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Henry Ward Beecher

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Henry Ward Beecher
Birthday
BirthplaceLitchfield, Connecticut, U.S.
Died
Occupation
Protestant Clergyman, Abolitionist

Beecher, Henry Ward

(1813–87) Protestant clergyman, reformer; born in Litchfield, Conn. One of 13 children of clergyman Lyman Beecher (one of his sisters was author Harriet Beecher Stowe), he graduated from Amherst in 1834 and studied under his father at Lane Theological Seminary in Cincinnati, Ohio. In 1839 he became pastor of the Second Presbyterian Church in Indianapolis, Ind., where he developed a forceful, emotional preaching style. Named the first pastor of Plymouth Congregational Church in Brooklyn, N.Y., in 1847, he crusaded from the pulpit for temperance and against slavery and became one of the most influential public figures of his time. He supported Free Soil political candidates and, later, Republicans; on the outbreak of the Civil War his church raised and equipped a volunteer regiment. He edited the religious publications The Independent and The Christian Union (later Outlook) during the 1860s and 1870s. He was acquitted on an adultery charge after a sensational trial in 1874. His many books include Evolution and Religion (1885).
The Cambridge Dictionary of American Biography, by John S. Bowman. Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1995. Reproduced with permission.
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References in periodicals archive
In prose as vivid as her subject's personality, historian Debby Applegate narrates the life of Henry Ward Beecher (1813-87) in this solidly researched and well-written biography.
As part of a negotiation between Henry Ward Beecher and Henry Bowen, in light of accusations of adultery Tilton was making against Beecher with his wife Elizabeth.
"I NEVER knew how to worship until I knew how to love." (Preacher Henry Ward Beecher in Trumpets of Jubilee; Harcourt, 1927)
She gathered data on six of the slaves, members of the Edmonson family, because the father of the fugitive slaves appealed to her brother, Henry Ward Beecher, for financial help.
The instability engendered by economic growth was made far more acute--for the larger community as well as for Brooklyn's African Americans--by the growth of an anti-slavery movement; leading abolitionists such as Arthur and Lewis Tappan and Henry Ward Beecher made Brooklyn their home.
`In a sermon he delivered shortly before the American Civil War began, New England minister Henry Ward Beecher declared that "manhood,--manhood,--MANHOOD,--exercised in the fear of God, has made this nation' (p.
Get the real scoop on Henry Ward Beecher and his 1870s scandal.
For seven months in 1875, America was riveted by a civil trial in Brooklyn in which one of the country's most famous and beloved ministers, the Reverend Henry Ward Beecher (brother of Harriet Beecher Stowe), defended himself against adultery charges brought by his onetime best friend and parishioner, Theodore Tilton.
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