John Brown: was he a hero or a terrorist?

[greenbriar]

This is the persuasive writing essay prompt my students have to do next week.


I am trying to give them all the info necessary to make an informed paper



what say you?

let me add, this is not my prompt but the districts. All 7th graders are doing this same writing in the next two weeks. I think it is a fascinating subject, but also a little deep for these students as they really do not have an extensive knowledge of John Brown and we do not have the time to do a complete study as I would like to do.



http://images.google.com/imgres?imgurl=&imgrefurl=http://www.cs.cornell.edu/nystrom/images/Antietam/pages/page_17.html&usg=__KmKI1-z8J71akvpfrkwfDBotK4I=&h=1005&w=1600&sz=549&hl=en&start=2&tbnid=MNOyol6SMufvBM:&tbnh=94&tbnw=150&prev=/images%3Fq%3Djohn%2Bbrown%26gbv%3D2%26hl%3Den

[Bolo Boffin]

1. Great topic.

Next, ask about the Boston Tea Party. Oops!

[greenbriar]

9. if you say both, give some details please

I want to see the points that will be brought up

[Davis_X_Machina]

2. Pretty clearly Potawatomie and Harpers' Ferry both

...fit the present-day legal definition of 'terrorism' in 22 USC 2656: "The term "terrorism" means premeditated, politically motivated violence perpetrated against noncombatant targets by subnational groups or clandestine agents, usually intended to influence an audience."

[Sequoia]

3. Hero.

"Now, if it is deemed necessary that I should forfeit my life for the furtherance of the ends of justice, and mingle my blood further with the blood of my children and with the blood of millions in this slave country whose rights are disregarded by wicked, cruel, and unjust enactments--I submit; so let it be done!" John Brown



John Brown's body lies a-mold'ring in the grave
John Brown's body lies a-mold'ring in the grave
John Brown's body lies a-mold'ring in the grave
His soul goes marching on

Glory, Glory! Hallelujah!
Glory, Glory! Hallelujah!
Glory, Glory! Hallelujah!
His soul is marching on

He captured Harper's Ferry with his nineteen men so true
He frightened old Virginia till she trembled
through and through
They hung him for a traitor, themselves the traitor crew
His soul is marching on


Glory, Glory! Hallelujah!
Glory, Glory! Hallelujah!
Glory, Glory! Hallelujah!

His soul is marching on
John Brown died that the slave might be free,
John Brown died that the slave might be free,
John Brown died that the slave might be free,
But his soul is marching on!

Glory, Glory! Hallelujah!
Glory, Glory! Hallelujah!
Glory, Glory! Hallelujah!
His soul is marching on

The stars above in Heaven are looking kindly down
The stars above in Heaven are looking kindly down
The stars above in Heaven are looking kindly down
On the grave of old John Brown

Glory, Glory! Hallelujah!
Glory, Glory! Hallelujah!
Glory, Glory! Hallelujah!
His soul is marching on

Song sung around the campfires of the Union Army.

[greenbriar]

4. do the ends justify the means?

is it okay to kill all slave owners to free the slaves?


I asked that today...many said yea

[The Straight Story]

5. Both - a hero for a cause, a terrorist for the methods employed

:)

[summer borealis]

6. He was both

[nomorenomore08]

7. It's easy 150 years later to see him as heroic, and I agree with that view myself.

But as mentioned by someone upthread, his actions did meet the legal definition of "terrorism." And of course, anyone using violence to further a political end, no matter what that end is, thinks his/her cause is just. Just goes to show that "right" and "wrong" are subjective concepts, and that hindsight is always 20/20...

[Marr]

31. It was easy to see him as a hero at the time, as well.

He was a sympathetic and popular character in his own time. I'd say much more so than he is today, in fact.

[jaysunb]

8. Both

n/t

[watrwefitinfor]

10. I believe him quite heroic.

And perhaps a little mad. Interesting, though, all those who followed him, in both Kansas and Virginia. He must have had great personal appeal.

Wat

[Xithras]

11. People today confuse the terms rebel and terrorist. He was the former, and there is a difference.

A terrorist kills unarmed innocent people in order to scare the larger population into caving to their demands. A rebel doesn't care about getting the population to cave, but instead simply uses force to achieve his means directly.

Brown was a rebel and an insurrectionist, he wasn't a terrorist. He wasn't trying to scare America into banning slavery, he was trying to free them himself, by force.

[ManiacJoe]

41. That pretty much says it for me, too.

[anonymous171]

12. Both. nt

[yellowcanine]

13. I would say neither. He tried to start an insurrection and failed.

Nobody was really terrorized and he essentially accomplished nothing except getting some people killed.

[coalition_unwilling]

16. Your opinion stands in stark contrast to

that of Frederick Douglass, who nnted that while he had lived his life to free the slaves, Brown had died to free them.

You might want to read Stephen Oates' "To Purge This Land With Blood," before making such a cavalier assessment.

[tabasco]

14. He would have done better to support abolitionist pro-war efforts in the North

rather than conduct an armed insurrection.

He may have made a good officer in the Union army, who knows?

