American Realities with Bill Youngs
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    • Gods Messengers: Religious Leadership in Colonial New England, 1700-1750 >
      • Table of Contents
      • Preface
      • Chapter 1: The Ministers and Their Times
      • Chapter 2: The Minister's Calling
      • Epilogue
      • Appendix: Length of Ministerial Settlement
      • Abbreviations
    • The Congregationalists >
      • Timeline
      • Bibliographic Dictionary of Leaders
    • Eleanor Roosevelt: A Personal and Public Life >
      • Prologue: The South Pacific, 1943 >
        • Eleanor Roosevelt South Pacific
      • A Victorian Family
      • The Legacy
      • Growing Up
      • Eleanor and Franklin
      • A Politician's Wife
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      • On Her Own
    • American Realities (Book) >
      • History as a Story
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      • Volume One >
        • The Native Americans
        • The English Background
        • The British American
        • Reform in Colonial America
        • Divided Loyalties
        • The American Revolution
        • Testing the Constitution
        • Republican Nationalism
        • The Limits of Jacksonian Democracy
        • Abolitionists and Anti-abolitionists
        • Texas Revolution
        • Reform in the Early Republic
        • Manifest Destiny
        • A Slave's Story
        • The Civil War >
          • Two Soldiers
      • Volume Two >
        • The “Taming” of the West
        • Beyond Emancipation
        • The New Industrial Era
        • The Birth of Environmentalism
        • New Immigrants
        • Expanding American Democracy
        • World War I
        • Modernity versus Tradition
        • The New Deal
        • Total War
        • The Cold War
        • The Civil Rights Movement
        • Turmoil on the Campuses
        • The New Computer Age
        • America, the Cold War, and Beyond
      • Additional Essays >
        • Norsemen in the New World
    • The Fair and the Falls >
      • Part I: Possessing the Falls >
        • Chapter One: James Glover: Purchasing the Falls
        • Chapter Two: Waiting for the Indians
        • Chapter Three: Harnessing the Falls
        • Chapter Four: "The World's Fair of the Northwest"
        • Chapter Five: The City Beside the Falls
      • Part II: Rediscovering the Falls >
        • Chapter Six: The Twilight of Old Spokane
        • Chapter Seven: Urban Blight and Urban Renewal
        • Chapter Eight: King Cole and The Heart of a City
        • Chapter Nine: Visualizing a World's Fair
      • Part III Redesigning the Falls >
        • Chapter Ten: From Spokane to Paris >
          • Tom Foley's Turn
        • Chapter Eleven: Wooing the Foreign Exhibitors
        • Chapter Twelve: Wooing the Domestic Exhibitors
        • Chapter Thirteen: The Environmental Debate
        • Chapter Fourteen: Building the Fair
        • Chapter Fifteen: Marketing, Money, and Management
      • Part IV: The Fair by the Falls >
        • Chapter Sixteen: Opening Day
        • Chapter Seventeen: A Mingling of Peoples
        • Chapter Eighteen: Days at the Fair
        • Chapter Nineteen: The Press of New Ideas
        • Chapter Twenty: The Final Tally
      • Part V: An American Environment >
        • Chapter Twenty-One: Spokane Falls, An American Environment
      • The Fair and the Falls Map

BEECHER, EDWARD

Picture
(27 August 1803, East Hampton, NY-28 July 1895, Brooklyn, NY). Education: B.A., Yale College, 1822; studied at Andover Seminary, 1824-25. Career: Headmaster, Hartford Academy, 1822-24; tutor, Yale College, 1825-26; minister, Park Street Church, Boston, 1826-30; president, Illinois College, Jacksonville, IL, 1830-44; minister, Salem Street Church, Boston, 1844-55; editor, Congregationalist, 1849-53; minister, Galesburg, IL, 1855-71; lecturer, Chicago Theological Seminary, 1859-66; assistant editor, Christian Union, 1871-73. 

On a November night in 1837 Edward Beecher stood beside his friend and fellow minister Elijah P. Lovejoy as a mob attacked the warehouse in which Lovejoy published an antislavery newspaper. They held off the mob, but the next night the antiabolitionists caught Lovejoy and lynched him. Losing his close friend to vicious men who were defending an evil institution sharpened Beecher's thinking about religion and society. 
As President of Illinois College, a struggling institution in the heart of a proslavery region of Illinois, he had been reluctant to take a strong position on abolition. But now as theologian he argued that since God's law is the fundamental law of the universe, people and nations should reject compromises with evil, however convenient. He publicized Lovejoy's death in A Narrative of the Riots at Alton, helped organize the state's first antislavery society, and supported students who were indicted by the local grand jury for helping runaway slaves. 
Beecher upheld traditional Calvinist ideas about human sinfulness and divine majesty. But like most other theologians of his time he was influenced by the atmosphere of the Enlightenment and sought to make God's favor accessible to deserving individuals. People, he said, came from a previous existence in which they had sinned; so they were responsible for their own shortcomings. But God made it possible for them to work for salvation and helped them by suffering on the cross. So men and women must strive for holiness in their own lives and must fight against evil in an imperfect world. 

Bibliography 
A: On the Kingdom of God (Boston, 1827); A Narrative of the Riots at Alton (Cincinnati, 1838; New York, 1965); Baptism, with Reference to Its Impact and Modes (New York, 1849); The Conflict of Ages (Boston, 1853, and subsequent editions); The Papal Conspiracy Exposed (Boston, 1855); The Concord of Ages (New York, 1860); History of Opinions on the Scriptural Doctrine of Retribution (New York, 1878). 
B: DAB 2, 128; DARB, 34-35; NCAB 3, 128; NYT 29 July 1895, 1; SH 2, 24; Robert Merideth, The Politics of the Universe: Edward Beecher, Abolition, and Orthodoxy (Nashville, 1963).