Transforming into an Abolitionist
Winning a Battle and Finding One’s Voice: The Story of How Henry Ward Beecher became an Anti-Slavery Activist
Adapted passages from “Henry Ward Beecher: An American Portrait” published in 1887
Henry Ward Beecher was asked to help in presenting a two slave girls who were sisters, the Edmonson sisters, to a large audience at the Brooklyn Tabernacle, to present their case with the objective of purchasing their freedom. It was said that these girls had previously experienced some traumatizing incident and those abolitionist who found out about it, wanted to purchase their freedom before they were sold off “down the river.”
At the time, Henry Ward Beecher did not talk publicly much about politics or anti-slavery themes. However, that all started to change once he stepped foot on that stage at the Tabernacle. Below we find the story of that night:
It was no longer a matter of abstract reasoning, but of concrete emotion. The issue was not, to his (Beecher) mind: “Do you believe in the abolition of slavery at the price, perhaps, of war or disunion?” but “Shall this girl be sold for money to the first comer to do as he likes with?”
“A sale by a human flesh dealer of Christian girls!” he cried, and went on to dwell upon the horrors awaiting female slaves. “Suppose them so comely that no price less than $3,000 would purchase them. Suppose this, and act as you would act then!”
These are Christian girls. It is not just a question of women who will drift into one immoral relationship after another, like so many animals. These are girls who have seen the Light, who know good from evil, whose souls have been saved by the immortal Redeemer. What may come to them as slaves will not be merely a pollution of the body, but a profounder, more agonizing wound — they will resist, they will pray, they will struggle — but they will be tempted beyond their strength or violated by brute force.
He sees all of this — as if he were an actor in it, himself. It is more real to him than the crowded Brooklyn Tabernacle filled with sobbing, hysterical women, with shining-eyed, trembling-handed men, vicarious participants in a tremendous drama of heroism, cruelty, sex, blood — yes, and virtue triumphant! For they tear the money from their pocketbooks — they pay the price of the virginity of these girls.
But to Henry Ward Beecher the sale of the Edmonson sisters (the name of the women of his first reverse slave auction) was more even than columns of publicity in the New York news papers and sudden fame in his new field of labor. It was a revelation. Here was the means and the method of power over vast multitudes of people — here was a subject beside which his lectures to young men on drunkenness and harlotry were mere exercises in elocution. More than that. Here also was the key to his own dilemma respecting slavery: he would treat it no longer as an academic discussion of constitutional powers and State rights, but as a human question, in which God, the sanctity of the home, chastity, salvation, bodily purity, the patriotism due a nation unrent, Christ’s love and the blood of atonement, could all be brought together in one stupendous emotional appeal that would achieve what the rest of the Abolitionists had come no nearer to accomplishing in twenty years of what Beecher termed their “ruinous absurdities.”
On his way home across the ferry that night, Henry Ward Beecher stood in the chill darkness that so suddenly and so completely had succeeded to the light and the excitement of the Tabernacle, and turned these things over in his mind. The intoxication of the meeting was still upon him. He felt his power, as a runner feels his second wind and settles into his stride. Not, perhaps, in so many words did he say to himself:
“This is the path I must follow and this the pace I must maintain.”
But at the bottom of his consciousness there formed an unquestioning confidence in the efficacy of a swift emotional rush to attain whatever ends might be desired — even the rebirth of mankind and the redemption of the world.
And then, providentially, Plymouth church burned down shortly after, and a there shortly later David Hale died. David Hale was one of the two main founders and financiers behind Plymouth Church. He was not for the abolitionist movement. However, Henry Bowen, the other Plymouth Church founder and financier, who was in support of the abolitionist movement.
Beecher knew exactly what he had to do now: he must erect a church that would be neither David Hale’s church nor Henry Bowen’s church, but Henry Ward Beecher’s church. It must be big enough to grow into. That amazing evangelist, the Rev. John Newland Maffit, had recently been holding revival meetings of over three thousand persons in Brooklyn. Well, Plymouth Church must be able to handle just as many. The old church burned on January 30, 1849. By mid-February Beecher writes of the prospect of raising $100,000:
“I do not regard the enterprise as quite sure, though looking favorably.” But it was not Henry Ward Beecher who raised the money to build Plymouth Church. “I carried the subscription paper (The Independent), day after day and evening after evening, and saw with my own eyes nearly every subscription that was made,” said Henry C. Bowen. Plymouth Church might be Beecher’s church — but it was his church, too.
Meanwhile, many things happened in the great world. In the course of 1849, some 150,000 people rushed to California, mad over gold. It was clear that the old difficulties over the admission of Missouri and Texas as slave States must shortly come up again over California. When the Missouri Compromise was reached, neither Texas nor California was in the Union at all. The South took the position therefore that the best way to settle the status of this new territory was simply to extend the Missouri Compromise line westward to the Pacific. New Mexico and Arizona were unsuited to slave development anyhow, and such a solution might have saved both pride and politics in the South, without materially enlarging slave territory.
