Brown's Raid Research Articles

John Brown, Filibuster: Republicans, Harpers Ferry, and the Use of Violence, 1855–1860

Although John Brown has been labelled in many ways, historians have not explored his connection with filibustering. This essay considers John Brown's raid on Harpers Ferry within that context, focusing specific attention on how Republicans turned Brown into a filibuster by comparing his actions to William Walker and Narciso López. In the immediate aftermath of Brown's raid on Harpers Ferry, Republicans faced the charge that they had inspired Brown by their alleged embrace of abolitionism. Republicans countered this by linking Brown to filibustering, arguing that Democrats had only recently championed William Walker. Brown's expedition was unlawful, Republicans argued, but it was no different than Walker's invasion of Nicaragua or López's forays into Cuba. By making this argument, Republicans shifted the blame for Harpers Ferry upon Democrats. In distancing themselves from Brown, however, Republicans demonstrated that they were far from radicals who were secretly bent on subverting the institution of slavery. Indeed, their argument that John Brown was a filibuster helped Republicans legitimize themselves as defenders of law and order, men who firmly rejected the use of armed violence and who would work to make sure that men were prosecuted for leading armed rebellions, whether in the United States or abroad.

Insiders, Outsiders: Toward a New History of Southern Thought ed. by Sarah E. Gardner and Steven M. Stowe

Reviewed by: Insiders, Outsiders: Toward a New History of Southern Thought ed. by Sarah E. Gardner and Steven M. Stowe Jason Phillips (bio) Insiders, Outsiders: Toward a New History of Southern Thought. Edited by Sarah E. Gardner and Steven M. Stowe. ( Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2021. Pp. 242. Cloth, $95.00; paper, $29.95.) Insiders, Outsiders showcases exciting new work in southern history, and most of it focuses on the Civil War era. Dedicated to Michael O'Brien, the volume reflects the vibrancy and curiosity that marked his work and inspired his field to explore the South's diversity of thought. In the introduction, editors Sarah E. Gardner and Steven M. Stowe also acknowledge how the 1977 Wingspread conference shifted American intellectual history toward a broader engagement with cultural values and practices. Whereas conventional intellectual histories studied the persistence of ideas across space and time, this newer approach explained how thoughts developed within distinct historical contexts. Despite this more holistic approach, the volume that resulted from Wingspread, New Directions in American Intellectual History (1979), and more recent anthologies, including The Worlds of American Intellectual History (2017) and American Labyrinth: Intellectual History for Complicated Times (2018), lack literary studies.1 With its long tradition of collaboration between historians and literary critics, southern studies—including works like Insiders, Outsiders—encourage interdisciplinary conversations by sharing important questions, theories, and methods. Gardner and Stowe organize their book into two parts that explore common themes in southern history. In part 1, historians study intellectual life in the South to consider how the region affected thinking within its borders and was, in turn, changed by that thinking. These essays range beyond the usual subjects of intellectual history. Stephen Berry argues that the "southernness" of Edgar Allan Poe questioned mainstream American and British faith in progress, capitalism, and destiny. Poe yearned to belong to a pantheon with Charles Dickens, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and other contemporary luminaries, but his realism and rage offended their clique, making him the insider's outsider. Michael T. Bernath uncovers how efforts to purge a South Carolina community of northern teachers after John Brown's raid exposed internal divisions along class lines. Only the wealthiest families could afford to hire northern tutors for their children, but this luxury became a social and political liability when sectional fervor and hysteria increased. Beth Barton Schweiger calls for new book histories of the South that focus on the uses and circulations of texts instead of their production. She encourages us to consider a book's linguistic, musical, and anthropological customs as it traveled through the region, touching everyone from [End Page 134] intellectuals to illiterates. Timothy J. Williams studies an obscure book, Edwin Wiley Fuller's autobiographical novel Sea-Gift (1873), to interpret southern men's fantasies during Reconstruction. In search of personal greatness and a utopian South, Fuller's Lost Cause romance focuses on the future, not the past. Mitchell Snay concludes part 1 by analyzing different Reconstruction writers, the journalists and politicians who saw immigration as a panacea for the southern economy after emancipation. His essay suggests the global dimensions of Reconstruction and how immigration debates exposed assumptions about race, citizenship, and capitalism, and how they still do today. In part 2, literary critics take the lead to interpret thinking about the South. Melanie Benson Taylor opens this section with an insightful essay on southern literature and the Anthropocene. The apocalyptic perspective of southern writers and the region's history of environmental destruction and dispossession frame southern stories as profound commentaries on humanity's endangerment to itself and others. Next, John Grammer identifies a "southern turn" in New Journalism by focusing on the careers of Willie Morris, Marshall Frady, and Larry L. King. As southern white men, this "Wrecking Crew" reported the civil rights movement from a privileged position—that of insiders who enjoyed better access than northern journalists, while staying outside the perils that threatened Black writers. Scott Romine explores the inchoate and contradictory identities of Lost Cause southerners by focusing on different versions of Edward Pollard's iconic text. His delightful essay introduces "subintellectual history," or "the history of ideas that are not quite complicated, as articulated by southerners...

Provocative Eloquence: Theater, Violence, and Antislavery Speech in the Antebellum United States

Provocative Eloquence: Theater, Violence, and Antislavery Speech in the Antebellum United States

‘“Dare you meet a woman”: black women, abolitionism, and protective violence, 1850–1859’

ABSTRACT ‘Dare you Meet a Woman’ examines how black women exhibited their willingness to take on forceful and even violent action to dismantle the institution of slavery. Black resistance was central to abolitionism and black women were essential to the movement. This essay argues that their activism should be examined as the politics of protective violence. The politics of protective violence explains black women's employment of force to protect themselves and their communities and ultimately promote the overthrow of slavery. Beginning with the Christiana Resistance in 1851 and culminating with John Brown's raid on Harpers Ferry, this essay examines the bookends and high points of free and fugitive black women's responses during key turning points of the 1850s. In sum, black women violently resisted the Fugitive Slave Law and anti-black oppression. Moreover, black women leaders contributed significantly to the acceleration of violent sectional tensions and, ultimately, the American Civil War.

