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Eye on John Brown
by Steven Mintz
John and Rebecca Moores Professor of History, University of Houston |
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Photograph
of John Brown, ca. 1859 (GLC 06391.14) |
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In 1856, three years before his celebrated raid on Harpers
Ferry, John Brown, with four of his sons and three others,
dragged five unarmed men and boys from their homes along
Kansas's Pottawatomie Creek, and hacked and dismembered
their bodies as if they were cattle being butchered in
a stockyard. Two years later, Brown led a raid into Missouri,
where he and his followers killed a planter and freed
eleven slaves. Brown's party also absconded with wagons,
mules, harnesses, and horses – a pattern of plunder
that Brown followed in other forays. During his 1859 raid
on Harpers Ferry, seventeen people died. The first was
a black railroad baggage handler; others shot and killed
by Brown's men included the town's popular mayor and two
townsfolk.
In the wake of Timothy McVeigh's attack on the federal
office building in Oklahoma City in 1995 and Al Qaeda's
strikes on the World Trade Center and Pentagon in 2001,
Americans might ask how they should remember John Brown.
Was he a bloodthirsty zealot, a vigilante, a terrorist,
or a madman? Or was he one of the great heroes of American
history, a freedom fighter and martyr to the cause of
human liberty? Was his resort to violence any different
from, for example, those by Paul Hill and John Salvi,
who, in the mid-1990s, murdered abortion-clinic workers
in God's name?
Nearly a century and a half after his execution, John
Brown remains one of the most fiercely debated and enigmatic
figures in American history. Brown's earliest biographers
– especially James Redpath, Franklin Sanborn, and
Oswald Garrison Villard – were hero-worshippers
who considered Brown a warrior-saint whose assaults on
slavery represented the first crucial steps toward emancipation.
During the 1930s and early 1940s, a more critical view
arose. At a time when revisionists regarded the Civil
War as a needless conflict fomented by fanatics and blundering
politicians, many scholars followed the lead of James
C. Malin, who argued that Brown was little more than an
indiscriminate murderer, swindler, and petty horse thief,
who had little genuine interest in antislavery or in the
rights of African Americans. Following World War II, many
leading historians dismissed Brown as clinically delusional
– Bruce Catton called him "unbalanced to the verge
of outright madness" – and denounced his attack
on Harpers Ferry as an act of treason. A notable dissenter
was the Marxist historian Herbert Aptheker, who argued
that Brown's rage against slavery grew out of his fury
over market capitalism, which had reduced his family to
poverty. In the 1960s a new generation of scholars viewed
Brown as an uncompromising idealist, a principled agitator,
and a genuine revolutionary who envisioned an America
free of racial prejudice.
Since 1970, Brown has been the subject of at least forty-three
biographies, scholarly studies, and works of fiction (as
well as eighteen children's books), including a best-selling
novel (Russell Banks's Cloudsplitter), a brilliant
collection of annotated primary sources (Zoe Trodd and
John Stauffer's Meteor of War), an extended analysis
of his religious beliefs (Louis A. DeCaro Jr.'s Fire
from the Midst of You), and two studies of his legacy
and place in American memory (Merrill Peterson's John
Brown: The Legend Revisited and Peggy A. Russo and
Paul Finkelman's Terrible Swift Sword: The Legacy
of John Brown). Far more objective and much freer
of the venom and over-romanticizing that marred earlier
scholarship, these works do an impressive job of separating
the man from the myth and locating Brown in the context
of his times.
David S. Reynolds's John Brown, Abolitionist,
the first full-length biography in a generation, provides
essential background for the critical issues raised by
John Brown's life. A "cultural biography," which seeks
to show how Brown's life reflected, shaped, and ultimately
transcended his age, the book is aimed at a popular as
well as a scholarly audience and advances two overarching
arguments: First, at a time when white supremacy was the
norm, Brown was one of a handful of white Americans who
could interact with blacks on a level of true intimacy
and equality. Second, although some of Brown's acts strike
present-day observers as barbaric, these acts of violence
were "ultimately noble," because they were necessary to
promote the cause of human liberty. The strengths of Reynolds's
book include its wealth of detail, its skillful synthesis
of recent scholarship, and its fascinating digressions
into such subjects as the Transcendentalists' attitude
toward violence and New Englanders' shifting views of
Oliver Cromwell. The book is less successful in explicating
Brown's religious beliefs, his personal psychology, the
ambiguities of his relations with African Americans, and
the links between his raid and the coming of the Civil
War.
