The Church That Auctioned Freedom

Just ahead, a preacher once staged slave auctions inside his own church, not to sell people, but to buy their freedom. In the decades before the Civil War, the pastor here, Henry Ward Beecher, turned Sunday mornings into theater with a purpose, shaming his wealthy Brooklyn congregation into paying for people's freedom instead of buying them as property.

The first came in October of eighteen forty eight, when Beecher learned of two young women who had escaped slavery and been recaptured. He raised more than two thousand dollars on the spot to buy their freedom. He held another in June of eighteen fifty six, for a young woman named Sarah. The most famous case came later, on February fifth, eighteen sixty, when Beecher brought a formerly enslaved child who had escaped from Alabama in front of roughly three thousand people crowded into the sanctuary. He asked the congregation to buy her freedom rather than buy her as property. They gave nine hundred dollars and a gold ring. Beecher placed the ring on the girl's finger and told the crowd, remember, with this ring I do wed thee to freedom.

The church's commitment went beyond theater. Its basement served as a real station on the Underground Railroad, hiding people who had escaped slavery on their way further north. The building moved so many people through, quietly and repeatedly, that it earned a nickname among those who used it, the Grand Central Depot of the Underground Railroad.

Plymouth Church still holds services today, one of the few Underground Railroad stations in New York still standing on its original site and still in active use, a monument built not from stone plaques but from what actually happened inside it.