ANTISLAVERY LITERATURE TEACHING GUIDE
Henry Clarke Wright’s
THE NATICK
RESOLUTION (1860)
Prof. Joe Lockard
Department of English
ARIZONA STATE UNIVERSITY
June 2006
The author gratefully acknowledges support from the Arizona State University English
department in developing this guide and teaching materials, particularly to Professor Keith
Miller, Bruce Matsunaga, and Kristen LaRue. The Antislavery Literature Project operates
in cooperation with the Eserver at Iowa State University’s English department.
Teaching Approaches
The Natick Resolution addresses one of the central problems of political life:
when should citizens advocate for or participate in violent rebellion against unjust state
authority or legal institutions? During the 1850s a majority of the antislavery
movement’s followers were non-violent and advocated peaceful means to end slavery.
It was a provocative shock to Southern supporters of slavery after John Brown’s
raid on Harpers Ferry to discover that many in the northern states who had previously
been pacifistic now defended rebellion. For many white Southerners, public countenance
of voices like those of Henry Clarke Wright, who cheered Brown’s actions, represented
acquiescence to treason.
Antislavery speakers, on the other hand, saw Brown’s violence as the inevitable
outcome of a system built on violence and deprivation of human rights, a system that
refused to change by peaceful means. Furthermore, since US law protected slavery, they
claimed Brown represented an expression of natural law and a divine will which
endowed freedom upon all humans. Some sympathetic observers compared Brown to
Christ, or as Underground Railroad conductor Harriet Tubman said, “It’s clear to me that
it wasn’t John Brown that was hung on the gallows — it was God in him.”1 In France,
Victor Hugo proclaimed Brown “the champion of Christ.”2
Teaching The Natick Resolution is a re-engagement with such debates, ones that
have not lost their force or relevance. The ‘social text’ question for discussion seems less
whether John Brown made the right choice, a discussion frame that dichotomizes debate
between the image of a moral martyr-hero versus a figure that employed violence to defy
the law and supercede political process. This only repeats the terms of mid-nineteenth
century debate in the United States, which has limited applicability in a twenty-first
century culture where there is near-universal agreement that slavery is an egregious
human rights violation and criminal offense. Slavery is not the debate here: the limits of
opposition and resistance to the state are the issue.
Teaching a text such as The Natick Resolution we seem to be drawn almost
magnetically to the contemporary implications of nineteenth-century conflicts. By
employing historic texts such as The Natick Resolution — or Thoreau’s Plea for Captain
John Brown — to discuss causes of violence and the political search for social justice to
remedy human rights deprivations as a means of avoiding violence, they become useful
platforms to explore present-day social choices.
The choice of violence, which Henry Clarke Wright honors here, is still honored
in the United States and elsewhere today, sometimes with good reason but more often
without. For students and teachers both, understanding how this choice appeared to
many people prior to the Civil War may help formulate clearer thinking about how we
approach issues of social violence in the United States today. For example, how do we
distinguish between the ‘legitimate’ violence of states and the ‘illegitimate’ violence of
terrorism? Why do many people today consider John Brown as a harbinger of racial
justice rather than as an American terrorist?
1
Jean Humez, Harriet Tubman: The Life and the Life Stories (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin
Press, 2003) 261.
2
Letters on American Slavery (Boston: American Anti-Slavery Society, 1860) 5.
Discussion Questions
1.
Henry Clarke Wright, for much of his career a dedicated pacifist, begins his letter
to John Brown with a complex rhetorical equation. The first term is “Resistance to
tyrants is obedience to God,”3 followed by a derived resolution, that therefore “…it is the
right and duty of the slaves to resist their masters, and the right and duty of the people of
the North to incite them to resistance, and to aid them in it.” (p. 3) Examine carefully
each half of this equation. Why did Wright need to refer to God to establish a right to
rebel against tyranny? What does this suggest about the evangelical Protestant tradition,
from which Wright emerged, and its concept of human rights? In the second half of the
equation, Wright asserts several rights and duties involving resistance. Are these equal
duties between slaves and free people? How might they differ? Were “people at the
North” truly free if they co-existed within a political union that protected slavery?