Personally, I consider him heroic but misguided.

[DearAbby]

15. Placing myself

in that time period, I would have to view his acts as terrorism. The acts of violence were not justified. What was accomplished via his actions? Was war the only means to the same goal? Did we have to inflict this bloody wound upon ourselves to rid the country of the cancer called slavery? Looking back, it took another 100 yrs for Blacks to gain a semblance of equal rights. Makes you wonder who profited most on the Civil war?

Great essay topic for teaching, bravo.

[coalition_unwilling]

20. You write that the "acts of violence

were not justified" but are you aware of "Bleeding Kansas" (where Brown first made his bones)? To say nothing of the massive violence perpetrated on African Americans by Southern slaveholders and their mercenary agents?

Brown's "acts of violence" pale to insignificance in comparison.

Last time I checked, Abe Lincoln did not fire the first shots at Fort Sumpter. As James McPherson has noted, the South could have re-joined the Umion after McClellan's botched Peninsula campaign with its vile institution largely intact. That it did not do so suggests that the South willfully chose war, while the North had war forced upon it.

[DearAbby]

23. John Brown's act preceded the war

as did the acts of bleeding Kansas. The war was fought because the states had considered seceding from the nation, nothing about slavery was stated until the fall of 1862 with the proclamation, again a considerable amount of time following John Brown's failed attempt to start an insurrection.

I have the advantage of looking back. Seeing the after effects, what changes the proclamation had, when it took 100 years following the surrender of Lee, for Black Americans to gain their full rights. I can see very little the war had on that issue.

[Hanse]

29. So the Civil War wasn't about slavery, and didn't really accomplish anything.

OK.

Thanks for the Bluto Blutarski "did we give up when the Germans bombed Pearl Harbor" point of view.

[DearAbby]

30. think about it

I view the Civil war as incomplete..the North won the shooting war..it was the second part of the war the North lost...the Reconstruction. And thanks for the snide "Bluto Blutarski" remark. :eyes:

The war was started over the State's individual right to secede. Lincoln felt otherwise. It took two years into the war to even introduce the Freeing the slaves, I would think if Slavery was the main reason of the war, the Proclamation would have been introduced at the start of the war.

[RoyGBiv]

36. delete

dupe glitch

[RoyGBiv]

37. You're confusing two things ...

You are conflating the reasons for secession with the reasons for opposition to secession that led to war. That the Union took up arms to subdue the seceding states and preserve the union regardless of the question of slavery does not invalidate the very bald fact that the states that attempted secession did so directly because they felt/believed/were hysterical about the possibility that slavery as an institution was in jeopardy of being ended.

The Union didn't go to war to free the slaves, but the South damn well did go to war to keep them.

[DearAbby]

38. Very true...and said much better than I could have...

Now another question would be...Does any state have the right to secede from the union? That would be opening another can of worms.

[leftofthedial]

17. yes.

the two are not mutually exclusive.

[Ikonoklast]

18. Misguided.

Murdering innocent people in a just cause is still murder.

[WeDidIt]

19. Terrorist

I put him in the same category as anti-abortion doctor murderers.

He's up there with OSama bin LAden, too, it's just that bin LAden had more efficient means of killing people.

[JVS]

21. Herorrist

[KG]

22. a nut.

[Saboburns]

24. John Brown wasn't misguided. He was very, very focused.

He experienced the most appalling thing a human could witness.

And he did something about it.

Good for him.

[greenbriar]

25. many believe the bigger his ego got, the more crazy he got

I don't particularly think of him as a hero, I don't condone murder no matter the cause

[oxygen destroyer]

26. He was a credit to his race

[oxygen destroyer]

27. In other words, one of the good ones

[RoyGBiv]

28. 7th Graders? Seriously?

Huh ... I've seen this sort of question perplex people who have had their PhDs for years.

Anyway, the inventive student might do what inventive students do and reject the premise of a natural dichotomy, which is what many scholarly debates on this kind of question tend to do. The thesis might be that one can be both a hero and a terrorist, depending on one's point of view. Or, one could focus on the definition of terrorism and describe Brown's actions as having the intent to instill terror and that some found these actions heroic for one reason or another.

For my part, I have not seen (and cannot imagine) any rational argument that would indicate that one of John Brown's primary goals was to inflict terror, which by definition makes him a terrorist. Ironically enough, that part worked. He terrorized a lot of people so well that an argument can be made ascribing the resulting fear as a significant portion of the impetus that drove southern secession. And then there was his "heroic" behavior while awaiting the gallows, on the gallows, and the resultant public reaction in the Northeast that painted him as a martyr, i.e. a hero. In fact, if you take out the name and specific details of the circumstances, you could describe John Brown in a manner that makes him almost indistinguishable from many individuals some today describe as terrorists and that others describes as heroes.

[AnotherDreamWeaver]

32. Wow, is the district keeping track of the students responses?

Do the students have computers to do web searches on John Brown?

