Normally when I speak at this point in a church service, I have a stock joke, wondering what on earth a nice Jewish boy could be doing in a place like this. But then there's Judson. And when friends ask me what kind of church it is, I'll now able to explain that it's the kind of church that had Jews preach two out of three Sundays in February, which can be said of very few churches, I assure you.
Even more peculiarly, is what this preacher really wants to talk about this Sunday: the place of faith - Christian faith - in the struggle for African-American rights in 19th century America.
So let's hear our text again:
What does God require of you, O mortal: only that you act justly, love kindness, and walk humbly with your God. (Micah 6:8)
You could say that this passage lies at the heart of God's message to the Israelites, that like "love thy neighbor as thyself," it is one of those foundational statements, in few words, poetically expressed, after which one is moved to say: All the rest is commentary.
The Amistad incident, by contrast, is confusing. In the movie, by the way, it is absolutely incomprehensible. There are a number of reasons for this confusion: one of the most important is the complication of the laws regarding slavery.
In a nutshell, importing slaves to the United States had become illegal in 1808 (though selling slaves within these United States remained entirely legal), and had also become illegal in Cuba (by a British-Spanish treaty) in 1820. Nevertheless, Cuba imported some 180,000 slaves during the 1830s to work on its massive sugar plantations. So it was business as usual when a Spanish slaver brought several hundred African slaves to Havana in 1839, gave them Spanish names, falsified papers to indicate that they had been born in Cuba, and sold 53 of them to two other Spaniards, who then set out to transport them to another Cuban city on a ship named, amazingly enough, La Amistad (or "The Friendship").
The human cargo, already brutalized by a 2-3 month voyage from Africa under appalling conditions, were terrified of the crew--for good reason. The captain had already killed one African, and the cook had threatened to kill and eat some of the others. So one night, led by the man called Cinque, - no one's really sure how to pronounce his name - the captives rebelled, killed the captain and the cook, and ordered the remaining crew to sail back to Africa. While they sailed East during the day, at night the crew sailed back northwest. A couple of months later the U.S. Navy seized the ship off the coast of Long Island. The remaining 39 African men and four children were charged with mutiny, murder, and piracy, and jailed in New Haven, Connecticut. For a year and a half they lived in a 20 x 30 foot jail cell, where spectators who paid 12 and a half cents could get a look at them.
American abolitionists saw the case as a way to chip away at slavery, so they took up the mutineers' cause. Since the slave trade itself was illegal, they argued, the captives were really free when they entered U.S. waters - and therefore should be set free. The government of Spain, on the other hand, insisted that the captives were Spanish property, born in Cuba, and should therefore be returned to their one surviving owner.
The President of the United States, New York Democrat Martin Van Buren, did not want to lose Southern support - sound familiar? - and when his prosecutors kept losing the case, despite his administration's truly shameful behavior (mistranslating documents, trying to have the captives shipped off secretly to Cuba during the case), he appealed, all the way to the Supreme Court. There he lost, as former President John Quincy Adams persuaded the Court that the captives had only exercised their right of self-defense since they had been illegally brought from Africa - and were therefore free.
The case and the incident cry out for interpretation. Some have seen it as a heroic story of African resistance to slavery, which it was; others have seen it as a corrective to their high school (and college) history courses that dealt too little with slavery, which it also is. But what gets ignored entirely too often in accounts of the Amistad incident is the place of this church's religious ancestors (or at least one branch of your family tree, the New England Congregationalists. Especially in the powerful Steven Spielberg movie, most religious folk are, to put it mildly, trashed.
I realize the movie came out some time ago, so you might not remember many details. But you may remember the scene in which, as the captives are being moved, there appears a small group of prune-faced singers, all dressed in those drab gray Puritan-style costumes, wearing bonnets, singing badly and off key, the hymn Amazing Grace. The captives refer to them as "miserable people," and they do look miserable, in the mud and rain. But this was tone-deaf movie making as well as singing, for of all the hymns in the Christian canon, Amazing Grace had the most to do with the slave trade. John Newton, who wrote the words, had been a slave trader himself who saw the light, converted, and became an anti-slavery speaker and activist. Consider the words in that context. "Amazing grace, how sweet the sound, that saved a wretch like me. Once was lost, but now am found, was blind but now I see."
