Since the mid-1840s Parker had become progressively more involved in various reform activities, particularly for Boston’s poor and institutionalized, and with the start of the Mexican War he had begun to devote much attention to the slavery question, too. But with Webster’s defection and the subsequent passage of the various bills that constituted the Compromise of 1850, like other reform-minded New Englanders, he was greatly radicalized. Parker was engaged with all the great reform movements of his time—“peace, temperance, education, the condition of women, penal legislation, prison discipline, the moral and mental destitution of the rich, the physical destitution of the poor.” None had broken in “upon the settled order of his life” or become “a dominant factor in his experience.” However, his biographer continued, “it was different with antislavery reform.”22
Parker was outraged by the annexation of Texas and the outbreak of the Mexican War, but his sermons on these topics had been based more on his support of the peace movement and a condemnation of United States imperialism than on a settled disposition against slavery. Although as early as 1841 he had preached against the peculiar institution, he did not publish a major antislavery statement until 1848, his open Letter to the People of the United States … Touching the Matter of Slavery, primarily a socioeconomic analysis of the slave system. Yet while he devoted the majority of the letter to matters like the “Effects of Slavery on Industry” and “Law and Politics,” fact-filled arguments about how slavery undermined the nation’s prosperity and growth, he concluded with a broad moral indictment. “American slavery,” he wrote, “is the greatest, foulest wrong which man ever did to man; the most hideous and detested sin a nation has ever committed before the just, all-bounteous God—a wrong and sin wholly without excuse.”23
The passage of the Fugitive Slave Law and the ensuing attempts to enforce it in Boston moved Parker to his life’s work. Assuming the chairmanship of the executive committee of the Vigilance Committee, established in the late 1840s to oversee the welfare of runaway slaves in the area and to come to their defense when attempts were made for rendition, Parker became one of the three or four best-known antislavery activists of the decade, a position established through his virulent polemics against the Fugitive Slave Law and the South, and his sheltering of runaways. His colleagues on the executive committee included Wendell Phillips, Samuel Gridley Howe, and the attorney Charles Mayo Ellis. Parker despised Northerners’ complicity with the law and spoke against it on any occasion. Thus, in May 1850, before the New England Anti-Slavery Convention in Boston, Parker condemned the moral bankruptcy of the nation’s politicians—and in particular those from Massachusetts—evident in their defense of the recent Compromise, and he starkly simplified the moral issue before all Americans. The question of most consequence was not whether the Union should be preserved, but “whether freedom or slavery is to prevail in America.” All else paled in comparison, and Parker was confident that in this matter, abolitionists were “on the side of God.”24
Soon thereafter two fugitives, William and Ellen Craft, Parker’s parishioners, were pursued. After he married them formally at an African American boardinghouse in the city, the couple escaped to England, bearing his letter of introduction to the prominent English Unitarian clergyman James Martineau. But theirs was only a prelude to other attempts at rendition in the cradle of American liberty. Shadrach Minkins came next, fortuitously rescued by a crowd of supporters and sent on his way to Canada. Then Thomas Sims was arrested for disturbing the peace—he was defending himself in an assault—delivered to his pursuers, and put aboard a vessel bound for Savannah. Boston was electrified, and the authorities were so alarmed that three hundred policemen guarded the jail in which Sims was kept. Parker was so involved in Sims’s plight that one of the abortive plans hatched for his rescue—an attempt to board the Savannah-bound vessel from another boat to steal him from captivity—was planned in his own study. Parker’s words were leading to direct and, by federal law, sometimes illegal action.
