Ohio History Journal

THE HUMILIATION OF HENRY WARD BEECHER IN

THE WEST

 

by DAVID MEAD

Assistant Professor of English, Michigan State College

In the columns of Ohio's newspapers of nearly a century ago

lies the dramatic account of Henry Ward Beecher's rejection as a

lecturer by the indignant citizens of the West, a story which has

not been revealed by the biographers of the great Eastern divine.

Not that Beecher was the first celebrity to be humiliated by Ohio's

lecture public in the boisterous 1850's. Ralph Waldo Emerson,

during his Ohio journeys of 1850 and 1852, had been reminded

often enough that he was a pantheistic dreamer whose disjointed,

unintelligible philosophizing had little to do with the practical

affairs of life. In 1854 the New York reformer George William

Curtis, had visited the state with a "namby-pamby, up-townish"

lecture on "Success." His listeners, men who had experienced the

struggle of the West to escape the economic bondage of the eastern

bankers and who loved their mercantile account books next to

their homes and families, resented his implication that wealth had

nothing to do with success in life. And the western press, in re-

minding Curtis that he would do well to remain at home, could not

suppress a sneer at the fashionable cut of his coat "or the particular

shade of yellow gloves." Parke Godwin of the New York Evening

Post suffered when he took the liberty with Ohioans in 1855 of

contrasting the social standards of the East and West in a discourse

entitled "American Social Life." His hearers objected vehemently

to his disparagement of the West's great middle class, "the sub-

stantial architects of our greatness," and dismissed both Godwin

and his lecture as "a miserable and disgraceful failure."

But these orators antagonized Ohioans merely by their opin-

ions. They offered nothing worse than annoying philosophical

speculation; Beecher, however, was associated with something much

more offensive-a financial speculation. In 1855 the eloquent min-

ister of Brooklyn's Plymouth Church hired himself out to a shrewd

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HENRY WARD BEECHER                       95

lecture agent, a speculator, and set out for the West, his right hand

raised in ardent praise of religion and truth, while, according to

contemporary accounts, his left hand sought to unfasten the purse

strings of the public. Western citizens were not usually averse to

financial speculation; indeed they throve on it. During the early

decades of the century their economic lives sometimes depended on

it. In 1855, the very year of Beecher's journey, Ohioans flocked

by the thousands to hear Phineas T. Barnum, the greatest speculator

in America, the "Prince of Humbug," deliver his lecture on "The

Philosophy of Humbug." They cheered and applauded a discourse

which was admittedly a collection of "stale newspaper scraps and

stump anecdotes, which have been bawled in all the school houses

of the country during the campaigns of the last twenty years."

Barnum appealed to their own sense of humbuggery. Besides, he

was an eminently successful speculator, and many of his listeners

secretly hoped they would learn something that could be turned to

advantage in their relations with their fellow citizens.

In the minds of western people, however, Barnum and Beecher

were as unlike as two Americans well could be. Barnum appealed

to the gullibility of the people; Beecher appealed to the highest

motives of human conduct. Beecher was the idol of American

Protestants and one of the most sought-after lecturers in the East.

Western citizens were familiar with his oratorical fame; they read

his published works and the excerpts from his sermons which were

scissored from eastern journals and reprinted by the western

press. Each year Beecher was besieged with a great volume of

invitations to appear before Ohio's lyceums.1

The source of Beecher's difficulty lay partly in his attempt to

lecture under conditions running contrary to customs developed by

Ohio's lecture system during the early fifties. The standard ad-

mission price for lyceum lectures was twenty-five cents; higher

prices were not countenanced by lecture-goers except on special

occasions when the proceeds were for charitable purposes. Ap-

pointments for lectures were normally arranged by lyceum secre-

taries through direct correspondence with prospective lecturers.

 

1 In addition to the lectures treated in this study, Beecher's Ohio engagements

included appearances at Painesville, July 4, 1854; at Cincinnati, November 16, 1856;

and at Cleveland, July 2, 1854, October 20, 1857, October 21, 1857, and February 26,

1862.

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Lecture agents were not numerous, and large agencies for sched-

uling speakers' itineraries were not successfully established until

after the Civil War. Lyceum secretaries annually wrote many invi-

tations to speakers, and no orator was likely to attempt the dis-

courtesy of lecturing privately in a community whose lyceum invi-

tation he had refused.

In 1854 and 1855 the Cincinnati Young Men's Mercantile Li-

brary Association had applied for Beecher's services, but no ap-

pointment was secured. It came as a considerable surprise to the

Cincinnati lecture public, therefore, when the announcement was

made in the local newspapers that Beecher would speak in the city

under the auspices of a Chicago lecture agent on October 22, 1855.

