Today is the 150th anniversary of John Brown's abolitionist raid on Harper's Ferry, and the commemorations are underway.
posted by Pope Guilty (121 comments total) 13 users marked this as a favorite

It's a shame how it's only kosher to be an uppity revolutionary in this country once you're dead.
posted by dunkadunc at 9:53 PM on October 15, 2009 [2 favorites]

I dunno that I'd call it "kosher"- Brown is hardly an uncontroversial figure even today.
posted by Pope Guilty at 10:02 PM on October 15, 2009

This is where I note that West Virginia is West Virginia, it's own state in its own right, because they were abolitionist, and dead-set against secession. Virginia is Confederacy - West Virginia is a solid, stout bulwark of the Union, as anti-slavery and pro-industrial as states come.

This is where I also note that West Virginia was destroyed by Virginia in a courtroom sympathetic to Johnny Reb for their commitment to the Union. Funds and revenues that should have modernized and developed the state were stolen, and instead left it deep in the 19th century, while other Northern states, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Maryland, etc, were able to capitalize and profit on the 20th century's manufacturing boom.

This is why West Virginia is a "joke", when it should be a beacon of American pride - they are poor and backwards, because they were fucked over by racist redneck suckups. This is why West Virginia is a borderline third-world culture, instead of a solid, contributing member of the American Rust Belt.
posted by Slap*Happy at 10:03 PM on October 15, 2009 [40 favorites]

John Brown was a religious nut and a terrorist. As much as we are for the abolition of slavery, the treatment of Abolition (with the capital "A") exclusively as a moral problem rather than as a moral, political, and economic problem caused a war and arguably lead to the twin problems of Reconstruction and Jim Crow.

Notice that of all the nations that practiced slavery, from Britain to Brazil to the United States, only the United States required a civil war to achieve abolition. While the reasons for this are complex, and much blame can be laid at the feet of intransigent defenders of the "peculiar institution", probably the greatest blame attaches to those who saw Abolition as an almost religious cause.

Yes, we should be horrified by the evils of slavery, but not so horrified that we desire, as the radical Abolitionists did, to expiate the national sin by washing in the blood of the lamb, in Bloody Kansas and later Antietam.
posted by orthogonality at 10:09 PM on October 15, 2009 [6 favorites]

was just reading about this last night, not sure if the first article goes into this at all (will read it later), but there is a good argument that Harper's Ferry lead to Lincoln (an underdog) winning the election. The reaction to Harper's Ferry split the Democrat party, and threw the leadership of the Republicans into turmoil, Lincoln he was seen as a moderate at the time, and won with something like 40% of the popular vote from a field of four candidates. If the election had been a straight traditional two party race I wouldn't have bet a plugged nickle on Lincoln's chance.

I have conflicted feelings about Brown, on one hand I greatly admire his passion and all out commitment. Harriet Tubman and Fredrick Douglass both considered Brown as a close kin and the only white person who truly understood their plight, but neither of them would have anything to do with Brown's plans for Harper's Ferry- on the other hand I can't condone much of his actions (e.q hacking 5 pro-slavery men to death with hatchets in the wilds of Eastern Kansas)... I think I understand why he did the things he did but just can't make the leap to defending the actions as much as I laud the sentiments behind them, and sympathize with the feeling that provoked the actions. Hell, in 1856 Senator and outspoken abolitionist Charles Summer was beaten senseless on the floor of the senate by a congressman from South Carolina!

It is interesting how many people claim solidarity with Brown, Eugine Debs, Tim McVeigh, Malcolm X, violent anti-abortionists...
posted by edgeways at 10:12 PM on October 15, 2009

A book that's very interesting - not so much historically, but contextually is Russell Banks Cloudsplitter. It's about Brown and his family. Banks toys with timelines etc. but in my opinion does an admirable (and interesting) job of illustrating the complexities of Brown and the political and social situation of the milieu.
posted by smoke at 10:19 PM on October 15, 2009

I only know about Brown via Russel Banks' fabulous novel, Cloudsplitter, so I'm not sure what is truth and what is pure invention. But clearly he was a driven and compelling person, not someone I might wish to have as a neighbor (or heaven forbid, a father), but at the same time maybe a necessary person in history. He someone went from the moral clarity of anti-slavery to the less morally-clear step of violent insurrection; I'm not sure I agree but I'm also not sure I disagree.
posted by Forktine at 10:19 PM on October 15, 2009

oh PS, one thing that Banks really does highlight is how many anti-slavery people believed that if things continued as they did that "free" states would disappear entirely. They were basically fighting a war before it was declared. Whether that was prescient or precursor is another question.
posted by smoke at 10:21 PM on October 15, 2009

John Brown in song:

John Brown's Body (Wikipedia)

PBS feature (with audiofile) (from "The American Experience")
posted by flapjax at midnite at 10:30 PM on October 15, 2009

Yes, we should be horrified by the evils of slavery, but not so horrified that we desire, as the radical Abolitionists did, to expiate the national sin by washing in the blood of the lamb, in Bloody Kansas and later Antietam.

