Post by cefil on Sept 30, 2008 13:50:37 GMT -6
This one is for Elisabeth, just in case she ever stops by to check up on old posts…
I just came across a book called The Passionate Beechers by Samuel A. Schreiner, Jr. (John Wiley & Sons, 2003). In it, the author deals briefly with the Frederick Beecher story:
So, clearly, the intention was to re-bury the body at home. It would be nice to know the timeline of Charles’s letter quoted above. If the reference to “a month later” means a month after the September notification, then his stated intentions pre-date the December expedition which apparently failed to recover the body. Access to the full set of letters would be useful in checking this timeframe out.
Also, the passage above certainly puts to rest any false impressions caused by the oddly dispassionate wording by Lyman Beecher Stowe, quoted in a previous post in this thread.
cefil
P.S.: This book tells a different version of the story (cited in a previous post) about who went to retrieve Fred after his wounds at Gettysburg. In this version, it’s the mother who travels to get Fred, not the father: “As soon as he heard about his son’s wound, Charles wanted to drop the trial [he was facing charges of heresy, brought against him by 27 members of his congregation] and rush to Gettysburg, but his wife, Sarah…insisted on going instead and found her Fred lying in a barn with an abscessed wound so serious that she had to nurse him for two months.”
cefil
I just came across a book called The Passionate Beechers by Samuel A. Schreiner, Jr. (John Wiley & Sons, 2003). In it, the author deals briefly with the Frederick Beecher story:
In the next few years, the greater Beecher family would experience a real need for a lightening of their lives. “I don’t know of any who could so well as you adopt the language of the scriptures, ‘all thy waves have gone over me’—stroke upon stroke falls upon you—blows, too, which strike the very heart center,” Henry Ward Beecher wrote to Charles and Sarah on September 26, 1868. The occasion was a news account and telegram Henry ward received from General Sheridan reporting the death of Lieutenant Frederick Beecher in a fight with Indians in Colorado. It was a little more than a year after the drowning deaths of Fred’s two younger sisters. Despite severe wounds at Gettysburg, Fred had stayed in the army and was serving with the Forsyth Scouts in an action that would be called the Battle of Beecher Island and marked by a monument to Fred, whose commander wrote of him, “Not an officer of his acquaintance but has a sore heart at the loss of a comrade so loved for his many manly & military virtues.” In his reply to Henry Ward, Charles raised a version of that unanswerable question as to why bad things happen to good people when he said, “There is something strange about Fred’s history—his trials so severe--& his death so painful—yet his character so faultless, his disposition so mild, unselfish, almost feminine in its delicacy—One would not have thought that he needed such an ordeal.” Although Harriet at first thought that Charles’s “hold on life is broken” by this new tragedy, he would write to James a month later: “I wish you could be with us when his remains come home, to be laid by the side of his sisters—Altho’ it is a house of sadness, yet it is not a house of unhappiness—Those that were with us last year at the funeral of Essie and Hattie were lifted up & seemed brought near Heaven. Our hearts were united in love—and the dividing influences of the world seemed to die away….We are comforted by the thought that in the society of the dear ones he so mourned--& in the presence of Saviour—he has found rest and blessedness.”
So, clearly, the intention was to re-bury the body at home. It would be nice to know the timeline of Charles’s letter quoted above. If the reference to “a month later” means a month after the September notification, then his stated intentions pre-date the December expedition which apparently failed to recover the body. Access to the full set of letters would be useful in checking this timeframe out.
Also, the passage above certainly puts to rest any false impressions caused by the oddly dispassionate wording by Lyman Beecher Stowe, quoted in a previous post in this thread.
cefil
P.S.: This book tells a different version of the story (cited in a previous post) about who went to retrieve Fred after his wounds at Gettysburg. In this version, it’s the mother who travels to get Fred, not the father: “As soon as he heard about his son’s wound, Charles wanted to drop the trial [he was facing charges of heresy, brought against him by 27 members of his congregation] and rush to Gettysburg, but his wife, Sarah…insisted on going instead and found her Fred lying in a barn with an abscessed wound so serious that she had to nurse him for two months.”
cefil