The press was quick to exploit this discourtesy to "the first of

lecture associations." The details of Beecher's lecturing arrange-

ments were available in the Chicago papers, as the orator had

begun his western tour in that city. Soon all Cincinnati knew that

Beecher, ignoring the invitations of lecture associations in Cin-

cinnati, Columbus, and Cleveland, had arranged with E. S. Wells, a

Chicago agent, to appear in these Ohio cities. Beecher had agreed

to deliver twelve lectures in the West for a sum of $1,500, or $125

per lecture. The Cincinnati Daily Gazette reminded its readers that

the great popular idol had hired himself out to a speculator, had

offended the Young Men's Mercantile Library Association, and, to

pad the pockets of Wells, was charging the exorbitant admission

price of fifty cents.

Beecher lectured on October 22, as announced. On the fol-

lowing day the Gazette noted with satisfaction that only three hun-

dred people had attended the lecture. It was apparent that Wells

had made a bad speculation and that Beecher had "not added to

his reputation by accepting the contract." Had Beecher visited the

city under the auspices of the Mercantile Library Association, "to

whom an unfulfilled promise to lecture has been out for two years,"

he would have "filled the largest church in the city every night for

two consecutive weeks." But he had come as the property of a

speculator, and the Cincinnati public, by staying at home, "ex-

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HENRY WARD BEECHER                       97

pressed in a manner as decided as it is severe, their opinion of the

course the gentleman has pursued."

Beecher defended himself in a letter published in the Gazette

on November 15, 1855:

In regard to the charge of the Cincinnati Gazette, that I had broken

an engagement of two seasons in that city, I pronounce the charge unfounded

and untrue. And no gentleman having official connection, or having had

such connection, with the Young Men's Association, will choose to assert any

such thing over his own proper name.

In answer to the accusation that Wells was a mere speculator,

Beecher declared that his agent was "an upright Christian gentle-

man, a member of the Presbyterian Church, active and useful."

As for the fifty-cent admission charge, Beecher asserted that "the

price is not an unusual one, nor is it unusual for the avails of a

lecture or a course of lectures to go to the lecturer and not to local

associations."

On the evening of October 23, Beecher lectured at Neil's New

Hall in Columbus. The editor of the Daily Capital City Fact

(October 18, 1855) had prepared the city's lecture public for

Beecher's appearance with an editorial entitled "The Lecture

Monopoly." This correspondent protested that it had become the

practice of some of the country's most distinguished and talented

lecturers "to hire themselves out to some Barnum for the lecture

season at a gross sum to be carried around the country." As the

sole object of the speculator was to make money, he would not

hesitate to demand an exorbitant admission fee for his "show."

Thus Beecher "was made to play cat's paw to put money in the

pocket of a heartless speculator," and the people of Columbus

would serve the public interest if they would "decline the honor of

contributing to Mr. W's missionary box."

This newspaper's review of Beecher's discourse provides ample

evidence that Columbus citizens quite agreed with the editor's opin-

ions of the lecture monopoly:

Last evening this gentleman read, very indistinctly, to forty persons, all

told, a lecture on "Beauty." He had advertised to read his lecture on

"Patriotism," but after discovering the want of patriotism in our citizens, in

the gross receipts of fourteen dollars and fifty cents, he concluded to treat

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them to a desertation on the love of the beautiful, not inaptly supposing,

that "money" was an article possessing peculiar charms in this locality.

Beecher did not read very well, "and who could-to a beggarly

account of empty boxes?" At the very outset he "called up the

mourners" to draw close around the stand so that he could see

them. Then, "very incoherently at times," he delivered his lecture

to his "woefully slim auditory." No doubt Beecher's mission as a

lecturer was a noble one, but the name of a "traveling showman"

had been attached to him, and, "until the name of Barnum has

become obsolete, his highest and most worthy endeavor to . . .

ameliorate the condition of man, will in a measure prove futile,

proportionately as the public has resolved to be humbugged no

longer."

In his Cincinnati letter, Beecher commented briefly on his visit

to Columbus:

Of Columbus, O., I have nothing to say. I spent a pleasant day at the

Neil House with a circle of much-loved friends; and if, the next day, any of

its citizens were found with heretical notions they certainly were not infected

by coming to hear my lecture. The Secretary of the Association there, who

wrote me a letter, will one day be an older man and I trust a wiser one.

At Cleveland, where he lectured on October 24, Beecher met

the full wrath of the press. The editor of the Herald (October 22,

1855), maintaining that Beecher broke an engagement with the

Cleveland Library Association to deliver this lecture, exhorted the

public "to effectually put a damper upon all such gouging designs

of showmen, by staying away, and thus leaving this clerical imitator

of the example set by traveling curiosities to discourse to bare

walls, and the exhibitor, Mr. Wells, to pay expenses out of his own

pocket."

