Beecher therefore always had a female following (it could not have hurt that he preached the Gospel of Love), and rumors of affairs with parishioners date from his time in Indianapolis. In Brooklyn, two women confessed to their husbands that they had carried on affairs with Beecher. (Both husbands, strangely, were close to Beecher personally and professionally.) In 1872, the affair with one of those women, Elizabeth Tilton, became public. This led, three years later, to a lawsuit by the aggrieved husband, Theodore Tilton, who accused Beecher of the tort of “criminal conversation” (a legalistic euphemism). The trial was the most sensational of the century.
As Reconstruction was falling apart in the South, newspaper readers were absorbed by the goings on in Tilton v. Beecher. In the six months leading up to the trial (which itself lasted six months), the Times published a hundred and five articles and thirty-seven editorials about the Beecher affair. People waited overnight in line to get seats at the courthouse. There were scalpers. Many colorful figures had walk-on roles in the story, from the feminists Victoria Woodhull and Elizabeth Cady Stanton to the manic Civil War major general Benjamin Butler and the anti-pornography crusader Anthony Comstock.
Multiple cultural trends converged: the crackdown on obscenity, the Gospel of Love, feminism, and above all, perhaps, the doctrine of free love promoted by Woodhull. That doctrine did not mean “love the one you’re with” so much as “be with the one you love.” It was, awkwardly, associated with the movement for women’s suffrage—the movement led by, among others, Stanton and Susan B. Anthony. “Free love” did not have the meaning it acquired in the nineteen-sixties. It was designed to make divorce easier for women by giving it philosophical justification. If Beecher had fallen out of love with his wife and in love with Tilton’s, all might be forgiven. The famous trial and the people and events surrounding it are the subjects of Robert Shaplen’s entertaining book “Free Love and Heavenly Sinners,” which has just been reissued.