Book Review: Tony Horwitz, Midnight Rising: John Brown and the Raid that Sparked the Civil War
Tony Horwitz, author of Confederates in the Attic, not only one of my favorite books about the Civil War, but one of my favorite non-fiction books ever, has recently published a new book on John Brown’s raid. Titled Midnight Rising: John Brown and the Raid that Sparked the Civil War, Horwitz demonstrates in lively prose the centrality of the Brown’s 1859 attack on the federal armory at Harpers Ferry, Virginia in creating the nation’s most deadly conflict.
Midnight Rising isn’t as profound as Confederates in the Attic. Nonetheless, Brown provides a straightforward and engaging story about one of the nation’s most polarizing figures, a man who still resonates with many people today. Horwitz’s Brown is a passionate, disturbed man, a failure in business and in everything else except agitating against slavery. Concerned with little other than eradicating the evil institution, Brown wrecks havoc not only on slaveholders who cross his path but his own family, terrorizing them one minute, creating devoted followers of them the next. Horwitz notes, and I think correctly, that Brown was almost certainly manic-depressive. His own writings admit that he felt great one minute and utterly horrible the next. In fact, Brown’s family had a significant history of mental illness.
The unhinged nature of Brown’s family was not helped by his actions. One of the most compelling parts of Horwitz’s story was how Brown’s 1855 attack on Kansas slaveholders at Pottawatomie Creek tramitized his sons who participated. Owen Brown, John’s oldest son did not want to participate. Convinced to do so, he went into a long depression because he personally killed one of the victims. The second son, Frederick Brown, basically went insane, castrating himself some time later. Even sons who did not take part, Jason and John Jr., began having major psychological problems after the raid. On top of this, since everyone knew Brown was involved, proslavery raiders quickly burned his home and possessions, leaving the family’s women poor, scared, and on the run, conditions that would be all too typical of life with John Brown.
Horwitz speeds through Brown’s first 55 years very quickly. Perhaps too quickly. By page 44 Brown is in Kansas and even that story is dealt with fairly rapidly. Horwitz wants to get to Harpers Ferry as soon as possible. He tells the story with aplomb, showing the convoluted ways Brown tried to make the operation work, his difficulty raising money (and his terrible business sense that led him to waste the money he did receive), how he gained his few followers, his plans for taking Harpers Ferry, and the disastrous results of his raid.
A point I frequently make to my students is how Southern politicians violently overreacted to every northern move to oppose slavery. Horwitz reinforces my feelings about this with his discussion of Henry Wise. Virginia’s governor in 1859 and an opportunist to the core, Wise sought to take advantage of the raid to improve his own political stock. A die-hard slaveholder and soon to be one of Virginia’s leading secessionists, Wise responded to Brown’s raid not with moderation, but by militiarizing his state, sending notices to the governors of Ohio, Maryland, and Pennsylvania that his troops would invade their states in pursuit of future raiders. This outraged even the pliant and worthless James Buchanan, not that our worst president did much about it.
Wise and his henchmen wanted to ensure Brown and his followers were executed as quickly as possible. They skirted legal procedures to speed through Brown’s trial, then oddly allowed him to hold court with all comers until his death. Rather than turn Brown over to the federal government where he would have likely been dealt with slowly and according to proper procedures, Wise and his supporters turned Brown into a martyr.
Few northerners supported Brown’s raid immediately upon its conclusions. Even most of his fundraisers recoiled in horror, some finding reasons to get out of the country. There were exceptions. Henry David Thoreau spoke out for him. So eventually did Frederick Douglass, who Brown had met years before and immediately before the raid, a meeting in fact that led to one of Douglass’ protégés joining Brown’s forces.
Brown even impressed southerners like Wise with his manly bearing and courage. Expecting a coward, they met a man they both loathed and expected. Horwitz doesn’t talk in these terms, but I was struck at how well Brown fit the culture of antebellum heroic masculinity. The emphasis on bravery, honor, and violence was more powerful in the South and among the working classes in northern cities than among the evangelical Whigs and the new middle class. Brown may have believed in northern reform movements but his actions and bearing impressed those who believed that manhood needed to be fought in the streets, in the duels that were so common among southern politicians before the Civil War and even in the brutal beating Preston Brooks placed upon Charles Sumner on the Senate floor after Sumner insulted not only the South generally but Brooks’ relative, South Carolina Senator Andrew Butler.
