The Great Brooklyn Scandal

FREE LOVE AND HEAVENLY SINNERS (273 pp.)--Robert Shaplen--Knopf ($3.95).

He was a national institution 80 years ago, widely acclaimed as the greatest preacher "since Paul preached on the Hill of Mars." Member of a famous evangelical family (Harriet Beecher Stowe, who wrote Uncle Tom's Cabin, was his sister), he had packed in the parishioners at Brooklyn's big Plymouth Church for 23 years. Then, at 57, and at the peak of his influence, he was accused of practicing what he preached against. "On the night of July 3, 1870,'' writes Author Robert Shaplen. "Elizabeth Richards Tilton, a small, dark-haired woman of 35, the mother of four children, confessed to her husband, Theodore, that she had committed adultery with her pastor, the Reverend Henry Ward Beecher."

Shocking Medium. The confession was the outcome of a weird triangle. Tilton had long worshiped Preacher Beecher as "my man among men." Beecher, who had married the Tiltons back in 1855, visited their home constantly, hinting freely at his own marital unhappiness. Tilton would say: "There is one little woman down at my house that loves you more than you have any idea of."

After the little woman confessed that the love between her and Beecher was not merely spiritual, bushels of self-abasing letters were exchanged. The three met tearfully in Mrs. Tilton's bedroom. "I kissed him and he kissed me," Beecher later recalled, "and I kissed his wife and she kissed me, and I believe they kissed each other." With that, all hoped to hush up the affair.

But it was too late. The Tiltons were great pals of the suffragettes, and Mrs. Tilton's secret became known to the sharpest battle-ax of the women's movement, Mrs. Victoria C. Woodhull. "The Woodhull," as the papers called her, was a freeloving fortuneteller and spiritualist who, according to Commodore Vanderbilt, furnished him with valued market tips; on the platform she would point to her "brevet husband," a Civil War veteran named Colonel Blood, and yelp: "There stands my lover, but when I cease to love him, I shall leave him." When The Woodhull was attacked for living a libertine life, she coldly countered by charging in print, naming all names, that the country's No. 1 preacher was a bigger libertine than she and a hypocrite to boot.

Flowery Denials. A special investigating committee of the Plymouth Church, chosen by Beecher, pronounced the pastor innocent. But in the end, Husband Tilton's forbearance gave out, and he sued Beecher for alienation of affections.

The trial lasted six months and the newspapers, Beecher complained, gave the case more space than the Civil War battles. Seated amid his six lawyers, Defendant Beecher, sniffing occasionally at a nosegay of violets, denied everything.

Q. Had you received any improper favors from her? A. (with great emphasis) It was a thing impossible to me--Never! (Applause).

After eight days and 52 ballots, the exhausted jurymen turned in a split verdict, 9 to 3 for Beecher. Author Shaplen, who has written a fascinating account of the great scandal, goes on to tell the epilogue. Three years later, Mrs. Tilton, whom neither side had dared call in the trial, suffered her final fit of conscience and published an open letter confessing "that the charge brought by my husband, of adultery between myself and the Reverend Henry Ward Beecher, was true."

Though Beecher's influence waned, he went on spellbinding in Brooklyn until his death in 1887, when 50,000 lined the streets for his funeral. Mrs. Tilton died in 1897, ten years before her husband, whose death came in lonely Paris exile. The redoubtable libertine, Victoria Woodhull, outlived them all.

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