You know, in concerts, Joan Baez gives a version of how this hymn got written: that Newton had an epiphany in mid-voyage, turned back to Africa, freed the slaves, and wrote the hymn. It's a great story - I've heard her tell it, and if it's the price of hearing her sing it, well that's all right with me. But it's not true.
Now I'm not going to argue that there have never been Congregational sourpusses. At one time or another in the 19th century, Congregational ministers inveighed against dancing, card playing, billiards, boxing, Sunday baseball, bloomers, croquet, and I'm just getting started. But the Amistad captives would never have won their freedom without Christian anti-slavery activists, most of whom were Congregationalists.
By 1839, when the Amistad incident hit the news, anti-slavery agitation, and the pro-slavery, or anti-abolitionist counter-attack had really stirred up national politics. In 1835 the abolitionist agitator and editor William Lloyd Garrison had nearly been lynched by a Boston mob. In 1837 the abolitionist printer Elijah Lovejoy was murdered by a mob in Alton, Illinois, across the river from slaveholding St. Louis.
There were 1,300 anti-slavery societies - volunteer groups - in the North by then, with over a hundred thousand members who distributed over a million pieces of abolitionist literature and gathered two million signatures in an 1838-1839 petition campaign.
What was the base of the anti-slavery agitation in the North? Christian churches. What was the basis of their political action? Their Christian belief - nourished by the revivalism that swept through Northern society in the 1830s - that there was a moral - and immediate - imperative to end the sinful practice of slavery, rather than to tolerate it as "business as usual," or "political realism." God did not approve of sin; why should God's people?
And while free people of color played a courageous role in anti-slavery efforts, the great majority of anti-slavery activists in the United States were white. There's more. Then, as now, most church members were women. So generations before they could vote, Congregational women gave suppers, distributed petitions and collected signatures, wrote letters, and raised money for the anti-slavery cause.
This story is not only about Congregationalists, I'm happy to be able to say in this pulpit. In 1840, smack in the middle of the Amistad case, anti-slavery Baptists in New York founded the American Baptist Anti-Slavery Convention; Boston Baptists founded the American Free Baptist Mission Society the same year. According to its constitution, the society's members sought to "separate ourselves now and forever from all connection with religious societies that are supported in common with slaveholders." You can guess what happened next, and you'd be right. In 1845, meeting in Augusta, Georgia, delegates formed the Southern Baptist Convention.
It would never have occurred to any of these anti-slavery folks that the Church should not get involved in "politics."
God, after all, has been quite clear on the subject. God did not ask for burnt offerings, "thousands of rams or rivers of oil" (that's how the Micah passage begins) or "realism," but to "act justly and love kindness." How could they act justly without getting involved in "politics"? How could they love "kindness" toward the enslaved without bucking their own government?
All this agitation intersected with the Amistad incident in the person of Lewis Tappan. Born Congregational in Northampton, Massachusetts, he had become a wealthy New York businessman by the 1830's. (Even then, New York was where the money was.) In 1833 he and his brother Arthur and the minister Theodore Weld formed the American Anti-Slavery Society; that same year they founded Oberlin College, open to blacks and whites alike.
On July 4, 1834, the sixtieth anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, a New York City mob ransacked Tappan's house and burned his furniture in the street. That's right. New York City. It took real courage, even here, to oppose slavery. Slaveholders eventually put bounties on the heads of the Tappan brothers - $100,000 for the pair.
Tappan saw the Amistad case as an opportunity to dramatize the evils of slavery as well to help free the Africans - and formed the Amistad Committee to raise funds, hire a lawyer, and publicize the case. The lawyer he hired was no young ambulance chaser, as he's played in the movie, but instead the well-connected, well-heeled Roger Sherman Baldwin, who would soon run successfully for Governor of Connecticut. Tappan hired Yale divinity students -Congregationalists, too - to give the Africans instructions in Christianity. To me this is fascinating. When a moviemaker of the skill of Steven Spielberg takes hold of a historical incident, he as a lot more power than a roomful - maybe even a convention hall full of historians. And what he takes out is important: organization, connections, political savvy, and . . . religion.
