Lyman Beecher

• Lyman Beecher
• Born: October 12, 1775
• Died: January 10, 1863

Theologian and educator, was born in New Haven, Connecticut, the only child of David Beecher by his third wife Esther (Lyman) Beecher. She died of consumption two days later. David Beecher’s family came to America from England in 1637. Beecher was brought up by his aunt and uncle, Catherine and Lot Benton, on their farm in Guilford, Connecticut. They adopted the boy and he spent his youth as a blacksmith and farmer. He was prepared for college by the Rev. Thomas Bray and entered Yale College at eighteen. He pursued the usual classical course, but under the influence of the Rev. Timothy Dwight, president of Yale, he studied theology. Graduating in 1798, he continued his studies for another year. After he was ordained in the Presbyterian church in 1799, Beecher accepted a pulpit in the East Hampton, Long Island, Presbyterian church. On September 19, 1799, he married Roxana Foote of Nut-plains, Connecticut, the grandaughter and ward of Andrew Ward, a Revolutionary War general. They had eight children. Catharine was born in 1800, William in 1802, Edward in 1803, Mary in 1805, George in 1809, Harriet in 1811, Henry Ward in 1813 and Charles in 1815. Catharine became an educator and author with a national reputation; Harriet as Harriet Beecher Stowe was the world-famous author of Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852); Henry Ward became a minister who promoted the social gospel movement; the other sons studied theology, and all were ordained ministers. Mary Beecher Perkins was the grandmother of Charlotte Perkins Gilman, the feminist thinker and heroine of the women’s movement. After seventeen years of a happy marriage, Roxanna Beecher died in 1816, and the following year Beecher married Harriet Porter, daughter of Dr. Aaron Porter of Maine. Their three children were Isabella, born in 1822, and Thomas and James born in 1824 and 1828. Isabella Beecher Hooker was a leading worker for the woman suffrage movement.

Beecher, a devoted father, gave his children a powerful sense of religious purpose; born to be a leader, he was their role model, and, like him, they reached people through writing and speech. There was a lighter side to Beecher as well. He romped and danced with his children and trained the boys in fishing, hunting, and woodcraft. Of the family, the Rev. Theodore Parker remarked that Lyman Beecher was “the father of more brains than any other man in America.”

Beecher’s salary in East Hampton was not large enough to support his wife and growing family comfortably, so in 1810 he accepted an offer from the First Congregational Society of Litchfield, Connecticut. He proved very popular here because he delivered sermons several times each week and hastened the conversion of many. He initiated one of the first moral crusades in the nation, when in 1813 the Connecticut Society for the Reform of Morals was organized at his initiative. The society’s goal was to eradicate Sabbath-breaking, profanity, and intemperance. Beecher demanded total abstinence from liquor in a series of six sermons addressed to his congregants in 1825; first published in 1826 as Six Sermons on the Nature, Occasions, Signs, Evils and Remedy of Intemperance, they were widely read and translated into several languages. Often quoted, they became a leading propaganda tract of the temperance movement. By then acknowledged as the leading temperance reformer of the clergy, Beecher also helped to organize the American Bible Society, the Domestic Missionary Society, and the American Society for the Promotion of Temperance.

Because his reputation grew throughout New England, it is not surprising that Beecher left Litchfield in 1826 to go to Boston as organizer of the Hanover Street Presbyterian Church. Once again his salary was increased, for he was deemed the best equipped to battle the growth of Unitarianism. His church quickly rose to 130 members and developed youth groups and social clubs under his guidance.

In 1832, Beecher became the president of Lane Seminary in Cincinnati and pastor of the Second Presbyterian Church in that city. The move was made because he felt strongly that the future of the new nation was closely linked to the proper moral development of the West. In his Plea for the West (1835) he expressed the view that the West was “a young empire of mind, power, and wealth and free institutions, rushing up to a giant manhood with a rapidity and power never witnessed below the sun.” Beecher believed he could exercise a leading role in bringing the civilizing influence of Christianity to the region. At Lane Seminary he was responsible for training new ministers for the future churches of the West and as a minister of his own church he would seek converts in the general population.

Beecher’s middle-class congregations in the East prospered during the economic expansion of nineteenth-century America. They were competitive and individualistic in their outlook and could not easily accept a traditional Calvinistic interpretation of the diety as a God of wrath, who preordained at birth those who would be saved in the next life. A different interpretation was developed by New School Presbyterians, of whom Beecher was one.

