Lem Coley’s words from the December 30, 2001

Sunday Service at the UU Fellowship at Stony Brook

In the spring of 1854, an African-American named Anthony Burns on his way home from his job with a Boston tailor, was snatched off the street by 6 U.S. Marshalls and carried to the Federal courthouse. Burns was an escaped slave, and according to the Fugitive slave law of 1850, his owner, a Virginian named Settle, was entitled to have Burns seized and returned to slavery by the U.S. government.

Outrage swept through Boston Abolitionist circles and beyond. Stakes had already been raised by the Shadrach case, when a group of determined African-Americans had rushed a fugitive slave from the courtroom and spirited him away to Canada. But the Gov’t was prepared for trouble now and things would not be so easy. Plans were made to break into the courthouse and free Burns at night after a mass protest meeting in Fanueil hall. But Signals got crossed and only a small group left the meeting to mill around outside the Courthouse.

The spearhead of the breakout attempt was already there. They had expected to operate under cover of a fired-up crowd. Now they must decide—go up, or call it off. They grabbed a battering ram and rushed the side door of the building where stairs led to the 3^rd floor courtroom in which Burns sat tied to a chair.

The first two men on the battering ram were an African American man and a 31 year old Unitarian Minister from the nearby town of Worcester. In his words--

" Taking the joist up the steps, we hammered away at the southwest door of the courthouse. It could not have been many minutes before it began to give way, was secured again, then swung ajar and rested heavily, one hinge having parted. There was room for but one to pass in. I glanced instinctively at my black ally. He did not even look at me, but sprang in first, I following. I n later years the experience was of inestimable value to me, for it removed once for all every doubt of the intrinsic courage of the blacks. We found ourselves inside face to face with six or eight policeman, who laid about them with their clubs, driving us to the wall and hammering away at our heads. "

They tried to hold their ground till reinforcements could come up, but none came and the minister and his ally were forced out of the narrow corridor. Their comrades hadn’t followed in because at the moment the door had splintered, a shot was fired, killing one of the federal deputies, a man named Batchelder. The assault party fell back and the crowd below wavered. By now the Minister had taken a cut on the chin from a cutlass and was bleeding badly. Standing on the courthouse steps, unaware that a marshal had been shot, the minister yelled down at the crowd—"you cowards, will you desert us now!!!".

Now silence came over the crowd and the armed marshals. Writing 48 years later, the old man who had been that young Unitarian minister remembered one picturesque incident.

How many of you have read LITTLE WOMEN? Well Louisa may Alcott’s father was a famous educator, philosopher, visionary and flake who now appeared on the scene. "Ascending the lighted steps alone, he said tranquilly, turning to me and pointing forward, ‘Why are we not within?’ ‘Because,’ was the rather impatient answer, ‘These people will not stand by us.’ He said not a word but calmly walked up the steps—he and his familiar cane. He paused again at the top, the center of all eyes, within and without; a revolver sounded from within but hit nobody, and finding himself wholly unsupported, he turned and retreated, but without hastening a step." [Higginson,1898]

The attempt had failed. Two companies of Marines and two of artillery were brought in the next day and Anthony Burns was taken down to Boston Harbor through streets crowded with thousands of angry people. The cavalry rode into the crowd from time to time forcing back protestors.

**** Today I want to talk about Unitarians and social action by looking at that young Unitarian minister. His name was Thomas Wentworth Higginson. He was a minister only from 1847 until the civil war—most of his life he was a writer and lecturer-- but his family was Unitarian, William Ellery Channing—one of our founding fathers—was his wife’s uncle; he went to the Unitarian-dominated Harvard Divinity School, and he sat at the feet of the great Unitarian radical preacher Theodore Parker.

I learned about Higginson when I taught American Literature at stony brook. Studying English in the South, I had not read much American literature. At my college, English majors were required to read Dante’s DIVINE COMEDY, but not Walt Whitman, Ralph Waldo Emerson or Henry David Thoreau. The reason seems clear to me now. These writers’ themes were Democracy, and the unlimited possibilities of the individual. Slavery was compatible with neither, so they opposed it. Emerson kept a room in his house for fugitive slaves. After John Brown was sentenced to die for the Harpers Ferry Raid, Thoreau gave a public eulogy for the abolitionist martyr. Its words can still burn us this morning:

"Others" said Thoreau, "craven-hearted, said disparagingly that he threw his life away. Which way have they thrown their lives pray?"

