Between the Courthouse and the Church
God is just, and Thomas Jefferson knew it.
“I tremble for my country,” Jefferson said, knowing that “justice cannot sleep forever.”[1] This is the man who enslaved people, theorized racism, and never took a committed stance against slavery when drafting the documents that would shape the United States. Yet as an Enlightenment thinker, he knew, if secretly, that he was violating the most basic principles of human dignity and worth. He bemoaned an assurance that eventually his chickens must come home to roost.
Here we are in 2025, and the full reckoning is still to come. It is to this reckoning, when the last shall truly be made first, when white America will finally come to terms with our sinister history and take necessary steps for restoration, that I dedicate my own life’s work.
In that spirit, back in 2021 I set out on a four-day abolition history tour with my friend Christopher Mathews, a history specialist at Norfolk Public Schools. Chris is in his thirties, and wickedly handsome. I would estimate his height at six-foot-infinity. When he’s not winning over people of all ages with his sparkling smile, he can be counted on at hardcore music venues, either in the audience or on stage.
Chris, who is Black, and I, who am white, share not only a passion for the study of American history, but a somber conviction of the ethical significance of historical study. In 2020, while COVID-19 raged all over the world, we read David Blight’s biography of the legendary abolitionist Frederick Douglass. Blight says Douglass was especially concerned about the telling of history, understanding that the stories we tell about our past shape the possibilities of our future. When Confederates after the Civil War began re-framing their fight as one of states’ rights and resistance to Northern tyranny, Douglass recognized the very real threat to the future of the United States. Many of these Confederates would go on to be elected and steer the country to the redemption of Southern whites and the reconstitution of Black subordination.[2]
Out of this ex-Confederate push to reclaim power and misconstrue the nation’s history came the countless Confederate monuments we still see today. Even in states that never seceded, groups like the United Daughters of the Confederacy erected monuments honoring the men and women who went to war against their country to uphold slavery.
Chris and I knew all this before we set out on our journey. But we still had much to learn.
Having read the Douglass biography, one of our destinations was Talbot County, Maryland, home to the plantation where Douglass was enslaved, the courthouse where he was held prisoner after an escape attempt and where a statue of him now stands, and also the church Douglass attended as a free man. We looked forward with reverence to walking these weighty grounds.
The drive took about an hour and a half from the apartment in D.C. where we were staying. The apartment, owned by Chris’ uncle, is itself significant. Around the corner from Frederick Douglass Court, it stands in what was once an abolitionist safeground. This coincidence was not lost on us, yet it was only one of a series of coincidences that made the trip seem divinely orchestrated.
We arrived in Talbot County around 11:00 a.m., after traffic gave us plenty of time to familiarize ourselves with interstate 50 E. We parked behind the courthouse, thankful to find free parking with plenty of open spaces. Slowly, we approached, silently holding onto the knowledge that this spot was once where Douglass was imprisoned.
Before we reached the courthouse, we recognized the separate structure where Douglass’ holding cell would have been, now bearing a sign on its front door which reads, “PRIVATE.” We made our way across the grounds and finally to the front lawn of the courthouse,where we passed by an unfamiliar statue on our way to the Douglass statue, which stands on the north side of the front entrance walkway.
“2011?” I remarked when I saw the inscription on the statue’s base, finding it rather awkward that Talbot County went 150-plus years without erecting a monument to their most famous son. There was no plaque or information panel detailing who Douglass was, or that he was held at that courthouse as a slave.
Intrigued, I walked over to the other statue on the grounds, standing on the south side of the front walkway. There I looked up at a boy scout-like child with a “C.S.A.” belt buckle, holding up a confederate flag. The side of the statue’s base displayed more than a dozen names of Confederate veterans from Talbot County. The inscription on the front read,
To the Talbot Boys
1861 - 1865
C.S.A.
My reaction betrayed a foolishness and innocence which do not befit my education. I was surprised, even as I have learned time and again never to be surprised. I walked back over to Chris, who was still with Douglass, writing in his journal. “It’s a Confederate thing, isn’t it?” he asked, to which I nodded, or answered yes, or whatever bumbling way I confirmed the terrible truth.
