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John Brown
A moving cultural biography of abolitionist martyr John Brown, by one of the most important African-American intellectuals of the twentieth century.
In the history of slavery and its legacy, John Brown looms large as a hero whose deeds partly precipitated the Civil War. As Frederick Douglass wrote: "When John Brown stretched forth his arm ... the clash of arms was at hand." DuBois's biography brings Brown stirringly to life and is a neglected classic.
In the history of slavery and its legacy, John Brown looms large as a hero whose deeds partly precipitated the Civil War. As Frederick Douglass wrote: "When John Brown stretched forth his arm ... the clash of arms was at hand." DuBois's biography brings Brown stirringly to life and is a neglected classic.
304 pages, Paperback
First published September 1, 1909
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3,884 people want to read
About the author
W.E.B. Du Bois
626books1,420followersIn 1868, William Edward Burghardt Du Bois (pronounced 'doo-boyz') was born in Massachusetts. He attended Fisk College in Nashville, then earned his BA in 1890 and his MS in 1891 from Harvard. Du Bois studied at the University of Berlin, then earned his doctorate in history from Harvard in 1894. He taught economics and history at Atlanta University from 1897-1910. The Souls of Black Folk (1903) made his name, in which he urged black Americans to stand up for their educational and economic rights. Du Bois was a founder of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, and edited the NAACP's official journal, "Crisis," from 1910 to 1934. Du Bois turned "Crisis" into the foremost black literary journal. The black nationalist expanded his interests to global concerns, and is called the "father of Pan-Africanism" for organizing international black congresses.
Although he used some religious metaphor and expressions in some of his books and writings, Du Bois called himself a freethinker. In "On Christianity," a posthumously published essay, Du Bois critiqued the black church: "The theology of the average colored church is basing itself far too much upon 'Hell and Damnation'—upon an attempt to scare people into being decent and threatening them with the terrors of death and punishment. We are still trained to believe a good deal that is simply childish in theology. The outward and visible punishment of every wrong deed that men do, the repeated declaration that anything can be gotten by anyone at any time by prayer." Du Bois became a member of the Communist Party and officially repudiated his U.S. citizenship at the end of his life, dying in his adopted country of Ghana. D. 1963.
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Although he used some religious metaphor and expressions in some of his books and writings, Du Bois called himself a freethinker. In "On Christianity," a posthumously published essay, Du Bois critiqued the black church: "The theology of the average colored church is basing itself far too much upon 'Hell and Damnation'—upon an attempt to scare people into being decent and threatening them with the terrors of death and punishment. We are still trained to believe a good deal that is simply childish in theology. The outward and visible punishment of every wrong deed that men do, the repeated declaration that anything can be gotten by anyone at any time by prayer." Du Bois became a member of the Communist Party and officially repudiated his U.S. citizenship at the end of his life, dying in his adopted country of Ghana. D. 1963.
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October 2, 2018
This title is among my favorite biographies of all time.
The profs teaching the class I took in college featured John Brown as a small figure in American contemporary history and dismissed him fairly quickly. He meant well, but was not stable, they said; in the end, he took extreme, hopeless measures that were destined for doom. He remained a hero to Black families (they admitted), South and North alike, as the first Caucasian man who was willing to die for the rights of Black people. Whereas many White folks (those with enough money for a fireplace and a portrait to go over it) featured a family ancestor or a painting of George Washington, Black homes often had a picture of John Brown.
The problem with the education I received is that no African-American scholars were included in this very central, pivotal part of the prelude to the American Civil War. Few would doubt the credentials of W.E.B. Du Bois, whose urgent and compelling defense of Brown as a selfless but sane man with a perfectly good plan that went wrong due to a couple of the people in key positions of responsibility for the taking of Harper's Ferry. The narrative Du Bois presents here is a compelling one, and it makes much more sense than the version peddled to most history students.
It's tempting to st0p here, but I think I need to give you a couple of instances that may draw you in--if you like history, care about the rights of Black people in the USA--because the oppression that started here is still not over. if you are interested in the Civil War or Brown in particular, you have to read this book.
Tidbits that do not spoil, then: Harriet Tubman planned to be there with him. She became seriously ill and was confined to bed; otherwise, she meant to fight alongside him.
White writers have all assumed that his escape route was impossible. They have the WRONG escape route. Brown did not share the working escape route with Quakers or other Caucasians apart from his family; DuBois tells us the actual route, which he argues could well have worked.
The Underground Railroad was run almost entirely by Black people, some of them wealthy, in the Northern US. DuBois points out that free Blacks owned over a million dollars worth of property, free and clear. Forget the mental image you may have grown up with in which the whole network is run by Quakers; though the Caucasian abolitionists were more Quakers (Friends) than not, they were a minority.
It galls me that even in this, the history of the first liberation struggle of African-Americans, Black folk are excluded from conventional U.S. textbooks.
It was this large body of free Blacks who provided the funding for Brown. He would have had more, if he had not become ill, and the loss of momentum removed most of his Canadian backers. Indeed, DuBois states that Brown most likely went to Harper's Ferry physically ill and "racked with pain", that he was very gaunt due to illness and poverty, but felt that to wait longer would be to lose his support and those he had gathered (a small group) for the initial attack.
To say more might make you feel as if you have little reason to read this book. It is eloquently laid out as only a wordsmith such as DuBois is capable of doing. I am deeply sorry I waited so long to find time for it. This biography holds a permanent position on my favorites list.
The profs teaching the class I took in college featured John Brown as a small figure in American contemporary history and dismissed him fairly quickly. He meant well, but was not stable, they said; in the end, he took extreme, hopeless measures that were destined for doom. He remained a hero to Black families (they admitted), South and North alike, as the first Caucasian man who was willing to die for the rights of Black people. Whereas many White folks (those with enough money for a fireplace and a portrait to go over it) featured a family ancestor or a painting of George Washington, Black homes often had a picture of John Brown.
The problem with the education I received is that no African-American scholars were included in this very central, pivotal part of the prelude to the American Civil War. Few would doubt the credentials of W.E.B. Du Bois, whose urgent and compelling defense of Brown as a selfless but sane man with a perfectly good plan that went wrong due to a couple of the people in key positions of responsibility for the taking of Harper's Ferry. The narrative Du Bois presents here is a compelling one, and it makes much more sense than the version peddled to most history students.
It's tempting to st0p here, but I think I need to give you a couple of instances that may draw you in--if you like history, care about the rights of Black people in the USA--because the oppression that started here is still not over. if you are interested in the Civil War or Brown in particular, you have to read this book.
Tidbits that do not spoil, then: Harriet Tubman planned to be there with him. She became seriously ill and was confined to bed; otherwise, she meant to fight alongside him.
White writers have all assumed that his escape route was impossible. They have the WRONG escape route. Brown did not share the working escape route with Quakers or other Caucasians apart from his family; DuBois tells us the actual route, which he argues could well have worked.
The Underground Railroad was run almost entirely by Black people, some of them wealthy, in the Northern US. DuBois points out that free Blacks owned over a million dollars worth of property, free and clear. Forget the mental image you may have grown up with in which the whole network is run by Quakers; though the Caucasian abolitionists were more Quakers (Friends) than not, they were a minority.
It galls me that even in this, the history of the first liberation struggle of African-Americans, Black folk are excluded from conventional U.S. textbooks.
It was this large body of free Blacks who provided the funding for Brown. He would have had more, if he had not become ill, and the loss of momentum removed most of his Canadian backers. Indeed, DuBois states that Brown most likely went to Harper's Ferry physically ill and "racked with pain", that he was very gaunt due to illness and poverty, but felt that to wait longer would be to lose his support and those he had gathered (a small group) for the initial attack.
To say more might make you feel as if you have little reason to read this book. It is eloquently laid out as only a wordsmith such as DuBois is capable of doing. I am deeply sorry I waited so long to find time for it. This biography holds a permanent position on my favorites list.
January 4, 2025
”Gentlemen, I consider the Golden Rule and the Declaration of Independence one and inseparable. And it is better that a whole generation of men, women, and children should be swept away rather than this crime of slavery should exist one day longer.�
~John Brown
”For he did not use argument. He was himself an argument.�
W.E.B. Du Bois’s biography of John Brown must be considered a monumental work for a variety of reasons. Top-most, this work, published in 1909, flew in the face of then current scholarly opinion that John Brown was a no account mad man and that his work was insignificant to American history. (This would remain the consensus on Brown throughout most of the 20th century, and was what I was taught in school.) Instead, Du Bois treated Brown, his actions, his motives, his designs, seriously, and put them in context of the turmoil of the 1850s as the country split over the slavery issue. Importantly, this biography was published just 50 years after Brown’s execution, when he and his deeds were still within living memory. And finally, Du Bois seriously considered the perspective of Black Americans, how they reacted to Brown, the effect his actions had on them, and how they responded to them. It would be decades before any other serious scholarship would deem to examine these issues.
John Brown was, and remains, a controversial figure, both during his lifetime through the present day. He took hard, brutal actions that broke the laws and social conventions, and horrified and terrorized many. Du Bois carefully puts these actions within the context in which they happened, particularly when addressing the Potawatomi massacre that Brown directed in Kansas. He notes that Brown’s five sons, like most other Free Staters and abolitionist, first came to Kansas peaceably:
”They came hating slavery, yet peacefully, unarmed, and in all good faith, with cattle and horses and trees and vines to settle in a free land.�
It was only after the pro slavery Boarder Ruffians began to use violence, terror, and murder to impose slavery on the Kansas Territory that Brown’s sons wrote to him asking him to send arms. Instead, Brown came himself bringing those arms. Free Staters in Kansas were slow to realize that mere words and political action would be wholly overwhelmed by the violence the pro slavery side was using with impunity. It was only after the Boarder Ruffians burned and sacked the town of Lawrence while its Free State citizens stood trembling by, offering no resistance, and committed multiple terrorizing murders that Brown chose to act. He organized his sons, rode to a notorious pro slavery settlement, pulled five men away from their families in the middle of the night, and directed his sons to execute them with broadswords. Asked about it after the fact, John Brown replied:
”I do not pretend to say that they were not killed by my order. And in doing so, I believe I was doing God’s service.
I think God has used me as an instrument to kill men, and if I live, I think he will use me as an instrument to kill a good many more.�
Nor is Du Bois at all equivocal in expressing what he feels about John Browns action:
”The last, red breath of the expiring war in Kansas flowed in these dark ravines. To this day, men differ as to the effect of John Brown’s blow. Some say it freed Kansas, while others say it plunged the land back into civil war. Truth lies in both statements. The blow freed Kansas by plunging it into civil war, and compelling men to fight for freedom which they had vainly hoped to gain by political diplomacy.�
And here, elegantly expressed in stirring prose, Du Bois further wrote:
”So Kansas was free. Free because the slave barons played for an imperial stake in defiance of modern humanity and economic development. Free because strong men had suffered and fought, not against slavery, but against slaves in Kansas. Above all, free because one man hated slavery, and on a terrible night, rode down with his sons amid the shadows of the Swamp of the Swan, that long, low-winding and somber stream, fringed everywhere with woods and dark with bloody memory. Forty-eight hours they labored there, and then, of a pale May morning rode up to the world again. Behind them lay five twisted, red, and mangled corpses. Behind them rose the stifled wailing of widows and little children. Behind them the fearful driver gazed and shuddered. But before them rode a man, tall, dark, grim-faces and awful. His hands were red, and his name was John Brown. Such was the cost of freedom.�
Of Brown’s Harpers Ferry raid, the event that cemented John Brown within American history, Du Bois also provides context that disputes the idea that it was wholly a mad endeavor. He also allows that it was seen as too risky an endeavor, even by allies like Frederick Douglass, who refused to join Brown on his raid. Du Bois explains their dispute over it so:
”Here two radically opposite characters saw slavery from opposite sides of the shield. Both hated it with all their strength, but one knew its physical degradation, its tremendous power, and the strong sympathies and interests that buttressed it the world over. The other felt its moral evil, and knowing simply that it was wrong, concluded that John Brown and God could overthrow it.�
And finally, Du Bois, all the way back in 1909, reached the conclusion that a century later has become the historical consensus on Brown. It was actually his trial and his execution which became Brown’s true, mortal blow against the institution of slavery. Brown came to this conclusion himself at the end. He stated:
”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 my children, and with the blood of millions in this slave country whose rights are disregarded by wicked, cruel, and unjust enactments, I submit, so let it be done.�
Du Bois was completely unambiguous in his biography of Brown. He saw him, not as a mad man, not as a criminal or villain, but as a courageous man willing to take hard actions and sacrifice all while other men stood by unwilling to do so:
”Slavery is wrong,� he said. “Kill it. Destroy it. Uproot it, stem, blossom, and branch. Give it no quarter. Exterminate it and do it now.�
Was he wrong? No. It is wrong. Eternally wrong. It is wrong by whatever name it is called, or in whatever guise it lurks, and whenever it appears. But it is especially heinous, black and cruel when it masquerades in the robes of law and justice and patriotism. So was American slavery clothed in 1859, and it had to die by revolution, not by milder means. And this men knew. They had known it a hundred years, yet they shrank and trembled.�
~John Brown
”For he did not use argument. He was himself an argument.�
W.E.B. Du Bois’s biography of John Brown must be considered a monumental work for a variety of reasons. Top-most, this work, published in 1909, flew in the face of then current scholarly opinion that John Brown was a no account mad man and that his work was insignificant to American history. (This would remain the consensus on Brown throughout most of the 20th century, and was what I was taught in school.) Instead, Du Bois treated Brown, his actions, his motives, his designs, seriously, and put them in context of the turmoil of the 1850s as the country split over the slavery issue. Importantly, this biography was published just 50 years after Brown’s execution, when he and his deeds were still within living memory. And finally, Du Bois seriously considered the perspective of Black Americans, how they reacted to Brown, the effect his actions had on them, and how they responded to them. It would be decades before any other serious scholarship would deem to examine these issues.