In the short term, Brown became a hero to abolitionists and African-Americans. And this leads to why I think Brown continues to fascinate us. We respect his stand for equal rights. Unlike even most abolitionists Brown was an anti-racist, thinking of African-Americans as absolute equals to whites. Slavery is our national sin. It needed to end by any means necessary.
On the other hand, I’ve been reticent to support Brown in the past because his example is held up by anti-abortion fanatics as a model of how to fight against an immoral system. This idea has had real consequences, including the assassination of Dr. George Tiller. How can we judge slavery so wrong that murder is acceptable to fight it (and say what you will about Harpers Ferry, but Pottawatomie Creek was definitely murder) and tell anti-abortion activists that it is totally different? Of course, it is completely different in my moral universe, but given that, unfortunately, I can’t apply my moral values to the world, the question comes down to the proper use of violence. Do we embrace Martin Luther King’s notions of nonviolence? Even King would not overstate the concept’s limits; certainly, he would not have spoken against Nat Turner’s violent rebellion in 1831 that put southern slaveholders on edge against a northern invasion. And if this rebellion were led by another Nat Turner rather than a northern white man with a death wish and a hope to bring the slavery question to a violent resolution, could any of us feel anything but support? There are no clear answers to these questions except a blanket denunciation of violence that can’t survive the real world. The only way I can accept Brown’s violence and not that of anti-abortion fanatics is relativism. It depends on the cause and one cause is right and one cause is wrong. I’m OK with my relativism on this issue. But it certainly means that Brown will remain a contested figure for generations to come.
I question whether a blanket denial of violence cannot, in fact, survive the real world. History is replete with examples of groups that resisted, nonviolently, even the most extreme circumstances. It’s just a lot harder than fighting, which is why weak men prefer fighting.
This sounds more like platitudes than an actual exploration of history.
It also doesn’t really do anything to answer the underlying moral conundrum. So, for example, it might have been possible to end slavery without violence and with non-violent resistance of some sort from the slaves, but would we say it would be immoral for a slave to use violence to fight for his freedom?
To take a stab at answering your question…I’m not sure it’s possible to make these distinctions without making moral determinations regarding the underlying causes. I guess that leaves us in a moral jungle of sorts, but as you say, short of making very broad blanket judgments it probably just isn’t possible.
I recommend you read at least the first volume of Gene Sharp’s “Politics of Nonviolent Action.” Nonviolent resistance has historically been very effective, when it’s been used.
Examples of this happening successfully in situations in which there was no political downside for the groups they were resisting to simply start killing them until the point was made?
MLK and Ghandi get a lot of play, and they were brave, principled men, but my bead on nonviolent resistance is that it can only work in situations where the opposite side is unwilling to do things like respond to your lunch counter sit-in by hauling you out of the building and executing you one by one.
So… what? You’re suggesting that we handled Hitler the wrong way?
I hate to skip right to a Godwin’s violation, but this topic is one of the few where I feel it’s pretty relevant. It seems to me that a blanket denunciation of violence doesn’t hold up well in real world circumstances. Would it be wrong to intercede, violently if need be, in a rape? A murder? A genocide?
It seems to me that the only way out is to make moral distinctions. On the one hand, John Brown was right to see slavery as an intolerable moral sin and something against which violence was legitimate. On the other hand, I feel that it’s correct to see abortion as an entirely different order of moral question and one that violence is inappropriate as a tool to address in our society. The drawing of such moral distinctions is the subject of many, many, many college course. ;)
People engaged in nonviolent resistance to the Nazis, successfully. They’ve even made movies about some of them. Check out what the Danes did under Nazi occupation.
Admittedly, you will run into problems with the definition of “violence.” I’m perfectly willing to limit it to “not killing people.” And in fact it’s possible to oppose violent people without resorting to the same methods they use. Read some Gene Sharp.
The trouble with valorizing violence, as Erik notes, is that someone else with a different view on what’s moral and what’s not will be justified in using violence to reach their goals just as much as you are. That’s a recipe for an endless cycle of violence. And it’s not as though even the perpetrators of self-justified violence escape the consequences; look at what happened to John Brown’s sons.
The Danish resistance was nearly inconsequential. Had they managed to achieve anything, the Germans would have responded. Instead, Denmark remained a propaganda tool for the Germans, an example of what was to be gained from peaceful cooperation with Hitler. The Danes benefited from Germany overvaluing that propaganda.
I suppose that depends on what you mean by “achieving something.” The Jews who weren’t killed because the Danes refused to turn them over were, presumably, pretty happy about that.
