Other Powers

The Age of Suffrage, Spiritualism, and the Scandalous Victoria Woodhull

By Goldsmith, Barbara

Perennial

BORN AGAIN IN THE LAMB'S BLOOD

Roxy Claflin stood on the frozen, rutted road, shivering in her threadbare calico dress as the late December winds lashed the frosted fields of Homer, Ohio, and resolutely awaited the messenger of God. When at last the black-cloaked rider, whom she had seen in one of her visions, thundered past on his mud-spattered black horse, she felt the beginning of exaltation. She would be reborn as fresh to creation as Eve.
In 1837, in the farm towns of Ohio, most religious revivals occurred in the long, dormant period from winter to spring. As if summoned by an unseen force, the isolated farmers, storekeepers, and laborers assembled in remote barns and churches to yield themselves up in pain and ecstasy, to obliterate themselves, to emerge, born again, from a crucible of fire. This young nation was ruled externally by its government but internally by rigorous Calvinist doctrine. Those who denied God's power were no more free of His iron hand than those who affirmed it. In these years heaven and hell were awesomely present, and revivals swept the nation. But the old Puritan faith that prescribed harsh laws of predestination and infant damnation had begun to yield to the less stringent "new Calvinism" of the kind preached by the great Lyman Beecher, who proclaimed that, through conversion, one could forge one's own destiny. If men and women chose a life of virtue, both they and their offspring might be spared damnation. Beecher's new, gentler Calvinism was intended to save souls for his church, for he knew that the world was changing, and no longer were people content to be consigned to an immutable place in society or in the hereafter over which they had no control. In nearby Cincinnati, Beecher preached this doctrine at revivals over the objections of the Presbyterian Church Synod.
In October 1835, the synod charged Lyman Beecher with heresy. At his trial, Beecher's twenty-two-year-old son, Henry Ward, stood by his side, handing him the books and other documents to which he referred in his defense. According to contemporary accounts, Lyman Beecher's defense was so equivocal and protracted that the weary church synod disbanded before it got around to asking his opinion on predestination. Later, when he too began to preach, Henry Ward Beecher would learn to follow his father's example of shading the truth to save his popularity, if not his soul.
Henry Ward Beecher was the fourth and dullest of Lyman's six sons. His mother, the former Roxanna Foote, was a brilliant, lighthearted woman who died when Henry was three. In a sermon, he would recall that as a child he had not even one toy. In school, Henry's slow wits and his stammer brought punishment. Often he was confined to the girls' corner, where he sat on a stool for hours at a time wearing a peaked paper dunce cap. Yet he laughed easily and knew how to flatter and charm.
At fourteen, Henry was sent to the Mount Pleasant Classical Institution in Amherst, Massachusetts, where he met Constantine Fondolaik, whose parents had been killed by the Turks in the massacre of 1822. Henry saw Constantine as "a young Greek God" and wrote, "We are connected by a love which cannot be broken." At nineteen, both young men were sent to Amherst College, and Henry declared, "We will love and watch over one another, seeking by all means in our power to aid and make each other happy." Throughout his life Henry Ward was able to feel such love for both the men and women who attracted him. As for Constantine, he died fifteen years later of cholera. Henry named his third son in memory of his dear companion.
In May of his freshman year at Amherst, Henry met Eunice Bullard, the daughter of a stern doctor who lived near Worcester, Massachusetts. Dr. Bullard discouraged his daughter's high spirits and gave her a strict Puritan upbringing. Once, when she appeared at the dining room table in a low-cut silk dress, her enraged father remarked that she must be cold, then picked up a tureen of soup and flung it at her. After a two-year sporadic courtship, Henry bought Eunice an engagement ring for which he paid 85 cents. That done, for the next three years he saw Eunice only twice. His constant companion, however, was Constantine, and on school vacations they traveled around the country demonstrating phrenology, the new so-called science that showed how the size and shape of the skull defined character and intelligence. At last, after a six-year, on-and-off-again courtship, Henry and Eunice were married.
Twenty-six-year-old Henry Ward Beecher secured his first pastorate as minister of the Second Presbyterian Church in Indianapolis in May 1839. It was a poor congregation, and the parish house was only ten feet wide. Eunice said the bedroom was so small that she was "obliged to make the bed on one side first, then go out on the veranda, raise a window, reach in and make the bed on the other side." They had arrived in the midst of a malaria epidemic, which Henry knew about but had not disclosed to his pregnant wife for fear she would not agree to the move. Soon Eunice came down with the disease and gave birth to a stillborn child. Her next child died at fifteen months.
In the five years that followed this death, Eunice aged prematurely from the effects of her repeated pregnancies but produced three living children. By then her husband had become a fiery revivalist preacher and had discovered that he could reach souls through raw emotion in a way that he never could do through intellect alone. He conducted revivals throughout Ohio and Indiana. In the woods near Terre Haute he whipped his audience into such a frenzy that he was able to bring a thousand men, women, and children into the fold in a single day. This burgeoning new country provided fertile ground for the second wave of what was known as the Great Awakening. So fiery was the spirit of revival that upstate New York and New England, where it was strongest, came to be called the Burned-Over District.Continues...

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