A paper I did for US History my junior year, on John Brown.
"Devotion"
How does one judge the importance of a historical figure? Ask historians, and they will, of course, as they should, suggest that the only way to really know is to have enough knowledge of history to be able to judge intuitively. But really now, who has time for that? So here’s a tip: check a high school textbook. If the figure has nary a mention, he or she is either unimportant or has truly indirect influence. But when it comes to impressing people at cocktail parties, who cares about indirect web-weavers and conspiracy leaders anyway? And impressing people at cocktail parties is the only time in life that knowledge of some historic figure whose name one heard in passing is going to be vital knowledge. John Brown gets mentioned twice.
Everyone, growing up, has pets. Even men who are going to go on to have some of the brightest minds of the 19th century compare them to Jesus Christ. John Brown’s was a squirrel named Bobtail. He tamed this squirrel soon after his father, Owen, moved the family out to Ohio. John’s earliest happy memories were of the trip West in the summer of 1805–he had been born five years earlier. Owen Brown was a strict father, possibly a result of his own father’s lack of discipline, and a Calvinist. John developed a strong sense of property and title due to his father’s unyielding will. He went through severe periods of loss whenever his "possessions"–Bobtail, a yellow marble, an ewe, especially his mother–were taken from him, be it by his father or nature. He did poorly in school, as he cared more for tough games outside the classroom than paying attention inside it. He also enjoyed driving cattle. As a young man, he found religion and decided to become a minister. After studying towards that for several months, Brown’s eyes became inflamed and he returned to his home.
As children seem to have an annoying tendency to, John grew up. He married, had children, lost his wife in childbirth, married the housekeeper’s sister, had more children. He would, in the end, have twenty children: seven with his first wife, Dianthe, and thirteen with his second, Mary. John the father was much like Owen the father. His discipline was harsh, and, to a modern mind, rather bizarre at times. For example, he kept a ledger of his son John’s "sins" and would on occasion give the boy a third his whippings and have the boy give him the other two thirds. In business, John Brown’s fortunes waxed and waned. Then they waned some more. Then they’d wax for a second but, no, back to waning again. In short, he lost a lot of money for himself and others through many a fool scheme. If his business sense was not bad enough, he often suffered from prolonged illnesses and severe paranoia. At one point attempted to have a legal feud with a friend, Amos Chamberlain, believing that Chamberlain had stolen land from him, when, in fact, he had bought the land to save Brown from a lawsuit. John’s threats of legal action fell on deaf ears. John’s lack of luck was not all his own fault, though. Many Americans shared his problems in a turbulent economy. After moving to North Elba, New York, a peaceful, beautiful area in the Adirondacks, another business scheme–to sell wool to Europe–fell through. He had to leave his haven to try his hand again at the domestic market. The next time he had the money to move back to North Elba, he would leave almost right away for Kansas.
Two threads in Brown’s life were intertwined as much as they could be: freedom and religion. John’s anti-slavery ideas, he claimed, began when he spent some time at slaveowner’s house and saw the horrible conditions the man’s slave lived in. His religious ideas were passed down by his father. He found himself in the far left in slavery issues and the far right in religious ones–he was called a Puritan by many, including Thoreau. This led to some conflict between him and William Lloyd Garrison, who at the time was still preaching nonviolent protest of slavery and very liberal religious concepts. In 1837, John got into a conflict with his church when he escorted several blacks–including a few fugitive slaves–to his pew so they did not have to stand by the door. John lost his membership in the church. Later that year, upon hearing of the death of abolitionist editor Elijah Lovejoy, John swore an oath to fight slavery. Ten years later, he met with Frederick Douglass, to lay out a plan to liberate slaves by taking over a county in Virginia and holding the hills. This plan would return.
In 1854, five of Brown’s sons moved out to Kansas to help win the territory as a free state. They settled at Osawatomie, near the Pottawatomie creek. However, they had not prepared well, and lacked the weapons needed to defend themselves against Southerners. The Brown clan realized better organization was needed among the free-soilers, and began forming a militia. Despite having just returned to North Elba, John Brown responded to his children’s’ pleas and came to their aid, in 1855 with arms. On May 24, 1856, John Brown earned his first, more grisly mention in the textbooks. After pro-slavery forces took the town of Lawrence, Brown decided a counter-attack was required. The closest victims were his nearby neighbors, the Shermans. Brown and some men including several of his sons took the father and two eldest sons of the family and killed them with swords. It would later be called the Pottawatomie Creek Massacre.
