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John Brown's body is a hangin' by a rope
You can silence his voice, but you can't kill hope
The soldiers are tremblin' as they cut him down
They can still feel the spirit of old John Brown
- Si Kahn, "Old John Brown"
I've built this year's "Heritage" posts around the story of John Brown. His life makes an amazing story in itself. And it also served here as a way to talk about some of the issues and passions that led to the Civil War.
The "neo-Confederate" ideology is much more than a study of the Civil War. The Christian Exodus fundamentalists may draw inspiration from the tales of the noble white heroes of the Lost Cause and the glorious days of slavery when the superiority of the white man was taken for granted. But they also have more present-day goals; I almost said "more realistic", but I'm not sure that's true. Goals like making John Calhoun's home state of South Carolina into a "Godly republic".
But the promotion of pseudohistory is also one of the goals and results of those who take a neo-Confederate view of American history. And that viewpoint today, like every day since Lee's surrender at Appomatox, has been bound up with white supremicist, anti-democratic and authoritarian leanings. Neo-Confederate ideology is a first cousin of Holocaust denial. Both use a fradulent version of history to promote a poisonous ideology.
Brown's story, and the many ways in which he has been remembered, is both a fascinating and frustrating one that does not easily fit into comfortable or simple categories. I agree (mostly) with the conclusion of Paul Finkelman in his introduction to the collection Terrible Swift Sword: The Legacy of John Brown (2005):
When all is said and done, I side with those who see him as a hero of civil rights and a tireless advocate of racial equality. At a time when many whites, even some abolitionists, were uncomfortable in the presence of blacks, John Brownshared his meals with them and recruited them as soldiers in his army of liberation. While many antebellum whites doubted the equality of blacks or their innate abilities, Brown was willing to stake his life on the abilities of his black recruits to take orders, execute commands, and fight bravely. As the American nation spiraled toward civil war, Brown helped prepare the North for the coming conflict. He understood that in times of crisis, self-sacrifice is essential. While other opponents of slavery talked about how bad the system was, Brown ventured into Missouri and helped a score of slaves escape to Canada.
Brown as a hero also underscores the limits of heroism. He was not a saint. He was not a dishonest businessman but was so negligent and sloppy that his economic ventures failed, and his behavior was almost criminal. He lied about his business affairs and about his political and revolutionary intentions. He kept records of correspondence with his backers that, for their safety and his, he should have destroyed. He was charismatic and mesmerizing but was also hard and almost cruel to his children and to those who disappointed him. He was a hero of civil rights and freedom but was perhaps not someone to trust or even someonewho was very likeable. One might love or admire Brown, but one would not want him as a role model.
He was in the end an enormously passionate, complex, and compelling figure. He was larger than life while alive, and larger still when dead. ...
Had he died in jail or been placed in an institution, he would be but a footnote to the struggle against slavery and the collapse of the United States on the eve of the Civil War. But dead on the gallows, surrounded by hundreds of Virginia soldiers protecting his execution from an abolitionist rescue, he was a martyr to freedom and the embodiment of all that the powers that upheld slavery feared. ...
From his death came his martyrdom and our endless fascination with his life. (Russo/Finkelman; Introduction; my emphasis)
Merrill Peterson brings up some important points by way of summarizing the views of Herbert Aptheker, who published a short pamphlet called John Brown in 1960:
Herbert Aptheker, the Marxist historian of black Americans, who began his fruitful career with a study of "militant abolitionism" in 1941, and sometimes wrote on Brown, seized the occasion of the centennial to condense his views of him in a twenty-four-page pamphlet. Emphasizing Brown's "sense of class," his identification with the oppressed, and his opposition to the rich and powerful, Aptheker brought him within the Marxist paradigm. He attacked slavery from four points of view, said Aptheker. First, slavery subverted the fundamental principle of the equality of humankind asserted in the Declaration of Independence; second, it jeopardized the existence of the republic founded on that principle; third, it violated the spirit and the letter of the U.S. Constitution; fourth, slavery was a system of "institutionalized violence," therefore intolerable in a civilized society. Aptheker went on to declare "that with John Brown we are dealing not with madness but with genius." (Peterson; 145)
Without making a judgment on how well Peterson summarized Aptheker's view in that pamphlet, which I have not read, those characterizations of Brown's position on slavery are accurate, as far as they go. But historians of all varieties, not just Marxist ones, have often downplayed religion as a factor in historical events. And without recognizing the central role that the Christian religion played in Brown's worldview, a major piece will be missing from understanding his actions and his attitudes toward equality, race and slavery.
Richard Boyer has a number of intriguing ideas about the influence of Christianity in the US at this time. With particular references to Brown, he writes:
There was scarce a facet of John Brown's life uninfluenced by that rich tapestry of early human striving known as the Bible. "With this book," he once wrote of himself, he became "very familiar, & possessed a most unusual memory of its entire contents." But it was not his knowledge of the Bible that was unusual. It was his belief in it. He himself seemed to regard his belief in the Bible as another proof of its validity, since he felt he was so naturally skeptical, so inherently doubtful, that only words that came from the Lord were capable of the miracle of making him believe. But even his credulity might have been unexceptionable had he not triedtomerge his biblical beliefs with his daily actions. This effort was the source of both his strengths and weaknesses, as when he sought out the poor and fed them because "Inasmuch as ye did it not to one of the least of these, ye did it not to me," ...
Whatever the reasons for its compelling influence, there was perhaps never a time in history that men tried more ardently to base their lives on the written word. They believed with St. John that "In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God and the Word was God." If that Scripture seems a contradictory jumble now, to many Americans then it seemed a body of coherent principle. Never did a scientist try more earnestly to give unity to theory and practice than John Brown tried to unite the truths of Scripture with the actions of life. It was to the word that was God he was referring, however indirectly, when he said, denying that he was motivated by revenge or self-seeking, "I act on principle." It was to the Bible he was referring when he wrote in his last letter to his family that it was "the Helm or Compass" helping us to avoid the errors of "our own vague theories framed up while our prejudices are excited; or our Vanity worked up to its highest pitch." (Boyer; 150-151; my emphasis in bold)
Oswald Garrison Villard delivered a measured judgment on a man who he admired without admiring all his deeds:
Now, fifty years later, it is possible to take an unbiased view of John Brown and his achievements, even if opinions as to his true character and moral worth diverge almost as violently as in 1859. There are those in the twentieth century, appointed to teach history in high places, who are so blind as to see in John Brown only the murderer of the Pottawatomie, a "horse-thief and midnight assassin." Still others behold in him not merely a sainted martyr of the most elevated character, but the liberator of Kansas, and the man who, unaided, struck their chains from the limbs of more than three million human beings. These writers would leave nothing to be credited to Abraham Lincoln, nothing to the devoted band of uncompromising Abolitionists who, for thirty years prior to Harper's Ferry, had gone up and down the North denouncing slavery in its every form, stirring the public conscience and preparing the popular mind for what was to come. The truth lies between these two extremes. Were men who have powerfully moulded their time to be judged solely by their errors, however grievous, all history would wear a different aspect. In Virginia, John Brown atoned for Pottawatomie by the nobility of his philosophy and his sublime devotion to principle, even to the gallows. As inexorable a fate as ever dominated a Greek tragedy guided this life. He walked always as one blindfolded. Something compelled him to attack slavery by force of arms, and to that impulse he yielded, reckoning not at all as to the outcome, and making not the slightest effort to plan beyond the first blow. Without foresight, strategy or generalship, he entered the Harper's Ferry trap confident that all was for the best, to be marvellously preserved from the sabre which, had it gone home, must have rendered barren his entire life, his sacrifice and his devotion. (Villard; 586; my emphasis)
The latter reference was to Brown's capture, when he was stabbed with a saber which turned out to be a fascimile meant to be used for drills, not a real sword. For all his reservations, Villard recognized Brown as a passionate fighter for freedom:
And so, wherever there is battling against injustice and oppression, the Charlestown gallows that became a cross will help men to live and die. The story of John Brown will ever confront the spirit of despotism, when men are struggling to throw off the shackles of social or political or physical slavery. His own country, while admitting his mistakes without undue palliation or excuse, will forever acknowledge the divine that was in him by the side of what was human and faulty, and blind and wrong. It will cherish the memory of the prisoner of Charlestown in 1859 as at once a sacred, a solemn and an inspiring American heritage. (Villard; 588; my emphasis)
But, in the end, the judgment of W.E.B. DuBois almost a century ago still hold up, when he wrote about Brown's execution:
The deed was done. The next day the worldknew and the world sat in puzzled amazement. It was ever so and ever will be. When a prophet like John Brown appears, how must we of the world receive him? Must we follow out the drear, dread logic of surrounding facts, as did the South, even if they crucify a clean and pure soul, simply because consistent allegiance to our cherished, chosen ideal demands it ? If we do, the shame will brandour latest history. Shall we hesitate and waver before his clear white logic, now helping, now fearing to help, now believing, now doubting! Yes, this we must do so long as the doubt and hesitation are genuine; but we must not lie. If we are human, we must thus hesitate until we know the right. How shall we know it? That is the Riddle of the Sphinx. We are but darkened groping souls, that know not light often because of its very blinding radiance. Only in time is truth revealed. To-day at last we know: John Brown was right. (DuBois; 338)
And it's only right for me to close with this observation from Richard Boyer:
If he valued his convictions to the point of dying for them, it was not entirely unusual in that time of anti-slavery mobs and hair-triggered pistols. In temperament, at any rate, there was little difference between Andrew Jackson, the slaveholder President, ready if necessary to face down the world over the barrel of a gun, and John Brown the farmer abolitionist, ready to gun down slavery and almost by himself. (Boyer; 67-8)
(See Sources on John Brown for references.)
