John Brown’s Vexed Legacy
Historians can’t stop saying it: John Brown still lives. As long as there are causes worth dying for, he always will. Brown’s allure, epitomized by his 1859 botched raid on the Federal armory at Harper’s Ferry, was his radicalized quest to emancipate North American slaves. This he aimed to do immediately, violently, and without the time-consuming task of political or social legitimization, which he implicitly viewed with contempt. Grassroots were his home turf and pragmatism his nemesis. Politics, as he saw them, were an impotent force at best. Social beliefs were to be damned.
Evidence that Brown had tapped deeply into incipient questions about social change and radicalism in America became evident in the voluminous commentary that followed his hanging. Quickly, and not surprisingly, a clear dichotomy crystalized around the public meaning of John Brown. This debate started playing out before the Civil War ended.
Some viewed Brown as a heroic crusader who infused the abolitionist cause with moral fervor. Others, by contrast, condemned him as a lunatic fringer whose lust for violence threatened to undermine a political process that would, for all its flaws, eventually ended the legality of slavery in the United States.
The legacy of this division remains intact and, as a result, the man continues to enjoy a polarizing influence today. It is often noted that the spirit of his radicalism—which many animal rights activists claim we should nurture—was steadfastly uncompromised by moral lassitude. Less appreciated, however, is how Brown’s rage for moral perfection backfired all over the place—and mostly onto innocent bystanders.
In 1856, driven by characteristic fervor, he attacked and killed five men living in a pro-slavery camp along Pottawatomie Creek in Kansas. None of them were slave owners. All of them were fathers. A grieving widow would later send Brown a heartbreaking letter reminding him of the havoc he wrought upon the life of her family (“you can’t say you done it to free our slaves,” she wrote, “we had none, and never expected to have.” All that mattered to Brown, though, was that the area was pro-slave. He never responded to the widow.
Of course, he was busy enacting other schemes. Brown’s famous raid on Harper’s Ferry was full of hard-charging zealotry. But, logistically, it was marred by grandiose visions that the rusty nuts-and-bolts of very poor planning (and lack of support) could never fulfill. The first shot fired in the defense of the occupied armory killed a baggage handler on a passing train. That handler was a freed slave.
Brown seemed to relish his image as an impending martyr as much as he did the purity of his emancipatory ideology. When Brown’s own son lie writhing on the floor of the beseiged armory, shot by one of Robert E. Lee’s troops, Brown basically told him to shut up and die like a man. This was a cause he was dying for, after all, one bigger than him. Thus Brown’s blind rage exploded and the cause obscured the consequence.
But Brown’s failures were not just about Brown. They were—controversial claim here—the necessary result of his inflexible approach. Radical emancipatory ideology let loose upon a conventional progressive culture that values gradual change is like the proverbial bull in the china shop. Even if you are right you are going to end up wrong. Stuff that people don’t want broken, and in many cases should not be broken, is going to get broken. You, no matter how noble your cause, will get the blame. The fallout will be immense, possibly counter-productive. That’s the reality of reality (as I’ve called it before), the history we have inherited as surely and unavoidably as we inherit the genetic codes of a male and female.
This is not to suggest that we should accept the reality of reality for what it is. It’s just to acknowledge that radicalism comes with shades, some which are less stark than others. John Brown won’t let us see this. But activists for any cause must be prepared to embrace that spectrum. The upshot of this embrace would be an opportunity to avoid the ideological stagnation that Brown’s raid engendered and, to this day, sustains in its original polarized form. Thankfully, a less violent and more gradual process prevailed and, thankfully, there’s no more slavery (albeit plenty of racism).
The downside to this approach is the time it takes to achieve goals that we, surging with indignation, want to accomplish with immediacy. Accepting that trade off is often dismissed as selling out or worse. I prefer to call it growing up and learning how to make moral choices in the world as it is and not as we want it to be. For that I can, I suppose, thank John Brown.
Tomorrow: John Stuart Mill and the complexity of personal choice.
Your statement that:”a less violent and more gradual process prevailed” would seem to need more supporting data . Since the civil war started two years after JB’s death and has been characterized as the deadliest war in American history a cursory glance at these facts seems to contradict your argument. Also, while slavery is no longer legal, there are still plenty of slaves and slavery: https://www.freetheslaves.net/SSLPage.aspx?pid=301
Thanks for writing in, compostbrian. I should clarify that the violence to which I was referring was activist violence. In a sense, I had Frderick Doublass and Garrison in mind as alternatives to Brown. My fault for not being more explicit on that point. Also, I think KIng Philip’s War (aka Metacomet’s War) was the most deadly per capita in American history. For whatever that’s worth.
“The Abolitionists,” which aired recently on PBS http://video.pbs.org/video/2323777396, doesn’t speak of the baggage handler or Brown’s son, so I’m grateful to the resident historian at Eating Plants for pointing out those two tragic facts. (Not that a three-part TV series could possibly contain the multiple events and conflicting points of view of any era.)
