A Long-Standing Commitment

Delivered at the Unitarian Universalist Church in Livermore.

February is Black History Month. I want to hold that up, but even more than that I want to pay attention to the questions put to us around issues such as racism—some which have no clear answers. We Unitarian Universalists tend to enjoy the questions more than we find comfort in rock-solid answers. One that looms before us as Black History month begins is the question of how we can, as individuals and as a community, step up to see that the idealism that was set in motion with the election of President Obama is continued into our asking ourselves what we can do to contribute to the manifestation of the values that bring us hope for our country.

History has lessons for us here. The ethical issues that were grappled with by our forebears have taken a different shape, but they have actually morphed into issues that are similar. For example, the Unitarians who were known as the “Boston Brahmans” and many well-known leaders, such as Thomas Jefferson, were faced with questions that had no easy answer. Jefferson was against slavery, but he owned 267 slaves, required to run his tobacco plantation—with only five freed upon his death because they were blood relatives. How did he manage to publically make statements such as everyone has the right to “Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness?” While owning slaves? Patrick Henry, the “Give Me Liberty or Give me Death” Founding Father owned slaves, and did not free them at his death—as some others did. Almost half of the signers of the Declaration of Independence were slave holders. The wife of John Adams, Abigail Adams, wrote to her husband in 1774 to ask how we could “fight ourselves for what we are daily robbing and plundering from those who have as good a right to freedom as we have.” This points to the contradiction between words and deeds. Many of us are living within the confines of this kind of contradiction. Once-in-awhile someone comes along who has been inspired to make a commitment to change—no contradictions! Freedom of the conscientious mind! Sleep like a baby! You may be broke, but you got something straight!

John Brown was sure broke, but he had that clarity of mind that only comes with ostracizing hypocrisy from one’s life. John Brown’s story is a good foundation for examining some of the ethical issues that remain with many of us.

When I taught church history at the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley, I learned that teaching as if our heroes and sheroes were faultless—were super-human, contributes to our inability to fully appreciate what we ourselves manage to accomplish. It prevents us from stepping forward with all of our gifts—from serving as the leaders that we are. It also carries the message that only those who became heroes and sheroes really matter. Everybody else goes nameless, becomes (and stays) invisible. Our search for the missing includes finding our own voice.

John Brown, who, in finding his own voice, has been depicted as a hero by some, a villain by others, depending on whither you were pro-Union in 1859 or pro-Confederate. Pro-Abolitionist or pro-slavery. He has, in the years following the Civil War, been described as a lunatic and a man of sound mind. A murderer and a saint. He himself said that his actions were based on knowing that prior to taking his most daring stance against slavery, “My whole life before had not afforded me one half the opportunity to plead for the right.

Who was John Brown? John Brown was a Calvinist with a passion for abolishing slavery. He was a lookout for his father who conveyed slaves to free territory on a route called “The Underground Railroad.” He was a tall, lanky man with a chiseled face along the same lines as Abraham Lincoln. He stood up in church one day, held up his right hand and announced “I consecrate my life to the destruction of slavery.” At the time he was 37 years old. He was mentally and physically active—having memorized the Bible, entering into several (mostly failed) businesses and supporting a wife and eighteen children. He had to flee more than once because he could not pay his debts, lost several of his daughters to influenza and believed that he was old when he took himself off to the land of a wealthy abolitionist in New York in order to stay out of trouble with the law over his debts. While there, he received word from five of his sons in Kansas that there was a huge influx of pro-slavery men, known as “boarder Ruffians” arriving from Missouri so that they could swing the vote about to be taken over whether it would be a free or a slave state.

It was 1856. Brown, who was called “Old Man Brown” at this point in his life, gathered arms and met up with his sons. They built a fortress/cabin near the Pottawatomie River. Brown had been to England in one of his failed attempts to make money—trying to sell wool from his sheep in Ohio. He made good use of his time while losing money by studying the structures historically used for fortresses, knowing he would eventually modify the designs so that they would be suitable for mountain warfare in the United States. Consequently, back in Kansas, Brown and his sons were well prepared for a shoot-out after attacking a group of pro-slavery settlers. Five pro-slavery men were killed. Free-state men had been killed or beaten prior to this event. John Brown claimed to have not participated in the massacre, but he was the designer of the plan. He escaped, but several free-state men were jailed.