John Brown was, and remains, a controversial figure, both during his lifetime through the present day. He took hard, brutal actions that broke the laws and social conventions, and horrified and terrorized many. Du Bois carefully puts these actions within the context in which they happened, particularly when addressing the Potawatomi massacre that Brown directed in Kansas. He notes that Brown’s five sons, like most other Free Staters and abolitionist, first came to Kansas peaceably:
”They came hating slavery, yet peacefully, unarmed, and in all good faith, with cattle and horses and trees and vines to settle in a free land.�
It was only after the pro slavery Boarder Ruffians began to use violence, terror, and murder to impose slavery on the Kansas Territory that Brown’s sons wrote to him asking him to send arms. Instead, Brown came himself bringing those arms. Free Staters in Kansas were slow to realize that mere words and political action would be wholly overwhelmed by the violence the pro slavery side was using with impunity. It was only after the Boarder Ruffians burned and sacked the town of Lawrence while its Free State citizens stood trembling by, offering no resistance, and committed multiple terrorizing murders that Brown chose to act. He organized his sons, rode to a notorious pro slavery settlement, pulled five men away from their families in the middle of the night, and directed his sons to execute them with broadswords. Asked about it after the fact, John Brown replied:
”I do not pretend to say that they were not killed by my order. And in doing so, I believe I was doing God’s service.
I think God has used me as an instrument to kill men, and if I live, I think he will use me as an instrument to kill a good many more.�
Nor is Du Bois at all equivocal in expressing what he feels about John Browns action:
”The last, red breath of the expiring war in Kansas flowed in these dark ravines. To this day, men differ as to the effect of John Brown’s blow. Some say it freed Kansas, while others say it plunged the land back into civil war. Truth lies in both statements. The blow freed Kansas by plunging it into civil war, and compelling men to fight for freedom which they had vainly hoped to gain by political diplomacy.�
And here, elegantly expressed in stirring prose, Du Bois further wrote:
”So Kansas was free. Free because the slave barons played for an imperial stake in defiance of modern humanity and economic development. Free because strong men had suffered and fought, not against slavery, but against slaves in Kansas. Above all, free because one man hated slavery, and on a terrible night, rode down with his sons amid the shadows of the Swamp of the Swan, that long, low-winding and somber stream, fringed everywhere with woods and dark with bloody memory. Forty-eight hours they labored there, and then, of a pale May morning rode up to the world again. Behind them lay five twisted, red, and mangled corpses. Behind them rose the stifled wailing of widows and little children. Behind them the fearful driver gazed and shuddered. But before them rode a man, tall, dark, grim-faces and awful. His hands were red, and his name was John Brown. Such was the cost of freedom.�
Of Brown’s Harpers Ferry raid, the event that cemented John Brown within American history, Du Bois also provides context that disputes the idea that it was wholly a mad endeavor. He also allows that it was seen as too risky an endeavor, even by allies like Frederick Douglass, who refused to join Brown on his raid. Du Bois explains their dispute over it so:
”Here two radically opposite characters saw slavery from opposite sides of the shield. Both hated it with all their strength, but one knew its physical degradation, its tremendous power, and the strong sympathies and interests that buttressed it the world over. The other felt its moral evil, and knowing simply that it was wrong, concluded that John Brown and God could overthrow it.�
And finally, Du Bois, all the way back in 1909, reached the conclusion that a century later has become the historical consensus on Brown. It was actually his trial and his execution which became Brown’s true, mortal blow against the institution of slavery. Brown came to this conclusion himself at the end. He stated:
”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 my children, and with the blood of millions in this slave country whose rights are disregarded by wicked, cruel, and unjust enactments, I submit, so let it be done.�
Du Bois was completely unambiguous in his biography of Brown. He saw him, not as a mad man, not as a criminal or villain, but as a courageous man willing to take hard actions and sacrifice all while other men stood by unwilling to do so:
”Slavery is wrong,� he said. “Kill it. Destroy it. Uproot it, stem, blossom, and branch. Give it no quarter. Exterminate it and do it now.�
Was he wrong? No. It is wrong. Eternally wrong. It is wrong by whatever name it is called, or in whatever guise it lurks, and whenever it appears. But it is especially heinous, black and cruel when it masquerades in the robes of law and justice and patriotism. So was American slavery clothed in 1859, and it had to die by revolution, not by milder means. And this men knew. They had known it a hundred years, yet they shrank and trembled.�
February 25, 2017
This is the definitive work on Brown. If you had to read only one book on the subject, this would be it.
Du Bois manages to do what no other biographer has done, and I've read about a dozen books on Brown. Du Buois manages to place the man in context. After all, there are a whole lot of John Browns out there, and it takes some doing to explain why this one is different. He starts back in the Revolutionary War, with Brown's parents, and follows him through his life and the deforming effect that 19th century American history had on him. Remember that Brown was born in 1800, so the War of 1812 happened when he was 12. 1816, the Year Without a Summer, hit when he was 16. The Panic of 1837 happened when he was 37. The labor unrests of the 1850s hit when he was in his 50s, and as it happened that was the final straw. Turns out you can only have your entire life destroyed so many times.
In a world without slavery, Brown would have been an farmer-businessman of great wealth and power, and we would probably remember him as an early figure in the labor movement. But the world came along and took everything away from him, again and again, until only abolitionism was left.
So the question, "Was John Brown crazy?" has been answered. He probably wasn't as sane at the end as when he started, but on the whole, he was a sane man in a crazy world.
Du Bois is the single most powerful writer I've come across since....Shakespeare, really. He's really that good. The words just leap out at you. The chapter on the Swamp of the Swan is one of the best-written things I've ever read, as is the last chapter, where he takes white supremacy apart to itty-bitty pieces. I mean, it's early 2017 and I live in America. I've read approximately one thousand takedowns of white supremacy in the last year. Du Bois's is the best. That's saying something.
I've been reading a lot of classics lately, and the guy's undoubtedly the best stylist I've run across. I plan to read a lot more by him, and I wouldn't be surprised if I ended up reading everything.
Du Bois manages to do what no other biographer has done, and I've read about a dozen books on Brown. Du Buois manages to place the man in context. After all, there are a whole lot of John Browns out there, and it takes some doing to explain why this one is different. He starts back in the Revolutionary War, with Brown's parents, and follows him through his life and the deforming effect that 19th century American history had on him. Remember that Brown was born in 1800, so the War of 1812 happened when he was 12. 1816, the Year Without a Summer, hit when he was 16. The Panic of 1837 happened when he was 37. The labor unrests of the 1850s hit when he was in his 50s, and as it happened that was the final straw. Turns out you can only have your entire life destroyed so many times.
In a world without slavery, Brown would have been an farmer-businessman of great wealth and power, and we would probably remember him as an early figure in the labor movement. But the world came along and took everything away from him, again and again, until only abolitionism was left.
So the question, "Was John Brown crazy?" has been answered. He probably wasn't as sane at the end as when he started, but on the whole, he was a sane man in a crazy world.
Du Bois is the single most powerful writer I've come across since....Shakespeare, really. He's really that good. The words just leap out at you. The chapter on the Swamp of the Swan is one of the best-written things I've ever read, as is the last chapter, where he takes white supremacy apart to itty-bitty pieces. I mean, it's early 2017 and I live in America. I've read approximately one thousand takedowns of white supremacy in the last year. Du Bois's is the best. That's saying something.
I've been reading a lot of classics lately, and the guy's undoubtedly the best stylist I've run across. I plan to read a lot more by him, and I wouldn't be surprised if I ended up reading everything.
December 25, 2007
My only knowledge of John Brown prior to reading several books on him in the last year was that he had been a overzealous and unrealistic idealist that led a raid on Harper's Ferry to try to spark a slave rebellion. Reading more details about his planning and overall plan show the historical inaccuracies in the standard narrative of both John Brown and of the abolitionist movement, specifically that the there was a wide range of opinion (from the pacifist educationalism of Garrison to the militant direct action of Harriet Tubman and Sojourner Truth and Brown's insurrectionalist scheme). The other main lesson of this book for me was that the reactions of John Brown's contemporaries within the abolitionist movement varied as widely as the contemporaries of the Weather Underground or the Black Liberation Army one hundred years later in the antiwar and Black liberation movements. Also, the tone of W.E.B. DuBois in the book was that of skeptical and sometimes archly ironic appreciation and respect.
The raid on Harper's Ferry was to be an opening of a strategic campaign of guerilla warfare where weapons would be taken and stockpiled in the hopes of outfitting guerilla teams in the alleghany mountains which would in turn conduct raids on plantations to rescue, recruit, and arm willing slaves to fight slavery directly. This would supplement the underground railroad which had been heroically carrying out clandestine transportation of escaping slaves for decades.
The raid on Harper's Ferry was to be an opening of a strategic campaign of guerilla warfare where weapons would be taken and stockpiled in the hopes of outfitting guerilla teams in the alleghany mountains which would in turn conduct raids on plantations to rescue, recruit, and arm willing slaves to fight slavery directly. This would supplement the underground railroad which had been heroically carrying out clandestine transportation of escaping slaves for decades.
February 16, 2023
"The cost of liberty is less than the price of repression."
This was the refrain that Du Bois repeated, particularly in the last chapter of this surprising biography. I listened to it, and upon finishing, immediately had the urge to read much of it over again at once, in print, especially the beautiful citations of poetry from the Hebrew scriptures, and the last sections in which Du Bois points up the legacy left by Brown which continued into his day, and indeed, even into our own day. Du Bois shows how the collusion of industrial interests and the racial interpretation of social relations, applied to Darwin's work as a means of using the power developed during Brown's time, the same power that drove him, a good and principled man, out of business, to prevent the existing hegemony from being changed, actually works to the detriment of all humanity. He ties up the implications of John Brown's life's work versus that interpretation of Darwin as a negation of the eugenics programs and all that led to those programs. Brown, much to my surprise, was described as a thoughtful man, initially stern, but eventually becoming a kind man, one who abhorred the shedding of blood, and believed deeply in the mutual obligations and respect due to every human being. Du Bois shows how the beginnings of Brown's plan were intended to be as non-violent as possible, and only reluctantly evolved into the raid on the federal arsenal, while remaining a project of killing only when absolutely necessary. Witnesses describe a community with by-laws drawn up to run much as the first century Christians are described as living in the book of Acts, and of Brown's insistence upon gentlemanly and respectful conduct, even to captured prisoners. This made him, it seems, a man well ahead of his times. But, also a bit of a dreamer. Du Bois describes Brown as attempting to convince other leaders, but finding them more skeptical of his plans. I was very impressed with Du Bois delving into military science to show that, had every member of Brown's group acted in strict accordance with his plan, the raid on the Armory would very likely have succeeded. Yet, a plan that depends on each man acting selflessly is, it seems, the plan of a dreamer. By the time I had finished Du Bois' devastating final chapter, I felt not only moved for the dream and strongly felt duty of Brown, but also for the life of honest and courageous integrity that was laid down as a willing martyr for the cause of Abolition. He used his trial as a means of putting the very South herself, and her Peculiar Institution in particular, on trial, quite successfully. Why are we not taught about the details of this trial, and his words at that trial, in school? This biography should be required reading in every High School history classroom in the United States. Please, please, please, read this book, perhaps starting with the final chapter. But read it.
My reading updates follow:
listening via ...
British wool tariffs nearly brought the US to consider invading, around 1830?? Wow. I've never heard of that, nor of the fact that Oberlin college was given land in Virginia.
John Brown as a bank director? Who would have thought of this? Ruined, like many, by the Panic of 1837
"Organized economic aggression" by business highwaymen literally forced a good man, John Brown, out of business because he refused to abandon his good principles!
and incredible, of all the poetic language Du Bois uses: "...a great Black phalanx" of escaped slaves and Free People of Color welcoming them into the "cities of refuge" up north and organizing Colored resistance. And John Brown's family sheltering ...
The reverend Lovejoy, from The Simpsons, is named for the murdered Abolitionist preacher Rev. Lovejoy? Who knew!
This murder, and being kicked out of their church for giving their nice seats to the Negro family attending the meeting, catalyzed Brown's 1839 knowledge and support of the Abolitionist movement. In fact, white brutality even against white people planted the seeds.
Section 7: So, Brooks caned Sumner over Missouri's lie about Kansas Territory, and the Civil War actually began in Lawrence, KA.
Shameless forcing of a faux election by Missourians of Kansas lawmakers, and the US Army helping the Southerners with guns and Bowie knives, and canon!? But despite the free-state majority, KA, nearly became a slave-state.
Ch. 7, The Swamp of the Swan, end of Section 8:
This militia formed by Captain John Brown is like David, as he says, but not a band of thugs, as that of David was: no profanity, no corporal punishment, no unkind or ungentlemanly behavior. Wow. Feeling themselves like a family, said his men. These were the Anla'Shok. "All great reforms...based on generous..."
Incredible.
How his image has been distorted.
... and why not admit women?
He wrote and had adopted an actual Constitution for his followers down South.
Preamble here: ...
Postponement of action, weeping to Schubert...
An indictment on the system of slavery, Brown's speech on the stand ends with
"Farewell. Farewell."