John spent the next few years laying low, and planning. After all, he was a fugitive from the federal government. He used this time to drum up support for his plan to form a new free state in the South. He managed to find funding, plus tentative support from Frederick Douglass. He even drew up a constitution. He began gathering an army in Iowa, and then, in May of 1858, brought them to Chatham, Canada, where a convention voted for his plans. After several delays, the plan finally got under way in the summer of 1859. John Brown, using the oh-so-creative alias "Smith," and his merry band of insurrectionists moved into a farmhouse in Harper’s Ferry, Virginia. In order to keep up the appearance of a normal family, "Smith" had his some women from his family come down. At this point, having observed the situation up close, John Brown changed his plan. In lieu of forming a new state, he would simply take the armory in town, then swiftly move throughout the slave states with a guerilla army freeing slavers whenever possible and sending them north to Canada. Now Brown waited for the moment to strike. He met with Frederick Douglass one last time, rather melodramatically, in an abandoned quarry, where Douglass warned Brown about how foolish his new plan was. Douglass was not alone in this opinion: most of John’s backers disappeared. One confidant even warned the Secretary of War of the plan, who thought it so insane that it had to be a hoax, and forgot about the whole matter. John Brown earned his second mention in the history books with his raid on Harper’s Ferry. It fell for the reason that most insurrections fail. The people did not rise. Well, the slaves did not rise. The slave-owners did, still as scared of slave rebellions in 1859 as they were right after Nat Turner in 1831. John took the armory. He took the arsenal. He took prisoners, even a descendant of George Washington. But within hours he was cornered in the engine house with federal troops led by Robert E. Lee breathing down his neck.
John Brown earned his second mention in the history books with his raid on Harper’s Ferry. He did not earn his second mention because of the raid, though. He "spun the nation inexorably toward civil war." He was "an elected instrument for the commencement of this [war]." "Extraordinary events took place in many northern communities on the day of Brown’s execution." Emerson and Thoreau compared him to Christ. Douglass would later tearfully praise the man’s bravery and commitment. What happened? How does a man go from leading a pathetically unsuccessful revolution to gaining such soundbites? A skillfully used trial works pretty well. As the man said, "I am worth inconceivably more to hang than for any other purpose." He rejected pleas of insanity and escape plans from his friends and relatives; his only complaints were wishing to either dispense with the trial altogether or not have one so rushed that he had to depend on unprepared lawyers. His guilty verdict came down from the jury on October 31, 1859. On November 2nd, he was sentenced to death. On December 2, he went to the gallows. Interestingly, present at his execution were Robert E. Lee (sent down from Washington again, as Buchanan was afraid of an invasion from the North), Stonewall Jackson, and John Wilkes Booth.
In discussing Brown’s actions, first at Pottawatomie and then at Harper’s Ferry, I have tried to stay away from analyzing them. To try to explain his actions is rather difficult in a research paper because, well, the sources researched have trouble deciding too. "From 1890 to about 1970, John Brown was insane. Before 1890 he was perfectly sane, and after 1970 he regained his sanity." The first argument to fight against Brown’s insanity is the semantic one. "Insane" is a dated, imprecise word. And even if it was not, hints of his insanity from the trial are also flawed. Slightly more modern techniques of psychoanalysis also have their problems. A truly in-depth survey of whether or not Brown had psychological problems, and to what degree, is beyond the scope of this paper. Suffice to say that he may have been sane, he may not have been, and quite likely he was not all there, but not more so than anyone else.
And so it becomes clearer why John Brown, who, to be frank, was but a terrorist–if rather more effective than most–still gets mentioned in survey history textbooks one hundred and forty years after his actions. He may have been insane, he may not have been. He definitely helped push the Union towards the Civil War, but it would be foolish to claim that he caused the war. To me, his most important legacy over all these years is his example of the poignant beauty of a man who has lost all he has but his ideals, and is not afraid to live by them and die for them. While it would be easy to write Brown off in light of the fact that his martyrdom, truly, was the result of his own spin-doctoring and that of others who found uses for his death, a closer look reveals a curious truth. John Brown rationally decided to martyr himself. He thought about the best way he could help his cause, and the best way was death. Logic and reasoning springing from passion. The man was a murderer, a terrorist, a traitor. He had conviction, though. He really believed in what he was fighting for. It does not excuse his actions, and it does not explain them very much either. But something within me admires such devotion.
Works Cited
Davidson, James West, and Mark Hamilton Lytle. After the Fact. New York:
McGraw-Hill, 1992.
Loewen, James W. Lies My Teacher Told Me. New York: Touchstone, 1995.
McPherson, James M. Battle Cry of Freedom. New York: Ballantine Books, 1988.
Oates, Stephen B. To Purge This Land With Blood. Amherst: The University of
Massachusetts Press, 1984.
Scott, John Anthony, and Robert Alan Scott. John Brown of Harper’s Ferry. New \
York: Facts on File, 1988.
"The Harper’s Ferry Trouble: Trial of the Insurrectionists." John Brown Homepage.
Institute for Advanced Technologies in the Humanities at the University of
Virginia in Charlottesville. 31 Aug. 1999
<http://jefferson.village.virginia.edu/jbrown/news.vs/vsbrown8.gif>
Warren, Robert Penn. John Brown. Nashville: J.S. Sanders & Company, 1929.