The south started the war, not the Abolitionists, so I'm not sure what you're point is.

As in aside, if you're ever in the DC area, Harper's Ferry is well worth a day trip. Bring a picnic basket and lots of bug spray.
posted by empath at 11:25 PM on October 15, 2009 [2 favorites]

But I do agree that there's not much difference between John Brown and the folks that kill abortion doctors.
posted by empath at 11:26 PM on October 15, 2009

Brown, Eugine Debs, Tim McVeigh, Malcolm X, violent anti-abortionists

Can you fill me in on how Debs fits in? I don't know that much about him but I thought he was a pacifist. Not snarking, genuinely curious.
posted by naoko at 11:41 PM on October 15, 2009 [2 favorites]

The problem with lauding John Brown is that, even if it's technically possible to separate and compartmentalize in our minds his abolitionism from the violent means he employed — means which are well into terrorism by any reasonable definition — there are lots of other figures in the abolitionist movement who didn't venture down that particularly slippery slope.

There is no reason to remember him except as a cautionary tale, of what sort of monster even the best of intentions can make you.

And that's assuming we give him the benefit of the doubt in retrospect, and assume that his methods and violence were a result of his fervor for his cause, and not the other way around; a possibility that strikes me as far more likely, given the number of very committed abolitionists who did not hack anyone to death with swords.
posted by Kadin2048 at 12:22 AM on October 16, 2009 [5 favorites]

"Notice that of all the nations that practiced slavery, from Britain to Brazil to the United States, only the United States required a civil war to achieve abolition."

Oh please. Slavery in America was different than in other nations because of the unquenchable thirst of southern plantation owners for it. And sure, the Civil War was about economics. But guess what the proverbial engine of the southern economy was? Slave labor.

Not that working in a 19th century factory is my idea of paradise either, but you can't separate the question of slavery from the economic fundamentals of the 19th century south. You can try and deny slavery was the foremost issue that led to the Civil War, but you wind up smacking your face into the fact of its dominance over all aspects of southern life, culture, and economics.

And none of this is was the fault of abolitionists.
posted by bardic at 12:24 AM on October 16, 2009 [15 favorites]

It is interesting how many people claim solidarity with Brown, Eugine Debs, Tim McVeigh, Malcolm X, violent anti-abortionists...

It is interesting how Johnny-Fucking-Reb tries to control the terms of the debate. To this, I add my reasoned and logical reply: Shuddup, slaver.

We died by the thousands to see you and yours tossed onto the slagheap of history, and if for a minute you think I'm gonna let you and your little reb friends slander my Great-Greats as tools of some industrial conspiracy instead of honoring them as sacrifice-the-farm Patriots, well, welcome to the new school of Civil War enthusiast. I'd take my kicks now, but the surviving relatives of the Iron Brigade get first dibs on your slaver ass.
posted by Slap*Happy at 12:25 AM on October 16, 2009 [12 favorites]

You can try and deny slavery was the foremost issue that led to the Civil War, but you wind up smacking your face into the fact of its dominance over all aspects of southern life, culture, and economics.

Well, and that the Articles of Secession all pretty much come right out and say that it's about slavery.
posted by Pope Guilty at 12:27 AM on October 16, 2009 [5 favorites]

Also Eugene Debs was one of the greatest American figures of the first part of the last century and if you have a problem with him it's because you are either speaking of things you do not know about or your opinions are seriously deleterious to human wellbeing.
posted by Pope Guilty at 12:29 AM on October 16, 2009 [7 favorites]

Harriet Tubman and Fredrick Douglass both considered Brown as a close kin and the only white person who truly understood their plight, but neither of them would have anything to do with Brown's plans for Harper's Ferry

I believe it's the first link in my post that mentions that Tubman planned to join the raid but was sick.
posted by Pope Guilty at 12:30 AM on October 16, 2009

Hey, bardic, way to catch up.