Du Bois calls his trial “the mightiest Abolition document that America has known� is right, and a beautiful one, by his last words to his family.
"The cost of liberty is less than the price of repression." Clearly, Du Bois wanted this phrase to stay with the reader, and he uses it to devastating effect, particularly in the last section, "The Legacy of John Brown."
Absolutely stunning look at both a deliberately misrepresented man, and a legacy that remains with us, to this very sad day.
Incredible.
Simply incredible.
This was the refrain that Du Bois repeated, particularly in the last chapter of this surprising biography. I listened to it, and upon finishing, immediately had the urge to read much of it over again at once, in print, especially the beautiful citations of poetry from the Hebrew scriptures, and the last sections in which Du Bois points up the legacy left by Brown which continued into his day, and indeed, even into our own day. Du Bois shows how the collusion of industrial interests and the racial interpretation of social relations, applied to Darwin's work as a means of using the power developed during Brown's time, the same power that drove him, a good and principled man, out of business, to prevent the existing hegemony from being changed, actually works to the detriment of all humanity. He ties up the implications of John Brown's life's work versus that interpretation of Darwin as a negation of the eugenics programs and all that led to those programs. Brown, much to my surprise, was described as a thoughtful man, initially stern, but eventually becoming a kind man, one who abhorred the shedding of blood, and believed deeply in the mutual obligations and respect due to every human being. Du Bois shows how the beginnings of Brown's plan were intended to be as non-violent as possible, and only reluctantly evolved into the raid on the federal arsenal, while remaining a project of killing only when absolutely necessary. Witnesses describe a community with by-laws drawn up to run much as the first century Christians are described as living in the book of Acts, and of Brown's insistence upon gentlemanly and respectful conduct, even to captured prisoners. This made him, it seems, a man well ahead of his times. But, also a bit of a dreamer. Du Bois describes Brown as attempting to convince other leaders, but finding them more skeptical of his plans. I was very impressed with Du Bois delving into military science to show that, had every member of Brown's group acted in strict accordance with his plan, the raid on the Armory would very likely have succeeded. Yet, a plan that depends on each man acting selflessly is, it seems, the plan of a dreamer. By the time I had finished Du Bois' devastating final chapter, I felt not only moved for the dream and strongly felt duty of Brown, but also for the life of honest and courageous integrity that was laid down as a willing martyr for the cause of Abolition. He used his trial as a means of putting the very South herself, and her Peculiar Institution in particular, on trial, quite successfully. Why are we not taught about the details of this trial, and his words at that trial, in school? This biography should be required reading in every High School history classroom in the United States. Please, please, please, read this book, perhaps starting with the final chapter. But read it.
My reading updates follow:
listening via ...
British wool tariffs nearly brought the US to consider invading, around 1830?? Wow. I've never heard of that, nor of the fact that Oberlin college was given land in Virginia.
John Brown as a bank director? Who would have thought of this? Ruined, like many, by the Panic of 1837
"Organized economic aggression" by business highwaymen literally forced a good man, John Brown, out of business because he refused to abandon his good principles!
and incredible, of all the poetic language Du Bois uses: "...a great Black phalanx" of escaped slaves and Free People of Color welcoming them into the "cities of refuge" up north and organizing Colored resistance. And John Brown's family sheltering ...
The reverend Lovejoy, from The Simpsons, is named for the murdered Abolitionist preacher Rev. Lovejoy? Who knew!
This murder, and being kicked out of their church for giving their nice seats to the Negro family attending the meeting, catalyzed Brown's 1839 knowledge and support of the Abolitionist movement. In fact, white brutality even against white people planted the seeds.
Section 7: So, Brooks caned Sumner over Missouri's lie about Kansas Territory, and the Civil War actually began in Lawrence, KA.
Shameless forcing of a faux election by Missourians of Kansas lawmakers, and the US Army helping the Southerners with guns and Bowie knives, and canon!? But despite the free-state majority, KA, nearly became a slave-state.
Ch. 7, The Swamp of the Swan, end of Section 8:
This militia formed by Captain John Brown is like David, as he says, but not a band of thugs, as that of David was: no profanity, no corporal punishment, no unkind or ungentlemanly behavior. Wow. Feeling themselves like a family, said his men. These were the Anla'Shok. "All great reforms...based on generous..."
Incredible.
How his image has been distorted.
... and why not admit women?
He wrote and had adopted an actual Constitution for his followers down South.
Preamble here: ...
Postponement of action, weeping to Schubert...
An indictment on the system of slavery, Brown's speech on the stand ends with
"Farewell. Farewell."
Du Bois calls his trial “the mightiest Abolition document that America has known� is right, and a beautiful one, by his last words to his family.
"The cost of liberty is less than the price of repression." Clearly, Du Bois wanted this phrase to stay with the reader, and he uses it to devastating effect, particularly in the last section, "The Legacy of John Brown."
Absolutely stunning look at both a deliberately misrepresented man, and a legacy that remains with us, to this very sad day.
Incredible.
Simply incredible.
October 19, 2017
Today happens to be the 158th anniversary of John Brown's ill-fated raid on Harper's Ferry. I was there just a month ago, and took that as a motive to read this bio by Du Bois. Du Bois is an excellent, literary writer, and it was a great book. It was published in 1909, commemorating the 50th anniversary of the raid, and offering an African-American perspective. I have not read any more recent or more scholarly bios, but this relied primarily on letters written by Brown or others who knew him, so it at least offers an important personal perspective.
Brown moved around a lot as a youth and adult, but he often lived in Richfield or Hudson, Ohio. That is very near where I grew up, and some of my family now live in Richfield. I have been to one of the houses (now an antique store) where he once lived. Thinking back on his time there, when he was later living in Massachusetts, he wrote (p. 37): "I can look back to our log cabin at the centre of Richfield with a supper of porridge and johnny cake as a place of far more interest to me than the Massasoit of Springfield."
At age 12 Brown drove a herd of cattle hundreds of miles through wooded wilderness, and was given hospitality along the way by a pleasant and friendly man (p. 10). While staying there Brown befriended the man's young slave boy, who was about the same age as him. He felt the slave boy was "fully if not more than his equal." But the host family regularly berated the slave boy, and Brown witnessed them beat him mercilessly with a shovel. Slaves had no human father to look after them, and Brown wondered "Is God their Father?" Then he determined to do something for slaves.
Brown was as close as there is to a modern-day Old Testament prophet. Certain in theology; humble in demeanor. "I have never made any business arrangement which would prevent me at any time answering the call of the Lord....I have permitted nothing to be in the way of my duty, neither my wife, my children, nor worldly goods. Whenever the occasion offered, I was ready. The hour is very near at hand, and all who are willing to act should be ready" (p. 111).
Much of his adult life was preparation for his raid. He had read all the books on insurrectionary warfare, and studied the guerrilla warfare of the Spanish chieftains against the Romans, and the Circassians against the Russians (p. 127). He lived and fought in Kansas, preventing it from becoming a slave-state. Many of his allies there were racists who fought slavery there b/c they didn't want ANY blacks in the state! So Brown was a pragmatist. Brown renounced non-violence as a form of cowardice (p. 88): "It seemed to Brown nothing less than a crime for men to lie down and be kicked by ruffians." In response to terrorism by pro-slavery forces he oversaw the capture of 5 of the worst of them and "raised his hand and at the signal the victims were hacked to death with broadswords" (p. 90 & 79). Brown said (p. 91), "God is my witness, we were justified under the circumstances....I believe I was doing God's service....He has used me as an instrument to kill men, and if I live, I think he will use me as an instrument to kill a good many more." "To recognize an evil and not strike it was to John Brown sinful. 'Talk, talk, talk,' he said derisively" (p. 204).
His plan for Harper's Ferry was to create a defensible independent community for blacks in the Appalachian mountains. It was well-thought-out, with a constitution and officers. But his main problem was convincing people to take the risk. One of his great personal friends and supporters was Frederick Douglass--but Douglass would not endorse the raid b/c he saw no way for it to succeed (pp. 177ff). Of course, he was right, and the raid lasted less than 24 hours. Brown's legacy stemmed more from his death than from his plan. Douglass claimed (p. 211): "John Brown began the war that ended American slavery, and made this a free republic."
An echo into the present:
p. 152: Brown recruited freed and escaped slaves in Canada to fight with him. "The question came up as to what flag should be used; [they] said they would never think of fighting under the hated 'Stars and Stripes'....But Brown said the old flag was good enough for him; under it freedom had been won from the tyrants of the Old World for white men; now he intended to make it do duty for the black men. He declared emphatically that he would not give up the Stars and Stripes. That settled the question." This reminded me of present-day supporters of the Confederate battle flag who argue that slavery long existed under the US flag.
Two months ago I was present in Charlottesville, VA, as part of the counter-protest against the Alt-right demonstration supporting the confederate monuments there. I went as part of a group of 8 who committed to non-violence. But the chaos there was such that I have to confess I was thankful for the presence of antifa groups, one of which called itself the Sons of John Brown.
Brown moved around a lot as a youth and adult, but he often lived in Richfield or Hudson, Ohio. That is very near where I grew up, and some of my family now live in Richfield. I have been to one of the houses (now an antique store) where he once lived. Thinking back on his time there, when he was later living in Massachusetts, he wrote (p. 37): "I can look back to our log cabin at the centre of Richfield with a supper of porridge and johnny cake as a place of far more interest to me than the Massasoit of Springfield."
At age 12 Brown drove a herd of cattle hundreds of miles through wooded wilderness, and was given hospitality along the way by a pleasant and friendly man (p. 10). While staying there Brown befriended the man's young slave boy, who was about the same age as him. He felt the slave boy was "fully if not more than his equal." But the host family regularly berated the slave boy, and Brown witnessed them beat him mercilessly with a shovel. Slaves had no human father to look after them, and Brown wondered "Is God their Father?" Then he determined to do something for slaves.
Brown was as close as there is to a modern-day Old Testament prophet. Certain in theology; humble in demeanor. "I have never made any business arrangement which would prevent me at any time answering the call of the Lord....I have permitted nothing to be in the way of my duty, neither my wife, my children, nor worldly goods. Whenever the occasion offered, I was ready. The hour is very near at hand, and all who are willing to act should be ready" (p. 111).
Much of his adult life was preparation for his raid. He had read all the books on insurrectionary warfare, and studied the guerrilla warfare of the Spanish chieftains against the Romans, and the Circassians against the Russians (p. 127). He lived and fought in Kansas, preventing it from becoming a slave-state. Many of his allies there were racists who fought slavery there b/c they didn't want ANY blacks in the state! So Brown was a pragmatist. Brown renounced non-violence as a form of cowardice (p. 88): "It seemed to Brown nothing less than a crime for men to lie down and be kicked by ruffians." In response to terrorism by pro-slavery forces he oversaw the capture of 5 of the worst of them and "raised his hand and at the signal the victims were hacked to death with broadswords" (p. 90 & 79). Brown said (p. 91), "God is my witness, we were justified under the circumstances....I believe I was doing God's service....He has used me as an instrument to kill men, and if I live, I think he will use me as an instrument to kill a good many more." "To recognize an evil and not strike it was to John Brown sinful. 'Talk, talk, talk,' he said derisively" (p. 204).
His plan for Harper's Ferry was to create a defensible independent community for blacks in the Appalachian mountains. It was well-thought-out, with a constitution and officers. But his main problem was convincing people to take the risk. One of his great personal friends and supporters was Frederick Douglass--but Douglass would not endorse the raid b/c he saw no way for it to succeed (pp. 177ff). Of course, he was right, and the raid lasted less than 24 hours. Brown's legacy stemmed more from his death than from his plan. Douglass claimed (p. 211): "John Brown began the war that ended American slavery, and made this a free republic."
An echo into the present:
p. 152: Brown recruited freed and escaped slaves in Canada to fight with him. "The question came up as to what flag should be used; [they] said they would never think of fighting under the hated 'Stars and Stripes'....But Brown said the old flag was good enough for him; under it freedom had been won from the tyrants of the Old World for white men; now he intended to make it do duty for the black men. He declared emphatically that he would not give up the Stars and Stripes. That settled the question." This reminded me of present-day supporters of the Confederate battle flag who argue that slavery long existed under the US flag.
Two months ago I was present in Charlottesville, VA, as part of the counter-protest against the Alt-right demonstration supporting the confederate monuments there. I went as part of a group of 8 who committed to non-violence. But the chaos there was such that I have to confess I was thankful for the presence of antifa groups, one of which called itself the Sons of John Brown.
February 22, 2019
This early work by W.E.B. Du Bois shows the author transitioning from an academic historian to a political writer. Ostensibly a biography, this is more revolutionary propaganda than historical document. However one chooses to categorize it, it is a worthwhile and entertaining work.
Du Bois is not here trying to humanize Brown in response to the demonization that most American historians had to that point, and to a degree still, treated Brown. Rather, Du Bois is using fire and brimstone to fight fire and brimstone. His Brown is neither demon nor man but an angelic incarnation of avenging decency.
Du Bois wants to make Brown not just morally great, but strategically brilliant as well. Some of the least convincing parts of the book attempt to convince the reader that were it not for bad luck, the raid on Harper's Ferry might well have been a success. The fact is that most every abolitionist leader of the day, particularly the African-American ones, with the notable exception of Harriet Tubman, considered Brown's attack on Harper's Ferry to be a suicide mission. Du Bois's attempts to retroactively prove them all wrong seem hollow. The authorial claim that does ring more true is Du Bois's assertion that Brown's raid was a decisive precursor to the Civil War. Without the terror Brown inflicted in Southern hearts, the slave states may have at least waited to succeed.