But the anti-slavery forces had, by now, grown into a great political party that in 1848 polled 300,000 votes and held the balance of power. The leadership of the movement was passing from those interested in the welfare of the slave into the hands of those interested in securing political and economic dominance, in the name of the slave. They were bent on hedging the slave-holding states so they could neither expand nor live on their own resources, thus using economic pressure to take from the South its political control of the country. As this ancient process involved neither violation of the Constitution nor civil conflict, those who cried out against being reduced to a state of ruin in the name of higher morality were made to appear antagonistic, rebellious and a menace to the peaceful continuance of the Union.
The Southern States were, in point of fact, none of these things.They were that most pathetic of modern misplacement, a people forced to depend on a purely agricultural economy in a rapidly industrializing world. Under the circumstances, the Southern planter was hardly concerned with the morals of his slaves or whether they could read the Bible or not. What bothered him was that the economic value of slave labor appeared to be growing less and less. He was caught in the cogs of an economic law which, conceivably, might be just as much God’s law as the seventh commandment.
But Henry Ward Beecher and thousands of clergymen like him in that day (and this) knew no more about economic law than they did about the paleolithic age. What interested them was the seventh commandment. They regarded slavery as a sort of gigantic debauch on the part of the slave-holders, in which female slaves were seen not as the economic liability they really were, but as the unwilling victims of their masters’ lusts. They attacked slavery not so much because of its cruel exploitation of man by man, but more so upon the ground of its wickedness as an incentive to grossly immoral behavior.
Which was not in the least the matter at issue.
Ever since Beecher left his editorial scissors sticking in the desk of the Western Farmer and Gardener, Henry Ward Beecher had itched to write again. Some 20,000 copies of his “Lectures to Young Men” had been sold — a promising beginning, certainly. Henry Ward had, moreover, a lively belief in the possibilities of religious journalism, fortified by unbounded confidence in his own resources as a religious writer. So when Henry C. Bowen and his partner in the dry-goods business began to turn over in their minds the idea of a religious weekly, Henry Ward was hot in support of the project. Three Congregational clergymen — Drs. Leonard Bacon (a lifelong friend of Lyman Beecher), Joseph P. Thompson and Richard Salter Storrs — were accordingly secured to act as an editorial board, and The Independent launched in December 1848. The choice of Joshua Leavitt as managing editor of the new paper was based on his twenty years’ experience in just such work.
But Joshua Leavitt happened also to be one of the founders of the New York Anti-Slavery Society back in the days when a mob sacked Lewis Tappan’s house and burned his furniture inthe street. He had been for James G. Birney for President, on the Liberty Party ticket, when Henry Ward Beecher was voting for that staunch old pro-slavery Virginian, William Henry Harrison. It was plain that if Henry Ward Beecher was to write for a paper under Joshua Leavitt’s management, he would have to come out against slavery more openly than he had yet ventured to do since coming East.
Beecher was at first reluctant to burn his bridges. Slavery had been at the bottom of a good deal of his trouble in Indiana, and that was precisely what he wanted to avoid any repetition of. Aside from the one incident of the Edmonson sisters (which he had been at some pains to explain was merely an act of Christian philanthropy divorced from the general question of slavery), he had trodden with meticulous care in respect of slavery since his arrival in Brooklyn.
He did so now, in writing for The Independent, sticking closely to the proved and familiar subjects of the “Lectures to Young Men” — temperance, the hideous moral perils of dancing, a defense of sudden conversion tempered by a warning against employing reformed characters to reform others (so often they did not stay reformed!), and a description of Henry Ward Beecher revisiting his childhood New England home. His debut in the metropolitan press was dedicated to “Vicious Reform Literature,” with special reference to certain periodicals purveying salacious matter in the guise of a crusade against vice. The National Police Gazette was just then hounding that incomparable evangelist, the Rev. John Newland Maffitt, on a charge of seducing a member of his flock, the step-daughter of the judge of the Brooklyn court. Maffitt’s “heart had literally burst” over the affair, his physician attested, at the autopsy. It was quite the scandal of the day.
The more anti-slavery The Independent became under Joshua Leavitt’s guidance, the more marked grew its “unparalleled accession of subscribers.” With this practical demonstration of the popular trend before him and Joshua Leavitt and Mrs. Bowen, Lewis Tappan’s daughter, to egg him on, Henry Ward Beecher finally took his courage in both hands and opened up on slavery in the columns of The Independent, two years and a half after he had first come East.
His specific target was not slavery, however, but Louis A. Godey, the editor of Godey’s Lady’s Book. Godey had denied that he had ever attacked “Southern Institutions” in his magazine, and Henry Ward fell upon him. Godey, he said, was little better than a slave himself, “as anxious for the shame of supple servility as the slave for the manliness of liberty.” Beecher went on, “Godey, might have a white skin, but his liver was whiter still.”
