Lyman Beecher

Lyman Beecher (born October 12, 1775, New Haven, Connecticut—died January 10, 1863, Brooklyn, New York, U.S.) was a U.S. Presbyterian clergyman in the revivalist tradition and an important figure in the Second Great Awakening.

A graduate of Yale University in 1797, he held pastorates at Litchfield, Connecticut, and at Boston, during which he opposed rationalism, Catholicism, and the liquor traffic (see temperance movement). Together with other American Protestant theologians, including Timothy Dwight, Nathaniel W. Taylor, and Asahel Nettleton, Beecher was a leader of the second and more conservative phase of the Second Great Awakening, which centred in the Congregational churches of New England from 1810–25. Turning his attention to evangelizing the West, he became president of the newly founded Lane Theological Seminary in Cincinnati, Ohio (1832–50), and also assumed a new pastorate there (1832–42). His Calvinism, considered strict by Bostonians, proved so mild for western Presbyterians that he was tried for heresy, but his synod acquitted him.

Beecher was called by a contemporary “the father of more brains than any other man in America.” Among the 13 children of his three marriages, Henry Ward Beecher and Harriet Beecher Stowe achieved fame. Five others well known in their day were Catharine (1800–78), a leader in the women’s education movement; Edward (1803–95), a minister, college president, and antislavery writer; Charles (1815–1900), Florida’s superintendent of public instruction; Isabella Beecher Hooker (1822–1907), a champion of legal rights for women; and Thomas (1824–1900), an early advocate of adapting church life to modern urban conditions.