All you wrote I assume was a foregone conclusion.
posted by sourwookie at 12:48 AM on October 16, 2009

No, I agree the war was about slavery.

Though for most Northerners, about the "Slave Power" ("Slave Power Conspiracy") than about the morality of slavery. That is, if we don't oppose the South, the South will enslave us. (And certainly, the South had been imposing its will for years, as demonstrated by the various Compromises and the Fugitive Slave Act.)

But for the Abolitionists, it was about morality, and all the more so for the Radical Abolitionists (as opposed to the Gradualists). For them, it wasn't just a matter of ending slavery; it had to be ended now, and moreover, the sin had to be expiated, redeemed, in blood.

And while most Northerners were not Abolitionists, the Abolitionists managed to frame the argument, to people the Northern image of the South with evil Simon Legrees and saintly Uncle Toms, and the pathetic Eliza Crossing the Ice. Which imagery, while it didn't convince the North to go to war to save the slaves, convinced them that Southerners were amoral evil brrutes, and that the Slave Power Conspiracy of these evil Southerners was real, and a real threat.

There's a parallel, I think, with the Cold War imagery -- we didn't go to Vietnam for the freedom of the Vietnamese -- we went to oppose the "threat" of Communism to ourselves. While Soviet Communism was evil, that's not why we fought it -- but it was the ideologues who thought it was so evil, who framed the problem and convinced us that contained evil was really expansionist threat.

But ultimately we didn't go to war with the Soviets. We didn't go to war over enslaved Hungary in '56, or enslaved Czechoslovakia in '68, or Polish martial law in the '80s. By treating the Soviet threat as a problem in realpolitik rather than as a moral problem, we achieved our ends without (direct) war.

As Brazil, with its massive plantations (which killed many more slaves than died on plantations in the US South), managed to end slavery: without war, but with gradual emancipation.

Something that arguably could have happened in the US too, if the Abolitionists hadn't framed slavery as a (purely) moral problem. Which would have avoided the 600,000 casualties of the CivilWar, and may have avoided the backlash in the South against blacks after Reconstruction, and the years of Jim Crow, and the continuing animosity between North and South that plays out in our politics to this day. We'll never know, of course. But no, I don't think John Brown's terrorism was the right answer to the (political, economic, or moral) problem of slavery.
posted by orthogonality at 1:07 AM on October 16, 2009 [3 favorites]

Hey, anything to take at least some portion of the blame for owning human beings as chattel property off of the people who did it and those who supported them.
posted by Pope Guilty at 1:33 AM on October 16, 2009 [2 favorites]

It strikes me as pretty intellectually dishonest to reject an otherwise-valid line of argument solely because it happens to in some minor way exonerate someone (or a group of people) that you find repugnant.

Also, it's pretty low to immediately assume maximum bad faith on the part of anyone who disagrees with you. I think we can pretty safely take on premise that everyone here thinks that chattel slavery was a bad thing, unless someone steps out and explicitly claims that particular position for themselves.
posted by Kadin2048 at 2:03 AM on October 16, 2009 [2 favorites]

Yes, we should be horrified by the evils of slavery, but not so horrified that we desire, as the radical Abolitionists did, to expiate the national sin by washing in the blood of the lamb, in Bloody Kansas and later Antietam.

Sorry, ortho, much as I like you, I can't agree.

Brown was a hero. A revolting, reviling, but necessary hero. He saw injustice and further, saw everyone looking on, clucking their tongues impotently… "Oh, how sad! Whatever shall we do about all these slaving murderers?"

The times leading up to the American Civil War are like a sick, national bystander effect. All these wrongs committed against blacks… hundreds of years of murdering, kidnapping, rape, torture, all ignored for bloody profit. Doing nothing in the face of such inhumanity is an offering of tacit approval. If you saw a man being beaten to death on the street, would you stand by and argue with you fellow bystanders about how you should deal with it? What if the guy doing the beating gave you a cut of whatever he found in his wallet? Perhaps you should call the police, or round up more people, or… or would you jump into the fray, meet violence with violence because for some people reason is not a weapon that can be wielded to any effect?

Of course, this isn't to say that Brown was perfect—I'd say he took too long to do anything, but then I can fully understand. It wasn't until he was at the point where he felt he had nothing to lose that he finally committed.
posted by Civil_Disobedient at 2:41 AM on October 16, 2009 [11 favorites]

WHITE SOUTHERNER CLAIMS CIVIL WAR FAULT OF ABOLITIONISTS: FILM AT ELEVEN!

