Overview

On the night of July 3, 1870, Elizabeth Tilton confessed to her husband that she’d had an affair with their pastor, Henry Ward Beecher. This secret would soon transfix America, for Beecher was the most famous preacher of the day, founder of the most fashionable church in Brooklyn Heights, a presidential hopeful, an influential supporter of Abolition, and a leader of the campaign for women’s suffrage. When Beecher tried to silence the Tiltons, it was a whisper network of suffragists, notably Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, who spread news of the affair, and it was the radical Victoria Woodhull - an outspoken proponent of “free love” - who seized on it, as political dynamite, to blow up the myth of monogamy among the political elite. Her public accusations led to even more public trials, which shocked the country and divided the most progressive thinkers of the era. In 1953, the journalist Robert Shaplen revisited the Tilton-Beecher affair in a series of articles for the New Yorker, relying on 3,000 pages of contemporary accounts - court transcripts, love-letters, newspaper reports and illustrations, even political cartoons - to reanimate a scandal that shook the American reform movement and to expose a strand of America’s cultural DNA that remains recognisable today.

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9781946022912

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"""A fascinating account of the great scandal.""-- ""Time"" ""When Theodore Tilton brought Henry Ward Beecher into court in 1875 on the charge of alienating his wife's affections, he raised the curtain on one of the most sensational trials in American history. The accused had been an intimate family friend of the Tiltons and was pastor of Plymouth Church in Brooklyn and a noted preacher and lecturer on public issues of the day. In Free Love and Heavenly Sinners, based on his articles in the New Yorker, Robert Shaplen tells the story with unvarnished realism against a background of circumstantial detail, much of it taken from the 3,000-page official record of the trial . . . In reviving what the author calls the 'passion drama' of the period he has brought a celebrated case into contemporary focus and has done it tellingly, assembling the record with stark precision and linking it closely to the moral and religious attitudes of the day."" --Ishbel ross ""New York Times"""

"""Remarkably level-headed and absorbing . . . Shaplen does not render a verdict, but he gives us the facts we need to reach our own.""--Louis Menand ""from the Foreword"" ""[Henry Ward Beecher] was a national institution . . . 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 . . . The trial lasted six months and the newspapers, Beecher complained, gave the case more space than the Civil War battles . . . [Shaplen] has written a fascinating account of the great scandal.""-- ""Time"" ""One of the most sensational trials in American history . . . In Free Love and Heavenly Sinners, based on his articles in the New Yorker, Robert Shaplen tells the story with unvarnished realism against a background of circumstantial detail, much of it taken from the 3,000-page official record of the trial . . . In reviving what the author calls the 'passion drama' of the period he has brought a celebrated case into contemporary focus and has done it tellingly, assembling the record with stark precision and linking it closely to the moral and religious attitudes of the day."" --Ishbel ross ""New York Times"""

Author Information

Robert Shaplen (1917-1988) began reporting in the Pacific theater during World War Two and became one of America's most influential experts on East Asia in the postwar era. He was Far East correspondent for the New Yorker from 1962 to 1978, and remained a New Yorker staff writer for the rest of his life. He published ten books, including one novel and one story collection. Free Love (originally titled Free Love and Heavenly Sinners) was his only foray into nineteenth-century American history. Louis Menand is an award-winning essayist, critic, author, professor, and historian, best known for his Pulitzer-winning book The Metaphysical Club, an intellectual and cultural history of late 19th and early 20th century America.

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