The Afterlife of John Brown

The Afterlife of John Brown

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The Afterlife of John Brown Edited by Andrew Taylor and Eldrid Herrington

THE AFTERLIFE OF JOHN BROWN

© Andrew Taylor and Eldrid Herrington, 2005. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. First published in 2005 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN™ 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010 and Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire, England RG21 6XS Companies and representatives throughout the world. PALGRAVE MACMILLAN is the global academic imprint of the Palgrave Macmillan division of St. Martin’s Press, LLC and of Palgrave Macmillan Ltd. Macmillan® is a registered trademark in the United States, United Kingdom and other countries. Palgrave is a registered trademark in the European Union and other countries. ISBN 1–4039–6992–2 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data The afterlife of John Brown / edited by Andrew Taylor and Eldrid Herrington. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 1–4039–6992–2 1. Brown, John 1800–1859—Influence. 2. Brown, John 1800–1859— Public opinion. 3. Public opinion—United States. 4. Brown, John 1800–1859—In literature. 5. American literature—History and criticism. 6. Abolitionists—United States—Biography—Miscellanea. I. Taylor, Andrew, 1968– II. Herrington, Eldrid. E451.A33 2005 973.7⬘114—dc22

2005048677

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Design by Newgen Imaging Systems (P) Ltd., Chennai, India. First edition: December 2005 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Printed in the United States of America.

Contents

Notes on Contributors

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Acknowledgments

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List of Illustrations

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Introduction: The Anguish None Can Draw Eldrid Herrington

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1. Black People’s Ally, White People’s Bogeyman: A John Brown Story Louis A. DeCaro, Jr.

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2. “The Blood of Millions”: John Brown’s Body, Public Violence, and Political Community Franny Nudelman

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3. John Brown, Bearded Patriarch Jean Libby

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4. “Earth Feels the Time of Prophet-Song”: John Brown and Public Poetry Joe Lockard

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5. Consenting to Violence: Henry David Thoreau, John Brown, and the Transcendent Intellectual Andrew Taylor

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6. Transforming the “Madman into a Saint”: The Cultural Memory Site of John Brown’s Raid on Harper’s Ferry in Antislavery Literature and History Kristen Proehl

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7. Meteor of War: The John Brown Cycle John Stauffer and Zoe Trodd

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8. Transatlantic Spartacus Janine C. Hartman

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9. W.E.B. Du Bois’s John Brown: Placing Racial Justice at the Center of a Socialist Politics Julie Husband 10. “I see your mouth calling / before the words arrive”: Muriel Rukeyser’s “The Soul and Body of John Brown” and 1930s America Bruce A. Ronda 11. John Brown and Children’s Literature Tyler Hoffman

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12. More Heat than Light: The Legacy of John Brown in Russell Banks’s Cloudsplitter Kimberly Rae Connor

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Works Cited

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Index

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Notes on Contributors

Kimberly Rae Connor teaches various topics in American Studies at the University of San Francisco. She is the author of Conversions and Visions in the Writings of African American Women (University of Tennessee Press, 1995) and Imagining Grace: Liberating Theologies in the Slave Narrative Tradition (University of Illinois Press, 2000), which was selected by Choice as an outstanding academic title for 2000. She is also the editor for the Academy Series, a joint publishing venture of the American Academy of Religion and Oxford University Press. Louis A. DeCaro, Jr. is a religious educator, lecturer, and an independent scholar. He holds graduate degrees from New York University and Westminster Theological Seminary, and a PhD from New York University. He is the author of “Fire from the Midst of You”: A Religious Life of John Brown (New York University Press, 2002), as well as On the Side of My People: A Religious Life of Malcolm X (New York University Press, 1996), and Malcolm and the Cross: The Nation of Islam, Malcolm X, and Christianity (New York University Press, 1998). He is also a contributor to New York Glory: Religions in the City, edited by Tony Carnes and Anna Karpathakis (New York University Press, 2001), and coeditor of Signs of Hope in the City: Ministries of Community Renewal (Judson Press, 1999). Janine C. Hartman is Professor of History at the University of Cincinnati. Her translation of Joseph Déjacque’s utopian novel L’Humanisphère is forthcoming. Her next project is the spiritualist press trance narratives of the American Civil War. Eldrid Herrington is a professor of English literature at University College Dublin and a recipient of an AAS National Endowment of the Humanities Fellowship and a Government of Ireland Fellowship for the forthcoming book Civil War, Revision, and Self-Representation. Tyler Hoffman is Associate Professor and Director of Graduate Studies in the Department of English at Rutgers University-Camden. His book, Robert Frost and the Politics of Poetry, was published in 2001 by the