Modern readers might at first be a bit put off by the Victorian tone of Du Bois's prose. However, the dramatic thrust of the book is powerful enough that one quickly acclimates oneself to the writing style. This is stirring stuff.
Du Bois is not here trying to humanize Brown in response to the demonization that most American historians had to that point, and to a degree still, treated Brown. Rather, Du Bois is using fire and brimstone to fight fire and brimstone. His Brown is neither demon nor man but an angelic incarnation of avenging decency.
Du Bois wants to make Brown not just morally great, but strategically brilliant as well. Some of the least convincing parts of the book attempt to convince the reader that were it not for bad luck, the raid on Harper's Ferry might well have been a success. The fact is that most every abolitionist leader of the day, particularly the African-American ones, with the notable exception of Harriet Tubman, considered Brown's attack on Harper's Ferry to be a suicide mission. Du Bois's attempts to retroactively prove them all wrong seem hollow. The authorial claim that does ring more true is Du Bois's assertion that Brown's raid was a decisive precursor to the Civil War. Without the terror Brown inflicted in Southern hearts, the slave states may have at least waited to succeed.
Modern readers might at first be a bit put off by the Victorian tone of Du Bois's prose. However, the dramatic thrust of the book is powerful enough that one quickly acclimates oneself to the writing style. This is stirring stuff.
January 28, 2023
Fanatics? Hero? Terrorist? Martyr? Criminal mystic? John Brown, for sure, has never left anybody indifferent. Even W.E.B. Du Bois, in fact, dedicated him this biography! But what about it?
Well, it's a very strong portrait. It hints towards the lyricism, and it offers, unabashedly, the view of a man painted as nothing less but a visionary, who gave his life in the name of a greater, noble, cause. Written and first published at a time when Brown was, by any account, considered as a murderous madman (1909), such portrayal was clearly a challenge to common prejudices, to say the least! But then again: isn't such a character still highly controversial, despite his good intent?
This is not a proper historical essay by any mean (it's far too emotional for that), but, as a brick thrown into a wall and by an intellectual whose legacy was no less impactful, it surely deserves to be discovered. John Brown, after all, still is a contentious figure.
Well, it's a very strong portrait. It hints towards the lyricism, and it offers, unabashedly, the view of a man painted as nothing less but a visionary, who gave his life in the name of a greater, noble, cause. Written and first published at a time when Brown was, by any account, considered as a murderous madman (1909), such portrayal was clearly a challenge to common prejudices, to say the least! But then again: isn't such a character still highly controversial, despite his good intent?
This is not a proper historical essay by any mean (it's far too emotional for that), but, as a brick thrown into a wall and by an intellectual whose legacy was no less impactful, it surely deserves to be discovered. John Brown, after all, still is a contentious figure.
March 26, 2015
"John Brown taught us that the cheapest price to pay for liberty is what it costs today" (p. 237).
John Brown's method of principled violence against entrenched systems of violent injustice must be taken seriously in dialogue with the non-violent methods of the Quakers, Gandhi and King. Du Bois brings beautiful writing and careful analysis to this pivotal episode in US history. And his concluding essay turning social Darwinism on its head is brilliant.
"These were the men - idealists, dreamers, soldiers and avengers, varying from the silent and thoughtful to the quick and impulsive; from the cold and biter to the ignorant and faithful. They believed in God, in spirits, in fate, in liberty. To them the world was a wild, young unregulated thing, and they were born to set it right. It was a veritable band of crusaders, and while it had much of weakness and extravagance, it had nothing nasty or unclean" (p. 171).
John Brown's method of principled violence against entrenched systems of violent injustice must be taken seriously in dialogue with the non-violent methods of the Quakers, Gandhi and King. Du Bois brings beautiful writing and careful analysis to this pivotal episode in US history. And his concluding essay turning social Darwinism on its head is brilliant.
"These were the men - idealists, dreamers, soldiers and avengers, varying from the silent and thoughtful to the quick and impulsive; from the cold and biter to the ignorant and faithful. They believed in God, in spirits, in fate, in liberty. To them the world was a wild, young unregulated thing, and they were born to set it right. It was a veritable band of crusaders, and while it had much of weakness and extravagance, it had nothing nasty or unclean" (p. 171).
September 16, 2023
John Brown might be the most based man in the history of the United States.
Read
January 15, 2016 I've always been intrested in John Brown and the Raid on Harper's Ferry. I have ancestors who were involved with Brown (though not the raid) and my parents are buried across from Edwin Coppoc who was executed for taking part in it. My gguncle brought Coppoc's body back to Salem, Ohio. I've also not read a lot of W E B DuBois, and as a trained historian I should. So I took this opportunity to catch up a bit.
From all reports, this is not one of DuBois's best books. He wrote it over a long period of time and it is not typical of his work apparently That's OK. I see the flaws, including his emotional attachment to Brown, but still it's a good read. Being influenced by Raymond Massey as John Brown in the movies, I had no idea that Brown has been so "respectable" and well-to-do (except during Panics) most of is life and that he was certainly not crazy. Obsessed with ending slavery--yes. (Frederick Douglass declared that when Brown stayed with him a few weeks he became a total bore unable to talk about anything else but freeing slaves). But crazy? No. I also found it surprising that almost Mansonlike (sorry!) he claimed never to have killed anyone; only taught others how to do it. Well, we'll let that one. I need to read more on Brown, but he sure played is part in Kansas. Brown's bio is full of surprises, the bigget that so many people, many of them prominent such as Frederick Douglass and Gerrit Smith knew all about the plans for raid (Smith financialy supported Brown to the tune of $1000 and Douglass thought the plan was pure folly), but that nothing happened to any of these people afterwards. Today our Homeland Security thugs would have hauled everyone to the slammer. I was also surprised to read that Brown was apparently a very kind man who loved children and animals.
It's hard to say if the raid could have succeeded if some of Brown's own men hadn't dawddled the day away (and it wasn't crackbrained as we sometmies hear), but it certainly set the stage for the War Between the States (my favored term for the Civil War, since civil wars are something a bit different).
The last few chapters of the book are riveting and elegant (unfortunatley DuBois sets a rather flowering tone through most of the book) and the last chapter, which Debois added decades later, places John Brown in the context of contemporary movements and politics.
Brown was certainly corrrect at the end believing that his execution would bring about what the raid never did.
From all reports, this is not one of DuBois's best books. He wrote it over a long period of time and it is not typical of his work apparently That's OK. I see the flaws, including his emotional attachment to Brown, but still it's a good read. Being influenced by Raymond Massey as John Brown in the movies, I had no idea that Brown has been so "respectable" and well-to-do (except during Panics) most of is life and that he was certainly not crazy. Obsessed with ending slavery--yes. (Frederick Douglass declared that when Brown stayed with him a few weeks he became a total bore unable to talk about anything else but freeing slaves). But crazy? No. I also found it surprising that almost Mansonlike (sorry!) he claimed never to have killed anyone; only taught others how to do it. Well, we'll let that one. I need to read more on Brown, but he sure played is part in Kansas. Brown's bio is full of surprises, the bigget that so many people, many of them prominent such as Frederick Douglass and Gerrit Smith knew all about the plans for raid (Smith financialy supported Brown to the tune of $1000 and Douglass thought the plan was pure folly), but that nothing happened to any of these people afterwards. Today our Homeland Security thugs would have hauled everyone to the slammer. I was also surprised to read that Brown was apparently a very kind man who loved children and animals.
It's hard to say if the raid could have succeeded if some of Brown's own men hadn't dawddled the day away (and it wasn't crackbrained as we sometmies hear), but it certainly set the stage for the War Between the States (my favored term for the Civil War, since civil wars are something a bit different).
The last few chapters of the book are riveting and elegant (unfortunatley DuBois sets a rather flowering tone through most of the book) and the last chapter, which Debois added decades later, places John Brown in the context of contemporary movements and politics.
Brown was certainly corrrect at the end believing that his execution would bring about what the raid never did.
January 3, 2025
This was a decent book, but was sort of hard to read. Being written in 1909, the language and rhythm was pretty stilted.. I liked the flavor of the times aspect, but it was not at all presented in a concise manner.
I put it aside halfway through to read a couple of other books, then got back to it and just finished it.
The version I bought for 3 bucks was withdrawn from Daniel Boone Library in Columbia MO.
It was reprinted 3x in the 1960s.
I almost ralphed at the last chapter about the Legacy of John Brown.
International Publishers, which was straight up, a communist mouthpiece... (much like DuBois himself) went off on a propaganda tirade that had nothing to do with John Brown.
The DuBois portion of the book from 1909 was pretty much free of this haranguing. Worth reading, but there are probably better biographies of him.
I put it aside halfway through to read a couple of other books, then got back to it and just finished it.
The version I bought for 3 bucks was withdrawn from Daniel Boone Library in Columbia MO.
It was reprinted 3x in the 1960s.
I almost ralphed at the last chapter about the Legacy of John Brown.
International Publishers, which was straight up, a communist mouthpiece... (much like DuBois himself) went off on a propaganda tirade that had nothing to do with John Brown.
The DuBois portion of the book from 1909 was pretty much free of this haranguing. Worth reading, but there are probably better biographies of him.
September 17, 2022
John Brown's half brother summed him up well:
"I urged him to go home to his family and attend to his private affairs; that I feared his course would prove his destruction and that of his boys ... He replied that he was sorry that I did not sympathize with him; that he knew that he was in the line of his duty, and he must pursue it, though it should destroy him and his family. He stated to me that he was satisfied that he was a chosen instrument in the hands of God to eat against slavery."
What a king. If you love other people the way you ought, others will want to kill you. Brown seems to have known this. What. A. King.
"I urged him to go home to his family and attend to his private affairs; that I feared his course would prove his destruction and that of his boys ... He replied that he was sorry that I did not sympathize with him; that he knew that he was in the line of his duty, and he must pursue it, though it should destroy him and his family. He stated to me that he was satisfied that he was a chosen instrument in the hands of God to eat against slavery."
What a king. If you love other people the way you ought, others will want to kill you. Brown seems to have known this. What. A. King.
July 5, 2013
Excellent biography of John Brown. History tends to paint him as some kind of murderous rebel, but Du Bois correctly shows he was a patriot hoping to fight a guerilla war to free America's slaves.
September 19, 2024
A brilliantly assembled biography of brown, which builds a rather interesting argument with regards to the difference between the society of the author and the society of Brown’s. The organization of the book is quite fascinating - a rough third dedicated to brown’s early life and childhood, prior to his more intense abolitionist activities, a rough third to Kansas and its aftermath, and the last portion dedicated to the buildup and events of the raid on Harper’s ferry. Given Brown’s current day legacy I was surprised how much of the book was dedicated to his Kansas escapades, rather than the famous siege. Du Bois, like many of the better (and more sympathetic) Brown biographers, emphasizes the piety towards his two chosen causes (which were intertwined) of following Christ and ending slavery rather than the spectacular violence of Kansas and Harper’s Ferry. There is still a definite emphasis here on those two particular instances - but quite a bit is placed on Brown’s organizing efforts as well as his ties to the Black liberationist world at the time (including tying his birth to that of the independence of Haiti). Brown’s frustrations as a truly dedicated abolitionist develop clearly throughout the work, becoming most clear at Kansas, where poor command of the Free State forces put Brown on the spot. The final chapter is an oddly forward and backward looking argument - appealing to social Darwinist sentiment (albeit to argue against its excesses), the need for a more intensive morality to fill the alleged void of a declining Christian one, the rising of model minorities and vulgar Marxist ideal,all of which ties back to earlier arguments made in the work about Brown’s religiosity, and willingness to work with a group viewed irredeemable because of it. This much is true, though one needn’t God for this, and in someways Brown did not. However, in a Godless world, this type of motivation is all the harder. Du Bois� prose is as usual flowery to the maximum, his chapters ending in bejeweled quotes which are unrivaled in any sort of work of sociology or fiction - except maybe in the select few Marxists who truly follow their namesake.
December 1, 2020
W.E.B. Du Bois' biography of John Brown is extremely sympathetic, even partisan, and highly readable account of Captain John Brown's life and legacy. Beyond the basic details of Brown's life, the strength of Du Bois book lies in his partisan presentation explaining Brown's personal actions as they fit into the broad human struggle against oppression. Brown was radicalized by witnessing the unfair treatment of those in bondage, but went further than most folks of the time by activity learning from the example of black resistance. Du Bois explains the influence that the Haitian Revolution and Nat Turner rebellion had on Brown personally, but more importantly in his planning of the raid on Harpers Ferry. Besides elaborating Brown's rationale, Du Bois is seeking to re-contextualize Browns plans to demonstrate that they were well thought through plans that could have succeeded. Likewise, Du Bois is responding to and rebuffing those who want to paint Brown as some irrational lunatic whimsically acting out.
There are many interpretations of Brown that have proliferated since his death. Du Bois does not present and pick apart these various differing accounts perhaps making it a little outdated. However, Du Bois does use large block quotes from John Brown, Fredrick Douglas, and other related characters that allows a reader to have a more complex understanding of Brown. Hopefully, the use of these block quotes will help inoculate the reader against the more obviously reactionary interpretations. Du Bois' biography is the ideal introduction that provides the basic details, the greater context, and an absolutely unapologetic, unabashed account of John Brown's Legacy: "John Brown was right." (254)
There are many interpretations of Brown that have proliferated since his death. Du Bois does not present and pick apart these various differing accounts perhaps making it a little outdated. However, Du Bois does use large block quotes from John Brown, Fredrick Douglas, and other related characters that allows a reader to have a more complex understanding of Brown. Hopefully, the use of these block quotes will help inoculate the reader against the more obviously reactionary interpretations. Du Bois' biography is the ideal introduction that provides the basic details, the greater context, and an absolutely unapologetic, unabashed account of John Brown's Legacy: "John Brown was right." (254)
September 16, 2024
"This then, is the truth: the cost of liberty is less than the price of repression, even though that cost be blood."
