The Beechers

In a Brooklyn Church one Sunday in 1848, a fiery young preacher stood at his pulpit, gesturing at a handsome mulatto girl who sat near him on the platform. Cried he: ''This is a marketable commodity! Such as she are put into one balance and silver into the other. I reverence woman. For the sake of the love I bore my mother I hold her sacred even in the lowest position and will use every means in my power for her uplifting. What will you do now? May she read her liberty in your eyes? Shall she go out free?"

Amid sobs from the congregation, the collection plates were heaped high with money to free the slave girl. Thereafter Henry Ward Beecher, zealous Abolitionist, continued to bring slaves into his Plymouth Church. This congregation had been founded in 1846 by three men who broke away, from the nearby Church of the Pilgrims. Inducing Henry Ward Beecher to be their preacher, they soon heard people saying: ''If you want to hear him preach, take the ferry to Brooklyn and then follow the crowd." Preacher Beecher stayed with Plymouth Church for the remaining 40 years of his life.

The Church of the Pilgrims and Plymouth Church, oldest congregational bodies in Brooklyn ("the City of

Churches'''), remained apart for 88 years. Last week, to carry on their social work and administer more efficiently their combined properties worth $1,000,000 and their $500.000 endowment, the two congregations totaling 1,500 voted to merge. Under the name "Plymouth Church of the Pilgrims,'' with two ministers alternating in the pulpit, the new church will retain the building to which Henry Ward Beecher brought fame, dispose of the other. The name of the great preacher appeared patly in headlines. This week a full-sized portrait of him, his father and nine of his brothers and sisters is to be published by his grandnephew, Publicist Lyman Beecher Stowe. Called Saints, Sinners and Beechers* it expounds the fact that when the Beechers entered the Church they found it grimly Calvinistic and weighty with theology; by the time they left it they had shifted its emphasis to the service of this world. Says Author Stowe : "Who knows whether the Beechers were good and great? I don't, but I do know they were amusing, lovable and outrageous."

Lyman Beecher (1775-1863) was called by Theodore Parker "The father of more brains than any other man in America." From his father, a New Haven blacksmith, he inherited distinctive Beecher qualities: dyspepsia, absentmindedness, manual skill, a sense of humor, intellectual curiosity and physical strength. Thrice-married he begat 13 children of whom three died young and the rest lived an average of 81.5 years. While a student of divinity at Yale, as an orthodox Calvinist Lyman Beecher stoutly believed in predestination: man was damned from the start and could be saved only through God's agency. When he left a pulpit at East Hampton, L. I. to take one at Litchfield. Conn, he preached a farewell sermon on "The Universal and Entire Depravity of Human Nature."

By the time he was a preacher in Boston in 1826, Lyman Beecher had become a "New School" Calvinist, believing both in free will and predestination. In 1835 when he was president of Lane Theological Seminary in Cincinnati. Lyman Beecher was tried for heresy. In a day when a theological squabble never failed to titillate the public, his trial and acquittal were front-page news all over the U. S. His children:

Catherine Esther Beecher (1800-78) was the first member of the family to revolt completely against Calvinism. When her fiance was drowned in a shipwreck, she declined to believe a preacher who told her "God has answered all his benevolent purposes by his death, and all is well.'' Catherine refuted Jonathan Edwards on free will, denied the doctrine of original sin, and set about improving the educational opportunities of U. S. females. She founded five schools, was one of the first progressive educators, wrote a best-selling treatise on housekeeping.

William Henry Beecher. (1802-89) was a dyspeptic minister who was called "The Unlucky" because misfortune attended all his ventures. Of his wedding he wrote: "Was married. . . . No company, no cake, no cards--nothing pleasant about it." William begat six children. Edward Beecher (1803-95) was for a time president of Illinois College. In a best-selling theological work called The Conflict of Ages he carried on the family trend away from orthodoxy. Said his father: "Edward, you've destroyed the Calvinistic barns, but I hope you don't delude yourself that the animals are going into your little theological hencoop." Few theological animals went into the hencoop, which was a theory of the pre-existence of souls. Mary Foote Beecher (Mrs. Thomas C. Perkins, grandmother of Author Charlotte Perkins Gilman) was the only purely private Beecher. Since she wanted to do something, she resolved to live to be 100. Writes Author Stowe of his Grand-Aunt Mary: "I remember when the old lady was in training for this century run, one was allowed to talk with her only for five minutes. Her attendant watched the clock." Born in 1805, Mrs. Perkins undershot her goal by five years. Harriet Beecher (1811-96) married Professor Calvin Stowe. upon the death of his wife who had been her best friend. Her first works were a geography and some sketches, but with the Abolition controversy all about her. Uncle Tom's Cabin evolved slowly in her mind. Later she said, 'The Lord Himself wrote it and I was but the humblest of instruments in his hands." In it? first year this book sold 1,800,000 copies. Translated into 37 tongues, it is estimated by Author Stowe to have sold a total of six or seven million. Mrs. Stowe never caused more stir than in 1869 when in the Atlantic Monthly she published The True Story of Lady Byron's Life. For defending the memory of her dead friend by recounting Lord Byron's incestuous relations with his sister, Mrs. Stowe was roundly condemned in the U. S. and England.

Henry Ward Beecher (1813-87). One of his earliest letters was: "Der Sister. We ar al wel. Ma haz a baby. The old sow had six pigs." He was educated at Sister Catherine's Hartford Female Seminary, Boston Latin School, Mount Pleasant Collegiate Institute. Amherst College and Lane Theological College. As a missionary preacher he lectured Indiana frontiersmen on gambling, drinking and wenching. In 1861 Beecher became editor of the Independent and was drawn into the most unfortunate part of his career. His assistant, a brilliant, erratic journalist named Theodore Tilton, and the owner of the paper, H. C. Bowen, became such radical Republicans that Beecher was forced to resign. Presumably for spite, Tilton accused Beecher of having made improper proposals to Mrs. Tilton. A third person succeeded in convincing soft-hearted Beecher that he had actually wrecked Tilton's home through not having been on guard against Mrs. Tilton. Trapped into signing a memorandum which sounded like an admission of guilt, Beecher was sued by Tilton for alienation of affection. He was exonerated after a trial which cost him $118,000 (his church raised his salary to $100,000 for that year) and, as he said, took up more newspaper space than all the battles of the Civil War.

Charles Beecher (1815-1900) was the family musician, a hymn-writer and also a heretic.

Isabella Beecher Hooker (1822-1907) was a pioneer Suffragist, called by Susan B. Anthony "The soundest constitutional lawyer in the country.'' She stormed the Senate Judiciary Committee, resolute in black silk, and in 1888 assembled in Washington the first international convention of women.

Thomas Kinnicut Beecher (1824-1900) founded in Elmira, N. Y. one of the first "institutional churches'' in the U. S., complete with gymnasium, library, theatre, dancing and billiard rooms. One of his jobs was to regulate the Elmira town clock.

James Beecher (1828-86), a sailor and Civil War soldier, became a minister in Owego, N. Y. He preached in the forests of Ulster County, N. Y., in the slums of Brooklyn, had a mental breakdown. One night he quietly went to his room, placed the muzzle of his gun in his mouth, shot himself.

*Bobbs-Merrill, $3.75.

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