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University Press of New England. He has published essays on a range of modern American poets and is currently working on a book on John Brown. He is the editor of the electronic American Studies journal The Mickle Street Review and the associate editor of The Robert Frost Review. Julie Husband is Assistant Professor of nineteenth-century American literature at the University of Northern Iowa. She is the coauthor of Daily Life in the Industrial United States: 1870–1900 (Greenwood Press, 2004) and has published essays on Frederick Douglass, Lydia Maria Child, the antebellum writings of factory women, and Philip Roth. Her recent work focuses upon the adaptation of antislavery rhetoric and icons to speak about northern class relations in the antebellum era. Jean Libby is a retired instructor of U.S. History and African American History at community colleges in northern California. She has published widely on John Brown and African Americans in the raid at Harper’s Ferry, and on the restoration of the John Brown farmhouse in Maryland and John Brown’s family in California. Her photo chronology of daguerreotypes of John Brown prepared with analysis by Eileen Barrow of the Forensics Anthropology and Computer Enhancement Services (FACES) Laboratory at Louisiana State University has been published in The Daguerreian Annual 2002–2003. Joe Lockard is Assistant Professor of English at Arizona State University, where he teaches early American and African American literatures. His research interests lie in narratives of U.S. slavery and he directs the Antislavery Literature Project. He is a member of the Bad Subjects Collective. Franny Nudelman is Associate Professor of English and American Studies at the University of Virginia. She is the author of John Brown’s Body: Slavery, Violence, and the Culture of War (University of North Carolina Press, 2004). Kristen Proehl is a PhD student in the American Studies Program at the College of William and Mary. Her primary areas of research include nineteenth-century literature, gender and violence in American culture, and collective memory of the civil war era. Bruce A. Ronda is Professor of English and chair of the English Department at Colorado State University, where he also served as the founding director of the American Studies Program. He is the author of Elizabeth Palmer Peabody, A Reformer on Her Own Terms (Harvard University Press, 1999) and The Letters of Elizabeth Palmer Peabody, American Renaissance Woman (Wesleyan University Press, 1984). He has also published a study of Harvard child psychiatrist and social critic Robert Coles and essays on nineteenth-century American literature and

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culture. He is working on a book-length manuscript called “Reading the Old Man: John Brown in American Culture.” John Stauffer is Professor of English, History of American Civilization, and African and African American Studies at Harvard University. His first book, The Black Hearts of Men: Radical Abolitionists and the Transformation of Race (Harvard University Press, 2002), received four major awards, including the Frederick Douglass Book Prize, the Avery Craven Book Prize, and the Lincoln Prize runner-up. He recently published the Modern Library edition of Frederick Douglass’s My Bondage and My Freedom; is the coeditor (with Zoe Trodd) of Meteor of War: The John Brown Story (Brandywine Press, 2004); and the coeditor (with Tim McCarthy) of Millennial Vistas: New Essays on American Abolitionists. His forthcoming book, which explores the possibility of racial equality, is called Dreaming of Democracy: American Interracial Friendships in History and Myth. Andrew Taylor teaches American Literature at the University of Edinburgh. His book, Henry James and the Father Question, was published by Cambridge University Press in 2002. He has published articles on a variety of subjects in nineteenth-century literature, and is currently working on a book project called “Thinking America: the Nation State and the Nineteenth-Century Public Intellectual.” He is also the coeditor of the Edinburgh Series in Transatlantic Literatures, published by Edinburgh University Press. Zoe Trodd is in the History of American Civilization PhD program at Harvard, and also has a degree in English Literature from Cambridge University. She has published Meteor of War: The John Brown Story (with John Stauffer), and her book American Protest Literature is forthcoming with Harvard University Press. She has won numerous prizes for her writing and teaching, and edits an annual anthology of African folklore for the Zamani Foundation.