We would later find out the Talbot Boys statue is over a hundred years older than the one of Douglass. We would also learn that the first name which appears on its base—Admiral Franklin Buchanan—was a member of the Lloyd family who enslaved Douglass himself.[3] Both the enslaved and the slaveholder were represented on the Talbot courthouse lawn—a pitiful both-sides-ism that plagues American politics to this day—yet for almost a hundred years only the slaveholder was represented.
Is this what we came here for? I wondered. To be demoralized and dejected? To be reminded that love for justice is no more American than love for whiteness?
We departed from the courthouse grounds in disappointment, and walked across the street into a book shop, perhaps hoping a little consumerism could be the boon we needed. Chris and I are bookworms, we have browsed many bookstores, but this one in particular was a gold mine. Before we knew it, we each had collected piles up to our necks. It was quite a spectacle, and one of the employees at the shop recognized fellow nerds in the odd characters browsing her store.
A neighborly white woman, Linda displayed an abundance of enthusiasm about the books we were grabbing, the trip we were on, and our purpose being there. It turned out, she is a professor of African-American literature at Chesapeake College, and had started a part time job at the book shop that very day. She told us about the places we absolutely had to visit while we were there. She also made us aware of the local campaign to get rid of the Talbot Boys statue that had just taken the wind out of our sails. While the statue’s presence made Chris and me distrustful of the locals, this woman gave us a taste of hope.
Thus placated, we set out, book bags in hand, toward the Bethel AME Church building, which Frederick Douglass dedicated in 1878.
The architecture of this humble church does not suggest grandiosity, but the information panel out front reveals a remarkable history. Bethel is the oldest African-Methodist-Episcopal church on the Eastern Shore. Founded in 1818, it served a thriving community of free Black people. Some owned property, which they preserved for generations, and others were escapees living as free. Black people with property hired and rented to ex-slaves looking for work and affordable housing. In the early 19th century, Talbot County was one of the wealthiest areas for free Black people in Maryland. The Black community there enjoyed an independence that would eventually offend their racist white neighbors, who were resentful of their success.[4]
Bethel AME Church appeared at a time when this free Black community was in economic decline. From 1804 to 1813, the number of Black people with property in Talbot County was 102. From 1817 to 1825, the number decreased to 54 largely because many of the property-owning Black people sold their property after white locals utilized the courts to threaten their livelihood.[5] John Dorrell, for example, was a wealthy, property-owning Black man who was accused of theft, an accusation that white people in Talbot County in the 19th century often levelled at their Black neighbors. As he paid for an attorney to defend himself, Dorrell feared for his assets and began selling them off. Some years later, his heir Washington Dorrell founded Bethel AME Church, and the church’s existence would long be shaped by this kind of white coercion.[6]
During the Civil War, white Easton legislators passed laws prohibiting Bethel from meeting on Sunday, and often threatened Bethel’s pastors with being resold into slavery.[7] In 1859, a local white man warned Rev. Thomas W. Henry, minister at Bethel AME at the time, against interacting with slaves.[8] While the church was initially founded to demonstrate that Black people were respectable, Christian people, its message of freedom and its mutual aid provided such a rich resource for free and enslaved Black people alike that it was continually seen as a threat by white slaveholders.
In 1878, when all of Talbot County’s Black people were free, and the Bethel community was once again thriving, Frederick Douglass dedicated the new building for the congregation on Hanson St. It is this building Chris and I approached after our disappointing experience at the courthouse.
One of the first things I noticed was that on the church’s adjoining lawn was propped a yellow sign that read:
MOVE TALBOT’S CONFEDERATE MONUMENT
Of course this sign would be here, I thought. The fact of its presence alone should serve to undermine any attempts to justify the counter-presence of Confederate monuments. This church was founded by former slaves and descendants of former slaves. The “Talbot Boys” fought for the right to enslave. Should we have a statue of them on Easton courthouse grounds? How do we think the people of Bethel AME Church would answer this question?
I stood reading the information panel which provided a little of the church’s history and for the first time since we stepped into Easton, I felt the awe of where we were and what had happened there. Having anticipated this moment, I retrieved the copy of Frederick Douglass’ Narrative that I brought on the trip with me. I told Chris I thought it would be appropriate to read Douglass’ Appendix to the Narrative in which he lays out his critique of “slaveholder Christianity.” We each took half the reading, and we did not whisper. We heard our voices echoing between the widely separated suburban houses surrounding the church.
