John Brown Did Nothing Wrong

John Brown—the abolitionist famous for his raid on Harpers Ferry in 1859—was a madman and a terrorist. At least, that's what I was taught in high school. The image of long-bearded Brown as insane is partially due to his lawyer, who invoked the insanity defense at his trial. In fact, Brown was, as revealed in his correspondence from prison, in full possession of his faculties. I think part of the historiographical motivation to depict Brown as a madman is to dodge a thorny question; namely, was Brown justified in his actions, as he believed himself to be? Is violence against the government, people, and property of the United States justified in defense of human rights?

Liberals like me are uneasy with this question. We have a perhaps misplaced trust in American democracy and believe that there's no excuse for political violence as long as there is recourse at the ballot box. We wag our finger at street altercations in Portland, Berkeley, and elsewhere and, fairly or unfairly, we condemn the likes of Antifa and the Proud Boys in equal measure. But in this fraught context, the question of whether John Brown was justified or not could be instructive for our own times. It's important that we don't dodge the question.

Let's be clear about John Brown's crimes. Brown and his men murdered a camp of what history generously calls "Southern settlers" camped along the Pottawatomie River in Kansas (I use the term "Southern settlers" loosely because they are, in the proper context, more accurately described as Southern pro-slavery militants.) The grisly manner of their death—struck down with swords, some decapitated—was as shocking to liberal sensibilities in 1856 as it is to us today. Brown was involved in various armed skirmishes between pro- and anti-slavery settlers in what became known as "Bleeding Kansas." In 1858, he killed a Southern slaveholder and freed his 11 slaves, shepherding them safely to Canada.

A railroad baggage handler was killed in the course of Brown's raid on Harpers Ferry, and later that night, several townspeople were killed, including the mayor, in a firefight with Brown's men (it should be noted, however, that Brown sent his son to negotiate with the townspeople under a white flag of truce, only to be shot dead.) Brown captured and held the federal arsenal in Harpers Ferry, hoping that word of his raid would rally slaves to his side. This never happened, and Brown was captured and found guilty of treason, murder, and conspiring to incite a slave revolt. He was executed in 1859. The Civil War would begin only a year and a half later, with Brown's raid widely seen both then and now as a precipitating event.

"... any revolution will result in the collateral damage of property and the death of innocent people. This isn't necessarily a reflection of the revolutionary merits."

If you divorce Brown's crimes from any context, it's much easier to say that, yes, he was justified. Surely we can agree that bloody measures are justified to end the enslavement of an entire race of human beings. There was no democratic recourse in the Kansas territory or Virginia at the time, governed as they were by regimes that didn't even allow the criticism of slavery. (So much for free speech!) It's placing Brown's actions in a modern American context that feels problematic to us, because we want to think better of America. It's a natural impulse to be aghast at crimes against American people and property, even if we can agree abstractly that any hypothetical government that abets slavery should be violently resisted.

But even in context, surely Brown's actions are largely justified. America then wasn't the country it is today; Southern slave power held the American government in its thrall. In Congress, a "gag rule" prevented the mere discussion of slavery, and federal marshals forcibly returned escaped slaves to slaveholders. (Lest it be argued that the Civil War was fought over "state's rights," it should be pointed out that a prime complaint of the Southern states was that fugitive slave laws were not being imposed forcefully enough upon Northern states. Make no mistake—the South didn't care a whit about "state's rights" when it came to Northern states. But I digress.)

What of the railroad baggage handler, a free black man who was a casualty of Brown's raid? It may sound callous to say so, but it must be conceded that any revolution will result in the collateral damage of property and the death of innocent people. This isn't necessarily a reflection of the revolutionary merits. We can also say in Brown's defense that he made efforts to avoid this; as the legal professor Paul Finkelmen writes, "[Brown] ordered no killings; he did not wantonly destroy property; and he cared for his hostages." He was also known to have spared the wife and son of the slaveholder James Doyle. Pro-slavery militants did not show the same restraint with Brown's unarmed son, Frederick.

John A. Andrew, the abolitionist lawyer and later governor of Massachusetts, is said to have declared that, "whether the enterprise of John Brown and his associates in Virginia was wise or foolish, right or wrong, I only know that, whether the enterprise itself was the one or the other, John Brown himself is right." This we can say conclusively of Brown, that his prognostications were correct, such as his famous declaration, "there will be no peace in this land until slavery is done for."

