Few acts of violence in American history have been as contentions
as John Brown’s massacre at Pottawatomie and the Raid on Harpers
Ferry. Had they not been done in the name of the abolition of
slavery, they would be remembered, if remembered at all, as acts of
gratuitous violence. The high moral purpose behind them, however,
casts them in a more ambiguous light.
John Brown, born in 1800, was raised in Ohio. His white family
was deeply religious, coming from a strict Puritan and Calvinist
background. His father was severe but morally righteous and raised
his children with strong values that favored the equality of all
people in the sight of God. These anti-racist views were not just
progressive and radical but some would even say bizarre for their
time. In any case, John Brown’s family made him socialize with
Native American children who lived nearby. As he grew older, he also
befriended an African-American boy; he had the misfortune of seeing
his friend get beaten by a white man and Brown grew up, as a result,
with a smoldering hatred for slavery and racial injustice.
When he grew older John Brown moved on to the progressive
northern city of Springfield, Massachusetts. He set up a tanning
business and quickly immersed himself in the Abolitionist political
movement. Springfield was a hotbed of Abolitionism and a major stop
on the Underground Railroad. It was here that Brown met Frederick
Douglass and went to work helping escaped slaves move onwards to
Canada were freedom waited for them. At about this time, the US
government ratified the Fugitive Slave Act, making the capture and
return of runaway slaves to their owners compulsory, even in the
northern states where slavery was illegal. In response, John Brown
set up a clandestine militant group called the League of Gileadites
to assist the freed slaves evade capture by bounty hunters. By this
point, Brown saw the futility of the Abolitionist movement which was
mostly comprised of pacifists who thought that slavery would
eventually die out. He began to advocate for the violent overthrow of
southern plantations at Abolitionist meetings; the response was one
of sympathy but not support.
In Springfield, Brown got married to a woman who would soon die;
they started having a lot of children. His business failed. They
moved to New York state and bought land near Lake Placid where he set
up a homestead that welcomed freed slaves with open arms. In his
sparse living conditions, black people and his white family members
all slept side by side and no one had a bed that was better than
anyone else’s; everybody was given equal amounts of work, pay, and
food. John Brown built up a reputation as being a white man who truly
trusted and loved African-American people.
After establishing the farm in New York, John Brown moved to
Ohio and got re-married after his first wife died. They went on to
have about twenty children, almost half of which died. He tried to
make it as a land speculator but failed at that so he moved on to
Kansas where three of his brothers were running a farm. Kansas was a
newly admitted territory to the USA at that time. Both pro- and
anti-slavery factions saw it as up for grabs; the stage was set for
the skirmishes that later came to be known as Bloody Kansas. Brown
arrived at the beginning of that era when pro-slavery landowners
would routinely hire border ruffians from Missouri to cross the state
line and raid the farms of Free State abolitionists; sometimes the
border ruffians were paid to cross into Kansas to vote illegally in
local elections as well, thus ensuring that pro-slavery politicians
stayed in power. The petty raids eventually turned into a larger
scale attack; in 1856 the thugs from Missouri, led by a local
sheriff, sacked Lawrence, burning down a Free State news agency and
a hotel as a warning that Abolitionists would not be tolerated in
Kansas. After the destruction, John Brown started to arm his family
in preparation for military conflict. The pro-slavery farmers
continuously made threats to the Free State supporters. John Brown at
that point had simply had enough.
One night at the end of May 1956, Brown led three of his sons
and a band of settlers to Pottawatomie Creek. Armed with swords, they
dragged five men, all of them supporters of slavery, out of their
beds and into a field where they proceeded to slice them up with
their blades. Brown turned his back and stared off into the night
while the posse went to work, slashing and stabbing their victims
until they were nothing but a bloody pile of corpses in the
moonlight. The families of the dead racists quickly identified the
ring leader as John Brown so he escaped with his men to live in the
forest until things cooled off. Meanwhile, the battles of Bloody
Kansas began in response.
John Brown and his men participated in two of these fights. In
his absence, the army captain Henry Pate burned down his family’s
farm and took two of his sons prisoner. The pro-slavery Pate and his
army of ruffians from Missouri marched on Lawrence. In the Battle of
Black Jack, Brown and his outlaw band emerged from the woods and
hijacked Pate’s column. They captured some of Pate’s men and held
them for ransom; Brown let them go in exchange for his two imprisoned
sons. They took to the woods again and hid out until the Battle of
Osawatomie. The backwoodsmen from Missouri led an attack on that
town; Brown arrived and saw his group outnumbered so they tried to
scare them away by shooting in all directions, making it look like
they were a bigger army then they really were. The pro-slavery gang
set the town on fire and ran. Brown’s gang scattered in the other
direction.
