The Freedom Ring : A Progressive Theology
By: Keith Wright
Tags: Chattel Slavery, American History, Henry Ward Beecher, Puritanism, Plymouth Church

Introduction by Michael Soussan, (Author, Journalist, and former UN Humanitarian Worker) who unearths and presents to us a speech given months before the Civil War broke out, given by the Abolitionist Pastor from Brooklyn, Henry Ward Beecher. This took place at Plymouth Church on Jan. 4th, 1861. The Speech is Titled — “Our Blameworthiness”

The year 1619 has recently become the subject of a series of articles called “The 1619 Project” published by The New York Times because it narrates the origins of America’s enduring race problem.

It can be said that the early American Puritans traded in slavery from day one. On the same day that the Puritans arrived in the North, another ship with African bonded slaves reached the American coast in the South. The Puritans — whose religion preached a purist adherence to biblical values, were not “pure” when it came to slavery. From day one, argues Henry Ward Beecher, this hypocrisy plagued America’s identity as a nation. He notes in the passage below how uncomfortable it made him feel to be a northern abolitionist while he was wearing shirts made with cotton picked by slaves. Herein he explains how slavery was very much a Northern problem, too, even as the North began expressing abolitionist sentiments.

The Leading Facts of American History - The First Negro Slaves Brought to Virginia

Only recently have voices re-emerged to call institutionalized racism a “white-on-white” problem to a large extent — in that it is a debate to be had between whites; a debate about how they can look at themselves in the mirror and call themselves a nation founded by puritans. This here goes to the root of how the Declaration of Independence, which declared every human equal, could have been written, in part, by slave owners. It would seem the hypocrisy ran deep in the American colonies, and that it took a man of puritan Christian faith to point this out.

The drawing below featuring a “slave-catcher” (whose lucrative jobs have served to fund some of America’s first police stations) shows us how this hypocrisy rapidly (and starkly, to this day) enwrapped America’s “law and order” institutions with racism — in both cases, profitably.

“A Queer Recontre,” Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper, March 7, 1863.

As you will see in Henry Ward Beecher’s message, he states that slavery has existed in almost every society on earth, but that, what was supposed to set Christianity apart in this regard was their definition — derived from the Hebrew definition of Slaves — never adhered to the Roman definition of slaves as being sub-humans. Having themselves been slaves in Egypt, Hebrews gave their servants, Jewish and non-Jewish slaves, the Sabbath off, and never considered them sub-human in any sense. While this distinction may seem irrelevant to us today, it served at the time to debunk the claims that Christianity and slavery could be compatible because the word “slaves” appears in biblical texts. In Beecher’s opinion, Christianity and Slavery were incompatible because the bible never referred to servants as subhumans — a distinction that was all to conveniently lost, even on the first self-described Puritans who founded this country.

In retrospect, Beecher’s sermon argues for America to re-examine its own identity — and perhaps live up to the mythical values on which it was created rather than on the hypocritical reality, which, as far back as 1619, governed its growth. Spoken barely 3 months before the Civil War broke out in America, which ended up decimating the nation to the tune of a half million deaths. Henry Ward Beecher’s words resonate today as they did in 1861, when racism and policing once again spark an air of growing social conflict.