The Most Famous Man in America: The Biography of Henry Ward Beecher
by Debby Applegate
Summary
Debby Applegate follows Henry Ward Beecher from a childhood as the eighth of Lyman Beecher's thirteen children, brother to Harriet Beecher Stowe, through Amherst College and Lane Theological Seminary and into small pulpits in Indiana before he took over the newly founded Plymouth Congregational Church in Brooklyn in 1847, the post from which he became, in Applegate's telling, the most famous man in America for the whole of his long career. The book traces the preaching style that built that fame: a warm, colloquial, often funny delivery that rejected his father's stern Calvinism for what Beecher called a gospel of love, a shift in American religious feeling that Applegate argues reshaped mainstream Christianity so thoroughly that later generations no longer recognized how radical it had been.
Applegate follows Beecher's evolving stance on slavery, from cautious moderate to committed abolitionist who staged mock slave auctions at his own pulpit to raise money for individual enslaved people's freedom and who sent rifles nicknamed Beecher's Bibles to antislavery fighters in Kansas, and through his wartime speaking tour of Europe, undertaken at Lincoln's own request, to build British support for the Union. The book gives equal space to Beecher's advocacy beyond slavery, including his presidency of the American Woman Suffrage Association, and to the personal scandal that nearly erased all of it: his affair with Elizabeth Tilton, the wife of a friend and colleague, exposed publicly in 1872 and litigated in a sensational 1875 trial that ended in a deadlocked jury.
Applegate writes with real sympathy for a man whose private failures sat uneasily against his public reform, and reading the book means following one of the nineteenth century's most consequential and most compromised public figures through both halves of his story together. It suits a reader interested in how religious celebrity actually worked in Beecher's America, and in a scandal that gripped the country the way only a fall from real fame could.
Historical Context & Significance
The Most Famous Man in America won the 2007 Pulitzer Prize for Biography or Autobiography over finalists Arthur H. Cash's John Wilkes and David Nasaw's Andrew Carnegie. It was Applegate's first book, drawn from a doctoral dissertation on Beecher's oratory that she expanded into a full biography; her second, Madam, a life of the New York brothel keeper Polly Adler, did not appear until 2021.
Reviewers praised the book for reviving a figure who, despite once being recognizable to nearly every American, had faded from popular memory far more than his sister Harriet, whose Uncle Tom's Cabin has kept her own name current in a way Beecher's sermons never could. Applegate's own account argues that mainstream American Christianity absorbed Beecher's theology so completely that the man who first preached it simply disappeared inside his own success.