An Index to Confederate "Heritage" Month 2006 postings is available.
I hates the Yankee nation and everything they do
I hates the Declaration of Independence too
I hates the glorious Union, 'tis drippin' with our blood
I hates the striped banner, I fit it all I could
- "Oh I'm a Good Old Rebel" by Confederate Major Innes Randolph
Don't associate Hoyt Axton with that song because he sings it; the version I have is on a 1991 Songs of the Civil War album that has songs from both sides. Some songs, like "Tenting Tonight" (which is not on that album, unfortunately) were popular on both sides. I'm not sure if it's true, as Shelby Foote claims, that Randolph wrote it originally as a parody. But it's credible, though like Rush Limbaughs most bigoted comments, extreme statements are often passed off as "humor". It dates from the Reconstruction days. The liner notes, apparently written by Arthur Levy, say of the song:
The vitiolic, no-regrets stance of the proud Southerner who sings this song is probably a barometer of some feelings still present in that part of the country today. He hates the Yankees, their Declaration of Independence, their bloody flag, and wishes there were three million of them dead instead of just 300,000.
Our present-day neo-Confederate types, at least, probably wouldn't think of the song as a parody.
Steve Gilliard, who has a keen eye for the politics of race in America, has devoted a couple of posts to manifestations of the neo-Confederate plague recently. In Too Many Hits to the Head 04/28/06, he defends Southern honor (the real kind, not the blowhard fool kind) against fake Republican down-home-iness:
Yes, the smart Southern[er]s are Dems for a reason: no one gave them s***. Edwards, Clinton, all these guys came from middle class backgrounds and worked their way through college and law school.
I think that people are sick of stupid. Stupid has consequences. Down home is fine, but you ever hear Tim McGraw or Garth Brooks interviewed? Do they sound like idiots? No? Because they're not. Toby Keith ain't too bright, but there's always an exception. Ever listen to a NASCAR driver talk, he may have an accent, but he's no idiot. Those guys reek of competence.
Southern cultural tastes? Ok, to a degree, but Bush isn't a fake Southerner. He's a fake Texan. ... The pig farm, the fear of horses, cowboy boots, the crudeness in speech.
Real Southerners mock that crudeness, a southern gentleman is supposed to be cultured and erudite, not crude. Bush's drunken antics would have drawn great scorn in the South. Trailer trash is an insult there for a reason. Bush's nicknaming and claims like he's the "decider" aren't Southern. ...
Bush? He's always trying to show he doesn't have a yellow streak even when it's evident to everyone. He's internalized the worst machismo of Texas with the prissy snobbiness of Conneticut. A mean, crude, drunk who belies his education. If he was a Southerner, he wouldn't be so cavalier about that.
That's why I'm so completely scornful of that fool Charlie Daniels in my Chuckie Watch posts. He postures like he's Mr. Average American. But the crap he spews out in his political rants is real trailer-trash bigot nonsense. Anyone who thinks that's what defines "Southern" is a jackass.
Don't get me wrong. There are more than enough Southerners that think just like the character (real or concocted) that Daniels portrays in his twice-weekly Chuckie posts.
Gilliard links to a post by the brilliant Digby, Portrait of The Racist As A Young Man Hullabaloo blog 04/27/06, about Virginia Republican Senator George Allen. Digby describes the distinguished Senator:
I know little about Allen except that he sounds even dumber than George W. Bush every time I see him speak on television. Yesterday he was blathering on about something and I was struck by how his rosy cheeks and strange purplish hair made him look a little like Reagan. So he has Reagan's looks and Bush's brains. Oh Jesus.
What I didn't know was that he was a racist, sadistic prick. I now understand why he is such a Republican favorite. I had heard that he kept a confederate flag around and that he had a cute little "noose" hanging from a ficus tree. I didn't know that he had been a neoconfederate since he went to Palos Verdes High, right here in LA. (He didn't live in the south until he was a sophomore in college.)
Digby understand that the neo-Confederate schtick is mainly about race:
If winning the presidency in the country really rests on relative good ole boy-ness, then it's hard to see how anyone can beat Allen. Aside from his total immersion in southern culture, the article is full of examples of his youthful (and not so youthful) racism and I can only assume that this will help him when he goes up against John McCain in the south. The racist voters of the GOP will catch all his winks and nods with no problem.
In a 04/29/06 post, Gilliard writes about The love of the Confederacy:
There are two Confederacys, one of history and one of imagination.
The one we deal with today is of imagination.
The one of rebel flags and the Sons of Confederate Veterans and the cult of the dead rebels.
It has little to do with reality. ...
The reason you get people like Jim Webb playing cute and George Allen praising the Confederacy has to do with how the Confederacy was ressurected in the postwar period.It was about race and integration, not history. (my emphasis)
He also talks in that post about some of the historical realities of the real Confederacy that actually existed in history, which do not fit well with Lost Cause ideology. And he concludes:
In short,the myth of the Confederacy allowed people to explain away how the North crushed them using far fewer of it's resources than it had. The raging incompetence of the Southern high command and the pettiness of Jefferson Davis was glossed over for years. Because the myth of a noble South was valuable for many reasons.
Even today, the numbers of Southerners who fought for the Union is still downplayed.
[The] myth of nobility plays into how the Confederacy is seen today
But slavery was not noble. And neither is what today's neo-Confederates stand for.
Remember that I die for others' freedom
To liberate the poor and the oppressed
Remember there are many yet to suffer
Before the scourge of slavery's laid to rest
Before the scourge of slavery's laid to rest
- Greg Artzner, "John Copeland" (one of Brown's men at Harpers Ferry)
Political philosopher Scott John Hammond contributed an essay to the Terrible Swift Sword: The Legacy of John Brown (2005) on "John Brown as Founder: America's Vilent Confrontation with Its First Principles". The title refers to his argument that Brown fits the model of a leader who was important in establishing some basic principles for a society.
He has some provocative observations about Brown. For instance, given the increasingly obvious ways in which slavery was undermining democracy even for white men:
In turning back to Harpers Ferry, we must also raise the following question: Why weren't more people of conscience moved to arms, as was John Brown? This can be partially explained by the close connection between abolition and nonviolent moral suasion, as in the case of William Lloyd Garrison and the Transcendentalists, but that connection notwithstanding, it is still remarkable that, after conceding the pacifism of most free opponents of slavery, we cannot remember another case that resembles or emulates the Harpers Ferry raid. (Russo/Finkelman; 72)
After all, some of the leading figures of the Revolutionary generation - Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Paine - had been opponents of slavery. Given the outrages that were taking place in Kansas Territory, the suppression of democratic rights for whites in the South and the general brutality of slavery, Hammond's question is a disturbing one.
Hammond also reminds us that acting against slavery was "consistent both with the tenets of scripture and with the political principles of the polity within which he lived". And he seems to me to be on solid ground in arguing:
Although Brown's raid on Harpers Ferry was ultimately unsuccessful, he exemplifies the true spirit of just liberty; and while he contributed neither new law to support democracy nor any new concept to develop the idea of freedom, his deeds accelerated its progress. Thomas Jefferson proclaimed the egalitarian creed when he drafted the Declaration, but he was unable to renounce his own status as master or overcome his idiosyncratic ideas about racial difference. ... John Brown, however, perhaps more than any founder since Thomas Paine, fully incorporated the creed into his actions and lived the idea of equality and racial friendship with unparalleled purity and ardor. John Brown compels us to think of him as a founder - one who, unlike Jefferson and Lincoln, appears to live and act on the fringes of society, but one who, on closer examination, springs from its very center. (Russo/Finkelman; 73; my emphasis)
Unless we are inclined to write off any kind of dedication to a larger cause than oneself and one's own immediate material interests as irrational, or some kind of psychological aberration, Hammond makes a very valid point. He also observes:
Measuring the character and relevance of any historical figure is a task that lends itself to a certain degree of ambiguity. Figures such as Jefferson, Lincoln, and King have all been assessed differently by their champions and critics, and interpretations of their character and descriptions of their heroism as well as their lesser acts have all undergone continual redefinition. Yet they remain, for us, heroes all the same, for in spite of any inadequacies, they reflect the perpetual quest for the affirmation of higher political principle and remain among the great movers who helped shape the conscience and the development of the republic. (Russo/Finkelman; 73; my emphasis)
And, in fact, John Brown believed in the principles of the American Revolution and was ready to act on them. Brown himself lost and was put to death. But his cause won. In the introduction to that same volume, Paul Finkelman points out one of the differences in the Brown of real life and those today who superficially (or even hyprocritically) use his image to justify acts of violence, like bombing abortion clinics or murdering doctors who perform abortions. That difference was the lack of democratic or eaceful alternatives. He writes:
Brown lived at a time when the political process and democratic values been undermined, or destroyed, by slavery. In Kansas the sword and the gun, not the ballot and the printing press, had become the method of determining what kind of government the territory and future state would have. Violence and fraudulent elections were the rule. A war was in progress, and one can view [the] Pottawatomie [massacre] as a tragic event in a tragic war. But even here Brown is clearly not a terrorist; he killed only soldiers or potential soldiers for the enemy at Pottawatomie, and he did not kill children or women, nor did he destroy buildings or other property. He killed those who threatened to kill him. This after all, is what warfare is about.
