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HARPER'S FERRY: THE PURSUIT OF JUSTICE

by the Reverend Phyllis L. Hubbell
at the First Unitarian Church of Baltimore
on the 8th of February 2001

Many of you are at least somewhat familiar with the story of John Brown's attack on Harper's Ferry in 1859. Some of you have visited Harper's Ferry and wandered through the historical section. Most, I suspect have at least some dim recollection of John Brown's raid from your high school history class. Maybe you saw the special on John Brown on public television Friday night.

But you may not know of the role prominent Unitarians played in the raid, nor have much understanding of the importance this event had in the abolition of slavery. You may think of John Brown as a fanatic bent on a suicide mission to abolish slavery-an isolated incident in a troubled time. But Harper's Ferry was so much more complex than that.

Writing on the 50th anniversary of Harper's Ferry, a New York columnist concluded that "Harpers Ferry was to the Civil War what the Boston Massacre was to the American Revolution. It was the first battle clang, the first flow of blood. It was the small skirmish which foretold and made unavoidable the momentous, devouring battle that was to follow."

John Brown had led a raid against the armory in Harper's Ferry against impossible odds, hoping that slaves would spontaneously rise up and join him to shift those odds and mark the beginning of guerilla warfare mounted in the Shenandoah mountains. But even he knew that the odds against him were great. After Brown's imprisonment, he spoke eloquently of how he had been called to free slaves. Now that his personal attempt had failed, Brown embraced martyrdom, believing that his death would move the nation toward a war that would inevitably accomplish what his underfunded, underplanned, understaffed raid had not. He wrote, "I cannot serve the cause I love better than to die for it."

If John Brown failed miserably in his raid, he triumphed in his martyrdom. The South saw this act as far more than it was. Hysteria gripped the land. Some believed that the entire North was complicit in the raid. They viewed Northerners as fanatics, thrilled with the "prospects of Negroes murdering their masters and raping Southern women." Southern newspapers used Harpers Ferry to whip up "anti-Northern, Anti-Republican hatred." Bells ringing from New England to Kansas to mourn John Brown's death only confirmed Southern suspicions. Town officials in Albany New York fired off a 100-gun salute to honor him. Cleveland hung banners across its streets quoting Brown, "I cannot serve the cause I love better than to die for it." William Lloyd Garrison, up until then a passionate believer in nonviolence publicly thanked God for men like Brown, who used weapons in the cause of freedom. Northern writers, poets, and intellectuals enshrined [Brown] in an almost endless procession of poems, songs, letters, essays and public addresses.

When Congress convened 3 days after Brown's execution, members on both sides were armed. Insults were exchanged on the floor. A Mississipean with a knife rushed at Northern abolitionist Thaddeus Stevens and had to be restrained. A special Senate investigation was convened, but it didn't do much. Despite ample evidence of wealthy Northern supporters, it concluded that no co-conspirators had assisted Brown. It was evident to the South that the investigation was a whitewash. Southern fears mounted. Rumors spread of abolitionists plotting to start race wars in the south. When Lincoln won the presidential election, he did so without receiving a single popular vote in ten Southern states. That's not electoral votes. That's popular votes. Civil War and freedom for the slaves was inevitable, in no small part, because of John Brown's raid on Harper's Ferry.

How should we as individuals respond when we are confronted by evil? Most of us care too much about our own lives to easily sacrifice them for some cause. We have family, and homes, and jobs, committees, classes, bridge groups, theater tickets, parties, vacations. We have obligations. We have loved ones. What would make us interrupt our lives to stop injustice? To give not $25, or $50, but $10,000 or $100,000? To risk arrest? To risk beatings or death? Most of us in this room have never taken part in combat. What would it take to overcome what for most of us is the ultimate taboo-"thou shalt not kill?" Especially if no government was urging us on, drafting us, training us, giving us weapons and orders.

John Brown's actions and those of his supporters did not arise in a vacuum. They were the culmination of decades of mounting opposition to slavery. They came after years of growing despair that slavery would ever end without violence. They came after repeated signs that the government could not be trusted.

The mid-1800s had seen an escalating fervor to end slavery. Abolitionists were outraged by the passage in 1850 of the fugitive slave laws that allowed bounty hunters to take custody of and return to the South any runaway found in any free state. Children of female runaways, even if born in a free state of a free father, could be claimed by slaveholders and returned to bondage. No trials for fugitive slaves were allowed, not even a hearing on a habeas corpus writ. Affidavits taken in slave states were admitted as evidence without cross examination or rebuttal testimony by those facing forced return. Special United States Commissioners appointed to hear the cases were paid $10 for anyone returned to slavery but only $5 if they were released. Their decisions were final.

