the three Sunday-schools connected with the church marched past Mr. Beecher's house, as he stood upon his doorstep, and each child laid a flower at his feet, until he stood "literally embanked in flowers." Each day through the week had its appropriate exercises. On Thursday, the historical day, the brilliant and learned Dr. Richard S. Storrs of Brooklyn gave an eloquent address. "May your soul," said the speaker, "as the years go on, be whitened more and more in the radiance of God's light, and in the sunshine of His love!"

That soul was soon to be tested and whitened in a furnace heated almost beyond endurance. Theodore Tilton, a member of Mr. Beecher's church, had, through the influence of the latter, become the editor of the _Independent_. Having lost his position, apparently by his own misdeeds, and made his family unhappy, Mr. and Mrs. Beecher advised his wife to separate from him. Tilton determined to drive Beecher from his pulpit, and forced his wife to criminate the latter in character, which statements she afterwards declared again and again were untrue in every particular. Plymouth Church dropped its obnoxious member. He took the case into the courts, asking one hundred thousand dollars damages. For six months the details were read all over the world. Mr. Beecher was acquitted by his church, by the jury, and by a National Advisory Council of one hundred and seventy-two churches. Mr. William A. Beach, the leading counsel for Tilton, said later, "I had not been four days on the trial before I was confident that he was innocent.... I felt and feel now that we were a pack of hounds trying in vain to drag down a noble man." Judge Neilson, who had not known Mr. Beecher previously, became his warm friend.

Most persons who will take the trouble to go over the testimony now, after twenty years have cooled the passions of the hour, will agree with Mr. Beach. Dr. Barrows says truly, "That any man should have endured the fires which surrounded Mr. Beecher, and have come forth so radiant, so pure, so self-respecting, and so widely trusted and beloved, is a moral miracle, the parallel of which it would be difficult to find."

The expenses of the trial year were $118,000; and though Plymouth Church raised Mr. Beecher's salary for that year to $100,000, he found himself deeply in debt. To pay this indebtedness he gave a series of lectures during the next two or three years. "The Reign of the Common People," "The Burdens of Society," "Conscience," "The Uses of Wealth," "The Ministry of the Beautiful," "Evolution and Religion," were among his most popular lectures. Upon the last, though a deep subject, I have seen five thousand persons strangely moved by his eloquence.

Although in some places he was jeered at by the rabble, yet year by year he found great strength and comfort in the love of the people. He wrote home that preaching Sunday evening in Boston, "Ten thousand people couldn't get in. Shook hands with whole audiences. Papers next morning with kind notices. Went to Congregational ministers' meeting on Monday morning. Cheered and clapped when I entered. After prayer for day was finished it was moved that I address the meeting. I did so, and closed with prayer. All wept, and it broke up like a revival meeting."

In 1886, when Mr. Beecher was seventy-three years of age, he consented to go a third time to England, to see his friends and lecture. Mrs. Beecher accompanied him, with his friend and lecture agent, Major J. B. Pond. Three thousand Plymouth Church people came to see him set sail in the early morning of June 19. Dodworth's band played "Hail to the Chief;" and then, as the vessel moved away, the great crowd sang, "Praise God from whom all blessings flow." One friend had sent a basket of twenty homing pigeons; and these in the afternoon carried back messages to the loved ones.

Everywhere in England Henry Ward Beecher was received with a royal welcome. There were no more meetings like those at Manchester and Liverpool in the days of the Civil War. So vast were the crowds to hear him preach, that the congregations had to be admitted by ticket. Thousands were necessarily turned away. His first lecture was at Exeter Hall, London.

"Between July 4 and Oct. 21, fifteen and one-half weeks," says Mr. Pond in his book, "A Summer in England with Henry Ward Beecher," "Mr. Beecher preached seven times, gave nine public addresses, and delivered fifty-eight lectures. For the fifty-eight lectures he cleared the sum of $11,600, net of all expenses for himself and Mrs. Beecher from the day they sailed from New York."

It is estimated that Mr. Beecher earned by his pen and voice during forty years in Brooklyn nearly a million and a half dollars, most of which he gave away.

But much as he enjoyed England, the brave man was growing weary with the work of life. He wrote, "I want to come home.... I long every year to lay down my tasks and depart.... It is simply a quiet longing of the spirit, a brooding desire to be through with my work, although I am willing to go on, if need be."

He came home Oct. 31, 1886, and soon promised to complete the second volume of the "Life of Christ." He also made a contract with a publishing firm to have his autobiography ready before July 1, 1888.

He wrote some on each book during the winter. March 3 he went to New York with his wife, who said, "I never knew my husband so lively, tender, or joyous before, or not in a long time." That night he retired early, feeling weary. The next day, Friday, he slept nearly all day, and, being aroused to go to a prayer-meeting, said he did not feel like getting up. A physician came in the afternoon and in the evening, and asked Mr. Beecher to raise his hand. He could not. The left side showed signs of paralysis. It was apoplexy.