Brooklyn, New York
1856
To most of America, her brother Henry was the most famous preacher in the States, perhaps the Western world, but he was still Harriet’s baby brother. Though she had heard him preach many times, she was no less amazed each time to hear him and to see him enthrall the congregation before him—hundreds of people, thousands, crowded into the sanctuary. It was the same across the country and overseas. He was paid handsomely to speak. Men, as well as women, wept when he preached, though in seconds his humor and antics had them laughing again.
When Harriet visited Plymouth Church, she sometimes sat on the back pew hoping to not be noticed. But today she sat in the front row so she would have a clear view of the notables who visited her brother’s church. The poet Walt Whitman visited, as did the author and abolitionist Henry David Thoreau. Newspapermen attended, copying every word of Henry’s sermons and publishing them in their papers. Politicians made their way to Plymouth, like the young Illinois lawyer Abraham Lincoln, who had ambitions to be senator. John Brown, Harriet Tubman, Sojourner Truth, William Wells Brown, and Henry Bibb had all been welcomed in the pews and sometimes in the pulpit at her brother’s Brooklyn church.
Outside was Orange Street and beyond that, New York. Manhattan, Staten Island, Brooklyn, with Brooklyn’s population swelling each day since the opening of the Fulton Ferry.
Each time she visited there were fewer trees—there was no room for them or for undeveloped plots. Every inch was needed for more dwellings, more businesses for the people who crowded into the city. Immigrants and refugees, English, Dutch, Chinese, Germans, Jews, Catholics, Protestants. Printers, nannies, shopkeepers, seamstresses, clerks, poets, painters, singers, bakers, bankers, factory workers, professors, and chimney sweeps. Hundreds of thousands of them huddled in town houses and tenements, finding hope in the crush and anonymity. Wedged together in flats and apartments, the rich and poor, foreign and domestic. Bustling down avenues to department stores, public schools, police stations, to galleries, to synagogues, churches, town halls, storefronts, and cathedrals wearing forced shields of privacy.
There were tensions between the groups jostling for elbow room. But they needed one another. Mind-your-own-business people who learned the necessity of interdependence. The restaurateur, with no room to grow his own, needed the peddler for produce and needed the shopgirl to buy.
Carriages, trains, boats, and millions of footsteps. Novelists, newspapermen, butlers, stevedores, waiters, Central Park, and the Erie Canal. Home to the Sons of Liberty, the Battle of Long Island, the place of President Washington’s inauguration, the first Congress, the first Supreme Court, Fort Hamilton, and Federal Hall. Home to the hopeful and the suffering.
Irish Catholics swelled the populous, swept across the sea by famine, hunger, joblessness, hopelessness, lynchings, floggings—and laws that forbade their education, voting, possession of arms, and property ownership. Refugee slaves, most swept North by starvation, joblessness—and laws that forbade their education, voting, possession of arms, and property ownership—and the hope of freedom, willing to leave whatever relations they had. Both risked all that was familiar. But disguised by hue and tongue, they did not recognize their brotherhood.
Most runaway slaves, fleeing the South, hitched a ride on the Underground. But some of the Negroes were former New York slaves. Until 1827, New York City had almost as many slaves as Charleston, South Carolina. The city was home to slave ships and investors in slaving—lending money for land, looms, seed, and in Southern cotton. Many of the Northern slaves were purchased in Newport, Rhode Island. Beautiful, beautiful Newport with its Atlantic beaches, lobsters, sailboats, and slaves in chains sold on the wharfs. And beyond Newport were the islands of Cape Verde and islands like Haiti, where captured Africans were broken and transformed into slaves. Beautiful Newport, where schoolmarms and shopkeepers invested their pennies in the trade, hoping to reap shiny dimes.
There were no plantations in New York; the skilled slaves built roads, docks, churches, and Wall Street’s wall. After 1827, the New York slaves were freed, but there were still scars and resentful former owners.
Into the slave city, into the darkness, drawn to the void, were the abolitionists, abolitionists more radical than their New England brothers and sisters. New York was home to the Radical Abolitionists Convention, abolitionists who argued that the United States Constitution forbade slavery… nor shall any state deprive a person of life, liberty, or property without due process.
Gotham was home to the Tappan brothers and the Grimke sisters, to William Wells Brown, Susan B. Anthony, Elizabeth Cady Stanton—abolitionists who argued that slavery was wrong legally and morally. Radical abolitionists argued that slavery was a demon that plagued America, who argued that all good men and women were legally and morally bound to help free the slaves. Slavery was as unlawful as murder, arson, or theft. Some even argued that slaves and their defenders had a duty to take up arms.
Many were not pleased with the abolitionists’ growing presence in New York State—there had been antiblack and antiabolitionist attacks that continued to worsen.
Inside Plymouth Church, Harriet leaned forward, and across the room she saw Frederick Douglass’s prematurely graying mane nodding as Henry spoke.
“Without love our faith is meaningless; it has no power. Without love our greatest philanthropy is less than a mere token.”
Henry’s voice shook the rafters in Plymouth Church—a sanctuary built more like an auditorium than a church—caused the air to vibrate, swelled, and then dropped to a whisper. Words came alive in Henry, or, better still, as Walt Whitman wrote, Henry’s words were substantial and delicious. When Henry spoke he became the words, and though he was human and given to human weaknesses, he tried to live the words he spoke. “Without love, intelligence and knowledge have no value.”
He not only preached freedom for the captives, he also used his church as a station on the Underground Railroad. He raised money to buy freedom for captive slaves. Henry purchased rifles—rifles that bore the nickname “Beecher’s Bibles.” At Henry’s direction, Sharps rifles were shipped to Kansas along with Bibles to help antislavery men defend themselves against the strangling westward aggression of slavery, slavery discontent to remain within Kentucky’s borders.
While some churches struggled to gain and hold any members, most that survived brimmed with women. But Plymouth overflowed with men. Henry offered messages of love to those who had been taught that their very being displeased God, just as her family had taught Henry and her. They were tainted by original sin and despised by God.
But Henry preached love, and they flocked to him like parched men to fresh water. His voice thundered, swept through the room, and then eased to a whisper. “Without love—not only for the greatest, but also for the least among us—all that we do is pointless.”
From the front of Plymouth, Henry whispered to the congregation, “The only bondage in God’s creation that is tolerable and desirable is the bondage of love.”
Again, Frederick Douglass nodded his head.