John Brown Was Right

by Michael Steven Smith / July 2005

A review of John Brown, Abolitionist, by David S. Reynolds, Alfred A. Knoff, New York, 2005.

Like me, I bet most of us never learned of John Brown in high school and probably not in college either. And if we did hear of him the common wisdom was that he was a nut, a religious anti-slavery maniac who did little for his cause but hurt it. In truth John Brown was a great man, an American hero, a revolutionary exemplar who Distinguished Professor David Reynolds has brought to life in his extraordinary just published page turner of a biography “John Brown, Abolitionist”. It is accurately subtitled: “The Man Who Killed Slavery, Sparked the Civil War, and Seeded the Civil Rights Movement”.

Reynold’s book does nothing less than fit Brown into American history. It is quite an achievement.

I began to appreciate John Brown while driving through the Blue Ridge mountains in Virginia during the Vietnam war. I was with Fred Halstead, who was known in the movement as “Big Red” Fred. We had just finished a GI civil liberties case in Columbia, South Carolina and were heading back to New York along the Blue Ridge Parkway in Virginia, right near the Harper’s Ferry federal arsenal which Brown and his l8 men had attacked in l859. Fred’s father had been in the IWW, a Wobbly merchant seaman who shipped out up and down the west coast from San Pedro to Seattle. The IWW has kept the revolutionary oral tradition alive on those ships and Fred knew all about John Brown.

He wasn’t nuts at all explained Fred. His plan was to arm black slaves and sympathetic whites with weapons captured at the arsenal and retreat to the Blue Ridge mountains to launch a guerilla campaign which would further encourage slave rebellion and rock the socks off and eventually topple the slave holding south, which was petrified of potential slave insurrections. Although Brown was captured and six weeks later hung as a traitor, as Reynolds movingly demonstrates, Brown succeeded after all.

The South saw Brown as an arrogant law breaker. For Brown breaking human law in order to serve a higher law was part of his proud Puritan heritage. Cromwell was one of his heroes and like the leader of the English revolution, people saw Brown variously as a saintly liberator or a blood-thirsty terrorist. Law- flouting individualism was a phenomena which appeared variously in the l9th century in militant Abolitionism and Transendental self-reliance. Brown traced his family back to the ship’s carpenter, Peter Brown, who came over on the Mayflower in 1620. Browns grandfather served as a captain in the revolutionary war, another was a lieutenant. Brown’s own father was a deeply religious man and a fervent Abolitionist.

John Brown believed in the Golden Rule and the Declaration of Independence. He once explained to George Sterns, a financial backer, that “I think both mean the same thing; and it is better that a whole generation should pass off the face of the earth - men, women, and children - by violent death than that one jot of either should fail in this country. I mean exactly so, sir.” The religion of Brown and his family won few converts, Reynolds writes, “because of the near-universal racism of American whites at the time. Brown straddled the poverty line most of his life, much of it spent on the Western Reserve, which is now Ohio, and in North Elba in the Adirondack mountains near Lake Placid, where he and his family raised sheep in an integrated community. He was both toughened and humanized by a grueling pioneer life in ethnically diverse environments.” For Brown, Indians were not savage “others” to be conquered but rather fellow humans to be respected. One his close comrades was an Austrian Jew. He was a strong supporter of women’s rights and a critic of economic inequality. All of this was much advanced in l9th century America.

Brown’s strategy and tactics at Harper’s Ferry were informed by his close study of Toussaint Overture and the Haitian revolution whose history is told so well in C.L.R. James magnificent volume The Black Jacobins. Brown also studied the slave revolts led by Nat Turner. It was Turner’s plan to retreat to the wilderness that guided Brown, who also knew of the success of the maroons in Jamaica and the Seminole tribe of Florida. The maroons were rebellious slaves who fled into the wilderness and founded communities there. The Florida Seminoles remained unconquered and drew escaped black slaves to their settlements.

Brown embarrassed the south and Virginia’s Governor Wise by holding off 800 soldiers with his small force of black and white rebels, but he was eventually wounded and overwhelmed. Although his plan failed, Brown’s words had the greatest impact on the country. In the six weeks from his capture to his execution he had the attention of the national press corps and the support of America’s leading intellectual, Ralph Waldo Emerson, of Concord, Massachusetts, and his friend Henry David Thoreau.

Captured, wounded, bleeding but unbowed, Brown lay on the floor responding to his interrogators with disarming candor. Virginia Senator James Mason asked him how he justified his acts? Brown: “I think, my friend, you are guilty of a great wrong to God and against humanity. I say it without wishing to be offensive and I believe it would be perfectly right to interfere with you, so far as to free those you wickedly and willfully hold in bondage.” And: “I think I did right, and that others will do right who interfere with you at any time and at all times.” Brown predicted brilliantly: “I wish to say, furthermore, that you had better – all of you people of the South prepare yourselves for a settlement of this question. You may dispose of me very easily. I am nearly disposed of now; but this question is still to be settled - the Negro question, I mean. The end of that is not yet.”

Lincoln’s Gettysburg address and John Brown’s speech before sentencing at the Virginia courthouse are considered the two greatest American speeches. He ended his brief plea observing “Now, if it is deemed necessary that I should forfeit my life for the furtherance of the ends of justice, and mingle my blood further with the blood of millions in this slave country whose rights are disregarded by wicked, cruel, and unjust enactments, I say, let it be done.”

Emerson said of Brown: “That new saint, than whom none purer or more brave was ever led by love of men into conflict and death, - the new saint awaiting his martyrdom, and who, if he shall suffer, will make the gallows glorious like the cross.” Reynolds concluded that Emerson’s views, which sped around the country like a bullet, “added fuel to the already inflamed sectional tensions that led to civil war” within months.

John Brown’s works and words were a constant thread from his death to the founding of the modern civil rights movement. Frederick Douglas and W.E.B. DuBois honored him above all others. Brown was a forefather of the NAACP. Robert F. Williams, the head of a chapter in North Carolina which practiced armed self-defense against the Klan, cherished John Brown. So did H. Rap Brown, a founder and leader of SNCC, and Malcolm X who said “If you are for me and my problems - when I say me I mean us, our people - then you have to be willing to do as old John Brown did.” SDS named a journal after Brown and one its leaders, Jeff Jones, along with Columbia Law School NLG chapter founder Eleanor Stein, recently organized Albany trade unionists and activists to commemorate Brown at his farmhouse and gravesite, now a national monument worth visiting, in North Elba, near Lake Placid, New York.

The Civil War is appreciated by historians as the second American revolution. If there is to be a third Brown’s example, political and moral, will be at its forefront. Reading this book is a stirring experience making you feel, down to your bones, that, indeed, his soul does go marching on.