Born in rural Connecticut in 1800 to a deeply religious
family, Brown grew up in northeastern Ohio's staunchly
antislavery Western Reserve. He had little formal education
and his personal life was filled with misfortune. He lost
his mother when he was eight and his first wife died in
childbirth. Of his twenty offspring, only eleven survived
childhood. His business life was marked by failure. He
experienced many of the vicissitudes of America's emerging
market economy, working as a surveyor, tanner, farmer,
shepherd, cattle merchant, horse trader, land speculator,
and wool broker. He experienced at least fifteen business
failures, and was the target of at least twenty-one lawsuits
– losing ten – and in at least one instance,
he misappropriated funds. It was not until 1855, when
he was in his mid-fifties, that Brown became a central
figure in the antislavery cause.
Among the key issues raised by Brown's life is why he
alone among leading Northern abolitionists chose violence
as the way to end slavery. The answer lies in Brown's
intense religiosity, which was rooted in the "New Divinity"
of rural New England, a religion harshly critical of materialism,
commercialism, and the relentless pursuit of profit. To
many proponents of the New Divinity, slavery epitomized
society's obsession with untrammeled self-interest. Brown's
religious upbringing not only taught him to hate slavery,
it also contributed to his moral absolutism, his messianic
self-image, and his embrace of the example of the Old
Testament prophets and of an earlier warrior for the Lord,
Oliver Cromwell, who led the overthrow of the English
monarchy during the English Civil War. The biblical passage
that best summed up Brown's religious ideas is "…without
the shedding of blood there is no remission of sin" (Hebrews
9:22).
Another fundamental issue that Brown's life presents is
his commitment to racial equality. Brown hated slavery
from an early age and by his twenties had helped at least
one fugitive along the Underground Railroad. During the
1830s, he considered various ways of helping African Americans,
including establishing a school, and in the 1840s, he
came into close contact with Frederick Douglass and moved
to the Adirondacks to assist a colony of free black farmers
who had received land from the wealthy abolitionist Gerrit
Smith. In 1851, he responded to the Fugitive Slave Law
by organizing, in Springfield, Massachusetts, "The League
of Gileadites," a group formed to resist slave catchers
and assist runaways to escape to Canada.
There is no doubt that Brown achieved a degree of intimacy
with blacks that was extraordinarily rare for his era.
Douglass later described Brown as the only white person
he knew without racial prejudice. Yet it remains unclear
if Brown was the true racial egalitarian that Reynolds
claims he was. A "self-appointed savior" (in David Potter's
sardonic phrase), Brown took virtually no advice from
African Americans (with the notable exception of Douglass)
and named no blacks to serve as lieutenants when he launched
his raid on Harper's Ferry. In fact, the paternalism of
his age runs through Brown's relations with blacks.
It was not until the mid-1850s that Brown committed himself
to overthrowing slavery by force. What were the factors
that transformed Brown, already in his fifties, into an
uncompromising agitator for slavery's abolition? The answer
lies in the convergence of personal and political factors,
including a series of personal misfortunes, frustrations,
and tragedies that culminated in the early 1850s. In the
early 1840s, Brown was declared bankrupt, evicted from
his farm, and lost four children to dysentery in a single
month. Later in the '40s and the early '50s, his troubles
continued. Brown was separated from his family for prolonged
periods of time, he lost another child (the result of
scalding), several sons abandoned their religious faith,
and bitter litigation swirled around his business ventures.
Meanwhile, the political crisis over slavery intensified
as a result of the Mexican War, enactment of the Fugitive
Slave Law, and passage of the Kansas-Nebraska Act. After
a prolonged period of vacillation, Brown decided to forsake
the material world, largely abandoning his farm, his business
ventures, and even his wife. He joined several of his
sons in Kansas and dedicated his remaining years to slavery's
overthrow.
How in today's age of terrorist violence committed in
the name of God should we evaluate Brown's actions? The
massacre at Pottawatomie Creek presents the greatest challenge
for Brown's sympathizers. Arguing that Brown's actions
were explicable, if not defensible, Reynolds contends
that the murders were designed to terrify the pro-slavery
forces and make it clear that antislavery Kansas would
not remain passive in the face of insults and threats.
By placing the killings in the context of their times
– which witnessed the murders of five antislavery
Kansans, the burning and pillaging of Lawrence, Kansas
by "border ruffians" from Missouri, and the caning of
Senator Charles Sumner in the U.S. capitol – Reynolds
seeks to diminish Brown's guilt.