On the day of the lecture, Wells and several of Beecher's Cleve-

land friends posted handbills which announced that the lecturer

would vindicate himself from the slanders of the western press.

The Herald called this action "A Trick Worthy of Barnum," adding

that "for this privilege of setting Mr. Beecher right before the

public, this Mr. Wells charges that public only fifty cents per head.

Viva la humbug!!"

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HENRY WARD BEECHER                             99

The announcements of Beecher's lecture were an undignified

mixture of robust western humor and sharp editorial temper:

GRAND LITERARY CIRCUS

Mr. Wells, of Chicago ................ Manager

Unparalleled Attraction, for One Night Only

The Manager announces that, at an expense of $125 per night, he has effected

an engagement with that distinguished individual, the

REV. HENRY WARD BEECHER,

Who will make his only appearance in Cleveland, on Wednesday evening,

Oct. 24th. The public are requested to contribute fifty cents each towards

paying the celebrated performer more money for an hour's talking than an

intelligent mechanic can make by nine hundred hour's labor, in three months.2

Mr. Wells, the Chicago showman, will let his fifty-cent lion roar at

Concert Hall, to-night. The smooth walls of that Hall are excellent for the

reverberations of the lion's voice, and we hope there will be few woolen

coats and silk dresses to deaden it.3

The newspaper editors had their way. According to the Herald,

only 104 persons were present to hear Beecher's lecture on "Patri-

otism," and there were not more than sixty paid admissions.

Beecher's humiliation was complete. He attempted to salvage

something of his reputation in a letter printed by the Cleveland

Plain Dealer on October 25. He denied that he had broken an

agreement to lecture before the Cleveland Library Association.⁴ He

upheld the character of Wells, whom he described as a merchant

and president of Chicago's Metropolitan Library Union. Comment-

ing on the fifty-cent admission price, Beecher wrote:

I think not only that fifty cents (except for lectures devoted to some

charitable end in the community, and where the fee may be regarded as a

contribution to some public end) is too much, but that it would be better to

charge less than twenty-five cents. It would answer the ends of popular

education better were lectures to be afforded for a shilling, and this could be

done with profit to the managers if Halls were large enough.

2 Daily Clevelander, reprinted in Daily Commercial Register (Sandusky), October

24, 1855.

3 Cleveland Morning Leader, October 24, 1855.

4 The correspondence of the Cleveland Library Association is reviewed in the

Cleveland Herald, October 27, 1855. Most of the letters are communications between

the secretaries of the Cleveland and the Chicago Library Associations. The Chicago

secretary talked with Beecher in the East and attempted to make arrangements for

lectures in both Cleveland and Chicago. He reached no satisfactory agreement and

wrote that Beecher's treatment of him was "rather shabby." It is clear that Beecher

broke no promises with lecture associations in the West. He simply did not reply to

their invitations.

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On this occasion Beecher declared that, because of his agree-

ment with Wells, he had no control over the admission price for

the lecture. Later, in his Cincinnati letter, he defended the fifty-

cent admission as a just one.⁵

On October 25, the day of the lecturer's departure, the Cleve-

land Herald pointed out that in the largest cities in Ohio-Cincin-

nati, Columbus, and Cleveland-Beecher had "had the pleasure of

addressing 449 men, women, and children." But if he had come to

the state as his respect for himself should have demanded, he

would have had audiences in these cities "of many hundreds, night

after night." As for Wells, he had perhaps learned that "clergymen

are poor showing stock," and that "the people of Ohio are not quite

so green as he took them to be."

In November 1856, Beecher returned to Cincinnati and de-

livered two lectures under the auspices of the First Orthodox Con-

gregational Society. His success was almost without precedent in

the city's lecture annals. The debacle of the previous year was

completely forgotten by the lecture public. Describing the crowd

that assembled to hear "The Ministry of the Beautiful," the editor

of the Commercial (November 17, 1856) asserted that he had "not

observed such a multitude, excited and swarming about any place

of public meeting in this town since the Buchanan Convention,

when the same ground presented a similar scene."

Beecher, "dressed in black, his coat buttoned tightly up, dis-

playing to advantage his portly proportions in a style rather mili-

tary than clerical," completely captivated his audience with the

beauty and power of his eloquence.

Twenty-three hundred people jammed Smith and Nixon's Hall

to hear the lecture on "Patriotism." The audience, eager to see and

hear the great pulpit orator, sprawled over the stage and stood in

the aisles and doorways. Hundreds more, unable to gain admission,

were sent away disappointed. Henry Ward Beecher had returned

to the West in triumph.

 

5 The Cincinnati letter, written about three weeks after the Ohio lectures, was

much less apologetic than the Cleveland letter. In the former, Beecher declared that

the attitude of Ohio's lecture associations was "arrogant avarice."

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