How about ‘effective at ending Nazi domination of Denmark?’ Explain how their nonviolent opposition gets them to that point without an allied invasion. Telling me to read a book doesn’t count.
Effective nonviolent resistance has an endgame that’s political in nature. If the political actors involved do not give a shit about your nonviolent resistance, cannot be FORCED to give a shit, and can get away with either ignoring you or murdering you, that is what they will do.
Which is why nonviolent strategists have increasingly focused on how to take away, or at least limit, the political actors’ ability to murder you. See, for example, Gene Sharp’s hugely influential essay “From Dictatorship to Democracy”: http://www.aeinstein.org/organizations98ce.html
No they didn’t, as soon as the Nazi’s saw any hint of “effectiveness” they began killing people- if they hadn’t been already.
As Njorl notes Danish resistance was nearly inconsequential. The Nazis managed to “turn” a great many pacifists, because essentially there was no way to deal with them except through the use of greater force. Of course the Nazis are an extreme example, let’s use the Ku Klux Klan- how should they have been dealt with, whatever was used didn’t work for several generations of African Americans and other non-WASPs…
Again, it depends what you mean by “effectiveness.” Nonviolent resistance to Nazis was pretty ineffective at killing Nazis and blowing stuff up, that’s certainly true.
The civil rights movement did a pretty good job dealing with the KKK without engaging in murder.
You should read Timothy Tyson’s Radio Free Dixie, which would complicate this significantly.
The civil rights movement managed that because by the 1950s and 60s, it was no longer politically possible for the racist establishment at the time to use brutal methods to suppress them.
If sit-ins had been tried in the 1890s, the people doing them would not have been arrested and done some unpleasant jail time. They would have been beaten to death and any who survived would THEN have been arrested. MLK would have been murdered had he set foot south of the Mason-Dixon and nobody with genuine political power would have cared.
Danish resistance was nearly inconsequential.
If you don’t count keeping Niels Bohr out of German hands . . .
History is replete with examples of groups that resisted, nonviolently, even the most extreme circumstances.
They’re in the index, under E for “Extinct”.
Some are; some aren’t. History’s pretty complex.
Name five.
Take your pick from these examples provided by the Albert Einstein Institution:
http://www.aeinstein.org/organizationsfb39.html
http://www.aeinstein.org/organizations72b5.html
Sure, plenty of nonviolent resistance efforts have failed, and been brutally, murderously suppressed. The same is true for many violent resistance movements.
No it isn’t. History is replete with wholesale slaughter and unrelenting, brutal oppression.
Note: wholesale slaughter and unrelenting, brutal oppression can be and have been inflicted regardless of whether people took up arms.
Well, Eric, that was quite a mouthful.
When I visited Harpers Ferry 20 years ago (one of the most beautiful spots on the planet), a glance at the blockhouse where the “raiders” were penned informed me that Brown was a mad man, intent on suicide/martyrdom.
I’ve yet to change my mind. Maybe I’ll read the book. It sounds interesting.
Harpers Ferry is one of my favorite places in America.
John Brown is one of my favorite Americans.
Oh, no, not this silly nonviolence thing again…
I condemn thee to reading TNC’s every Civil War Thread from nigh unto eternity.
and the whole focus on anti-abortion zealots reflects a confusion about entitlement to violence. Were Northerners all that violent about anti-slavery before Harper’s Ferry, and including Bleeding Kansas? Did Southerners need any provocation to retaliate in violence? Anti-abortion folks are fighting for the right to control women, and it’s not a concept that’s hard to explain to any non-involved person. They view themselves as entitled to violence, and the permissiveness of the system implicitly grants that entitlement, with some limit. Whatever the family planning activist acts maybe, violent or no, they don’t have the same entitlement to violent action nor would nonviolence be reciprocated.
“Anti-abortion folks are fighting for the right to control women…”
Certainly, but they also see themselves as trying to protect a class of human beings from a plague of horrible violence. I choose to take that claim seriously; you seem to disregard it, which I don’t think can be supported. If you just refuse to take the moral claim at face value, you’re back inside Erik’s Big Box O’ Relativism again.
No. The Slave Power and anti-choicers are soul-mates; they have the same objective. Both wish to strip a specific large class of persons of their autonomy. The anti-choicers want to do this to a gender, though for only nine months. The Slave Power wanted to do it to a race, for life.
