Free Love
The Story of a Great American Scandal
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
A wry, instructive, and hugely entertaining account of “one of the most sensational trials in American history” (New York Times Book Review).
On the night of July 3, 1870, Elizabeth Tilton confessed to her husband that she’d had an affair with their pastor, Henry Ward Beecher. This secret would soon transfix America, for Beecher was the most famous preacher of the day, founder of the most fashionable church in Brooklyn Heights, a presidential hopeful, an influential supporter of Abolition, and a leader of the campaign for women’s suffrage. When Beecher tried to silence the Tiltons, it was a whisper network of suffragists, notably Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, who spread news of the affair, and it was the radical Victoria Woodhull—an outspoken proponent of “free love”—who seized on it, as political dynamite, to blow up the myth of monogamy among the political elite. Her public accusations led to even more public trials, which shocked the country and divided the most progressive thinkers of the era.
In 1953, the journalist Robert Shaplen revisited the Tilton-Beecher affair in a series of articles for the New Yorker, relying on 3,000 pages of contemporary accounts—court transcripts, love-letters, newspaper reports and illustrations, even political cartoons—to reanimate a scandal that shook the American reform movement and to expose a strand of America’s cultural DNA that remains recognizable today.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
First published in 1954, this droll and waggish chronicle of an American media frenzy from journalist Shaplen (The Lost Revolution) revels in the eccentricity of 19th-century elites. Tracking the consummation and public fallout of an 1860s extramarital affair between famed preacher Henry Ward Beecher and Elizabeth Tilton, wife of Theodore Tilton, one of Beecher's most ardent followers, Shaplen pokes sly fun at the trio and their upper-crust set through extensive excerpting of their saccharine letters to one another and reports on their outlandish behavior, all of which became public during a civil trial. Beecher, a serial philanderer, comes off as a charismatic seducer (instructing Elizabeth in his letters on how to keep their affair secret by referring to it as "nest-hiding"), while Elizabeth appears pitiable and lonely in light of her husband's strange aloofness (a bizarre man, Theodore was given to walking around his house at two in the morning moving picture frames). Shaplen's liberal quotations from the correspondence occasionally bog down the narrative in confessions and apologies; however, the book comes alive in the latter half with the entrance of Victoria Woodhull, a politically ambitious spiritualist who pushed the scandal into public view (she hoped that this evidence of men's fallibility would undercut the public's faith in male politicians). Shaplen's eye for detail creates a vision of sweaty, prurient absurdity in postbellum America. This enthralls.