Brooklyn Museum: American Art: Henry Ward Beecher

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Henry Ward Beecher

Henry Ward Beecher, the theatrical Congregationalist pastor of Brooklyn's Plymouth Church and a powerful antislavery orator (and the brother of Hamet Beecher Stowe, author of Uncle Tom's Cabin), has been criticized by modern historians for convincing a wide national audience that abolition should be achieved gradually through the Christianization of African-American slaves, Despite his avoidance of radical abolitionist measures, his oratory nevertheless remained a powerful wartime force. He offered the following indictment of the complicity of New Yorkers in the practice of slavery: "We clothe ourselves with the cotton which the slave tills . . . It is you and I that wear the shirt and consume the luxury. Our looms and our factories are largely built on the slave's bones. We live on his labor."

Artist: George Augustus Baker Jr., American, 1821-1880
Medium: Oil on canvas
Dates: 1874
Dimensions: 30 1/8 x 25 1/8in. (76.5 x 63.8cm)
Signature: Signed lower left: "G.A. Baker / 1874"
Collections: American Art
Museum Location: This item is on view in American Identities: A New Look, Everyday Life/A Nation Divided, 5th Floor
Accession Number: 1999.54.1
Credit Line: Gift of the American Art Council
Image: Framed, 1999.54.1_reference_SL1.jpg. Brooklyn Museum photograph

Collections: American Art: Henry Ward Beecher