John Brown, Abolitionist
By David S. Reynolds
Vintage Books, 2006
578 pages, $34.95 (pb)
"John Brown's body" may lie "mouldering in the grave" but, in the words of the American Civil War song and in the spirit of the battle against race oppression, his "soul goes marching on". David Reynolds' biography of Brown, John Brown, Abolitionist, expertly shows why this fearless man, hung by the state of Virginia for treason, has not been forgotten, why his raid with 21 other comrades on the federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry in Virginia in 1859 climaxed his war on slavery and kickstarted the Civil War two years later with its emancipation of four million slaves by its end.
Born in Connecticut in 1800 to devout Puritan and anti-slavery parents, Brown knew hard manual labour and failed capitalist enterprise (thanks to a surfeit of honesty), forever treading the poverty line as leather tanner, sheep farmer, cattle trader, horse breeder, lumber dealer, real estate speculator and wool distributor. His "hardscrabble existence" moulded Brown's democratic sympathies for small farmers, for working class whites and for women, while his childhood experiences with reservation Native Americans and a maltreated slave boy inflamed his burning hatred of racial abuse.
Brown's conviction that he was one of God's warriors in a struggle to unite all people as equals, regardless of colour, steeled his anti-slavery fervour. He was a member of the Underground Railroad, the illegal network of abolitionists that helped southern slaves to escape north. In the slave state of Missouri, Brown liberated 11 slaves, leading them on a triumphant thousand-mile flight to freedom in Canada, dogged by sheriffs' posses. He fought legendary gun battles with pro-slavery settlers and federal troops in Kansas, where the state's future as a slave or "free labour" state sparked a mini (though no less savage) civil war as prelude to the main event.
In this war, however, Brown also led the murder of five prominent but unarmed pro-slavery citizens in 1856. Brown squared it with his conscience as an act of much-justified and long-delayed retaliatory vengeance in response to a violent catalogue of butchery and intimidation by southern slavers against slaves and white abolitionists.
Unlike nearly all other abolitionists, who were pacifists, Brown saw slavery as an undeclared war against a whole race and his armed strategy as part of this war, as God-ordained violence in support of Christian principles. Brown was a new phenomenon, a white abolitionist committed to armed warfare against slavery.
What was also radically new about Brown was that he was one of the rare white anti-slavery reformers to thoroughly reject racial stereotypes. He lacked a racist bone in his body, living with blacks, believing they should not only be freed from slavery but have equality with whites. Brown proposed civil rights goals for blacks a hundred years before the civil rights movement in the 1960s. He was to give his life in an effort to liberate the slaves.
One aspect of black culture that inspired Brown was the history of slave rebellions (in the US south, Jamaica, Haiti and elsewhere) that used guerilla actions against superior forces to establish freed-slave communities in mountain colonies. Borrowing this leaf from the book of slave insurrection, Brown chose Harpers Ferry, a strategic river town in the slave-state of Virginia and home of a major federal arsenal, thus also launching a direct political challenge to the federal government, which was heavily compromising with and propping up slavery in the south.
Brown's band of 21 young men, five of them black, were militant egalitarians — intelligent, courageous and fully prepared to die. The latter outcome was, alas, hastened by Brown's departure from the theory of guerrilla warfare. He delayed their escape from the arsenal, waiting for a slave uprising that never came, and wound up waging not guerilla warfare but open confrontation with hundreds of armed white civilians, militia and troops. Brown had unrealistically expected a spontaneous slave uprising, failing to prepare the local slaves who mostly reacted with indifference (untrusting of liberation from outside, by whites they did not know) or with fear of the swift and brutal reprisals that would surely follow.
Brown, wounded and in custody, was ferociously attacked by the pro-slavery Democratic Party and disowned by the nominally anti-slavery Republican Party. At best, he attracted a "praise-the-man-but-not-the-deed" support from some white abolitionists, but this was to turn around as, from prison, Brown eloquently and with great dignity and humility turned his trial into a trial of slavery. It was a case of battle lost, war won, as Brown triumphed over slavery, not with bullets, but with words.
What may have been a soon-forgotten adventure had become, in the seven weeks between Brown's capture and his execution, a polarising national symbol. The southern secessionist movement surged on a wave of slave-owners' fear and hatred of Brown, while Brown's supporters built momentum to turn President Abraham Lincoln's imminent war to preserve the union into a war to also liberate the slaves.
"John Brown's Body", initially composed by Massachusetts soldiers about a different John Brown — a much-teased but well-liked Scot in their company — soon became the most popular of the Union Army marching songs, particularly among black soldiers whose enlistment in the army Brown's followers had successfully campaigned for.
Brown's opponents, abolitionists less militant than Brown and hostile biographers called him insane, a crazed fanatic. Reynolds, without glossing over Brown's moral lapse in the Kansas murders, succeeds in objectively, but never dispassionately, showing how Brown's intense moral conviction against an inhuman system triggered an explosive realisation of powerful religious, racial and political currents in this not unblemished, but undeniable, hero of the great battle against the harms and sorrows of racial injustice.