Thus began John Brown’s national notoriety, which takes us to his new and influential friends, who welcomed him with open arms. He corresponded, and then met with Frederick Douglass, a gifted orator and respected more than any other black man in the country. Douglass had once been a slave, but escaped. Brown also corresponded and then met with Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Theodore Parker and other influential Unitarians. William Lloyd Garrison, a member of Theodore Parker’s congregation and a newspaper publisher was also a highly influential abolitionist at this time, influenced by John Brown.

Unitarians in the Boston area took him into their homes, though his coarse habits such as frightening his hostesses by bringing a large hunting knife to dinner every evening and slamming it down among the fine china was something unfamiliar to their civility.

Not all abolitionists had the same idea about what freeing the slaves would mean. Emerson wrote in his diary about the inferiority of the black man, but after his conversations with John Brown he became more radical in his views and was an eloquent adversary of slavery. Today, Cornell West, who recently left Harvard University to take another post, refers to Emerson as “Moderately Racist.” Thoreau also became more radical by meeting John Brown, but did not envision the free slaves as his neighbors. There was a group called “The Colonialists” who wanted to see the slaves freed and returned to Africa, but Thoreau was not a member. Thoreau was not a joiner, he was a loner, which make stories about his mother doing his laundry and his own pride in spending one night in jail protesting the law that allowed slave holders to travel north and capture their runaways seem rather dilettante. Especially in comparison to civil disobedience practitioners like Alice Paul, who we met in the sermon last week.

The sins of slavery were debated long before John Brown became the center of attention. To bring a halt to slavery there were as many opinions as there were leaders. Some supported only immediate action, and advocated the right of a slave to kill his master if no other means would work to gain freedom. Some favored immediate action (Garrison, for example) but with a non-violent approach. Some were “gradualist” and wanted a smooth transition, while others were concerned about what the slave would do to survive when suddenly becoming free. We have seen our share of those who wanted immediate action, most notably Malcolm X, those who were more in the category of gradualist, most notably Martin Luther King, Jr. and everything in-between. And the question remains: is slavery still at work here, but in ways we are not looking for?

Abigail Adams wrote to her husband, President John Adams, that she thought the bloodshed of their time was God’s punishment for the sin of slavery. And, Thomas Jefferson, who was a slaveholder, said that he “trembled for the country when he reflected “God is Just.”

The ethical dilemmas under the surface of these questions are many, and remain with us—though sometimes wearing different clothing, to this day.

Do harmful means ever justify a desired objective? Does Brown’s thinking that if he sacrificed a few lives he might save countless others make sense? Why would one human being think that he or she had the right to make such a decision? Our last President made that decision. He sent additional troops to the Middle East regardless of House or Senate votes, declining support of his own party or the voices of those who entrusted him with his office. If we were against him it is because we don’t understand the big picture, we don’t know the details and we thought we had no power, save a revolution. In some ways we did have a revolution. Not with weapons of mass destruction, but with the weapon of solidarity brought together in a critical mass through the Internet and other related technologies, referred to in the current issue of San Francisco, a magazine for subscribers to the public television and radio stations, as “Democracy, the Upgrade: How Bay Area Technology, Indignation, and Cunning Remade U.S. Politics.” In the thinking of this expansive article, the authors make a good case for Bay Area activists with hi-tech savvy being an essential part of the election and go so far as to say that Obama would not have won without massive support in the Bay Area.

Brown had the cautionary advice of the best—Frederick Douglass—warning him against taking Harper’s Ferry. The fears of Douglass proved themselves out. Brown’s band of men were trapped in the arsenal, there were no masses of Justice-seeking free men marching in to aid Brown’s cause and there were no slaves rushing to aid Brown’s effort either. No one came to join the righteous cause. In fact, the first man killed was a black man who worked at Harper’s Ferry. All but one of John Brown’s sons were killed, along with most of the remaining nineteen men who had made up his minuscule army. Brown received a grave wound, and an eyewitness report states that innocent bystanders were killed for no reason.

