The sordid tale—and scandalous case—that is the subject of this book involved Reverend Henry Ward Beecher (the brother of Harriett Beecher Stowe, the author of Uncle Tom’s Cabin) and two of his congregants—a young acolyte named Theodore Tilton and Tilton’s wife. The scandal became a case because in the United States, as Tocqueville observed near the beginning of our nation’s birth, every issue seems to end up in a court of law. This one culminated in a trial that lasted half a year and produced many half-truths, little certainty and no justice—ending as it did with “the whimper of a hung jury.”