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Henry Ward Beecher (June 24, 1813 – March 8, 1887) was an American Congregationalist clergyman, social reformer, and speaker, known for his support of the abolition of slavery, his emphasis on God's love, and his 1875 adultery trial. Henry Ward Beecher was the son of Lyman Beecher, a Calvinist minister who became one of the best-known evangelists of his age. Several of his brothers and sisters became well-known educators and activists, most notably Harriet Beecher Stowe, who achieved worldwide fame with her abolitionist novel ''Uncle Tom's Cabin''. Henry Ward Beecher graduated from Amherst College in 1834 and Lane Theological Seminary in 1837 before serving as a minister in Indianapolis and Lawrenceburg, Indiana. In 1847, Beecher became the first pastor of the Plymouth Church in Brooklyn, New York. He soon acquired fame on the lecture circuit for his novel oratorical style, in which he employed humor, dialect, and slang. Over the course of his ministry, Beecher developed a theology emphasizing God's love above all else. He also grew interested in social reform, particularly the abolitionist movement. In the years leading up to the Civil War, he raised money to purchase slaves from captivity and to send rifles—nicknamed "Beecher's Bibles"—to abolitionists fighting in Kansas and Nebraska. He toured Europe during the Civil War speaking in support of the Union. After the war, Beecher supported social reform causes such as women's suffrage and temperance. He also championed Charles Darwin's theory of evolution, stating that it was not incompatible with Christian beliefs. Widely rumored to be a womanizer, in 1872 the ''Woodhull & Claflin's Weekly'' published a story about his affair with Elizabeth Tilton, the wife of his former associate Theodore Tilton. In 1874, Tilton filed adultery charges against him for the affair. The subsequent trial, which resulted in a hung jury, was one of the most widely reported American trials of the century. Beecher's long career in the public spotlight led biographer Debby Applegate to call him "The Most Famous Man in America". ==Early life== Born in Litchfield, Connecticut, Henry was the eighth of thirteen children born to Lyman Beecher, a Presbyterian preacher from Boston. His siblings included author Harriet Beecher Stowe, educators Catharine Beecher and Thomas K. Beecher, and activists Charles Beecher and Isabella Beecher Hooker; Lyman would later become known as "the father of more brains than any man in America". Beecher's mother, Roxana Foote, died when Henry was three; Lyman Beecher soon remarried to Harriet Porter, whom Henry later remembered as "severe" and subject to bouts of depression. Beecher also taught school for a time in Whitnsville, MA. The schoolhouse was later moved and became a residence which is still occupied. The Beecher household was, one of the children later recalled, "the strangest and most interesting combination of fun and seriousness". The family was poor, and Lyman Beecher assigned his children "a heavy schedule of prayer meetings, lectures, and religious services" while banning the theater, dancing, most fiction, and the celebration of birthdays or Christmas. The family's pastimes included story-telling and listening to Lyman play the fiddle. Henry had a childhood stammer and was considered slow-witted and one of the less promising of the brilliant Beecher children. His less-than-stellar performance earned him punishments such as being forced to sit for hours in the girls' corner wearing a dunce cap. At age fourteen, he began his oratorical training at Mount Pleasant Classical Institution, a boarding school in Amherst, Massachusetts, where he met a fellow student, Constantine Fondolaik, a Smyrna Greek. Both students later attended Amherst College together, where they signed a "contract" pledging lifelong friendship and brotherly love. Fondolaik died of cholera after returning to Greece in 1842, and Beecher later named his third son after him.〔Hibben, Paxton; Lewis, Sinclair, Henry Ward Beecher: An American Portrait, Kessinger Publishing, 2003, p. 32〕 During his years in Amherst, Beecher had his first taste of public speaking and, setting aside his early dream of going to sea, resolved to join the ministry.〔Wikisource:Appletons' Cyclopædia of American Biography/Beecher, Lyman〕 He met his future wife, Eunice Bullard, the daughter of a well-known physician, and on January 2, 1832, became engaged to her. During his Amherst years, he also developed an interest in the new pseudoscience of phrenology—an attempt to link personality traits with features of the human skull—and befriended Orson Squire Fowler, who later became the theory's best-known American exponent. Beecher graduated from Amherst College in 1834 and then attended Lane Theological Seminary outside Cincinnati, Ohio. Lane was headed by Beecher's father, who had by this time become "America's most famous preacher". Lane's student body was riven in these years by the slavery question: whether to support a form of gradual emancipation, as Lyman Beecher did, or to stand by principle and demand immediate emancipation. Henry stayed largely clear of the controversy, sympathetic to the radical students but unwilling to defy his father. He graduated in 1837. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Henry Ward Beecher」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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