... [B]y y the 1850s democracy in America was in crisis. In the South there was no discourse on slavery. No debate was tolerated, and agitation against slavery was illegal. Thus there was no possibility for internal change in the South. The Constitution did not allow the national government to interfere with slavery in the states. Thus there was no political process that could end slavery or even challenge it where it existed. In Kansas there was an open political process, but violence, intimidation, and vote fraud undermined the legitimacy of any elections. For Brown, revolution was the only way to significantly challenge slavery. Thus some modern Americans see Brown as a hero of civil rights, challenging slavery in a nation where a proslavery constitution made political change impossible. (Russo/Finkelman; Introduction; my emphasis)
In another context, I might quibble a bit over whether the Constitution was inherently pro-slavery, but his point is an important one. And not only does it distinguish Brown from present-day abortion-clinic bombers, it also is a reminder of the extent of the challenges the partisans of democracy faced at that time. And of the way Brown was ready to confront an ugly reality and defend democracy and freedom, the basic ideas of the Declaration of Independence, at a time when they were being challenged in the most severe way by the Slave Power.
One of the great ironies of Brown's raid at Harpers Ferry is that the federal commander who captured him was Robert E. Lee, who was to become the most successful military leaderof the Confederacy and the patron saint -or rather the Christ-figure - of the Lost Cause after the war. Hammond asks some pefectly sensible question about Lee, a man who even many people who generally have little sympathy for the Lost Cause manage to admire (though not with very good reason). Hammond writes:
If some can embrace as a great hero the figure of Robert E. Lee, the defender of a commonwealth that included slavery as an accepted institution, then is it implausible to recognize heroism in the more astonishing figure of Brown? Lee never supported secession until the deed was committed, yet he chose to renounce his commission and past loyalties after years of distinction under arms only in order to side with his state. Other distinguished Southern warriors, such as David Farragut of Tennessee and Winfield Scott, Lee's fellow Virginian, went with the North, but Lee reluctantly [!?!] followed the Old Dominion [Virginia] into the Confederacy. Is it fair to say that whereas Lee chose his homeland, Brown chose humanity? (Russo/Finkelman; 74; my emphasis)
Yes. It would be fair to say that Brown was hung for treason to the state of Virginia, a state of which he had never been a citizen, while Lee chose to betray his country for the cause of slavery. Brown fought for the basic principles of the Declaration of Independence; Lee fought to destroy them.
Whose abstraction is more meaningful: Lee's insistence on abiding with Virginia right or wrong or Brown's devotion to a people sealed in bondage? We must bear in mind that, in spite of his protestations, Lee owned slaves, and his wife owned even more than he did. Regardless of the answer to these questions, popular history has made its judgments, and Lee is known (by most) today as a gentleman warrior, acting from duty and on principle, while Brown is considered (by many) as the guerrilla fanatic, blinded by undignified zeal and without honor. But we must ask which of the two acted on the higher principle, which violated the greater law, which one carries more blood on his hands, and who between them is a more genuinely American hero? (Russo/Finkelman; 74; my emphasis)
I think I'll go with John Brown on that choice.
If it is madness to conduct a private,unruly, and suicidal war against an enemy that one perceives as the very cause of sinful oppression, then what state of mind could cause a man of principle to lead thousands into death out of questionable loyalty to a political system that acknowledges oppression as a venerable institution? (Russo/Finkelman; 74; my emphasis)
These days, our President and his supporters use Democracy primarily as a slogan to justify foreign wars that have little to do with democracy. It's worthwhile to keep in mind the difference between that and actually believing in and acting on the principles of democracy.
(See Sources on John Brown for references.)
An Index to Confederate "Heritage" Month 2006 postings is available.
We may not see the slaves go free,
Neither did Moses reach the promised land.
Still none could be more blessed than we,
Who are an instrument in God's hand. - Peggy Eyres, "Mary Brown, Abolitionist"
John Brown famously played the role of martyr well between his capture at Harpers Ferry and his execution by hanging. Whether that was virtuous or sinister was judged differently by the opponents of slavery and its friends.
But he certainly framed his own story by his many statements and letters while on trial and in jail. For instance:
I have numerous sympathizers throughout the entire North. ... I want you to understand that I respect the rights of the poorest and the weakest of colored people, oppressed by the slave system, just as much as I do those of the most wealthy and powerful. That is the idea that has moved me, and that alone. We expected no reward except satisfaction of endeavoring to do for those in distress and greatly oppressed as we would be done by. The cry of distress of the oppressed is my reason, and the only thing that prompted me to come here.
The Concord Transcendalists Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau were extremely important in presenting a positive and sympathetic image of Brown in the North. Both enjoyed enormous prestige and were well known. Merrill Peterson describes Thoreau's position defending Brown's raid at Harpers Ferry:
Thoreau, the New England Transcendentalist, had been transfixed by Captain Brown when he earlier heard him speak in Concord. On October 30, [1859,]while Brown was still on trial, Thoreau lectured on him as if he were already a sainted martyr. He described him as a rough-hewn Yankee who went to school in the West and "a transcendentalist above all, a man of ideas and principles." To those who say he threw his life away, Thoreau asked "which way they threw their lives, pray?" No American had ever stood more heroically for the idea upon which the country was founded. "It was his peculiar doctrine that a man has a perfect right to interfere by force with the slaveholder, in order to rescue the slave. I agree with him." This sentiment, coming from a man who some years before wrote a celebrated essay advocating passive resistance, surprised many people. But Thoreau's defense of John Brown's force was only the other face of the doctrine that proclaimed, basically, the superiority of conscience over the state and its laws. By teaching Americans how to live, the hero of Harpers Ferry might finally teach them how to die. That was his best legacy. "Perhaps he saw it himself. I almost fear," said Thoreau, "that I may yet hear of his deliverance, doubting if a prolonged life, if any life, can do as much good as his death."
Such words and feelings helped to change the mind of the North about John Brown. Lunatic! Fanatic! Incompetent! Traitor! The language of disparagement and dishonor that had rained upon Brown immediately after the ill-starred invasion gave way to a chorus of respect, admiration, and praise. (Peterson; 16-17; my emphasis)
David Reynolds emphasizes that this outspoken opposition to slavery was a vital social side of Transcendentalism that is often de-emphasized in accounts of that movement.
But not all Northerners were sympathetic to Brown, of course. As mentioned in an earlier post, the Republicans who shared much of his attitude against slavery were going out of their way to dissociate themselves from Brown's violent militance.
So did the "Doughfaces", the Democrats in the North who were either pro-slavery or indifferent to it. Reynolds describes a series of "Union" meetings the Doughfaces held on the occasion of Brown's execution. One of them was at the Academy of Music in New York, with six thousand people inside and 15,000 out in the streets:
The crowd that day heard that slavery was good and John Brown was evil. One speaker said, "I insist that negro slavery is not unjust. (Cries of 'Bravo!') It is not only not unjust, but it is just, wise, and beneficent. ... I hold that the negro is decreed by nature to a state of pupilage under the dominion of the wiser white man in every clime where God and nature meant that the negro should live at all." Another pointed out that, actually, few Northeners completely supported Brown. "That there should be any," he said, "is a disgrace to a Christian age and country. But while those who approve the act are only a handful, revilers of all human laws and blasphemers against God, there are those—too many who, while they condemned the act, sympathize in some degree with the man," despite his "cold-blooded atrocity."
After the speakers, letters were read from notables who could not attend the meeting but supported its aim. Among those who had written were Franklin Pierce, Martin Van Buren, Millard Fillmore, and Winfield Scott. A typical letter stated that Brown's "pathway can be traced by bloody footprints along his whole career, from theft to murder," starting in Kansas, where "his course was marked by every species of wrong and violence," and culminating at Harpers Ferry, the scene of "stealth, fraud, robbery, murder, treason, and attempted insurrection." Even worse, this criminal "has been canonized by the blasphemous orgies of those who demand an anti-slavery Bible and an anti-slavery God," including one [Emerson] who declared "that the gallows would henceforward be more glorious than the cross and crucifixion." (Reynolds; 414)
The kind of racism reflected in some of the speakers' words was a fact of life in the North. Pro-Confederate writers often point to this as proving some kind of hypocrisy, or lack of sincerity, or something else unworthy on the part of the Yankees. But in the end, the brutal Peculiar Institution of slavery would drive many of those Doughfaces to despise it, and in the end to reject it altogether.
