Trials of Intimacy: Love and Loss in the Beecher-Tilton Scandal by Richard Wightman Fox

Abstract

BOOK REVIEWS357 Trials ofIntimacy: Love and Loss in the Beecher-Tilton Scandal. By Richard Wightman Fox. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 1999. Pp. xii, 419. $30.00 cloth.) Richard Fox brilliantly recovers and Ulumines one of the biggest messes in nineteenth-century religious history: the Beecher-Tilton "scandal" and trial(s) of 1874-75. Henry Ward Beecher, pastor of Brooklyn's Church of the PUgrims, brother of Harriet Beecher Stowe and assorted other Beechers, and the man described by the Andover Review in the decade after the Civil War as "the greatest preacher of the EngUsh-speaking race, the foremost private citizen of the Republic," was charged by Theodore TUton with having had "criminal relations" with his wife, Elizabeth. The charge of TUton—himself a weU-known editor and lecturer, as well as erstwhUe confidant, parishioner, and protégé of Beecher's who had joined "PUgrim Church" as a direct result of Beecher's own preaching —resulted in what might be termed the nineteenth-century analogue to the OJ. Simpson media circus. As Fox correctly observes at the beginning of his elegantly written, captivating, and thought-provoking study,"every sentient American foUowed the Scandal in 1874 and 1875," reading (UteraUy) hundreds of pages of verbatim trial transcript in papers from Portland, Maine, to Portland, Oregon: nothing really approached the media frenzy unleashed by the BeecherTUton trial until the trial in Los Angeles over a century later. Students of American religion before Fox tended to avoid writing critical studies of the scandal both because of the conflicted nature of the "evidence" presented by the two sides in the case (Beecher steadfastly denied any immoral relations with TUton's wife untU his death), and because Elizabeth TUton herself changed her testimony before her death: denying any wrong-doing during the course of the trial, Elizabeth subsequently published a "confession" in 1878 in which she admitted to immoral relations with her beloved pastor. While both the ecclesiastical and civU juries in 1875 found Beecher innocent of the charges brought against him, pundits at the time and since have raised disturbing questions about the probity and innocence of the "most trusted man in America." How can any scholar, over a century after the "Scandal," pick through the mass of conflicting evidence to assign praise and blame? Fox himself confesses that his historian's instinct at the outset of his project was to "find out what had really happened: who was telling the truth?" (p. 4). But such a quest was probably doomed from the start: the reality of Elizabeth TUton's relationship with Beecher was far too complicated to settle with a simple 'yes' or 'no' on the question of adultery. Indeed, Fox observes that what confronted him as an historian was not a simple choice between "guUt" and "innocence," but rather an interpretation of multiple competing stories, each of which was far too complex to be encompassed by the "side" metaphor. What Fox actually does in a compelling reverse-chronological narrative that reads like a page-turner is to listen carefuUy to these stories, "and try to hear what the tellers were saying about their selves, their relationships, and their culture ." In attending to these multiple stories, the reader is not asked to move any 358BOOK REVIEWS closer to a final judgment regarding the adultery issue; rather, attention to these stories "will point us toward some large truths about the Uved experience of one segment of late 19th century middle class Americans." It wfll deliver these "large truths," Fox adeptly points out, because Beecher and the TUtons were, paradoxicaUy, both very religious and very secular northern liberal Protestants. Much like the briUiant story limned by WiUiam McLoughlin in The Meaning ofHenry Ward Beecher, Fox uses his three protagonists to adumbrate two cultural worlds—one passing away and one a-birthing—that are the real focus of his study. Indeed, one of Fox's chief motives in recounting his story in reverse chronological order—despite the problems such a chronology might pose for comprehension—is that it "saves the reader from a bigger trap: that of suspecting that there is a straightforward story to be told in the first place" (p. 6). By recovering...