John Brown: A Real American (Anti)Hero

John Brown: A Real American (Anti)Hero. A reaction to David S. Reynold's _John Brown. Abolitionist_ (2005)

Chapter 5 of David S. Reynolds’s John Brown. Abolitionist begins: “Few successful people in history have failed so miserably in so many different pursuits as John Brown.” The chapter goes on to state: “In pre-Civil War America, however, success and failure, like patriotism, were often reversible. Herman Melville declares on the eve of writing _Moby Dick_: “It is now my settled purpose to write novels that are said to ‘fail.’” Emily Dickson was another proud failure of this time, being arguably the greatest poet who ever ‘failed,’ as virtually none of her work was published during her lifetime.

There is something to be said of being a failure and of being an unreasonable non-conformist. As George Bernard Shaw points out, “The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable man persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the unreasonable man.” After reading about the successes/failures of John Brown and after reflecting on this society’s particular rampant cravings for success (unfortunately defined more by material and power than by virtue and forthrightness), I am coming to the conclusion that it is time to fail proudly and with a quixotic flare. Let's be like John Brown, like Melville, like Dickinson, and have our mark be that of failing in a way that changes the world. In a society as self-absorbed and driven by greed as this one, failing seems like the nobler option, the more admirable pursuit.

But back to John Brown. Why John Brown as a symbol of this failure? I became obsessed with John Brown during my tenure in Kansas, a time when I learned more about my country than I had during any other time in my life other than my 3 years away from it. Living in the Midwest gave me a new appreciation of American history and American ideals and values. It all started early on in my first year in Lawrence as I remember driving back from Kansas City with my friend Boston Mike. We were taking a rural route and passed by the site of the Battle of Black Jack. We read how many consider this to be the first (unofficial) battle site of the Civil War. Like many actions in history, a series of mishaps and coincidences affected the outcome of this important event, possibly John Brown’s greatest success in the traditional sense of the word. A rag-tag group of Brown’s 29 Free-Staters were on the prowl for retaliation against a group of Missourian pro-slavery forces. A sentry for the pro-slavery group reported to Captain Pate that 100 abolitionists were coming. Pate organized his men in a defensive position. As the enemy had greatly overestimated the number of his forces, Brown was able to surprise the Missourians, who greatly outnumbered his forces. The Missourian border ruffians had a number of deserters who shot at their own side’s horses. Brown’s son, Frederick, appeared on one of the horses riding through the battlefield and yelling “We’ve got ‘em surrounded,” which was followed by Pate’s surrender, even though he still had the upper hand in the battle. Reynolds describes the scene at the Battle of Black Jack as silly: “The threadbare Free State troops who laughed at themselves; the imaginary horde of Abolitionists who alarmed Pate into an overly defensive posture; the deserters who helped Brown win the battle by taking potshots at the enemy’s horses; the crazy Frederick terrifying the Missourians into surrender—all lent an air of absurdity to the affair.” (186). He goes on to note that “Black Jack revealed that violent Abolitionism, when it took up arms, could puncture Southern intimidation and bluster.” (187) Brown brought both guerrilla tactics and clemency towards his captors, which make him a unique rabble-rouser. A vivid account of this victory was submitted to the _New York Tribune_ and Brown became an effective orator for the abolitionist cause.

John Brown’s courage and his eloquence would impress the Concord Transcendentalists, who brought him to Messiah status in their writings. Emerson would feature Brown in his lecture “Courage” and Thoreau would emphasize his valor in his speech “A Plea for Captain John Brown.” Brown embodied Thoreau’s notion that individual conscience surpassed laws and majorities. The Transcendentalists regarded John Brown as a “Cromwellian warrior against corrupt political institutions in the name of a higher law.” Reynolds notes that “[i]f they magnified him to supernatural proportions, it was because they believed he might succeed where they failed. They had tried for years to supplant their culture’s materialism, conformity, and shady politics with spiritual-minded individualism. Like their favorite poet, Walt Whitman, they wanted to cleanse America by providing it with an alternative vision. They began to realize, however, that they were waging an uphill battle. They believed that John Brown was better equipped than they to win this battle. They recognized themselves to be philosophical observers, theorizing about principles. He was an actual soldier in the field, fighting for principle.” (221). Even his dark role in the Pottawatomie murders did not dissuade the Transcendentalists from revering Brown. In fact, Emerson makes note of the “folly of the peace party” because for too long the abolitionists had been too passive, too peaceful, and too affable in their attempts to stop one of the country’s most lasting institutions. In fact, it seemed about time for the black slaves to fight back, and if they wouldn’t, Brown would for them. Therefore, there existed a “perfect right” for the Missouri border ruffians “to be shot.” Frederick Douglas remarked that Brown’s violence, like that of Lincoln’s generals, must be viewed historically. Brown was making up for centuries of outrages committed against American blacks. W.E.B. Dubois points out that Brown was “the man who of all Americans has perhaps come nearest to touching the real souls of black folk.” Reynolds concludes: “Without the racial factor, Pottawottomie seems like heartless butchery and Harper’s Ferry appears inane and quixotic. With the racial factor, both make sense. At Pottawatomie, Brown was responding to proslavery outrages: not only the sack of Lawrence and the caning of Sumner [a senator caned by Southern congressmen opposed to his abolitionist suggestions] but the whole bloody history of America’s cruelty toward blacks. At Harper’s Ferry, he was tapping into Southern whites’ deepest fear—slave insurrection—and protesting against the proslavery federal government in the process.” (505). Whether or not you believe in violence or peace as means to change the world, Brown’s legacy has also been used for evil as his name is invoked by blatant murderers such as Timothy McVeigh and those who bomb abortion clinics and other anti-government activists or terrorists (depending on how you see them). I will return to this point later.