These writers, along with other transcendentalists and activists like Margaret Fuller, or the Unitarian abolitionist writer Lydia Maria Child, were older than Higginson who was born in 1823. They were his mentors. Margaret Fuller was one of those who taught him his lifelong commitment to feminism, and Lydia Maria Child’s 1833 book An Appeal for that class of Americans Called Africans put substance into his anti-slavery beliefs.

---- I want to give an example of their idealism, to show what Higginson’s early influences were like:

Child’s attack on slavery came out when the abolitionist movement was meeting violent opposition in the North where many businessmen depended on the cotton trade. So Child was attacked and her livelihood suffered. Here’s how she responded:

" I am fully aware of the unpopularity of the task I have undertaken, but though I expect ridicule and censure, I cannot fear them…this book will be abroad on its mission of humanity long after the hand that wrote it is mingling with the dust. Should it be the means of advancing even one single hour, the inevitable progress of truth and justice, I would not exchange the consciousness for all Rothschild’s wealth or Sir Walter Scott’s fame." ___

These brave spirits inspired Higginson and he never backed off from following their ideas to practical applications in 19^th century America, if that meant facing a howling mob from the platform of a women’s rights convention, leading an armed convoy of anti-slavery settlers into Kansas, or going into battle as the colonel of the first black regiment to fight in the Civil War.

I could run way over my allotted time just surveying Higginson’s career. Let me just give a smattering of his feminist activities:

The year before he battered down the courthouse door, he addressed the Massachusetts Constitutional Convention. The California Gold Rush had made women a majority in Massachusetts, and they ought to have the vote, he said. That same year he went to a temperance convention in New York. When they refused to seat Lucy Stone on the platform, he led a walkout and formed a "Whole World’s Temperance Convention."

The thing he’s remembered for today is his relationship with Emily Dickinson. She wrote him in 1862 and they corresponded off and on until her death in 1886. He was instrumental in publishing her first collection of poems posthumously. After 8 years of letters, she wrote him: "Of our greatest acts we are ignorant. You were not aware that you saved my life."

What I had never realized is that he had a policy of helping women writers. To name one more, Helen Hunt Jackson became famous when her novel Ramona dramatized the mistreatment of the Native American. She said that she would never have published a line without Higginson.

His satirical article "Ought Women to Learn the Alphabet," (1859) is an amazing catalogue of women writers through history. It ran in the Atlantic Monthly, was reprinted as a pamphlet, and became tremendously influential.

From 1877, he served for 14 years as a contributing editor of the magazine of the American Women’s Suffrage Association. And so on. But he also did things like organize Physical Education classes, and rowing clubs for women. He was a great believer in exercise and as a young minister would take parties of young women out on nature excursions.

To mention one more thing, in 1899, at the age of 76, he co-founded The Anti-Imperialist League to stop America’s taking over the empire of defeated Spain.

BUT SO WHAT. I suppose none of you has ever doubted that there were plenty of Unitarians who sat on committees, advocated progressive notions, stood up for the weak and downtrodden. Why talk about Higginson? Was there anything intrinsically Unitarian about his good works?

At first glance it wouldn’t seem so. I’m pushing this man as an exemplary Unitarian activist, and the truth is he was kicked out of his first church, in the wealthy town of Newburyport, 40 miles north of Boston. Asked to resign is better. It wasn’t the first time a young minister right out of divinity school has exposed his flock to too many radical ideas

What had he done? Well, he decided to let his small town church have the benefit of Boston’s most advanced minds. He brought in abolitionists to speak. The proprietors of the church ruled that he could not use the church for anti-slavery meetings. He attacked his whig parishioners after the election of 1848 for supporting Zachary taylor, who owned slaves.

Next he brought in unannounced his idol, the great Boston Radical Theodore Parker. Parker was a Unitarian, but he was hated by the Unitarian orthodoxy. He had been forced to resign from the Boston minister’s association. It was then a popular practice for ministers to swap pulpits for a Sunday, but no one in Boston would swap with Parker, who used his ministry to advocate radical politics.

