John Brown: Madman or Supremely Sane?

A new book reevaluates the still-controversial insurrectionist.

The picture of John Brown that has come down through time is largely that of a madman, a fanatic. The leader of the failed 1859 raid on the U.S. arsenal at Harpers Ferry, Virginia, who hoped to touch off a massive slave rebellion, was deranged, a violent psychotic, “a brutal murderer if ever there was one,” wrote the historian Bruce Catton in 1961. But Evan Carton, an English professor at the University of Texas, argues otherwise in his thoughtful, well-researched new biography of Brown, Patriotic Treason: John Brown and the Soul of America.

As Carton sees it, Brown was no psychotic but rather an immensely principled activist, a revolutionary whose dedication—whose sacrifice of his life—to the cause of freeing America’s slaves has much to teach a morally relativistic, ethically relaxed age.

Perhaps the chief reason for the verdict of fanaticism was Brown’s espousal of violence. Not only were lives taken at Harpers Ferry, but three years earlier Brown had overseen the killing of five proslavery settlers in the Kansas Territory. Yet his advocacy and use of violence need to be viewed against the failure of mainstream abolitionism, preaching nonviolent moral suasion, to make a dent in slavery’s thick hide. “It had seemed for a while,“ Carton writes, “that abolitionism was the arena in which intellectual men could act again, reclaiming the country for its founding principles. But [the abolitionist leader William Lloyd] Garrison’s mighty rhetoric had proved mighty in rhetoric alone.”

Years of abolitionist speechifying had not kept slavery from increasing its strength and advantages. By the 1840s and ’50s a growing number of antislavery fighters felt that more emphatic means than argument were necessary, and Brown was one of them. When he met the ex-slave and eloquent abolitionist Frederick Douglass, with whom he became close friends, the two engaged in a long and searching colloquy on how to overthrow slavery. Perhaps, offered Douglass, the slaveholder might still be converted by peaceful means.

“No,” Brown almost shouted. “I know their proud hearts. They will never be induced to give up their slaves until they feel a big stick about their heads.”

Taking up arms in the cause of their own freedom, Brown told Douglass, would in itself be liberating for slaves, giving them a sense of manhood. The British of the 1770s, he argued elsewhere, didn’t respect the colonists, and didn’t fully acknowledge their seriousness, until the Americans showed that they were ready to fight for their liberty. As Carton points out, Brown never stopped making parallels between the antislavery struggle and the American Revolution. He was fond of saying, “I believe in the Golden Rule”—for Brown the ultimate antislavery principle—“and the Declaration of Independence. I think they mean the same thing.”

One reason for the lingering notion of Brown’s madness, Carton argues, is disbelief that a white man would lay down his life for blacks: A white man who “lived, went to war, and died to help win black people’s rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. . . . must have been deranged or fanatical.” As Malcolm X once said, “John Brown . . . was a white man who went to war against white people to help free slaves. And any white man who is ready and willing to shed blood for your freedom—in the sight of other whites, he’s nuts.”

Far from a psychotic fanaticism, Carton argues, what drove Brown was deep principle, derived ultimately from the Bible, whose Jews had freed themselves from slavery. “Christianity for Brown was a liberation theology,” he writes, “one that required powerful faith and—when the moment was right—power politics.” To Carton, Brown is quite simply a hero, a man of principle who was not content to merely argue principles but was ready to make the ultimate sacrifice for them. He remains a hero for today, Carton writes in his epilogue, “The Unfinished American Revolution.” Today’s multiculturalism leads all too easily “to the cynical relativism that claims there are as many truths and moralities as there are identity groups.” For John Brown, slavery’s wrongfulness was a universal evil, to be fought, if necessary, with one’s life.

Up until the 1970s and later, writers on Brown typically subscribed fully to the madman notion. Although more recent historians have balanced the picture, Carton claims that they still fail to fill in Brown’s human characteristics; most scholars’ Brown remains “abstract and alien.” To Carton, he was intensely, vividly human, “a man of deep, varied, and sometimes conflicting capacities: for reason and faith, practicality and idealism, harshness and tenderness, isolation and intimacy, blindness, vision, transformation.” Accordingly, Carton sets out to present him as flesh and blood. Digging deep into letters and other documents, he succeeds handsomely. A series of vignettes drawn from Patriotic Treason indicates some of the contours of Brown’s complex humanity.