November 9, 2024
ah 💔 john brown lives eternally
August 31, 2021
I really enjoyed reading this biography of a remarkably austere, sober-minded Calvinist militant set on trying to move forward the cause of abolition. I know the 'biography' is so often such a bourgeois literary form, but I have bourgeois taste in literature and I think Du Bois was also such a good writer. I visited my friend in Guelph back when I was still reading this book. Upon asking me what I was reading, I told him of this book and the revolutionary Calvinist spirit of Brown that Du Bois was able to capture so well, especially in the material he compiled into this biography. An example excerpt that Du Bois includes from an abolitionist and Unitarian minister that funded Brown's guerrilla military plans:
“I never shall forget,� writes Thomas Wentworth Higginson, “the quiet way in which he once told me that ‘God had established the Allegheny Mountains from the foundation of the world that they might one day be a refuge for fugitive slaves.� I did not know then that his own home was among the Adirondacks.”�
Insurrectionary Calvinist geography must be a concocted field of inquiry for which Brown would be the perfect militant subject. As I wandered around Mono Cliffs last weekend staring at all the Allegheny blackberries fruiting among the brambles along the trail, I thought of John Brown imagining God sculpting the Allegheny Mountains as a foundational act of creation. John Brown really thought himself to be an instrument of God in the divine task of liberating slaves. The Ceylon blackberry (of course related to the Allegheny blackberry) native to Asia (from China to the Malay peninsula, where my ancestors are from) is now an invasive species in the Galapagos. It was interesting that Du Bois included some commentary on the context of Victorian science and the publishing of Darwin’s Origin of Species, and the wellspring of eugenicist racism that happened to follow in its wake, which geneticists like Haldane would strongly resist. Darwin himself did not assert the views that would come to be known as ‘social Darwinism�. Darwin had imbibed the staunch abolitionist sentiments from his family, and his diary entries from Brazil for example exuded with indignation of the Portuguese slave system still in effect there). The Harvard historian of science Janet Browne wrote:
“Throughout [Darwin] expressed the view that humans were all brothers under the skin. In fact a strong antipathy to slavery in any form was crucial to his developing views about the unity of all mankind. Anti-slavery politics were integral to his family viewpoint in general, for the first Erasmus Darwin had been an active promoter of emancipation causes in Britain and in his poems publicly praised Josiah Wedgwood’s famous medal emblazoned with the motto ‘Am I not a man and a brother�. Darwin’s father, sisters and cousins all supported the anti-slavery movements of the early nineteenth century � as did he. And the Beagle was travelling the world just when these mass philanthropic movements reached their pinnacle in Britain with the Emancipation Act of 1832.
The only time that Darwin was really angry with Captain FitzRoy was over an incident at a great estância in Brazil, where the slave-owner called all his men before him and asked whether they wished to be free. No, they answered. Talking in the cabin afterwards, FitzRoy complacently took that response as a simple truth until Darwin pointed out that no slave would risk any words to the contrary. �
Du Bois interestingly remarked that after the publication of Darwin’s Origin of Species, John Brown was seen as a sort of out-dated anomaly with good intentions, but misinformed about the newly discovered scientific realities. Du Bois astutely confronts the bizarre and dubious logical foundations of eugenicists, and his arguments shared striking similarity to those of the geneticist Haldane who found it so ridiculous that eugenicists had the arrogance to believe they knew what were the highest qualities of humanity and their confidence to throw out all the rest of human genetic diversity because they believed they themselves happened to be the current pinnacle of human evolution. Du Bois writes:
“…first, assuming the truth of the unproved dictum that there are stocks of human beings whose elimination the best welfare of the world demands it is certainly questionable if these stocks include the majority of mankind; and it is indefensible and monstrous to pretend that we know to-day with any reasonable assurance which these stocks are. We can point to degenerate individuals and families here and there among all races, but there is not the slightest warrant for assuming that there does not lie among the Chinese and Hindus, the African Bantus and American Indians as lofty possibilities of human culture as any European race has ever exhibited. It is, to be sure, puzzling to know why the Soudan should linger a thousand years in culture behind the valley of the Seine, but it is no more puzzling than the fact that the valley of the Thames was miserably backward as compared with the banks of the Tiber. Climate, human contact, facilities of communication and what we call accident, have played a great part in the rise of culture among nations: to ignore these and assert dogmatically that the present distribution of culture is a fair index of the distribution of human ability and desert, is to make an assertion for which there is not the slightest scientific warrant.�
Anyway, to return to the issue of John Brown who was actually fare more visionary and wise than the eugenicists who would shortly arrive after his time, another exemplary sample of Brown’s staunch Calvinism I mentioned to my friend was this fascinating slightly humorous austerity of Brown turning down butter at the dinner table confessing that he was not accustomed to such luxuries. Du Bois many times calls Brown a Puritan, and takes time to even trace his Puritan ancestry. My friend had a good chuckle over Brown turning down butter as a luxury though, as we were on his backyard deck luxuriating over takeout korma and vindaloo, along with glasses of Shiraz. I wish I had the sobriety of John Brown but I admittedly like butter on my bread, and a cheap glass of wine once in a while also.
I also mentioned to my friend that Brown’s militancy reminded me of communists I read about. He was infuriated by strict pacifists and non-violent abolitionists, and some of the things he did, or that he permitted his followers to do, I found terrifying. But slavery is a particular social circumstance in a different time, and I supposed he had good justification for his actions. Some of Brown’s fellow comrades would raid the homes of slave owners at night and sometimes they would end up executed. War, insurrection, and revolution are no dinner parties as another revolutionary once suggested.
Du Bois was initially offered the task of writing a biography of Frederick Douglass, which he agreed to, only to be displaced by an agreement by Booker T. Washington to write it. Du Bois counter-proposed to write a biography of Nat Turner, but the publisher was not interested, so Du Bois's next choice was John Brown. Du Bois, in this bioraphy, interestingly includes details of John Brown studying Nat Turner and the strategies of other leaders of slave uprisings while trying to formulate his own ideas. Du Bois writes:
"He studied the census returns and the distribution of the Negroes and made maps of fugitive slave routes with roads, plantations, and supplies. He learned of Isaac, Denmark Vesey, Nat Turner and the Cumberland region insurrections in South Carolina, Virginia, and Tennessee; he knew of the organized resistance to slave-catchers in Pennsylvania, and the history of Hayti and Jamaica."
Du Bois has a fascinating account of Frederick Douglass visiting John Brown’s home and being slightly shocked (even a bit disappointed) at how plain and austere the place was, after seeing Brown’s nice store in town. Douglass wrote:
“It was a small wooden building on a back street, in a neighbourhood chiefly occupied by labouring men and mechanics; respectable enough, to be sure, but not quite the place, I thought, where one would look for the residence of a flourishing and successful merchant. Plain as was the outside of this man’s house, the inside was plainer. Its furniture would have satisfied a Spartan. It would take longer to tell what was not in this house than what was in it. There was an air of plainness about it which almost suggested destitution.�
I like many first encountered John Brown through the folk songs of Pete Seeger, who would sing the old John Brown verse along with the later verses from the Battle Hymn of the Republic. After reading Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath I would play folk renditions of this song over and over to the annoyance of those living with me.
Some of my favourite passages from this book were Brown’s encounters with Harriet Tubman (who befriended Brown and associated him with one of the recurring dreams she had), and Brown actually spent quite a significant amount of time in Canada recruiting runway slaves that had escaped across the border into his military campaign to liberate those enslaved in the South. I would love to take a few day trips out to St. Catherines and Chatham to follow along the trail of Brown in Ontario. Du Bois even records Brown visiting Toronto’s Temperance Hall and the home of Black man named Mr. Holland. Du Bois also mentions Brown staying at the home of the naturalist, ornithologist, physician, and abolitionist Alexander Milton Ross, although some historians question the veracity of some of Ross’s accounts (I suspect some want to distant Brown from Ross because he was somewhat untrustworthy and also an anti-vaxxer). I’d like to some time follow up on two of Du Bois� sources, especially before taking some day trips to Chatham: “John Brown in Canada� by James Cleland Hamilton and “A Voice from Harper’s Ferry� by Osborne Perry Anderson (the only surviving Black man from Brown’s Harpers Ferry raid) with the help of Mary Ann Shadd Cary (a remarkable Black feminist, abolitionist, lawyer, and publisher). I heard there’s a little cinematic production out there on the Chatham Convention with Ethan Hawke as John Brown, and I should maybe make a film night of it too before heading out to Chatham.
Anyway, Brown was a remarkable soul and who better to capture such a fascinating person than W.E.B. Du Bois.
There’s a book coming out this December (Arise Africa, Roar China) by the historian Gao Yunxiang, which has an entire chapter dedicated to Du Bois and his close relationship with Maoist China, and his involvement in internationalist communist politics later in his life. This book on John Brown was published in 1909, decades before Du Bois became a communist, but Du Bois spends a good portion of his last chapter expressing his strong anti-imperialist sentiments long before his communist commitments. I wanted to finish with this wonderful excerpt by Du Bois that comments on the way colonized peoples of the world are exploited by the industrial bourgeoisie:
“No sooner is the question put this way than the defenders of modern caste retire behind a more defensible breastwork. They say: “Yes, we exploit nations for our own advantage purposely—even at times brutally. But only in that way can the high efficiency of the modern industrial process be maintained, and in the long run it benefits the oppressed even more than the oppressor.� This doctrine is as wide-spread as it is false and mischievous. It is true that the bribe of greed will artificially hasten economic development, but it does so at fearful cost, as America itself can testify. We have here a wonderful industrial machine, but a machine quickly rather than carefully built, formed of forcing rather than of growth, involving sinful and unnecessary expense. Better smaller production and more equitable distribution; better fewer miles of railway and more honor, truth, and liberty; better fewer millionaires and more contentment. So it is the world over, where force and fraud and graft have extorted rich reward from writhing millions. Moreover, it is historically unprovable that the advance of undeveloped peoples has been helped by wholesale exploitation at the hands of their richer, stronger, and more unscrupulous neighbors.�
“I never shall forget,� writes Thomas Wentworth Higginson, “the quiet way in which he once told me that ‘God had established the Allegheny Mountains from the foundation of the world that they might one day be a refuge for fugitive slaves.� I did not know then that his own home was among the Adirondacks.”�
Insurrectionary Calvinist geography must be a concocted field of inquiry for which Brown would be the perfect militant subject. As I wandered around Mono Cliffs last weekend staring at all the Allegheny blackberries fruiting among the brambles along the trail, I thought of John Brown imagining God sculpting the Allegheny Mountains as a foundational act of creation. John Brown really thought himself to be an instrument of God in the divine task of liberating slaves. The Ceylon blackberry (of course related to the Allegheny blackberry) native to Asia (from China to the Malay peninsula, where my ancestors are from) is now an invasive species in the Galapagos. It was interesting that Du Bois included some commentary on the context of Victorian science and the publishing of Darwin’s Origin of Species, and the wellspring of eugenicist racism that happened to follow in its wake, which geneticists like Haldane would strongly resist. Darwin himself did not assert the views that would come to be known as ‘social Darwinism�. Darwin had imbibed the staunch abolitionist sentiments from his family, and his diary entries from Brazil for example exuded with indignation of the Portuguese slave system still in effect there). The Harvard historian of science Janet Browne wrote:
“Throughout [Darwin] expressed the view that humans were all brothers under the skin. In fact a strong antipathy to slavery in any form was crucial to his developing views about the unity of all mankind. Anti-slavery politics were integral to his family viewpoint in general, for the first Erasmus Darwin had been an active promoter of emancipation causes in Britain and in his poems publicly praised Josiah Wedgwood’s famous medal emblazoned with the motto ‘Am I not a man and a brother�. Darwin’s father, sisters and cousins all supported the anti-slavery movements of the early nineteenth century � as did he. And the Beagle was travelling the world just when these mass philanthropic movements reached their pinnacle in Britain with the Emancipation Act of 1832.
