Who Was Rev. Charles Beecher?
Composer of Church Hymns; Son of Lyman Beecher
A short biography of Charles Beecher, minister, church musician and composer of hymns.
The Beecher family of New England had many illustrious members: Rev.Henry Ward, author Harriet Beecher Stowe, suffragette Isabella Beecher Hooker ( to name a few ), and a brother, Charles, whose name is almost eclipsed today by his more famous siblings.
Litchfield, Connecticut
Charles Beecher was born in Litchfield, Connecticut, in 1815, while his father, Lyman Beecher, was pastor of the First Congregational Church there. He later prepared for university at the Boston Latin School and the Lawrence Academy at Groton, Connecticut, where his brother George was the principal. Charles then went to Bowdoin College, where he was president of the gymnasium society and graduated near the head of his class at age nineteen.
Lane Seminary
In 1833 he travelled to Cincinnati to attend the Lane Seminary, of which his father was now the guiding force. While there he agonized over his growing agnostic feelings and believed that he would never be the minister his father wished him to be. Being passionate about music (he had studied with Lowell Mason in Boston), he made the decision to become an organist and choirmaster.
He began his teaching career in Cincinnati, where he stayed for a few years, afterward relocating to New Orleans, Louisiana, where he became a clerk in a cotton factory and the organist of a Presbyterian church. From New Orleans he went to brother Henry Ward's church in Indianapolis, Indiana, as organist, and regained his faith sufficiently to enter seminary. He was ordained at the age of thirty-one and began his ministry at a Presbyterian church in Fort Wayne, Indiana.
Sarah Coffin Beecher
While in New Orleans, Charles met and married Sarah Coffin and they had their first child there. Other children followed, and one, Lieutenant Frederick Beecher, died in a battle in Yuma County, Colorado.
Charles removed to Newark, New Jersey, in 1851, where he took charge of a dying Presbyterian congregation and turned it into a dynamic Congregational church. Here he took part in the growing anti-slavery movement and relayed to his sister the atrocities he had seen while living in New Orleans. Some of this information became the basis for her world-shaking book, "Uncle Tom's Cabin."
Here he also became irate over the fugitive slave law and his fellow ministers expelled him from the ministerial society bacause of his sermon "The Duty of Disobedience to Wicked Laws."
Knox College
In 1856, at the invitation of his older brother Edward, he accepted the position of professor of rhetoric at Knox College, Galesbug, Illinois, where Edward was the president. However he left the next year to become the pastor of the Congregational Church in Georgetown, Massachusetts, where he stayed until 1881.
Charles Beecher left Georgetown and went to Wysox. Pennsylvania, where he remained until his retirement in 1893 at the advanced age of seventy-eight, when he returned once again to Georgetown to live with a daughter until his death in 1900.
Beecher composed several church hymns, and one, "We Are on Our Journey Home," was sung at his funeral service.
Source: "Saints, Sinners and Beeechers," by Lyman Beecher Stowe. The Bobbs-Merrill Company, Indianapolis, 1934.
"Love Divine: The Life of Henry Ward Beecher," by Anya Laurence, iUniverse Publishing, 2006
For more about the Beechers see:
Rev. Edward Beecher-The Scholar
Who Was Isabella Beecher Hooker
