Free Henry and Clara by Thomas Mallon

agitated than the rest of the audience. Rumors were everywhere that John Brown, who had come back east to raise money from the radical abolitionists, was planning to finance a slave rebellion. These days Pauline Harris was so swept up by national events that she neglected to test each one’s relevance to the political career ofher husband. Reverend Beecher was, of course, Horace Greeley’s chosen preacher, not something to please Mr. Weed, but lately the Dictator himself seemed a small thing, just one more perplexed politician trying to ride the tide of news. Pauline was determined to hear Beecher no matter whose protégé he was.
    The crowd settled itself while an usher filled the water glass at the platform. Howard Rathbone, who had gone down to his cousin Henry’s aisle seat, thought he’d better now double back to his own. He took just enough time to say, “Perhaps you
are
a great prognosticator, Cousin. The crowd seems worked up for Armageddon.”
    When Henry Ward Beecher at last took the stage, he struck Clara as a compressed version of her handsome father. Though quite a bit younger, and wearing long hair that had not gone so gray, the minister had a broad face and chest that might have belonged to a shorter Ira Harris. There was power in Beecher’s form, the suggestion of great energy too long pent up and needing loud, immediate release. He flung his first words at the audience like a lightning bolt, punctuating them with a stomped foot: “Did I, when I became a minister, cease to be a man or a citizen? No! A thousand times no! Have I not as much interest in our government as though I were a lawyer, a ditch digger, or a wood sawyer?” He was soon pounding his fists and throwing back his hair, and when he came to utter the name of John Brown, it was with a force that shook even the Rathbones at the back of the hall: “I may disapprove of his bloody forays and of those feeble schemes we hear rumored, and I may shrink likewise from the judicial bloodshed that doubtless would follow them.” He paused and stood stock still. Not a cough interrupted the silence.
“But if such schemes unfold, let no man pray that Brown be spared!”
Raising his clenched fists heavenward, Beecher cried, “Let the South make him a martyr! His work will have been miserable. But a cord and a gibbet will redeem all that and round up his failure with heroic success!”
    The crowd was too stunned even to applaud.
    When it came to Brown’s feeble schemes and bloody forays, Henry Rathbone realized he felt no disapproval at all. Neither,he knew, did Beecher. Passion was passion, and Beecher had it, a lust for drama and catastrophe and redemption that he might have satisfied equally as a stage tragedian. So long as the action was spectacular, its moral end was beside the point. John Brown, Henry felt sure, was the same: after fomenting an insurrection, he would be the perfect man to lead the avenging mob against himself. They were, Henry thought unhappily, three of a kind, himself and Brown and Beecher.
    Beecher dropped his voice to a hush. “If an enslaved man, acting from the yearnings of his own heart, desires to run away, who shall forbid him? I stand on the outside of this great cordon of darkness, and every man that escapes from it, running for his life, shall have some help from me.” He trailed off into complete silence, which was soon broken by clapping at the back of the auditorium, a smattering that gathered noise and gusto as it rolled forward toward the stage. Listening to its full thunder, Beecher cast his eyes modestly downward.
    No hands contributed more fervently to the ovation than the small gloved ones belonging to Mary Hall, who was imagining how eagerly she would help any slave found tapping at her family’s door on a cold night like this. She had already had her gentle heart impassioned by the novel Beecher’s sister had written, and only wished there were some way to stop the sufferings of gentle souls like Topsy.