Southern reaction to Brown's raid was to intensify the suppression of anything that seemed to threaten even any open discussion of their sacred institution of slavery, which was last seriously debated in the early 1830s in the states of the future Confederacy. In practice, white Southerners were not free to openly oppose slavery, or even to read what Northern critics of slavery themselvevs were saying about it. Reynolds writes:
The Atlanta Confederacy explained, "We regard every man in our midst an enemy to the institutions of the South, who does not boldly declare that he believes African slavery to be a social, moral, and political blessing" - if not, he "should be requested to leave the country." A Virginia postmaster announced unapologetically: "We are in the midst of a Reign of Terror here. ... All men of Northern birth now here are under surveillance by the so-called Vigilance Committee; and any one suspected of thinking slavery is less than divine is placed under care."
Northern newspapers even mildly sympathetic to Brown were widely banned in the South. Many Southern post offices refused to distribute the New-York Tribune, the Springfield Republican, the Albany Evening Journal, the New York Independent, and other papers deemed subversive. Even some conservative periodicals, like Harper's Weekly and Frank Leslie's Illustrated Newspaper, were banned. The Springfield Republican lamented that "nearly all northern papers are now excluded from the South, except the New-York Herald and the New-York Observer, the one the organ of Pro-slavery diabolism and the other of Pro-Slavery piety."
"Black lists" of "Abolition houses," or businesses run by antislavery people, were circulated so that their products could be boycotted. These businesses were said to be "steeped and saturated in Sewardism, Brownism, Greeleyism, Helperism, and incendiarism." Westmoreland County, Virginia, passed a resolution to "adopt a strict non-intercourse in trade and commerce with the citizens and merchants of all the non-slaveholding States," and to "arrest and send out of the State ... all itinerant venders of northern books, newspapers, periodicals, or any other articles of northern growth or manufacture." A main impetus behind the anti-John Brown Union meetings in the North was economic. Failure to sign up for such a meeting was "regarded as conclusive proof of infidelity to southern interests, while signing it was to be a way to southern favor." (Reynolds; 417-418)
Such was the civilizing effect of slavery on the South, where the Peculiar Institution was claimed to be the foundation of white civilization and freedom for whites.
The political effect of Brown's failed Harpers Ferry raid is a complicated matter to gauge. But the image of John Brown was clearly a highly polarizing one.
(See Sources on John Brown for references.)
An Index to Confederate "Heritage" Month 2006 postings is available.
Goodbye to old Ohio, for we are southward bound
We're gonna fight for freedom with Captain John Brown
We'll march into Virginia with the truest of the brave
Down to the plantations to liberate the slave
- Greg Artzner & Terry Leonino, "Goodbye to Old Ohio"
I've always been fascinated by "psychohistory". But I also realize it's a very tricky field. Kenneth Carroll's contribution to Terrible Swift Sword: The Legacy of John Brown (2005), "A Psychological Examination of John Brown", is a good example of why.
It makes a lot of sense to try to use psychology to understand historical characters and events. But it's also something that requires careful fact-checking. A classical example is one of the pioneering works in that area, Sigmund Freud's Leonardo Da Vinci (1910). Freud took as his starting point a childhood dream of Da Vinci's, which involved a vulture. He explored various mythological and artistic representations of vultures and what they symbolized and used that to make some inferences about Da Vinci. There was a small problem, though: he relied on a faulty German translation of Da Vinci's Latin. The dream was about a kite, not a vulture. Oops!
Carroll's essay exhibits some of the same flaws. Except that Freud's Da Vinci study had a lot of other things to recommend it. Carroll hangs a far-reaching assumption on some pretty thin threads.
To be fair, space limitations may have prevented him from providing some more convincing details. But his argument as it appears is far from convincing. Carroll argues, "The evidence that [John Brown] was mentally ill is clear and abudant". If so, it's more than a little remarkable that his essay essentially relies on the same old arguments of Brown's detractors.
I wouldn't assume that Carroll was constructed a smear job on Brown. But his essay lends itself far too easily to pro-Confederate arguments that dismiss Brown as a madman. His concluding paragraphs provide good illustration of the problems in his argument:
Perhaps the more interesting question is this: Had Brown not been laboring under the influence of his illness, would Harpers Ferry or his adventures in Kansas have happened at all? Again, probably not. Had he not been driven by his illness, Brown, in all likelihood, might have stayed in one place, put down roots, attended more faithfully to his domestic responsibilities, and applied himself more prudently to his businesses. Given his intelligence and moral character, he would probably have fared well. He would have been too busy and too duty bound to neglect family and business to go crusading. He would have had less need to compensate for failures with dreams of glory because he would have had too much to lose. In short, he might have been an ordinary man. (Russo/Finkelman; 135; my emphasis)
This is a classic example of how psychohistory can slip, intentially or not, into crude reductionism. That paragraph could charitably be described as reflexively conservative. "Bone-deep reactionary" might not be too much of a reach.
I mean, how pitiful is this assumption, really. An "ordinary man" - a healthy man, a responsible man - would never have been been moved to fight Border Ruffians in Kansas on behalf of free elections and democratic government. Or to actively oppose slavery. Or to put patriotic, religious or compassionate concerns ahead of purely selfish and familial interests.
Oil and business barons like Bush, Cheney and Rummy going into politics to help their cronies make money and invading a Middle Eastern country in pursuit of those psychiatrically healthy goals, now that's responsible and normal. But some white guy, who wasn't wealthy or anything like normal, healthy people all are, who wants to go off crusading to free black slaves, who goes off "crusading" in his fifties to fight for democracy and the principles of the American Revolution? Well, he must be crazy as a loon!
You have to wonder what someone with such assumption would have to say about the mental health of Americans who volunteer for military service. How would they go about "honoring the troops", as all good conservatives are supposed to do, when the only people who would volunteer for service are those who are unable to "have stayed in one place, put down roots, attended more faithfully to his domestic responsibilities, and applied himself more prudently to his businesses".
Yeah, I'm leaning toward "bone-deep reactionary" to describe this assumption. Carroll continues:
But he was, of course, an extraordinary man with great charisma and energy who threw himself into a noble cause. He was in some ways a genius or at least a visionary. Indeed, much has been written about the close connection between genius and madness. (Russo/Finkelman; 135)
Yeah, a lot has been written about that. And some large portion of it is bunk. To take a couple of examples from country music, was Gram Parsons' creativity and artistic production enhanced by his drug problems that killed him in his 20s? Has George Jones been helped by his alcholism more than hindered? Did Johnny Cash's recurring bouts with drug problems, dramatized in the movie Walk The Line, help him be a better artist?
And, besides, who ever claimed John Brown was a "genius"? Passionate, talented, intelligent, brave and a lot of other things, yes. But if even admiring biographers like DuBois, Villard and Reynolds gave any emphasis to argue that he was a "genius", it somehow failed to stick in my memory. It just sounds like a gratuitous association of Brown to "madness". Carroll continues:
Hundreds of notable people in the arts, literature, science, and public life have suffered from a major mental illness, especially bipolar disorder, and have had brilliant periods of creative energy punctuated by episodes of psychosis. There is a very fine line between the ability to view the world in new and unconventional ways and the inability to understand convention and maintain contact with mundane reality. Often, they are two sides of the same coin, and some people are better than others at managing this mixed blessing and curse. Some are able to harness the forces of their powerful emotions and differently constituted minds and drive them toward creative discovery. Others, unfortunately, lose the reins and are driven out of control. ...
And so the critical difference between genius and madness is one of competence and control. Brown, if he ever had it, lost such control and, impelled by powerful internal forces he could neither understand nor regulate, tumbled headlong into the vortex.
And, for good or ill, pulled the world in after him. (Russo/Finkelman; 135-6; my emphasis)
Now, John Brown may or may not have suffered from some clinical disorder. But was he "understand convention and maintain contact with mundane reality"? Did he lose the reins of his mind and go out of control? Was he "impelled by powerful internal forces he could neither understand nor regulate, tumbled headlong into the vortex"?
To put it briefly, no. It could be argued that he made a strategic mistake in his plan for "taking the war into Africa" (the South). He certainly made a tactical error at Harpers Ferry by remaining in the town too long, and also in releasing a train that came into town, allowing the passengers and crew to notify the authorities faster. But his planning and execution of the raid didn't show any loss of touch with "mundane reality".
And losing control? I would think that any search for psychological analysis of John Brown should focus instead on his remarkable degree of discipline. If anyone ever had a stern super-ego, it was him.
His other implied assumption in those quotations also don't hold up. Brown's business dealings have been hashed over in detail by biographers, and their assessments of his talents differ. But so far as I can see, he suffered from some overconfidence and perhaps an excessive perfectionism at time. But the notion that he was somehow careless about his business undertakings or unable to focus on them or the like just doesn't hold up.
