HomeLOOKING BACK: Unitarianism, Slavery and Civil War - Part 2
As part of the ongoing series of reflections about our congregation’s 150 years of existence, I continue to explore the great issues of the past
Good morning!
I want to begin by adding to comments I made last year about Abiel A. Livermore, the first minister of this congregation. I had reported in a sermon that he had refrained from speaking to the issue of slavery while serving the Unitarian congregation in Cincinnati, and seemed to have said little against slavery that I could find. I later reported that following his resignation from the pulpit here in 1863, in a letter recognizing his service to the then church from the President of this congregation, there was mention that he was among other things, “the voice of the slave”. I now have some additional information to add.
On the UUA website there is a biographical reference for Sarah Otis Ernst, a social activist of the mid 1800’s. Included there is mention of an anti-slavery convention in Cincinnati in 1853. The document goes on to say “the 1854 Convention included Frederick Douglass, Christian Donaldson, Lucy Stone and Henry Blackwell. Stone and Blackwell—a member of the Unitarian Church in Cincinnati—married the next year. The Cincinnati Unitarian minister, Abiel Livermore, publicly declared his support for abolitionism, which had heretofore been carefully hidden”.
You will remember from last year’s sermon—because you hold in your hearts the full recollection of every sermon I have ever delivered--that Henry Blackwell was brother to Elizabeth Blackwell, first woman doctor in the US; and brother-in-law to Antoinette Brown Blackwell, the first woman in the US to be ordained by a denomination.
Also, from UNITARIANISM IN AMERICA II, by Rev. George Willis Cooke, a Unitarian minister, comes the following selection:
“When the names of individual Unitarians who took an active part in the anti-slavery movement are given, it is at once seen how important was the influence of the denomination.”
There is then a long list of ministers who were strong advocates of ending slavery,
{I leave the list intact here—DB: Early in the century Rev. Noah Worcester uttered his word of protest against slavery. Rev. Charles Follen joined the Massachusetts Anti-slavery Society in the second year of its existence, and no nobler champion of liberty ever lived. If Dr. Channing was slow in applying his Christian ideal of liberty to slavery, there can be no question that his influence was powerful on the right side, and all the more so because of his gentle and ethical interpretation of individual and national duty. His various publications on the subject, his identification of himself with the abolitionists by joining their ranks in the Massachusetts State House in 1836, his speech in Faneuil Hall in protest against the killing of Lovejoy in Alton during the same year, exerted a great influence in behalf of abolition throughout the North. It is only necessary to mention John Pierpont, Theodore Parker, William H. Furness, William H. Channing, William Goodell, Theodore D. Weld, Ichabod Codding, Caleb Stetson, and M.D. Conway in order to recognize their uncompromising fidelity to the cause of freedom.}
And then he goes on to say, “Only less devoted were such men as…” {ditto—DB: Charles Lowell, Nahor A. Staples, Sylvester Judd, Nathaniel Hall, Thomas T. Stone, O.B. Frothingham, Abiel A. Livermore, Samuel Johnson, Samuel Longfellow, Thomas J. Mumford, and many others} and in that list he includes the name of Abiel A Livermore. I am glad to be able to amend what I said last year in this much more positive way. [It is odd, but I felt a sense of relief to find this information, as if this made me a better person somehow.]
The Kansas Nebraska act allowed Kansas into the union with the residents of Kansas to decide slavery issue within the state by a vote. However, the date of such a vote was not set by the US congress, not was there a statement of who would be qualified to vote, so it became by default anyone present in Kansas at time of vote. This inspired people on both sides of the issue to send settlers to Kansas.
Lawrence Kansas was founded on August 1, 1854 and named for Amos Lawrence, a member of the Brattle Street Church in Boston, a Unitarian congregation.
New England Emigrant Aid Society was formed to send and support anti=slavery settlers in Kansas. This organization included many Unitarians, for example Rev. Edward Everett Hale who led it at one point.
Charles Robinson, a Unitarian, one of the leaders of the settlement program and later became the first governor of the state of Kansas.
The settlers included Congregationalists, Baptists, Methodists and Unitarians. They worshipped together in the Unitarian Church until other churches could be built.
This is commitment. These people moved to a new and, to them, unknown territory in order to support the goal of ending slavery, most of them doing so based upon their social but also their religious beliefs. These people did not ask themselves, “What’s in this for me?”; they were committed to the cause of abolition and so they acted. When one is deeply committed, one does not do a cost benefit analysis of one’s action. Instead, you do that which is necessary.
What is our commitment in our lives today?
How committed am I to my own religious principles? How much of myself and my resources am I willing to give to any cause, movement or institutions? How deeply am I committed to my religious movement and my religious congregation? Am I committed or do I judge my giving of resources based solely upon my judgment of what I receive in return?
The Emigrant Aid Society support to the settlers included not only food, clothing and money, but after it became clear that Kansas was going to be the embroiled in violence, Charles Robinson sent word to Boston that the settlers would also need weapons. The Emigrant Aid Society then supplied rifles and ammunition. There is a legal fiction attached to this; the Directors of the Aid Society put up money to purchase weapons and ammunition, not the Aid Society itself. But those weapons then accompanied the shipments of aid to the settlers. So, really, the Emigrant Aid Society sent the weapons. They did so for good reason.
