Publisher's Synopsis
On the night of July 3rd, 1870, Elizabeth Tilton confessed to her husband that she'd had an affair with their pastor, Henry Ward Beecher. When Beecher tried to silence the Tiltons, it was a whisper network of suffragists who spread news of the affair, and it was the radical Victoria Woodhull who seized on it, as political dynamite, to blow up the myth of monogamy among the political elite. Her public accusations led to even more public trials, which shocked the country and divided the most progressive thinkers of the era. In 1953, the journalist Robert Shaplen revisited the Tilton-Beecher affair in a series of articles for the New Yorker, relying on 3000 pages of contemporary accounts to reanimate a scandal that shook the American reform movement and to expose a strand of America's cultural DNA that remains recognisable today.
