September 1, 2006
In Defense of John Brown Posted by Fredric Smoler at 10:00 AM EST Fred Schwarz writes that while “people [who] used persuasion, law, and direct action to restrict, expose, and nullify slavery as far as it was possible” were heroic, their heroism is irrelevant to the business of judging John Brown: “John Brown, by contrast, achieved nothing at Harpers Ferry, and he did it at the cost of many lives and much increased bitterness.” He concludes that Brown “was not a hero. He was just a crazy fool.”
What about the argument that the raid on Harpers Ferry provoked the war that brought slavery to an end? Fred argues that “The raid does seem to have heightened the already severe sectional conflict, and it may have brought civil war five or ten years sooner than it otherwise would have occurred, but if so, it’s unclear whether this was good or bad. He “suggest[s] very tentatively that the North was industrializing much faster than the South and developing new weapons as well, so a war that began in 1865 or 1869 would probably have ended much quicker.”
One can argue the contrary: Gatling’s 1861 version of a machine gun could already fire 200 rounds a minute, and Michael Kelly invented pretty good barbed wire in 1868. Sunken lanes defended by muzzle loaders were hard enough to take with nineteenth-century offensive weapons; given a few more years and some modest luck, Confederate generals could have made the Potomac as gorily famous as the Somme.
That observation does not seem to me to be an adequate response to Fred Schwarz’s post. Neither does pointing out a possible contradiction in his argument (I am not sure how Brown can simultaneously have accelerated the war by perhaps a decade and achieved nothing). I think the problem is that John Brown seems both a kind of monster and a greater and more tragic figure than Fred Schwarz’s account allows. In an age of terrorism, a terrorist in a just cause is not an easy man to defend. Still, a partial defense seems to me to be necessary.
What about the Pottawotamie Massacre, where Fred Schwarz notes that Brown killed proslavery settlers in cold blood? It seems to some degree relevant that the massacre was part of a very ugly fight that Brown’s side did not begin. (Brown himself was provoked by both the earlier Lawrence raid, and by Preston Brooks’s assault on Charles Sumner, on the floor of the Senate.) So Brown was a terrorist who used terror against men who had employed it first, and in a vicious cause, the worst cause for which Americans have ever fought. At Pottawotamie, he murdered five or six men—the accounts I have seen vary—but spared a 16-year-old boy who was not a member of a political society that employed violence in that worst of causes. This is modest forbearance, although more than many modern terrorists show. Does that forbearance to any degree soften our judgment of Brown as a terrorist? I think it does, although I am not sure how much.
In an age when murder of civilians is frequently and joyously done, usually with the conviction of utter righteousness, Brown is an embarrassing hero, but it seems important to acknowledge that he was a hero to an impressive collection of nineteenth-century Americans. So while I do not know what an adequate response to Fred Schwarz’s argument would be, I do know that on May 28, 1863, the Massachusetts 54th Regiment, the first black unit in the United States Army, paraded in review in Boston singing “John Brown’s Body.” And I know that in 1881, at Harpers Ferry, Frederick Douglass observed that John Brown “had practically illustrated a truth stranger than fiction,—a truth higher than Virginia had ever known,—a truth more noble and beautiful than Jefferson ever wrote.” And as Douglass said on the same occasion, “If John Brown did not end the war that ended slavery, he did at least begin the war that ended slavery.”
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