The same is true of his family life. His children were devoted to him, as were both of his wives. He raised twelve children to adulthood. And his "crusading" in Kansas dates to 1856; he entered the Kansas Territory when he was 55 years old and several of his adult children were already there. The ideal suburban father of TV sitcoms he was not. But he was far from neglecting his family. On the contrary, he was clearly very concerned with them. And, unlike many fathers of his time and situation, he was insistent that his girls as wellas boys needed formal education. The girls in the Brown family clearly enjoyed more equal treatment to the boys than in most American families of the time.
Carroll's conclusions are so far from matching the facts of Brown's life in those cases that it calls his whole argument into question.
Given those kinds of assumptions, it's hard to see how he would have come up with a meaningfull result. The only reason he was writing about Brown or that I'm writing about him now or that anyone is reading about him is that he was a famous antislavery fighter. If you start from the assumption that there was something inherently abnormal and unhealthy about a willingness to take risks to fight against slavery and for democracy, what other conclusion can you draw than that Brown was sick in the head? Along with every pretty much other Abolitionist activist, social worker, minister, soldier, or Good Samaritan that every lived.
As far as the actual methods he used to conclude that Brown either suffered from bipolar disorder ("manic-depression") or paranoid schizophrenia, they are pretty questionable. One was that he had three people who had studied Brown closely take the MMPI-2 psychological test and answer the questions as though they were Brown. Carroll avoids elaborate claims for the validity of this problematic approach. But his essay treats it as though it was largely convincing - even though the results indicated things like "His petulant, demanding behavior may place a great deal of strain on his marriage", which would likely be difficult to document from other available material. (Apart from being so vague that almost any married couple would fit the description.)
The other source of his diagnostic approach was to take 19 affidavits that Brown's supporters submitted to Virginia Governor Henry Wise to persuade him not to execute Brown. Carroll writes:
It has been suggested that Brown's friends and relatives, anxious to save his life, may have exaggerated or contrived their accounts of his symptoms. This seems highly unlikely. (Russo/Finkelman; 124)
Say what? These were his supporters trying to keep him from being put to death. That doesn't mean we should assume that everything that was inthose documents was false. But since they were explicitly provided in an attempt to save the life of someone they supported by arguing that he was mentally unfit, any of their specific claims bearing on his mental health would have to be regarded with great care in the absence of specific supporting documentation. Just to be clear: these were not documents gathered by some independent police or Congressional investigations. They were documents secured by Brown's supporters to prevent his execution.
Whatever the state of Brown's clinical mental health really was, Kenneth Carroll's arguments hardly seem definitive. Or even especially plausible.
(See Sources on John Brown for references.)
An Index to Confederate "Heritage" Month 2006 postings is available.
David Reynolds used the "t" word, terrorist, in one of the quotes in my previous "heritage" post. Was John Brown a terrorist?
One of the most discussed questions about terrorism is how to define it. I won't wrestle with that one here. But it's something of an anachronism - reading current conceptions into a past where they may not apply - to talk about John Brown as a terrorist. For one thing, political "terror" at that time was thought of more as repressive actions by a government, as in the Terror of the French Revolution. The notion of "terrorism" as somebody who throws bombs and tries to assasinate people became familiar in the late 19th century, largely thanks to Russian anarchists.
If we take a "terrorist" to be anyone commiting an act of political violence who's not part of an official governmental army or other institution, Brown was unquestionably a terrorist. If we take terrorism in the current notion of deliberate, random killing of innocents, he doesn't qualify. Even his most controversial act of guerrilla war, the Pottawatomie massacre, was a planned and disciplined action aimed specifically at men involved in some way with the illegitimate pro-slavery government of Kansas. Brown's guerrilla actions, including Pottawatomie and Harpers Ferry, were disciplined actions with clear political goals and targets. None of them involved random killing.
James Gilbert addresses this question in his essay, "A Behavioral Analysis of John Brown: Martyr or Terrorist?" Gilbert illustrates, surely unintentionally, how problematic applying a contemporary notion of "terrorism" to condition in the 1850s in the US really is. He argues that Brown does indeed count as a terrorist. He also writes:
While the violent acts of John Brown in Kansas and at Harpers Ferry were extreme, the episode is far from the sole example of deadly historical American terrorism. Some suggest American violence against the British before the Revolutionary War was our earliest example of terrorism; other authorities cite crimes committed in the name of the agrarian movement immediately following that war. (Russo/Finkelman; 113; my emphasis)
Uh, dude, what about those acts of violence against Britain that were part of the Revolutionary War? The whole thing was criminal in the eyes of the British. And one of the advantages the revolutionaries had was that they used irregular warfare to attack the British formations, the British soldiers being trained to march against similar armies in the field. If we use "terrorism" as describing techniques - like the sabotage, bombing and assassinations that were standard operating procedure for the pro-Allied partisans in occupied Europe in the Second World War - then it's hard to say that "terrorism" in the abstract is bad. It can be used in pursuit of just wars as well as unjust ones.
Conversely, if we define "terrorism" as inherently evil, as in the Bush administration's global war on terrorism (GWOT), then it's hard to avoid contortions like the one in which Gilbert indulges there to avoid hanging the pejorative label of "terrorism" on a "good war" like the American Revolution.
Gilbert bases his labeling of Brown as a terrorist on three motivations that he takes as three main concepts into which the motivation of terrorists can be grouped:
1. Society is sick and cannot be cured by half measures of reform.
2. The state is in itself violent and can be countered and overcome only by violence.
3. The truth of the terrorist cause justifies any action that supports it. While some terrorists recognize no moral law, otherS have their own "higher" morality. (Russo/Finkelman; 111; my emphasis)
I could think of several ways in which this fails to account for the suicide bombings of recent years, the Stern Gang in the Israeli war for independence, the Palestinians fighting today against Israel, and several other situations more recent than 1859.
Gilbert's arguments fitting John Brown into those three categories are, to put the most generous interpretation on them, excessively restricted. More directly, they seem contrived.
In reference to motivation (1), Gilbert points to the fact that Brown wrote the "Provisional Constitution" in 1858 shows that he held a "solid belief that society, particularly a society that would embrace slavery, was sick beyond its own cure". He claims that the Constitution "utterly rejects the legal and moral foundations of the United States". Hogwash.
In fact, Brown's Provisional Constitution largely modeled the US Constitution. It's most dramatic exceptions were its guarantees of full citizenship to blacks and women. It included a few (to our eyes) eccentric moral provisions, as I mentioned in an earlier post. But it was meant as a protest against the existence of slavery - and, not incidentally, against the denial of full rights to women - and was written in the year just following the Dred Scott decision, in which the Supreme Court held that under the existing Constitution that no black person, free or slave, could be considered a citizen of the United States. In fact, Brown was distinct from some of the most radical Abolitionists in that he rejected the idea of the free states sece from the Union, a notion much discussed in the 1850s. His guerrilla war scheme which was aborted at Harpers Ferry was meant ultimately to force the Union to suppress the institution of slavery in the South.
His Provisional Constitution even explicitly stated, in all caps, " THESE ARTICLE NOT FOR THE OVERTHROW OF GOV'M'T" and said that the document "shall not be construed so as in any way to encourage the overthrow of any State Government of the United States and look to no dissolution of the Union, but simply to Amendment and Repeal". It also explicitly endorsed the existing American flag, whose current version is such a precious idol to our superpatriots today. Gilbert's example to convict Brown of Count One in his terrorism indictment is just silly.
On Count Two, the idea that the state itself is violent, he cites Brown's famous note handed to one of his jailers on his way to the gallows:
I John Brown am now quite certain that the crimes of this guilty land: will never be purged away; but with Blood. I had as I now think: vainly flattered myself that without very much bloodshed: it might be done.
Now, Brown couldn't look into the future, but he prophesied correctly on this point. Nor was it simply bitter outburst on his part that he left as a last testament. He had seen what the agents and leaders of the Slave Power had done in Kansas. They intended to take the Territory for slavery, with violence and stolen elections and anything else they could use. We could make counter-factual speculations about how nonviolent resistance might have eventually prevailed in Kansas. But what did in actual history put the pro-democracy and antislavery Free State partisans in a position to have free and honest elections was the willingness of John Brown and other Free State fighters to violently resist the proslavery partisans.
It's also notable here that Gilbert Count Two carries a strong bias toward existing governments. But as his Union sympathies showed, Brown did not want to overthrow the national government. He wanted to do away with the institution of slavery. He was no abstract dreamer, for all his religious idealism. He was very aware that the Buchanan administration was dominated by the Slave Power. But, apart from the conceptual flaws in Gilbert's Count Two, Brown did not want to overthrow the national government. He wanted to protect its democratic character by ridding it of the slavery that was undermining democracy even for white men in the North. And it's simply not accurate to characterize his activities in Kansas as simply trying to overthrow the Territorial government. As we saw in the posts on Kansas, the Lecompton government was an illegitimate government by the standards of the national laws governing the Territory. When Brown returned to Kansas in 1858, he did not pursue guerrilla violence against the slavery partisans, because he could see that legitimate democratic processes were now being protected there.
