Scandals sell newspapers. Especially when they involve clergymen and sex.

In the days before political correctness, Brooklyn was nicknamed “the city of churches.” And in the most upscale residential neighborhood of Brooklyn, today’s Brooklyn Heights, Henry Ward Beecher built the fledgling pre-Civil War Plymouth Church into America’s first mega-church, thanks to his opposition to slavery combined with his oratorical skills and his knack for publicity.

But it was publicity of the wrong kind after the war, when a beautiful adventuress and newspaper publisher, Victoria (Claflin) Woodhull Blood, accused Beecher of practicing but not preaching the free love she advocated. Specifically, she alleged that Beecher had had an affair with Elizabeth Tilton, a parishioner and the wife of a religious journalist whom Beecher had mentored. After Beecher’s attempted cover-up, Elizabeth’s husband, Theodore Tilton, obligingly sued for alienation of affection, and the newspaper circus began.

A recent spate of books on Woodhull (who understandably kept her first husband’s name) has now been supplemented by Debby Applegate’s new biography of Beecher (Doubleday, 527 pages, $27.95). As a longtime member of Plymouth Church and former docent, and something of an aficionado of the whole Beecher clan, I already knew the story, so I was especially interested in whether Ms. Applegate sided with the jury (unable to reach a verdict but reportedly 9-3 in Beecher’s favor) or with most recent books (guilty as charged). The cover photo provides the first clue: It shows Beecher reclining on an Adirondack-style chaise longue like some pasha.

Ms. Applegate’s focus on the 1875 trial results in her slighting topics that are potentially more meaningful, and certainly less well known. Beecher’s opposition to anti-Semitism, which engendered much publicity in his day, is mentioned only in one brief phrase; there is next to nothing on his concern about American Indians. His support for temperance and Charles Darwin are worth more space than they were awarded. Plymouth was the largest and best-known American church for decades – what of the life of that institution?

Still, to give the author her due, this is a thoroughly researched, detailed, scrupulously footnoted work, written in good solid English prose, if more encyclopedic than engrossing. The book is particularly good in appraising Beecher and the Civil War, his anti-slavery speeches in England during the war, and the impact of politics and war on freeing the slaves, and in showing how an initially popular war became unpopular, especially in New York.

Although the author leaves for another biographer many of the topics that arose from Beecher’s own interests and activities, she is thorough in her presentation of the complex web of personal, economic, and political relationships that led to the public accusation against Beecher and the failure of the cover-up. However, the chronological structure of the book and its level of detail work against the reader. The overwhelmed reader wishes for a list of characters, a time line, subheads, a summary, something to put the minutiae into proper categories.

The newspaper owner and politician Henry Chandler Bowen emerges as the chief villain, manipulating Theodore Tilton, his employee, who is shown as ambitious but foolish, suspicious of his wife but not of Bowen when it mattered. Bowen needed Beecher’s column in his newspaper, both for the income it provided and for the power an alliance with the pastor provided in the Republican Party. Victoria Woodhull is depicted as the star of a seamy rags-to-riches story: a daughter of a small-time confidence man who married a drunk at 15, later conducted seances, and merged into New York’s demi-monde, from which she rose thanks to Cornelius Vanderbilt, who befriended her and, especially, her sister Tennie. Woodhull even “ran” for president – Ms. Applegate reports her candidacy but doesn’t mention that she didn’t meet the constitutional age requirement. Woodhull espoused suffrage for women while touting free love.

But Ms. Applegate never convincingly explains Bowen’s hatred for Beecher, which she attributes only to the fact that Beecher had severed his connection with the Independent and started a competing magazine. Did Bowen’s wife really have an affair with Beecher? Ms. Applegate accepts Bowen’s denial. Would a wily, possibly corrupt politician like Bowen really be offended if his minister was unfaithful? Did Beecher’s support for Andrew Johnson really antagonize Bowen so much? Or, as one of the principal founders of Plymouth Church, did he resent Beecher’s eventual control of the church?

Tilton, who succeeded Beecher as editor of Bowen’s paper, became increasingly radical both politically and socially. By now a liability, he was fired by Bowen on December 31, 1870, less than a week after Bowen had manipulated him into writing Beecher a letter of accusation. During the ensuing cover-up, Tilton had an affair with Woodhull, during which Tilton supplied her with part of the ammunition she used against Beecher. He later published a biography of Woodhull that was described by a contemporary as “too ridiculous almost, even to ridicule.”

When no newspaper would print Woodhull’s accusations, she put out a special edition of Woodhull & Claflin’s Weekly. It sold like hotcakes. Bowen, who preferred to work behind the scenes, had copies mailed out of state so that the sisters would be arrested for mailing obscene material. Newspapers that wouldn’t print Woodhull’s story did report the details of the arrests, including the accusations.

Woodhull’s actions show her character, time after time. But Elizabeth Tilton eludes the author’s attempt to characterize her. Ms. Applegate shows that Elizabeth Tilton’s mother was crazy, that her husband was abusive, that her chief concern was that her children not suffer. But the author also shows how Elizabeth Tilton confessed, recanted, confessed, recanted, and was so responsive to pressure that neither side called her to the witness stand. Her final statement came several years after the trial: Yes, we had sex. Ms. Applegate accepts the statement at face value, but it came too late to sway Elizabeth’s contemporaries. Beecher by then had largely redeemed his reputation.

The reader must decide: Was her final confession true? Or was she bitter toward Beecher or Plymouth, bidding for attention from her estranged husband, trying to ingratiate herself with old friends from the suffrage movement, or setting the record straight? What was her mental state? In our more psychologically aware era, the reader could have reasonably expected a discussion of how Tilton’s affair with Woodhull might have affected his obsession regarding his wife’s relationship with Beecher. We now know more about the damage done to wives by abusive husbands, but Ms. Applegate does not explore that, either.

Ultimately it was the Tiltons who suffered. The two charismatic figures, Beecher and Woodhull, landed on their feet, Beecher as a wealthy minister, with his reputation put back together, and Woodhull as the very wealthy widow of an English banker, trying to play Lady Bountiful to an English village. Bowen, the manipulator, spent the next two decades making money. But Elizabeth Tilton lived with her daughter in Brooklyn, lonely and going blind. Theodore worked the lecture circuit until audiences dwindled, and ended his days living in an attic room in Paris on the Ile St.-Louis, writing bad poetry and playing chess with Judah P. Benjamin, the former secretary of state of the Confederacy.

Another tragedy was that women’s suffrage was delayed for a generation, damaged by association with immorality. Woodhull undermined the same women’s movement that had brought her fame and a degree of respectability.

Ms. Applegate is generous in her ultimate assessment of Henry Ward Beecher. Yes, he did much to show the evil of slavery, and to stiffen the backbones of Americans so they were willing to endure the bloodshed of the Civil War. But most important, more than anyone else, he changed the prism through which Americans, still a religious people today, view God. We are no longer sinners in the hands of an angry god; today, our worldview is undergirded by the sense that we are loved by God, sinners though we be. Thus God forgave Beecher the dalliances that he most surely had. But, Ms. Applegate explains, Beecher’s theological view of God arose from his psychological need to deal with his weaknesses. This is a book that explains Beecher through the prism of our time. And it serves as a reminder that scandals sell books, too.

Ms. Bartley lives in Brooklyn Heights and is a member of Plymouth Church.