The Sinfulness of Racism and Slavery
6 examples of the harm caused to America, by Henry Ward Beecher
“Let us take a look and see if there is any testimony, under God’s great moral government, on the subject of the sinfulness of racism and slavery.”
The following words of this article were originally spoken by the abolitionist pastor of Brooklyn, Henry Ward Beecher. They were delivered in one of his weekly sermons at Plymouth Church, this one called “National Injustice and Penalty.” I have lightly adapted the text in order to modernize the victorian style language.
This was no ordinary Sunday in our nation’s history. There was a high level of intensity in the air. Possibly thicker than that of 1960 and 2020. This one God given Sunday took place during May of 1861. The American Civil War had broken out one month earlier on April 12th, 1861.
Let's take a look at how Mr. Beecher lays out six examples of how racism and slavery in America violates natural and moral law.
You might find similarities in the message of Martin Luther King Jr. who wrote this from a Birmingham jail in April of 1963;
“Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly.”
So let’s now dive into Beecher’s…
6 Examples of the Sinfulness of Racism and Slavery
- Freedom of Labor. Its primal.
- Violation of One’s Social and Family Rights
- Racism Makes Ignorance Indispensable
- Making Human Life Unsacred
- Evil Coexisting with Seemingly Civil Ideas
- The Federal Government Tolerating Slavery & Racism
First — Freedom of Labor. Its primal.
There is no right more universal, and more sacred, than the right of people to their own labor. It is primal. But in building this nation we denied this right to millions of people. They were denied the right to direct their own labor or the fruits of it. However, many white people cunningly explained that slaves were better off where they were. Take a close look at what this caused the slave states. God cursed their soil. Every slave state by the mid 1800’s that had exacted and forced labor felt the blight and curse of slavery in its agriculture.
What was Virginia worth in 1860? It was worn out and abandoned. If it were not for slave-breeding, old slave-tilled Virginia would have become a free state. It wasn’t because of their tobacco or cereals, it was because the Virginian’s were willing to sell their own blood in the market that they decided to continue as a slave state. It was the only way for that state to make a profit. Their agriculture was dead. Their soil was wasted. North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi and Louisiana, throughout the 1800’s history shows how slavery was an exhausting agricultural practice in these states. It was wearing out every part of the country that it touched.
The work of the slave carried the punishment of their master. The master took away the right to his labor and the slave knew to turn around and say, “I curse the soil.” By the mid 1800’s the soil had become cursed in the South, which God stood as witness.
Second — Violation of One’s Social and Family Rights
Racism violates the social and family rights of people. Racism was born in our country from the system of slavery. The law of slavery is that every person enslaved is property to their master and not their own. Therefore every woman follows the same law. There was also no such thing as the right of marriage. There was a form of marriage among America’s enslaved people, which the whites allowed and observed with more or less decency under a variety of circumstances. However, there was no doctrine or any sort of impression by society that when two enslaved Americans married they were sacred to each other forever. A divorce for enslaved Americans was referred to as a “sale”. The general law was that when an enslaved man was sold from one plantation to another that was at least ten miles away, that man was then free to remarry.
Now if anything is fundamental in this world, it is marriage. A major systemic violation in America was the right of marriage between two people who could not own their children. Do you believe God had any testimony to this violation? Should God use punishment against this monstrous violation of natural and moral law?
Slavery destroyed the sacred family relation. The virtue of the family estate was completely sapped out of the South. The great sanctities and purities of wedded life were universally violated all throughout the South. This system drained and undermined the foundational virtue of its people.
Women of the South were the most virtuous, however. And nowhere more did they suffer than in the South. When God finally brought those very revealing days, the heart’s of wives and mothers became anguished and contaminated by the practice of slavery that was brought into their households. How dreadful for the nation of America the fact that God witnessed this vile system. His punishment will be in our presence for many years to come.
America took away the fundamental right of matrimony and of the family from its own people.
This naturally led to the punishment of whites by the undermining of the virtue and purity of their own households.
Third — Racism Makes Ignorance Indispensable
Racism makes ignorance indispensable because where there is knowledge, every faculty is a wheel set in motion. The more complex the machinery of a man’s mind is, the more needful it is to have a skillful engineer to manage and keep it in repair, and the more fuel it requires to run it. While the less complex it is, the nearer the man is to an animal, the easier it is to manage it and keep it in repair, and supply its wants.
As long as man lives only in bone and muscle, he asks nothing but pork and corn-meal. As long as he is an ox, he chews ox-fodder. When he becomes a man, he eats man’s food. And the difference between a slave and a man is the difference between fodder and food.
The moment you give a man a heart, he must have something for his heart. The moment you give him imagination, he must have some opportunity, some scope, and some leisure, for his imagination. The moment you give him reason, he must have food for his reason.
As you augment a man in civilization, and make more and more of him, there must be a larger space, more room for him. And so, when you give slaves intelligence, you make them so voluminous that a man cannot afford to provide for a hundred of them. The only way, therefore, to make slavery profitable, was to keep the slave ignorant.
Is there no punishment for this wrong? If a man shuts the door of knowledge against his fellowman, is there no testimony of God against it? Is it no sin to rob manhood of knowledge? Is it no crime to take from man the liberty of being what God made him to be? I hold that there is no other crime in the calendar to be compared with that.
The man that robs a bank in New York commits a slight offense compared to someone who commits robbery of a human being’s right to open his own mind before God and man. And what is the punishment for that? The white man says to the slave, “You shall not know anything”; and the slave says to the white man, “Massa, you shall not know anything,” — and he does not!
For the great mass of those racists who are all profoundly ignorant, and must remain ignorant. You cannot have functioning schools where there is a legalized system of ignorance. This is a system of enforced ignorance that deprives millions of people of knowledge. You cannot have a system of forced intelligence that shall diffuse knowledge only among the remainder of the population.
