Black History Month has come and gone with February, with minimal attention by the media. But, of course, after 35 years what is left to say? I think one factor that has been overlooked is what abolition of slavery, elimination of Jim Crow laws, and gaining civil rights does for white people.

Whites need to recognize the freedom we have ourselves gained by freedom coming to Blacks. The legal and practical abolition of slavery indeed gave freedom to Blacks, but it was also necessary in order for Whites to gain freedom—from moral accountability for the sin of inhumanity to brother humans.

I tell you a family story. William Henry Brisbane, my great-great-grandfather, was born a slave-holder in 1806 in the low country of South Carolina. His family was aristocratic cotton planters, and he inherited a plantation with its slaves and a townhouse in Charleston. He first trained as a Baptist preacher and then earned a M.D. He published in Charleston during the 1830s “The Southern Baptist and General Intelligencer” to defend slavery as an economic necessity and, further, justified by the Bible he preached sincerely.

Having failed to demolish the logic of abolitionists, Dr. Brisbane softened his argument to admit the Bible doesn’t directly support slavery but held it still allows it. In defending his modified position against angry readers, he began to mention evils in slavery as then practiced but still held it to be an evil economic necessity for South Carolina. What troubled him most was the fact that God created Blacks the same way he created Whites, i.e., equally human and in his own image.

Planters cancelled their subscriptions, and he found himself out of business. Worse, he lost his friends and even family turned against him. Being warned of a tar-and-feather party formed, he fled in the middle of the night and ended in the border city of Cincinnati.

This ex-patriot arranged to sell his field hands in 1837, but this was initially a practical matter in leaving his plantation and, at best, a simple divestiture to escape uncomfortable moral tension. He retained his domestics because, frankly, he didn’t know how to conduct his own domestic affairs without their service.

Cincinnati was a hot bed of abolitionists and they got to him. He refused to be called an abolitionist, however, because among self-respecting South Carolinians, which he remained, this was the equivalent of the N-word. Although his call as pastor of the city’s First Baptist Church included neutrality in regard to slavery, he couldn’t control himself when asked about cruelty against slaves, and he spoke out. This cost him another job.

He manumitted his domestics, but they chose to remain as unpaid subsisted servants. The local lawyer who executed the manumission papers was Salmon Portland Chase, later to become Lincoln’s treasury secretary and then chief justice.

This much didn’t satisfy Brisbane’s conscience, however, and he snuck back into his native state and repurchased his former slaves in order to free them as well. Whereas his cousin/overseer had agreed only to under-market price for purchase, he now demanded an inflated price to sell them. Both acts, of course, exploited Brisbane’s moral predicament and effectively impoverished him.

Putting his “property” aboard a steamer, he transported them north to Baltimore. Then by “special conveyance” to Pittsburg, where together they boarded a river boat that took them down the Ohio River to settle on his farm outside Cincinnati.

During the 1840 layover in Baltimore, he wrote an article for the “Saturday Visitor” newspaper. He reviewed how he had been driven out of the South for doing no more than questioning the morality of slavery. When he went to hear Black preachers in their churches, he was socially ostracized. He couldn’t even preach in his own church that negroes are humans and ought to be treated as brothers. Burdened by such oppression, he could not himself feel like a free man. If he could not speak freely his moral convictions, he was not free.

Dr. William Henry Brisbane wrote to the Baltimore audience: I freed my slaves so they could be free, to be sure. But I freed my slaves so I could be free.