Emerson and Thoreau exalted him because he did what they only talked about. “He did not just theorize about fighting the government; he had actually fought government troops in Kansas. […] If he was a lawbreaker, all the better, since law itself was a mockery—as evidenced yet again that same month by the Dred Scott decision, which stripped American blacks of social rights.” Brown had a profound vision; having befriended a black boy as a child, he wholeheartedly believed that blacks, whites and Indians should be treated with equality and that slavery was an intolerable abomination and disgrace to the still budding nation. William A. Phillips, an antislavery journalist, recalled how on top of Mount Oread (now the site of the University of Kansas) he noted the magnificent scene below them and how Brown replied, “a great country for a free State.” John Brown seemed to be the real-life incarnation of the democratic “I” of Walt Whitman’s _Leaves of Grass_. As Reynolds points out, “[h]is supporters were as unbothered by the fact that he espoused retaliatory violence as Whitman’s were that his “I” identified with criminals, prostitutes, and fugitive slaves. In a time of compromise and evasion in high places, there was something refreshing about decisive action, even when it was illegal.” (206). Thoreau believed that the principled individual was worthier than the strongest government, and therefore saw Brown as a saint who had the best interests of America in his heart. And also saw Brown’s dilemma as indicating the corruption of the American system. Thoreau saw Brown as the virtuous, sturdy individual willing to sacrifice his life for the liberty of millions of enslaved African Americans while those opposed to him—the press, the government, and the South—were depraved and inhuman. The newspapers accused him of insanity. Thoreau chastised the editors who needed to “get their sentences ready for the morning edition,--and their dinner ready before afternoon, […]. Did it ever occur to you what a sane set of editors we are blessed with!—not ‘mistaken men’; who know very well on which side their bread is buttered!’ […] What has Massachusetts and the North sent a few sane senators to Congress for of late years?... All their speeches put together and boiled down… do not match for simple and manly directness, force, and effectiveness the few casual remarks of insane John Brown on the floor of the Harper’s Ferry engine-house.” (345)

John Brown put his beliefs into action. Before his raid on Harper’s Ferry, he wrote a new version of the Declaration of Independence that registered the position of the black man within the United States and signaled racial injustice as an important detriment to the progress of the nation. In many ways, it is still a ghost that haunts us today. He made an assertion for their natural rights as human beings and as citizens of a “free” republic.

John Brown is most remembered for his “botched” raid on Harper’s Ferry and Reynolds makes the point that it was not what happened during the raid that made it a “success” and still remembered today but the way Brown behaved during and after it, and the way it was perceived by key figures on both sides of the slavery divide. “The raid did not cause the storm [aka the coming Civil War]. John Brown and the reaction to him did.” Reynolds goes on to state, “The greatest irony was that John Brown, famous for demanding action while ridiculing ‘Talk! Talk! Talk!’ failed in military action but created a huge effect because of how he talked: to his prisoners during the raid, to his interrogators after it, and to the world during his trial and from prison. He won the battle not with bullets but with words.” (309) In this sense, failure led to victory in a way befitting of those times, so violent and in need of someone to stand up for (un)reason.