Something that arguably could have happened in the US too, if the Abolitionists hadn't framed slavery as a (purely) moral problem. Which would have avoided the 600,000 casualties of the CivilWar, and may have avoided the backlash in the South against blacks after Reconstruction, and the years of Jim Crow, and the continuing animosity between North and South that plays out in our politics to this day. We'll never know, of course.

That's a hell of a lot of "arguably", "may", "maybe", and "we'll never know". Maybe, maybe, maybe.

On the other hand, we do know that every day that went by with slavery notended meant millions of human beings laboring under the yoke, women repeatedly raped, men flogged, beaten, and killed, infants stolen from their mothers, and an entire people kept as subhuman chattel.

The Antebellum South was evil to its core. The women in their beautiful dresses, stately plantations, men in mornings coats, cotillions, and all the rest of it was a thin veneer over one of the most brutal, repressive, and sick societies in modern history. The only comparable example is Nazi Germany; the parallels are obvious.

I can't believe you have the gall to sit there talking about how, if only those nigger-lovers and damn Yankees had been more understanding about our peculiar institution, well, maybe the Late Unpleasantness could have been completely avoided! All that blood is actually on their hands, and pay no attention to the pile of skulls and charnel ash we've built our grand Southern culture upon.

A very many good men died in the Civil War, on both sides. A very many bad ones as well, again on both sides. But there is no equivalency, and I won't shed a single tear for the actual slavers. It was a cancerous tumor that had to be excised, yes, by any means necessary.
posted by Justinian at 4:24 AM on October 16, 2009 [11 favorites]

Slavery in America was different than in other nations because of the unquenchable thirst of southern plantation owners for it


And the insatiable demand for southern cotton by other nations. Britain who had, you know, burned Washington D.C a few decades before, was waiting to see who came out on top with the general feeling that would be easier to cut deal with two smaller, waring states than one huge one ..which was straight out of the British Colonial handbook for dealing with Places That Have Stuff You Want.
posted by The Whelk at 4:28 AM on October 16, 2009 [4 favorites]

Oh, and to point out your shoddy facts as well as your poisonous logic, slavery in the British Isles lasted for almost two thousand years, from before the Roman Occupation until 1833. At which point it had become mostly economically pointless. To which I add that, proving the point, they made exceptions for the East India Company and some possessions where slavery still did turn a healthy profit.

The U.K. didn't abolish slavery despite it being economically profitable, they wrung every last drop of sweat and blood that they could out of it and then, once slavery didn't much advantage them nymore, decided to take the great moral position of ending it. Hallelujah, let freedom ring!

It's rather like if I stole your elderly parent's life savings, spent all of it, and then once they died in illness and poverty came to Jesus and repented but, oh hey, sorry about that money and all but its water under the bridge what-ho, no point in dwelling on it.
posted by Justinian at 4:34 AM on October 16, 2009 [2 favorites]

Something that arguably could have happened in the US too, if the Abolitionists hadn't framed slavery as a (purely) moral problem.

as opposed to southerners who try to frame it as a purely political and economic problem?

Which would have avoided the 600,000 casualties of the CivilWar, and may have avoided the backlash in the South against blacks after Reconstruction, and the years of Jim Crow, and the continuing animosity between North and South that plays out in our politics to this day.

if we were going to have a unified country, the war was inevitable - and we were not going to have a unified country with the institution of slavery intact - the south made sure of that

they were the ones who withdrew from the nation and said there was no compromise with lincoln, who, at that time, was not someone who was taking a purely moral stance in regard to slavery, or was even planning on eliminating it in the areas it existed by simple fiat - there was actually a chance that the problem could have been solved the way it had been in other countries by a set of economic and political compromises - yes, there were abolishionists who did not want to compensate slave owners for their "property" or see any other compromises done, but they were not in power in 1860 - it was the south that decided it could not talk this through and walked away - and then it was the south that fired the first shots

as far as the backlash being avoided and all the consequences following, it was our failure to thoroughly scour and change the south's culture like we did with nazi germany in ww2 that resulted in the failure of reconstruction, the institution of jim crow and our current southern problem - of course, that would have meant we yankees would have had to change some things, too, and we would have had to keep an occupation force active for a few years - it turned out to be politically impossible
posted by pyramid termite at 4:49 AM on October 16, 2009 [2 favorites]

"Notice that of all the nations that practiced slavery, from Britain to Brazil to the United States, only the United States required a civil war to achieve abolition."