In a sermon delivered at the Melodeon on a day of fast and humiliation, Parker spoke on “The Chief Sins of the People,” using the occasion of Sims’s imprisonment to castigate the city for allowing this outrage. In the United States, he claimed, a historic love of individual liberty was being eroded by inordinate love of wealth. This selfishness, Parker observed, was now “the most obvious and preponderate desire in the consciousness of the people,” having grown exponentially in the past half century, particularly among those whom he called the “controlling” class. With them, he continued, “everything gives way to money, and money gives way to nothing, neither to man nor to God.” Parker had moved from ratiocination to an emotional appeal for public action against the Fugitive Slave Law. Money, he declared, “is master now, all must give way to it,” and “the church, the State, the law, is not for man, but money.”25
Parker also objected to the fact that there was a false idea afoot that people were morally bound to obey any law until it is repealed, when in fact the law of God always took precedence over any “statute of an accidental president unintentionally chosen for four years.”26 Tired of the division between the two great sects in Christendom—“the churches of Christianity, and the churches of commerce”—Parker urged ministers to stop bowing to the moneyed interests and to speak out against the injustice of the Fugitive Slave Law and slavery in general. Invoking the region’s hallowed memory of the Revolutionary generation, Parker asked their descendants to support the same ideals and so to speak out against the party in power. “Resist, then, by peaceful means,” he urged, “not with evil but with good. Hold the men infamous that execute this law, give them your pity, but never give them your trust, not till they repent.” What if nothing changed? Should one support the Union at all cost? If men continued to enforce the Fugitive Slave Law, Parker opined, “I do not know how soon it will end; I do not care how soon the Union goes to pieces. I believe in justice and the law of God,” he continued, and that “ultimately the right will prevail.” 27 “America,” he exclaimed, “thou youngest born of all God’s family of States!”
Thou art a giant in thy youth, laying thine [sic] either hand upon either sea; the lakes behind thee, and the Mexique [sic] bay before. Hast thou too forgot thy mission here, proud only of thy wide-spread soil, thy cattle, thy corn, thy cotton, and thy cloth? Wilt thou welcome the Hungarian hero [i.e., Louis Kossuth], and yet hold slaves, and hunt poor negroes through thy land? Thou art the ally of the despot, thyself out-heathening the heathen Turk. Yea, every Christian king may taunt thee with thy slaves. Dost thou forget thine own great men—thy Washington, thy Jefferson, forgot thine own proud words prayed forth to God in thy greatest of prayer? Is it to protect thy wealth alone that thou hast formed a State? And shall thy wealth be slaves? No, thou art mad. It shall not be.28
Yet Parker knew how difficult effecting such change would be.
The following year, on the anniversary of Sims’s incarceration, Parker spoke on “The Boston Kidnapping,” venting his anger at the outrageous actions of his city’s elected officials in handing Sims over to the bounty hunters to return him to a life of misery. The twelfth of April, he warned, would be the anniversary of a great crime, and of a great sin “against the law of God wrote in human nature.”29 Neither did it escape Parker that ironically, Sims landed in Georgia on April 19, the day of the battle of Lexington and Concord. “Some of you had fathers in the battle of Lexington,” he told his auditors, “many of you relations,” and some kept “trophies from that day,” won on the battlegrounds. He then dramatically raised a shredded coat. “Here is a Boston trophy from April 19, 1851,” he said. “This is the coat of Thomas Sims,” worn on April 3, when he was captured. “Sims did not give his liberty easily,” Parker continued dramatically. “See how they rent the sleeve away” and tore the coat to “tatters.” “Will Boston be called on again to return a fugitive?”30 If so, he asked, how would elected officials and citizens conduct themselves?
They found o
ut, two years later, with the case of Anthony Burns. In late May 1854 Burns, returning from his work in a clothing shop in Brattle Street, was jailed on a trumped-up charge of burglary. This was a ruse to take him into custody, for when he was brought to the courthouse, his master, a Virginia plantation owner, who thereupon asked for his rendition, confronted him. The Vigilance Committee quickly went into action and secured the city’s historic Faneuil Hall for a meeting on the evening of May 26. Several thousand people attended.31
The meeting’s organizers intended to rally the crowd to overwhelm the courthouse the next morning and carry off the prisoner, but they were unable to control the increasingly agitated attendees. Finally, when word came that some of Boston’s African American population already were marching on the courthouse to free Burns, Faneuil Hall erupted in chaos, many participants immediately rushing to join the march. Thomas Wentworth Higginson, a young Worcester, Massachusetts, Unitarian minister in the city for the Vigilance Committee’s meetings, already was at the site and took the lead in battering down the building’s stout doors; when they finally gave way, he was one of the first inside. But Burns was well protected, and after much fighting—one person, James Batchelder, a watchman at the courthouse, was killed and Higginson himself gashed on the face—the liberators were driven back. Disarray spread with word that someone had been killed.
