Beecher, Henry Ward

1813–1887

Minister, Lecturer, Writer, and Social Reformer

The scion of a famed family of ministers and reformers, Henry Ward Beecher was a chief spokesman of the nineteenth-century middle class. Although charges of adultery ultimately undermined his influence, he promoted an ethos of middle-class Protestant masculinity that addressed the challenges posed by the market economy and industrial capitalism of the nineteenth century.

Beecher was ordained in 1837, and he became the pastor of the Plymouth Congregational Church in Brooklyn, New York, ten years later. He attracted a large following among the urban middle class in Brooklyn—more than 3,000 people attended his sermons every Sunday. His early preaching articulated a style of Victorian manhood at once entrepreneurial and religious, calling upon men to exercise moral and sexual restraint and to reject the temptations of immoral business dealings, gambling, and prostitution that were by-products of the new market economy. He encouraged young men to channel their masculine energies into their own salvation and the salvation of the world by taking up the causes of abolitionism, temperance, and even woman suffrage.

Beecher's Lectures to Young Men (1844), part of a growing body of advice literature for urban men, brought his ideas on masculinity to a national audience. He urged the upwardly mobile young men streaming into America's growing cities— a group that reformers considered particularly prone to immorality—to avoid excessive secularism as they sought economic success. Beecher encouraged these men to embrace Christianity and practice the virtues of self-made manhood: self-discipline, industry, sobriety, and piety. He maintained that these virtues, which blended capitalism and Christianity into a coherent model of American masculinity, could bring purpose and success to the lives of young men.

In 1874, Beecher became embroiled in a sex scandal that severely tarnished his public image. His friend, Theodore Tilton, filed suit against Beecher, alleging that Beecher had committed adultery with Tilton's wife, Elizabeth. The controversy raised questions about the relationship between male ministers like Beecher, who possessed authority, influence, and charisma, and the women who constituted a majority of most congregations. It also suggested disparities between public Victorian-era pronouncements about male sexuality and the actual sexual identities and practices of men. A months-long trial ended in acquittal, but rumors of his alleged affair would continue even after Beecher's death.

In the years following the trial, Beecher increasingly became an apologist for established, Victorian male authority. An advocate of social Darwinism, he sanctioned economic and social competition among men as natural and identified success as a mark of manliness. Beecher viewed the labor radicalism of the late-nineteenth century as an inappropriate challenge by inferior and unreasonable men to the social order. In marked contrast to his earlier warnings, he increasingly encouraged middle-class men to enjoy their hard-earned affluence. He also began advocating “muscular Christianity,” calling for increased male membership in the church, emphasizing the connection between physical fitness and spiritual strength, and he was one of the first to advocate the building of gymnasiums within the facilities of the Young Men's Christian Association (YMCA).

Although often remembered as a hypocrite, a man whose success brought about the betrayal of his earlier ideals, Beecher's significance should not be underestimated. In the early decades of the nineteenth century, he was among the most prominent advocates of self-made Christian manhood and, later in his career, he became one of the most well-known defenders of the middle-class hegemony made possible by that ideology.

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