GEORGE M. BEEBE SON OF ELDER BEEBE And The Civil War (Santamaria)

  

[IT should be made clear that this is a historical article and does not indicate any point of view on this long-ago fought-over issue – ed]

 

G. Beebe = George Monroe Beebe (1836–1927), widely identified as Elder Gilbert Beebe’s son, though one state write-up gives different parents (notes below). Here’s the compact, no-nonsense profile.

---

Origins & training. Born Oct 28, 1836, New Vernon, NY; schooled at Walkill Academy; Albany Law School, 1857. Admitted to the bar the same year. (Fact Monster)

• Bleeding Kansas → acting governor. Moved to Kansas Territory in 1858; territorial council member (1858–59). Appointed territorial secretary (1859); served as acting governor twice during the secession winter: Sept 11–Nov 26, 1860, and Dec 17, 1860–Feb 9, 1861—he urged neutrality as statehood loomed. (ksgenweb.org)
• Law, newspapers, and Congress. Practiced law in Missouri and Nevada; back in NY, he edited the Republican Watchman (Monticello) from 1866. In NY politics, he served in the State Assembly (1873–74), then won two terms to the U.S. House (NY-14, 1875–79), chairing Expenditures in the Navy and serving on Mines & Mining. (Fact Monster)
• Later posts. Delegate to Democratic National Conventions (1876, 1880, 1892); judge on the NY State Court of Claims (1883–1900); retired to Ellenville (1892), died Mar 1, 1927; buried at Woodlawn Cemetery (New Windsor/Newburgh). (Fact Monster)
• Marriage. Married Cornelia Bennett Foster at St. Joseph, Missouri, June 12, 1861 (some summaries list a later Jessie Beebe; the Kansas Historical Society cites Cornelia for the 1861 marriage). (Kansas Historical Society)

About the father–son link (the tiny wrinkle)

• Many references explicitly refer to him as the son of Elder Gilbert Beebe of New Vernon, the editor of Signs of the Times, a publication of the Old School/Primitive Baptist movement. (Wikipedia)
• Kansapedia (Kansas Historical Society) lists his parents as George and Lydia (Wiles) Beebe, which conflicts with those accounts. It’s a lone outlier against multiple political biographies, but worth flagging. (Kansas Historical Society)

If you’re exploring Beebe père vs. fils as a thematic contrast, the arc almost writes itself: the father became the ink-and-pulpit voice of Primitive Baptist anti-institutionalism; the son took that native verbal force to the rough theater of territorial politics and later Congress—editing papers, steering committees, and trying (at least in 1860–61 Kansas) to tamp down the fuse. The family lived where doctrine meets power, and both men wielded words like chisels.

How did G. Beebe react to the Civil War?

Beebe publicly styled himself a Union man—constitution-first, anti-sectional, and fiercely Democratic—while defending slavery and blasting Republican “fanaticism.”

• In his 1860 tract against Helper, Beebe says the Republic’s greatness rests on “the bond of union… the Constitution,” and warns that trampling it will shatter the Union into warring confederacies ruled by armies and strongmen.
• He literally cheers the Union on—quoting “Sail on, Union, strong and great!”—and argues peace requires letting each state manage its “domestic affairs” (i.e., slavery) under the federal compact.
• He pitches his newspaper, the Banner of Liberty, as standing “by the Constitution and the Union,” framing his pamphlet as a National Democratic campaign document—i.e., pro-Union but anti-Republican.
• When accused of Southern bias, he counters that he’ll “never prove traitor” to any section of the Union, casting himself as a patriotic mediator while still defending the South’s social system.

So, Unionist—but of the 1860 Democratic, “keep the constitutional compromises” variety. He opposed abolitionist politics as sectarian and incendiary, yet rooted his appeal in preserving the Union as a constitutional order.

The Banner of Liberty Paper

Here’s the gist of Beebe’s Banner of Liberty—in his own 1860 pitch:

• What it was. A weekly quarto newspaper edited and published by Gilbert J. Beebe in Middletown, New York, carrying a full synopsis of each week’s doings in Congress plus news, literary pieces, miscellany, and humor.
• How he positioned it. Beebe trumpeted it as “standing by the Constitution and the Union”—explicitly National Democratic in tone and mission, especially for the 1860 campaign.
• Reach (as he claimed). By his account, in 1856 it had a larger circulation than any other Democratic paper in the U.S., and second only to the New-York Tribune among all political papers. (That’s Beebe’s boast, but it shows the ambition.)
• Business model. He lists subscription bundles and bulk rates (single copies, sets of five, eleven, thirty, etc.), treating the paper as a campaign organ to be spread by the bundle.
• Context. In the same pamphlet, he rallies readers to preserve the Union under the Constitution—then segues to promoting the Banner as the tool to do that work. It’s journalism welded to party organizing.

He wrote a booklet against Helper's Impending Crisis[1].