In the movie, Tappan is shown, disparagingly, opposite the fictional black abolitionist played by Morgan Freeman (of course, who wouldn't look bad next to Morgan Freeman?), musing on how a loss in the case would help the larger anti-slavery cause. Given Tappan's sacrifices, faith and commitments, this was a historical slander.
Don't get me wrong. Black Congregationalists played a vital role in anti-slavery agitation. The Rev. James William Charles Pennington, for example, escaped from slavery at the age of 21, became a schoolteacher and audited classes at Yale Seminary before becoming a licensed Congregational Minister and pastor of Hartford's Talcott Street Congregational Church in 1840. Pennington founded the largely black Union Missionary Society in 1841, which the Amistad Committee joined the following year. But they did not lead the Amistad Committee.
After the captives were freed Tappan raised the money to return them to Africa as they wished, and continued to agitate on behalf of racial equality and the abolition of slavery. In 1846 Tappan, other abolitionists, and the Union Missionary Society came together to found the American Missionary Association.
This remarkable organization always included black and white Americans among its leaders and workers, in a time when segregation defined American life, North and South. During and after the Civil War, AMA teachers, blacks and whites, men and women, went South to teach the freed people to read and write, and to help them found churches. In fact, if you find a church in the South called First Congregational, that was founded during Reconstruction, say, between 1864 and 1877, it was almost certainly a black church founded by the AMA.
Why is the American Missionary Association relevant this morning? Because it was the direct ancestor of the United Church Board for Homeland Ministries, the principal social justice arm of the United Church of Christ for most of the last 50 years. Now it's the "Justice Witness Unit" - a demonstration that historical progress need not always be for the good.
So what are some meanings of the Amistad that we can take with us? First, the fight to end slavery would never have been won without faithful Christian men and women willing to risk physical danger, social disapproval, the nastiness of neighbors and politicians, and the condescension of filmmakers many years after their deaths. It may have been the historical high-water mark for white folks in America until that time - and they often paid dearly for taking their faith seriously.
Second, the political savvy and organizational ability of those involved in the case helped strengthen Northern anti-slavery sentiment, despite the Supreme Court deciding the case on very narrow, even "technical" grounds. Frederick Douglass, for example, the great black abolitionist and escaped slave, began his public career in 1841, the year the Amistad case was decided.
Finally, the story to me is about the irreducible humanity of the captives themselves, against odds I can only begin to imagine. So let's end with their voices. First, from Ka-Le to Mr. Adams, that's John Quincy Adams - who really did get a break being played by Anthony Hopkins - something of a stiff as a younger man when he served as President, but a wily politician as an older man. Ka-Le this letter during the trial:
Dear Friend Mr. Adams,
I want to write a letter to you because you love Mendi people and you talk to the Great Court. Want to tell you one thing. Jose Ruiz say we born in Havana, he tell lie… we all born in Mendi - we no understand Spanish language… we want you to ask the court what we have done wrong. What for Americans keeps us in prison. Some people say Mendi people crazy dolts because we no talk American language. Americans no talk Mendi. American people crazy dolts? They tell bad things about Mendi people and we no understand… Dear friend Mr. Adams you have children and friends you love them you feel sorry if Mendi people come and take all to Africa…
And now from the captive we know as Kin-Na to Lewis Tappan:
Dear Sir:
We have reached Sierra Leone and one little while after we go Mendi and we get land very safely. Oh dear friend, pray to God. God will hear your prayer. We will pray for you; and God is very great, very good and kind. We have been on great water. Not any danger fell upon us. Oh, no. We never forget glorious God for these great blessings. How joyful we shall be. I never forget you. May God be blessed. Our blessed saviour Jesus Christ have done wondrous works. Dear Mr. Tappan, how I feel for these wondrous things. I pray Jesus will hear you; if I never see you in this world, we will meet in heaven.
Your true friend,
Kin-Na
