By Thomas Kidd
Ever since the evangelist George Whitefield took the English-speaking world by storm in the 1730s, British and American publishers had been on the lookout for the next great evangelical celebrity. By the 1850s, a new candidate had emerged as the “Modern Whitefield,” as one widely-printed sermon collection put it. He was the Baptist preacher Charles Spurgeon, who took on much of Whitefield’s mantle in England. But in his lifetime Spurgeon never took on Whitefield’s outsized role in America. Why?[1]
One obvious reason is that Spurgeon never visited America. More crucially, his cresting fame and popularity in the United States was short-circuited by the burgeoning crisis over slavery, secession, and the Civil War. Spurgeon’s reputation in the U.S. was particularly damaged by a letter published in early 1860, in which he praised the abolitionist martyr John Brown.
The key events in the American firestorm over Spurgeon and slavery began with John Brown’s ill-fated raid on Harpers Ferry, Virginia, in October 1859. American politics had been convulsed for years over slavery and abolition, and Brown’s attack on the federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry took the controversy to a new level. Brown was hanged on December 2, proclaiming before his execution that “the crimes of this guilty land will never be purged away, but with Blood.”
Spurgeon became connected to the controversy over Brown through a sermon given by Henry Ward Beecher at the Plymouth Church, Brooklyn, on October 30, 1859. On the eve of the Civil War, Henry Ward Beecher was one of the most well-known and controversial American ministers, not least because of his vocal opposition to slavery. His October 30 oration, devoted to Brown, was ambivalent about the Harpers Ferry attack itself. In sum, Beecher said that Brown’s “soul was noble; his work miserable.”
But Beecher alleged that too many northern Christians and churches were afraid to confront the topic of slavery. He further claimed that northern book publishers were averse to printing critiques of human bondage. Specifically, he declared that some had cut out antislavery passages from the works of popular foreign authors, including Charles Spurgeon.
Spurgeon fatefully responded to Beecher’s allegation, in a letter originally printed in a Boston newspaper. Spurgeon said he wanted to make his views on slaveholding clear: “I do, from my inmost soul, detest slavery anywhere and everywhere, and although I commune at the Lord’s table with men of all creeds, yet with a slaveholder I have no fellowship of any sort or kind.”
Spurgeon’s letter offered as vociferous a Christian indictment of slaveholders as one could imagine. Then he moved on to the “rumor” that he had “left out the anti-slavery from my American edition of sermons.” He denied this was true, although he again noted that he had rarely made mention of slavery in his printed sermons. He intended to focus more on the subject, however. “I shall not spare your nation in [the] future…the crying sin of a man-stealing people shall not go unrebuked.”
He followed up this letter with another in which he said that he was not aware of any “allusions” in his sermons that were cut. Again, he denounced slavery as “a crime of crimes, a soul-destroying sin, and an iniquity which cries aloud for vengeance.” He did not plan on publishing anything more extensive on the subject of slave-owning thawn these “red-hot letters,” however.
Spurgeon’s first letter on slavery would have already been widely noticed and controversial, but it was the final lines of it that proved truly incendiary. He concluded it by stating that “John Brown is immortal in the memories of the good in England, and in my heart he lives.” Most American antislavery leaders, including Beecher, had not offered such unambiguous praise for Brown. Newspapers widely reported that white southerners burned Spurgeon’s sermons in reaction to the “Brown is immortal” letter.
Spurgeon’s “Brown is immortal” letter was widely circulated in America by February 1860. Demonstrating that the comment about Brown—and not just slavery—was the center of the controversy, some newspapers simply quoted that sentence in a short article titled, “Spurgeon a John Brown Man.” Efflorescent denunciations of Spurgeon were reported frequently in the American press during spring 1860. One newspaper in Jacksonville, Florida, called Spurgeon “a beef-eating, puffed-up, vain, over-righteous, pharisaical, English, blab-mouth, ranting preacher of doctrine not found in the Bible.”
Another report said that, in addition to “kindling bonfires of his sermons,” Spurgeon had been receiving letters that said things like “You varmint! you vile English abolitionist! How we wish we had you over here! We grow plenty of hemp, and would soon find a rope to hang you!”