The man who wields the blood-clotted cowskin during the week fills the pulpit on Sunday morning, to show me the way of life, and the path of salvation. He who sells my sister, for purposes of prostitution, stands forth as the pious advocate of purity. He who proclaims it a religious duty to read the Bible denies me the right of learning to read the name of the God who made me.[9]
With his words, Douglass exposed the diametrical opposition between slaveholding and Christianity, driving the spoke right through the wheel of white Christian hypocrisy. Pro-slavery is anti-Christian, full-stop. “To be the friend of the one, is of necessity to be the enemy of the other.”[10] It was at once a self-evident truth and a scandal to white society. Actually, Black people do have rights that we are all bound to respect. Actually, Thomas Jefferson had no right to enslave another person, but was right to fear the consequences of doing so.
It occurred to me that Chris and I had arranged a little church service of our own, and we had just heard the sermon. We knew without having to say it that we were on holy ground. That brick building might as well have been the burning bush. I took off my shoes and stepped on holy grass.
Along with his critique of slaveholder Christianity, Douglass included in his Appendix a parody of the hymn Heavenly Union, rewritten (plausibly by Douglass himself, though he ascribes it to “a northern Methodist preacher”) to reflect the hypocrisy and violence of American Christianity.
‘Love not the world,’ the preacher said,
And winked his eye, and shook his head;
He seized on Tom, and Dick, and Ned,
Cut short their meat, and clothes, and bread,
Yet still loved heavenly union.[11]
Pro-slavery preachers loved to talk about heaven while making hell on earth, all the while charging their subjects to, “Love not the world,” and instead “lay up treasures in heaven.” These words stuck out to me as Chris read them because of their special resemblance to the Christianity of my own upbringing. As children, Chris and I both were not just encouraged but commanded to ‘hate the world’ and love heaven. We were not supposed to listen to “secular,” “worldly” music like Led Zeppelin or The Beatles, but only “Christian,” “worship” music, like the kind they played at church. We were not supposed to “believe” in evolution or climate change, but were rather supposed to believe that God created the world in six days six-thousand years ago, and that this little time capsule we call earth will be destroyed when Jesus returns to judge sinners and take the “saved” to heaven. We were taught to hate reality, reject facts, withdraw from “the world,” and hope for the glorious hereafter.
Feeling the grass brush against my feet, I thought how absurd that I should hate the grass, and how terrible that someone would compel others to spurn life and live miserably. “Love not the world,” is just another way of saying, “Neglect your body,” “Think not of wellbeing,” “Improve nothing,” and “Hate yourself.”
But, as Douglass pointed out, this theology is not “the Christianity of Christ,” who came to serve the world and cultivate abundant life. Jesus did not neglect but attended to the material needs of others. Jesus loved people, and took care of their physical bodies.
I turned to my left to see Chris sitting against the façade of the church, scribbling in his notebook. We each carried one with us everywhere we went, and when we noticed or commented something significant, we would grab our pens and click with the ferocity of medical students observing a surgeon. Returning to my shoes, I sat next to Chris and remarked, “This is not a tour. It’s more like a pilgrimage.” He agreed, using the word “sojourn.”
We reflected together on the holiness of what we were experiencing, and warily approached the language of being guided by divine hand. I say “warily” because we both harbored a reluctance to return to stock terms like “providence” and “the Spirit.” In our experience in charismatic evangelical circles, these terms are often resorted to in laziness and passivity, whereas we knew that we had arranged to be where we were, that we ourselves had taken the time to plan the trip. We knew what we were doing there, and more or less what was in store for us. But we could not deny the power of being there, and the transformative effect it was having on us. It was a power we felt but could not quite be named.
Yet in that space, a word did occur to me. “It’s the ancestors,” I said. “The ancestors left a trail for us, knowing that if we followed it, we would find the way.” We were not in Maryland to see interesting historical sites. We were not just there for an “abolition history” lesson. We were there to follow the path the abolitionists made, and to be transformed by it.