The only time that Darwin was really angry with Captain FitzRoy was over an incident at a great estância in Brazil, where the slave-owner called all his men before him and asked whether they wished to be free. No, they answered. Talking in the cabin afterwards, FitzRoy complacently took that response as a simple truth until Darwin pointed out that no slave would risk any words to the contrary. �
Du Bois interestingly remarked that after the publication of Darwin’s Origin of Species, John Brown was seen as a sort of out-dated anomaly with good intentions, but misinformed about the newly discovered scientific realities. Du Bois astutely confronts the bizarre and dubious logical foundations of eugenicists, and his arguments shared striking similarity to those of the geneticist Haldane who found it so ridiculous that eugenicists had the arrogance to believe they knew what were the highest qualities of humanity and their confidence to throw out all the rest of human genetic diversity because they believed they themselves happened to be the current pinnacle of human evolution. Du Bois writes:
“…first, assuming the truth of the unproved dictum that there are stocks of human beings whose elimination the best welfare of the world demands it is certainly questionable if these stocks include the majority of mankind; and it is indefensible and monstrous to pretend that we know to-day with any reasonable assurance which these stocks are. We can point to degenerate individuals and families here and there among all races, but there is not the slightest warrant for assuming that there does not lie among the Chinese and Hindus, the African Bantus and American Indians as lofty possibilities of human culture as any European race has ever exhibited. It is, to be sure, puzzling to know why the Soudan should linger a thousand years in culture behind the valley of the Seine, but it is no more puzzling than the fact that the valley of the Thames was miserably backward as compared with the banks of the Tiber. Climate, human contact, facilities of communication and what we call accident, have played a great part in the rise of culture among nations: to ignore these and assert dogmatically that the present distribution of culture is a fair index of the distribution of human ability and desert, is to make an assertion for which there is not the slightest scientific warrant.�
Anyway, to return to the issue of John Brown who was actually fare more visionary and wise than the eugenicists who would shortly arrive after his time, another exemplary sample of Brown’s staunch Calvinism I mentioned to my friend was this fascinating slightly humorous austerity of Brown turning down butter at the dinner table confessing that he was not accustomed to such luxuries. Du Bois many times calls Brown a Puritan, and takes time to even trace his Puritan ancestry. My friend had a good chuckle over Brown turning down butter as a luxury though, as we were on his backyard deck luxuriating over takeout korma and vindaloo, along with glasses of Shiraz. I wish I had the sobriety of John Brown but I admittedly like butter on my bread, and a cheap glass of wine once in a while also.
I also mentioned to my friend that Brown’s militancy reminded me of communists I read about. He was infuriated by strict pacifists and non-violent abolitionists, and some of the things he did, or that he permitted his followers to do, I found terrifying. But slavery is a particular social circumstance in a different time, and I supposed he had good justification for his actions. Some of Brown’s fellow comrades would raid the homes of slave owners at night and sometimes they would end up executed. War, insurrection, and revolution are no dinner parties as another revolutionary once suggested.
Du Bois was initially offered the task of writing a biography of Frederick Douglass, which he agreed to, only to be displaced by an agreement by Booker T. Washington to write it. Du Bois counter-proposed to write a biography of Nat Turner, but the publisher was not interested, so Du Bois's next choice was John Brown. Du Bois, in this bioraphy, interestingly includes details of John Brown studying Nat Turner and the strategies of other leaders of slave uprisings while trying to formulate his own ideas. Du Bois writes:
"He studied the census returns and the distribution of the Negroes and made maps of fugitive slave routes with roads, plantations, and supplies. He learned of Isaac, Denmark Vesey, Nat Turner and the Cumberland region insurrections in South Carolina, Virginia, and Tennessee; he knew of the organized resistance to slave-catchers in Pennsylvania, and the history of Hayti and Jamaica."
Du Bois has a fascinating account of Frederick Douglass visiting John Brown’s home and being slightly shocked (even a bit disappointed) at how plain and austere the place was, after seeing Brown’s nice store in town. Douglass wrote:
“It was a small wooden building on a back street, in a neighbourhood chiefly occupied by labouring men and mechanics; respectable enough, to be sure, but not quite the place, I thought, where one would look for the residence of a flourishing and successful merchant. Plain as was the outside of this man’s house, the inside was plainer. Its furniture would have satisfied a Spartan. It would take longer to tell what was not in this house than what was in it. There was an air of plainness about it which almost suggested destitution.�
I like many first encountered John Brown through the folk songs of Pete Seeger, who would sing the old John Brown verse along with the later verses from the Battle Hymn of the Republic. After reading Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath I would play folk renditions of this song over and over to the annoyance of those living with me.
Some of my favourite passages from this book were Brown’s encounters with Harriet Tubman (who befriended Brown and associated him with one of the recurring dreams she had), and Brown actually spent quite a significant amount of time in Canada recruiting runway slaves that had escaped across the border into his military campaign to liberate those enslaved in the South. I would love to take a few day trips out to St. Catherines and Chatham to follow along the trail of Brown in Ontario. Du Bois even records Brown visiting Toronto’s Temperance Hall and the home of Black man named Mr. Holland. Du Bois also mentions Brown staying at the home of the naturalist, ornithologist, physician, and abolitionist Alexander Milton Ross, although some historians question the veracity of some of Ross’s accounts (I suspect some want to distant Brown from Ross because he was somewhat untrustworthy and also an anti-vaxxer). I’d like to some time follow up on two of Du Bois� sources, especially before taking some day trips to Chatham: “John Brown in Canada� by James Cleland Hamilton and “A Voice from Harper’s Ferry� by Osborne Perry Anderson (the only surviving Black man from Brown’s Harpers Ferry raid) with the help of Mary Ann Shadd Cary (a remarkable Black feminist, abolitionist, lawyer, and publisher). I heard there’s a little cinematic production out there on the Chatham Convention with Ethan Hawke as John Brown, and I should maybe make a film night of it too before heading out to Chatham.
Anyway, Brown was a remarkable soul and who better to capture such a fascinating person than W.E.B. Du Bois.
There’s a book coming out this December (Arise Africa, Roar China) by the historian Gao Yunxiang, which has an entire chapter dedicated to Du Bois and his close relationship with Maoist China, and his involvement in internationalist communist politics later in his life. This book on John Brown was published in 1909, decades before Du Bois became a communist, but Du Bois spends a good portion of his last chapter expressing his strong anti-imperialist sentiments long before his communist commitments. I wanted to finish with this wonderful excerpt by Du Bois that comments on the way colonized peoples of the world are exploited by the industrial bourgeoisie:
“No sooner is the question put this way than the defenders of modern caste retire behind a more defensible breastwork. They say: “Yes, we exploit nations for our own advantage purposely—even at times brutally. But only in that way can the high efficiency of the modern industrial process be maintained, and in the long run it benefits the oppressed even more than the oppressor.� This doctrine is as wide-spread as it is false and mischievous. It is true that the bribe of greed will artificially hasten economic development, but it does so at fearful cost, as America itself can testify. We have here a wonderful industrial machine, but a machine quickly rather than carefully built, formed of forcing rather than of growth, involving sinful and unnecessary expense. Better smaller production and more equitable distribution; better fewer miles of railway and more honor, truth, and liberty; better fewer millionaires and more contentment. So it is the world over, where force and fraud and graft have extorted rich reward from writhing millions. Moreover, it is historically unprovable that the advance of undeveloped peoples has been helped by wholesale exploitation at the hands of their richer, stronger, and more unscrupulous neighbors.�
July 13, 2024
Y’all imagine my Quaker and nonviolent and abolitionist and history-nerd joy in learning that none other than W.E.B. Du Bois wrote a bio of John Brown, the white man who set out to abolish slavery by any means necessary.
How? How had I not known about this book?
I love reading Du Bois almost as much as I love reading James Baldwin, for similar but not entirely the same reasons. Anyways �
Trust your Unruly Quaker pal that Du Bois� is THE definitive biography of John Brown.
Why?
Du Bois has no time for the TIRESOME debate about whether John Brown was sane / insane. I groan and roll my eyes at biographers' “debates� about Brown’s sanity.
I mean, I don’t think Brown was a chill hang.
He was clearly super intense and driven and judgey.
The sanity thing, though? I think the only reason people question his sanity is because he was a white man who used violence in what he considered necessary action to abolish slavery.
Do we question the sanity of Black folks who used violence in what they considered necessary action to abolish slavery? No. We don’t. Nat Turner, Denmark Vesey, Toussaint Louverture, Harriet Tubman: we don’t question their sanity. Yes, we do everything else to them � call them terrorists, villains, communists, assassinate them, and more � but their sanity isn’t questioned.
So. What (white) writers and historians cannot grok about John Brown is why a sane white person would put everything on the line for abolition.
But Du Bois gets it.
What you get in this biography is a deeply moral, beautifully written, contextual, and respectful presentation of Brown.
Du Bois understands that it was not, it is not, insanity to commit your life to the freedom and liberty of oppressed peoples. The only thing that makes John Brown seem insane to white people is that he was white and willing to give his life, and willing to take lives, for the cause.
This is also what challenges *me* so much about John Brown: his use of violence � and his uneasy feelings about nonviolent abolitionists (like I am).
John Brown, and Du Bois, ask us to reckon with the question of whether, and/ or when, violence is permissible to overturn violently oppressive systems.
Do you think about violence and nonviolence a lot? As tactics and strategies and morality and an ethos?
I sure do.
I call myself nonviolent. But what does that even mean? Does it mean anything?
It’s quite easy for me, a comfy-cozy middle class white cisgender (albeit bisexual) gal to espouse nonviolence both as a moral, a belief, a strategy, a practice, and a tactic.
But. And. What are the limits of nonviolence?
What if one day, and I mean God forbid, someone snatched my son and husband? Just took them away from me? Chained them? Transported them or made them walk 300 miles? Then forced them to work, in fields, dawn to dark? Did not pay them, kept them under lash and constant threat of murder? What if that was going to be their fate for the rest of their lives - and my potential grandchildren’s lives? And it was perfectly legal?
How would I respond?
Is my nonviolence truly rooted in, and grown from, from the knowledge that we are all children of the God, aka the Great Cosmic Echidna?
And / or � does it rely on the comfort of my relative safety?
Does it come from fear? (Fear of being injured or becoming unsafe?)
What would test my nonviolence?
What would break it?
When, if ever, is it legit to take up arms?
Can I really call myself nonviolent if I am complicit in systems of violence � humans being violently separated from their families and caged in my —in our� names? Humans in densely populated areas of Gaza being hit with 500-pound bombs that my taxes pay for?
What about the legacy of violence that my settler-colonizer family has perpetrated for the past four the centuries? Do I just get to wash my hands clean of that?
What about the violence I do every day to the planet by driving my car, putting clothes in the dryer, running the air conditioner at home and work?
What about the unspeakably gruesome violence our economic enacts on animals, just to have a sandwich at Chic-Fil-A, or an omelette at the diner?
I believe these are important questions.
I don’t think we should get comfortable until we can answer them, answer for them.
So, yeah: back to this book about John Brown, y’all.
In reading Du Bois you get primary sources: John Brown’s letters to family, contemporaries writing to and about him � including Frederick Douglass� thoughts and letters. (NERD RADAR PINGING! AWOOGA! FREDERICK DOUGLASS!)
And then you also get Du Bois as narrator: his wisdom, his politics, his morality.
For instance, on page 4, you get: “The price of repression is greater than the cost of liberty.� I mean. Come on. That’s just page 4.
Fast-forward to Chapter 5, “The Vision of the Damned�:
“Four things make life worthy to most men: to move, to know, to love, to aspire. None of these was for Negro slaves.� —page 41.
To move. To know. To love. To aspire.
We’ll come back to those another time.
After walking us through the (in)famous raid on Harpers Ferry, which, dudes, friends, girlies, Du Bois gives the clearest picture of that I’ve seen or read anywhere, Du Bois writes:
“Such was a such a light was the soul of John Brown. He was simple, exasperatingly, simple, unlettered, plain, and homely. No casuistry of culture or learning, of well-being or tradition moved him in the slightest degree: “Slavery is wrong,� he said,—“kill it.� Destroy it—uproot it stem, blossom and branch; give it no quarter, exterminate it and do it now. Was he wrong? No. The forceable staying of human uplift by barriers of law and tradition is the most wicked thing on earth. It is wrong. Eternally wrong. It is wrong by whatever name it is called, or in whatever guise it lurks, and whenever it appears. But it is especially heinous, black, and cruel when it masquerades in the robes of law and justice and patriotism." � p. 205
Whew.
That is the beautifully written moral clarity you just don’t get anywhere but with Du Bois, James Baldwin, and Unruly Quaker.
But that’s not all.
Get a load of this:
This isn’t in the book. It’s in a speech Du Bois gave at Harpers Ferry in 1932. They were dedicating a memorial plaque or something. From the end of Du Bois� speech:
"Some people have the idea that crucifixion consists in the punishment of an innocent man. The essence of crucifixion is that men are killing a criminal, that men have got to kill him, and yet that the act of crucifying him is the salvation of the world. John Brown broke the law, he killed human beings. Those people who defended slavery had to execute John Brown, although they knew that in killing him they were committing the greater crime. It is out of that human paradox that there comes any crucifixion."
I mean.
I’ll let you sit with that awhile.
Grateful to be sitting here with you.
Full post, with photos and art and recommendations, on my Unruly Quaker Substack:
How? How had I not known about this book?
I love reading Du Bois almost as much as I love reading James Baldwin, for similar but not entirely the same reasons. Anyways �
Trust your Unruly Quaker pal that Du Bois� is THE definitive biography of John Brown.
Why?
Du Bois has no time for the TIRESOME debate about whether John Brown was sane / insane. I groan and roll my eyes at biographers' “debates� about Brown’s sanity.
I mean, I don’t think Brown was a chill hang.
He was clearly super intense and driven and judgey.
The sanity thing, though? I think the only reason people question his sanity is because he was a white man who used violence in what he considered necessary action to abolish slavery.
Do we question the sanity of Black folks who used violence in what they considered necessary action to abolish slavery? No. We don’t. Nat Turner, Denmark Vesey, Toussaint Louverture, Harriet Tubman: we don’t question their sanity. Yes, we do everything else to them � call them terrorists, villains, communists, assassinate them, and more � but their sanity isn’t questioned.
So. What (white) writers and historians cannot grok about John Brown is why a sane white person would put everything on the line for abolition.
But Du Bois gets it.
What you get in this biography is a deeply moral, beautifully written, contextual, and respectful presentation of Brown.