So Higginson had to leave. The whole congregation didn’t vote him out. A self-appointed committee of the wealthiest men told him that if he didn’t resign, they would withdraw their financial support. Not the last time that has happened. The Bankers made money loaning to plantations, and the ship captains carried slave picked cotton to Europe. The liberation of women didn’t sound like such a good idea to them either. And Higginson had suggested that local millowners weren’t paying workers enough.

The point of all this is that being a Unitarian meant different things to different people. You could be a good Unitarian and disagree with other good Unitarians. His next church, in Worcester, suited him better because it was formed by people who wanted to be involved in social action. But after he left for South Carolina to be a colonel in the first black regiment, he never served as a minister again.

And yet, to my mind, Higginson’s activism does have a Unitarian quality. And to draw that out, I want to talk about the most controversial episode in the 60 year public record of this man’s social action—something that many people still criticize. That is Higginson’s membership in the Secret Six.

THE SECRET SIX

Sounds melodramatic doesn’t it. Who were the secret six? They were abolitionists, mostly from Boston, businessmen, middle-class professionals. Their secret was that they provided the financial backing, and arms, for John Brown’s raid on Harper’s Ferry. As I say, this is still controversial.

It might be assumed that a minister, an idealist, would oppose slavery. But should he conspire for violence? In 1857 when John Brown came east and paid a call on Higginson and his friends, the Dred Scott decision pushed many abolitionists to the brink. The Dred Scott decision said no African American could ever be a citizen or ever have rights in America. It said that Congress could not forbid slavery in any state. In the South, the slaveowners had things sewn up tight. Anyone who challenged slavery was run off.

Abolitionists had to either put up or shut up. It became clear to some that something beyond moral persuasion was needed. In January Higginson called a convention at Worcester to discuss breaking off from the South. Theodore Parker, whom I mentioned earlier, spoke: He concluded "I used to think this terrible question of slavery in America would be settled without bloodshed; I believe it no longer." In May Higginson made a speech to the New York anti-slavery society. He said The slaves would have to rise up and seize their freedom.

Men like John Brown, who were willing to fight began to look more realistic than the old pacifist, non-violent types like William Lloyd Garrison. Brown had fought in the guerrilla wars of Kansas. After proslavery men had raided Lawrence Kansas and burned much of it to the ground, Brown and his sons took 5 of them from their homes at night and hacked them to death in the woods.

That spring of 1857 Brown began contacting the Secret six. He needed money for something serious but he could not reveal his plans. He told different men different things at different times. But they knew who they were dealing with. They committed themselves to raising money.

The whole story is too complicated to lay out here and historians disagree about important points of fact. Higginson later said of Brown and of their collaboration "He lived, as he finally died, absolutely absorbed in one idea; and it is as a pure enthusiast—fanatic if you please—that he must be judged. " Brown had worked as a surveyor in the Allegheny Mountains. He showed Higginson maps of places where a hundred men could hold off a thousand. Like the Marroons of Jamaica and Surinam, he would make forts in the mountains where slaves could flee and form guerilla bands, armed by Brown.

"All this," says Higginson, he explained to me and to others plainly and calmly, and there was nothing in it we could consider objectionable or impracticable; so that his friends in Boston [the secret six] were ready to cooperate in his plan as thus limited. ..We helped him in raising the money."

Problems set in which caused delays. An Englishman, supposedly an expert on guerilla warfare, tried to extort money or he would spill the beans. Higginson wanted to go forward. The committee got cold feet. Brown went back to Kansas to throw off suspicion. While there he led a raid into Missouri, killing a slave owner and bringing out 11 slaves. He came back east and eventually after more delays and difficulties, went South with his little band.

In October of 1859, Higginson walked into a store to buy a paper and heard someone say--"Old Ossawatomi Brown has got himself in a tight place this time."