This portion of the movie’s transcript supports your statement, “Brown seemed to relish his image as an impending martyr as much as he did the purity of his emancipatory ideology,” James:
John Brown (T. Ryder Smith): As I said, the spark — we are but the spark. There are four million men in bondage who will fly to our banner. Not immediately, of course, but even a few thousand slaves in this vicinity will fly to our aid.
Tony Horwitz, Author: [Frederick] Douglass expected Brown to unveil a mission to free slaves and funnel them north along the mountains to freedom. But when he gets to the stone quarry, Brown presents a very different plan.
John Brown (T. Ryder Smith): I know. My friend, I have been over this a thousand times. I can assure you …
Frederick Douglass (Richard Brooks): And I can assure you that you’ll be walking into a perfect steel trap …
R. Blakeslee Gilpin, Historian: He’s talking about invading the South and occupying the South and taking over the South, sort of building this republic out, one mile at a time, and that republic is going to be a new country.
Frederick Douglass (Richard Brooks): It will kill you. And it will serve no purpose. There will be a bloodbath …
John Brown (T. Ryder Smith): Without the shedding of blood, there’s no remission of sin, Douglass.
John Stauffer, Historian: Douglass spends two days trying to convince John Brown not to raid Harpers Ferry. Brown spends the same amount of time trying to convince Douglass to go to Harpers Ferry with him to be his right-hand man.
John Brown (T. Ryder Smith): My friend, the world will remember what we do here. How do you want the world to remember you? How do you want your children to remember you?
Frederick Douglass (Richard Brooks): I don’t want them to remember me as throwing my life away for nothing. Captain, it pains me more than you will know, to leave you. Mr. Green, you’ve heard Mr. Brown. What will you do?
Shields Green (Thomas Coleman): I believe I’ll go with the old man.
John Brown (T. Ryder Smith): Come with me Douglass. I will defend you with my life. I want you for a special purpose. When I strike, the bees will begin to swarm, and I shall want you to help hive them.
Narrator: Frederick Douglass returned home alone. The decision to leave Brown would haunt him for the rest of his life.
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Please continue to share your thoughts on previous social justice movements and their participants’ motives, strategies, tactics, hopes, and dreams. I imagine one day the current justice-for-nonhumans movement will be dissected by future historians in much the same way you are doing with the US slavery-and-war subject in this post.
A history lesson in a good way. Although JMC alludes to only activist violence, three very extraneous points present themselves:
First, the activist message of John Brown was useful to draw a bight ideological line to define the slavery-abolitionist issue but the majority of enfranchised white Americans were indifferent until it became linked with the overarching issue of the mercantile state’s protectionists interests which were a result of Henry Clay’s promotion of industrial capitalism, both by himself and via his assistant Abraham Lincoln. Viewed this way, slavery, a mere sideshow to white America, was an economic enabling mechanism of the free trade Southern states . Thus, slaves were not freed except as a means of economically undermining the South. Their freeing was essentially incidental in the larger context of capitalism v. an agrarian economy and John Brown’s moral indignation was an atmospheric sideshow to an audience unconcerned with mass human suffering. Only by allying to a greater and more powerful economic force were the abolitionists able to achieve their goal, although it is debatable if slavery has not merely been renamed in America. The lesson to extrapolate for animal activists and vegans is that as long as capitalism exists nothing will fundamentally change while there is a profit to be made of meat. The only means I see of achieving such change is via the mechanism of adaption to climate change: cheap food will require workers eat a near-vegan diet as meat becomes too costly to produce and subsidize.
Next, I would like to bring up that hoary chestnut of Eating Plants, the is violence in social change inevitable? question. References to Cormac McCarthy aside, the recent revelations in the “Affair Sahlins” http://www.counterpunch.org/2013/02/26/the-destruction-of-conscience-in-national-academy-of-sciences concerning Chagnon’s phony anthropological observations of Brazilian rainforest tribes actually support JMC’s hope that peaceful social change is possible, or at least not impossible. Although I am very cynical about such possibility I must now reconsider the history of violence as a contested state monopoly and that quack Richard Dawkins. I want to believe the slaves might have been freed through discourse and the world may choose to go vegan as a matter of principle, but is it reasonable to believe? John Brown did not think so, but then again he romanticized violence.
Last, is there a moral absolute to resist slavery via violence? Viewed in today’s accepted ethics there almost certainly is. But then if the proposition is absolute, how can this absolute have been viewed differently in the 1860s? In a materialist system there are no absolutes. So maybe John Brown was right. JMC disagrees with Brown concerning the use of activist violence as a mechanism for advancing “radical emancipatory ideology” and prefers moral choices. Here are a few: If the 1860s John Brown came upon an anachronistic slave plantation today (which had never heard of the 13th Amendment) and shot the slave master, would a jury convict him? Would he even be tried for an act of freeing slaves from conditions of slavery and institutional violence. Should he be?