During the raid, John Brown held his hostages (including one of George Washington’s descendants) with dignity and humanity. But it was during his trial that he brought the issue of abolition more to the mainstream and highlighted its own humanity. When asked by Senator Mason about how he could justify his acts, John Brown responded: “I think, my friend, you are guilty of a great wrong to God and against humanity—I say it without wishing to be offensive—and I believe it would be perfectly right to interfere with you, so far as to free those you wickedly and willfully hold in bondage. I think I did right and that others will do right who interfere with you at any time and at all times.” In this sense, John Brown admirably demonstrates the Golden Rule, something that moved him to abolition since an early age. He looked at his mission as one ordained by God, and in many ways, he puts his Christian principles into action. His hostages, even Colonel Washington, spoke highly of him, believing him to be a man of principle and courage. By using the Golden Rule as a way to rationalize his actions, John Brown thus raised the “negro question” in a way that illustrated the confounded backwardness of the South and slave owners. When he was hanged, it was as a martyr. For many in the North it was the martyrdom of a saint. Emerson most profoundly describes Brown’s sainthood: “That new saint, than whom none purer or more brave was ever led by love of men into conflict and death,—the new saint awaiting his martyrdom, and who, if he shall suffer, will make the gallows glorious like the cross.”

More importantly, Brown’s greatest impact was made not with weapons but with words. In one of his final speeches in the court before being sentenced and pilloried, Brown concludes by making reference to the Bible that rests as part of courtroom proceedings, “which teaches me that all things whatsoever I would that men should do to me, I should do even so to them. It teaches me, further, to remember them that are in bonds as bound with them. I endeavored to act up to that instruction. I am yet too young to understand that God is any respecter of persons. I believe that to have interfered as I have done, as I have always freely admitted I have done, in behalf of His despised poor, I did no wrong, but right. Now, if it is deemed necessary that I should forfeit my life for the furtherance of the ends of justice, and mingle my blood further with the blood of millions in this slave country whose rights are disregarded by wicked, cruel, and unjust enactments, I say, let it be done.”

Of course, Brown knew that the Southerners believed that the Bible ordained slavery. Untrue, Brown retaliated. “Untrue, he suggested, because Americans should know the real meaning of the Bible. Americans had revolted against tyranny. Americans [as James Joyce reminds us are the sweepings of every country] sympathized with the downtrodden. They stood for liberty and justice for all. For true Americans the most meaningful Bible passage is the one that asks us to remember those in bonds. Americans knew that it was not ‘the rich, the powerful,…the so-called great’ who needed assistance but rather the ‘despised poor,’ the weak and the oppressed.” (356) This once again brings me back to the great notion of failure that seemed to ripple through all the great “successes” the 19th century (Whitman, Melville, Dickinson, the abolition of slavery, even Lincoln had known so much failure before he went anywhere).

Another point that Reynolds makes is that it was good that the controversy that Brown provoked brought about the Civil War in 1861 rather than later, say 1881. The 1850s were marked by growing tensions and the country seemed to be in a quagmire that materialized into increasing violence on the streets of American cities. “In this atmosphere, war served to purify the atmosphere like a violent thunderstorm. Walt Whitman recalled having been depressed about the state of the nation in the late 1850s, remarking that the war ‘saved’ him and saved America by arousing idealism and social commitment.” (442) Indeed, Emerson and Thoreau were led by John Brown to the belief that abolition could redeem America, and it was Brown’s influence that helped them crystallize their take on the America of that time.

John Brown’s legacy can be felt in literature in music. Reynolds points out that “[n]o one in American history—not even Washington or Lincoln—was recognized as much in drama, verse, and song as was Brown.” (444). The war song “John Brown’s Body,” which eventually became “The Battle Hymn of the Republic,” was used as the Union’s fight song during the Civil War. The song began with the remark by a soldier in the Massachusetts 12th regiment that John Brown was dead. And the other soldier replied, “But his soul goes marching on.” And then other verses were improvised by other soldiers. Such as:
He captured Harper’s Ferry with his nineteen men so few,
And he frightened ‘Old Virginny,’ till she trembled through and through;
They hung him for a traitor, themselves a traitor crew,
But his soul is marching on! Glory, Hallelujah!
Brown powerfully influenced the war not just in verse and music but in its pursuits. The North originally fought to preserve the Union but then eventually to free the slaves, taking on an increasingly Abolitionist tenor. The war became John Brown’s war. Reynolds points out, “It was largely because the North increasingly adopted Brown’s aims and his tactics that it defeated the South.” (470) Lincoln had originally denounced Brown and steered clear of an abolitionist agenda, wanting to avoid recreating the divisiveness that Brown provoked. But “[b]y the end of the war, Lincoln had not only emancipated the slaves but had conquered the South largely because he had directed what well might be called ‘a John Brown raid, on a gigantic scale.’” (471)