The next morning, shaken U.S. commissioner Edward Loring resumed the hearing on Burns’s fate, and despite much legal maneuvering by Richard Henry Dana and other attorneys on the Vigilance Committee, on June 2 Burns was delivered to his master and returned to a Virginia plantation. At Parker’s urging, Boston’s population turned out along the route to protest the city’s shame, wrapped their homes with black crepe, and tolled the bells of the various meetinghouses. Because of their part in stirring up the crowd at Faneuil Hall and at the courthouse, he, Wendell Phillips, Higginson, and four others were indicted for “obstructing, resisting, and opposing the execution of the law,” with a trial set for April 1855. The stakes in the battle to end slavery had risen significantly since Thoreau was jailed overnight for not paying his poll tax.
On June 4, 1854, in the immediate aftermath of the assault on the courthouse, Parker preached on “The New Crime against Humanity” and indicted citizens for abandoning the ideals of the Revolutionary generation by selling their souls to Mammon. “You remember the meeting at Faneuil Hall, last Friday,” he said, when even the words of his friend Wendell Phillips, “the most elegant words yet spoken in America in this century, hardly restrained the multitude from going, and by violence storming the Court House.” What stirred them, he asked? “It was the spirit of our fathers—the spirit of justice and liberty in your heart, and in my heart, and in the hearts of us all.” Moreover, the reason why there was not even more outrage at the Fugitive Slave Law in general and the Burns case in particular was because slavery allowed cunning men to secure money and political power.32
A month later he again made these charges, in a sermon on “The Dangers Which [sic] Threaten the Rights of Man in America.” In America, he told his auditors, “money is the great object of desire and pursuit.” The money standard measures everything, Parker continued, for “Mammon is a profitable God to worship—he gives dinners!” The nation was at a crossroads, he warned, with this chief question before it: “Which shall prevail—the idea and fact of Freedom or the idea and the fact of Slavery?” Given his countrymen’s complicity in the slave system—New England’s mills, after all, needed Southern cotton—he worried that liberty might fail. “Was it for this the pilgrims came over the sea?” he asked. “Does Forefathers’ Rock assent to it?” Was it for this that the New England clergy prayed and John Eliot carried the Gospel to the Indians? “Today,” Parker concluded, “America is a debauched young man, of good blood, fortune, and family, but the companion of gamesters and brawlers; reeking with wine; wasting his substance in riotous living; in the lap of harlots squandering life which his mother gave him.” Would he return to Mother Liberty, or would he perish?33
Conspicuous by its absence in this and all the passionate sermons and addresses he gave in the aftermath of Burns’s rendition is any mention of the plight of the slaves themselves. With the exception of a gesture to writers like Harriet Beecher Stowe, Parker rarely laced his addresses with graphic descriptions of slavery’s horrors. Instead, he condemned the institution as profoundly un-American, a system whose values did not belong in a nation founded on sacred principles of freedom of conscience and individual liberty. The corrupting power of slavery on the nation’s values most concerned him. Time after time, he lamented their betrayal by politicians, North and South, who for pecuniary gain sacrificed the lofty ideals on which the nation was founded. This invocation of the Founding Fathers not only played well in Boston, the cradle of the American Republic, but also moved the many others sympathetic to the cause of antislavery.
Arrested late in November 1854 for his role in instigating the attack on the courthouse to free Burns, Parker genuinely feared imprisonment, and in his journal he recorded what he would do in that eventuality: compose a sermon per week, he noted, to be read in the Music Hall and printed the following week. He also would prepare a volume of sermons from old manuscripts, write his “Memoirs,” and return to work on his “Historical Development of Religion.”34 But the occasion never came. His lawyers and the lawyers for the other defendants successfully argued that the indictments were flawed. The district attorney, Commissioner Benjamin F. Hallett, dismissed all charges, telling Parker, “You have crept out through a knot-hole this time.” Parker retorted, “I will knock a bigger hole next time.”35 Parker subsequently published a two-hundred-page account of his actions in the Burns affair, The Trial of Theodore Parker for the “Misdemeanor” of A Speech in Faneuil Hall Against Kidnapping … with the Defence, a tour de force of legal and ecclesiastical reasoning as well as of moral indignation, peppered with contempt for those in Boston—particularly Commissioner Loring—who so eagerly complied with the Fugitive Slave Law.
