Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [581]
Middle-class communities, like wealthy enclaves, sought ecclesiastical anchors. In mixed-class districts they often made use of churches established by their more affluent neighbors. On Brooklyn Heights professionals and clerks might join an Episcopalian stronghold of the older-monied elite, whose fortunes flowed from land. Or they might associate themselves with the richest of the mercantile elite who worshiped along with the Low family at the Unitarian Church of the Saviour, Minard Lafever’s brownstone Gothic masterpiece. But the middle class had an anchor of its very own in Brooklyn Heights—the largest and most influential church in all Brooklyn, all New York, and some said all the nation.
Plymouth Church was a breakaway from Brooklyn’s first Congregational venue, the Church of the Pilgrims, a conservative bastion of New Englanders led by the Rev. Richard Salter Storrs. In search of a more potent pastor, Plymouth’s founders reached across the country to Indianapolis, where they found Henry Ward Beecher, himself of New England stock, and brought him east to serve.
When Beecher arrived in 1847, Plymouth consisted of fewer than two dozen members, but soon his bravura preaching was pulling in crowds (including an enraptured Walt Whitman). A large-framed man, Beecher had a powerful voice and was a master of the anecdotal and colloquial: some called him a combination of St. Paul and Phineas T. Barnum. When Plymouth burned down in January 1849, it was rebuilt according to Beecher’s specifications—along lines pioneered by Charles Grandison Finney—with a central platform instead of a pulpit and with seats arranged in a giant semicircle. This format would allow his “social and personal magnetism” to work better, Beecher said. “I want the audience to surround me,” he told the architect, “so that I shall be in the centre of the crowd, and have the people surge all about me.”
The barnlike sanctuary on Orange Street was completed in January 1850—barely adequate, it turned out, for within another few years Plymouth’s membership stood at twelve hundred, there was a waiting list of over two thousand, and the deacons had figured out how to distribute the communion bread and wine to fifteen hundred worshipers in under ten minutes. So many people came over from Manhattan to hear Beecher that on Sundays the Fulton Street Ferry came to be known as “Beecher’s Ferry.” His ministerial range was magnified, moreover, by New York’s national-circulation newspapers, which covered Beecher consistently, and by the Independent, a Congregational journal for which he himself wrote regularly.
Beecher was successful because his message suited the membership. Although Plymouth’s trustees included a few of Brooklyn’s wealthiest merchants, its congregants and visitors were predominantly middle class. Many (perhaps three-fourths) were newly arrived in Brooklyn and New York. Like Rufus Griswold, clerk in a business house, they were doing well in the marketplace but feeling socially isolated, fearful of wandering into wicked ways. Griswold immediately felt “at home” in Beecher’s church, in part because the minister’s liberal, barely denominational Protestantism presented virtually no doctrinal barriers to admission.
Beecher’s lack of concern for old dogmas and rigid creeds appealed to young men and women who themselves had broken with their past. His amiable and urbane theology also offered a comforting contrast to the faith of their parents, with its emphasis on human depravity and damnation. Beecher did not try