At the end of the Civil War, Henry Ward Beecher, like many other powerful white men North and South, was embedded in a misogynistic regime of gender and sexuality that played as central a role as racism in re-establishing white male supremacy. While David Blight has incisively analyzed the racial dynamics that doomed Reconstruction and re-established white brotherhood under the guise of post-war “healing,” I want to highlight how Beecher participated in and deployed misogyny in the white male halls of power. From 1863 onward, Beecher was obsessed with forgiveness. The most influential preacher in the country, he aggressively agitated for the Union to extend complete forgiveness to Confederates. Preaching what his detractors called “the gospel of gush,” Beecher ricocheted between contradictory positions. He publicly called for suffrage for women as well as black men, but publicly and privately promoted the political and economic interests of white men who exhibited sexual and racial machismo.
Lincoln was not his idea of a strong man; Andrew Johnson was. Just hours after Lincoln was assassinated, Beecher declared: “Johnson’s little finger [is] stronger than Lincoln’s loins.” When Johnson reversed Lincoln’s policies and revealed himself to be an all-out racist, many northerners were incensed, but not Beecher. He asserted that the war had freed blacks and now they could fend for themselves. According to historian Debby Applegate, when Johnson “offered blanket amnesty to all but the very highest-level Rebel leaders and ordered all land in federal hands returned to its former owners, evicting the freedmen who’d been settled on them and sparking a series of violent confrontations,” Beecher supported him. When in February 1866 Johnson vetoed the Freedmen’s Bureau Bill in order to undermine federal protections and actions on behalf of southern blacks, Beecher supported him.
Performing what Frederick Douglass described as “that maudlin magnanimity that is now our greatest danger,” Beecher deployed evangelical tropes of love, forgiveness, and self-pitying brotherhood that upended political visions of justice, compassion, and equality. Dismayed by Beecher’s betrayal, Douglass perceived that white men’s self-pity was a key factor in the resurgence of anti-democratic forces. Douglass’s incisive phrase interlinked Beecher’s hyper-sentimental theatrics with Johnson’s well-known (maudlin) drunkenness to underscore the danger to the republic of white male supremacy masquerading as moral generosity: a politics of “forgiveness” intended to re-establish the pre-war status quo, at the expense of African Americans, women, and everyone who had suffered and died in fighting for a more perfect union.