Acknowledgments

The editors are grateful to Oxford University Press and the University of North Carolina Press for permission to reprint Franny Nudelman’s essay “ ‘The Blood of Millions’: John Brown’s Body, Public Violence, and Political Community.” This essay first appeared in American Literary History 14, no. 1 (2001): 639–670 and was subsequently a chapter in Nudelman’s book John Brown’s Body: Slavery, Violence, and the Culture of War (University of North Carolina Press, 2004). The editors also acknowledge Brandywine Press for their permission to reprint parts of John Stauffer and Zoe Trodd’s essay “Meteor of War: The John Brown Cycle” that originally appeared in their book Meteor of War: The John Brown Story (2004). Thanks are also due to Brendan O’Malley, formerly at Palgrave, for his initial interest in the project, and to his successor Melissa Nosal for seeing it through to publication; to the University of Edinburgh for funding the reproduction of images; and to the American Antiquarian Society and the National Endowment of the Humanities for their funding of research for the book. We also wish to acknowledge here the work of two scholars, Paul Finkelman and Merrill D. Peterson, whose writing on John Brown inspired our own project. Although published too late to be considered in this book, David S. Reynolds’s 2005 biography has underscored our belief that Brown remains a pivotal and highly relevant figure in the cultural consciousness of the United States.

List of Illustrations

2.1 Alfred Berghaus, “Carrying Prisoners from the Armory to the Railroad Station.” Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper, November 12, 1859. West Virginia State Archives, Boyd B. Stutler Collection. 43 2.2 W.S.L. Jewett, “Trial of Ossawattamie [sic] Brown.” Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper, November 12, 1859. West Virginia State Archives, Boyd B. Stutler Collection. 43 2.3 “The Death of John Brown.” Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper, December 10, 1859. Negative #29062, Collection of The New-York Historical Society. 44 3.1 Oil painting by Helen Tanner Brodt from a portrait owned by Mary Brown, 1864. The original had been given by her husband to Henry David Thoreau (Goulder 1964, 223). Courtesy of the Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division, LC-USZC4-11789. 60 3.2 John Brown in Boston, May 1859. Library of Congress Fine Arts Collection, LC UZ62-4272. Copyright registered December 12, 1859. Print courtesy Professor John M. Lawlor, Jr. 61 3.3 Vignette donated by John Brown, Jr. to the Western Reserve Historical Society in Cleveland in 1908. Courtesy of the Western Reserve Historical Society. 63 3.4 Sarah Brown’s charcoal portrait courtesy of the Saratoga Historical Foundation, California. 64 7.1 Jacob Lawrence, The Life of John Brown No. 22 (1941): John Brown was found “guilty of treason and murder in the 1st degree. He was hanged in Charles Town, Virginia, on December 2, 1859.” The Detroit Institute of Arts. © ARS, NY and DACS, London 2005. 122 7.2 John Steuart Curry, The Tragic Prelude (1937–1942), detail of John Brown, north wall of the East Corridor, Kansas Statehouse murals. Courtesy of the Kansas State Historical Society. 128

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7.3 Joseph-Charles de Blezar, John Brown (1870). Courtesy of the Library of Congress. 7.4 Victor Hugo, frontispiece from John Brown par Victor Hugo (1861). Courtesy of the Lilly Library, Indiana University.

