“Mangled and Bleeding” Facts

Abstract

In December 1896, Eunice Beecher contributed to The Ladies’ Home Journal an article recalling her husband’s development and activities as an abolitionist under the title “When Mr. Beecher Sold Slaves in Plymouth Pulpit.” Eager to make New Yorkers viscerally aware of the realities of slavery, Henry Ward Beecher had presented fugitive slaves in his church, taking on the persona of an auctioneer, and encouraged the bidding that would purchase those slaves’ freedom. Such displays—and the visual depictions of them that followed—insisted that the price of freedom was transformation yet again into a commodity to be consumed by white viewers and purchasers.¹ Mrs. Beecher calls this an “object lesson in Southern slavery” offered by her husband, and it is precisely an “object” lesson insofar as it indicates a principle through the material object of a person’s body. She explains that her husband’s congregation stood in need of such lessons because “the majority of the people of New York and Brooklyn were Southern sympathizers. Of the realities of slavery they knew nothing; they regarded it sentimentally as a patriarchal institution that had come down from Biblical times, and that gave the Southern people ample leisure to develop into charming ladies and eloquent politicians. Mr. Beecher came to open the eyes and arouse the consciences of these sentimentalists.”²