The Most Famous Man in America

I’ve recently finished reading Debby Applegate’s The Most Famous Man in America: A Biography of Henry Ward Beecher. I first heard about the book when it came out and received really excellent reviews. So I picked up a gently used copy online (actually, I don’t think it had even been read!) and it sat on my night stand for about eight months. This summer, though, I’ve started work on an essay on Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter and Harriet Beecher Stowe’s* Uncle Tom’s Cabin for the SAMLA conference in Atlanta in November. There isn’t all that much out there specifically and explicitly connecting Hawthorne and Stowe, so I found myself doing more general reading on both and looking for interesting connections there. This led to me to another excellent biography, Joan D. Hedrick’s Harriet Beecher Stowe: A Life. After reading Hedrick’s book and learning just a bit more about the fascinating Beecher clan, I couldn’t resist diving into Applegate’s text.

And I am so glad I did. When this book first came out, I remember people making a lot out of what was probably the most sensational part of Beecher’s life: his very public trial for adultery. (See here and here). It was, to use a cliché, a trial of the century, with all the bells and whistles: sex, religion, secrets, scandals…no murders, so maybe it wouldn’t find its way into a Law and Order: 19^th Century America series, but you get my point. The trial business was incredibly interesting, but the book as a whole is quite good. It has a less academic voice than most biographies I read these days, but honestly, I found that just a bit refreshing.

Simply put, Beecher is a fascinating man: smart, compassionate, passionate, deeply flawed, but (and I think I can say I really believe this) a good man who ultimately wanted to do good work in the world. I found myself very interested in Beecher’s own religious struggles. Raised by Lyman Beecher, the last of the great New England Calvinist preachers, he inwardly struggled with and eventually rejected Calvinism, embracing instead an explicitly evangelical religion that stressed Christ’s loving redemption of men—as well as man’s potential to do and be good. The sections in which Applegate addresses Beecher’s agony over perfectionism are especially moving, I think. (Hedrick, incidentally, also discusses Stowe’s battle with perfectionism with equal skill). It makes sense, of course, that great minds of the nineteenth-century—people like Beecher, Stowe, Hawthorne, Emerson—would lose sleep over their spiritual states. Nineteenth-century America was a place of great promise and trouble—a nation growing and changing, but also marked by great national sins (the way I describe it to my students): slavery, unequal rights for women, and the continuing genocide of the Native Americans. Beyond the scope of the nineteenth-century, though, Beecher’s spiritual journey still resonates today for Christians who wonder about the big questions: what is the nature of man? What is my role in this world? How should I live my life as a Christian? What role should evangelism play in my everyday life?

Anyway, Applegate’s book gives great insights on nineteenth-century America and the amazing Beecher clan. It also reinforces a point that continues to impress me the more I learn about this time period—how very connected all the big names were. For instance, Walt Whitman admired Beecher very much, as did Twain*. I am reminded of a moment in researching my dissertation when I discovered that Sarah Winnemucca had possibly met Henry James on one of her trips east. It’s hard to think of two figures in nineteenth-century American less alike than these two (both of whom figure into my dissertation), yet even they seem to have crossed paths.

Next on my list of pseudo-fun reading: Reinventing The Peabody Sisters, a collection of essays on these amazing women. Well, I suppose that’s more “work” reading than fun, but I do need to get to this book, which I’ve had since January. Maybe I ought to pick up this one for fun…

*I've linked to both the Harriet Beecher Stowe House and the Mark Twain House in part because I have very nice memories of visiting both homes during a snowstorm a few years ago while visiting my sister in Hartford, CT. She lived right behind the Twain house, which is right next to the Stowe House. Don't ask her about it though--she'll just talk about how all we did in Stowe's house was visit the gift shop. "Some scholar of women's writing you are," she laughed. In my defense, the snow was really coming down by the time we got there! Plus I didn't even know the Stowe House was there until we saw it, which says a lot about her reputation these days versus Twains'.