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Introduction:The Anguish None Can Draw Eldrid Herrington

ohn Brown is dead. Long lives John Brown. An ordinary name and an extraordinary fate. This book examines the afterlife of John Brown, in part, by asking why the apprehension of him remains unsettled. One answer lies in an uneasy legacy of the split within contemporary opinions about the man and his action; another lies in the apparently unique action of the Harper’s Ferry raids and the unsettling standards it demands. “Unique action” rests on a number of claims—of which many are contingent on race. Those who say “Long live John Brown,” tend to divide along a color line. Lerone Bennett, Jr., among others, has little hesitation in rewriting John Brown’s race. What makes many baulk is that John Brown presents a daunting model of heroism, one that none of the writers in this book put into question. What is at issue, then, is what action for what crime. To John Brown, there was no question: the ownership of slaves was an issue of selves and souls, and Brown felt the issue was of such urgency that he thought he could not live inactive while slavery was alive in his nation. One death was a small price to pay for a nation and to annihilate the suffering in it, and it should also be remembered that he was willing not just to stake his life but even those of his sons. Brown undertook many conflicts; the significance of the Harper’s Ferry raid was its carefully self-dramatized eye for an eye. It was the first attack on the only Federal arsenal in a Southern state and was made when sectional feeling was extremely high. John Brown hanged; his death pictured out a lynch mob’s violence. His hanging pictured out exactly the failure of the United States, dead in its aspirations for human freedom, daily murdering those who, excluded by others from humanity, required rights to citizenship.

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“The Portent (1859)” “Hanging” is the first word of “The Portent (1859),” Melville’s prefatory poem to Battle-Pieces. The poem is one of the finest written about John Brown because it captures the ways in which he was a sage of his time and strange to it; these dislocations Melville lays at the door of the South. John Brown is “weird” not in the sense of “odd” but in the older sense of “predictive”: he presaged war; he was a seer who out-faced his nation with those eagle eyes, so famously captured in photographs. “Weird” is a weird word but is meant to show the ancientness of Brown’s purpose. The single syllables “Weird John Brown” punctuate the singular predictive actions that would be reenacted in the war, reenacted in the battle-pieces of Melville’s book. The trinity of blank syllables matches the bleak fact: Brown is a pendent measure of where the nation needed to be at the same time that he is a warning of pending conflict. The first word of the poem is not “Hanged” but “Hanging”: Brown is hanged, but the issue is not dead: his death was not a suspension but an inauguration of violence. Shenandoah should hang its head in shame over the hanging of John Brown. Two heads are here in the poem: Shenandoah’s, hung in shame, and Brown’s, hanged by the neck. He is a meteor, a planetary fragment whose gravitational trajectory meant inevitable destruction. When Melville writes “Slowly swaying/ Such the law,” he declares that the nation’s laws have gone against natural law: John Brown hanged by physics, not by justice; by science, not by right sentence. The only true law that was fulfilled was, gruesomely, the law of gravity: Brown hanged on his own weight. His “sacrifice” is a matter of nature and fact. By invoking science, Melville implies that Brown’s death was, in fact, a sentence he passed on himself—the means of death were appropriate. The act of insurrection bloodied Brown, but in death he was untouched. Franny Nudelman is right to observe that John Brown’s body is absent in the poem, though I would add that a specific absence is invoked. The words in the poem that invoke the body are those that talk about the head: “crown,” “cap,” “veil,” “beard.” The “streaming beard” is the meteor’s tail; John Brown’s head is the meteor—John Brown’s head when it is hanged. The invoked absence, then, is the neck. John Brown’s name is placed in parentheses, as though a whispered, personal aside. But these marks are not so much about secrecy as about circumstance: the parentheses picture out the noose. There is something that cannot be witnessed in the scene, though; there is “the anguish none can draw.” The suffering to come is beyond portrayal,