Abolitionists in the North, especially in the state of Massachusetts, were incensed at the idea that bounty hunters from the south might pursue runaway slaves into their state and remove them by force. These were the grandchildren of the American Revolution, the sons and daughters of the signers of the Declaration of Independence. What had happened to freedom? To the fundamental right to liberty? These laws violated deeply held notions of justice-what this nation was about.

It got worse. In 1854, Congress passed the Kansas Nebraska Act, allowing these two states the right to decide for themselves whether they would be free or slave. The country, which had seemed to be gradually increasing limits on slavery, now seemed to be reversing itself. Although many settlers came seeking a new start, both pro- and antislavery forces recruited settlers to Kansas to try to ensure the outcome of the elections. Both sides overestimated the efforts of the other, enflaming passions. In 1855, more than 5,000 Missourians swarmed across the state to vote in an election for a territorial government. "By using fists and threatening murder, unseating fair judges and counting illegal ballots," they elected an overwhelmingly proslavery legislature. A host of slave codes and sedition measures were enacted. It was now illegal to speak publicly in opposition to slavery. Only those who recognized the right of slavery could hold elected offices or sit on juries. The free-state settlers set up a rival constitutional convention.But President Pierce (a Southern sympathizer) repeatedly supported the proslavery elements, appointing governors who were friendly to slavery.

In 1856, a Southerner had attacked prominent abolitionist Charles Sumner on the floor of the Senate. The attacker had savagely beaten Sumner after a speech he had given about Kansas. Abolitionists were outraged, grief stricken. Remember the assassination of John F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King? This attack generated similar responses. A senator who was an abolitionist was not safe even in the Senate itself. The government seemed to be powerless against proslavery thugs. Someone had to do something.

Of course, the mass of people did nothing. Continued going to work, getting married, having babies, cleaning house, making love. But some individuals could not ignore the call.

John Brown was a man who had failed repeatedly in business, an ardent abolitionist, and a fervent believer in a God of righteousness, a God who demanded retribution. His was a God who exacted an eye for an eye. But his was also a God who demanded freedom and dignity for all. John Brown was a man who called blacks "mister." Who invited them in to his table. Who at one time moved to a free black farming colony determined to teach them how to survive in land not naturally hospitable to farming.

He was also a man who heard God calling him to lead the fight for freedom. He saw it as his mission to free the slaves, with any force necessary.

Indeed, he was eager-perhaps too eager-to be about his work. In the 1850s, Brown moved to Kansas, eager to save that state for freedom. Shortly after his move there, proslavery forces attacked the free-state city of Lawrence, Kansas, seeking someone they said had broken the law. Brown and his son joined the defenders, offering to slip out at night to the campsite of the attackers and slaughter them in their sleep. Only the direct order of the commanding officer held him back.

In the beginning, most of the violence was on the part of the proslavery forces. Prior to the incident in Lawrence, one freestater had been killed. Drunken thugs had been vandalizing the countryside. In May, 1856, a drunken proslavery mob killed two freestaters. On May 21, an army of about 1,000 proslavery men burnt the Free State Hotel in Lawrence to the ground. Other proslavery forces arrested Governor Robinson, (elected to the as-yet-unrecognized free-state government) and set fire to his house.

Enraged, John Brown took several men and set off at night for Pottawatomie Creek. There they murdered and mutilated five Southerners. Despite the disavowal of most moderates of Brown's act, no serious attempts were made to bring Brown and his men to trial. But Brown's fame and infamy grew.

For some time, Brown had been making plans to free slaves. Initially his plan was to arm the free-state advocates in Kansas. Brown began to make trips to Boston, meeting with prominent abolitionists. Among them were Franklin Sanborn, Dr. Samuel Gridley Howe (husband of Unitarian Julia Ward Howe, who wrote the words to The Battle Hymn of the Republic), George Luther Stearns and Gerrit Smith, two of the wealthiest men in New England, and Unitarian ministers Thomas Wentworth Higgenson and Theodore Parker. These were men, many of them, who had participated in the Underground Railroad, recruited free-state settlers, and personally led or supported attempts to rescue fugitive slaves. Higgenson had led a mob that attempted to break into a courthouse with a battering ram in a failed attempt to rescue a fugitive slave. Parker had married two fugitive slaves in his own house and provided the husband with a sword to defend himself. Stearns donated 21,000 acres in western Virginia to the strongly abolitionist Oberlin college. He set aside 120,000 acres of land in New York's Adirondack Mountains to be parceled into homesteads for Black freedmen, allowing them not only a new beginning but qualifying them to vote in New York.

