New York State outlawed slavery in 1827, but a variety of interests kept slavery at the forefront of the public’s consciousness until the Civil War and the passage of the 13th Amendment, which abolished the practice nationally, in 1865.
Many New Yorkers, especially wealthy investors, resisted calls for emancipation because of the city’s close economic ties to the nation’s cotton industry. Wall Street bankrolled the planting and harvesting of cotton in the South, the New England textile factories that spun cotton into fabric, and the buying and selling of African Americans whose forced labor in the cotton fields led to increased profits for everybody else. The cotton economy, including slavery, was so intrinsic to the New York way of life that in the historic presidential election of 1860 nearly two out of every three votes cast in the city went against Abraham Lincoln for fear of what his policies—which weren’t exactly radical—might do to this lucrative market.
While many New Yorkers supported slavery, some took up the cause of abolition, the effort to bring about slavery’s end. Some abolitionists wanted immediate change and were willing to break the law to make it happen, while others preferred a more gradual transition to freedom, yet they all agreed that slavery was an odious institution that needed to end.
In the decade before our nation went to war against itself, no single issue drew the pro and anti-slavery parties into the fray like a piece of legislation called the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850. Designed to protect the investments of interested parties, this federal law made it a crime to assist runaway slaves in any way, even in states where slavery was illegal.
The Fugitive Slave Act is the legal reason why the Underground Railroad had to be secret. Its passage made criminals of heroes of the American Exodus like Harriet Tubman while it empowered a cabal of kidnappers and corrupt officials who walked the streets of northern cities with impunity.
The fact that someone who offered a meal to a runaway could be sent to prison and fined the equivalent of $25000 under this law while slave catchers who violently seized families and separated children from their parents had the weight of the government behind their actions is one of the reasons that Frederick Douglass said that the Slave Act was born in hell, and why modern American historians regard it as one of the worst laws ever passed.
Throughout the 1850s, despite being more than hundred miles north of the Mason Dixon Line, the institution of slavery and the experience of enslaved people were ever present in the daily lives of New Yorkers and the members of this church.
They thought about slavery. They debated slavery. Some benefited from it. Some worked to abolish it. And thanks to the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, all had to ask themselves some important questions, “What would I do if a runaway approached me and asked for help? Would I risk my freedom to break the law and assist them on their way, or would I turn them in, maybe even claim a reward?”
A few weeks ago, I found a sermon in our archives that attempted to help the members of John Street Church faithfully answer these questions. Undated and unsigned, I don’t know who wrote this sermon—it’s a sermon outline, actually—or the date they preached it, but it’s a pretty safe guess that sometime in the 1850s the pastor of John Street stood where I’m standing and delivered it to the congregation sitting in the pews where you sit.
The pastor spoke about the national debate, he raised the moral question, he examined several passages of scripture, and he concluded that the good God-fearing Methodists on John Street shouldn’t break the law. They shouldn’t help runaway slaves escape to freedom.
Learning history can be a sobering exercise. Learning church history can be especially humbling, even humiliating.
How exciting it would be to find an old sermon in which the preacher offered a stirring defense of freedom, a theological explanation of the Image of God borne by all people, and a call to offer hospitality to and to seek justice for all God’s children, the Fugitive Slave Act be damned?
That’s certainly what I hoped to find when I laid eyes on those aged pages, rather than an embarrassing chapter from our sinful past.
Thankfully, we have come to believe that it’s more important to be honest about our history than whitewashing the past and puffing up our egos with stories about how great our ancestors were, because attempting to be honest about the past is a vital step in our efforts to live honestly today.
I think we see the value of wrestling with the past, not just so that we can stand in judgment of it—insisting that we would’ve known better—but so that we can see ourselves in it.
I want to believe that I would’ve been repulsed to hear a sermon preached in favor the Fugitive Slave Act, but when I realize that the preacher was simply encouraging the church to follow a federal law that had been passed with what we would call bipartisan support and presented as the best hope at keeping the country from falling apart, I’m given pause.
You see, we have no reason to believe that our old preacher’s sermon was in anyway controversial, no reason to think that the people thought their shepherd was leading the congregation astray, no reason to think either the preacher or the congregation thought that they were hearing anything less than the Gospel truth.
They were blind to the harm they were causing, blind to their sin, and it seems a reasonable conclusion that so are we.
We are oh-so-capable of remaining blissfully unaware of the harm we cause, the way in which we benefit from other peoples’ pain, of the way, as Rev. Peter Storey puts it, we allow institutions to do our sinning for us.
Reflecting on the way in which sin befouled his sight, John Newton—a slave trader turned preacher of repentance—famously wrote, “Amazing grace, how sweet the sound that saved a wretch like me. I once was lost, but now am found, was blind but now I see.”
The witness of the ages, therefore, leads us to acknowledge that the thoughts and actions of the people who gathered in this space in 1850 weren’t just the products of a 19th century worldview and a slave-based economic system. No, our ancestors’ thoughts and actions were the product of the Deceiver’s lies and Adam and Eve’s fall—an inheritance in which we also share.
If history teaches us anything it’s how grave an error it is to assume one’s present generation is inherently morally superior to its predecessors simply by virtue of being born at a later date.
They were blind and so are we. This is the reality that beckons us into this season called Lent.
During Lent we intend to unite our prayers and sacrifices with God’s desires for us so that we might discern—so that we might see—the truth about ourselves to which we are currently blind and the path God sets before us whose trail head we just can’t find on our own.
We sing, “Be thou my vision,” because we need God to show us the way out of sin, over temptation, and directly to God’s Holy Presence and the blessings God would give us.
In this way, we follow Jesus who for a season entered the wilderness to pray, who faced temptation there, and who emerged with a clear sense of where he was going—to the poor and outcast, to the sick and lonely, to you and to me, to the Cross and his Father’s right hand.
“Be thou my vision.” Show me the way that I should go because I just can’t find it on my own and I’m hurting others as I stumble through the darkness.
George Orwell once wrote, “To see what is in front of one's nose needs a constant struggle.”
In a moment of what even Orwell would call clarity, Saint Paul wrote, “I do not understand my own actions. For I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate.”
In the light of these insights and the lessons learned from the recent find in our archives, I pray that this season brings to us clarity about the sins to which we are currently blind, a view of the path we’re called to travel, and a vision of the One whose boundless mercy makes this a journey worth making.
During Lent we intend to unite our prayers and sacrifices with God’s desires for us so that we might discern—so that we might see—the truth about ourselves to which we are currently blind and the path God sets before us whose trail head we just can’t find on our own.
“To see what is in front of one's nose needs a constant struggle.”
Let us not shy away from this struggle.
Let’s endeavor to live honestly so that others would have reason to join us in giving thanks to God for this vision of mercy and love, for the Good News of Jesus Christ.
Thanks be to God. Amen.
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