Sexual liaisons that threatened the home became the issue at the root of the Beecher-Tilton trial, the great private scandal of the 1870s, in which Theodore Tilton sued Henry Ward Beecher for the alienation of his wife’s affections. The New York Herald declared that no event since the assassination of Lincoln had stirred such interest.57 Except for Ulysses S. Grant, Henry Ward Beecher may have been the most famous man in the United States in the 1870s.