On balance I find the Slave Power more objectionable than I do the anti-choicers, but the anti-choicers are preferable only in relative terms.* Violence aganist slave-owners and those they paid to protect their interests was justified. (It’s a pity that violence was not used against them in any systematic way until they committed treason, and was used then for entirely different reasons.) The delta between the moral repulsiveness of the Slave Power and that of anti-choicers is sufficiently large that I do not believe violence against anti-choicers justified, at least not unless they significantly increase their terrorist activities.
* OTOH, one must in fairness grant in the Slave Power’s favor that, unlike the anti-choicers, it no longer exists, its latter-day disciples being limited to rear-guard actions to preserve such scraps of institutional racism and disloyalty to the Constitution as they can.
I choose to take that claim seriously; you seem to disregard it, which I don’t think can be supported.
A necessary condition of my taking that claim seriously would be for the people who make the claim to take it seriously themselves. But they routinely back away from all manner of logical conclusions of that claim and consistently refuse to entertain or support policies that are actually effective at reducing abortion but are neutral to positive with respect to women’s autonomy.
I don’t think it’s moral relativism to say that violence is justified in good causes but not in bad ones. It may be narrowly relativistic on the issue of violence, i.e. saying that it’s justification is relative to its cause and circumstances, but then I presume everyone save a moral nihilist would say that. What it isn’t is a position on this issue that can be applied uniformly regardless of one’s other moral beliefs. But that doesn’t make it relativistic, I don’t think.
Well and succinctly said, Stephen. It’s not relativism to say that one’s position of moral approval or disapproval depends upon the context of a given act, it’s just a refusal to give an absolute, a priori, a-contextual moral assessment to the act in question. Pacifism, strictly speaking, means nothing ever justifies violence. But not being a pacifist doesn’t mean therefore that one is wishy-washy and indecisive regarding; it just means that you have other principles in play.
Erik,
Have you read “John Brown; Abolitionist” by David Reynolds?
No, should I?
I need to read the book before passing judgment, but in my view I don’t think Harper’s Ferry did much to change the course of history other than throw a few more sticks on an already raging fire. But maybe Horwitz makes a case I haven’t heard before. I should add that I know approximately 100x as much about pre-1820 US history as about post-1820, so maybe I’m talking through my ass.
I loved Midnight Rising, not as much as I loved Confederates in the Attic, but that’s a tough standard to beat.
Pragmatically, non-violence is almost always the best way for the weak to challenge the strong–unless they’re willing to resort to martyrdom and provoke the strong into striking militarily. That’s how Osama bin Laden got what he wanted: A war between the West and Islam that would ruin the West.
Maybe that’s what John Brown really wanted, too. But in service of a noble goal.
Horowitz stresses that the historical record is ambiguous about what John Brown really wanted to accomplish with his raid. Did he have credible plans to overthrow slavery by rebellion/revolution, or was he just an anti-slavery terrorist?
One of the most interesting questions raised by the book is whether (and how) that should enter into our assessment of Brown. If he wanted to overthrow the slave-holding regime, he was a failure, but at least he wasn’t a terrorist. On the other hand, if he wanted to draw the North and the South into a final confrontation over slavery, he was a successful martyr for the noblest cause you can imagine, but also a terrorist.
Either way, Horowitz explains, Brown tricked a lot of idealistic young men into siding with him for what they thought was going to be a serious military campaign against slavery. He also makes it clear that Brown’s authoritarian top-down, quasi-mystical leadership style left him prey for blunders that wouldn’t have befallen other types of leaders.
I’m impressed that you find time to read at all. I only do so now because I’m commuting by bus and thus can justify reading.
As to your reading of it, it definitely seemed to me that while Brown had a vague sense of what he wanted to do in Harpers Ferry, he really knew that he was going to die there and was completely OK with it. I thought Horwitz showed that his plans Brown’s plans were obviously half-assed at best, but that this ultimately didn’t bother Brown much. I absolutely think he was an anti-slavery terrorist, but then, I’m not sure that was a bad thing.
I had a professor whose theory of John Brown at Harper’s Ferry was as follows:
Brown thought that only open warfare would end American slavery—and he intended to be the spark that ignited that war.
After seizing control of the federal arsenal at Harper’s Ferry, Brown basically sat there, waiting to be caught. He didn’t take the weapons to arm slaves across Virginia. After having cut the telegraph wires and stopped a train, he let the train go. (Allowing the train’s crew to go up the line a few miles where the wires were intact, and send word to the outside world that John Brown was at Harper’s Ferry.)