Du Bois understands that it was not, it is not, insanity to commit your life to the freedom and liberty of oppressed peoples. The only thing that makes John Brown seem insane to white people is that he was white and willing to give his life, and willing to take lives, for the cause.
This is also what challenges *me* so much about John Brown: his use of violence � and his uneasy feelings about nonviolent abolitionists (like I am).
John Brown, and Du Bois, ask us to reckon with the question of whether, and/ or when, violence is permissible to overturn violently oppressive systems.
Do you think about violence and nonviolence a lot? As tactics and strategies and morality and an ethos?
I sure do.
I call myself nonviolent. But what does that even mean? Does it mean anything?
It’s quite easy for me, a comfy-cozy middle class white cisgender (albeit bisexual) gal to espouse nonviolence both as a moral, a belief, a strategy, a practice, and a tactic.
But. And. What are the limits of nonviolence?
What if one day, and I mean God forbid, someone snatched my son and husband? Just took them away from me? Chained them? Transported them or made them walk 300 miles? Then forced them to work, in fields, dawn to dark? Did not pay them, kept them under lash and constant threat of murder? What if that was going to be their fate for the rest of their lives - and my potential grandchildren’s lives? And it was perfectly legal?
How would I respond?
Is my nonviolence truly rooted in, and grown from, from the knowledge that we are all children of the God, aka the Great Cosmic Echidna?
And / or � does it rely on the comfort of my relative safety?
Does it come from fear? (Fear of being injured or becoming unsafe?)
What would test my nonviolence?
What would break it?
When, if ever, is it legit to take up arms?
Can I really call myself nonviolent if I am complicit in systems of violence � humans being violently separated from their families and caged in my —in our� names? Humans in densely populated areas of Gaza being hit with 500-pound bombs that my taxes pay for?
What about the legacy of violence that my settler-colonizer family has perpetrated for the past four the centuries? Do I just get to wash my hands clean of that?
What about the violence I do every day to the planet by driving my car, putting clothes in the dryer, running the air conditioner at home and work?
What about the unspeakably gruesome violence our economic enacts on animals, just to have a sandwich at Chic-Fil-A, or an omelette at the diner?
I believe these are important questions.
I don’t think we should get comfortable until we can answer them, answer for them.
So, yeah: back to this book about John Brown, y’all.
In reading Du Bois you get primary sources: John Brown’s letters to family, contemporaries writing to and about him � including Frederick Douglass� thoughts and letters. (NERD RADAR PINGING! AWOOGA! FREDERICK DOUGLASS!)
And then you also get Du Bois as narrator: his wisdom, his politics, his morality.
For instance, on page 4, you get: “The price of repression is greater than the cost of liberty.� I mean. Come on. That’s just page 4.
Fast-forward to Chapter 5, “The Vision of the Damned�:
“Four things make life worthy to most men: to move, to know, to love, to aspire. None of these was for Negro slaves.� —page 41.
To move. To know. To love. To aspire.
We’ll come back to those another time.
After walking us through the (in)famous raid on Harpers Ferry, which, dudes, friends, girlies, Du Bois gives the clearest picture of that I’ve seen or read anywhere, Du Bois writes:
“Such was a such a light was the soul of John Brown. He was simple, exasperatingly, simple, unlettered, plain, and homely. No casuistry of culture or learning, of well-being or tradition moved him in the slightest degree: “Slavery is wrong,� he said,—“kill it.� Destroy it—uproot it stem, blossom and branch; give it no quarter, exterminate it and do it now. Was he wrong? No. The forceable staying of human uplift by barriers of law and tradition is the most wicked thing on earth. It is wrong. Eternally wrong. It is wrong by whatever name it is called, or in whatever guise it lurks, and whenever it appears. But it is especially heinous, black, and cruel when it masquerades in the robes of law and justice and patriotism." � p. 205
Whew.
That is the beautifully written moral clarity you just don’t get anywhere but with Du Bois, James Baldwin, and Unruly Quaker.
But that’s not all.
Get a load of this:
This isn’t in the book. It’s in a speech Du Bois gave at Harpers Ferry in 1932. They were dedicating a memorial plaque or something. From the end of Du Bois� speech:
"Some people have the idea that crucifixion consists in the punishment of an innocent man. The essence of crucifixion is that men are killing a criminal, that men have got to kill him, and yet that the act of crucifying him is the salvation of the world. John Brown broke the law, he killed human beings. Those people who defended slavery had to execute John Brown, although they knew that in killing him they were committing the greater crime. It is out of that human paradox that there comes any crucifixion."
I mean.
I’ll let you sit with that awhile.
Grateful to be sitting here with you.
Full post, with photos and art and recommendations, on my Unruly Quaker Substack:
September 28, 2019
John Brown's body lies a-mouldering in the grave,
His soul's marching on
One of the first observations one will make about this is its lack of original research and reliance on two-or-three biographers. But it then becomes apparent that this is in fact an extremely ambitious meta-analysis of the historiography and, especially, an attempt to radically re-contextualize the figure of John Brown. In both respects it is interesting and successful.
One of the highlights is definitely the 1962 addition to the post-script, in which du Bois extends John Brown's legacy to the achievements of the Soviet Union (and the People's Republic of China). The original 1909 text of the post-script and its 1962 addition both seem disturbingly prescient today: the former because its discussion of the evil of Social Darwinism predates the phenomenon's nadir in European Fascism, and even more so the latter because its excoriation of Amerika's neofascist prison system was to be soon followed by a further blossoming of that malignant flower which continues to the present.
His soul's marching on
One of the first observations one will make about this is its lack of original research and reliance on two-or-three biographers. But it then becomes apparent that this is in fact an extremely ambitious meta-analysis of the historiography and, especially, an attempt to radically re-contextualize the figure of John Brown. In both respects it is interesting and successful.
One of the highlights is definitely the 1962 addition to the post-script, in which du Bois extends John Brown's legacy to the achievements of the Soviet Union (and the People's Republic of China). The original 1909 text of the post-script and its 1962 addition both seem disturbingly prescient today: the former because its discussion of the evil of Social Darwinism predates the phenomenon's nadir in European Fascism, and even more so the latter because its excoriation of Amerika's neofascist prison system was to be soon followed by a further blossoming of that malignant flower which continues to the present.
December 18, 2020
"When a prophet like John Brown appears, how must we of the world receive him?"
John Brown is one of the more enigmatic figures in history because he, unlike most of us, knew absolutely what he believed, and unlike almost all of us, wouldn't compromise on what he knew. And so, knowing that slavery was wrong and that violence was an acceptable means to defeat the evil of slavery he got a bunch of people killed in a sort of insane raid the intention of which was to create an armed highway of black exodus from slavery through the mountains. Is he a hero for this? Or an insane person? Or do our normal categories not apply?
I tend to think the world is thicker and stronger because John Brown lived in it once.
Thanks is due to Marilynne Robinson, in this as in many things, for recalling Brown to our national attention in her Gilead novels.
John Brown is one of the more enigmatic figures in history because he, unlike most of us, knew absolutely what he believed, and unlike almost all of us, wouldn't compromise on what he knew. And so, knowing that slavery was wrong and that violence was an acceptable means to defeat the evil of slavery he got a bunch of people killed in a sort of insane raid the intention of which was to create an armed highway of black exodus from slavery through the mountains. Is he a hero for this? Or an insane person? Or do our normal categories not apply?
I tend to think the world is thicker and stronger because John Brown lived in it once.
Thanks is due to Marilynne Robinson, in this as in many things, for recalling Brown to our national attention in her Gilead novels.
August 29, 2020
This biography, while good, treats John Brown more like a mythic prophet than an actual person. He certainly is larger than life, so it's kind of understandable. Still, I would have preferred a more neutral and objective look into the life of the man, even if I do overall consider him a hero. I would probably give this book one more star, but the last bit of the book makes a bizarre argument for non-racist eugenics (which is apparently a thing), which is just strange and really doesn't need to be in there. But since it's only one small section of the book, the rest of the book is still worth reading for the history of John Brown and how his personal actions helped start the Civil War and ultimately end slavery.
July 6, 2014
Starts slow, but once Kansas starts bleeding, things start picking up. A judicious but passionate investigation of one of the most important men in the most important periods in American history.
W.E.B. DuBois' voice is also always a pleasure to read, and his theoretical considerations at the end have profound resonance in our day as well.
W.E.B. DuBois' voice is also always a pleasure to read, and his theoretical considerations at the end have profound resonance in our day as well.
December 30, 2022
This book amazes me because I had never heard of either the other or John Brown until I was 32. That's wild. Both W.E.B Du Bois and John Brown are important figures in history and I recommend everyone in America reads this book and learn more about both people. W.E.B. Du Bois is an incredible person in history and an amazing historian.
December 11, 2020
Every American should read this book.
August 11, 2023
Du Bois is a great writer and his his prose is more beautiful than any other historian's I've read. Also John Brown did nothing wrong.
September 20, 2013
For their second gathering, the leaders of the anti-racist Niagara Movement chose to convene on the campus of Storer College in Harper's Ferry, West Virginia in 1906. Two days after the conference attendees marched barefoot to the "hallowed ground" of John Brown's 1859 raid to free enslaved Americans, W.E.B. Du Bois read his famous "Address to the Country." The choice of location for the important conference that would help set the stage for the founding of the NAACP, the somber promenade to visit the historic landmark of Brown's rebellion, and Du Bois's fiery address, all resonate with the urgency of Du Bois's deep reflections on the life and legacy of the white abolitionist, John Brown.
In the over 150 years since Brown's raid, the name John Brown continues to haunt the American imaginary. As a child, I remember very well my first visit to Harper's Ferry. On the one hand, Brown is presented in the National Park Services official exhibitions as a visionary hero whose religious convictions led him to organize a battalion of vigilantes determined to sacrifice their own lives for liberating enslaved men and women across the South. On the other hand, Brown is portrayed as a fanatic whose extremism promoted violence, murder, and war. The latter view informed John Steuart Curry's famous "Tragic Prelude" painting on the walls of the State Capital building of Kansas. In Curry's mural, Brown bears the visage of a crazed lunatic, driven by religious extremism. For Curry, like many of his generation, it was absolutism on both sides that resulted in the Civil War between the North and the South.
Written between 1904 and completed three years after the Niagara Movement conference in Harper's Ferry, Du Bois's biography of John Brown constructs a representation in which Brown is neither mythic nor lunatic.
Reading Du Bois's book, I kept thinking about the stark difference between his account of Brown's life and the mural by Curry. Where the latter attempts to fix an analysis in a static image with Brown towering over a perfectly balanced the human and natural forces of North and South on either side, Du Bois is less interested in a singular image than in the long road of how one organizes a life committed to liberation. Drawing on his powers as a sociologist, Du Bois extensively consults the available written accounts of witnesses as well as Brown's own correspondences. What emerges is not merely a demythified John Brown, but a singular historical figure situated in an expansive landscape of actors, events, forms of political organization, and competing ideas around strategy and tactics. In other words, Du Bois gives us an exhaustive account of the machinery behind the image. We learn of the extensive networks of abolitionist societies that spanned from New England to the Kansan Territories and deep into Canada. We learn of the volatile coalition between slavery abolitionists, those who saw slaves as an economic threat to White workers, and those who opposed slavery purely out of White Supremacist impulses. We also learn of the role of Quakers in hosting Brown's military training camp where the young men who would lead the assault on Harper's Ferry drilled with arms, studied, and practiced their Christian faith.
Du Bois's sociology, however, does not limit him to providing only descriptive account. Compelled by his own growing hunger for mass political action, Du Bois takes the time to attend to those like Frederick Douglass and others who critiqued Brown's plan for the Harper's Ferry assault on the basis of tactic. In his account of how the actual raid unfolded, Du Bois offers keen insights into the failings of the interventions -- all the while insisting that the plan had the potential to succeed.
The lesson we take from John Brown is not a warning against fanaticism per se. Citing in detail the transcripts from the court proceedings that sentenced Brown and his surviving fighters to the gallows, Du Bois clearly shows that the abolitionist aimed to free slaves as a strategy for breaking the slavery system. War, murder, and sedition were not in any way his purpose. From his experience in Kansas fighting against pro-slavery ruffians, Brown had no delusions about the reaction from those with the most to lose from the defeat of the slavery system. Rather, as Du Bois takes pains to demonstrate, there is something absolutely rational about Brown's strategy and his means, long-cultivated in the battlefields of Kansas and in the dialogue with those most connected to the anti-slavery movement.
It is true that there are many accounts of John Brown life. In either biography, history, or comic novel, he remains a crucial figure in how we grapple with the contradictions of American promise and American injustice. And yet Du Bois's book offers something uniquely priceless in terms of reading a biography of a white abolitionist who took up arms written by one of the most significant architects of the freedom struggle. What does Du Bois think about Brown, the white Northerner, acting upon his convictions for the liberation of the oppressed? What does the historical account of John Brown suggest for the foundation of solidarity between the races in the struggle against oppression and exploitation? How does Du Bois make sense of Brown's tactical use of armed rebellion in the fight against a social-economic system? What is Du Bois's analysis of the larger abolitionist movement that could claim such diverse figures and strategies from the underground railroad to those advocating extraction? And since Du Bois is writing at precisely the same moment the Niagara Movement takes up its debate against the conciliatory tendency of Booker T. Washington, Du Bois's John Brown becomes as much a radical voice for 1906 as a figure of the mid-1800s.