As to Count Three, John Brown clearly did adhere to a notion of a higher law. How is he different in that way from any other Christian, then or now? And it can't be stressed enough in this context how strongly the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850 had affected public opinion in the free states. That notorious law allowed any male citizen in a free state to be drafted into a federal slave-hinting posse, under threat of heavy fines for refusing, to hunt down escaped slaves and return them to bondage in the South. (This law also completely overrode any consideration states rights, something the Slave Power was always willing to do in defense of slavery.) If thinking that such a law was horribly unjust and a violations of Christian principles, the will of God, basic democratic rights (of white men), and an offense to the most basic human decency is a sign of terrorist motivation, then Gilbert should have devoted himself to explaining why numerous cities in the North didn't have terrorist violence on some like the levels of Baghdad today.
Gilbert's essay illustrates the hazards of trying to use "terrorism" as normative concept (terrorists bad, good people not terrorists) instead of a description of a technique of irregular warfare. As a normative concept, it's very fuzzy. Which leads Gilbert to some fairly fuzzy results in trying to shoehorn John Brown into a present-day "terrorist" mold.
(See Sources on John Brown for references.)
An Index to Confederate "Heritage" Month 2006 postings is available.
As David Reynolds said of John Brown's "Provisional Constitution", we could say of Brown's militant Christianity: it was "hardly unproblematic".
But it's also useful to look a bit more closely at how Brown's religion translated into his social outlook. Obviously, between the 9/11 attack, car bombers in Iraq, subway bombers in Spain and Britain, suicide bombers blowing up restaurant patrons in Jerusalem, and more more of the like, the whole notion of violent action in pursuit of religious convictions is "hardly unproblematic" for us today.
However, though Brown himself was strongly motivated by his own Christian convictions and his sense of a religious mission to help abolish slavery, his movement was not a religious movement. It was a movement to free the slaves. He didn't fight to drive out Methodists or Mormons. He fought to end the "peculiar institution" that made the lords of the lash owners of their fellow human beings.
It's common, and deeply misleading, to generalize about religious fanaticism. While religious people fanaticial and otherwise may share certain characteristics, they also have forms and customs particular to that religion. Reynolds addresses the inevitable comparison of Brown with you-know-who and makes an important point about Brown's religiosity:
Brown had a breadth of vision that modern terrorists lack. He was an American terrorist in the amplest sense of the word. He was every bit as religious as Osama bin Laden - but was the Muslim bin Laden able to enlist Christians, atheists, or Jews among his followers? The Calvinistic Brown, reflecting the religious toleration of his nation, counted Jews, liberal Christians, spiritualists, and agnostics among his most devoted soldiers. Bin Laden's ultimate goal was the creation of a Muslim theocracy in which opposing views, especially Western ones, were banned. Brown's goal was a democratic society that assigned full rights to all, irrespective of religion, race, or gender. (my emphasis)
Whatever similarities John Brown's democratic Christian militancy may have with that of present-day radical Muslim Salafists like Bin Laden, the goals toward which they aimed as well as their methods were radically different. If the effect of their actions in the real world of human society is a measure, any meaningful comparison would be difficult.
W.E.B. DuBois also gives a sense of the variety of followers Brown assembled in preparation for the Harpers Ferry mission:
These were the men - idealists, dreamers, soldiers and avengers, varying from the silent and thoughtful to the quick and impulsive ; from the cold and bitter to the ignorant and faithful. They believed in God, in spirits, in fate, in liberty. To them the world was a wild, young unregulated thing, and they were born to set it right. It was a veritable band of crusaders, and while it had much of weakness and extravagance, it had nothing nasty or unclean. On the whole, they were an unusual set of men. Anne Brown who lived with them said : "Taking them all together, I think they would compare well [she is speaking of manners, etc.] with the same number of men in any station of life I have ever met."
They were not men of culture or great education, although Kagi had had a fair schooling. They were intellectually bold and inquiring - several had been attracted by the then rampant Spiritualism; nearly all were skeptical of the world's social conventions. They had been trained mostly in the rough school of frontier life, had faced death many times, and were eager, curious and restless. Some of them were musical, others dabbled in verse. Their broadest common ground of sympathy lay in the personality of John Brown - him they revered and loved. Through him they had come to hate slavery, and for him and for what he believed, they were willing to risk their lives. They themselves had convictions on slavery and other matters, but John Brown narrowed down their dreaming to one intense deed. (Dubois; 286-7)
Reynolds also gives us a glimpse of Brown's Harpers Ferry band at the same time:
Accustomed to wilderness camps, the men didn't mind the hard lifestyle. They divided their time between military preparation - which included studying Forbes's Patriotic Volunteer [a military manual], readying rifles, and making belts and holsters - and desultory activity such as chatting, singing, and playing cards or checkers. They sang hymns like "Nearer My God to Thee" and sentimental ditties like "Faded Flowers" and "All the Old Folks Are Gone" (they changed it to "All the Dear Ones Are Gone").
They debated religion and other topics. Stevens had a copy of Thomas Paine's Age of Reason that he passed around for others to read. John Brown, tolerant as usual, encouraged the group to discuss Paine's skeptical ideas, even though they conflicted sharply with his unwavering Calvinism. The men kept up with the news by reading the Baltimore Sun, which Brown had subscribed to, and the newspapers and magazines that Kagi sent in bundles from Chambersburg. (Reynolds; 298)
Paine's Age of Reason was a strongly-stated argument, heavily influeced by his personal involvement with the French Revolution, that was highly controversial when it was first published, earning him accusations of atheism (which were true). But it was a militantly skeptical book in religious matters.
Within his family, apparently none of his children (he had 20, of whom 12 survived into adulthood) carried on the intensity of Brown's devotion to the Christian God. Brown was very concerned over the spiritual health of his children's souls, and tried always to convince them to follow the ways of the Lord. Yet their lack of faith, and even open skepticism, didn't seem to affect the intensity of his love for them.
In other words, Brown was more concerned in practice with the deeds of his followers and family than with their professed religious beliefs. Obviously, he had far more in common with a Jew or a Spiritualist than with a Southern minister of the Gospel who endorsed slavery.
I'm not sure it sounds consistent to say that a devout Calvinist like Brown, who believed in predestination, respected freedom of the conscience. But, in practice, he obviously did when it came to matters of religious faith. And he was clearly a man who was not afraid of ideas. He had no fear that "dangerous" ideas from Tom Paine would harm him, or his followers - at least no such fear that he would hide from such ideas or expect other to do so. I'm sure he found much in the professional revolutionary Tom Paine to admire, apart from his religious skepticism.
Brown was convinced of his faith in an other-worldly God. But he saw it as his mission to serve that God in the fight for the freedom of the slaves and the defense of democracy here in this world.
(See Sources on John Brown for references.)
An Index to Confederate "Heritage" Month 2006 postings is available.
Several aspects about John Brown's Christianity stand out. One is that it was closely associated for him with a democratic commitment and attitude toward others. His comment that I quoted in the last post that he believed in the Golden Rule (do unto others as you would have them do unto you) and the Declaration of Independence seems to be a good definition of his core beliefs about the world.
David Reynolds stresses a point that other biographers have also featured prominently, which is that John Brown regarded blacks as equal to whites, in a way that even most Abolitionists did not. The author Richard Henry Dana happened to be a guest at Brown's cabin in 1849, well before the Kansas battles. Brown was then active in the Underground Railroad, and two escaped slaves were their guests for dinner that night. Dana was particularly impressed with the egalitarian manner in which Brown treated his dark-skinned guests:
We were all ranged at a long table, some dozen of us more or less; and these two negroes and one other had their places with us. Mr. Brown said a solemn grace. I observed that he called the negroes by their surnames, with the prefixes of Mr. and Mrs. The man was "Mr. Jefferson," and the woman "Mrs. Wait."
He introduced us to them in due form, "Mi. Dana, Mr. Jefferson," "Mr. Metcalf, Mrs. Wait." It was plain that they had not been so treated or spoken to often before, perhaps never until that day, for they had all the awkwardness of field hands on a plantation; and what to do on the introduction, was quite beyond their experience. There was an unrestricted supply of Ruth's best bread, butter and corncakes, and we had some meat and tea, and a plenty of the best of milk.
But Brown's attitude toward blacks was not just manifested in table manners that were unusual among whites of that time. Reynolds discusses Brown's attitudes in comparison to Lysander Spooner, a militant Abolitionist, and Hinton Rowan Helper, author of The Impending Crisis of the South:
An even deeper difference, on the issue of race, divided Brown from Spooner and the other Abolitionists. Brown's plan for liberating the slaves was free of the racism that more or less tainted the views of the others. In this regard, Spooner and [Thomas Wentworth] Higginson were the least culpable of the group, since they both believed blacks capable of independent military action. Like [Wendell] Phillips, however, they sometimes assumed a patronizing attitude toward blacks, whom they felt needed instruction and guidance before they would be ready to rebel. As Higginson wrote to Spooner, "The great obstacle to anti-slavery action has always been the apparent feebleness & timidity of the slaves themselves." Higginson's ambiguous attitude toward blacks would carry into the Civil War, when he commanded blacks troops whom he treated as docile and childlike, and would harden into conservatism toward the end of Reconstruction, when, ignoring the rise of Jim Crow, he insisted that blacks had made sufficient gains and needed no further help from white reformers.