Topic	Helper’s[2] claim (as presented/quoted in Beebe)	Beebe’s counterargument
Political role of the book	Republicans mass-circulated the “Helper Book” as a campaign text; many members endorsed it.	The book is incendiary; the House resolution says endorsers are unfit for the Speakership.
Big economic thesis	“Free” states outperform “slave” states across output/wealth; even hay outweighs Southern staples.	Hay is a local input (winter feed) priced at niche markets—can’t be compared to export staples; the claim is a category error.
Livestock vs. “hay wealth”	Northern hay implies superior real output.	Using Helper’s own census tables, livestock/slaughtered stock shows South ≈ North, undercutting the hay brag.
Per-capita production	Northern totals prove the free-labor advantage.	Adjust for population and climate/crop mix: per white capita, the South compares favorably.
Exports & surplus	Northern industry proves superior surplus creation. (Ch. VIII omnibus tables)	National export surplus is driven by Southern staples; sectional split favors Southern ports in Beebe’s cited year.
Abolishing slavery (mechanics)	Lays out steps to end slavery (Ch. II heading & program).	Constitutional math (e.g., Three-Fifths Clause) makes the scheme a non-starter; without it the seat distribution flips.
Founders’ voices	Deploys Washington/Jefferson/Madison et al. as anti-slavery ammunition (Ch. III–IV headings).	“Garbling”: quotes torn from context; founders favored Union/constitutional order, not Helper’s program.
“Testimony of the nations”	European moral authority supports abolition. (Ch. V)	England, etc., has its own poverty/misery; not oracles for American policy.
Churches & Bible	Churches and Scripture witness against slavery (Ch. VI–VII headings).	Beebe waves off Ch. VII as “common-place bluster” and proof-texts NT passages to defend masters/servants.
Cities & commerce	South needs a great emporium; city growth = progress. (Ch. IX)	Cites Jefferson—“cities are sores”—and argues Northern cities concentrate vice and misery.
Character & credibility	—	Long personal attack: quotes Sen. Asa Biggs on alleged theft/name change; cites Helper’s earlier Land of Gold passages to paint hypocrisy.

How did George Beebe feel about Lincoln?

George M. Beebe—Kansas territorial secretary/acting governor and later a New York Democratic congressman—sat on the opposite side of Lincoln’s politics. He worked to keep slavery legal in Kansas and aligned himself with the Buchanan-era Democratic wing that opposed the emerging Republican program.

Receipts, not vibes:

• In June 1860, Beebe wrote Jefferson Davis, insisting he’d “fought in favor of slavery and remain[ed] committed to the cause.” That’s as clear a marker of anti-Lincoln alignment as you’ll find.
• As a Kansas legislator, he filed a minority report against an antislavery bill; as acting governor (Jan. 1861), he urged repealing the law abolishing slavery and even argued for admitting Kansas to the Union as a slave state.

So if Lincoln was the North Star for Republicans, Beebe’s compass pointed the other way. Nothing in his record suggests affection for Lincoln or his war aims; rather, his writings and official messages put him squarely among the Democratic critics of Lincoln’s antislavery and wartime policies. (For biographical context: he was the son of Primitive Baptist elder Gilbert Beebe and later served two terms in Congress as a Democrat.)

---

[1] Hinton Rowan Helper’s The Impending Crisis of the South (1857/59): it’s an antislavery polemic that argues—using a blizzard of stats—that slavery was an economic deadweight on the South, especially for non-slaveholding whites. Even its chapter map signals the thesis: a head-to-head “comparison between the free and slave states,” with output, wealth, and productivity tables meant to prove that free labor beats enslaved labor.

The book detonated. A pro-slavery pamphlet by Gilbert J. Beebe—A Review and Refutation of Helper’s “Impending Crisis”—framed Helper’s work as “incendiary,” and the U.S. House actually debated a resolution saying no member who endorsed the book (or its compendium) was fit to be Speaker. That wording appears in the record Beebe reproduces. Southern critics went further, claiming Helper’s text encouraged enslaved people to murder their masters—a tendentious reading, but it shows the level of panic and propaganda in late-1850s politics.

Beebe also cataloged Republican endorsements—dozens of congressmen and public figures backed the wide circulation of a cheap compendium—while quoting William H. Seward’s blurb praising the book’s data and logic. Those lists and the Seward line help explain why the “Helper Book” controversy dominated the 1859-60 speakership fight.

Net-net: Helper tried to beat slavery with balance sheets rather than sermons; his opponents answered with character assassination, biblical defenses of slavery, and parliamentary roadblocks. That clash—numbers vs. hierarchy—was a microcosm of the Union’s fracture. Want to keep digging? I can map Helper’s main economic claims against modern data, or chart the “Helper circular” and its role in the 1859 Speaker brawl to show how a book became a political tripwire.

[2] Links to both:

·        Beebe, A Review and Refutation of Helper’s “Impending Crisis” (1860)
Your uploaded PDF: sandbox:/mnt/data/Beebe The Impedning Crisis.pdf
(Public catalog record for the pamphlet: (National Library of Australia Catalogue))

·        Helper, The Impending Crisis of the South (1857)
Project Gutenberg (read/download): https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/36055 (Project Gutenberg)
Library of Congress scan: https://www.loc.gov/item/01004197/ (The Library of Congress).