In many respects, the above questions linger even today for anyone committed to the struggle for freedom. But at a time when identity -- particularly Whiteness -- becomes a growing alibi for indifference and lethal resentment, Du Bois's John Brown provides a challenge for how we might think about the agency of solidarity; one in which the old problem of fanaticism succumbs to the urgent question of what it means to take militant action when the severity of the risks fall unevenly on people of color as on Whites, on the poor as on the propertied, on the enslaved as on the free, and on the citizen as on the noncitizen.
According to Du Bois, the reality that Blacks would suffer more than Brown himself from taking armed action served as the basis for Frederick Douglass's decision to decline Brown's call to join the raid on Harper's Ferry. Even in the final hour, standing in a quarry facing the entreaties of Brown and his plans for a sustained attack on slavery, Douglass would not follow his old friend into battle. Interestingly, as Du Bois points out, whatever reservations Douglass felt were not shared by Harriet Tubman. In fact, had it not be for a debilitating illness, Tubman would have been at Harper's Ferry, and the would have been the only woman present (and permitted by Captain Brown).
In the immediate wake of the raid, Douglass watched and listened as shockwaves rippled through the fabric of American discourse and consciousness. In time, Douglass would come to see Brown's assault as not the ending of slavery that Brown may have intended but as the beginning of that ending. Furthermore, Douglass would some come to believe that only revolution would shake America free from the system of slavery.
As for me, a reader of Du Bois's John Brown, it is not so much Frederick Douglass or even John Brown that haunts me after reading the last page. Rather, and here I think Du Bois too felt so inclined, I cannot shake from my thoughts Du Bois's depiction of Shields Green. An illiterate former slave, Green listens to Douglass's counsel on the eve of the raid not to partake in Brown's foolish suicide mission. Yet after hearing the entreaties of the leader of the freedom struggle, Green responded, "I'll go with the old man," and thus elected to go into battle and to his death. As Du Bois repeats continually throughout the book, "The cost of liberty is less than the price of repression." These words, these terrible words, could so easily be dismissed as fanatical. But what is fanaticism to those oppressed by centuries of suffering in a society whose wealth and elites stand erect on the toil and dehumanization of the working masses?
Calling such thinking and acting fanaticism serves as a convenient way to not have to ask these questions of ourselves in the time we have on earth.
In the over 150 years since Brown's raid, the name John Brown continues to haunt the American imaginary. As a child, I remember very well my first visit to Harper's Ferry. On the one hand, Brown is presented in the National Park Services official exhibitions as a visionary hero whose religious convictions led him to organize a battalion of vigilantes determined to sacrifice their own lives for liberating enslaved men and women across the South. On the other hand, Brown is portrayed as a fanatic whose extremism promoted violence, murder, and war. The latter view informed John Steuart Curry's famous "Tragic Prelude" painting on the walls of the State Capital building of Kansas. In Curry's mural, Brown bears the visage of a crazed lunatic, driven by religious extremism. For Curry, like many of his generation, it was absolutism on both sides that resulted in the Civil War between the North and the South.
Written between 1904 and completed three years after the Niagara Movement conference in Harper's Ferry, Du Bois's biography of John Brown constructs a representation in which Brown is neither mythic nor lunatic.
Reading Du Bois's book, I kept thinking about the stark difference between his account of Brown's life and the mural by Curry. Where the latter attempts to fix an analysis in a static image with Brown towering over a perfectly balanced the human and natural forces of North and South on either side, Du Bois is less interested in a singular image than in the long road of how one organizes a life committed to liberation. Drawing on his powers as a sociologist, Du Bois extensively consults the available written accounts of witnesses as well as Brown's own correspondences. What emerges is not merely a demythified John Brown, but a singular historical figure situated in an expansive landscape of actors, events, forms of political organization, and competing ideas around strategy and tactics. In other words, Du Bois gives us an exhaustive account of the machinery behind the image. We learn of the extensive networks of abolitionist societies that spanned from New England to the Kansan Territories and deep into Canada. We learn of the volatile coalition between slavery abolitionists, those who saw slaves as an economic threat to White workers, and those who opposed slavery purely out of White Supremacist impulses. We also learn of the role of Quakers in hosting Brown's military training camp where the young men who would lead the assault on Harper's Ferry drilled with arms, studied, and practiced their Christian faith.
Du Bois's sociology, however, does not limit him to providing only descriptive account. Compelled by his own growing hunger for mass political action, Du Bois takes the time to attend to those like Frederick Douglass and others who critiqued Brown's plan for the Harper's Ferry assault on the basis of tactic. In his account of how the actual raid unfolded, Du Bois offers keen insights into the failings of the interventions -- all the while insisting that the plan had the potential to succeed.
The lesson we take from John Brown is not a warning against fanaticism per se. Citing in detail the transcripts from the court proceedings that sentenced Brown and his surviving fighters to the gallows, Du Bois clearly shows that the abolitionist aimed to free slaves as a strategy for breaking the slavery system. War, murder, and sedition were not in any way his purpose. From his experience in Kansas fighting against pro-slavery ruffians, Brown had no delusions about the reaction from those with the most to lose from the defeat of the slavery system. Rather, as Du Bois takes pains to demonstrate, there is something absolutely rational about Brown's strategy and his means, long-cultivated in the battlefields of Kansas and in the dialogue with those most connected to the anti-slavery movement.
It is true that there are many accounts of John Brown life. In either biography, history, or comic novel, he remains a crucial figure in how we grapple with the contradictions of American promise and American injustice. And yet Du Bois's book offers something uniquely priceless in terms of reading a biography of a white abolitionist who took up arms written by one of the most significant architects of the freedom struggle. What does Du Bois think about Brown, the white Northerner, acting upon his convictions for the liberation of the oppressed? What does the historical account of John Brown suggest for the foundation of solidarity between the races in the struggle against oppression and exploitation? How does Du Bois make sense of Brown's tactical use of armed rebellion in the fight against a social-economic system? What is Du Bois's analysis of the larger abolitionist movement that could claim such diverse figures and strategies from the underground railroad to those advocating extraction? And since Du Bois is writing at precisely the same moment the Niagara Movement takes up its debate against the conciliatory tendency of Booker T. Washington, Du Bois's John Brown becomes as much a radical voice for 1906 as a figure of the mid-1800s.
In many respects, the above questions linger even today for anyone committed to the struggle for freedom. But at a time when identity -- particularly Whiteness -- becomes a growing alibi for indifference and lethal resentment, Du Bois's John Brown provides a challenge for how we might think about the agency of solidarity; one in which the old problem of fanaticism succumbs to the urgent question of what it means to take militant action when the severity of the risks fall unevenly on people of color as on Whites, on the poor as on the propertied, on the enslaved as on the free, and on the citizen as on the noncitizen.
According to Du Bois, the reality that Blacks would suffer more than Brown himself from taking armed action served as the basis for Frederick Douglass's decision to decline Brown's call to join the raid on Harper's Ferry. Even in the final hour, standing in a quarry facing the entreaties of Brown and his plans for a sustained attack on slavery, Douglass would not follow his old friend into battle. Interestingly, as Du Bois points out, whatever reservations Douglass felt were not shared by Harriet Tubman. In fact, had it not be for a debilitating illness, Tubman would have been at Harper's Ferry, and the would have been the only woman present (and permitted by Captain Brown).
In the immediate wake of the raid, Douglass watched and listened as shockwaves rippled through the fabric of American discourse and consciousness. In time, Douglass would come to see Brown's assault as not the ending of slavery that Brown may have intended but as the beginning of that ending. Furthermore, Douglass would some come to believe that only revolution would shake America free from the system of slavery.
As for me, a reader of Du Bois's John Brown, it is not so much Frederick Douglass or even John Brown that haunts me after reading the last page. Rather, and here I think Du Bois too felt so inclined, I cannot shake from my thoughts Du Bois's depiction of Shields Green. An illiterate former slave, Green listens to Douglass's counsel on the eve of the raid not to partake in Brown's foolish suicide mission. Yet after hearing the entreaties of the leader of the freedom struggle, Green responded, "I'll go with the old man," and thus elected to go into battle and to his death. As Du Bois repeats continually throughout the book, "The cost of liberty is less than the price of repression." These words, these terrible words, could so easily be dismissed as fanatical. But what is fanaticism to those oppressed by centuries of suffering in a society whose wealth and elites stand erect on the toil and dehumanization of the working masses?
Calling such thinking and acting fanaticism serves as a convenient way to not have to ask these questions of ourselves in the time we have on earth.
October 26, 2016
This is a very complete, very through book on John Brown. It covers his entire life and just what kind of person he was and how this led to the assault on Harper's Ferry. The introduction talks about slave revolts, the revolution in Haiti, a race riot in Atlanta in 1906 and other similar things. The preface establishes a chronology for Brown's life and how, when he was quite young, he saw a slave abused.
As an adult his financial life was damaged by various crashes and 'panics' in the world of money. He has a family and is quite a stern father, even using a whip when he feels it is necessary. Some slaves were escaping to Canada (eventually 100,000 escaped but that's out of a population of about 4,000,000 slaves.)
One of the most fascinating parts of the book is about the fight between Missouri and Kansas. The people in Missouri wanted to make Kansas a slave state and they basically waged war against Kansas with actual armed invasions of that state.
Eventually John Brown came up with the idea of freeing slave and getting them into nearby mountains (along with weapons and support) and having them wage a guerrilla warfare to free more slaves.
The problem was that John Brown did not have an actual army behind him. He did recruit some men but nowhere near what he actually needed. He traveled all over the country to get money so he could raise his 'army' but even that proved extremely difficult.
Even the attack on Harper's Ferry did not go as planned. Some of his men (not at the site) did not do what they were supposed to. The townspeople eventually started to fall back. Slaves did not rise in vast numbers to support him. (He also had not considered carefully enough just how he would have fed the slaves that were to become the guerrilla fighters.)
The battle itself is covered in detail. The trial is also covered along with the judge's refusal to give Brown's defense enough time to prepare their case.
The final part of the book consists of a commentary by the author and a bibliography.
As an adult his financial life was damaged by various crashes and 'panics' in the world of money. He has a family and is quite a stern father, even using a whip when he feels it is necessary. Some slaves were escaping to Canada (eventually 100,000 escaped but that's out of a population of about 4,000,000 slaves.)
One of the most fascinating parts of the book is about the fight between Missouri and Kansas. The people in Missouri wanted to make Kansas a slave state and they basically waged war against Kansas with actual armed invasions of that state.
Eventually John Brown came up with the idea of freeing slave and getting them into nearby mountains (along with weapons and support) and having them wage a guerrilla warfare to free more slaves.
The problem was that John Brown did not have an actual army behind him. He did recruit some men but nowhere near what he actually needed. He traveled all over the country to get money so he could raise his 'army' but even that proved extremely difficult.
Even the attack on Harper's Ferry did not go as planned. Some of his men (not at the site) did not do what they were supposed to. The townspeople eventually started to fall back. Slaves did not rise in vast numbers to support him. (He also had not considered carefully enough just how he would have fed the slaves that were to become the guerrilla fighters.)
The battle itself is covered in detail. The trial is also covered along with the judge's refusal to give Brown's defense enough time to prepare their case.
The final part of the book consists of a commentary by the author and a bibliography.
May 23, 2024
I can't think of a more appropriate author for this biography. Few have analyzed the Civil War for what it truly was: a revolution driven by a conflict between two systems of production (the northern industrial capitalism and the southern slave system) and the mass rising of the slaves to join the Union army. In this proper context DuBois places John Brown as one of the abolitionist figures that embodied in heart and soul the militant anti-slavery and revolutionary spirit of the times. His work Black Reconstruction on the Civil War and its aftermath in the South are required readings to understand this process whose interruption by the Southern reaction (and northern complicity) still mark the living conditions and oppression faced by Black people in the South and beyond.
DuBois, himself an anti-capitalist, appreciates Brown's dedication and determination to end slavery while raising the real limitations of his strategy, which Brown himself recognized as suicidal. His goal of "sparking" a slave revolution via guerrilla bands in the Virginia mountains brings up for me Che Guevara's idealistic and ultimately limited guerrilla strategy in Latin America, which found its demise in Bolivia. Frederick Douglass, John Brown's confidant and collaborator, opposed his vision although was not against armed struggle per se; John Brown's greatest strategic limitation was lifting guerrilla warfare to the level of strategy as opposed to a tactic aimed at a fundamental strategy of mass organization and action by the slave population.
Ultimately, as DuBois writes in Black Reconstruction, it was the mass "general strike" by southern slaves during the Civil War when they left the plantations to join the North that represented the death knell of the Confederacy. In all, this is a vivid appreciation of the role of leadership in revolutionary change and the strategic debates which occur in all liberation movements.
DuBois, himself an anti-capitalist, appreciates Brown's dedication and determination to end slavery while raising the real limitations of his strategy, which Brown himself recognized as suicidal. His goal of "sparking" a slave revolution via guerrilla bands in the Virginia mountains brings up for me Che Guevara's idealistic and ultimately limited guerrilla strategy in Latin America, which found its demise in Bolivia. Frederick Douglass, John Brown's confidant and collaborator, opposed his vision although was not against armed struggle per se; John Brown's greatest strategic limitation was lifting guerrilla warfare to the level of strategy as opposed to a tactic aimed at a fundamental strategy of mass organization and action by the slave population.
Ultimately, as DuBois writes in Black Reconstruction, it was the mass "general strike" by southern slaves during the Civil War when they left the plantations to join the North that represented the death knell of the Confederacy. In all, this is a vivid appreciation of the role of leadership in revolutionary change and the strategic debates which occur in all liberation movements.
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