“If he has had in his magazine one word in favor of love, of the family, of the sacred relation of parent and child, husband and wife, mother and sister . . . then he has aspersed the reputation of these Southern Institutions, whose very foundations are laid in the negation of all these. Is this the magazine for our sons and daughters to read? . . . Are these the men who are to direct the reading of our children? Are their magazines to lie upon our tables?”
This hurricane of rhetoric left the readers of Godey’s Lady’s Book gasping. It had never occurred to them or to Louis Godey, either, that its chaste pages were a suitable vehicle for anti-slavery propaganda. Had Godey been a large, choleric gentleman with a thick neck, Henry Ward Beecher’s crusade against slavery might have ended as suddenly as it began. But as nothing happened to Henry Ward, he began to get up steam in earnest.
The week after Beecher demolished Brother Godey, Henry Clay spoke in support of his Compromise Measures to a Senate so crowded that the Tribune correspondent could not get near enough to hear his voice. Considering how much his own procrastination during the seventy odd years of his life had contributed to the need for a calmness of spirit that now no longer existed, Henry Clay did the best he could. He appealed for concessions by both North and South, “not of principle, but of feeling, of opinion in relation to matters in controversy between them.” He was afraid of what might happen to the country if emotion unseated judgment over the slavery issue.
He appealed in vain to Henry Ward Beecher. The whole slavery question was a matter of emotion with him. What opinion he had was rooted in feeling:
“The struggle now going on is a struggle whose depths lie in the organization of society in the North and South respectively; whose causes are planted in the Constitution,” he wrote in The Independent. “There never was a more plain question for the North. … It is her duty to refuse her hand or countenance to slavery where it now exists. … If the compromises of the Constitution include requisitions which violate humanity, I will not be bound by them. … If my patriotic sires confederated in my behalf that I should maintain that instrument, so I will to the utmost bound of right. But who, with power which even God denies Himself, shall with compact foreordain me to the commission of inhumanity and injustice? I disown the act. I repudiate the obligation. Never while I breathe will I help any official miscreant in his base errand of recapturing a fellow-man for bondage.”
It was gallantly, bravely said. Henry Ward Beecher was right. The Fugitive Slave Law was nothing more than the rendering effective, through Federal instead of State operation, of a specific provision of the Constitution of the United States. If slavery was wrong, the Constitution was wrong and ought to be torn up. True, during the five years he had spent on the banks of the Ohio, he had seen many hunted negro returned to bondage under the Fugitive Slave Law adopted by the Founding Fathers in 1793. While Henry Ward was at Lane (a theological college), James G. Birney and Salmon P. Chase, single-handed, had fought in vain to save the mulatto girl, Matilda Lawrence, from “a fate worse than death” — and it had been Beecher’s friend, William Henry Harrison, who as clerk of the court had signed the papers delivering the girl up to be sold to the highest bidder in the slave mart of New Orleans.” Henry Ward Beecher had managed to worry along under the Constitution of the United States for thirty-seven years without outcry.
But in the last fifteen years times had changed — thanks to Birney and Garrison and Wendell Phillips. Public opinion had veered around. Just before Henry Ward Beecher launched his bold pronouncement, Horace Greeley had trumpeted the same sentiment in the columns of the Tribune.” Henry Ward found himself shouting with the multitude. It was beginning to be a popular pastime in the North to attack slavery, and as the slaves who escaped were only three one-hundredths of one percent of those remaining in bondage, the Fugitive Slave Law was by all odds the safest feature of slavery to assail.
Henry Ward Beecher did not limit himself, however, to the Fugitive Slave Law, which passed “without much opposition and with slight notice” on September 18, 1850.” It was the Constitution of the United States he was bent on overturning, by force and violence if necessary. It was an immoral instrument, and he, as a Christian, would not be bound by it:
“As a Christian nation we have a right to interfere in this matter,” he told the American and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society.
“In this nation the law of Christianity is the only authorized law for all men. . . . We are not to cease our exertions until the victory is accomplished. I know not how long I may live, but as long as I do live, I will not, as one man, cease my endeavors or hold my peace unless the vile monster is driven from the land. Peace! — there shall be none to the system or its upholders while a fragment of it remains! Peace! — there shall be none until God in His infinite mercy takes us from the face of the earth — or the vile stain is removed from America ! “
The voice was Henry Ward Beecher’s voice, but the hands were the hands of Horace Greeley.” Nevertheless, for Henry Ward it was a stroke of genius. Elijah Lovejoy had died for the faith. Samuel J. May, Samuel H. Cox, William Lloyd Garrison, James G. Birney, Lewis Tappan, the Grimke sisters and a host of others had suffered at the hands of mobs. In this distinguished company Henry Ward Beecher now took his stand, without pain, without labor.
“He sat down amid the most vociferous applause and waving of handkerchiefs by the ladies present,” recorded The Independent.