As it depended on the individual’s ability to prosper in the market place, so salvation became linked with the ability to use one’s free will; first to go through the mystical experience of conversion and become one of the elect; then to use that will to renounce one’s sins. A sense of achievement was possible in the spiritual realm as it was in the material.

The concept of free will as it was linked to the idea of immediate repentance was Beecher’s contribution to the theology of the era. He and his fellow ministers felt their major responsibility lay in fostering and mightily encouraging conversion. The doctrines of the church as interpreted by its ministers provided guidance. The incentive was the knowledge that heaven not hell awaited the righteous.

The Presbyterian church that Beecher was to lead in Cincinnati wanted none of this New School interpretation, with its emphasis on free will and choice. The Second Presbyterian Church was a stronghold of Old School beliefs and soon after his arrival Beecher was formally charged with heresy. He was brought to trial by the local presbytery and was acquitted. His opponents were not content with this decision and appealed it to the Presbyterian church’s General Assembly. Realizing that the verdict there would go against them, the Old School group finally withdrew their complaint. The Beecher case hastened the schism that split the Presbyterian church in the United States into Old and New School branches in 1837-1838.

Beecher resigned his pulpit in 1843. He then organized the Walnut Street church where New School doctrines were welcome and accepted. Harriet died in 1835 and he married Lydia Jackson in 1836. They had no children. Having triumphed over his adversaries in the church, Beecher’s reputation was enhanced throughout the Midwest.

Other problems confronting Beecher in Cincinnati centered on Lane Seminary, where anti-slavery debates took place on nine evenings in February 1834 under the leadership of the radical abolitionist Theodore Dwight Weld. The students formed an antislavery society and became advocates of immediate emancipation. They also proposed to work with the free black population of the city to uplift them through “social intercourse according to character, irrespective of color.” That resolution angered the faculty, the trustees, and Beecher as well. Critical of their support of immediate freedom, they found even less tolerable the still more radical concept of socialization among the races on an equal basis.

Beecher left for the East on a fund-raising tour in May of 1834, hoping the students would compromise and withdraw the dreaded resolution. His plea for Christian unity was not heeded. On August 20, 1834, the executive committee of the Seminary trustees recommended that all student groups except those dealing directly with education be banned. In October, Beecher signed a “Declaration of the Faculty of Lane Seminary,” which endorsed the trustees’ proposals. Weld was thereupon expelled and his group left the seminary and moved to nearby Oberlin College.

Beecher was not an enthusiast of the abolitionist cause, and, like the trustees, he thought mixed social relations among the races particularly disdainful. He had allowed the debates because he believed in the right of free speech and discussion. He did not choose to return to mediate the dispute although Weld had requested that he do so, and, fearing a loss of support from the conservative Cincinnati trustees, he supported their resolution of August. He resigned from the presidency of Lane Seminary in 1850.

Invited to be a keynote speaker at the World Temperance Convention in London in 1846, Beecher made his only tour abroad. He lectured throughout the British Isles and was warmly received. Beecher returned to the East in 1851 and prepared his collected theological works for publication. They appeared in three volumes in 1852-1853. In Boston he also dictated his two volume Autobiography (1864-1865) to his son Charles. Another son Henry Ward Beecher had become a nationally known minister and Beecher moved to Brooklyn, New York, to be near him and worship at his church. He died there in January of 1863, at the age of eighty-seven.

Beecher’s significance as a reformer lay in his creative transformation of Presbyterian doctrine for the emerging white, upward-striving industrial middle class. He seized upon the most viable elements of Protestant theology and shaped a crusading faith. Both he and his children were leaders and trend-setters of American thought. This devoted minister and loving father bequeathed to America a Christian heritage of reverence and respect for human striving, fallibility, and freedom.

Books by Lyman Beecher include: The Autobiography of Lyman Beecher, edited with an introduction by B. Cross (1961). Books about Lyman Beecher include M. Rugoff, The Beechers: An American Family in the Nineteenth Century (1982); M. Caskey, Chariot of Fire: Religion and the Beecher Family (1978); F. B. Dexter, Biographical Sketches of Graduates of Yale College, vol. V (1911); S. C. Henry, Un-vanquished Puritan: A Portrait of Lyman Beecher (1973); C. Rourke, Trumpets of Jubilee (1927); and L. B. Stowe, Saints, Sinners and Beechers (1934). See also R. H. Abzug, Passionate Liberator (1980).