Source: Excerpts from: “A Brooklyn Minister Discusses Resistance to Slavery.” Social Science Docket, Volume 1 Number 2, Special Theme Issue, Summer-Fall 2001:46)

Henry Ward Beecher, a white man, was a minister at the Plymouth Congregationalist Church in Brooklyn, New York and a leading opponent of slavery in the 1850’s. He was also the brother of Harriet Beecher Stowe. In 1848, 1856 and 1859, to protest against the evil of slavery, Beecher raised money in his church to purchase the freedom of slaves. Because of his popularity as a minister, many of his sermons were published. Beecher believed it was necessary to oppose the Fugitive Slave Law and the extension of slavery into the west. He thought it was a mistake to actively oppose slavery in the South or encourage slaves to run away. The following passages are excerpts from his writing in 1850 and 1859.

A Response to the Compromise of 1850

There are two incompatible and mutually exclusive principles brought together in the government of this land…These elements are slavery and liberty…One or the other must die…The South now demands room and right for extension. She asks the North to be a partner. For every free state she demands one for slavery…It is time for good men and true…to stand for God and humanity. No compromise will help us which dodges the question, certainly none which settle it for slavery…There never was a plainer question for the North. It is her duty to refuse her hand or countenance (help) to slavery where it now exists. It is her duty to declare that she will under no consideration be a party to any further inhumanity or injustice…If the compromises of the Constitution include requisitions (rules) which violate humanity, I will not be bound by them, not ever the Constitution shall make me unjust…”

The Future of Slavery in the United States
”Our policy for the future is plain. All the natural laws of God are warring upon slavery. Let it go to seed…Shut it up to itself and let it alone. We do not ask to interfere with the internal policy of a single State by constitutional enactment..We only ask that a line be drawn about it…that it be fixed and forever settled that slavery must find no new sources (or) new fields…”

Response to John Brown’s Call for a Slave Rebellion and the attack on Harpers Ferry

“…If we would benefit the African in the South we must begin at home. No one fail to see the inconsistency between our treatment of those amongst us who are in the lower walks of life and our professing of sympathy for the Southern slave…We must quicken all the springs of feeling in the free states on behalf of human liberty…”

Source: Excerpts from “New York City Minister Urges Resistance to Slavery.”Social Science Docket, Volume 1 Number 2, Special Theme Issue, Summer-Fall 2001:45

In 1843, Rev. Henry Highland Garnet of New York City called upon slaves in the South to rise up and revolt in a speech at an abolitionist conference in Buffalo, New York. Rev. Garnet was African American and a former slaver himself. His ideas were considered radical at the time because most abolitionists preferred using more and economic arguments to challenge slavery and opposed violence.

…Brethren (brothers), it is as wrong for your lordly oppressors to keep you in slavery, as it was for the man thief to steal our ancestors from the coast of Africa. You should therefore now use the same manner of resistance, as would have been just in our ancestors, when the bloody foot-prints of the first remorseless soul-thief was placed upon the shores of our fatherland. The humblest peasant is as free in the sight of God as the proudest monarch. Liberty is a spirit sent out from God and is no respecter of persons.

Brethren, arise, arise! Strike for your lives and liberties. Now is the day and the hour. Let every slave throughout the land do this, and the days of slavery are numbered. You cannot be more oppressed than you have been, you cannot suffer greater cruelties than you have already. Rather die freemen than live to be slaves. Remember that you are four millions!…”

Source: Excerpts from “Judgment Day.” Africans in America. WGH Education Foundation, 1998

For and Against Freedom

There was a conspiracy of silence on the slavery issue. And one

of the first things abolitionists had to do was put the issue on the

table in a way that it couldn’t be ignored. Or as Wendell Phillips said, our

enemy is not the slaveowner only, it’s also the person of good will who simply

doesn’t want to talk about slavery…

Eric Foner, historian

The struggle may be a moral one; or it may be a physical one; or it may

be both moral and physical, but it must be a struggle. Power concedes nothing

without a demand. It never did and it never will.

Frederick Douglass, 1849