John Brown, under cover of night, secretly escaped to
Springfield with two of his sons. Inspired by recent news of Nat
Turner’s slave rebellion in the South and Maroon societies living
in the hills of Jamaica, he began to scheme up a plan to hatch a
rebellion which would end slavery in America. He believed the
Abolitionists were not acting aggressively enough so he dreamed up a
plan to begin a guerilla war by seizing an arms depot in the South,
quickly arming the slaves and sending them on to other plantations to
supply other African-Americans with arms in order to kill their
masters. All the freed slaves would then escape into the Appalachian
Mountains and hide until a later date when they would emerge and
establish a country, neither Unionist nor Confederate, where all
people white, black, and Native American would live in equality. He
even drew up a provisional constitution boldly stating that the first
president of the new nation was to be a Black man. Brown began
lecturing on the underground circuit, hoping to attract thousands of
followers. Although he found no shortage of audiences willing to
listen, he only inspired about forty men, both white and black, to
join him. However, a group of rich Abolitionists, later to be called
the Secret Six, agreed to fund the revolt. Brown and his followers
took their money and sneaked off to Ohio where they bought a supply
of rifles and pikes to be handed out to slaves once the rebellion
started.
John Brown and his small army rented some land near in Virginia
(now part of West Virginia) where they began training and drilling
for the attack. In October 1859, the amateur soldiers marched on
Harpers Ferry. They cut the town’s telegraph wires and a couple men
were left at a railroad bridge to prevent anyone from coming or
going. As a train came down the tracks, the men blocked the rails and
began shooting until it stopped. A porter named Heyward Shepard got
off the train to see what was happening. He saw the men with guns
and, thinking it was a robbery, began to run. They commanded him to
stop and he did not, so they shot him in the back. Shepard was a free
African-American man and, ironically, the first casualty in John
Brown’s proposed slave rebellion. For some unknown reason, they
allowed the train to continue on; it stopped at the next town and a
telegraph was sent to a nearby military stating that a raid was
taking place.
Meanwhile, John Brown sent some of his followers around to the
plantations to tell the slaves a rebellion was taking place and their
help was needed. A small number of them reluctantly took guns and
went along; most of the slaves refused to join, thinking the idea of
a white man leading a slave rebellion to be bizarre and impossible to
understand. Brown’s men seized the town’s armory which had been
filled with a massive stockpile of weapons which they were planning
to hand out to slaves all over the South until all the Black people
were armed and ready to fight. Some of the town’s people took to
the hills behind the armory and began to fire. Brown’s team killed
several of them and held the fort. Then the army started to arrive
and Brown decided to move his platoon to the engine house which was
closer to the road. A night-long firefight ensued and several people
on both sides got shot and killed. Brown knew he was outnumbered;
their food and water supply was dwindling so in the morning he sent
his son out with a white flag to declare a truce. The soldiers
responded with a fusillade of bullets but they did allow the men
inside the engine house to surrender and be escorted to the jail.
The Raid on Harpers Ferry had failed.
Fearing that the South was under imminent attack from the North,
John Brown and his companions were quickly put on trial. Brown,
suffering from a severe head wound, defended himself by stating that
he committed a justifiable act of violence because the institution of
slavery was an act prohibited by the Christian God whose law was
higher than the laws of men. The trial lasted less than a week. Brown
and his army were sentenced to hang.
On December 2, an military unit came to Virginia to guard the
gallows pole from anyone attempting to rescue Brown at his time of
execution. Present in the squadron were Robert E. Lee, Stonewall
Jackson, John Wilkes Booth, and Walt Whitman who later wrote a
laudatory poem about the hanging, praising John Brown for his
courage. John Brown, alongside two of his fellow fighters, were hung
at 11:15 am, quickly packed into coffins with the nooses still around
their necks, and sent away.
The Raid on Harpers Ferry led to panic and paranoia in the
South. Previously, the Southerners thought the Abolitionists were too
cowardly and weak to use violence but then the Southern bigots became
scared. The Secessionist movement grew rapidly and the Confederacy
declared their independence from the USA. Soon the Unionist troops
would attack and the Civil War would begin, culminating in the
Emancipation Proclamation that freed the slaves. John Brown’s acts
of violence are now believed to be the first battles of the Civil
War.
The practicality, morality, and sanity of John Brown have been
debated ever since. Some of the more militant leaders of the Civil
Rights movement hailed Brown as a hero while some historians and
scholars have concluded that his violence was rational and sane, even
if a bit far-fetched and grandiose, given the context in which they
happened. Others say he was delusional, psychotic, and stupid. People
of the latter persuasion tend to be Confederate sympathizers who wish
to vilify and demonize the man. There have also been some pacifists
who claim that Brown’s attacks were unnecessary as they continue to
tow the line that slavery would have ended peacefully in the end
anyways. That idea is not widely supported by scholars. In the end,
if John Brown had never raided Harpers Ferry, the Civil War may never
have started which leaves the possibility open that America might
still be a legalized slave state to this day. John Brown reminds us
that sometimes violence is moral and sometimes violence is necessary.
Reference
Reynolds, David S. John Brown Abolitionist: The Man Who Killed
Slavery, Sparked the Civil War and Seeded Civil Rights, Vintage,
revised edition 2006.
No comments:
Post a Comment