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After eight days and 52 ballots, the exhausted jurymen turned in a split verdict, 9 to 3 for Beecher. Author Shaplen, who has written a fascinating account of the great scandal, goes on to tell the epilogue. Three years later, Mrs. Tilton, whom neither side had dared call in the trial, suffered her final fit of conscience and published an open letter confessing "that the charge brought by my husband, of adultery between myself and the Reverend Henry Ward Beecher, was true."
Though Beecher's influence waned, he went on spellbinding in Brooklyn until his death in 1887, when 50,000 lined the streets for his funeral. Mrs. Tilton died in 1897, ten years before her husband, whose death came in lonely Paris exile. The redoubtable libertine, Victoria Woodhull, outlived them all.