As for the other Abolitionists mentioned above, two who stand out for their close association with Brown, Hinton Rowan Helper and Theodore Parker, had racial views that were downright reactionary. Helper's link to Brown was hardly intentional. Helper vilified not only Spooner's circular but also the Harpers Ferry raid, about which he said defensively, "I had nothing to do, and never expect to have anything to do, with any such ill-advised proceeding. It is impossible to achieve victory on the Brown basis." His denials notwithstanding, in the anti-Abolitionist frenzy that swept the South after Harpers Ferry, he and Brown were held up as demonic cocon-spirators behind a plot by the "Black Republican" party to assault Southern institutions. The Virginian Edmund Ruffin went so far as to label the Republicans "the Brown-Helper party."
Ruffin and other Southerners did not recognize that a hatred of slavery was just about the only thing Helper and Brown had in common. Helper opposed slavery not on moral grounds but because he thought it was hurting the South economically. An unabashed racist from North Carolina, he wanted slavery to be abolished so that blacks, whom he believed had little to contribute to America, could be expelled from the nation and intelligent, efficient whites could save his section's economy. (Reynolds; 102; my emphasis)
I discussed Helper's book in last year's "heritage" post that I linked above. The whole question of how people could be intensely anti-slavery and still racist against blacks, even by the standards of the time, is an interesting and complicated one. This is one of the twists of neo-Confederate ideology, whose advocates often cite instances of Northern racism, which they contrast to the tolerant and broad-minded attitude of the kindly lords of the lash who held slaves as human property.
But Brown's attitude was different. Reynolds goes on to quote Theodore Parker, one of Brown's most loyal backers: "No doubt the African race is greatly inferior to the Caucasian in general intellectual power and also in an instint for liberty which is so strong in the Teutonic family." Reynolds writes:
John Brown never manifested such racism. A chief source of inspiration for him was black culture in its varied dimensions. Harpers Ferry would not have happened had he not had a profound knowledge of this culture.
Significantly, Brown felt most comfortable about discussing his military plans with blacks. He mixed with free blacks in Springfield; there were some 270 living in the town and 130 elsewhere in Hampden County. Among the first people outside the family with whom he discussed his invasion plan was Thomas Thomas, a black porter who worked for Perkins & Brown. (Reynolds; 103)
Brown knew blacks in a way that few white Americans of his time did. Slaveowners knew black slaves intimately. Often in the most intimate ways, which was one of the scandals of the slave system. But they did not live in a situation of equality with blacks, nor regard them as equals. Brown did.
As mentioned in an earlier post, Southerners of the time and Confederate apologists later ridiculed Brown for his excessive confidence in slaves to abandon their masters and assist his band at Harpers Ferry. There is an element of truth to this. If Brown and his group had fought their way out of town and into the mountains sooner, they would have been able to proceed with their plan for guerrilla warfare in the mountains. Part of the reason, possibly the main reason, was that Brown hoped for more escaped slaves to join them as recruits before they left the town of Harpers Ferry.
But Reynolds points to the following exchange during his interrogation on the Monday of his capture:
Q: "Brown, suppose you had every nigger in the United States, what would you do with them!"
Brown: "Set them free."
Q: "Your intention was to carry them off and free them?"
Brown: "Not at all." [i.e., the idea was to free them right there, not to "carry them off" to the North]
Q: "To set them free would sacrifice the life of every man in this community."
Brown: "I do not think so."
Q:"I know it; I think you are fanatical."
Brown: "And I think you are fanatical. Whom the gods would destroy they first make mad, and you are mad."
Q: " Was it your only object to free the Negroes ! "
Brown: "Absolutely our only object."
To the Southerners, "servile insurrection" was perhaps the greatest fear. The combination of the actual experience of the slave insurrections in Haiti and of the Nat Turner rebellion of 1831, combined with their own fiercely-denied recognition that their slaves despised their condition and often their masters, led them to think of "servile insurrection" as a genocidal slaughter against whites.
But, Reynolds notes, "Brown had lived with blacks too long to accept this canard" (Reynolds; 331). It was a telling interchange. Brown knew that the blacks were human beings who could conduct themselves with at least as much humanity as the slaveowners and their white accomplices (which isn't saying a lot in itself). While the Southerner posed the question, whose whole society by that time defended slavery as a civilizing institution, could only conceive of a slave revolt as mass racial slaughter. Brown saw it in terms of the "unalienable rights" of the Declaration of Independence.
Brown's notion of equality was also not restricted to men. He advocated full rights for women, a concept that had been placed on the national agenda thanks to the Seneca Falls Convention of 1848 organized by Elizabeth Cady Stanton. How his religious convictions melded with his soldiers ideals is illustrated by the "Provisional Constitution and Ordinances for the People of the United States" he wrote at the home of Frederick Douglass in 1858. Though ridculed by his critics - and even occasionally by his admirers - the Provisional Constitution gives real insight into Brown's radical-democratic egalitarian outlook. It included full citizenship and voting rights for blacks and for women. Reynolds writes of this document:
His constitution was hardly unproblematic. Its behavioral rules give one pause. One of its articles said, "Profane swearing, filthy conversation, indecent behavior, or indecent exposure of the person, or intoxication, or quarrelling, shall not be allowed or tolerated; neither unlawful intercourse of the sexes." So much for free speech and civil liberties. Public officials who got drunk could be removed. Rape of female prisoners was punishable by death. Divorce was discouraged; incompatible couples must make every effort to stay together. "Schools and churches [were to be] established, as soon as may be, for the purpose of religious and other instructions; and the first day of the week regarded as a day of rest appropriated to moral and religious instruction and improvement." All persons "known to be of good character, and of sound mind and suitable age, . . . whether male or female" were "encouraged to carry arms openly."
In real life, enforcing such rules would have been impractical, if not impossible. But the society Brown envisaged was not a normal one. It reflected his preoccupations in a time of widespread social inequities and personal corruption. Brown's constitution reflected the full range of his Puritan values, from the radical to the prudish. Like rebellious Calvinists from Anne Hutchinson to Wendell Phillips, he defied established laws in the name of what he regarded as Christian justice. Like conservative Calvinists from Cotton Mather to Lyman Beecher, he insisted on moral rectitude. His imagined society featured racial and gender equality but also strictly enforced morality. In it people of all ethnic backgrounds would, he hoped, become educated, upright, and productive citizens. (Reynolds; 253)
John Brown took his religion and his politics seriously. I want to add another wrinkle to the picture of Brown's outlook here. Richard Henry Dana also wrote in his diary during his 1849 visit:
The place belonged to a man named Brown ... a thin, sinewy, hard-favored, clear-headed, honest-minded man, who had spent all his days as a frontier farmer. On conversing with him, we found him well informed on most subjects, especially in the natural sciences. He had books and had evidently made a diligent use of them. (my emphasis)
Now, in his short visit, there was presumably a limited amount of time to discuss the scientific issues of the day. But it's notable that Brown was well-informed on a variety of subjects and that he seemed to Dana to be an avid reader. As much as he believed in Christianity, he wasn't a "God said it, I believe it, and that's all there is to it" kind of guy.
(See Sources on John Brown for references.)
An Index to Confederate "Heritage" Month 2006 postings is available
Although the basic facts about Brown's raid on Harpers Ferry and his plans are well known, it's a little surprising that one of the most controversial things about it is what Brown's goal actually was.
The main controversy seems to be over whether Brown intended to promote a general "servile insurrection" across the South. Brown himself, during his questioning immediately after his capture, in response to the question, "Did you expect a general rising of the slaves in case of your success? ", replied, "No, sir; nor did I wish it. I expected to gather them up from time to time, and set them free."
In his legendary statement to the Virginia court at his sentencing, Brown described his intentions this way:
In the first place, I deny everything but what I have all along admitted: of a design on my part to free the slaves. I intended certainly to have made a clean thing of that matter, as I did last winter, when I went into Missouri and there took slaves without the snapping of a gun on either side, moving through the country, and finally leaving them in Canada. I designed to have done the same thing on a larger scale. That was all I intended. I never did intend murder, or treason, or the destruction of property, or to excite or incite slaves to rebellion, or to make insurrection.