When Brown was captured, so were all his papers and correspondence with “The Secret Six” and his other backers—revealing to Southern plantation owners that some of the same Northern businessmen who bought their cotton were secretly plotting to seize their most valuable property (i.e., their slaves).
That revelation convinced many Southerners that war was inevitable, and they acted accordingly over the next year—which helped lead to the firing on Fort Sumter.
P.S. Not only a provocative thesis, but a spellbinding lecture—to which dozens of people returned each year swelling (for one day) the attendance for that course.
It’s a persuasive argument but… is there any evidence that Brown wanted those documents to get captured? Why did he keep on shooting it out rather than surrendering to Lee as soon as Lee turned up? He would have had the same effect, and he might have saved some lives (including those of his own sons). For that matter, wouldn’t a successful raid and escape have been just as much of a spark for war?
Good questions. I don’t have the answers. Anyone else?
Erik, I tend to agree that John Brown was perfectly OK dying at Harper’s Ferry. But that brings us to the second part of the dilemma. Horowitz makes it clear in the subtitle that he thinks Brown’s raid sparked the Civil War, which ended slavery. So, that would make him a successful anti-slavery terrorist. That’s a really challenging point because we’re accustomed to believing that terrorism is always wrong.
Right–and that gets back to my discussion of violence. I talked about anti-abortion fanatics but Horwitz thinks the more clear comparison is Al-Qaeda and fair enough. But I think the key question is the same–when is it OK to use violence to (potentially) cause more violence? And there’s no easy answer. But I have no problem with the comparison between Brown and Al-Qaeda.
Did he have credible plans to overthrow slavery by rebellion/revolution, or was he just an anti-slavery terrorist?
This isn’t really an either/or question. Terrorism isn’t another word for “pointless violence”.
If I were editing that sentence, I’d strike the word “just.” The question is whether Brown was a revolutionary or a terrorist.
Terrorism isn’t any old pointless violence, it’s theatrical violence that’s calculated to work by its psychological effect on some audience, rather than by direct physical coercion. Anti-abortion terrorists can’t hope to take and hold every clinic in America. Instead, they kill a few doctors and hope to scare the rest away.
I take it as a given that it’s okay to fight slavery with violence. If there were ever a form of tyranny that justified insurrection, slavery would be it.
It was good that the United States government joined the fight. But as long as the government wouldn’t fight slavery, I can’t fault ordinary people for taking matters into their own hands.
(a different Aaron)
Did he have credible plans to overthrow slavery by rebellion/revolution, or was he just an anti-slavery terrorist?
It would seem to me that if by “credible,” we mean plans with any chance of succeeding, the conclusion has to be he didn’t have such plans.
If he wanted to overthrow the slave-holding regime, he was a failure, but at least he wasn’t a terrorist.
I hope I’m not misunderstanding you here. I think your point is not that the goodness of his cause determines whether he was a terrorist, but rather that in trying to set off an anti-slavery rebellion, he was doing something very different from his terrorism in Kansas. A problem with this is: it’s very unlikely that Brown would have refrained from actions similar to those in Kansas if his raid on Harpers Ferry had succeeded (whatever “success” would have meant). So I believe the knottiest question that John Brown presents us is this: is terrorism (not just violence) justifiable in a good cause?
You understand me correctly, Aaron. As far as I’m concerned, the rightness of the cause has no bearing on whether someone’s a terrorist.
Violence may certainly be justified in moral causes but that doesn’t change the fact that Brown was a nut, that his raid didn’t free a single slave, that it could never have achieved its goals, and that the raid began with the murder of a free black man by the raiders, making a mockery of its supposed ends.
It’s a lot like the Iraq war. Even if one believes that Saddam Hussein was a bad man and that Iraq would be best rid of him, that doesn’t justify the sad, stupid spectacle of the U.S. invasion. Just because your cause may be just doesn’t justify your actions ipso facto.
I don’t think you are appealing to relativism as the term is commonly understood in ethics. You don’t think that violence is right just if you believe it to be right. You think that it’s justified in some circumstances and not in others.
I don’t think there’s any escaping the logic of radical anti-abortion people except pacifism. But there no way to escape it. You condemn John Brown and they’ll go all Hilter. Overall, I think John Brown is a minor, fungile player in the justification of anti-abortion terrorism, so I don’t know it’s worth really wrestling with.
