The scandal that would lead to one of the most sensational trials in American history began quietly: “On the night of July 3, 1870, Elizabeth Richards Tilton, a small, dark-haired woman of thirty-five, the mother of four children, confessed to her husband, Theodore, that she had committed adultery with her pastor, the Reverend Henry Ward Beecher, who was then the foremost preacher in the land.”

This is the opening sentence of “Free Love: The Story of a Great American Scandal,” by the late Robert Shaplen, who died in 1988. First published in 1954 as “Free Love and Heavenly Sinners,” it has been reissued recently as a handsome McNally Editions paperback.

“Free Love: The Story of a Great American Scandal,” by Robert Shaplen. McNally Editions. 264 pages. $18, paperback McNally

It’s quite a story. As Shaplen writes, the Tilton-Beecher case “ultimately was to cut such a wide swath through the vast area of contemporary debate over private versus public conduct, the function of the evangelical church, and the place of women in the expanding social scene, that its importance would transcend the titillation it caused.”

While the Tiltons and Beecher took center stage, they were surrounded by a throng of celebrated historical figures, including the pioneering feminists Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton; several Beecher sisters, the most famous of whom was the author of “Uncle Tom’s Cabin,” Harriet Beecher Stowe; and, most important, Victoria Woodhull, the spiritualist advocate of “free love.” Among the men were the wealthy Brooklyn publisher Henry Bowen, the anti-vice zealot Anthony Comstock and the leading trial lawyers in the country, one of whom, William M. Evarts, was a former secretary of state. Even Frederick Douglass receives a brief cameo as Woodhull’s running mate when, in 1872, she became the presidential candidate of the Equal Rights Party.

Dominating the story, however, is Henry Ward Beecher. “Charismatic” hardly does him justice. The Sunday services at his Plymouth Church in Brooklyn attracted crowds so large that standees, unable to find places in the pews, would swarm the aisles and pack the vestibule. The services themselves grew so histrionic they came to be called “Beecher’s Theater.” During the week, middle-class women would flock to the church’s more intimate prayer meetings, eager to hear the “Word of God” from their pastor’s golden tongue.

In appearance, Beecher was a large man in every sense, corpulent, long-haired, flamboyant. According to one friend, nothing about him was “indicative of days of fasting or nights of prayer.” Instinctively theatrical, he was always “on,” as if performing for an audience. When the preacher spoke, the words always seemed to come from the heart, and, more often than not, abundant tears would stream down his cheeks. Not surprisingly, his followers came to identify the love of their pastor with the love of God.

While Beecher had early on done good work, decrying slavery and even chastising Abraham Lincoln for delaying the Emancipation Proclamation, he was also – to use a biblical phrase – a whited sepulchre, outwardly virtuous but inwardly corrupt. To his devotees, he could do no wrong, no matter what the evidence or how reliable the testimony or how often he contradicted himself. In the Tilton case, Beecher would ultimately adopt the all-too familiar tactic of blaming the injured party: Libby Tilton had fantasized everything. He was the real victim, the focus of a hysterical woman’s overheated imagination. One could even forgive her. After all, he was Henry Ward Beecher.

Yet Libby wasn’t the first woman he had seduced. Rumors swirled about his relationship with a teenage girl in Indianapolis at the start of his ministerial career – and she was not the only one. Henry Bowen had made Beecher the editor of the Independent, a Christian-oriented newspaper he owned, with Theodore Tilton as the managing editor. But, in 1862, as she lay dying, the 38-year-old Lucy Maria Bowen whispered to her husband a confession exactly like that made by Elizabeth Tilton eight years later.

Bowen chose to remain silent about his late wife’s affair. Theodore Tilton, however, couldn’t decide what to do. He wanted to protect his children and shield Libby from being labeled a “fallen woman.” As he later told one journalist, he couldn’t believe that she had been a free agent: “I think she sinned her sin as one in a trance.” Still, for a while, he too kept silent, and Beecher remained blithely unaware that his secret was out. Then Libby suffered a miscarriage, losing what she called her “love-babe.”

Shaplen – whose book grew out of a 1953 series for the New Yorker – is only one-third of the way into “Free Love,” and matters are just starting to heat up and grow dizzyingly complicated. Everyone involved wrote tearful, emotion-packed letters to one another; a mutual friend worked hard to establish an entente, if not actual peace, among all the principals. The scandal simmered, died down, then boiled up again. There were further accusations and retractions, reconciliations and then retractions of the retractions. Several times, Beecher came close to admitting the truth but never quite. Instead, to quash the “utterly false” rumors, he arranged for a church council, whose six members he had personally chosen, to acquit him of any moral wrongdoing. Meanwhile, Beecher’s wife, Eunice, and Libby Tilton’s mother, who loathed her son-in-law and adored the pastor, intensified a vicious smear campaign against Theodore Tilton. In the background, Bowen, for complex reasons of his own, started playing Beecher and Tilton against each other, hoping for their mutual destruction.

Then, just when matters could hardly grow more topsy-turvy, Woodhull, the free-love advocate, learned the truth and broke the scandal to the press, after which she went on to become the confidante, and perhaps more than confidante, of Theodore Tilton. Meanwhile, Elizabeth Cady Stanton assailed the era’s pious, patriarchal oppressiveness: “We have had enough women sacrificed to this sentimental hypocritical prating about purity. This is one of man’s most effective engines for our division and subjugation. … Let us henceforth stand by womanhood.”

It is only at this point that Theodore Tilton finally took Beecher to court for alienating his wife’s affections and violating the sanctity of the family. The trial lasted six months, with hundreds of witnesses. Tourists to New York shelled out extravagant sums for tickets to the courtroom. More than 2 million words were entered as evidence. To defray his trial expenses, Beecher’s inner circle solicited thousands of dollars from his parishioners and well-wishers.

Let me stop there. The above account presents only the bare bones of Shaplen’s carefully fleshed-out, fact-filled classic of historical reportage. There’s much, much more to “Free Love” than what you’ve just learned. In the end, though, the Tiltons’ lives are basically destroyed, while Beecher lives long and prospers, suffers no diminution in his popularity, and, yes, even entertains the notion of running for president. It may have taken place some 150 years ago, but this is, in more ways than one, a very modern story.