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as is the suffering of that instant. Brown cannot be “drawn”: the purposes of his gaunt, attenuated figure cannot fully be gathered or adduced. Brown’s Face Thoreau said of Brown that “I need not describe his person to you”: he was hard to forget and known to all. Much is invested in Brown’s physical appearance, like his epithets; many characterizations say more about beliefs of onlooker. The “mad” photograph can show the fever of a just or unjust purpose, and, against both of those readings, indications of a mild stroke. In photographs, he seems to outstare the frame in a gaze that does not greet but goes beyond the onlooker. The sacrifice in the face is made mystical; Brown outfaced himself and became symbolic and figural. This is not what he would have wanted, if it meant abstraction instead of action. Jean Libby reminds us that Brown was aware that photographs would form part of the hagiography used in his figuration, that these were deliberate sittings to proliferate the image of a martyr. The beard was grown before, but the occasion made the beard biblical. This is the beard in John Steuart Curry’s giant painting The Tragic Prelude in which Brown is a giant, his arms spread like the cross, with a Beecher’s Bible in one hand and a Bible in the other. Conflicting sides of the war arranged as pro-slavery and free-soilers, North and South are made the saved and the damned of Judgment Day. This is a struggle between good and evil where nothing less than the soul of the nation is on trial. Brown is a mountain of a man, a force of nature contending with fire and whirlwind. Curry’s epic scale is made human in the series of paintings by Horace Pippin and the children’s book sequence by Jacob Lawrence. Brown’s scaffold is not an elevated position, no more elevated than a tree from which a lynch mob hangs a man or woman. In Pippin’s John Brown Going to His Hanging, the only forward-looking figure is a lone black woman, a Harriet Tubman figure, facing out of the canvas from the bottom right; all the rest are men, wearing hats, facing away (even John Brown). The painting makes the point that, now John Brown is dead, what will happen to those who might benefit most from his legacy? Brown acknowledged that his sacrifice was symbolic—it brought about no change unless others joined him after. Lawrence paints the 21 men as mountains or weapons and he does not try to “capture” Brown’s face, giving him a figure more than a face. Brown is always hunched over, studying field plans or battle plans; he is most upright when dead. His body is long and drawn; he is tall, but not towering as in Curry’s painting. It is as though Lawrence gets at the horrifying fact of hanging’s lengthening a man’s body.

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Brown’s Name It is appropriate that Brown’s name lives most in words performed by the body, in the song “John Brown’s Body,” later transposed to hymn and military march. He turned a millenarian (and particularly New England) tradition to militant ends. His call for war jarred the nation, out of tune, out of step, but brought into line with John Brown’s body, and with “John Brown’s Body.” In a United States of shame, which required that it rescue itself, Brown’s action is shared by soldiers, one reason why his song was taken up by them particularly. In Julia Ward Howe’s rewriting of the song into hymn, John Brown’s soul becomes God’s truth, the truth that is marching on. John Brown’s plain name lends itself to the various epithets applied to him; the ways in which he is apprehended imply familiarity, not strangeness: Old John Brown; John Brown of Osawatomie; Captain John Brown. To call him “old John Brown” is to make him ancient and familiar, not strange. It is the nation estranged from its principles; old John Brown brought it back to its first purposes. In another sense, his name should not be given an exalted place because in his time he was one of many John Browns and John Does, hanged unjustly. His plain name stands in for many unnamed and unknown sufferers.

Democracy and Action John Brown’s action challenged not eternal questions but ones that were temporal and immediately real: bodily suffering. Also, in making Brown Christ-like, the problem is less with blasphemy than with a demotion of democracy. Brown’s tone is wholly different from that of Thoreau when he says, “I speak for the slave when I say, that I prefer the philanthropy that neither shoots me nor liberates me.” Brown did not speak for but spoke with; he did not act for but acted with. Why are all the raiders not Christ? Blacks had been fighting and dying for centuries; one white man stands up with them and becomes Christ-like. Someone had to give a life for so many lives given, and it just happened to be Brown; he was elected by history. Through Brown, whites showed that they were finally willing to sacrifice their bodies, even in suicidal missions. When Shaw sent his son to war, he knew the likely manner of his death. Many of the writers in this volume remind us of the signal difference between John Brown’s raid and the violence it inaugurated. Brown acted with whites and blacks; the Civil War was fought by whites until blacks were permitted to join the armies as privates. Blacks, in large part, were

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denied a part in war but were equal partners in Brown’s raid. It was not the slaves that Brown was “redeeming” but the nation; he enlisted black men to the fight. It was the nation that was shamed, not slaves. Black men helped him, they were not rescued by him—they were a band of 21 in open conflict, not a “Secret Six.”