So Brown was right, but was he justified? No less a figure than Abraham Lincoln didn't think so. "Old John Brown... agreed with us thinking slavery wrong," Lincoln is said to have remarked, "That cannot excuse violence, bloodshed, and treason. It could avail him nothing that he might think himself right." This quote may be a condemnation of Brown's methods, but I think it's more aptly read as a condemnation by extension of the "violence, bloodshed, and treason" of Southern states in the Civil War. That Lincoln is consistent on this point is perhaps not surprising. But with respect, I think he's wrong.

What might this mean for our time? Slavery still exists in the world today, and it is likely that all of us have unknowingly purchased and enjoyed goods made by slave labor. But America is not a willing party to slavery as it was in Brown's day. Still, the legacy of slavery remains doggedly with us. As Frederick Douglass remarked in his 1881 Lecture on John Brown, "Slavery is indeed gone; but its long, black shadow yet falls broad and large over the face of the whole country." It isn't just that blacks are shot by police at disproportionate rates, or that black inmates comprise roughly 33% of the prison population despite being only 12% of the total U.S. population, or that blacks are more likely to be arrested on drugs charges despite comparable usage rates (a disparity that has only worsened over the past 4 years.) Black households also have dramatically less wealth than white households—white households have 17 times greater wealth—and a dramatically lower homeownership rate. And blacks are drastically less likely to be members of Congress or the CEOs of Fortune 500 or S&P 500 companies.

The degree to which these disparities are due to slavery is debatable, but it's beyond dispute that these statistics are part of an unbroken lineage of discrimination against black Americans that stretches back to John Brown's day. Brown, who styled himself as a fighter for God's "despised poor," would likely feel that his work isn't done today. But are his methods applicable to modern times?

We might also note that the United States—the world's foremost exporter of guns—has rather unsurprisingly been, at times, a malign influence in world affairs, supporting the likes of brutal right-wing dictators and Islamofascist rebels in defense of U.S. geopolitical or economic interests. (Lest it be said that such episodes are relics of the Cold War, bear in mind it was only in February of this year that the United States withdrew its support for the Saudi campaign of cluster-bombing and starvation in Yemen.) These deeds are done by the United States in the name of the American people, so isn't it incumbent upon we Americans to resist?

"John Brown is unfairly maligned in American history cirricula that have long taught an equivocal version of Civil War history."

As the proverbial effete liberal, writing as I do from a center-left political perspective, you already know my answer; no, we should not take up arms and commit violent acts of treason against the United States, as Brown did. Nor should we resort to political violence of any sort. We are right to be wary of street violence, especially after seeing where such altercations can lead a society, as in Weimar Germany. Witnessing such incidents on American streets in recent years has been greatly concerning to me. As long as democratic recourse exists to resolve political disputes, it should be utilized to its fullest extent before even contemplating violence.

Slavery was a unique evil that was deeply- and violently-entrenched in antebellum American institutions, and repeated political "compromises" failed to dislodge it. Comparisons to a cancer are apt. As Frederick Douglass remarked in his Lecture, "Church, State, politics, and religion, were like defiled, and dying as by this moral pestilence. The nation was sinking into a sleep of moral death, and needed some such thunder clap as John Brown’s raid upon Harpers Ferry, to startle it into a sense of danger.” Brown was prophetically correct when he declared that "the crimes of this guilty land will never be purged away but with blood."

But the foreign policy of the United States in Yemen can be effected by the democratic process. Indeed, it has; Joe Biden promised during the 2020 campaign to end U.S. support for Saudi operations in Yemen—including the bombing of a school bus full of children, using American-made munitions—and he did so. "The system works" is a contentious assertion for elements of the far-left that have an internalized skepticism of electoral politics. I may be accused of liberal naivety for thinking so, but it has been shown that the system at least can work (in principle, if not always in practice.)

Commonly portrayed as a madman and a terrorist, John Brown is unfairly maligned in American history cirricula that have long taught an equivocal version of Civil War history, designed to avoid offending Southern sensibilities that still cling stubbornly to the Lost Cause mythos. Textbooks dodge the thorny question of whether Brown's violent acts were justified, perhaps to avoid confronting the modern day implications of such a question. White American power structures are more comfortable teaching Martin Luther King, Jr.'s non-violent tactics, which are less threatening to those structures. "It is not easy to reconcile human feeling to the shedding of blood for any purpose," Douglass observes, but slavery is an inherently violent institution, and could only be met with violence.

As Brown himself rather coyly observed, "I don't think the people of the slave states will ever consider the subject of slavery in its true light till some other argument is resorted to other than moral persuasion."