Another booming nineteenth-century industry also caught his attention. He went to Brooklyn Heights’ Plymouth Congregational Church, home of America’s most famous Protestant clergyman, Henry Ward Beecher, whose brilliance was helping to adapt American Puritanism to nineteenth-century middle-class needs. The son of a well-known clerical father among whose prominent children was Henry’s half-sister, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Beecher exemplified, to American Protestants, the high level of leadership God had provided as a sign that He was on their side. Beecher’s Sunday sermons were the hottest ticket in town. A post-Civil War religious revival, led by Beecher and a national cadre determined to bring America back to the straight and narrow, eager to wipe out private and public sins, particularly alcoholism, felt it had a winning hand. Beecher believed that Puritan righteousness and Victorian materialism could be reconciled. Congregational Calvinism promised much to those who would follow its version of Christ, to those who would accept church discipline and religious direction. Abolitionist, idealistic and, at the same time, practical, the Plymouth congregation had come out of the war strengthened and even more intent on playing a major role in American life. Henry Ward Beecher would lead the way and, every Sunday, he was on show.
Promised a seat by a prominent congregant, who had advised him to come early, Twain also had a letter of introduction from one of his San Francisco clerical friends. Arriving at ten A.M., “earlier than any Christian ought to be out of his bed on such a morning,” he found the street lined with people eager to get in. When he presented his reservation number, he was chastised for his lateness by a haughty usher who directed him to the upstairs galleries. That’s where he remained, “the last individual,” he was sure, “to get a seat in Mr. Beecher’s church that day…Every pew, above & below, was filled with elegantly-dressed people, & the aisles and odd spaces in both places occupied with stools like mine.” The choir sang beautifully. Beecher got up and began to preach “one of the liveliest & most sensible sermons” he had ever heard. His voice was rich and resonant. “His discourse sparkled with felicitious similes & metaphors.” Sometimes, he walked away from his notes, “sawing his arms in the air, hurling sarcasms this way & that, discharging rockets of poetry, exploding mines of eloquence.” He knew how to make the congregation hang expectant on his every word, to be so silent that Twain had the desire to startle them with a single clap of the hand. He even knew how to make his audience laugh as he tore satirically into the corruption of American political life. Twain marveled not only at the performance but at how “remarkably handsome” Beecher was “when he is in the full tide of sermonizing, & his face is lit up with animation.” He was, though, “as homely as a singed cat” when he wasn’t speaking. It was a performance of the sort that epitomized his own longstanding fantasy of Samuel Clemens, the powerful preacher, holding an audience in the palm of his hands.
From: The Singular Mark Twain: A Biography by Fred Kaplan (New York: Doubleday, 2003), pp. 174-176.
Samuel Langhorne Clemens (1835-1910), “Mark Twain,” is still the most famous writer the United States has yet produced.
Henry Ward Beecher (1813-1887) was one of the most famous American preachers of his day. A Congregationalist minister, he was not a theological conservative, but was, rather, a powerful preacher who specialized in Americanizing Christianity by making it (in his view) understandable to average Americans.
