she pretends to be able to enter Beecher’s mind, saying that he was nervous about his big speech at the end of the Civil War, but in general she shies away from that temptation and keeps her prose nonfictional. However, about a third of the way into the biography she falls prey to a very modern failing, the temptation of judgment, and it undermines the rest of the book.

It is a bad sign even before this happens that she occasionally uses some anachronistic language, referring to Beecher’s early performance as a minister in which he was good at preaching but not good at pastoral care as “a mixed bag.” Similarly, it is jarring when she speaks of the conflict between students and their elders at Beecher’s college as a “generation gap.” Finally, it is especially disconcerting to read in a work that aims to bring an earlier century to life that “it is difficult to understand how Americans [in the early nineteenth century] could have tolerated slavery.”

Slavery was a key issue in Henry Ward Beecher’s life, and it is a key issue in this biography, but it is not handled here with enough historical sensitivity. Applegate does note that there were those in the North who, though they opposed slavery, feared that to try to end it might disrupt the Union, a reasonable fear since it in fact did, producing the horrific Civil War. However, when the slavery issue arises in Beecher’s life and in this biography, Applegate seems unable to understand why someone like Beecher might take a moderate stance on it, criticizing slavery but also criticizing the extreme antislavery abolitionists. From this point on in the book she begins to suggest that Beecher was guilty of hypocrisy or cowardice or worse, and more generally she falls out of sympathy with her subject.

In fact, this loss of sympathy begins even earlier in the book, in discussing Beecher’s marriage to Eunice Bullard. Applegate presents evidence showing that Eunice was difficult, but for some reason the author seems to blame Henry for any marital difficulties. A biographer is probably better off seeking to understand than to blame, but if blame is to be handed out, the evidence suggests that it might be better attached to Eunice. Similarly, it would be much more useful to seek to understand Beecher’s moderation than to condemn it, especially since Applegate notes how popular Beecher became. If he was simply wishy-washy, hypocritical, and cowardly, why did he become such a force in nineteenth century America?

This is not something that Applegate answers, but an earlier biography of Beecher, by Clifford E. Clark, Jr., in 1978, does attempt an explanation. For Clark, Beecher was a “spokesman for a middle-class America,” in tune with the large moderate center of public opinion in the North before the Civil War. Beecher, according to Clark, articulated the conflicted position of the moderates on the slavery issue and in general spoke to the hopes and fears of middle-class Americans at a time of rapid development and uncertainty.

Clark pushes his thesis too hard, but at least he has one; he also provides readers with a better sense of the American mind at the time and of Henry Beecher’s mind. Clark spends a large part of his biography analyzing Beecher’s sermons and essays to draw out the details of his views on such topics as individualism and society, social reform, temperance, the women’s movement. Applegate spends much less time on Beecher’s ideas and instead devotes the last part of her biography to the confusing sex scandal that enveloped him in the 1870’s when he was sixty years old. Applegate presents evidence that suggests Beecher may have had various affairs, but the most scandalous affair, if it was indeed an affair, was with Elizabeth Tilton, the wife of his colleague and friend Theodore Tilton.

Accusations of impropriety led to an investigation by Beecher’s church in Brooklyn and then a lawsuit by Theodore Tilton. Matters were complicated by the fact that Elizabeth Tilton confessed to adultery with Beecher and then recanted her confession, then confessed and recanted again. In the end, Beecher was let off by a hung jury that had voted nine to three in his favor. The twenty pages Clark devotes to this episode seem too much. Applegate gets mired in it and devotes most of the last part of her book to it, in the process losing the focus on Beecher and going on at length about the Tiltons and other characters involved.

Applegate’s biography begins with a tight focus on her subject, sensitively portraying his development through childhood, adolescence, and young manhood, laying the basis for a biography that gets to the essence of its subject’s life. Unfortunately she goes astray, becoming first a stern judge and then a reporter of confused gossip. Still, the reader gets a sense from this book that Henry Ward Beecher was an extraordinary man with extraordinary influence. Even after the scandal, his parishioners raised money to pay his legal bills, and a lecture tour he went on was a huge success. President Abraham Lincoln personally chose Beecher to give the speech of reconciliation at Fort Sumter marking the end of the Civil War, and in the presidential election of 1884 both the Republicans and the Democrats competed for his endorsement.

Beecher was an important man with some interesting notions about reaching the public through candor and emotion and through the informality he learned in Indiana before moving east to Brooklyn. He helped change the direction of American Christianity in the nineteenth century by emphasizing love and compassion instead of hellfire and damnation. In addition he played an important role in shaping public opinion on slavery, going so far as to raise money for rifles to defend against pro-slavery mobs in Kansas in the 1850’s and holding mock slave auctions in his church to raise money to buy individual slaves’ freedom.

All of this emerges to a certain extent in Applegate’s book, but especially on the slavery issue she does not provide the sympathetic insight that she might have, and the whole last half of Beecher’s career still calls out for the nuanced treatment she provides for his early life. The reader learns from Applegate’s biography how the young Beecher prepared himself for his adult career, but the shape of that career then gets lost amid the biographer’s criticisms and her long account of his alleged adultery.

It is also disappointing to reach the end of the biography without ever discovering who it was that called Beecher “the most famous man in America.” The reader might expect that some contemporary called him this, but apparently the phrase is of Applegate’s own invention. It is a questionable phrase: Surely Abraham Lincoln was more famous, or such writers as Ralph Waldo Emerson, Mark Twain, or Walt Whitman, or even General Ulysses S. Grant. However, Beecher did have a certain amount of fame in his time; as Applegate notes, he was often in the news, his sermons were published and sold well, he received a large amount of fan mail, he endorsed commercial products like a modern celebrity, and the Brooklyn ferries creaked with crowds wanting to attend his church to see and hear him preach.

Beecher’s sister, the equally famous Harriet Beecher Stowe, author of Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852), wondered to her brother: “What does make people go on so about you?” It is a question Applegate never really answers, but she does at least present the question, and though her biography falls down in its later stages, its opening chapters give evidence of a scholar who knows how to make an interesting story out of the past.