Though Brown learned abolitionism first from his stern Calvinist father, he “dated his personal abolitionist convictions” to an episode early in his adolescence. He was staying in the Michigan home of a man who treated him “like a favorite nephew.” In the same household was a black serving boy, with whom he quickly became friends. Brown recognized that the boy was his superior in a host of qualities. Yet the black youth was badly clothed, badly fed, and ridiculed by his master. At one point Brown watched in horror as his host beat the boy with a shovel for some minor infraction. Falling asleep, John “imagined that he still heard the boy’s muffled sobs.” The event made a lasting impression on him, and he often spoke of it. Why should such a promising, capable soul be so brutally rewarded? ”Sometimes,” Carton writes, Brown “even posed the question to himself whether [black] children had a caring father in God.”

As remote as he could be, Brown had deep feelings about the people in his life. The first of his two wives, Dianthe, died in childbirth. He was devastated; barely able to function, he moved his family and himself in with neighbors. One day his oldest son, John Jr., happened past the empty Brown house and saw his father lying face-down on Dianthe’s grave, howling in agony. It’s a very different picture from the one we have of the doughty stoic.

A stern but affectionate father, he was unstinting of himself in his efforts to set a moral example. He kept an account book of the spirited, stubborn John Jr.’s misdeeds. When the list reached 25, he took John Jr. aside, read him the list, discussed each infraction, and proceeded to whip the boy with a beech switch. But he stopped after eight blows.

“Seventeen more lashes are due, John,” he said, “and I will take them myself. I am your father, and it is on me that blame must fall for failing to teach you your duties.” The boy, bursting into sobs, began whipping his father’s back. Blood dripped from the switch when Brown finally raised himself from the floor, the whipping over. “After that,” John Jr. later said, “nothing could ever persuade me that my father could possibly do anything wrong.” As demanding as Brown was, none of his children—he had 20—“ever grew alienated from their father,” Carton writes.

One of black abolitionists’ grudges against their white counterparts was the latter’s retention of all the usual prejudices against blacks. But Brown was remarkably prejudice-free. “Virtually alone among nineteenth-century white Americans,” Carton writes, “John Brown managed not only to free himself of the pervasive and supposedly scientifically respectable white supremacism of his time but also to develop personal relationships with black people”—not only the distinguished Douglass but many humbler blacks—“that were sustained, intimate, trusting and egalitarian.” He had an “utter lack of discomfort” in his dealings with blacks, and “the manner of a man who took it as a given that he and his interlocutors were both creations of a God who was no respecter of persons.”

He could be maddeningly high-minded and impersonal. A gruesome instance of this came during the siege at Harpers Ferry. One of the raiders’ hostages was Col. Lewis Washington, a great-grandnephew of the first President. Brown treated the hostages well, engaging them in spirited debate about the sufferings of blacks and Christian duty. Meanwhile Brown’s 20-year-old son Oliver lay mortally wounded, begging his father to shoot him and put him out of his misery. Washington, says Carton, wondered what manner of man “could so steel himself to the present agony of his own flesh and blood while he discoursed so passionately about the distant tribulations of strangers.”

If Brown was almost always brave in facing danger, he had his moments of weakness. After he was sentenced to hang, he and his wife, Mary, were allowed to take their last supper together in the Charlestown, Virginia, jail. When it was time for Mary to go, he burst into tears, pleading with the jailer to let his wife sit with him on his last night on earth. “Just as quickly,” writes Carton, he “regained control. . . . He blessed his wife, embraced her one last time, commended her to God, and let her go.”

Carton’s John Brown is a man of tremendous courage, all the more so for the times it failed him. Such a man makes a reader wonder if, thrust into circumstances a tenth as demanding as those Brown faced, he himself would act a tenth as bravely.

—Tony Scherman is a writer who lives in Nyack, New York.