EAN: 9781946022912

FREE LOVE - ROBERT SHAPLEN KARTONIERT (TB)

A wry  instructive  and hugely entertaining account of one of the most sensational trials in
American history” (New York Times Book Review). On the night of July 3  1870  Elizabeth Tilton
confessed to her husband that she’d had an affair with their pastor  Henry Ward Beecher. This
secret would soon transfix America  for Beecher was the most famous preacher of the day 
founder of the most fashionable church in Brooklyn Heights  a presidential hopeful  an
influential supporter of Abolition  and a leader of the campaign for women’s suffrage. When
Beecher tried to silence the Tiltons  it was a whisper network of suffragists  notably Susan B.
Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton  who spread news of the affair  and it was the radical
Victoria Woodhull—an outspoken proponent of free love”—who seized on it  as political dynamite
to blow up the myth of monogamy among the political elite. Her public accusations led to even
more public trials  which shocked the country and divided the most progressive thinkers of the
era. In 1953  the journalist Robert Shaplen revisited the Tilton-Beecher affair in a series of
articles for the New Yorker  relying on 3 000 pages of contemporary accounts—court transcripts
love-letters  newspaper reports and illustrations  even political cartoons—to reanimate a
scandal that shook the American reform movement and to expose a strand of America’s cultural
DNA that remains recognizable today.

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