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Theodore Tilton (October 2, 1835
– May 29, 1907) was an American newspaper editor, poet and abolitionist.
He was born in New York City to Silas Tilton and Eusebia Tilton (same surname).
On his twentieth birthday, October 2, 1855, he married Elizabeth Richards.
Tilton's newspaper work was fully supportive of abolitionism and the Northern
cause in the American Civil War. Theodore Tilton was present at The Southern
Loyalist Convention held in Philadelphia in September 1866. Frederick Douglass
writes of him in his autobiography: “There was one man present who was brave
enough to meet the duty of the hour; one who was neither afraid nor ashamed to
own me as a man and a brother; one man of the purest Caucasian type, a poet and
a scholar, brilliant as a writer, eloquent as a speaker, and holding a high
influential position-the editor of a weekly journal having the largest
circulation of any weekly paper in the city or State of New York- and the man
was MR. Theodore Tilton. He came to me by the hand in a most brotherly way, and
proposed to walk with me in the procession.” From 1860 to 1871, Tilton was the
assistant of Henry Ward Beecher. He
gave the 1869 commencement speech for the Irving Literary Society. In 1874 Tilton filed a complaint
against Beecher for "criminal conversation"
(adultery) with Elizabeth Richards Tilton and
sued for a $100,000 judgment. The
Beecher-Tilton trial ended in a deadlocked jury. Afterwards, Tilton moved to
Paris, where he lived for the rest of his life. In the 1880s, Tilton frequently
played chess with fellow American exile (but ex-Confederate) Judah Benjamin, until the latter died in 1884. As a poet,
Tilton is famous mainly for his masterpiece 'Even This Shall Pass Away', a poem
that talks about how everything in life is limited and will end.