Show BEECHER AS A PUBLIC MAN His Career During the War and Afterward When in 1S54 the Missouri Compromise was repealed by congress Mr Beecher was among the first to express the indignation felt by those who held that this was a breach of good faith and to declare against the policy of allowing slavery to enter when it had once been excluded The great battleground was in Kansas where men with the northern repugnance re-pugnance to slavery met slaveholders from Missouri with their gangs of slaves purposing purpos-ing to establish the institution on its soil From his pulpit Mr Beecher declared that force must be used to prevent this if possible His words resulted in the starting of a subscription sub-scription in Plymouth church to furnish every eastern family going to Kansas with a Bible and a rifle When Fremont was nominated nomin-ated Mr Beecher took the stump in his behalf and worked with pen and tongue four years later for the election of Abraham Lincoln When the war broke out a regiment was raided < from Plymouth church and Mr Beechers eldest son was one of its officers The pastor often visited his boys as he used to call them before they went into actual service At about this time ho assumed the editorship of The New York Independent in order to secure a medium through which he could speak directly to the people In 1863 ho went to England with the avowed intention inten-tion of recuperating his health but while there ho made many addresses for the purpose pur-pose of showing the English that the government govern-ment of this country was in the right of the struggle His experience was a stormy one and he was well nigh mobbed at several points receiving his roughest treatment per hap at Liverpool where he was stoned and hooted and subjected to many indigni I its But he succeeded in forcing the IIIT crowd which had been inflamed by those who favored the cause of the Confederacy Confed-eracy and before he returned home he had stv tired tile general respect of the people of E gland In speaking of this in a private letter written at the time he said England will be enthusiastically right providing we hold on and gain victories But England has an intense and yearning sense of the value of success After the war Mr Beecher who had always al-ways been a Republican went south and looked over the ground When the reconstruction recon-struction period came on he took a stand not in exact conformity to his party embodying his views in a sermon on the Forgiveness of Injuries The result was the severing of his connection with The Independent Henry C Bowell its then editor declaring in its columns that tho paper was not responsible for Mr Beechers views Mr Beecher was not particularly active in politics after that till 1884 when as everybody remembers he came out for Cleveland |