A Curse upon the Nation: Race, Freedom, and Extermination in America and the Atlantic World by Kay Wright Lewis

Reviewed by: A Curse upon the Nation: Race, Freedom, and Extermination in America and the Atlantic World by Kay Wright Lewis Stephen E. Maizlish A Curse upon the Nation: Race, Freedom, and Extermination in America and the Atlantic World. Kay Wright Lewis. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2017. ISBN 978-0-8203-5127-8, 292 pp., cloth, $64.95. Kay Wright Lewis's goal is to correct past accounts of slavery and its aftermath that have inadequately acknowledged the fear and trauma created by the racialized violence African Americans experienced. In A Curse upon the Nation: Race, Freedom, and Extermination in America and the Atlantic World, Lewis claims that "extermination was part of a racialized ideology used to sustain" slavery (2). For African Americans, the memories of that violence in the antebellum South and in the Jim Crow society that followed "remained significant into the Civil Rights era" (2). Whites in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Lewis argues, believed that emancipation and black equality would lead to a race war and the extinction of both races. It was to avoid this outcome that whites employed exterminating racial violence against blacks. Racial violence in America began with the first European settlements. It was initially directed against native peoples. As the colonies expanded, this culture of exterminating brutality came to dominate race relations generally, eventually extending to the imported African population. Lewis traces this growing determination to eliminate or enslave those whom European settlers considered barbarians through the entire colonial period. White people's fear of what they believed to be the warrior past of the Africans they enslaved drove them with particular force to treat their slaves with harsh and gruesome cruelty. Nevertheless, African slaves resisted their enslavement. That in turn, argues Lewis, led to retaliation and even more widespread exterminating white violence. This bloodletting persisted into the antebellum period and intensified in the aftermath of Nat Turner's rebellion in 1831. The result of this new explosion of terror was a series of lasting traumatic memories that haunted the black community for many years. Fear of a race war continued to consume the antebellum white South following Turner's insurrection and its bloody aftermath. Dread of a race war dominated the Virginia debates over slavery and formed the basis for Southern opposition to the reopening of the Atlantic slave trade. Lewis argues that this dread also explains the panicky Southern white people's reaction to John Brown's raid. The memory of the exterminating horror that came after Turner's upraising led African American slaves to be wary of and ultimately reject participation in Brown's plan for a slave insurrection. They feared a bloodbath, but even though they had not responded positively to Brown, one followed the raid anyway. Lewis follows her analysis of racial violence in antebellum America with the claim that South Carolina left the Union not only in reaction to its perception of Northern hostility to slavery but also from a belief that the Federal government [End Page 299] would no longer protect the South from a slave insurrection, that is, from the very race war Southerners had long dreaded. Slaves saw the war for the Union, unlike John Brown's raid, as an opportunity to at last achieve their dream of freedom, so they willingly participated in the Northern war effort. The white Southern response was predictable. As they had been for centuries, African American civilians, along with captured black soldiers, were slaughtered by white Southerners in another exterminating reign of terror that continued after the war and traumatized the black populations for decades to come. That trauma, Lewis explains, was only reinforced during the years of Jim Crow and by the violence visited upon returning black soldiers following the First and Second World Wars. Civil Rights leaders of the 1950s and 60s had different views of how to counter white violence, but, Lewis reminds us, they all recognized that this violence needed to be confronted. Lewis is correct to focus on the ever-present Southern concern over a mutually destructive war of the races. It is impossible to examine the Southern white past without continuously encountering this obsessive anxiety over racial conflict. Lewis's...

Naming the Nation: A Poetic Retrospect

The work of conjuring settler nationhood for literary space was a self-conscious, colonial, and then nationalist task for both and New Zealand, and as literary space becomes increasingly global or, as Wai-Chee Dimock and Lawrence Buell would put it, planetary, that conjuring must be repeated for broader (and usually more powerful) reading formations and in ways that can guarantee no singular literary tradition for either nation. This conjuring project is powerfully present in poems bearing the name of the country in which they were written, apostrophizing that national/colonial entity and bringing it into a literary reading space. The Australian colonial poets, from the first half of the nineteenth century onward, sought to trope the in global and imperial terms: in 1859, just before John Brown's raid on Harpers Ferry, for instance, Caroline Carlton's Song of Australia took pains to declare that No shackled slave can breathe the air / Fairest of Britain's daughters' fair-Australia! Repeated in the national anthem Advance Fair, which was penned by Peter Dodds McCormick in 1878 but did not replace God Save the Queen until 1984, the fairness of settler mained at for poetry, as it did for the non-white and Indigenous populations through Federation in 1900 and beyond. Bernard O'Dowd's poem from the year of Federation conjures Australia as the Last sea-thing dredged by sailor Time from Space-imperial cartography and European temporalities write Australian literary space as already belated even as it is inaugurated.A 1932 poem titled Australia from the long-lived feminist and socialist Mary Gilmore begins by lamenting the censured, absented Aboriginal names for country replaced by Australia. It is sensitive and typically elegiac in pondering the differing gaps between the land and its perceivers' apprehension of it: between landscape and language, place and speech.There was great beauty in the names her people called her,Shaping to patterns of sounds the form of their words;They wove to measure of speech the cry of the bird,And the voices that rose from the reeds of the cowal.All these Australia poems address the classically postcolonial question of how to leverage a sense of cultural difference that would speak back to British colonial sway, yet find credibility within the Anglophile canon that, as Leigh Dale has has pointed out in The English Men, came along with Anglo-Celtic settlement. ( AngloCeltic was often used both to acknowledge the Irish element in the nineteenth-century diaspora and to recognize that migrants from other European countries had a different status within Australia.) Cultural nationalism is the logical response. Settler Australians sought their own sense of identity, to repudiate the stigma of inferior belatedness that Anglocentric discourse can propagate. But the search for identity not only effaced the tear in the national fabric represented by excluding Indigenous people from that identity, it also had the potential to lead to the facile, rousing optimism appropriate only to national songs.This optimism is precisely the target of A. D. Hope's satiric, yet deeply felt, 1939 poem Australia.They call her a young country, but they lie:She is the last of lands, the emptiest,A woman beyond her change of life, a breastStill tender but within the womb is dry.Hope undoes the Austral trope, exposing its gendered elements, too; the virtues that an optimistic brand of settler nationalism would claim for Australia-that it is fresh, virginal, and untainted by or tragedy-are not there. Geologically the continent is old, and culturally it is barren: Without songs, architecture, and history echoes the charges of antipodean cultural failure familiar from European first encounters. Yet it is precisely the state of Australia's cultural desiccation that lends it some promise for Hope-hoping, if still from the desert the prophets come // Such savage and scarlet as no green hills dare / Springs in that waste [. …

