Unitarian Universalist Church of Palo Alto

John Brown

Reverend Alicia McNary Forsey, PhD
February 25, 2007
Palo Alto, CA

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 and can never be resolved by a kind of “in your face” confrontation during an anti-racism workshop or seminar. I want to pay attention to ethical issues we have inherited from our forebears — issues we grapple with individually and as a community, often feeling isolated and of a mind that we ought to do more or that we have not done anything to contribute to a solution.

The word religion means “To bind together”. As a religious community we are especially aware of the need to remain inclusive — to stay open to what, on first superficial glance seems in some way different and to incorporate that perception into what appears to be alike, even though the alike part of the church is actually as different as anything else. If we can cut through all the clutter and get down to our human-beingness — if we stay with that we will still be dealing with questions that have no perfect answer but we will be doing it together and we won’t be blaming ourselves or bickering among ourselves, or wondering how we ought to move.

John Brown’s story is a good foundation for examining some of the ethical issues that remain with us and probably always will.

I taught Church History for 13 years at Starr King School. There, I learned that my position required that I make what we think of as history relevant to current times. John Brown’s history is as relevant today as it was in the mid-1800s.

I learned that teaching as if our heros and sheros were faultless — were super-human, contributes to our inability to fully appreciate what we ourselves manage to accomplish. It prevents us from calling out “TAKE ME!” — from serving as the leaders that we are. It also carries the message that only those who became heros and sheros really matter. Everybody else goes nameless, becomes (and stays) invisible. We need to search for the missing, including ourselves.

I learned more, and will talk about these in future sermons, for today’s time is brief. I will cover four areas relating to John Brown, to us, and to the agenda of some of our Unitarian giants which makes them human, not candidates for sainthood.

First, 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 woud be suitabe 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 settlrs. 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.

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 were 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.

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, and has it expanded to include the poor, the immigrant, those who are at risk?

Abigal 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? Today Bush has made that decision. He will send 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 are against him it is because we don’t understand the big picture, we don’t know the details and we have no power, save a revolution.

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. When the killers of innocent people were questioned they responded that they were not required to give reasons. Where is truthful accountability to the public today?

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 in Florence, Italy when John Brown was executed in December, 1859

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 the vast army of men who had joined him and escaped to pre-designated locations built in the Blue Ridge Mountains? He would move from there to the south, where he could fight the slave holders. If there were no slaves, how would the wealthy Unitarians — the Boston Brahmans — maintain their incomes? They may not own slaves directly, but relied upon the slave-trade business to ferry rum to other ports, trade in cotton and other goods. Like many of us, we find ourselves depending on, say, a car that contributes to environmental problems while we feel in our hearts and in our minds that the environment is desperately in need of a break from our destructive lifestyles. This is my situation, and I am not able to sort it out right now. How do I manage to get from Berkeley to Palo Alto without causing harm to the environment? I have every reason you can imagine for being “stuck” where I am for now. But somewhere in me I know I’m not stuck. There is a solution. I am just too busy or too tired to get down to it. This sort of thing creates a feeling of tension in me — a low grade uneasiness related to the discrepancies between what I want to accomplish, how I want to behave and what I actually manage to do. Our Unitarian Universalist Principles and Purposes are ideals we can attempt to model, but we will never fully reach exemplifying all of them until we learn to walk on water, so I refuse to beat myself up over it. The other day I was at a meeting here at church and I asked a question about what is being done in a certain area. There was a fairly long pause followed by a statement about how not much was being done. Then someone thought of something being done, and that was followed by another and another until it was clear that quite a bit is being done, but it is not known because individuals are taking on the work of the world in rather isolated ways. Besides, we have been taught not to be prideful of our accomplishments. The conversation ended with someone saying “We are too hard on ourselves.” Yes, most Unitarian Universalists are. During my tenure here, let’s find ways to stay in touch regarding how we are engaged with what matters to us. We might find out we are doing the same thing, or that one member wants to join another in their effort. Come and see me. Tell me what is important to you and how you manage to keep the peace with yourself.