David S. Reynolds' new biography of John Brown has been greeted as a revelation (congratulatory appearances on NPR, laudatory reviews in The Atlantic) – the forgotten hero and martyr rediscovered, his bones exhumed from an unmarked grave hidden in the basement stacks of a university library, restored to their rightful place within the American pantheon. Reynolds thinks Brown has gotten a bad rap from the historians (slandering him as too violent, too religious, a little fanatical, probably insane), when they should have been lauding him as a fighting multiculturist and inspired visionary of racial justice, without whom no war, no emancipation, no civil rights revolution.
Reynolds, who is not a historian, writes like a defense attorney, sometimes as a prosecutor, and always as a monk glorifying the holy deeds of a saint. No sooner does he elucidate one of Brown's shady business speculations, describe a brutal murder, or explain Brown's rather peculiar child-rearing philosophy (rigorous beatings, father absent for years at a time), than the rationalizations kick in: nobody paid their debts back then, embezzlement was normal, corporal punishment as customary as the milking of a cow, horse stealing and castle rustling a part of war, brutal Southrons deserving to be shot. And like his hero, he has high standards of righteousness (selectively applied of course). Even the abolitionists, although meaning well and progressive for their time, fail to come up to the mark (chided as patrician and racist); the others gradually falling away into the pits of darkness: the Kansas free-state militia are antislavery but tarnished with white supremacy; Republicans are opportunistic and unprincipled; the Democrats beyond the pale of humanity; Southerners deserving to be shot. Only Brown and his Sacred Band of antislavery warriors, his financial backers (the Secret Six), and the Concord Transcendentalists who deified him merit his praise.
We might be tempted to dismiss Reynolds as yet another raving leftist lunatic (like his hero), but we would be wise to refrain from the temptation. Like it or not, Brown represents one pole of the American character. The type recurs throughout our history, usually preceding a war, and is well represented in our literature, by authors skeptical of the founding of the Republic of Heaven. Our current president may lack Brown's courage and eloquence, but he shares his moral certainty and faith in the redemptive properties of war. Like Brown, he clearly sees himself as an instrument of Providence, the war in which he is engaged (or started) as holy and righteous, and the methods he chooses as sanctified by the Almighty. The figure of the martial Christian armed with a Bible in one hand and a revolver in the other, battling for the Lord, (to paraphrase Henry Ward Beecher's famous phrase) is a strikingly loathsome one, at utter variance with the example and teachings of Christ. But it has returned.
It is surely significant and foreboding that the Whiggish North hosted a Cromwell revival ten years before the war. Brown raptly read the key texts: Joel Tyler Headley's Oliver Cromwell (1848), an iconic biography that washed the blood-stained garments of the Royalists and the Irish with sanctimony; Thomas Carlyle's study in proto-fascism, On Heroes, Hero-Worship and the Heroic in History (1845) and his edition of Cromwell's Letters and Speeches (1845). Today, the revival tents are hosting a seminar featuring authors Tim Lahaye and Jerry Jenkins, whose Left Behind novels celebrate the rapture of the saints and the extermination of the sinners at the Battle of Armageddon.
The smell of Brown's gunpowder is all around us. Two years after the Iraq war began with great fanfare to the music of Shock & Awe, the government stills seems uncertain as to the identity of the enemy: are they foreign fighters or Baathist holdouts? Islamist fanatics or Saddam's cousins? Not Lt. Colonel Gareth Brandl of the Marine Corps who announced last year: "The enemy has got a face. He's called Satan. He lives in Falluja. And we're going to destroy him." Not the president: "It is good versus evil." One hundred and forty eight years before, John Brown rode west to meet "Satan and his legions" (his words) on the plains of Kansas. Film critic Michael Medved, a favorite of the so-called Christian Right, has just given a speech before the theocon divines of Hillsdale College. After flushing some of our better antiwar films down the toilet of anti-Americanism, he closes with this peroration to the sword: "What solved Hitler was violence. And what will solve the problem of Islamo-fascist terrorism, I'm sorry to say [no he's not], is not understanding, negotiation, conferences, social workers, daisies, or anything other than heroic violence of brave men and women with guns, fighting selflessly for their country – this greatest nation on God's green earth." I wondered why he did not close with "His truth is marching on," or "Exterminate the Evil Doer's!" Medved's jeremiad leaves out the effect of a previous American intervention in creating the conditions for the rise of Nazism and Bolshevism; and why is it Americans think every political argument can be won by mentioning Hitler?