Border War: Fighting over Slavery before the Civil War by Stanley Harrold (review)

Reviewed by: Border War: Fighting over Slavery before the Civil War by Stanley Harrold Joseph M. Rizzo Border War: Fighting over Slavery before the Civil War. By Stanley Harrold. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010. Pp. xi, 292.) Studies of disunion have long sought to explicate the significance of slavery in the border states. While much of the culpability for secession falls on the lower South, Stanley Harrold argues that decades of fighting over slavery in the border region of free and slave states profoundly influenced sectional tensions and the coming of the Civil War. In Border War, Harrold examines the struggle over slavery in the North-South borderland. In this region, decades of violence, which grew out of the proximity of free and slave labor societies, shaped perceptions of slavery's future and convinced the lower South it was necessary to secede. While violent events such as Bleeding Kansas and John Brown's raid on Harpers Ferry received widespread national attention, Harrold demonstrates that these events were an escalation of an already existing border struggle that had been happening since the late eighteenth century. Central to the antagonism between the border South and lower North were runaway slaves, which placed slavery in direct contact with the lower North. This expansion of the institution into the region, which brought with it sporadic violent antiblack and anti-abolitionist riots, caused border Northerners to reckon with slavery's influence on their society. Slavery was no longer just a moral wrong in a distant land—it now directly affected those on the northern side of the sectional line—and antislavery and abolitionist groups publicized the damaging consequences of those proslavery initiatives. As Harrold illuminates, the abduction of African Americans and violent riots in cities such as Cincinnati and Philadelphia gave credence to the abolitionist accusations that slavery degraded their society and threatened the safety of white residents. Harrold notes how the border South slaveholders, as well as the lower North residents, believed their culture was under attack. Proslavery Southerners thought that Northerners who aided runaway slaves and flouted fugitive slave laws needed punishment. Harrold contends that slaveholders increasingly perceived abolitionists as conducting a war of attrition. With antislavery literature circulating throughout the South and the growth of a violent resistance against slave catchers, border South politicians sought to protect their region and society from internal and external subversion. Harrold's most compelling argument pertains to the border South residents who sought to keep slavery away from their Northern neighbors. Historians typically look at the timeline of secession to demonstrate the lower South's greater commitment to slavery, yet Harrold shows that this was not necessarily the case. While the border South was more economically tied [End Page 126] to the North and had a larger free African American population and more supporters of gradual emancipation, Harrold argues it was the experiences within the border region that made border South residents slow to embrace secession as the surest way to defend slavery. To many in the border South, the prospect of secession made their situation more precarious. Because decades of interstate diplomacy had failed to recapture runaway slaves, who were a more realistic concern in the border South than in the lower South, border South politicians preferred federal action to protect slavery rather than designs of secession. Border South politicians put faith in the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850 to improve the ability to recapture slaves. In the 1850s, however, the lower North's rebuff of the new federal law, along with the border conflict in Kansas and John Brown's raid, splintered the belief that the federal government was the best option. The lower South, observing the threat to slavery in the border South, viewed secession, rather than strengthened federal law, as the surest way to preserve the institution. As Harrold notes, if the border South had successfully defended slavery, the lower South would have had less reason to leave the Union. Border War offers a refreshing perspective on disunion by examining the tensions in the North-South borderland. While Harrold treats too lightly the political and regional division over territorial expansion, he nonetheless provides a worthy contribution in understanding the...

The Tribunal: responses to John Brown and the Harpers Ferry Raid

When John Brown led twenty-one men in an attack on the federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry on October 16, 1859, he envisioned a biblical uprising of millions of armed bondsmen, thus ridding the nation of the scourge of slavery. The insurrection did not happen, and Brown and the other surviving raiders were quickly captured and executed. This landmark anthology, which collects contemporary speeches, letters, newspaper articles, journals, poems, and songs, demonstrates that Brown's actions nonetheless altered the course of American history. John Stauffer and Zoe Trodd have assembled an impressive and wide-ranging collection of responses to Brown's raid: Brown's own words, northern and southern reactions, international commentary, and reflections from the Civil War and Reconstruction era. Represented here are all the figures one would expect to see (Lincoln, Thoreau, Frederick Douglass), many surprises (John Wilkes Booth, Karl Marx, Giuseppe Garibaldi), as well as free and enslaved blacks and white citizens. The result is a book that views Brown from multiple vantage points. The Introduction describes the panic that Harpers Ferry created in the South, splitting the Democratic Party along sectional lines and altering the outcome of the 1860 presidential election. Without Brown, it speculates, the Civil War and emancipation would have been delayed by another four years--probably more--which in turn might have disrupted emancipation movements in Brazil, Cuba, and even Russia. The Tribunal is essential reading for anyone interested in the Civil War era and the history of social protest movements.