“Terrorism” and Madness Santa Fe Trail, a movie starring one of America’s recent presidents, fed the myth of Brown as a fanatic and wide-eyed madman. John Brown was found crazed by those who found this sangfroid frightening and a test of their sacrificial limits. He was also found crazed by those who found that there were no reasons for turning from reason to violence. Brown’s reputation as a madman diverts from the fact of the insanity of the United States of his time. To help slaves who were sold on the auction block, abolitionists committed their bodies to the lecturing stage. John Brown’s eloquence was on the hanging scaffold. Those who invoke madness and “terrorism” must address the question of comparable cause. Louis DeCaro, Jr. rightly reverses this wrong done to John Brown; Brown was fighting against “proslavery terrorists.” Stauffer and Trodd remind us of the unjust comparisons to Timothy McVeigh; making such a comparison attempts to erase the crime of slavery. Brown made a strike against slavery, what he called the “unjustifiable War of one portion of its citizens upon another.” Slavery was terror inflicted daily and for generations on innocent men and women. It was a crime against the Constitution and made the United States, in the bald hypocrisy of its position, “A land of freedom, boastfully so-called, with human slavery enthroned at the heart of it, and at last dictating terms of unconditional surrender to every other organ of its life, what was it but a thing of falsehood and horrible self-contradiction?” (James 1911, 42). To call Brown a terrorist is still to believe that the antebellum United States was the United States as it should be. Brown is also seen as a madman because of his “failure” but this “failure” was a measure of the failure of the United States. Governor Wise’s logic was that if he did not hang Brown, others would lynch him. Hanging Brown was a striking challenge to the futility of Wise’s action, purportedly meant to quell rather than instigate violence. Many wanted Brown’s death to bring on violence. Brown showed in the moment of his death that the United States as it existed at that moment would die—its corrupt body politic had never really lived. Brown’s death in effect fractured the state: Harper’s Ferry was in Virginia when Brown died, but would become “free”

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West Virginia during and after the war; Virginia was the one state split on the Eastern seaboard to have remained halved. It was to be seen as a phenomenal triumph of a body over the body politic, but as Franny Nudelman eloquently describes the hypocrisy of war, violence was the basis for collectivity where collectivity could have put violence to rest. History was compactly staged on that scaffold in that many who captured Brown would stake their claim for slavery: Robert E. Lee and J.E.B. Stuart; John Wilkes Booth, who thought Brown a fanatic, went to Harper’s Ferry to see him hanged. It was another staged scene of the “drama” and tragedy of the United States, a moment, as Arthur Miller would say of the moral vertigo he experienced when writing The Crucible, “when an individual conscience was all that could keep a world from falling.” John Brown’s hanging was not John Brown’s tragedy, but the tragedy of a nation. It took a man who straddled the divide to unite the nation: Lincoln was a conciliator as well as an emancipator in the sense that he wanted to resolve the question of union before that of slavery. Judgment of Lincoln cannot be the same as that of Brown because Lincoln did not court his assassination; because of Booth, who felt that Lincoln was, like Brown, a traitor, Lincoln did not live to see poisonous half-measures enforced by subsequent governments. Brown and Labor The labor question made John Brown accessible, in particular, to Europeans who might have had a more distant sympathy regarding slavery. But also in an America where blacks were economically shackled from Reconstruction on, John Brown’s attempts at wage equality resonated. Julie Husband shows that Du Bois knew that “race consciousness [was] the foundation for class-consciousness” in the United States and held the first meeting of the Niagara Movement at Harper’s Ferry in 1906. Studying and writing his 1909 biography about Brown taught Du Bois about action; he was moved from academia to activism through his biographical work. Bruce Ronda shows how Muriel Rukeyser takes the deprivations of the Depression and layers them with the kinds of labor questions Brown’s life asks. Civil Rights and Violence Blacks had been standing up, rising up, and dying for centuries. The question, in a way, was about white insurrection. It was not hanging that

