John's Reviews > The Most Famous Man in America: The Biography of Henry Ward Beecher

The bumptious, angry, confused adolescence that America went through in its first 100 years is brought resplendently to life in this biography of Beecher who, in many ways, personified the search for a workable identity that consumed a young nation. This incredibly epochal period saw the country wrestle with the choice of a strong aristocracy or a democracy, fight another war with Britain, and launch the wholesale extermination of indigenous populations, loftily calling it "Manifest Destiny". Political parties and religious sects popped up like weeds; the struggle between the strictures of religion and the logic of science, between agriculture and a burgeoning industrial economy consumed the hearts and minds of its citizenry. America resembled a surly teenager whose moods, hairstyles, clothes, and friends change by the hour. In this swirling vortex, stood Beecher: a curiously Clintonesque preacher, charismatic orator, abolitionist, social reformer, newspaperman and public intellectual. He was central to the creation of the Republican party, created the modern Christian ideology that repudiated the Calvinist tradition of sin and guilt and developed a very modern taste for the baubles of conspicuous consumption – carrying precious jewels to pull out when he felt down. Largely forgotten to history or only remembered as the brother of the woman that wrote Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Beecher now takes his places in the pages of history in this illuminating biography written with vigor, intelligence and a keen sense of historical context.