Structurally analogous arguments are generally uncomfortable! That’s why the material content of your moral beliefs matters. It’s scary to think that you might be analogous to the sincere (albeit racist) Southerner defending slavery as the natural order (fetuses aren’t persons!), or good for blacks (unwanted babies are better off aborted!), etc. I’m pretty damn comfortable with the disanalogies between being pro-slavery and being pro-abortion or pro-choice (I’m anti-slavery and pro-choice and even pro-abortion (the last in the sense that I think that plenty of abortions are positive good, not necessarily a regrettable evil)), but it’s non-trivial work to get there. That pro-abortion people depend on lies, have systematically incoherent views that happen to benefit the rich and powerful, systematically attack measures that would reduce the number of abortions, etc. are pretty good signals that they’re in the wrong. (Note that tactical or strategic lies might be justified, but there’s no evidence that that’s what’s going on. They lie to harm women, not to effectively reduce abortion incidence.)
Hanging from the beam,
Slowly swaying (such the law),
Gaunt the shadow on your green,
Shenandoah!
The cut is on the crown
(Lo, John Brown),
And the stabs shall heal no more.
Hidden in the cap
Is the anguish none can draw;
So Your future veils its face,
Shenandoah!
But the streaming beard is shown
(Weird John Brown)
The meteor of the war.
it definitely seemed to me that while Brown had a vague sense of what he wanted to do in Harpers Ferry, he really knew that he was going to die there and was completely OK with it
A good companion to this book (which I haven’t read) might be Norman Dixon’s “On The Psychology of Military Incompetence”. Brown’s actions at Harper’s Ferry – including his strange paralysis from midnight on – sound very similar to the sort of wilfully blind and almost deliberately faulty generalship that Dixon describes from the Boer War.
Harper’s Ferry, it’s obvious to anyone with common sense and a map, is a really easy place to take but a terrible place to hold. The Harper’s Ferry raid should have been a raid – take the bridges, cut the telegraph wires, cut the railroad, take the armoury, do whatever you need to do (steal weapons or whatever) and clear out. They could have been done inside an hour.
Brown took Harper’s Ferry and then… he just sat there, mucking around with hostages and souvenirs. The easiest conclusion to draw is that he just wanted to die.
There is indeed evidence of Brown’s intent to take off into the mountains and fight a variety of guerilla war, aiming to gradually peel military-age male slaves to the cause and to increase the scope of the insurrection over time. Speculation runs into Brown modeling his efforts after those which had proven successful a half-century earlier in Haiti. Thus the consternation of some of Brown’s co-conspirators when the whole thing bogged down at the arsenal. Now, Brown had some para-military experience, but he could hardly have been considered an experienced commander, especially with regards to such a complex and multi-pronged offensive plan. It’s not entirely surprising that he froze when the rubber hit the road and decided to hole up and shoot it out.
Just want to chime in to say Huzzah for Tony Horwitz. Confederates is one of the best books I have ever read. But really, all of his books are great. He does a great job of telling you all kinds of interesting and strange history while keeping things very funny. Blue Lattitudes (about Captain Cook/seafaring), Baghdad Without a Map (Middle East travel), Voyage Long and Strange (pre-Pilgrim New World history) and even his book recounting his attempt to hitch-hike across the outback…they’re all great. Can’t wait to try this one on for size.
Wrong. Abortion is not remotely analogous to slavery, and not just in liberal minds.
Slaves were actual human beings living and breathing outside the womb.
Blastocysts are undifferentiated clumps of cells unable to survive outside a woman’s body.
That’s not “morality.” That’s science.
Shame on you, Erik.
That “anonymous” comment above is from me. I was so mad I just posted without filling in the ID boxes.
“..Brown had some para-military experience, but he could hardly have been considered an experienced commander..”.
He was certainly unfamiliar with the time honored concept known as “a line of retreat”.
The problem with John Brown is that his story has been used from the failure of Reconstruction up to the present-day in many schools as an example of a crazy person not challenging power in the correct way.
The fact is that John Brown just brought the war in the west to the east. The laws being passed were vile and unenforceable and caused good people to become criminals. The ability of the country to function was in shambles and John Brown was just a symptom of that system gone wrong.
I find the fear around John Brown, simply because he is cited by violent anti-abortionists, to be misplaced. They also think of themselves as Catholics resisting a Nazi Holocaust. These people are nuts, and it always make me gag to think they value the small collection of cells of a human fetus to be equal value to living, independent oppressed people.
Tony H. will be at Back Pages Books (run by a friend of mine) in Waltham, MA at 7 p.m. on December 2 to discuss this book. If any LGMers show up, we could get beer afterwards.