Well, sort of. Haiti's independence was born of a (quite bloody) slave revolt; the French formally ended slavery there before independence, in response to the revolts, but wikipedia says that they were planning to reinstate it. I don't know if you want to call that "civil war," but without it slavery would likely have continued on the island much longer.

And Brazil and Jamaica (among other places) both had a long series of slave uprisings and battles with free Maroons that made slavery a lot more expensive to sustain. Not civil war, no, but not exactly free of strife and bloodshed, either.

Slavery was structured differently in the US, more embedded and with much more care about preventing uprisings. It's hard for me to imagine an alternative history where the south voluntarily gave up slavery within the 1860s or '70s, and if we are to imagine some kind of decades-long gradual emancipation, then you have to weigh the human cost of continuing slavery against the human cost of the Civil War.
posted by Forktine at 5:14 AM on October 16, 2009 [4 favorites]

As Brazil, with its massive plantations (which killed many more slaves than died on plantations in the US South), managed to end slavery: without war, but with gradual emancipation.

Something that arguably could have happened in the US too, if the Abolitionists hadn't framed slavery as a (purely) moral problem.

Or, more relevant, if the pro-enslavement side had not been intent on expanding ownership of human chattel into every new territory possible and legally covering the entire nation. Given how long Manifest Destiny took to be formally concluded, when would the imaginary clock for the countdown to the nonexistent Southern version of "gradual emancipation" start ticking? How many fellow Americans' individual liberties would be an acceptable sacrifice to counterfactual history? One generation's? Two? Three?

Brown's raid on Harper's Ferry took the ongoing guerrilla war from Kansas (beginning with the pro-slavery forces' Sack of Lawrence, numerous incursions by "Border Ruffians" from the slave-state Missouri - who menaced Brown's family while he was still living in New York - and Brown's own Massacre at Pottawatomie Creek) into one of the oldest slave states in the Union. Unsurprisingly, the Virginia slavers were so used to their peculiar institution that they thought Brown a madman and religious fanatic for carrying over a fight they thought they'd already won.
posted by Doktor Zed at 5:34 AM on October 16, 2009 [3 favorites]

The was fought because of slavery, but the end of slavery didn't really become a top rallying cry for the Union until well into the war. For many, the preservation of the Union was an important motivation at the beginning. That's not to say there weren't many soldiers who felt passionately about ending slavery in 1861. It irritates me to no end when someone tries to get around slavery as a root cause of the war, as every argument made in its place, ultimately leads directly back to slavery.


With regard to Brown, I was brought up in Virginia, where it was instilled intentionally or not in me that there was something negative about him. To this day, I certainly don't have warm fuzzy feelings for him, though I applaud what he tried to do that day in Harper's Ferry. On a secondary note, my grandfather's grandfather was named John Brown, too. (That John Brown was about 4 or 5 when the other went and got himself executed). My granddad used to say as a boy, he got very upset by the song, "John Brown Rolling In His Grave" because he thought people were singing about his grandpa.
posted by Atreides at 5:47 AM on October 16, 2009

His zeal in the cause of freedom was infinitely superior to mine...
Mine was as the taper light;
his was as the burning sun.
I could live for the slave;
John Brown could die for him.

-Fredrick Douglass
posted by shothotbot at 5:59 AM on October 16, 2009 [7 favorites]

Britain who had, you know, burned Washington D.C a few decades before, was waiting to see who came out on top
Interestingly, Britain had also sent 10,000 troops to Canada. I am sure the government was conflicted given the strong anti-slavery sentiment in the UK, but I think they were also ready to put their thumb on the scale if they thought it would be effective.

I will make another plug for Steven Blight's lecture series which covers 1845-1877, his lectures on the coming of the civil war are especially strong. Here is the one which covers John Brown
posted by shothotbot at 6:09 AM on October 16, 2009 [3 favorites]

The Civil War was a wild melee among bearded, kill-crazy lunatics, the sole purpose of which was to sate a frenzied blood lust whipped up by intransigent politicos, religious fanatics, and self-righteous murderers (Brown). God help 'em if they'd had talk radio, as in the Congo in the 1990s: They'd all have been hacking each other's arms off. We can also thank heaven that our current nasty left-right politics isn't linked to any clear cut regional interests, or we'd be going down the same road again, because there's nothing the human race enjoys more than a good slaughter fest.

But about those beards... No one has ever satisfactorily explained to me the efflorescence of baroque facial tonsure that erupted so suddenly on the eve of the Civil War and lasted pretty much up to the turn of the centu