These Bostin Brahmins were impressed with Brown and promised him their support. Brown pleaded with them for arms, ammunition, and money. But the promised support was always erratic-too little money, too late. Too few arms to do any good. They believed that violence was needed to end slavery. They were excited by the charismatic Brown. But times were tight financially, and financing and army was both expensive and frightening. This was not just a personal statement. This was treason. And Brown wasn't really their kind. He was indeed exciting, but he wasn't terribly well educated. He was religious in a very different sense than they were.

However, by Christmas of 1856, the proslavery governor appointed by Pierce surprisingly had cracked down on all the violence and brought to an end the informal civil war in Kansas. Brown had to turn his sights away from that state. He began developing his plan to take a small force to Harpers Ferry, Virginia, where he would seize the federal armory and wait for hundreds of slaves to join him. From there, they would move on to Tennessee and Northern Alabama. These plans he shared with his Boston friends and others, seeking support and supporters. Brown gathered around him a small band of white and Black "soldiers," with whom he intended to do God's work.

His Boston friends encouraged him, but offered him little in the way of support. Most who heard his plan thought it poorly thought out and unlikely of success. At a certain point, they requested a new arrangement in which Brown would keep them out of the details, so that they could deny involvement if criminal charges were ever brought. Frederick Douglas discouraged Brown, believing that his plan was foolhardy, but Brown wouldn't listen. Higgenson said afterwards that at least the others of the six knew that Brown's plan for inciting a slave rebellion in Virginia invited defeat, but they believed that the attempt would hasten civil war. They were willing to sacrifice Brown. Higgenson refused to believe that his mission was doomed. Later, he said he should have been "brave enough to understand" the "absolute inevitability of failure" and to make his "brave, mad, noble friend step back from martyrdom."

As we all know, Brown's attack on Harper's Ferry failed. Little had been done to prepare the slaves in the surrounding area for joining the battle. Brown and his small band of men-20 or 30 in number-were surrounded by hundreds of troops. The situation was hopeless. The raid was over within 24 hours. Seventeen lives were lost. Seven people from Harper's Ferry were killed, including two slaves, as were 10 of Brown's men, including two of his own sons. No general uprising occurred. John Brown's "army" was destroyed.

Still, in the end, Brown may have been instrumental in his objective-to free the slaves. Despite their own personal acts of generosity and courage, the "secret six"-the well-educated, wealthy, respected abolitionists-had far less impact on freeing the slaves. Certainly, they can get little credit for Brown's work. Higgenson wrote, 50 years later, "We of the Six were . often unreliable (and often all-too-cynical) aiders and supporters of a truly great man who deserved better than what he got from us. (I am ashamed that we were not more true to our task-as true at least as he was to his.)"

Frederick Douglas wrote, "If there is no struggle, there is no progress. Those who profess to favor freedom and yet deprecate agitation are [people] who want crops without plowing up the ground, they want rain without thunder and lightning. They want the ocean without the awful roar of its many waters." Yet Douglas himself had refused to support John Brown because he felt his cause was doomed.

What would we have done, you and I? Would we have realized that even though Brown failed, he might win? Few of us can claim such insight. What should we have done? Should we have taken arms with John Brown, accepting that nothing short of killing would end slavery in our lifetimes? I want to be a pacifist, and I fear violence. I tremble at the thought both of losing my life and of taking another's. I believe that violence begets violence.

But successful nonviolence requires that we risk all-our time, our wealth, our bodies, our lives. And sometimes there is no King, no Gandhi, who can somehow reach the hearts of thousands, of millions, and enable them to change the course of history. Often there is no galvanizing figure who can lead us in ending suffering now. Can we who desire nonviolence accept the continued suffering of those who have no voice, who have no power? They count on us. Offering them only assurances that someday, someday, some distant day, we, or our children, or our children's children, will overcome?

The Civil War is over here. But injustice continues all over the world. We face the same questions that haunted John Brown, Theodore Parker, Charles Higgenson, and so many others in that terrible conflict. The face of injustice may be different. It may be far away, or it may be next door. But still we are called to respond.

"I cannot serve the cause I love better than to die for it." So said John Brown. So said Martin Luther King, Jr. So said Mahatma Gandhi. So said Nelson Mandela. How will we serve the causes we love?