John Brown, Abolitionist
David S. Reynold, Vintage Books ©, 2007
reviewed by bill leonard

Reynolds is a cultural historian and a professor of English and American Studies at City University of New York. But don’t let that turn you off; he writes well for an academic. This is arguably the best biography of John Brown, a crucial figure in the history of this country and one often written off as a crazy old man.

The fulcrum of this story is Brown’s raid on the Federal Arsenal at Harper’s Ferry (then Virginia, now West Virginia). Brown and fewer than 20 men seized the town and the Federal Armory located at the junction of the Shenandoah and Potomac Rivers. He was striking a blow at slavery, an institution he was convinced the government had not the will to eliminate. He would free slaves, arm them, and they would flock to his side to carry on a guerilla war.

For 36 hours the confrontation went on, with gunfire and hostage taking. Irony hung as thick as the gun smoke. The mayor, a kindly man who had a will that freed the slaves he owned upon his death, was shot and killed by a Quaker member of Brown’s raiding party. The U.S. Army, who trained in quickly from Washington, was under the command of Col. Robert E. Lee. One of his subordinates on the scene was Lt. J.E.B. Stuart. Soon these West Point graduates would once again be wearing grey. The action was furious and brutal and Brown’s raiders were either killed on the spot or went to the gallows.

If the raid was the fulcrum, what were the other ends of the teeter-totter? For one, Reynolds details Brown’s life leading up to the raid. We see John Brown’s steadfast opposition to slavery. This stern Calvinist saw Abolition as his life work. This was in contrast to other perceived Abolitionists of the time — Lincoln, Seward, and Garrison, for example. Unlike Brown, they saw the slave as inferior. Lincoln was willing to settle for allowing slavery where it existed, but with no expansion to new states, a position he eventually changed, of course. The others were patronizing at best and for deportation at the worst. Not John Brown, who saw the slaves as equal and wrote a shadow constitution that granted equal rights to slaves — and to women, by the way.

You will, vaguely perhaps, remember “Bloody Kansas,” where plebiscite was to determine whether or not Kansas was to be a free state. Supporters of both the free and slave positions streamed to Kansas in the late 1850s to have a voice in that decision. Bloodshed resulted, some of it directly at the hands of John Brown. This has always been troubling for those who see Brown in a positive light.

And what about the other end of the teeter-totter, the time after the raid?  Brown’s stoic acceptance of death on the gallows and his calm and reasoned remarks from prison — widely circulated in a growing print medium — influenced many northerners. His raid, and especially his plan to foment slave uprisings, both terrified and angered southerners and, in the eyes of many historians, made the Civil War inevitable. The song “John Brown’s Body” became an anthem in that struggle and morphed into “The Battle Hymn of The Republic.” Emerson compared Christ and Brown in a famous line “gallows glorious as the cross,” inspiring some and causing rage in others.

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