There can be no doubt that mob violence was common in
the mid-1850s, and not only in Kansas. Reynolds might
well have situated the violence in Kansas in an even broader
context. Election-day riots in 1854 left eight dead in
Baltimore and ten dead in St. Louis; twenty reportedly
died in an 1855 riot in Louisville; and the 1857 Mountain
Meadows massacre in southern Utah resulted in the killing
of approximately 120 members of a wagon train by a Mormon
militia and Paiute Indians. Yet while it is helpful to
contextualize the Pottawatomie Creek killings, Reynolds
should have made it clear that the massacre and the mutilation
of the corpses certainly worsened the situation in "Bleeding
Kansas," igniting the conflict's most violent phase, which
ultimately left about fifty-five settlers dead. Perhaps
the most significant question raised by Brown's life involves
the impact of his Harpers Ferry raid on the coming of
the Civil War. Here it is essential to distinguish between
the raid itself and the way it was interpreted. The raid
itself was poorly planned and executed. Brown succeeded
in attracting only twenty-one followers, far fewer than
the fifty or one hundred he had hoped for. He made no
effort to communicate with slaves in the Harpers Ferry
area before the raid. He and his men carried no provisions
when they attacked the federal arsenal. Brown failed to
destroy a stash of documents incriminating his supporters.
In the end, his indecisiveness and procrastination during
the raid resulted in the deaths of ten of his supporters
and the capture and hanging of six others. Had Brown died
in the attack, he might well have been dismissed as an
incompetent fanatic.
At first, Brown was widely denounced in the North as a
murderer, criminal, and madman, leading conservative unionists
to feel confident that his actions would unite the nation
against extremists, South and North. But during the forty-five
days between his capture and execution, he was transformed,
in the eyes of thousands of Northerners, from a brutal
terrorist into a prophet and avenging angel. The deification
of Brown as a heroic martyr outraged many white Southerners,
who felt that Brown expressed the North's secret will:
to foment race war in the South.
Brown himself played a crucial role in reshaping his public
image. His calm demeanor and fierce commitment to the
antislavery cause persuaded many that he was a Christ-like
martyr, not a murderer or traitor. He was helped by abolitionists
(who believed that his execution would do more for the
antislavery cause than his acquittal or rescue), editorialists,
eulogists, and speechmakers, as well as members of the
clergy like the Reverend Henry Ward Beecher, and poets
and writers like Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau.
Even Abraham Lincoln, who condemned Brown for committing
"violence, bloodshed, and treason," also applauded the
old man's motives and lauded his "great courage" and "rare
unselfishness." Meanwhile, Southern fire-eaters insisted
that Brown's raid was rooted in the Republican Party's
rhetoric about a "higher law" and an "irrepressible conflict."
This argument was so successful that the Republican Party
wrote off the South during the 1860 election.
Was Brown mentally ill? In a bid to spare their client
from the gallows, Brown's attorneys gathered nineteen
affidavits testifying to insanity in Brown's immediate
family. Certainly not, says Reynolds. In fact, the real-life
Brown was considered enigmatic by many who knew him personally.
He could be stubborn, selfish, cold, arbitrary, intolerant,
and vindictive. Yet he could also be loving, compassionate,
and tender-hearted. There is also no doubt that he exhibited
certain signs of mental abnormality, including sudden
mood swings, an inflated notion of his military skills,
and, above all, an obsessive fury over the institution
of slavery. Of course, at a time when many Americans accepted
slavery as an inevitable part of the social order, a degree
of mental abnormality may have been necessary to recognize
slavery's evil.
John Brown's prophetic truth was that slavery could not
be purged from America except with blood. In a 1949 essay,
Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. rejected the notion that Civil
War was a "repressible conflict" caused by fanatics and
blundering politicians. Writing in the wake of World War
II, he argued that there are times when a society works
itself "into a logjam; and that logjam must be burst by
violence." By the mid-1850s, it was apparent that moral
suasion and political institutions had failed to place
slavery on the road to extinction. The nation had reached
an increasingly violent impasse. Antislavery crowds sought
to prevent slave catchers from transporting fugitives
back to the South. "Bleeding Kansas" had revealed that
popular sovereignty offered an illusory solution to the
problem of slavery in the Western territories. The Supreme
Court's Dred Scott decision eliminated possible compromise
solutions to the westward expansion of slavery. Ultimately,
slavery could only be ended by force of arms.
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