Plymouth Congregational in Brooklyn

Beecher's Pulpit and Lincoln's Pew

On a clear and cool Sunday morning Penny and I walked a couple of miles to Plymouth Congregational Church in Brooklyn for Sunday services.  Henry Ward Beecher became the country’s most influential Abolitionist while minister there from the church’s founding in 1847 to his death in 1887.  He filled the sanctuary to overflowing each week with sermons on the supremacy of God’s love, abolition, Darwinism (he was for it), and a variety of other topics of the day. He held “slave auctions” from the pulpit, where slaves’ freedom was bought by those in attendance.  The church basement was a stop on the Underground Railroad.  He collected money to send rifles to Bloody Kansas, which the newspapers dubbed “Beecher’s Bibles”. Alas, he was also an inveterate philanderer and in 1875 was almost undone by a charge of adultery and the subsequent trial.

Penny and I sat close to Pew 89, where Abraham Lincoln sat when he spoke at Plymouth in 1860 (next week we’ll come early and get a seat there).  In 1867, Mark Twain was invited to go with Plymouth church members to see the Holy Land, a jaunt that would later become the basis for The Innocents Abroad.  The pulpit saw William Lloyd Garrison, Clara Barton, Charles Dickens and Ralph Waldo Emerson in the nineteenth century, and in 1963, Martin Luther King, Jr., who spoke on “The American Dream” weeks before his famous “I Have a Dream” speech in Washington.

They say we can expect a stretch of good weather in Brooklyn for our stay here over the next week. Stay tuned for more adventures.