Parker soon made good on his promise to Hallett through his support for a “free” Kansas, that is, his encouragement of New Englanders and others sympathetic to the antislavery cause to settle in the new Western Territories to prevent the South from acquiring more legislative power. Opposed by “border ruffians” from Missouri, a slave state, who likewise flooded the area with immigrants to gain support for their own position, antislavery settlers soon were at war. Parker opposed the idea of popular sovereignty because it overrode the Compromise of 1820, and after South Carolinian Preston Brooks viciously beat Massachusetts senator Charles Sumner on the Senate floor for his incendiary speech, “The Crime against Kansas,” Parker was virtually apoplectic.
In one of two speeches before the American Anti-Slavery Society in New York on May 7, 1856, an event at which Garrison introduced him as “a very excellent fanatic, a very good infidel, and a first-rate traitor,” Parker spoke on the “Present Crisis in American Affairs.”36 Just a few days earlier a contingent of forty-five people, some of them his parishioners, had embarked for Kansas with twenty “Sharp’s rifles,” ready to keep Kansas from the hands of the Southerners.37 The United States, Parker observed, now comprised two different populations, once united, but in the last two generations “so diverse in their institutions, their mode of life, their social and political aims” that now they were not only unlike but hostile. Citizenship still bound them together, “but no moral union makes the two one.” And they were on a collision course in Kansas.38
Once again Parker presented the question in practical rather than moral terms. The battle is for Kansas, he proclaimed. “Shall it be free, as the majority of its inhabitants have voted; or slave, as the Federal Government and the slave power” have determined “by violence” to make it? Would Kansas be a place for the Northern workingman or the Southern plantation owner? Would slavery spread all over the United States and root out freedom from the land? Americans could still end this crime agains
t humanity by ballots, he observed; but “wait a little, and only with swords and with blood can this deep and widening blot of shame be scoured out from the continent.”39
Parker was by now moving down a more and more radical path, obsessed that the United States was at a crossroads in its brief history. He shelved his long-anticipated work “The Historical Development of Religion,” which promised to set a new standard for comparative studies, and more and more turned to the nation’s internal political problems. His deep involvement in the Kansas-Nebraska question eventually brought him in contact with another radical abolitionist, not a clergyman or a politician, but a Connecticut-born tanner and wool merchant named John Brown, just back from the territories.
Parker met Brown in Boston in 1857, introduced by Franklin Sanborn (1831–1917), a young schoolteacher in Concord who, after graduation from Harvard, had attached himself to Emerson and other Transcendentalists and entered enthusiastically into various reform movements. Sanborn had just met Brown, whose three eldest sons had moved to the Kansas Territory to augment the antislavery population and who in 1855 had joined them, answering their request for weapons by delivering them himself. Brown was already well known in abolitionist circles. In 1848 he had shared with Frederick Douglass his dream of founding a community for runaway slaves in the vastness of the Allegheny Mountains; Douglass was the first to call him “Captain.”
Outraged by Brooks’s brutal caning of Sumner in the Senate chamber, as well as by recent violent actions of proslavery settlers in Kansas—in May 1856, for example, a group had sacked the capital of Lawrence, destroying a newspaper office and other buildings and killing two men—Brown retaliated in kind. Shortly after the attack on Lawrence he and some of his supporters seized and brutally killed five proslavery settlers at Pottawatomie Creek. More fighting ensued, and proslavery militias took prisoner two of Brown’s sons. In a battle in which Brown and a small number of antislavery settlers held their own against three hundred “bushwhackers” from Missouri at Ossawatomie, another of his sons was killed. To compensate for these heartbreaking losses, Brown won the release of his two captured children and valiantly continued his resistance in the territory. Throughout the antislavery North he became a hero, “Ossawatomie Brown.”40
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