One of the most radical Unitarian ministers in our history, Theodore Parker, was a member of “The Secret Six.” Six influential, and in a couple of cases very wealthy, men supported John Brown. Parker was, at one point, asked to resign from the Unitarian Ministers group in New England because his views were too radical. He went ahead of the slave holders coming to Boston in search of runaways, and posted notices all over the streets warning slaves of their masters arrival. He kept a gun in his pulpit in order to defend any slave that was forced from his church to return to the south with their owner. He broke federal law and married runaway slaves. Parker refused to resign, and his colleagues refused to force the issue.

Why was John Brown so attractive to the Unitarians in the east, especially around Boston? Did they fully understand his intention to begin a revolution at Harper’s Ferry, moving a vast army of men who had joined him, and who would escape to pre-designated locations (in fortresses, designed after what he had learned in Europe) built in the Blue Ridge Mountains? He would move from there to the south, where he could fight the slave holders. John Brown did not listen to Frederick Douglass when he said that Harper’s Ferry was a trap, where, once in he would easily be contained with no hope for escape. Reporters arrived from across the country and began interviewing John Brown even before he was removed from Harper’s Ferry to jail. His speech was eloquent. His plan had failed for all practical purposes, but he had known prior to his assault on Harper’s Ferry that, regardless of which way things went, his objective would find success. A failed attempt meant death for him and his small group of followers, which included two of his sons, but the attention he drew was phenomenal. He was laid on a cot in the courtroom during his trial.

John Brown was made to sit on his own coffin in the back of a wagon that took him to the site where he was to be executed on December 2, making him the first American since the founding of the nation to be executed as a traitor. Throughout the North, church bells rang in mourning. Louisa May Alcott, William Dean Howells, Herman Melville, John Greenleaf Whittier and Walt Whitman were among the poets who responded to the event. “The gaze of Europe is fixed at this moment on America: wrote Victor Hugo from France. Executing Brown, Hugo predicted, “will open a latent issure that will finally split the Union asunder. The punishment of John Brown may consolidate slavery in Virginia, but I will certainly shatter the American Democracy. You preserve your shame but you kill your glory.” (From Lies My Teacher Told Me, p. 176)

Antiracism is one of America’s great gifts to the world. Its relevance extends far beyond race relations. Antiracism invigorated the women’s movement, inspires our democratic spirit, and continues to influence movements of oppressed people around the world. People who, in East Germany who sang “We Shall Overcome” in clandestine anticommunist meetings, Iranians who used the methods of Martin Luther King in overthrowing their hated shah. On Ho Chi Minh’s desk in Hanoi on the day he died lay a biography of John Brown, and students in Tiananmen Square were inspired by the words of Abraham Lincoln. (From Lies My Teacher Told me, p. 199) Abraham Lincoln, who said in a speech to Abolitionist Unitarian ministers in 1862: “We shall need all of the anti-slavery feeling in the country, and more; you can go home and try to bring the people to your views, and you may say anything you like about me if that will help… when the hour comes for dealing with slavery, I trust I will be willing to do my duty, though it cost my life.”

To what great purpose do we consecrate our lives? As Unitarian Universalists, we are dedicated—we covenant to uphold high purposes and values that are timeless. As we live, we grow in understanding but we are works in progress. Our revelation is not sealed, and we are moving forward. Be good to yourselves, and always remember that Our Unitarian Universalist Principles and Purposes are ideals we can attempt to model, not ideals we should expect to perfect in ourselves. Our forebears did not claim any lofty status beyond being fully human, Abraham Lincoln, John Brown, Harriet Tubman, Sojouner Truth among others in the struggle for Abolition—people who held to high ideals while owning their personal struggles—keep these forebears close to your heart this month and in the months which will flow into years, to generations who will remember them and will remember you.

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