With renewed spirits, Chris and I made our way back to the town center to nourish our bodies. But we noticed something we had overlooked on our way to the church—an art museum with a strikingly colorful and large cube on its lawn. The Academy Art Museum was exhibiting this four-sided installation titled “Freedom!”in celebration of Juneteenth.[12] The museum website describes the vibrant installation, created by local artists as “a testament to the joy and pride that Juneteenth sparks.”
There was a stark contrast between what Chris and I felt circling this work of art and what we felt circling the Talbot Boys statue. One might say they were as starkly different as slaveholder Christianity and the Christianity of Christ. Where the Talbot Boys monument was, to borrow Douglass’ words, “bad, corrupt, and wicked,” the Juneteenth monument was “good, pure, and holy.”[13]
That last word—holy—we used a lot throughout the weekend. We sensed the holiness of the historical places we visited, of the Black resilience they signify. I thought, if we let freedom reign, we would never see the end of the new life that would burst forth.
Happily, the Talbot Boys statue has since been removed from the Talbot County courthouse lawn. It was removed on Monday, March 13, 2022.[14] Two months before the removal was authorized, Chris and I sent an epic email to the Talbot County Council about our experience, calling the statue an "absolute disgrace." I like to think it helped the local campaign against the statue succeed.
But the tragedy of present day America is that we continue to celebrate what is evil and neglect what is good. White Americans fight to preserve statues of genocidal racists, and we fight to hide the history behind them from our kids. The white backlash to “critical race theory” and "diversity, equity, and inclusion" is merely a refusal to confront our history and acknowledge that our actions in the past have consequences for the present. It is, in other words, the refusal to acknowledge what Thomas Jefferson himself admitted—that justice cannot sleep forever.
“Dark and terrible as this picture is, I hold it to be strictly true,” Douglass said, toward the end of his criticism of slaveholder Christianity.[15] It was a statement that haunted Chris and me both. The truth about our country is dark and terrible, there’s no question. And just as Douglass was accused in his lifetime of being “nihilistic,”[16] so today anti-racists like Nikole Hannah-Jones are criticized for failing to offer “redemption.”[17] But there can be no redemption without justice. We must finally root out of our political system all semblances of white supremacy, restore the fortunes of the people we have oppressed for hundreds of years, and abolish all forms of oppression. As long as we do not do these things, we can only, like Jefferson, dread the consequences.
Jack Holloway
Footnotes:
[1] Thomas Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1954), 163.
[2] David Blight, Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2018), 530ff.
[3] Chris and I were grateful for the exceptional journalism of Casey Cep in her article, “My Local Confederate Monument,” The New Yorker (Sep. 12, 2020).
[4] Jennifer Hull Dorsey, “Free People of Color in Rural Maryland, 1783-1832,” dissertation, Georgetown University, Washington D.C. (June 3, 2002), ch. 5.
[5] Dorsey, 190.
[6] Dorsey, 173ff.
[7] Bethel A.M.E. Church Inventory Form for Historic Sites Survey, Maryland Historical Trust (Sep. 15, 1976), 3.
[8] Thomas W. Henry, From Slavery to Salvation: The Autobiography of Rev. Thomas W. Henry of the A.M.E. Church, ed. Jean Libby (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1994), 51, quoted in Dorsey, 206.
[9] Frederick Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, critical edition (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2016), 85.
[10] Douglass, 85.
[11] Douglass, 90.
[12] Juneteeneth is a holiday commemorating the emancipation of enslaved people in Texas, which eventually grew to be celebrated by African Americans all across the country. See Maggi M. Morehouse, “Juneteenth,” in The Encyclopedia of African American History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009).
[13] Douglass, 85.
[14] Nora McGreevey, "Maryland Removes Its Last Confederate Monument on Public Land," Smithsonian Magazine (Mar. 18, 2022).
[15] Douglass, 87.
[16] Blight, 743.
[17] See Adam Serwer, “The Fight Over the 1619 Project is Not About the Facts,” The Atlantic (Dec. 23, 2019), as well as Anilka Exum, “Here’s what to know about the debate over ‘Wit & Wisdom’ curriculum in Williamson schools,” Tennessean (Jun. 11, 2011).
