John Brown

[Anonymous <anon@anon.efga.org>]

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Robert Hettinga wrote:
>> And so on. Throughout history there have been those who spoke their
>> mind.  And others who told them to cool it, to not anger the local
>> prince, to not rock the boat.
>
>No, Tim. Your analysis is too simple, here. My point is, all John
>Brown & Co. did was get shot up one afternoon in Harper's Ferry. They
>didn't help the cause of abolition one whit.

"Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook
Got Wrong" by James W. Loewen, pages 167 through 169:

  "After 1890 textbook authors inferred Brown's madness from
his plan, which admittedly was farfetched.  Never mind that John Brown
himself presciently told Frederick Douglass that the venture would
make a stunning impact even if it failed.  Nor that his twenty-odd
followers can hardly be considered crazed too.  Rather, we must
recognize that the insanity with which historians have charged John
Brown was never psychological.  It was ideological.  Brown's actions
made no sense to textbook writers between 1890 and about 1970.  To
make no sense is to be crazy.
  "Clearly, Brown's contemporaries did not consider him insane.
Brown's ideological influence in the month before his hanging, and
continuing after his death, was immense.  He moved the boundary of
acceptable thoughts and deeds regarding slavery.  Before Harpers
Ferry, to be an abolitionist was not quite acceptable, even in the
North.  Just talking about freeing slaves - advocating immediate
emancipation - was behavior at the outer limit of the ideological
continuum.  By engaging in armed action, including murder, John Brown
made mere verbal abolitionism seem much less radical.
  "After an initial shock wave of revulsion against Brown, in the
North as well as in the South, Americans were fascinated to hear what
he had to say.  In his 1859 trial John Brown captured the attention of
the nation like no other abolitionist or slaveowner before or since.
He knew it: `My whole life before had not afforded me one half the
opportunity to plead for the right.'  In his speech to the court on
November 2, just before the judge sentenced him to die, Brown argued,
`Had I so interfered in behalf of the rich, the powerful, it would
have been all right.'  He referred to the Bible, which he saw in the
courtroom, `which teaches me that all things whatsoever I would that
men should do to me, I should do even so to them.  It teaches me
further, to remember them that are in bonds as bound with them.  I
endeavored to act up to that instruction.'  Brown went on to claim the
high moral ground: `I believe that to have interfered as I have done,
as I have always freely admitted I have done, in behalf of His
despised poor, I did no wrong but right.'  Although he objected that
his impending death penalty was unjust, he accepted it and pointed to
graver injustices.  `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 my children and 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.'
  "Brown's willingness to go to the gallows for what he thought was
right had a moral force of its own.  `It seems as if no man had ever
died in America before, for in order to die you must first have
lived,' Henry David Thoreau observed in a eulogy in Boston.  `These
men, in teaching us how to die, have at the same time taught us how to
live.'  Thoreau went on to compare Brown with Jesus of Nazareth, who
had faced a similar death at the hands of the state.
  "During the rest of November, Brown provided the nation graceful
instruction in how to face death.  In Larchmont, New York, George
Templeton Strong wrote in his diary, `One's faith in anything is
terribly shaken by anybody who is ready to go to the gallows
condemning and denouncing it.'  Brown's letters to his family and
friends softened his image, showed his human side, and prompted an
outpouring of sympathy for his children and soon-to-be widow, if not
for Brown himself.  His letters to supporters and remarks to
journalists, widely circulated, formed a continuing indictment of
slavery.  We see his charisma in this letter from `a conservative
Christian' - so the author signed it - written to Brown in jail:
`While I cannot approve of all your acts, I stand in awe of your
position since your capture, and dare not oppose you lest I be found
fighting against God; for you speak as one having authority, and seem
to be strengthened from on high.'  When Virginia executed John Brown
on December 2, making him the first American since the founding of the
nation to be hanged as a traitor, church bells mourned in cities
throughout the North.  Louisa May Alcott, William Dean Howells, Herman
Melville, John Greenleaf Whittier, and Walt Whitman were among the
poets who responded to the event.  `The gaze of Europe is fixed at
this moment on America,' wrote Victor Hugo from France.  Hanging
Brown, Hugo predicted, `will open a latent fissure that will finally
split the Union asunder.  The punishment of John Brown may consolidate
slavery in Virginia, but it will certainly shatter the American
Democracy.  You preserve your shame but kill your glory.'
  "Brown remained controversial after his death.  Republican
congressmen kept their distance from his felonious acts.
Nevertheless, Southern slaveowners were appalled at the show of
Northern sympathy for Brown and resolved to maintain slavery by any
means necessary, including quitting the Union if they lost the next
election.  Brown's charisma in the North, meanwhile, was not spent but
only increased due to what many came to view as his martyrdom.  As the
war came, as thousands of Americans found themselves making the same
commitment to face death that John Brown had made, the force of his
example took on new relevance.  That's why soldiers marched into
battle singing `John Brown's Body'.  Two years later, church
congregations sang Julia Ward Howe's new words to the song: `As He
died to make men holy, let us die to make men free' - and the
identification of John Brown and Jesus Christ took another turn.  The
next year saw the 54th Massachusetts Colored Regiment parading through
Boston to the tune, en route to its heroic destiny with death in South
Carolina, while William Lloyd Garrison surveyed the cheering
bystanders from a balcony, his hand resting on a bust of John Brown.
In February 1865 another Massachusetts colored regiment marched to the
tune through the streets of Charleston, South Carolina."

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