Angel of Light: Interpreting John Brown

Abstract

Angel of Light: Interpreting John Brown William E. Cain (bio) Paul Finkelman, ed. His Soul Goes Marching On: Responses to John Brown and the Harpers Ferry Raid. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1995. xii 354 pp. $65.00 (cloth); $19.95 (paper). As the biographer Stephen B. Oates has noted, John Brown is “one of the most controversial figures in American history.” 1 Many have condemned Brown as a madman for committing gruesome murders in the Kansas territory in 1856 and for plotting insurrection at Harpers Ferry, Virginia, in 1859, while others have honored him as a warrior-saint who sacrificed his life in an inspired but doomed attempt to free America’s slaves. In His Soul Goes Marching On, Paul Finkelman and nine other historians chart “responses” to Brown during the period of his imprisonment and trial and its immediate aftermath, showing vividly the ways in which he clarified, complicated, and heightened the slavery crisis and arguments for and against secession. This is an excellent collection — diverse, wide-ranging, richly detailed — and an important contribution to scholarship on the Civil War period. Part 1 of the book performs the tasks of summary and overview. Finkelman launches it with a cogent preface that surveys Brown’s life and abolitionist activities and comments on the significant work that biographers (e.g., Oswald Garrison Villard, W. E. B. Du Bois, Oates) and scholars (e.g., Benjamin Quarles, Jeffrey Rossbach) have done. Bertram Wyatt-Brown comes next, with a suggestive piece that outlines the themes of the collection and meditates on the “heartening and horrifying” meanings of Brown’s action (p. 11). He scrutinizes Brown’s strange, brooding, obsessive personality and the hold that Brown exercised over northern writers, intellectuals, and reformers. Part 2 focuses on “Northern supporters of Brown.” First, Finkelman describes the “antislavery response” and the process by which Brown was “canonized” as a Transcendentalist and Christian hero (p. 43) — a process to which, Finkelman keenly points out, Brown himself contributed through the nobility he cultivated in his writings, speeches, and conduct in prison and the courtroom. Daniel C. Littlefield follows with a superb study of African Americans’ responses to Brown, whose raid intensified debates about alliances between black and white abolitionists, the meaning of black manhood [End Page 606] and masculinity, and the place that violence should or should not occupy in the campaign against slavery. As Littlefield shows, African Americans were caught in a dilemma; if they resorted to violence, they were portrayed by whites as “aggressive and unprincipled savages,” but if they submitted meekly and relied on moral persuasion alone, they then were seen as weak, acquiescent, incapable of the kind of righteous resistance that white colonists had undertaken during the Revolution when they battled the British (p. 88). Wendy Haman Venet concludes Part 2 by sketching responses to Brown by northern antislavery women, including Harriet Tubman, Lucretia Mott, Antoinette Brown Blackwell, Abby Kelley Foster, Susan B. Anthony, and, in particular, Lydia Maria Child, whose correspondence with Virginia governor Henry Wise and Margaretta Mason (wife of Virginia senator James Mason) sold 300,000 copies in pamphlet form and was reprinted in many newspapers. Part 3 consists of three illuminating essays on “Northern and Southern opponents of Brown.” Peter Knupfer studies political alignments in the North and Brown’s jolting effect on them. He treats the problems that Brown’s raid caused for the Republican party as it sought to present itself as a moderate force — opposed to slavery extension but not intent on abolition in the slave states themselves — and as its leaders prepared for the election of 1860. But even more, Knupfer delineates the attempt by northern conservatives, Democrats, and constitutional unionists somehow to meet the threat of national disorder and disintegration that antislavery agitation fostered and that, to them, Brown starkly epitomized. In the next essay, Peter Wallenstein concentrates on southern politics and the quest for sectional unity, as proslavery forces addressed the triple danger they perceived in their four million slaves, nonslaveholding whites, and the Republican party. Brown’s raid, Wallenstein explains, dramatized the evil of “Black Republicanism” and the peril of slave revolts that, it was said, northern whites would kindle but that might...