At the Juncture of Justice and Faith
by Steve Thornton
Segregation in New England Churches
Young Hosea Easton attended church every Sunday in Bridgewater, Massachusetts with his parents James and Sarah Dunbar. In 1805, while the American colonies were conspiring against British domination, the Eastons were engaged in their own freedom struggle, one that taught Hosea about principle, courage, and self-sacrifice.
At church, the family ignored the “colored” section of the church pews and took seats among the white congregation. They were forced to move by the church elders, so the next week they brought their own chairs. Those seats were vandalized and thrown from the building, so the Easton family stood during the service. The scene played out in other Bridgewater churches, where the family was subsequently banned.
Around 1819 in Hartford, Black congregants at the Center Church were challenging racist segregation enforced by their Christian neighbors. Excluded from the “whites only” section, they eventually founded their own place of worship. Hosea Easton would later serve as pastor of the congregation formed by this movement, Hartford’s first Black church.
The Eastons and the American Revolution
The Eastons fought side by side with white soldiers during the American Revolution. Family members married Native American and white spouses alike in New England. They built their lives and contributed to the welfare of their neighbors. But that did not make them equal in the eyes of American society.
Hosea witnessed the fate of the metal shop and vocational school built by his father, costing “many thousand dollars” to teach trade skills, academics, and “the strict rules of morality” to young Black men who were barred from white schools. Sustained racial resentment and hatred against the effort led to its failure. This waste of resources, Easton would later conclude, was akin to a “hurricane”, sinking a ship “richly laden, and well manned.”
Easton would go on to write that whatever differences existed between the races were “casual or accidental.” He determined that the newly formed United States belonged as much to his people as anyone else’s. They had proven it when they fought for liberty against colonial subjugation.
The Revolution had freed Americans from England, Easton reckoned, and British law was the legal basis of racial slavery. The Declaration of Independence and other founding documents never explicitly denied the rights of Blacks; therefore, the sons and daughters of Africa must be included. All other immigrants should be under the protection of this new democracy as well. Black people were “Americans by birth, genius, habits, language, etc. ” he argued.
A Pastor for Hartford’s Black Community
Hosea Easton became a preacher and led two Boston churches for a brief time. He moved his young family to Hartford in 1833 and became the first pastor of the Talcott Street Congregational Church, a few blocks north of the State House. The new congregation arose from the original Center Church members who had objected to segregated seating in 1819. The Talcott church building, erected in 1826, was also Hartford’s first pillar of worship built for and by the Black community.
Tending to Hartford’s small Black population – 495 people or 5 percent of the city’s population – was only a part of the Reverend Hosea Easton’s calling. He pursued his father’s dream of providing formal education to the young through teaching. He was a correspondent for William Lloyd Garrison’s The Liberator, a prominent abolitionist paper at the time. He increased the church’s community base and political power by aiding the formation of several of the first civil rights organizations in the United States.
Easton’s “Treatise”
If this had been the full record of his accomplishments, Easton’s place in history would be assured. But he also left a lasting legacy on the slavery debate with the publication of his 1837 treatise on the American slave system with a proposition for its ultimate cure. He wrote this at a time when the nation followed the more practical (and profitable) course of expanding the immoral practice to new states added to the union on the one hand or followed the “colonization” scheme that shipped freed people “back” to Africa on the other.
His 1837 work was entitled A treatise on the intellectual character, and civil and political condition of the colored people of the U. States; and the prejudice exercised towards them. The church leader incorporated the lessons he learned as a child, but his moral imperative took him even farther than that. The reverend condemned the imperialism of white Americans and their “unholy war with the Indians and the wicked crusade against peace in Mexico.” In his view, European barbarians and imperialists were far inferior to the earlier civilizations of “Egypt, Ethiopia, and Carthage.” According to his biographer, “no pre-Civil War writer refuted the scientific claims of innate African inferiority more forcefully or intelligently than Easton did.”