Brown was later invoked by a variety of factions in their attempts to justify violence, the downside of the abolitionist’s legacy. Malcolm X said he “didn’t go for any nonviolent white liberals,” saying that they must do as John Brown did. Historian David W. Blight asks, “Can John Brown remain authentic American hero in an age of Timothy McVeigh, Osama Bin Laden, and the bombers of abortion clinics?” Reynolds goes on to ask: “How can America, which regards terrorism as its greatest threat, admit to the fact that it was shaped by a terrorist of its own?” (500). It is true, unfortunately, that violent right-to-lifers have used Brown as an excuse to bomb the innocent. McVeigh, who killed 168 people, also was a devotee of John Brown. The Unabomber, in his single-handed assault on technological industrialism, and Bin Laden, in his battle in the name of God against what he sees as a corrupt system, have also been compared to Brown.

But can we make the comparison of Brown to these lunatics? Reynolds notes that the “idea that ‘one man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter’ is no less true now than it was in Brown’s day.” Indeed, Brown (like the Unabomber, Bin Laden and Timothy McVeigh) saw many things wrong with American society. But he focused on slavery as the object of his fight. If we find politics corrupt in this current age, it was certainly no less so in Brown’s times. He certainly recognized his frustrations with other injustices but it was only slavery that drove Brown to violence. Why? “Because slavery was a uniquely immoral institution that seemed cemented in place by law, custom, and prejudice.” He saw slavery as the “sum of all evils” and it “deprived millions of their rights as Americans and their dignity as human beings.” And it was Brown’s lucidity in identifying a sole issue to bear against that made his plight more justified. Therefore, Reynolds argues that “Brown had a breadth of vision that modern terrorists lack. He was an American terrorist in the amplest sense of the word, because he believed in the American ideal of equal rights for all, regardless of creed or race. […] The Calvinistic Brown, reflecting the religious toleration of his nation, counted Jews, liberal Christians, spiritualists, and agnostics among his most devoted soldiers.” So long as they were with him in his fight against the “sum of all evils.” His respect for tolerance of others makes Brown an embodiment of true American ideals. And in my mind, one of our most admirable heroes. “Bin Laden’s goal was the creation of a Muslim theocracy in which opposing views, especially Western ones, were banned. Brown’s goal was a democratic society that assigned full rights to all, irrespective of religion, race, or gender.” And also, it was words that “won” the battle. Not his violence. “Brown’s eloquence distinguished him from modern terrorists. When Emerson and Thoreau singled out Brown for praise among American writers and orators, they were highlighting the power of his language. Perhaps Ted Kaczynski would have won more people to his side if he had published something more forceful than the meandering, garbled manifesto against leftism that he sent to newspapers.” Or perhaps something more lucid and noble in purpose might have helped.

The 505 page book concludes with an appropriate statement by W.E.B. Dubois: “John Brown was right.” And after looking at both sides of the historical documents, I have to agree. This book has made an enormous impact on me both in the sense of how it has broadened my understanding of American history during the 19th century but also in the sense of what it means to be a real hero. I find Americans a little too obsessed with the idea of hero. They label just about anybody who does something special a hero, and this belittles the meaning of the term. I’m not trying to demean the heroic qualities of firefighters, soldiers, pilots that avert disaster or even teachers that alter students’ conscience, who all certainly sacrifice themselves for a better society but are not heroes. They are simply doing their jobs. Europeans rightly point out the folly of Americans’ obsession with finding heroes in everyday life. It points to our selfish individualism and the idea that in America you can branch off and do your own thing and not work as a collective community. Then the hero worship reverts into idol worship and the John Wayne attitude of “my way or the highway,” which certainly does not make sense in an interconnected pluralistic world. Firefighters, soldiers, pilots, and teachers are taking an active role in bettering their communities and society and they should be praised. But my point is that when I say John Brown was a hero, I do not believe it to be hyperbole. Here is someone who truly sacrificed everything and went against all reason in order to bend reason. He gave up his life to attempt to make life better for millions of others. And more importantly, he was an (anti)hero. His flaws and his failures made him into who he became, and made him more human than the idealized heroes of some American mythology. That he was closer to failure, indeed the quintessence of failure, makes his success more meaningful. His humanity and his singularity in purpose is a true reflection of the Golden Rule. And if we take anything from the Bible, from Jesus’ teachings, and from John Brown’s life, it should be his embodiment of the Golden Rule. And that is why he is worth remembering.