Disunion! The Coming of the American Civil War, 1789-1859 (review)

Reviewed by: Disunion! The Coming of the American Civil War, 1789-1859 Frank Towers Disunion! The Coming of the American Civil War, 1789-1859. Elizabeth R. Varon. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010. ISBN 978-0-8078-7159-1, 472 pp., paper, $21.00. Elizabeth Varon's impressive synthesis of the recent scholarship on the coming of the Civil War represents both a new account of the war's origins and continues a rich tradition of scholarship on how immediate emancipationists influenced the sectional conflict. Varon identifies "disunion" as a term that "offers a new and hitherto hidden key to understanding the origins of the American Civil War" (2). Unlike secession, a specific legal-political mechanism, disunion "was a sublimely adaptable concept" that became entangled with discussions of slavery and served as a "catalyst" of sectional conflict (4, 6). Operating in the five "registers" of prophecy, threat, accusation, process, and program, talk of disunion "worked at every stage to escalate sectional tensions" (14). Disunion! reflects trends in historical writing that have broadened the scope of the sectional conflict beyond the confines of elections and government and pushed its origins back to the eighteenth century. Varon begins with the Constitutional Convention rather than a more familiar starting point, such as the Missouri crisis, nullification, or the Wilmot Proviso. More than any other synthetic work on the Civil War's origins, Varon gives attention to African Americans and white women, who often played leading roles in disunion debates despite their disfranchisement. Varon's "heroes" are "radical abolitionists" like William Lloyd Garrison and Frederick Douglass, whose "incisive and trenchant . . . political analyses" unified the North against the slaveholders (15). By 1858 abolitionist ideas had been mainstreamed by Republican Party leaders like William Seward, who described disunion "as a cataclysmic collision" and a "secular vision of deliverance" (319-20). John Brown's raid, which "brought antebellum politics to an abrupt end," capped abolitionists' drive to replace northern fears of slaveholder disunion threats with a program for a new Union based on freedom and equal rights (335). Immediatism's northern triumph benefited from southern disunionists who publicized antislavery radicals in order to conflate the North with abolition, and abolition with an apocalypse of race war, gender disorder, and economic ruin. Despite strengthening their northern enemy, disunion rhetoric helped proslavery activists neutralize pro-Union arguments within the South. Fire-eaters' program of disunion as a remedy for northern aggressions [End Page 272] turned tactical defeats, like the Compromise of 1850, into long-term victories by forcing moderates to agree that northern conduct should be tested by southern standards of honor and racial solidarity. Once southern voters agreed that the Union was conditional on the North's good behavior, disunionists had victory within their sights. On one hand, Varon's focus on disunion rhetoric offers a new understanding of the Civil War's origins that moves beyond a debate over how much direct impact slavery had in causing the war. On the other, her emphasis on abolitionist ideas as drivers of sectional politics carries forward a long-running interpretation of antislavery as the North's primary motivation and the South's principal fear. Beginning in the 1940s with reassessments of Lincoln during the secession crisis, scholars in subsequent decades argued for the sincerity of Republican antislavery and assigned abolitionists a more substantial role than what many earlier historians allowed. Varon's vast reading in the secondary literature is impressive, yet the book's emphasis on rhetoric downplays economic and social studies that jar with the story of immediatism preparing the North to wage a war for freedom while stimulating slaveholders to go for broke in the opposite direction. Jonathan Earle, Lori Ginzberg, and Bruce Laurie argue that political antislavery owed more to poorer agricultural and artisan communities than to the urbanizing, bourgeois world of Garrison and Elizabeth Cady Stanton. Slavery as a wealth-generating system of property rights led others to identify power and profits as secessionists' primary motivation. Similarly, northern fears of slavery's economic invasion—fears hastened by railroad integration of regional markets—may have outweighed concerns over political invasion. Finally, newer work on the international dimensions of the sectional conflict shows that in...

