These days it can be easy to forget that, through the heyday of the great awakenings and for a long while after, one hallmark of the evangelical stream of Christianity was the wideness of its banks. In 1740, when George Whitefield’s Anglican superiors urged him to remember that theirs was the only true church, the sensational revivalist responded, “I saw regenerate souls among the Baptists, among the Presbyterians, among the Independents, and among the Church [of England] folks—all children of God, and yet all born again in a different way of worship: and who can tell which is the most evangelical?”
A century later, when Princeton Theological Seminary graduate Robert Baird sat down to write the first major history of religion in America, he included among the “evangelical churches” not only the Episcopalians, Congregationalists, Baptists, Presbyterians, and Methodists but also the Lutherans, German Reformed, Reformed Dutch, Cumberland Presbyterians, Reformed Methodists, Reformed Presbyterians, and even Quakers. It was a big tent, to say the least—less a stream than a vast ocean.
Obbie Tyler Todd’s riveting new book, The Beechers: America’s Most Influential Family, opens a window into this earlier season in evangelical history by telling the story of one of its leading families. The Beechers did not see eye to eye on almost any particular theological or political question. But at a more fundamental level, like most evangelicals of their day, they embraced a faith that called them to improve the world.
One can certainly quibble with Todd’s subtitle. Did the Beechers exert more influence in United States history than, say, the Adamses, with their two presidents and numerous other luminaries, let alone the Rockefellers or the Kennedys? But there is no question that the members of this one family played outsize roles in the major dramas of their time. Readers will be struck not only by the extent of their sway but also by the depth of their optimism that God’s will might be done on earth as it is in heaven—a conviction as characteristic of their moment as it is discordant with our own.
The clan’s paterfamilias, Rev. Lyman Beecher, radiated this hopeful outlook. Although he revered Jonathan Edwards and felt deeply loyal to the Calvinist tradition, he contributed to its cultural diminishment by charting the path of a “New School” of Presbyterianism, which was vastly more sanguine about the promise of human strivings. Lyman had no shortage of those, throwing himself into campaigns for temperance and for evangelizing the West.
His enthusiasm for reform and suspicion of Roman Catholicism (another common article of 19th-century evangelical faith) rubbed some of his neighbors the wrong way. When a church where he was serving in Boston caught on fire, Todd writes, “the firemen, many of whom were Catholics, refused to put [it] out.” And that was not all. “In an instance of unbelievable irony,” he goes on to relay, “the church basement, rented out by a local merchant who had been secretly storing jugs of rum, began to explode. Boston’s ‘temple of temperance’ was now overflowing with liquor.”
If “Beecherism” went too far in the eyes of some, it was not thoroughgoing enough for others. Lyman, for one, was no revolutionary. During his stint as president of Cincinnati’s Lane Seminary, a group of students, led by the abolitionist Theodore Dwight Weld, started fraternizing with the local Black community and pushing the administration and trustees to accept the gospel’s radically emancipatory implications. “Although Lyman was quick to point out that Lane had been the first seminary in the United States to admit a Black student, James Bradley, this was not nearly enough for the Lane rebels,” Todd writes. “Weld and his ‘Weldites’ were, in some sense, out-Beechering Beecher.” Lyman’s children would, in more ways than one, end up doing the same.
Part of what makes Todd’s book such a rich read is that it tells a family story through and through. As he narrates the Beechers’ ups and downs, he beautifully captures so many perennial human dynamics. Lyman, for example, was not aware of his own contribution to traditional Calvinism’s eclipse. There was an unnoticed slippage between the ideas he believed he stood for and the way he lived his life. He was, meanwhile, overly attuned to his children’s waywardness when it came to what he regarded as the basic truths of the Christian faith. Like so many parents, he set out to shape them in accordance with his own deepest values, only to bump into the stubborn reality that, like it or not, they got to be their own people and to direct their own steps.
Both things were true: Lyman’s imprint ran deeper than most, and the Beecher children were prone to wander. All seven of his sons who lived to adulthood went on to become ministers. All seven also abandoned anything resembling strict Calvinism.
Lyman’s third-eldest boy, Henry Ward Beecher, went on to become the best-known minister in all the land. In no small part, this owed to his talent for marrying faith and reform (almost always—like his father—in a moderate rather than revolutionary mode). But in the years after Lyman’s death, Henry Ward also became embroiled in arguably the best-publicized sex scandal of the 19th century. He was charged with sleeping with Elizabeth Tilton, who was, along with her husband Theodore, a member of Beecher’s congregation in Brooklyn, New York.
The Beecher-Tilton affair divided sibling from sibling, with some rushing to Henry Ward’s defense and others leading the charge against him. For years afterward, it continued to produce no shortage of pathos and petty squabbling within the family—to wit, when Isabella, Henry Ward’s half sister and sometimes public accuser, showed up to the reception following his funeral, his widow, Eunice, barred her at the door of their home. Isabella waited outside, but to no avail.
She was by that point an avid practitioner of spiritualism and claimed she was able to commune with her dead brother and resolve their differences even while his body lay in the grave. In so many ways, Isabella could not have fallen farther from her father’s tree. And yet, tellingly, when she died, an oil painting of Lyman still hung in the very center of her Connecticut living room.
For Lyman’s part, he was proudest of his eldest daughters. Catharine founded Hartford Female Seminary in the early 1820s. At the end of that same decade, she rallied women across the nation to oppose President Andrew Jackson’s insidious plans for removing the Cherokee from their rightful lands.
Although Catharine’s most lasting work was in education rather than activism, her sister went on to become an abolitionist icon. Harriet Beecher Stowe’s best-selling 1852 novel, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, won countless new recruits to the cause of freedom. So many, in fact, that it got the attention of President Abraham Lincoln. According to a famous story Todd recounts, Stowe met Lincoln at the White House in the winter of 1862, where he reportedly remarked, “So you are the little woman who made this big war.”
Both Catharine and Harriet eventually wound their way out of the Presbyterian fold and joined the Episcopal Church. It was not what Lyman would have chosen for them, even though there was plenty of room to roam within the surprisingly capacious boundaries of the evangelical fold of their day.
Yet there were limits too. When Harriet’s son Charley flirted with joining the Unitarian church, his mother drew a hard line in the sand. “I protest with all the energy of my heart & soul against your joining the camp of the Unitarians,” she wrote to him. Her father could not have said it better himself.
As Todd underscores, “In the house of Lyman Beecher, there were numerous enemies of Christianity, but only two represented complete apostasy from the faith: Catholics and Unitarians.” Charley relented, at least formally even if not in his heart. Family ties were not everything for the Beechers, but amid all the centrifugal energies of the age, they never stopped exerting an inordinate pull.
The saga of this storied 19th-century evangelical family is, in Todd’s expert telling, not a simplistic morality play. In these pages, the Beechers appear as the complex, multidimensional persons they in fact were. They embodied a generous vision of orthodoxy even as they clung to various forms of prejudice. Their intense investment in familial relationships proved time and again to be at once grounding and crushing. And their myriad efforts to grow the church and better the world—their unremitting “Beecherism”—should function as both a source of inspiration and a cautionary tale.
This book is a must-read for anyone interested in the longer history of evangelical Protestantism and its momentous impact during a critical period in the development of a much-younger United States. As the nation now careens toward the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, with pessimism surging on all sides of the lines that divide, The Beechers should spur us to deep reflection on the possibilities and pitfalls of the human impulse to improve. Lyman and his brood would have it no other way.
Heath W. Carter is an associate professor of American Christianity at Princeton Theological Seminary and the author of Union Made: Working People and the Rise of Social Christianity in Chicago.
