SCHOOL, SCANDAL, SUFFRAGE

In looking onto an event which occurred 377 years ago today, I came upon an interesting tale of tabloid scandal involving a clergyman, his assistant, his assistant’s wife, and the first woman to run for president of the United States. 

The school today

The Boston Latin School is a public exam school founded on 23^rd April 1635 in Boston, Massachusetts. It is both the first public school and oldest existing school in the United States. The Public Latin School was a bastion for educating the sons of the Boston elite, resulting in the school claiming many prominent Bostonians as alumni. Its curriculum follows that of the 18th century Latin-school movement, which holds the classics to be the basis of an educated mind. Four years of Latin are mandatory for all pupils who enter the school in 7th grade, three years for those who enter in 9th. In 2007 the school was named one of the top twenty high schools in the United States by U.S. News & World Report. As of 2012, the school is listed under the gold medal list, ranking 38 out of the top 100 high schools in the United States (21,000 public high school from 48 states and the District of Columbia were analysed) by U.S. News & World Report.  The school was named a 2011 Blue Ribbon School of Excellence, the US Department of Education's highest award.

The school's first class included nine students; the school now has 2,400 pupils drawn from all parts of Boston. Its graduates have included four Harvard presidents, four Massachusetts governors, and five signers of the United States Declaration of Independence, as well as several preeminent architects, a leading art historian, a notable naturalist and the conductors of the New York Philharmonic and Boston Pops orchestras. There are also several notable non-graduate alumni, including Louis Farrakhan, leader of the Nation of Islam. Another non-graduate alumnus is Benjamin Franklin. Boston Latin admitted only male students at its founding in 1635. The school's first female student was admitted in the nineteenth century. In 1972, Boston Latin admitted its first co-educational class.

Statue of Henry Ward Beecher in

Downtown Brooklyn, New York

Henry Beecher

The list of graduates includes Cotton Mather, Samuel Adams, John Hancock, Joseph Kennedy (father of John F. Kennedy) Ralph Waldo Emerson, George Santayana, Theodore White, Leonard Bernstein, Nat Hentoff and Henry Ward Beecher.

Beecher was a clergyman, social reformer, abolitionist and speaker. He graduated from Boston Latin in 1826. He was one of the thirteen children of Lyman Beecher, a minister from New Haven, Connecticut. In 1799 Lyman Beecher married Roxana Foote, the daughter of Eli and Roxana (Ward) Foote. They had nine children: Catharine E., William, Edward, Mary, Tommy, George, Harriet Elizabeth, Henry Ward, and Charles. Roxana died on 13^th September 1816. The following year, he married Harriet Porter, and fathered four more children: Frederick C., Isabella Holmes, Thomas Kinnicut, and James Chaplin. After Harriet died on 7^th July 1835, he married Lydia Beals Johnson, but had no more children. His third wife pre-deceased him as well.  His daughter Harriet Elizabeth is better known as Harriet Beecher Stowe, the author of Uncle Tom’s Cabin. 

As to Henry Ward Beecher, graduate of the Boston Latin School, Amherst College (1834) and the Lane Theological Seminary (1837) he was an advocate of Women’s suffrage, temperance and Darwin’s theory of evolution, and a foe of slavery and bigotry of all kinds (religious, racial and social). Beecher held that Christianity should adapt itself to the changing culture of the times. It was said that "His career took place during what one scholar has called the Protestant Century, when an eloquent preacher could be a celebrity, the leader of one or more reform movements and a popular philosopher — all at the same time." It is also said that he was close to a series of attractive young women, but his wife, Eunice, the mother of his 10 children, was "unloved."

In a highly publicised scandal known as the Beecher-Tilton Affair, he was tried on charges that he had committed adultery with a friend’s wife Elizabeth Tilton. In 1870, Elizabeth had confessed to her husband, Theodore Tilton, that she had had a relationship with Henry Ward Beecher. From 1860 to 1871, Tilton was the assistant of Beecher, and in 1874, he filed criminal charges against the clergyman for "criminal intimacy" with his wife. Following the apparent acquittal of Beecher in the trial (the public view was ambivalent to his acquittal), Tilton moved to Paris, where he lived for the rest of his life. The charges became public when Theodore Tilton told Elizabeth Cady Stanton of his wife's confession.

Stanton

Woodhull

Stanton repeated the story to fellow women's rights leaders Victoria Woodhull and Isabella Beecher Hooker. Henry Ward Beecher had publicly denounced Woodhull's advocacy of free love. Woodhull hated hypocrisy. She published a story in her paper (Woodhull and Claflin's Weekly) on 2^nd November 1872, claiming that America's most renowned clergyman was secretly practicing the free-love doctrines which he denounced from the pulpit. The story created a national sensation. As a result, Woodhull was arrested in New York City and imprisoned for sending obscene material through the mail. The Plymouth Church held a board of inquiry and exonerated Beecher, but excommunicated Mr Tilton in 1873.

Tilton then sued Beecher: the trial began in January 1875, and ended in July when the jurors deliberated for six days but were unable to reach a verdict. His wife loyally supported him throughout the ordeal.

Strauss-Kahn

Beecher

A second board of enquiry was held at Plymouth Church and this body also exonerated Beecher. Two years later, Elizabeth Tilton once again confessed to the affair and the church excommunicated her. Despite this Beecher continued to be a popular national figure. However, the debacle split his family. While most of his siblings supported him, Isabella Beecher Hooker openly supported one of his accusers.

In 1871, Tilton had published Victoria Woodhull: A Biographical Sketch. In 1872 Victoria Woodhull was the first woman candidate for President of the United States (see previous blog – Women of 1838 published on 7/04/2011).

Woodhull wrote, inter alia, the following:

"To woman, by nature, belongs the right of sexual determination. When the instinct is aroused in her, then and then only should commerce follow. When woman rises from sexual slavery to sexual freedom, into the ownership and control of her sexual organs, and man is obliged to respect this freedom, then will this instinct become pure and holy; then will woman be raised from the iniquity and morbidness in which she now wallows for existence, and the intensity and glory of her creative functions be increased a hundred-fold."