John Brown's Body

John Brown's Body Paul Theerman John Brown, the great nineteenth-century abolitionist, remains a divisive figure in American history. To this day, people argue over the rightness of his path. Even before the outbreak of the Civil War, he used violence to put down slavery, and was met by violence in return. In the matter of John Brown there arose a debate not just about him, but a debate about what to do with him, that is, with his very body. From ancient times, as shown in Sophocles' drama Antigone, to the present day, the most satisfying victory seems to lie not just in vanquishing one's foes, but in dealing with their mortal remains. In the weeks following John Brown's raid, northern abolitionists struggled with both southern politicians and medical practitioners to obtain the bodies of John Brown and his followers. In microcosm, this dispute showed the nation beginning to fray and unravel, as violence entered the dispute, and dissent from one's countrymen gave way to disgust with one's opponents, and then to desire to put them on display as specimens. In 1856 John Brown, the staunch abolitionist farmer from upstate New York, went west to "Bleeding Kansas" to take part in the guerilla wars over the spread of slavery. After a year of outright battle, he returned east to raise funds to carry out his raid at Harper's Ferry, Virginia. On October 16, 1859, Brown attempted to provoke a general slave uprising by capturing the federal arsenal at Harper's Ferry. Brown led some twenty men into battle; two days later he and the surviving raiders were captured by federal troops under the command of Colonel Robert E. Lee. Although Brown had attacked a federal facility and had been captured by federal forces, his first battles had been with Virginia militiamen, and his troops had killed the local mayor. So when he went to trial on October 25, 1859, a week after his capture, the charge was treason against the Commonwealth of Virginia. The trial took place at the Jefferson County courthouse at Charles Town, and the prosecuting attorney was Andrew Hunter, the local attorney for the commonwealth. Few doubted that Brown would be convicted and sentenced to death. But even before the conclusion of the trial, competition had begun for possession [End Page 75] of his body. Arthur E. Peticolas, professor of anatomy at the Medical College of Virginia in Richmond (now part of Virginia Commonwealth University), wrote to prosecutor Hunter on November 1: Richmond, Nov. 1, 1859 Dear Sir, — We desire if Brown and his coadjutors are executed to add their heads to the collection in our museum. If the transference of the bodies will not exceed a cost of five dollars each we should also be glad to have them. This request will of course not interfere with any clemency which it may be found desirable to extend to those convicted. Attention to this request will confer a great favor. A. E. Peticolas M.D. Prof Anat at Med. College of Va. Mr. Andrew Hunter Peticolas had apparently also written to Virginia governor Henry Wise, for on the following day—the day that Brown was found guilty and condemned to death—Wise wrote to Hunter: Richmond, Va Novr 2nd 1859. A. Hunter, Esqr Dr Sir, — … The Medical faculty of Richmond College ask for the bodies of such as may be executed. The Court may order the bodies to be given over to surgeons. See to that in the sentence. It will not interfere with the pardoning power. And any who are hung ought not to have burial in Virginia. Yrs truly Henry A. Wise1 In nineteenth-century America, the dearth of bodies for anatomical dissection is well attested. Here Peticolas took advantage of the prerogative of the courts to provide the bodies of the condemned to surgeons for anatomical dissection—a decision that was greatly aided by Virginians' visceral hatred towards Brown.2 As it turns out, the abolitionist was far too famous [End Page 76] and national sentiments were far too raw for Peticolas...

In the name of God and country: reconsidering terrorism in American history

With insight and originality, Michael Fellman argues that terrorism, in various forms, has been a constant and driving force in American history. In part, this is due to the nature of American republicanism and Protestant Christianity, which he believes contain a core of moral absolutism and self-righteousness that perpetrators of terrorism use to justify their actions. Fellman also argues that there is an intrinsic relationship between terrorist acts by non-state groups and responses on the part of the state; unlike many observers, he believes that both the action and the reaction constitute terrorism. Fellman's compelling narrative focuses on five key episodes: John Brown's raid on Harpers Ferry; terrorism during the American Civil War, especially race warfare and guerrilla warfare; the organized 'White Line' paramilitary destruction of Reconstruction in Mississippi; the Haymarket Affair and its aftermath; and, the Philippine-American war of 1899-1902. In an epilogue, he applies this history to illuminate the Bush-Cheney administration's use of terrorism in the so-called war on terror. In the Name of God and Country demonstrates the centrality of terrorism in shaping America even to this day.

Toussaint Louverture and the American Civil War: The Promise and Peril of a Second Haitian Revolution (review)

Reviewed by: Toussaint Louverture and the American Civil War: The Promise and Peril of a Second Haitian Revolution R. Darrell Meadows (bio) Toussaint Louverture and the American Civil War: The Promise and Peril of a Second Haitian Revolution. By Matthew J. Clavin. (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010. Pp. viii, 238. $39.95 cloth) In recent years, scholars have shown with increasing subtlety the breadth and depth of the long shadow that the Haitian Revolution cast over the nineteenth-century Atlantic world. Matthew Clavin's new book contributes to this literature by exploring manifestations of historical memory of Toussaint Louverture and the Haitian Revolution in late antebellum and Civil War America. Following a similar binary thread that Edward Bartlett Rugemer traced in The Problem of Emancipation: The Caribbean Roots of the American Civil War (2009), Clavin likewise situates the origins of this historical memory in contemporary accounts of the Haitian Revolution produced in the 1790s and early 1800s, especially those based on first-person narratives of the white "victims" of the revolution. These early works established an indelible narrative about the revolution, the abolition of slavery, and race war that, in the U.S., shaped subsequent arguments of both slaveholders and abolitionists. Clavin does an excellent job of showing that conservatives and reformers frequently invoked the memory of Toussaint Louverture and the Haitian Revolution. In the 1820s and 1830s, abolitionists sought to counter the proslavery narrative (that their efforts would provoke slave rebellion) by praising Toussaint Louverture's "compassion, probity, and integrity at the expense of his militancy and defiance." By the eve of the Civil War, according to Clavin, radical abolitionists had "transformed Louverture into a symbol of black masculinity and violence that they deployed to bring about the destruction of slavery" (p. 35). Chapter three continues this line of argument for the period between John Brown's raid and the outbreak of war. [End Page 308] Here and at other points, Clavin is less successful in his analysis of the proslavery camp, missing clues in his own evidence that suggest it was not only memory of the Haitian Revolution that informed southern perspectives. Discussing the 1860 proslavery writing of Professor Albert Taylor Bledsoe of the University of Virginia, for example, Clavin's evidence makes clear how steeped the proslavery camp was in the history of the French Revolution—especially French Jacobinism, and the slaughter of innocents and violent destruction they associated with it. In part two, Clavin focuses entirely on the Civil War years after 1862 when the arming of slaves and emancipation became fundamental components of Union war policy. Again, the Haitian example often took center stage in these debates. Unitarian minister John Weiss's Atlantic Monthly articles, published in 1862-63, in fact, anticipated Clavin's work. Weiss noted, for example, how for decades Northerners and Southerners had similarly, though for different ends, invoked the history of "St. Domingo." And now partisans on all sides invoked memory of the Haitian Revolution to weigh in on the question of African American recruitment. For John Weiss, the "history of the Haytian Revolution" was "positive proof that negroes have made good soldiers" (p. 83). William Wells Brown, Wendell Phillips, and others made the same point. In various ways, Clavin shows how antislavery politicians like George Boutwell and Charles Sumner, abolitionists like William Lloyd Garrison, James Redpath, and Lydia Maria Childs regularly drew on the Haitian example. But in invoking Toussaint, many writers avoided his use of military violence and the essential participation of slave-soldiers in ultimate overthrow of the French regime. Rather, they depicted the freedmen of Saint-Domingue as docile and contented with Toussaint's new labor regime, arguing by analogy that freed American slaves would be the docile children that Southerners claimed them to be. Perhaps the clearest example of how memory of the first French emancipation could affect decision making was William Whiting's The War Powers of the President, and the Legislative Powers of Congress in Relation [End Page 309] to Rebellion, Treason, and Slavery (1862), which impressed Lincoln enough that he appointed Whiting solicitor of the War Department. In this work, Whiting had expressly drawn upon the actions of the French civil commissioner...