David Reynolds describes the state of Brown's plan "taking the war into Africa" (the South) in 1858 as he was organizing it. And this seems to be the best explanation of what his strategy was. Building on the experience of the Underground Railroad, the clandestine network that helped slaves escape to freedom and in which Brown had been personally active, Brown's idea was this:
The [Underground] railroad business "on a somewhat extended scale." The words understated dramatic differences between Brown's plot and the Underground Railroad. For decades, blacks who escaped from slavery on the Underground Railroad chose among four main routes that led north: the Atlantic coast, along sea passages and swamps that stretched from Florida to Virginia; the Appalachian Mountains, which went from the Deep South to upstate New York and northern New England; the Cumberland Mountains of Kentucky and other Southern states, leading up to Ohio and Michigan; and the Mississippi River Valley. In all cases, the goal was the North and freedom.
Brown's project was something altogether new: not a "railroad" passage to the white-dominated North but an armed invasion of the South, using the Appalachians as a shield for an ever-expanding colony of blacks. In early February he wrote his son John, asking him "to get good Maps & State statistics of the different Southern States." Found among Brown's papers in the aftermath of Harpers Ferry were slave statistics and the maps of seven Southern states, with the main slave counties marked as targets. Brown expected his revolution to spread like a wildfire from Virginia southward through Tennessee, Alabama, and Mississippi to Georgia and other states. Thousands of blacks would flee to him, establishing an independent mountain society that, if necessary, could last for years, like the durable maroon communities of Jamaica. (Reynolds; 249; my emphasis in bold)
This was not an outlandish scheme. Bold, highly risky, but not impractical.
The basic idea was to seize the federal armory at Harpers Ferry, take as much of the guns and ammunition as they could carry, and head off into the mountains of Virginia. There they would move down the Appalachians, freeing groups of slaves at various planatations along the way. Some they would send North to freedom by connecting them with the Underground Railroad. Those who wished to stay and fight would join the mountain guerrilla band.
This plan had been forming in Brown's mind well before the fighting in "Bleeding Kansas". But his expectations for his mountain guerrilla invasion of the slaveholding states clearly drew on his experiences in Kansas. Like his action at Pottawatomie, he hoped his mission would inspire Northern opponents of slavery to embrace the necessity of more militant action. He expected the Southerners to react with hysteria, which would then speed up the coming of what not just Brown but many less determined foes of slavery had come to believe was an inevitable violent clash between the demands of the Slave Power and the preservation of a democratic national Republic.
Brown was willing to defy the federal government in the most direct way possible at Harpers Ferry. But he was not disunionist. He wanted to preserve the Union as a republic free of slavery.
It's worth looking at how the young Robert Penn Warren portrayed Brown's plans in his 1929 pro-Confederate biography. Speaking of Brown's preparations for the raid with his followers who planned to accompany him, Warren wrote:
In discussing this adventure with his followers, John Brown seems to have kept to safe generalities. He did mention Harper's [sic] Ferry as the point where operations would probably begin, but the critical details of the affair and its eventual reach were obscure in the minds of at least some members of the company. To the doubtful Parsons, for instance, John Brown, declared that he merely intended to release some slaves with as little fighting as possible, and give them arms to defend themselves on their flight to the North Star. In other words, Parsons was being lured on into the project just as Cook had been lured to the military school - a step at a time, with pretext after pretext gradually cleared away. With exquisite tact John Brown let each man know, or surmise, just what it was best for him to know about the total adventure. The adventure was the conquest of the South.
The soldiers who were to execute the conquest were the slaves themselves. John Brown knew so little about actual conditions in the South that he believed every negro was only waiting the chance to rise and cut his master's throat. He would provide the organization to harness this energy and hate. The great need was for officers to keep this vast potential army under direction and control. The men at William Maxson's farm were the nucleus but many more were necessary, and John Brown had a scheme to get them. The operations would in the beginning be confined to a single State, so that a collision with the United States troops would be postponed until the insurrection and conquest were well under way; he was sure that the State militia would lack the decision and organization necessary to make them a major obstacle. The actual course of events proved this to be true. And John Brown had a scheme which would take care of the crisis when the General Government intervened.
... Besides gaining trained men who could drill and direct the liberated negroes, he would, bythe same blow, paralyze the United States Government, and give time for the disunion sentiment in the North to be transformed into action. The North would be convulsed with its own revolution, the central Government would be but a word, and he would have his own army behind him and a collapsing South at his feet. Colonel Forbes, with his superior education, was to put into practice the idea of seducing the private soldier of the army. The New England disunionists, who had contributed money to John Brown in the past, would concoct the Northern revolution. (Warren; 265-6; my emphasis in bold)
This is factually so tendentious that I feel embarassed even quoting it. But at least its literary quality is a distinct cut above the usual neo-Confederate propaganda. So it's worth looking at the things the pro-Confederate view emphasizes, taking this passage from Warren as an example. He stressed: Brown was devious and deceptive (he was a revolutionary, for God's sake; and we know that his security was actually dangerous lax); the conquest of the South was his goal (not true); he was depending on a massive army of rebelling slaves to be his army (also not true; he planned to use escaped slaves in a guerrilla force in the mountains); Brown didn't realize how kindly and gently the happy slaves were generally treated by their masters (if you believe that one, let me tell you about the WMDs in Iraq); he was a disunionist (not so); he intended to provoke a revolution in the North (also not so).
Now, it's not surprising that a pro-Confederate viewpoint would be critical of John Brown. Brown fully intended to help destroy the slave system. He intended to deprive Southern planters of their huge capital investment in human property. And he was willing to kill Southern white folks to do it. If you're going to defend the Confederacy, you have to trash John Brown.
Warren's description of Brown's plans makes it sound grandiose and impossible, which is consistent with his argument (assumption, more like it) that Brown was insane. By stressing that Brown intended to raise an army of slaves that would want to cut their master's throats, he pictures Brown as intending to promote wanton murder. His suggestion that Brown envisioned some sort near-termrevolution in the North adds to the image of megalomania.
But it seems that all neo-Confederate versions of history wind up singing the praises of slavery in some way or another, even as they deny the centrality of slavery to the conflict that resulted in the Civil War. While Warren wants to accuse Brown of wanting a massive slave insurrection, he also has to deny that such a thing was possible. Later on, Warren gives the following description about how differently the happy slaves saw their condition than what the fanatical Abolitionists imagined was a burning moral issue:
The slave himself was at the same time more realistic and more humane; he never bothered his kinky head about the moral issue, and for him the matter simply remained one of convenience or inconvenience. Since the system did not involve that absentee ownership, which had caused the horrors of West Indian slavery, and since immediate contact existed between master and slave, an exercise of obligation reached downward as well as upward and the negro's condition was tolerable enough. The system was subject to grave abuse, but economic considerations bolstered whatever little decency the slaveholder possessed, for the slave was very valuable property and it was only natural that the master would take care to give his property such treatment as would not jeopardize its value. There was, by consequence, no great reservoir of hate and rancor which at the least opportunity would convert every slave into a soldier; when the war came the masters marched off, leaving their families and estates in the care of those same negroes for whose liberty, presumably, the North was fighting. (Warren; 332; my emphasis)
In fairness to Robert Penn Warren, he later became quite sympathetic to the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s. You wouldn't guess that from his Brown biography from 1929 with things like the above description of the happy darkies. He even ventured in 1965 or so, commentin on his John Brown biography of decades earlier:
It is far from the book I would write now, for that book was shot through with Southern defensiveness, and in my ignorance the psychological picture of the hero was presented far too schematically. (Peterson; 155)
But he hadn't entirely rejected his youthful indescretions about John Brown. He still thought Brown was crazy.
I won't try to parse the ideology of all that last paragraph I quoted from his book; I've dealt with common pro-slavery in previous years' posts. But that last sentence is a sign of the sloppiness of Warren's factual presentation. While many masters did go off to fight, the Civil War was, if anything, even more of a "rich man's war, poor man's fight" than the Iraq War today. One of the most controversial Confederate laws was the one popularly known as the "20 n****r law". It allowed owners of twenty or more slaves to pay someone else to do their required military service for them.
These widely differing views I've discussed here give an idea of how heavily ideology affected even much later historical evaluations of Brown. He became a very emotional symbol for both sides of that most emotional of all political events, a civil war.
But I don't mean to imply that "one side's view is just as valid as the other". For one thing, just making up stuff about what Brown intended, and packaging it together with hokum about the happy and contented slaves, makes for pseudohistory. We can judge Brown many different ways. But one of the biggest problems with neo-Confederate accounts of the past is that they promote sloppy, emotional and highly ideological ways of looking at the factual occurrences of that period.
And not all frameworks for judgment are equivalent, either. As I've tried to illustrate in this year's "heritage" series of posts, John Brown's actions can't be honestly evaluated without taking full account of the fact that he sided with democracy and fought for freedom for the slaves; the Southern slaveowners fought to maintain their "sacred institutions of slavery and white supremacy", and it was clear to those in the free states that the Slave Power's action were a real and present threat to the survival of democracy even for white men.
So, it's hard to see how anyone taking the viewpoint of democracy and basic human rights could disagree with W.E.B. Dubois in saying, at least on the issue of slavery, "John Brown was right".
(See Sources on John Brown for references.)
An Index to Confederate "Heritage" Month 2006 postings is available