When it was learned that Brown had left a locked trunk with all his correspondence back at his last staging area, one wealthy member of the secret six checked himself into a mental institution. Others jumped on boats and went to Canada, including Samuel Gridley Howe, a doctor famous for treating the blind. He had fought as a young revolutionary in Greece, but now he denied that he had helped Brown or known his plans. A few years later when his wife heard Union soldiers singing "john browns Body lies a moldering in the grave" she wrote the Battle Hymn of the Republic to add dignity to the struggle.

Higginson stayed where he was and began planning how Brown could be rescued. At one point he traveled into the Adirondacks to escort Mrs. Brown to visit her husband. Brown had said he didn’t want to be rescued and Higginson hoped Mrs brown could change his mind. She told him: " I have had 13 children and only 4 are left; but if I am to see the ruin of my house, I cannot but hope that Providence may bring out of it some benefit for the poor slaves." Higginson was with her when word came of the death sentence.

Higginson made plans, held secret conversations, wrote coded letters, at one point bought six revolvers and sent them to some German radicals who had volunteered to free brown, but more and more he began to appreciate the power of the martyrdom Brown had created for himself.

There would be no desperate attempt to free brown, but Higginson would not deny him. His confederates burned their letters from Brown but Higginson would not. Southern senators held hearings where Higginson was named in testimony, but they did not dare call him. They had no wish to give a man who denied nothing a platform to denounce slavery.

That April Federal marshals came out to Concord to arrest one member of the secret six, a schoolteacher named Sanborn. He resisted and as they tried to force him into the carriage, his sister ran for help. Someone began ringing church bells, calling out men and women from fields, kitchens and shops. They gathered around and made the marshals leave. When they returned a judge dismissed their warrant. Higginson came from Worcester to join Sanborn’s body guard.

So what was the Unitarian quality of Higginson’s commitment?

Let’s compare Higginson and Brown. Many historians and academics call Brown a sadist and a psychopath. But I accept him at Higginson’s evaluation. Higginson said Brown was like an old time puritan or one of Cromwell’s men who had cut off king Charles’ head. When his sentence was pronounced, Brown had told the courtroom: " Now if it is deemed necessary that I should forfeit my life for the furtherance of the ends of justice, and mingle my blood further with the blood of my children and with the blood of millions in this slave country whose rights are disregarded by wicked, unjust and cruel enactments, I say, Let it be done. "

Brown took the Old Testament literally and believed in a wrathful Jehovah who took an active part in human affairs through Divine providence. Some men were even called to be God’s instruments on earth and to mete out the severe and sometimes violent punishment of sinners. Without blood sacrifice there could be no redemption of sin.

New England Unitarianism had grown out of the rejection of these doctrines. It believed in liberal rationalism and free will. It denied original sin and eternal punishment.

Higginson’s mentors like Emerson and Parker came to feel that Unitarians had gone too far in their logic and reason. There must be a way to combine rationalism with a modified supernaturalism that did not deny the spirit and the mystical, transcendental consciousness taught by German philosophy or the great religions of the East. And religion must serve humanity.

Thus Higginson’s anti-slavery had a different origin than Browns. Slavery denied the unity and equality of humanity. Rather than help humans reach their potential, it degraded people—masters as well as slaves. Higginson’s Unitarianism was intertwined with democracy, the American Revolution and the Declaration of Independence. As he saw it, White Americans in new England had become self-reliant, independent citizens by fighting for their freedom. Slaves must do the same.

It was the humanity of the slaves that Higginson valued. In the army with African American soldiers he made the first collection of spirituals. And his classic book Army Life With a black Regiment stresses the ordinary humanity of the freed slaves.

So what can we learn about social action as Unitarians from Thomas Wentworth Higginson? We can learn to combine an idealistic sense of unlimited human potential with the courage to seek practical opportunities for putting that idealism to work. He accepted the liberal, rational principles of the Unitarian mainstream, but he believed that at some point there was an intuitive truth deep within each individual that ran above and beyond the dry, careful reason of the orthodox Unitarians. It was this truth that united individuals, in all their radical uniqueness, with other individuals and made us feel our common humanity. And we had to act upon our common humanity in the real world, not rest on our prudent virtue.

He is part of our institutional heritage as Unitarians and we should remember him, his courage, and his lesson of commitment to idealism and democracy. Thank you