Death
In March 1887, Beecher suffered a stroke and died in his sleep two days later on the 8th. Brooklyn, still an independent city, declared a day of mourning. The state legislature recessed, and telegrams of condolence were sent by national figures, including President Cleveland. Such was the anticipated attendance at his funeral, held at Plymouth Church at 10:30 a.m. on March 11, that tickets for members of the congregation, allowing them their normal pew seating, had to be printed. Crowd control was obviously a concern, as bearers were instructed the ticket "must be shown at the outer cordon of police and presented at the Orange street entrance by 10 A.M. As far as practicable, pew holders will be seated in their pews, save in such portion of the Church as may be necessarily reserved." The procession to the church, led by a black commander of the William Lloyd Garrison Post in Massachusetts and a white Virginia Confederate general and former slaveholder, marching arm in arm - paid tribute to what Beecher helped accomplish. Henry Ward Beecher was interred in Brooklyn's Green-Wood Cemetery, survived by his wife Eunice, and four of their nine children: Harriet, Henry, William and Herbert.
Read more about this topic: Henry Ward Beecher
Famous quotes containing the word death:
“Or I shall live your epitaph to make,
Or you survive when I in earth am rotten;
From hence your memory death cannot take,
Although in me each part will be forgotten.
Your name from hence immortal life shall have,
Though I, once gone, to all the world must die:”
—William Shakespeare (1564–1616)
“Surrealism is merely the reflection of the death process. It is one of the manifestations of a life becoming extinct, a virus which quickens the inevitable end.”
—Henry Miller (1891–1980)
“Death does determine life.... Once life is finished it acquires a sense; up to that point it has not got a sense; its sense is suspended and therefore ambiguous. However, to be sincere I must add that for me death is important only if it is not justified and rationalized by reason. For me death is the maximum of epicness and death.”
—Pier Paolo Pasolini (1922–1975)