The Montgomery Mail published a nationally reprinted story of a “gentleman of this city” who invited all to bring copies of Spurgeon’s sermons to the town’s jailyard, to be burned in a bonfire. When the sermons had been burned, the newspaper writer noted his hope that “the works of the greasy cockney vociferator may receive the same treatment throughout the South.” The piece further suggested that, if Spurgeon was ever to visit the South in person, “We trust that a stout cord may speedily find its way round his eloquent throat.”
One of Spurgeon’s American publishers had, as Beecher suggested, earlier tried to tone down and quietly delete Spurgeon’s earlier comments indicting slavery. In Spurgeon’s sermon “Presumptuous Sins” (1857), he had raged against America’s pretensions to “freedom” as compared to Britain. Spurgeon mocked the American slave masters’ idea of freedom. The British admittedly did not have “the freedom of beating our slaves to death, or of shooting them if they choose to disobey…we have not the freedom of hunting men, or the freedom of sucking another man’s blood out of him to make us rich,” he declared.
This was only a brief allusion in a longer sermon, perhaps making it easier for the publisher to justify deleting the short passage. They silently did so in the American edition of the sermon. But there was no hiding his letter praising John Brown.
So why would Spurgeon pen the “Brown is immortal” letter, given the volatile situation in America in 1860? The most straightforward explanation is that he possessed a longstanding moral revulsion against slave-owning. In a June 1859 sermon, for example, he made one of his most ferocious statements against slavery, proclaiming that “there is no God in heaven if the iniquity of slavery [goes] unpunished. There is no God existing in heaven above if the cry of the negro [does] not bring down a red hail of blood upon the nation that still holds the black man in slavery.” He did not explicitly name the United States, but the inference was hard to miss.
Spurgeon’s encounter with a runaway slave in 1859 undoubtedly fueled his contempt for slavery. This South Carolina runaway was named John Andrew Jackson. His relationship with Jackson may have helped to radicalize Spurgeon and make him more willing to provoke Christian slaveholders in America. Jackson had traveled to Canada in the wake of the Fugitive Slave Act (1850). In 1857 he went to Britain, using references from antislavery figures such as Harriet Beecher Stowe and Frederick Douglass, in hopes of raising funds to liberate family members who remained in slavery.
Jackson spoke about his ordeal as an enslaved man in an address at Spurgeon’s New Park Street Chapel on December 8, 1859. Spurgeon commended Jackson’s speech and alluded to John Brown’s raid, saying that if Brown was in fact executed he would be a Christian martyr. Spurgeon also reportedly responded to Jackson’s address by proclaiming that “slavery is the foulest blot that ever stained a national escutcheon, and may have to be washed out with blood.”
In any event, by December 1859 it appears that hearing about Brown’s raid on Harpers Ferry, in addition to his encounter with Jackson, propelled Spurgeon to write the “Brown is immortal” letter. There was nothing that he could have said to cause more furor across the United States, and particularly in the South, than to unreservedly praise Brown. Thus, it was not simply Spurgeon’s antislavery sentiments that elicited the outburst of fury toward him. It was that arguably the most discussed and most widely published Anglo-American evangelical leader of the day had commended John Brown. Actual burnings of Spurgeon’s sermons seem to have been relatively few, but coverage of the bonfires made them known from New England to the Deep South, the Midwest, and even out to California.
During the crucial months between Brown’s raid and Abraham Lincoln’s nomination for president in mid-1860, Spurgeon’s alleged antislavery fanaticism, and the burning of his sermons, provided the American press with a major focus of hostility. The episode stoked more popular animosity in the year that would conclude with Lincoln’s election and South Carolina’s exit from the Union. Spurgeon’s antislavery and pro-John Brown stance made him a persona non grata in much of America, but especially in the South.
Thomas Kidd | Research Professor of Church History & John and Sharon Yeats Endowed Chair of Baptist Studies
[1] A longer version of this essay appeared in October 2023 in the journal American Nineteenth-Century History.
