Editing Henry Ward Beecher (section)

==Early life==
[[File:Henry Ward Beecher daguerreotype.jpg|thumb|230px|Daguerreotype of Beecher as a young man]]
Beecher was born in [[Litchfield, Connecticut]], the eighth of 13 children born to [[Lyman Beecher]], a Presbyterian preacher from [[Boston]]. His siblings included author [[Harriet Beecher Stowe]], educators [[Catharine Beecher]] and [[Thomas K. Beecher]], and activists [[Charles Beecher]] and [[Isabella Beecher Hooker]], and his father became known as "the father of more brains than any man in America".{{sfn|Applegate|2006|p=264}} Beecher's mother Roxana died when Henry was three, and his father married Harriet Porter, whom Henry described as "severe" and subject to bouts of depression.{{sfn|Applegate|2006|pp=29–31}}
Beecher also taught school for a time in [[Whitinsville, Massachusetts]].

The Beecher household was "the strangest and most interesting combination of fun and seriousness".{{sfn|Applegate|2006|p=28}} The family was poor, and Lyman Beecher assigned his children "a heavy schedule of prayer meetings, lectures, and religious services" while banning the theater, dancing, most fiction, and the celebration of birthdays or Christmas.{{sfn|Applegate|2006|pp=19–20, 27–28}} The family's pastimes included story-telling and listening to their father play the fiddle.{{sfn|Applegate|2006|pp=28–29}}

Beecher had a childhood stammer. He was also considered slow-witted and one of the less promising of the brilliant Beecher children.{{sfn|Applegate|2006|p=42}} His poor performance earned him punishments, such as being forced to sit for hours in the girls' corner while wearing a dunce cap.{{sfn|Goldsmith|1999|p=9}} At 14, he began his oratorical training at [[Mount Pleasant Classical Institute]], a boarding school in [[Amherst, Massachusetts]], where he met Constantine Fondolaik Newell, a Smyrna Greek. They attended [[Amherst College]] together, where they signed a contract pledging lifelong friendship and brotherly love. Fondolaik died of cholera after returning to Greece around October 1848, and Beecher named his third son after him.<ref name="Hibben 2003, p. 32">Hibben, Paxton, ''Henry Ward Beecher: An American Portrait'', with a foreword by Sinclair Lewis. New York: The Press of the Readers Club, 1942 [1927], p. 32.</ref>

During his years in Amherst, Beecher had his first taste of public speaking, giving his first sermon or talk in 1831 about four miles southeast, in the schoolhouse at a village then called Logtown, today known as [[Dwight, Massachusetts|Dwight]].<ref>Blake, H.W. (ed.) “Beecher’s First Sermon.” ''Belchertown Breeze'' February 2, 1888. Courtesy Belchertown Historical Association, Stone House Museum.</ref><ref>Beecher, William C., and Scoville, Reverend Samuel. A Biography of Reverend Henry Ward Beecher. New York: Charles L. Webster & Co., 1888, p. 121.</ref> He was in his second year at [[Amherst College]], and he soon thereafter resolved to join the ministry, setting aside his early dream of going to sea.{{sfn|Applegate|2006|pp=69–71}}<ref name=Appletons>[[Wikisource:Appletons' Cyclopædia of American Biography/Beecher, Lyman]]</ref> He met his future wife [[Eunice Bullard]], the daughter of a well-known physician, and they were engaged on January 2, 1832.{{sfn|Applegate|2006|pp=84, 90}}{{sfn|Benfey|2008|p=68}} He also developed an interest in the pseudoscience of [[phrenology]], an attempt to link personality traits with features of the human skull, and he befriended [[Orson Squire Fowler]] who became the theory's best-known American proponent.{{sfn|Applegate|2006|pp=96–97}}

Beecher graduated from Amherst College in 1834 and then attended [[Lane Theological Seminary]] outside Cincinnati, Ohio.<ref name=CEE>{{cite encyclopedia |year=2013 |title =Henry Ward Beecher |encyclopedia=Columbia Electronic Encyclopedia, 6th Edition |publisher=Columbia University Press }}</ref> Lane was headed by Beecher's father, who had become "America's most famous preacher".{{sfn|Applegate|2006|p=110}} The student body was divided by the slavery question, whether to support a form of gradual emancipation, as Lyman Beecher did, or to demand immediate emancipation.{{sfn|Applegate|2006|pp=104–05, 115–18}} Beecher stayed largely clear of the controversy, sympathetic to the radical students but unwilling to defy his father.{{sfn|Applegate|2006|p=118}} He graduated in 1837.{{sfn|Applegate|2006|p=134}}