Southern Outcast: Hinton Rowan Helper and The Impending Crisis of the South (review)

Reviewed by: Southern Outcast: Hinton Rowan Helper and The Impending Crisis of the South David Smith Southern Outcast: Hinton Rowan Helper and The Impending Crisis of the South. By David Brown. (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2006. Pp. 336. Cloth, $50.00.) Next to Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852), Hinton Helper's critique of slavery and the Southern class system, The Impending Crisis of the South (1857), was arguably the most important antislavery book of the 1850s. After the Civil War, he followed it with intensely antiblack polemics. Consequently, historians and critics from Edmund Wilson (Patriotic Gore, 1962) to George Fredrickson (The Arrogance of Race: Perspectives on Slavery, Racism and Social Inequality, 1988) have dismissed him as an inveterate racist and crank. David Brown, however, portrays Helper as a determined writer, a capable statistician, and, early in his career, a committed Republican with malleable racial views. Dismissing Helper as a bigot, Brown fears, leads to minimizing his historical impact. Brown deserves credit for focusing renewed critical attention on Helper. His biography contains numerous insights into this complicated individual and his importance, although it is unclear that he has overturned prevailing interpretations. The work shines in its treatment of Helper's early life in North Carolina, his family's ownership of slaves, and Helper's embezzlement of $300. His wartime service as consul in Buenos Aires also illuminates a neglected facet of wartime American foreign relations. The book's greatest contribution may be the fine chapter that discusses the 1859–60 crisis over the Speakership of the House of Representatives. In the aftermath of John Brown's raid, Southerners determined to bar any candidate who had endorsed Helper's book. Brown argues that this two-month political struggle was almost a "rehearsal for secession" (173). Like Fredrickson, Brown points out that Republican support for Helper's book made it very difficult for Southern Democrats to believe Republican claims that they would not harm Southern slavery. Despite the contretemps, Brown argues that Helper's book, focused on the impact of slavery on whites, helped merge antislavery ideas with conservative Republican nationalism. The book became the "most important campaign document" of 1860 (153), "virtually sold itself" (153), and "contributed significantly" to the sectional crisis and Lincoln's election and secession (187). Brown's argument about Helper's racial views, however, is less convincing. Brown maintains that before the Civil War, Helper worried only about "cultural diversity" and was not a systematic racist (45). This allows him to [End Page 531] move Helper's racist period to after the Civil War, rescuing The Impending Crisis from the taint of racism. This claim is contradicted by Helper's statements in The Land of Gold (1855) that the "inferior races" would have to give way before the "Anglo-Saxons." Brown discounts them, however, and argues that since Helper did not believe in a biological basis for racial difference, he lacked an organized racial hierarchy. This line of argument is very troublesome. Antebellum racial thought was complicated, but for Helper, who later places race at the crux of his argument, it must be fully grappled with. As William Stanton compellingly argued (The Leopard's Spots, 1960), the most sophisticated, pseudoscientific antebellum racial constructs made limited inroads into Southern thought because of their implicit critique of biblical accounts of creation. The failure of polygenist scientific racialism to win acceptance, however, did not preclude Southerners, including Helper, from having profoundly hierarchical views of race. Brown's claims that Helper's prewar views were "different . . . from believing in a superior white race" are unconvincing (45). With most of its space given to literary analysis, the book omits some biographical details such as who Helper's associates were. The birth of his son is never mentioned. Most such omissions are minor, except where they relate to the tricky question of Helper's motivations. Late in the book Brown identifies Helper as a "lawyer," a potentially vital piece of information (250). Helper's motivation to write The Impending Crisis is still unclear. Could he have been hoping for advancement in the Southern or Northern wings of the Republican party? Political aspirations were common for antebellum lawyers, but Brown rarely considers such...

Texas Terror: The Slave Insurrection Panic of 1860 and the Secession of the Lower South (review)

