By Susan Martin, Processing Archivist & EAD Coordinator

Frederick Beck, whose papers form part of the Beck-Alleyne family papers here at the MHS, counted among his friends and acquaintances many eminent artists and intellectuals of 19th-century Massachusetts. His correspondence includes letters from artist Hammatt Billings, writers Ednah Dow Cheney and Kate Field, physician Nancy Elizabeth Clark, and Ralph Waldo Emerson, whom Beck greatly admired. The collection also contains a few letters from the charismatic young minister and lecturer, Thomas Starr King.

Standing about five feet tall, weighing only 120 pounds, and by all accounts looking even younger than his years, with little formal education, King may have seemed an unlikely celebrity, but that’s what he became. After preaching in Charlestown, Mass. for a short time in the 1840s, he took over the pulpit at Hollis Street Church in Boston. There he made a name for himself and gained recognition as a compelling orator, one of the best of his day. He joined the popular lyceum circuit, lecturing to audiences in New England and the Midwest on religious, literary, and social topics.

The Becks were friends of Thomas Starr King. According to a family history published in 1907, Frederick Beck said:

Thomas Starr King and my mother were great friends, for they were both very humorous and he used to come to our house a great deal. He was a brilliant talker; we went to his church, which is now the Hollis Street Theater. I saw a great deal of Starr King, and he used to tell us most amusing anecdotes. (p. 107)

King was an abolitionist, like many of his Boston contemporaries, and in his correspondence with Beck, he shared his feelings on the subject of slavery. In early 1859, Beck was traveling in St. Augustine, Florida, and sent King an advertisement for a local auction of enslaved people, or “barracoon bill of lading.” A disgusted King replied:

Your impassioned pages on Slavery stirred me thoroughly. I have always felt that presence at a slave-auction would crystallize me into a confederate of Parker Pillsbury. I never read the Liberator, because it makes my blood boil. I fear you are right in saying that only blood will atone for the horror & blasphemy that are rampant now in the slave-state customs & literature. The day of grace is doubtless sinned away.

In 1860, King moved to San Francisco and was soon drawn into the political arena. California had only been a state for ten years. With transplanted Southerners threatening secession, King delivered long, fiery speeches around the state aimed at keeping California in the Union. On George Washington’s birthday in 1861, King spoke to a packed house for 2 1/4 hours. He wrote to Beck ten days later:

This is the Fourth of March, inauguration day of the new President over the Crippled Union. I am afraid the wretches around the Gulf will get back again by some imbecile compromise. They ought to be pitched into the Gulf that Lazarus in Abraham’s bosom looked down into. I hope that our Abraham will make them feel where they are, & how comfortable a drop of water would be.

Our public is greatly exercised on Disunion & Pacific Republics. The Chivalry here began to pull the wires to divorce sympathies between California & the North, & we have pitched into them. […] Such a thing was never known in California before, & it makes the “Chivs” open their eyes, & wonder what century they live in. We have utterly crushed Disunion, Secessionism, & Pacific-Republic folly in the State.

This speech was just one of many. None other than Abraham Lincoln is said to have credited King with preventing the secession of California.

King was not all fire and brimstone, though. Beck described his friend as “humorous” and “amusing,” and King’s letters are often very funny. He complained that the San Francisco fleas were too “attentive.” And here’s what he had to say about a fellow clergyman:

Bellows has no principles. His impulses are the noblest, but he exhausts a subject, & feels it blaze, after one flaming exposition of it, & in the evening rights himself by taking the other side. I understand that his evening sermon […] was the antipodes of the morning. That’s the way he “comes full circle.” He is not an individual, so much as an incarnate debating-society.

Thomas Starr King died in 1864, at the age of 39, due to diphtheria and pneumonia reportedly brought on by exhaustion. He left a wife and two children. He is buried in San Francisco.