Why John Brown Matters

Abstract

Why John Brown Matters William Lansing Brown John Brown, Abolitionist: The Man Who Killed Slavery, Sparked the Civil War, and Seeded Civil Rights David S. Reynolds Alfred A. Knopf http://www.aaknopf.com 590 pages; cloth, $35.00 The four decades leading up to the Civil War in America, beginning with the Missouri Compromise of 1 820 and culminating in John Brown's raid at Harpers Ferry and death by hanging in the fall of 1 859, were among the most divisive in our history. During this period the nation was embroiled in a multitude ofreligious , class, and ideological battles that were proving all but irresolvable in the courts and legislatures of the land, and fractionating— morally, politically, and spiritually—over the issue of slavery. Against the backdrop of these times cultural historian David S. Reynolds traces the arc of John Brown's life in John Brown, Abolitionist: The Man Who Killed Slavery, Sparked the Civil War, andSeeded Civil Rights. Countering longstanding conceptions ofJohn Brown as delusional, crazy, or at best a "fringe fanatic," Reynolds presents him as a man driven by his firm Calvinist faith and empathy for blacks to the conclusion that slavery could only be brought to an end by the shedding of blood. In the pages of this ambitious and well-researched biography, Reynolds, distinguished professor of English at the graduate center of the City University of New York, argues that John Brown was not only reacting, like William Lloyd Garrison, Frederick Douglass, Gerrit Smith, and other abolitionists, out of frustration with the failed politics of the day; but, more importantly, that Brown was stirred to violence amid a climate of "cultural rage" whipped by the winds of pro- and antislavery sentiment. One of the impressive aspects of Reynolds's study is the mass of textual data he has gathered to show how heated the war of words over slavery was becoming during the abolitionist era. His documenting of source material from newspapers, political pamphlets, and popular literature, as well as from previously uncited public and private utterances ofthe times, provides a fertile context in which to view the heightening passions. He separates the "theorizers" from the "practitioners" of violence, only to show us the more vividly that—whereas William Lloyd Garrison , Frederick Douglass, and other abolitionists, including their transcendentalist supporters Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, and Bronson Alcott, were becoming ever more strident in their rhetoric—John Brown was secretly planning to act. A galvanizing occurrence for Brown, coinciding with numerous acts of brutality committed by partisans on both sides of the slavery issue, was the violent death in 1837 ofElijah P. Lovejoy, a St. Louis newspaper editor, until that time a lesser known figure in the abolitionist movement, fatally shot defending his printing press against a mob of proslavery agitators . The signing of the Kansas-Nebraska Act by President Franklin Pierce in 1854, effectively nullifying the Missouri Compromise, had already set Brown on the path to militancy, as had the ensuing murders two years later of several Free-State abolitionists near Lawrence. But "the immediate trigger of John Brown's murderous rage," according to Reynolds, was the vicious caning ofCharles Sumner, an antislavery senator from Massachusetts, by Preston Brooks, a relative of South Carolina senator Andrew P. Butler, a major defender of slavery, in the halls ofCongress in late 1856. Brooks, who had left Sumner lying beaten and bloodied on the floor beside his Senate desk, was reacting to a speech by the Massachusetts legislator denouncing the spread ofslavery and mockingly calling Brooks's kinsman a "chivalrous knight" in love with the "harlot Slavery." Casting a wider historical net on the climate of violence, Reynolds calls attention to "an unduly neglected novel" of 1 847 titled Life and Opinions of Julius Melbourn, whose author, Jabez Hammond, had characterized the relation existing between master and slave as "a state of war." Even as far back as the American Revolution, Reynolds says, John Adams had also wondered whether the slave problem could be settled "only by force." Reynolds also reminds us that among the many violent outbreaks over slavery that had occurred over the years prior to the Fugitive Slave Act were the Amistad mutiny...