Today's Review From
The New Republic Online
John Brown, Abolitionist: The Man Who Killed Slavery, Sparked the Civil War, and Seeded Civil Rights
by David S. Reynolds
<<>
Read today's review in HTML at:
http://www.powells.com/tnr/review/2005_10_27<>>
Homegrown Terrorist
A review by Sean Wilentz
John Brown was a violent charismatic anti-slavery terrorist and traitor, capable of cruelty to his family as well as to his foes. Every one of his murderous ventures failed to achieve its larger goals. His most famous exploit, the attack on Harpers Ferry in October 1859, actually backfired. That backfiring, and not Brown's assault or his later apotheosis by certain abolitionists and Transcendentalists, contributed something, ironically, to the hastening of southern secession and the Civil War. In a topsy-turvy way, Brown may have advanced the anti-slavery cause. Otherwise, he actually damaged the mainstream campaign against slavery, which by the late 1850s was a serious mass political movement contending for national power, and not, as Brown and some of his radical friends saw it, a fraud even more dangerous to the cause of liberty than the slaveholders.
This accounting runs against the grain of the usual historical assessments, and also against the grain of David S. Reynolds's "cultural biography" of Brown. The interpretations fall, roughly, into two camps. They agree only about the man's unique importance. Writers hostile to Brown describe him as not merely fanatical but insane, the craziest of all the crazy abolitionists whose agitation drove the country mad and caused the catastrophic, fratricidal, and unnecessary war. Brown's admirers describe his hatred of slavery as a singular sign of sanity in a nation awash in the mental pathologies of racism and bondage. Alone of the northern white abolitionist leaders, they say, Brown was willing to put his life on the line by taking up arms alongside blacks against the accursed institution; and in doing so he fired the shots that triggered the Civil War. Unlike inconsistent moderates such as Abraham Lincoln (who, Brown's champions assure us, had no interest in destroying slavery at the war's outbreak, only in saving the Union), Brown saw slavery for the enormity that it was, and fought for racial equality as well as emancipation. He was, as W.E.B. DuBois wrote in a celebratory biography, "the man who of all Americans has perhaps come nearest to touching the real souls of black folk." Most important, DuBois concluded, "John Brown was right."
More:
http://www.powells.com/tnr/review/2005_10_27It's pretty long. I haven't finished it yet, even; but it's a pretty interesting review, especially for a newbie like me.