John Brown, Abolitionist

Sentimentality is not an appropriate reaction to the life and career of John Brown. When the question of whether "Bleeding Kansas" would become a slave or a free state hung in the balance, Brown's gang tipped the balance against Missouri's pro-slavery marauders by hauling five of them from their beds and hacking them to pieces with broadswords. As a result, "Old Brown" not only terrorized the pro-slavery forces, mostly invaders from Missouri who were not above such tactics themselves, but also transformed the the stereotype in the South of Northern abolitionists from "cowardly pacifists" to "murderous fanatics."

In John Brown: Abolitionist, David Reynolds draws a straight line from John Brown's massacre at Pottawatomie through the Emancipation Proclamation to William Tecumseh Sherman's March to the Sea and the tactics of total war that ultimately led to victory for the Union.

Brown was unusual among Northern Abolitionists in his willingness to employ violence against slaveholders; he was virtually unique in his radical passion for complete equality and full integration into American society of African Americans, Native Americans, and women. Brown lived what her preached, spending many of his later years as a member of a largely African American community in North Elba.

In the famous raid on Harper's Ferry in 1859, Brown gave the ultimate expression to his devotion to the cause of liberation of the slaves and full equality for African Americans. With a small company of whites and African Americans, Brown seized the federal arsenal at Harper's Ferry and held off several hundred state militia until he was finally overwhelmed by Col. Robert E. Lee in command of some 60 United States Marines.

In staging the raid, Brown was inspired in part by past slave revolts led by such figures as Toussaint L'Ouverture, Denmark Vesey, and Nat Turner. That a white Northern Abolitionist would attempt to raise such a revolt on Southern soil horrified and terrified the South, giving a major impetus toward secession.

In the North, initial reaction was largely negative, as Brown's raid was derided as "suicide" and "folly." So it might have remained, were it not for the perhaps surprising response of New England Transcendentalists such as Henry David Thoreau, who wrote a lengthy Plea for Captain John Brown, and Ralph Waldo Emerson, who proclaimed that Brown's execution would "make the gallows as glorious as the cross." In the event, Brown became a hero to the North, thousands of whose troops marched South singing, "John Brown's body lies a mouldering in the grave." If Brown assumed an almost Christ-like status in the North, in the South he was regarded as the devil incarnate.

Reynolds' history is particularly effective as "cultural history." He deftly explores the religious antecedents to Brown, who was often characterized as an old-style Puritan in the mold of Oliver Cromwell and whose favorite sermon was John Edwards' Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God. He persuasively explains how the influences of the New England Transcendentalists helped shape public perceptions of Brown that hardened the nation's attitudes toward war. And he has a thoughtful coda on Brown's influence on such prominent African American figures as Frederick Douglass (a friend), W.E.B. DuBois, and Malcolm X.

White opinion of Brown reached its nadir after the collapse of Reconstruction, and it is no surprise that Southern revisionist historians derided him as a lunatic. Books such as Reynolds', however, suggest that while Brown may have been capable of great brutality (albeit also great kindness), he was far from being insane, and that the nobility of his conduct during and following the raid on Harper's Ferry was a crucial element in galvanizing public determination to end the evil of slavery.