On December 1, 1855 the Missouri Militia crossed the border into Kansas, surrounded the town of Lawrence and threatened to burn it to the ground. The Territorial Governor intervened and the attack did no0t happen.
Then on May 21 1856 (less than six months later) a raid by a pro-slavery militia from within Kansas (a raid led by the local sheriff) destroyed many of the buildings in town. The raiders stated that they intended to return the following day to burn the last surviving of the main buildings in town: the Unitarian church; but they did not return.
Then, on August 21, 1863, during the Civil War, Quantrill’s Raiders attacked and burned the town killing two hundred residents.
(I have an indirect personal connection to Lawrence: my wife’s Great grandmother was a one year old survivor of Quantrill’s raid.)
In October of 1855 John Brown moved to Kansas and took part in the conflict. Following the attack on Lawrence by the Kansas pro-slavery militia in 1856, John Brown had his followers attack a settlement of pro-slavery advocates in what is called either the Pottawatomie executions or the Pottawatomie massacre depending upon which side you are on. John Brown’s followers went to the settlement, knocked on doors and dragged five men outside, killing them by hacking at them with long knives. This was done intentionally to make the killings gruesome.
Brown developed a plan to attack Harper’s Ferry, Virginia to grab the federal armory there in order to hand out the weapons and spark a slave uprising.
He was supported financially by a group called the "Secret Six": George L. Steams, Gerrit Smith, Rev. Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Rev. Theodore Parker, Franklin Sanborn, and Samuel Gridley Howe (husband of Julia Ward Howe). At least four of them were Unitarians and two of those four were Unitarian ministers. Gerrit Smith had established his own independent Christian congregation in upstate new York (Where John Brown worshipped until he moved to Kansas), and Franklin Sanborn is someone whose religious affiliation I could not find, though he was headmaster of the school in Concord, Massachusetts which was the center for so many Unitarians. While they did not know his precise target, they knew that he intended an attack and they also knew of the Pottawatomie killings. That is to say, they supported John Brown knowing that he was a violent, even ruthless man.
They supported him despite, even because, of his resort to violence because they felt a righteous indignation at injustice.
Among those who spoke out for him following his arrest and until his execution were such seemingly non-violent Unitarians as Ralph Waldo Emerson (a Unitarian minister) Henry David Thoreau and William Lloyd Garrison, the famous abolitionist and pacifist who worshipped at Theodore Parker’s church.
This is an issue for us today.
John Brown was clearly a terrorist; in fact he described the killings at Pottawatomie as “terrorism”, using that word. In his view, slavery must be stopped by any means, and violence was the only means that would work. In this particular case, the men he killed were people whom he believed had led the raid on Lawrence, Kansas, and the raids and attacks against free soil settlers declined dramatically after these killings. So on a purely practical level the executions worked, though the fact that something has an effect is never alone justification for it. If it is evil, it remains evil even if it works.
I do have to change the phrase a bit from “righteous indignation at injustice” to “righteous indignation at perceived injustice”, because “injustice” is a matter of perception. We do not have to agree with the particulars of the perception of injustice to recognize the feeling of righteous indignation.
The man who shot a doctor for providing abortions perceived injustice in what he believed was the killing of babies.
The Catholic based Irish Republican Army and the Protestant based Ulster Defense Forces, each of which engaged in terrorist actions in Northern Ireland, saw injustice in the acts of the other, injustice that justified a resort to violence in response.
The men who flew planes into buildings in New York City saw injustice in American actions in the Middle East.
We can recognize the feeling of righteous indignation even if we reject the claim of injustice that inspires it.
There also was a sense of righteous indignation in the American invasion of Afghanistan.
When is it acceptable or right to decide that acts of injustice by a person or an institution justify acts of violence in response?
It has been pointed out that John Brown sought to overturn slavery, an institution that is maintained through violence and the threat of violence, and an institution that is itself a form of violence. When is it right to use violence to overturn such an institution? When is it right to decide that some person or some people have no right to live? And do we expect clergy to arrive at that conclusion? I recoil at the idea that clergy supplied weapons to Kansas and to Brown. When would you expect me, as your minister, to state that it was time to use violence?
Earlier this year I preached about Gandhi and Martin Luther King. How different from them the movement in Kansas became, and how different from them was John Brown. In each of these cases, Unitarians including clergy supported acts of violence.
This choice between violence and non-violence is one I grapple with today; in that choice, who was right, Gandhi and King or John Brown?
Is non-violence merely a tactic to be used when it can be effective, or is it something else? Both King and Gandhi specifically rejected the claim that it was merely a tactic and claimed that it is a way of living and being.
This remains our issue today.
For me, non-violence is the goal but I too often succumb to practicality; violence works, so let’s use it.
Another question here: Can we recognize when we ourselves support institutions that depend upon violence or are themselves violence in another form? Slavery is violence, but isn’t wage slavery also violence, just violence in a more genteel form?
Legislated segregation is a form of violence, but isn’t economic segregation also a form of violence?
Further, do I hypocritically condemn violence only for goals I do not support, but accept it for goals I seek? Or do I judge violence itself as an evil?
John Brown’s spirit still stalks us today, and the questions he raised still haunt.
Return to
Home
Return to Sermons Index