That violence begets violence is a principle found in the Bible, validated by experience, and confirmed by human nature. Those dropping the bombs may very well be more humane, enlightened, and civilized than those being bombed, but it is unlikely the latter will accept the lesson. They will feel aggrieved and will strike back (in whatever way they can). The failure to understand the reciprocity of violence partly accounts for the Bush administration's folly in declaring war on terror. For everyone they kill, they instill ten more with the desire for martyrdom. And the innocent die. Sometimes even the objects of redemptive violence. During the initial fighting at Harper's Ferry, Brown's men ordered a man walking on the street to surrender. When he ran, they shot him in the back, just below the heart (he spent the night writhing in agony and died the next day). The victim (Shephard Hayward) was a free black, popular and respected in the town, gainfully employed as baggage master at the train station. They also fatally shot the mayor (Fontaine Beckham) in the face as he peered around a corner and an Irish grocer (Thomas Boerly) in the groin as he tried to cross the street. Collateral damage.
None of this caused Brown to lose any sleep. Not even the death of two of his sons during the battle, one of whom, Oliver, had been shot in the bowels and, in excruciating pain, begged to be shot. Brown told him to shut up and "die like a man." In his last days, Brown slept soundly, appeared cheerful, eager to receive visitors, and reported that he had never "enjoyed life better." Reynolds thinks this all as it should be, for Brown waged only philanthropic war. Consider his view of the Pottawatomie Massacre (May 1856), in which Brown and his sons roused five southern or proslavery (but non-slaveholding) settlers from their homes in the dead of night and then butchered them with broad swords, except for one (James Doyle) whom Brown executed by a pistol shot to the head. Reynolds does not gloss over the brutality of the deed, and he admits it was "a horrible crime," "an act of terrorism," even "murder." But that is not his final word. He proceeds to justify it on various grounds: the victims were supportive of the proslavery territorial government and guilty of bluster and brag; Missouri "border ruffians" had crossed the border to cast a ballot or shoot an abolitionist; Kansas was in a state of war. Thus, Brown "gave the South some of its own medicine" and delivered a "long-delayed retaliation for years of Southern violence." That was how Brown saw it too – righteous retribution, preemptive defense, and a warning.
Reynold's defense is not sufficiently unqualified for Christopher Hitchens, whose review of the book graces the patriotic pages of the May issue of The Atlantic Militancy. Hitchens is perturbed by the author's lengthy rationalization of Brown's midnight frolic along Pottawatomie Creek, and indignant that Reynolds concedes the political murders constituted "terrorism" (italics Hitchens). He explains that since terrorism "by definition offers nothing programmatic," Brown (who wanted to extirpate slavery) could not have been a terrorist. The definition is peculiar (not to be found in the OED) but it seems to be favored by the speechwriters and press agents of the Bush administration, who have long maintained that the terrorist enemy has no other aim in view than love of evil and hatred of the good. For Hitchens, the slashing represented "only a small installment of payback" for the murder of abolitionist editor Elijah Lovejoy in Alton, Illinois by an anti-abolitionist mob, and the brutal caning of Massachusetts Senator Charles Sumner by Representative Preston Brooks of South Carolina. He does not inform the magazine's readers that the Lovejoy killing took place nearly twenty years before (November 1837), nor does he explain how a beating justifies a murder, but Hitchens has the mind and morals of a commissar. It is hard to decide who is more reprehensible, the Trotskyite turned militant neocon, or the editors who give space to his pronunciamentos, as well as to the imperial posturing of Robert D. Kaplan, who dreams of the glories of a Sino-American war in the June issue.
I think the editors. The caption below the title of Hitchens review reads: "Slandered by craven abolitionists as unhinged, John Brown was in fact an eloquent, cool-headed tactician who succeeded in his long-range plan: launching a civil war." That last part gave me pause. I knew that Brown had been sane, though fanatical, and a capable guerrilla fighter, but I always thought his Harper's Ferry raid was intended to spark a slave insurrection (using the Appalachian Mountains as refuge and redoubt) – not to provoke southern secession followed by northern emancipation. So I read Reynolds closely to see if he makes this claim – he doesn't. That Brown had nothing like that in mind is evident from Article 46 of his Provisional Constitution, which forswears any intention of overthrowing a government, state or federal, or bringing about the "dissolution of the Union." The editors, evidently carried away by their enthusiasm for the resurrection of a saint, have decided to burnish the image with the gilt of a lie.
