Thinking John Brown

One of the interesting things being at Harpers Ferry was hearing the words John Brown uttered so many times. Seeing the site where he planned to raid a federal armory was not the only reason people were coming to visit. The town sits on the confluence of the Potomac and Shenandoah Rivers, where the C & O Canal and railroad made it a transport center. It was also an important manufacturing site, including the guns with replaceable parts. Given this, not surprisingly there was a Civil War battle here where the Confederacy scored a win.

But what did we actually learn about John Brown? The wax museum's portrayal of a man who hated slavery from a young age, and whose eyes flashed with mad passion, was not that different from the National Park Service programming. The NPS provided more context, but this was not context that would help make palpable the conflict over slavery and dispute over strategies for change. The word abolitionist is used freely on site without any discussion of what that movement meant (much less its different strands), what John Brown meant to people in that movement, etc. While John Brown is portrayed as an uncompromising idealist, often a beloved trait, the depiction treats him more like a demigod than a person who connected with hundreds and thousands of others to create freedom.

Frederick Douglass, who had met with John Brown, found Brown far more significant than just an enigmatic idealist, but saw his raid as the first volley of the Civil War. In his speech delivered in Harpers Ferry in 1881, "Did John Brown Fail?", Douglass reminds us of the conflicts that were so left out of the programming:

With eighteen men this man shook the whole social fabric of
Virginia. With eighteen men he overpowered a town of nearly
three thousand souls. With these eighteen men he held that large
community firmly in his grasp for thirty long hours. With these
eighteen men he rallied in a single night fifty slaves to his stan-
dard, and made prisoners of an equal number of the slave-hold-
ing class. With these eighteen men he defied the power and
bravery of a dozen of the best militia companies that Virginia
could send against him. Now, when slavery struck, as it certain-
ly did strike, at the life of the country, it was not the fault of
John Brown that our rulers did not at first know how to deal
with it. He had already shown us the weak side of the rebellion,
had shown us where to strike and how. It was not from lack of
native courage that Virginia submitted for thirty long hours and at
last was relieved only by Federal troops ; but because the attack was
made on the side of her conscience and thus armed her against
herself. She beheld at her side the sullen brow of a black Ire-
land. When John Brown proclaimed emancipation to the slaves
of Maryland and Virginia he added to his war power the force of
a moral earthquake.

There is a lot more in the essay, but in taking up the debate over John Brown's legacy, he was of course talking about how to go about ridding oppression. The concluding line:

Until this blow was struck, the prospect for freedom was
dim, shadowy and uncertain. The irrepressible conflict was one
of words, votes and compromises. When John Brown stretched
forth his arm the sky was cleared. The time for compromises was
gone — the armed hosts of freedom stood face to face over the
chasm of a broken Union — and the clash of arms was at hand.
The South staked all upon getting possession of the Federal Gov-
ernment, and failing to do that, drew the sword of rebellion and
thus made her own, and not Brown's, the lost cause of the cen-
tury.