Words Worth Remembering: The Voice of God Against National Crime
The Broadway Tabernacle in New York City was among the more prominent pulpits in antebellum America, a house of worship and a house of conscience, presided over by the Congregationalist anti-slavery minister Joseph Parrish Thompson, a Philadelphia-born Yale man who believed that the church—and nation—had no business being silent when the nation had business being wicked. In the spring of 1854, the nation did.
On May 30 of that year, President Franklin Pierce signed the Kansas-Nebraska Act into law—legislation championed by Illinois Senator Stephen Douglas, who argued that the question of slavery in the new territories ought to be left to the settlers themselves, through what he called “popular sovereignty,” a shameful bastardization of democratic process devoid of moral power.
To Abraham Lincoln, as he would later say in Alton, Illinois, in October 1854, this was nothing less than the extinguishing of the moral lights around us. To Thompson, it was something older and plainer: national crime.
The Kansas-Nebraska Act effectively repealed the Missouri Compromise of 1820, which had forbidden slavery above the 36°30’ parallel in the Louisiana territories. It reopened what many had hoped was a closed question, and in doing so, it forced the nation to decide, once again, not merely a legal or political question, but a moral one. As Thompson saw it, Kansas presented America with a challenge as well as a choice: slavery would either be tolerated as a legitimized institution of labor or excluded and admonished as the moral wrong it is.
Thompson was no politician. He belonged, as he said plainly from the pulpit, “to no anti-slavery society, and to no political party whatever.” He spoke “for the honor of Christ’s name; for his suffering cause; for the dignity of Religion; for the sake of Humanity; for the sake of Liberty; for the honor and safety of my Country.”
What he saw proposed in Kansas—the introduction and legalization, on virgin soil, of a system that “makes man a chattel, and puts him under the irresponsible will of his fellow; that separates husband from wife, and parent from child, by force and for gain; that keeps God’s Word from men made in his image”—was not, he insisted, a sectional question, nor a political one.
“It is a national question,” he said, “and a moral question. If this wrong is done, it will be done by the representatives of the whole people, in their name and by their authority.”
Then came the sentence that cut to the marrow of what was at stake—and what, in every generation, is at stake when a nation is tempted to look away from its own crimes: “The man who can be indifferent to this, can be indifferent to any crime.”
It was not a sentence about slavery alone. It was a sentence about the American conscience itself—about what happens to a people when they train themselves to tolerate the intolerable. Thompson had watched, he said, as “Christian merchants of this city” admitted that slavery was an enormous evil, that the biblical arguments against it were “true and forcible,” yet then held their peace about it anyway, because “the major part of their business was at the South.” He knew what that indifference cost. It cost the conscience first, then the nation’s soul, then unimaginable more.
“I fear that this wickedness will be consummated,” he said. “And then it will be no marvel if our children see a prostrate commerce, a servile insurrection, or a civil war.” Unfortunately, he was right on all counts.
In the Senate chamber, while Thompson preached at the Broadway Tabernacle, Ohio’s Benjamin Wade was making a nearly identical argument against Indiana’s John Pettit, who had called the Declaration of Independence’s equality clause “a self-evident lie.” It is “a hard thing for a man to quarrel on this floor with that old Declaration,” Wade replied, with something close to exhaustion.
And on the Kansas plains, the war Thompson warned of had already begun to smolder—what history would call Bleeding Kansas, the opening act of the war over which Lincoln would preside.
Thompson drew his sermon to a close not with despair but with warning and charge, addressed as much to his congregation as to the republic itself: “Whatever judgment may befall our guilty nation, he that taketh warning shall deliver his soul.”
In every age of national trial, the choice Thompson named in 1854 returns in new form: whether we will be the people who saw, who knew, and who spoke—or the people who understood the wrong and held their peace, because the cost of conscience was too high, the discomfort of truth too great.
The man who can be indifferent to this, Thompson said, can be indifferent to any crime. He was talking about Kansas. But in another sense, he was talking about us today. The question, as then, is whether we listen—and whether we act.