While some of his “racial science” is muddled (he ascribes Black physical features to “deformities” caused by slavery), Easton’s fundamental point is that race is a construct. Humankind is “one blood” and all humans bleed the same color. Outward appearance “cannot be an efficient cause of malignant prejudice of the whites against the blacks; it is an imaginary cause at the most.”
Linking Language and Violence
In the Treatise, Easton also exposed the English language as a weapon that reinforced racism and thereby slavery. The more that white people used casual slurs to describe physical and intellectual attributes of Black people, and the more that young people heard these insults, the stronger the racist system became. Through constant repetition of belittling phrases (e.g. ni**er lips), and use of adjectives in everyday language (ignorant as a n**ger, poor as a n**ger, etc.), racism was sure to remain widespread in Hartford and the state. Such words and the racist attitudes behind them were unleashed when young white men violently reacted to the Black church on Talcott Street and its congregation in a series of riots from 1834 to 1836.
These evil practices were something with which Reverend Easton was all too familiar. He noted that racist words were expressed not only by white children, but “sometimes [by] professors of religion as well.” One slander on his list, the ”n**ger priest,” was surely thrown at him as an epithet.
Yet he saves his greatest anger for the white clergy. Few abolitionists were as frank as Easton about organized religion’s culpability with slavery and prejudice. Of all his criticism of pro-slavery apologists, this target seemed to provoke the harshest public reaction. Those who publicly addressed views as Easton did were met with violent opposition. Visiting Hartford, abolitionist speakers such as Stephen Symonds Foster similarly railed against northern clergy who did not forcefully oppose southern slavery and was accustomed to being pelted with vegetables or thrown bodily out of church buildings, sometimes from the second floor.
Easton’s Legacy
The Reverend Hosea Easton died prematurely on July 6, 1837, at 38 years of age. (His father died at 76 and his mother at 73.) His cause of death is not known. Yet he might have written his own terminal diagnosis in the Treatise: “The effect of these discouragements are every where manifest among the colored people. I will venture to say, from my own experience and observation, that hundreds of them come to an untimely grave, by no other disease than…oppression.”
Upon close reading, we can discern that Hosea Easton, anticipating the formal end of slavery, called for what we now identify as reconstruction and reparations. “Immediate abolition,” he wrote, “embraces the idea of an entire reversal of the system of slavery. The work of emancipation is not complete when it only cuts off some of the most prominent limbs of slavery, such as destroying the despotic power of the master.” This simply “leaves the poor man who is half dead … without proscribing any healing remedy for the bruises and wounds.”
Layng the foundation for what we would today call the argument for reparations, Easton continued,
Emancipation embraces the idea that the emancipated must be placed back where slavery found them and restore to them all that slavery has taken away from them. Merely to cease beating the colored people, and leave them in their gore and call it emancipation, is nonsense. Nothing short of the entire reversal of the slave system in theory and practice—in general and in particular—will ever accomplish the work of redeeming the colored people of this country from their present condition. (Emphasis added.)
Hosea Easton expected to publish a new volume of writing immediately after the Treatise on the subjects of “civil, social, and moral economy.” Had he lived, Easton’s voice would have amplified the growing demand to abolish human bondage. Four months after publication of his signature work, however, he died and the next book never came.
Thanks in large part to Hosea Easton and his family, Hartford became an important intersection of men and women who understood slavery as the country’s primary political and religious issue of the day: Prudence Crandall, Rebecca and Hettie Primus, all educators before and after reconstruction; Casper Young, James Mars, and Nancy Jackson, who risked death to fight slavery in Connecticut; Alanson Work, James Pennington, and John Brown, for whom abolition was a religious calling; and Ann Plato, Lydia Sigourney, and Harriet Beecher Stowe, who fought injustice with literary power.
Some of these names are well known, others, like the Reverend Hosea Easton, are not. Each risked their own comfort, security, and safety to dismantle our nation’s most shameful and destructive dilemma.
Anthology Selections
Treatise (excerpts or all?)
Other?
Hosea Easton – Biographical and Critical Sources