Reviewed by: Texas Terror: The Slave Insurrection Panic of 1860 and the Secession of the Lower South Christopher Cameron (bio) Texas Terror: The Slave Insurrection Panic of 1860 and the Secession of the Lower South. By Donald E. Reynolds. (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2007. Pp. 264. Cloth, $45.00.) Over the past four decades historians have produced a number of excellent studies on secessionism within individual states. In Crisis of Fear [End Page 558] (New York, 1970), Stephen A. Channing argues that the hysteria and fear that swept South Carolina in the wake of John Brown's raid were pivotal in pushing that state toward secession. James M. Woods's Rebellion and Realignment (Fayetteville, AR, 1987) takes a different approach, examining political parties, leaders, and the effect of interest groups and geography on the politics of secession, while Christopher J. Olsen's Political Culture and Secession in Mississippi (New York, 2000) argues that secession stemmed from the culture of honor that developed on the Mississippi frontier in the thirty years before the Civil War. Donald Reynolds's Texas Terror: The Slave Insurrection Panic of 1860 and the Secession of the Lower South differs from these works in the singular impact Reynolds attributes to threats of insurrection within Texas on the secession movement throughout the entire Lower South. While Channing's work does not place the secession movement in South Carolina into the larger context of secessionism, Reynolds begins his work with a broader focus on the South and the increasing fear of servile revolt, and he ends the book with an analysis of how the Texas Troubles influenced the debate over secession in states such as Georgia, South Carolina, Mississippi, and Arkansas. When people in these states heard reports of the fires and alleged conspiracies in Texas, and then experienced similar plots closer to home, they were much more likely to distrust all northerners and discredit Unionists as traitors to southern principles. In Texas Terror, Reynolds tells us that from the time of Nat Turner's 1831 rebellion, scarcely a year passed without a slave panic somewhere in the South. The "periodic scares over possible uprisings were about as familiar to most white southerners as grits and redeye gravy," he writes (1). Turner's rebellion, periodic slave panics, the memory of the Haitian Revolution, and finally John Brown's raid of 1859 pushed many white southerners into a siege mentality, whereby they believed northerners were constantly working to undermine cherished southern values and institutions. Add to this equation reports of twelve fires that broke out in the Dallas area on July 8–9, 1860, and you get a much strengthened movement for a separate southern confederacy, according to Reynolds. Reynolds shows that this movement began locally, with newspapers around Texas stirring up fears of rebellion and invasion from northern "abolitionists." Papers such as the Austin Texas State Gazette, the Houston Weekly Telegraph, and the Marshall Texas Republican argued that so many fires within such a short period of time were no coincidence, but a northern-inspired abolitionist plot to destroy the South. In addition to [End Page 559] fire, according to the papers, abolitionists meant to destroy slavery by poisoning wells and inciting slaves to kill their masters and other whites. Texans responded to these fears by creating vigilance committees across the state to guard against possible uprisings. Entrusted with broad powers, the vigilantes dispensed "justice" to would-be conspirators through whippings, banishment, and executions. Reynolds argues that fire-eating editors and politicians in the state, those people pushing for secession, used the fear of servile revolt to strengthen their arguments against the Union, often to great effect. Elsewhere in the South, fire-eaters such as William Lowndes Yancey and Robert Barnwell Rhett similarly used what Reynolds calls the "Texas Troubles" to argue for the creation of a southern nation. They claimed that if Lincoln was elected, a situation that began to appear more likely as election day approached, then the entire South awaited a fate similar to that of Texas. Reynolds does an excellent job of demonstrating the importance of the Texas Troubles to political debates over secession within Texas and elsewhere in the South. He draws...

Ghostwriting Transnational Histories in Michelle Cliff's Free Enterprise

Abstract In this article I argue that Cliff's portrait of the nineteenth-century African American abolitionist, entrepreneur, and civil rights activist Mary Ellen Pleasant participates in a genre of subaltern historiography that I term “ghostwriting.” Cliff was inspired to write about Pleasant, who provided major funding and leadership in John Brown's raid on Harper's Ferry in 1859—and indeed the stone that marks her grave reads simply: “M. E. P. She was a friend of John Brown”—because her role in the raid and in U.S. abolition is absent from nearly all historical documentation. I open the essay with the fact of Pleasant's erasure by documenting her historiographical absence and then go on to explain how Cliff ghostwrites Pleasant's story through a narrative of strategic adjacencies. Cliff enmeshes Pleasant's story with those of others engaged in contrapuntal history-telling from all over the world. This transnational network of resistance extends in Cliffs novel from the Caribbean to the Pacific to Sephardic passageways; her character bears witness to events from the Spanish Inquisition to the Civil Rights era in the U.S., a temporal span that Cliff achieves through the dynamic of haunting. Through her emphasis on the power of mutual witnessing and her use of a Decameronian plot structure, Cliff acts as a ghostwriter by first telling another person's story and, more importantly, by recounting stories of largely absent and hence ghostly subjects.

To set this world right: the antislavery movement in Thoreau's Concord

To Set This World Right: The Antislavery Movement in Thoreau's Concord. By Sandra Harbert Petrulionis. (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2006. Pp. 264. Cloth: $29.95.)Reviewed by Carol FaulknerIn this illuminating local study, Sandra Harbert Petrulionis traces Henry Thoreau's evolution as an abolitionist in the context of Concord's antislavery movement. Though scholars have devoted time and energy to understanding the abolitionism of the town's two most famous residents, Ralph Waldo Emerson and Thoreau, this is the first study of the activism that helped shape their ideas. Joining recent books on the antislavery movement like Julie Roy Jeffrey's The Great Silent Army of Abolitionism (University of North Carolina Press, 1998) and Beth Salerno's Sister Societies (Northern Illinois University Press, 2005), Petrulionis views female abolitionists, including Thoreau's mother and sisters, and Emerson's wife and daughter, as the central figures in Concord's antislavery movement. She also sees Concord as an example of the transformation of antislavery sentiment in the north. The town's response to and participation in national events such as the Fugitive Slave Law and John Brown's raid on Harper's Ferry radicalized relatives and neighbors previously divided on Garrisonian abolitionism, colonization, and racial equality.The book's four chapters are organized chronologically, and Petrulionis begins with the founding of the Concord Female Anti-Slavery Society in 1837, following a local appearance by the controversial Grimke sisters. Some of the town's female residents, most notably Mary Merrick Brooks, had already been active in the Middlesex County Anti-Slavery Society, and the female society continued the women's identification with Garrisonian moral suasion. The sixty-one charter members included Lidian Emerson and Cynthia, Sophia, and Helen Thoreau, and at least one African American, Susan Garrison. But Brooks, whose father was a slaveholder and whose husband opposed abolition, was the most important female activist in Concord. As Petrulionis notes, she pursued Waldo Emerson with a vengeance, convinced that his backing would lend critical weight to the immediatist cause (24). Brooks finally succeeded in 1844 when Emerson addressed an anniversary celebration of West Indian emancipation.Petrulionis weaves the local story into the larger history of the antislavery movement, noting the embrace by Concord abolitionists (though certainly not the entire town) of disunionism in 1844. Personal connections to the national controversy served to radicalize the town's population, as when moderate politician Samuel Hoar went to Charleston, South Carolina, to appeal for the freedom of northern black sailors imprisoned in the state. When South Carolina officials shunned Hoar, Emerson and others were outraged at the insult. …