Adam Gopnik's review of the book in The New Yorker reassured me that the humanist tradition is not entirely dead in this country. Unlike Hitchens, whose writing style is as humorless as an NKVD interrogator and as rigid as a Fatwah, Gopnik knows how to write and has not massacred irony on the altar of crusade. He admits that Brown was "by almost any definition a terrorist," and concedes that his Harper's Ferry venture was "to say the least, quixotic." Reynold's strenuously and indignantly denies the charge. According to him, Brown's plan was "progressive and multicultural" – and eminently rational. Brown expected the local slaves (mostly house and field servants, who had no advance knowledge of Brown or his raid) to flock to his banner of revolt the instant they heard him blow the trumpet of freedom from the top of the federal arsenal. Gopnik isn't persuaded, wondering how anyone could expect them to rush to the side of an "unknown white man with a flowing beard who handed them a pike and told them to kill somebody and run for the hills." Reynolds believes such criticism misses the point – Brown had such an enlightened opinion of blacks that he was willing to fill his regiments with the hope of just such an instantaneous (and suicidal?) response. Gopnik aptly describes Brown as representative of a peculiar American type: the innocent idealist, who possesses an "indifference to human life lost on the way toward his ideal. Like our current idealists in power, he didn't want to kill, but he didn't want to count the dead he did kill either." Gopnik, however, fails to sustain the insight, falling in the end beneath the weight of the American tradition of redemptive war: "In the long run, even the best moral arguments get their force from the readiness of men to kill and die for them." But is it moral to kill to impose a morality?
Reynolds endorses Doris Lessing's distinction between "good terrorism," invoked to remedy "obvious social injustice," and the other kind, perpetrated for a reactionary cause (i.e. racism, patriarchy, inequality, European civilization). Since Brown "used violence in order to create a society devoid of slavery and racism," he qualifies as a good terrorist, worthy of emulation. Reynolds takes umbrage at the suggestion that Brown may have fathered some illegitimate children: a Gulf War veteran named McVeigh, a Polish mathematician hiding behind the mask of the Unabomber, an assassin named Paul Hill (who shot an abortionist). For Reynolds, "slavery was a uniquely immoral institution," not at all like abortion, high taxes, industrial pollution, or the incineration of children. Like so many of his countrymen, Reynolds wants to privilege the violence of which he approves, to grant a prerogative on killing to the tolerant and multi-culturally enlightened. Brown said that he never shed blood but "in self-defense or promotion of a righteous cause," but has any government ever gone to war in defense of what they believed to be an unrighteous cause? And what assassin has ever struck from a conviction of sin?
Brown had conceived the outlines of his plan as early as 1838 when he described them to Frederick Douglas on their first meeting. Douglas was skeptical (of the chance of success and the need for violence), but Brown was adamant that Southerners, whom he claimed to know intimately, would never relinquish their slaves unless forced to do so. "No political action will ever abolish the system of slavery," he assured Douglas. "It will have to go out in blood." The theory rests upon the premise of omniscience (knowing the hearts of men and the course of the future), which is an incommunicable attribute of divinity. His actions rested on his possession of another: "Those men who hold slaves have even forfeited their right to live." Reynolds too believes "war was needed to rid the nation of slavery," for, rather than fading away, it was becoming more profitable, more dogmatic, and more aggressive.
He should know better. The first law of market economics, reinforced by the force of technological innovation, is that nothing ever stays the same. The combination of mechanization and the rise of cotton production in other parts of the world would have made slavery a losing investment sooner or later, and how could the South have long endured the role of international pariah? Reynolds neglects to mention the northern conservatives who rebuked the abolitionists for contributing to a proslavery backlash. People don't like to be hectored, especially by outsiders with a claim to special virtue, and will often grow worse under the lash of moral condemnation.
Perhaps the most important question is whether a Christian should draw the sword at all except in self-defense (and by logical extension the defense of one's neighbor or country). Beyond that, choosing violence is usurping a prerogative of God (defining good, delivering retribution, deciding who lives and who dies). Brown acted upon the doctrine that the moral sublimity of his end purified the choice of his means. The Apostle Paul expressly repudiated such presumption, forbidding us from doing evil that good may come. After Brown was hanged (no man more justly, wrote Hawthorne), John Greenleaf Whittier, a non-violent abolitionist, penned the morally beautiful line: "Perish with him the folly/that seeks through evil good." Amen.
June 10, 2005