2.
In his speech and letter, Wright undertakes a process of ‘conscientization’ – that
is, fostering a public conscience over the issue of slavery. He writes “We would arouse
the North to embody liberty and resistance to slavery in their whole life.” (4) One of his
strategies to accomplish this is to argue that “the people of the south…embody death to
liberty…”, whereas by their account white citizens of the southern states viewed
themselves as defending their own liberty. Do you think that Wright’s rhetorical
strategy works?
3.
Some older histories erroneously reported that Brown was mentally ill; one
bestselling modern history repeats this idea. Wright addresses this once-common myth
directly where he states “Why should the North call you a ‘fanatic,’ a ‘maniac,’…” (4)
Later in the text, Wright states to southern readers “This may seem to you madness. It is
so, as viewed from the slaveholding stand-point…” (10) Wright argues that not only has
Brown fulfilled his duty to humanity and the nation, but those who do not understand
self-sacrifice characterize it as madness. Why might myths that Brown was mentally ill
persist? What are the politics of designating someone a ‘fanatic’?
4.
Wright is writing a peculiar epistolary sub-genre, a pre-execution letter of
consolation to the condemned prisoner. He chooses to write the letter as a compliment to
John Brown’s triumph on his soon-forthcoming day of execution and into future
perpetuity. How does Wright seek to reconcile an individual’s fate with the lives of
millions? How does he mobilize grief to lend support to Brown?
5.
Wright sees the future with certainty: “Your execution is but the beginning of that
death struggle with slaveholders, which must [emphasis added] end in striking the last
fetter from the last slave.” Is certainty over the historical future of slavery warranted?
Note that according to one United Nations estimate, there are some 27 million slaves in
the world today, more than at any other time in human history.
3
Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson proposed this as a motto for the Great Seal of the United States.
William Lloyd Garrison frequently referred to this quotation in his antislavery speeches.
6.
In his letter to the Richmond Enquirer (8-11), Wright makes a comparison
between John Brown and Christ that was shockingly sacrilegious to some: “Christ…has
proved a dead failure, as a power to free the slaves…The nation is to be saved, not by the
blood of Christ…but by the blood of John Brown…” (9) Discuss what Wright means by
this formulation. After Brown’s execution, speakers at a public commemoration meeting
at Tremont Hall in Boston compared Virginia’s governor who signed the death warrant to
Pontius Pilate. (22) Why did religious opprobrium speak so powerfully at this moment?
7.
If one conceives of slavery as a form of social violence against individuals and
groups, basing itself upon implicit and explicit threats of disciplinary punishment or
death for those who rebel against it, how might we read Wright’s letter to Governor Wise
of Virginia (11-16) as advocacy for self-defense? How does it conceive of Brown as a
defender, and how does it align Brown’s actions with iconic figures of US history?
8.
Henry Wilson, senator from Massachusetts, was called to account on the Senate
floor in December 1859 by southern colleagues who protested that he did not object to
the Natick Resolution although he was in attendance when it was accepted by unanimous
vote. Wilson defended himself that this was a public debate he attended, and he had no
sympathy for the resolution. He argued that it was never “right or expedient” to use
violence to resist that state by force. What are the social and political implications of
Senator Wilson’s sentiments? Why does Wright include an 1851 speech by Wilson (3336) as an appendix?
9.
In the aftermath of Brown’s execution, Wright wrote a letter to abolitionist
publisher William Lloyd Garrison (25-32) dealing with “resistance, rebellion, and
insurrection.” (25) How does Wright discuss racial violence? Noting that Garrison
remained a committed pacifist even at this date – the Civil War would break out in a little
over one year – how does Wright seek to persuade his colleague to change his position?
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