To Set This World Right: The Antislavery Movement in Thoreau's Concord (review)

To Set This World Right: The Antislavery Movement in Thoreau's Concord. By Sandra Harbert Petrulionis. (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2006. Pp. 264. Cloth: $29.95.)Reviewed by Carol FaulknerIn this illuminating local study, Sandra Harbert Petrulionis traces Henry Thoreau's evolution as an abolitionist in the context of Concord's antislavery movement. Though scholars have devoted time and energy to understanding the abolitionism of the town's two most famous residents, Ralph Waldo Emerson and Thoreau, this is the first study of the activism that helped shape their ideas. Joining recent books on the antislavery movement like Julie Roy Jeffrey's The Great Silent Army of Abolitionism (University of North Carolina Press, 1998) and Beth Salerno's Sister Societies (Northern Illinois University Press, 2005), Petrulionis views female abolitionists, including Thoreau's mother and sisters, and Emerson's wife and daughter, as the central figures in Concord's antislavery movement. She also sees Concord as an example of the transformation of antislavery sentiment in the north. The town's response to and participation in national events such as the Fugitive Slave Law and John Brown's raid on Harper's Ferry radicalized relatives and neighbors previously divided on Garrisonian abolitionism, colonization, and racial equality.The book's four chapters are organized chronologically, and Petrulionis begins with the founding of the Concord Female Anti-Slavery Society in 1837, following a local appearance by the controversial Grimke sisters. Some of the town's female residents, most notably Mary Merrick Brooks, had already been active in the Middlesex County Anti-Slavery Society, and the female society continued the women's identification with Garrisonian moral suasion. The sixty-one charter members included Lidian Emerson and Cynthia, Sophia, and Helen Thoreau, and at least one African American, Susan Garrison. But Brooks, whose father was a slaveholder and whose husband opposed abolition, was the most important female activist in Concord. As Petrulionis notes, she "pursued Waldo Emerson with a vengeance, convinced that his backing would lend critical weight to the immediatist cause" (24). Brooks finally succeeded in 1844 when Emerson addressed an anniversary celebration of West Indian emancipation.Petrulionis weaves the local story into the larger history of the antislavery movement, noting the embrace by Concord abolitionists (though certainly not the entire town) of disunionism in 1844. Personal connections to the national controversy served to radicalize the town's population, as when moderate politician Samuel Hoar went to Charleston, South Carolina, to appeal for the freedom of northern black sailors imprisoned in the state. When South Carolina officials shunned Hoar, Emerson and others were outraged at the insult. …

Why John Brown Matters

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...

Calculating the Value of the Union: Slavery, Property Rights, and the Economic Origins of the Civil War (review)

Calculating Value of Union: Slavery, Property Rights, and Economic Origins of Civil War. By James L. Huston. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003. Pp. xvii, 394. Illustrations. Cloth, $45.00.)James L. Huston's new study of coming of Civil War is intended to demonstratethat rights in slaves generated sectional conflict, that concentration of valuable rights in one region thwarted any attempt at compromise and undermined genius of democratic process. Southern slaveholders searched for a sanctuary founded on absolute guarantee that all members of Union would view slaves as and agree that no law at any level of government anywhere within Union could directly or indirectly harm value or ownership of that property-the absolute sanctity of rights m Northern resistance to southern demands about rights in African Americans stemmed from a number of sources, but crucial one was economic.Northerners, he concludes, came to oppose because they saw growing system as a ruinous competitor to their system of free village labor (xiv).A casual reader of this thesis statement might wonder what, exactly, is original in it. The short answer is, not much. One finds here an account of 1840s and 1850s with much more in common with those of David Potter and Hermann von Hoist than with more recent ethriocultural school. At least since Abraham Lincoln, and arguably since James Madison, conflict within federal system has been traced to distinction between slave states and free. Huston is aware of this, as his reliance on Potter and rejection of Holt show. So what does he believe to be historiographical contribution of his jaunt through fractious events beginning with Wilmot Proviso and ending in southern secession?Instead of referring to slavery as nub of sectional crisis, Huston points to the right to own slave property. To my mind, this distinction does little to further understanding. What does one glean, for example, from learning that John Brown's raid prompted many southerners' concern for future of their rights in slaves under a Republican government instead of, as he might have thought, concern for future of under a Republican government? Very little, it seems to me.In one characteristic paragraph, Huston states that Kansas-Nebraska debate highlighted property rights in slaves. He then quotes an Alabama senator's reference, in course of arguing for legality of in territories, to constitutional protections of rights. …

"What Business has the World With the Color of My Wife?" A Letter From Frederick Douglass

In this 1884 letter to an old friend, Frederick Douglass touches on key moments, both hopeful and discouraging, in his experience of post-Civil War America. He reveals to Amy Post his frustration with the public reaction to his recent marriage to Helen Pitts, a white woman. (His first wife, Anna Murray Douglass, a black woman, had died in 1882.) Amy Post and her husband Isaac were Quaker abolitionists active in the underground railroad. They had been friends with Douglass since the early 1840s, when he and Anna moved to Rochester, New York. Amy had assisted Douglass in the 1850s with financial support for his newspaper, the North Star, and had helped look after his family when he fled authorities pursuing him for complicity in John Brown's raid on Harpers Ferry in 1859. Though her husband Isaac had died shortly after the Civil War, Amy and Frederick had remained...