He did make a name for himself. Checking Wikipedia I find this paragraph:
Pottawatomie
Main article: Pottawatomie Massacre
Brown and the free state settlers were optimistic that they could bring Kansas into the union as a slavery-free state. But in late 1855 and early 1856 it was increasingly clear to Brown that pro-slavery forces were willing to violate the rule of law in order to force Kansas to become a slave state. Brown believed that terrorism, fraud, and eventually deadly attacks became the obvious agenda of the pro-slavery supporters, then known as "Border Ruffians." After the winter snows thawed in 1856, the pro-slavery activists began a campaign to seize Kansas on their own terms. Brown was particularly affected by the Sacking of Lawrence in May 1856, in which a sheriff-led posse destroyed newspaper offices and a hotel. Only one man was killed, and it was a Border Ruffian. Preston Brooks's caning of anti-slavery Senator Charles Sumner also fueled Brown's anger. These violent acts were accompanied by celebrations in the pro-slavery press, with writers such as Benjamin Franklin Stringfellow of the Squatter Sovereign proclaiming that pro-slavery forces "are determined to repel this Northern invasion, and make Kansas a Slave State; though our rivers should be covered with the blood of their victims, and the carcasses of the Abolitionists should be so numerous in the territory as to breed disease and sickness, we will not be deterred from our purpose" (quoted in Reynolds, p. 162). Brown was outraged by both the violence of the pro-slavery forces, and also by what he saw as a weak and cowardly response by the antislavery partisans and the Free State settlers, who he described as "cowards, or worse" (Reynolds pp. 163–164).

Reading further in the article it sure sounds like he is defending the terrorism of the southern "Border Ruffians".

Sounds like just a hero to me, defending his sons property.

I'm from Calif. and had to look up his history.

[fujiyama]

33. Both

and a bit deluded as well.

He was morally just in acting to defeat an obvious evil, but his methods were arguably wrong.

I suppose, we can look at it in the context of the times and war in general. How do we view "collateral damage" in general? If we view Brown's actions as part of a larger war on the institution of slavery itself, the slaveholders may be seen as collateral damage - though, I suppose it can be asked if they were truly civilians in the traditional sense if they participated to protect the institution.

Brown's actions still resonate because it poses eternal questions of how many lives should be risked for the greater good and what the price of martyrdom is worth...

[Vidar]

34. The fairest answer is both.

[JonLP24]

35. It's hard for me to label him a terrorist when the pro-slavery forces were militant

I believe his actions where in response to their actions. Violence was common as well during that era so I consider him a man of the era. Kansas I feel he was mostly protecting his family and trying to keep it an anti-slave state. The raid I feel was well intended but many things went wrong. I think he lit the spark that led to the civil war and the ending of slavery. I can't predict what would've happened if it wasn't for him but before all the violence he was truly a great man. I watched a history channel documentary of him and I absolutely feel in love with him. I did not make it to the violent parts to have a complete view but I know full well the pro-slavery forces were militant and I feel his actions were in response to their actions. These are just opinions but I find it real hard to label him a terrorist when it seemed battles were common for that era. He was just a man of the era imo.

[JoseGaspar]

39. What a question.

This is Fredrick Douglas on John Brown:

"The true question is, Did John Brown draw his sword against slavery and thereby lose his life in vain? And to this I answer ten thousand times, No! No man fails, or can fail, who so grandly gives himself and all he has to a righteous cause. No man, who in his hour of extremest need, when on his way to meet an ignominious death, could so forget himself as to stop and kiss a little child, one of the hated race for whom he was about to die, could by any possibility fail.

"Did John Brown fail? Ask James M. Mason, the author of the inhuman fugitive slave bill, who was cooped up in Fort Warren, as a traitor less than two years from the time that he stood over the prostrate body of John Brown.

"Did John Brown fail? Ask Clement C. Vallandingham, one other of the inquisitorial party; for he too went down in the tremendous whirlpool created by the powerful hand of this bold invader. If John Brown did not end the war that ended slavery, he did at least begin the war that ended slavery. If we look over the dates, places and men for which this honor is claimed, we shall find that not Carolina, but Virginia, not Fort Sumter, but Harpers Ferry, and the arsenal, not Col. Anderson, but John Brown, began the war that ended American slavery and made this a free Republic. Until this blow was struck, the prospect for freedom was dim, shadowy and uncertain. The irrepressible conflict was one of words, votes and compromises.

"When John Brown stretched forth his arm the sky was cleared. The time for compromises was gone – the armed hosts of freedom stood face to face over the chasm of a broken Union – and the clash of arms was at hand. The South staked all upon getting possession of the Federal Government, and failing to do that, drew the sword of rebellion and thus made her own, and not Brown's, the lost cause of the century."

John Brown was one of the greatest heroes in American history. 300,000 poor farmers from Iowa, factory workers from New York, German immigrants from St. Louis and "colored" freeman from New England went to their deaths singing his name. If you don't get why, its time to go read some more history.

I have a question for you:

When did America become so sissified (to use a George Carlin term)?

[LWolf]

40. Great prompt.

I wish I'd thought of it, or you'd posted it, a few weeks ago. My 8th graders were just reading about John Brown this week, but they finished a persuasive essay on another topic last week.