The necessity of keeping people of color ignorant is the necessity of keeping the major part of the white people who practice racism ignorant. They are ignorant, and ignorant they will remain while the practice of racism continues to oppress people. God bears witness that he punishes this exclusion of knowledge from the oppressed.
Fourth — Making Human Life Unsacred
Slavery and racism takes away a person’s rights and degrades them to be a thing of bargain and sale. This evil system will avenge itself by making human life unsacred wherever slavery and racism prevails. It begins by lowering the idea of manhood and by making a minority’s life worth nothing, except for purpose of capital and traffic.
What is the punishment for this? When a nation lowers the idea of manhood and degrades life to zero among millions of their own people, it does the same thing in respect to all mankind.
And, where is life so cheap? And, where can a man be killed so easily? And, with so little disturbance of society? As in America? And where racism is most rancorous, not only are duels, riots, assassinations, and bloody broils most frequent, but the whole of social life is low. And it is reasonable that life should be cheaper there than in other communities.
This is because America believes it is a great deal more to kill a “virtuous, noble-minded man” than a “barbarian!” There are some men such that if you kill one, you kill a thousand men; and there are some men of whom you might kill a thousand, and then not kill more than one.
Influences proceed together by elective affinities; and thus a system that for the sake of racism lowers the doctrine of manhood, lowers it for all men. Thus it punishes itself and carries the penalty in its own nature.
Fifth — Evil Coexisting with Seemingly Civil Ideas
This brings us to yet an even more terrible aspect. Racism, while we admit that it is evil and regretted, it might disguise itself with seemingly correct civil ideas. It did in the beginning of our nation. Early on in our history, Christian men and statesmen in the South admitted that slavery and racism was an evil. They hoped for the decline and extinction of slavery and racism. It was quite compatible with the demand for complete racial equality that these early Americans wanted instilled in their own doctrine of government.
But a change came and the doctrine that was formed throughout the South on the subject of racism demonstrated that racism is “right.” Their doctrine supported a system where it deemed “correct” for the strong and the intelligent to take away from the weak and the ignorant every civil and personal right. They want them to subject and subdue them to their own will. This doctrine has been claimed by the South as a right.
What has been the penalty? The systematic act of stripping away the rights of millions of people, avenges itself in the South by rolling back and corrupting every political theory and idea. Every thinking man there was corrupted to the core by this doctrine of racism.
I believe without fear of contradiction, that the South set themselves free from democracy and republicanism. They are neither republican nor democratic. They are aristocratic and nearly became a monarchy. But, slavery and racism will continue to punish them.
As an instrument in the hand of God, it has been turned upon them for their own punishment. They have been punished as with a whip of scorpions. They have held a doctrine that justified them in taking every civil and every natural right away from their fellow-men, and God has punished them by turning them back to the barbaric periods.
And the States of the South, — you know where they are. They are four hundred years back of where we stand in the North, and they are going back. They are on the wrong side of Reformation. They are on the way to the Red Sea and God will thrust them in!
Sixth — The Federal Government Tolerating Slavery & Racism
As with States, so with the Federal government. I might cite innumerable instances of penalty that have accompanied the opening progress of this system of slavery and racism. The Federal government has experienced and is experiencing punishment because it has tolerated slavery and racism. In the inception of this government, when independent States were being persuaded to coalesce and to form one great nation, the dread of weakness was so great that people consented to act by sight and not by faith.
A cooper goes to work to make a wine-cask barrel. He prepares the wooden staves and begins to set them up. “This one is sound” and he sets it up “that one is sound” and he sets that up. He runs around the circle, till he comes to the last three or four staves. When he picks them up and finds that they are worm-eaten all throughout. He says, “I am afraid that I shall not make my barrel if I do not put them in. I know these staves are worm-eaten. I know that the wine will leak out. And, I know that I shall have a terrible time to save it. But, I must make up my barrel and these are all that I have.” So he puts them in and drives down the hoops. Later when the wine is put in it runs out. The cooper then follows a system of tinkering. Driving in a chip here and a sliver there. But in spite of all that he can do, the wine leaks away. After infinite trials and vexations, he finds that the wine is all gone, and that the barrel is good for nothing. What should he have done? He should have thrown out those worm-eaten staves, and made the barrel smaller.
Because the Federal government was afraid that South Carolina — the rottenest of rotten staves — would not join our nation. So, the framers of our government admitted slavery, the worm-eaten devastation of this country. Suppose our founding fathers had said, “We will have a Union and have freedom in it. Only those that consent to the exclusion of slavery shall be admitted,” — suppose they had made their barrel smaller and more sound. Is there any doubt about what the issue is? But they were so afraid of weakness and wanted the largest barrel possible so they put in worm-eaten staves. The result is that every single weakness of this government now stems directly from slavery and racism.
We were a homogeneous people. We had opportunities on this continent and elements of prosperity that no nation ever possessed. There never was launched such a people on such a sphere as this. And the great and only cause of weakness and trouble in the Federal government has been slavery and racism. The agitations, disturbances and sufferings we experience as a nation are the penalties and punishments for the wickedness of slavery and racism in this government. We have had a head full of sound teeth. Slavery, the tooth of racism, is the only one that has ached. Every other tooth has been true to its function.
It has been said that resistance to slavery and racism has been the cause of all our national troubles. Imagine a doctor would say that the cause of a fever is brought on by a man’s own bodily fight to stay healthy. And, that the way to fight the fever is to lie down and let the disease go through its course. Yes, there has been conscience enough to make resistance, thank God. If it had not been for that, the disease of racism would corrupt our nation through and through. The very marrow would have been torren before this time.