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troubled John Brown, but what he and his nation had to live with. His daunting demand for an answering commitment and debates concerning the place of violence were most acutely witnessed in the civil rights movement. John Brown laid down his life for his country and for the rights of a race. But the place of words and nonviolent resistance should not be forgotten. Frederick Douglass knew how tough Brown’s demand was; he did not join Brown because he knew his words had force where his body might not. John Brown’s is one kind, one measure of action, not one-of-a-kind. Other kinds of action are also honorable. In listening to the faltering parts of Thoreau’s “Plea,” we should remember Gandhi, who read “Resistance to Civil Government” when in jail in South Africa and recognized the action he was at that moment advocating—satyagraha—soul force. It was that same force that Martin Luther King, Jr. invoked in his “I have a dream” speech in Washington, DC: “Again and again we must rise to the majestic heights of meeting physical force with soul force.” Many might place John Brown on the side of, say, the Black Panthers. But is this parallel apt? John Brown demonstrated passive resistance on the scaffold. He acted with blacks.

Chapters Louis DeCaro, Jr. shows that who tells history is a matter of inheritance, of money and of opinion and family tradition. Oswald Garrison Villard shared blood with his grandfather William Lloyd Garrison, hence his ambivalence toward John Brown in his biography of the man. He had money to pay research assistants whereas Du Bois wrote without ancillary funds. Villard wrote a harsh, unsigned review of Du Bois’s John Brown in his own paper; Du Bois defended himself in private letters. DeCaro, Jr. is the writer who most pulls The Afterlife of John Brown short: it too minimizes the African American memory of John Brown and brings terrorism to the fore. Franny Nudelman uncovers absent bodies in her chapter: there is no mention of slavery in the song “John Brown’s Body;” Wendell Phillips says that Brown acted on behalf of slaves whereas Brown confounded racial identity; John Brown’s blood reminds us of “the staggering material differences between the enslaved and the unenslaved.” On the scaffold, Brown “represented both a suffering slave population and a guilty white nation,” sacrifice and penance together. Nudelman’s word “represented” is accurate because Brown’s suffering was not comparable with that of slaves: he hanged in an instant. Robert Penn Warren feels that the United States has no “felt” history until the Civil War. His quotation marks sit uneasily around the word because of the suffering American bodies inflicted on

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themselves. The absences Nudelman identifies are the pattern of the enactment of the Constitution. “Slavery” was mentioned only on its abolition; it was meant to correct the tacit understanding that “all other persons” designated blacks, Indians, and anyone who was not white. Joe Lockard examines sentimental poetry about Brown’s death published in Garrison’s Liberator. Even these poems of apocalyptic phraseology or pat acceptance pave the way for “John Brown’s Body” reincarnated as a hymn. The hideous paradox of the United States is laid bare in these poems, which turn over words such as “traitor” and make them “glorious.” Andrew Taylor shows that these paradoxes linger in speeches of the time too: the teleological vista Thoreau invokes in his “Plea” demotes the radicalism of John Brown’s act. As with the absences that Nudelman notes, Thoreau glosses over blood. But Thoreau is intelligent about the “risk of isolating Brown in his own transcendence;” Taylor’s essay constitutes a response to John Stauffer and Zoe Trodd’s observation that “Brown made the transcendentalists’ abstractions concrete and in return they made him a transcendentalist abstraction.” Kristen Proehl returns again to the place of natural fact in Brown’s life and in his portrayal by others: “Brown transformed the natural world into a tool that could be used to dismantle the institution of slavery.” Thomas Higginson in particular is interested in Brown’s knowledge of the mountains, as a key to his character and as a matter of military tactics. John Stauffer and Zoe Trodd show the persistence of Brown seen as a force of nature: as a prairie fire and tornado in John Steuart Curry’s murals for the Kansas State House. They also bring him back to earth in their argument that his “character and actions made possible and necessary by his time and his country.” They show that Brown’s extremity was forced by his reluctance of his times to have done with its greatest crime. Turning to other countries, Janine Hartman explores a European pantheon of resistance—labor activists and anarchists—through a pairing of Victor Hugo and Joseph Déjacque. She shows that ways in which Europeans approached the name of John Brown was often through an equation of slavery with “wage slavery”; in their view, Brown could be viewed as working against an aristocracy in order to form a true republic. Julie Husband shows that this labor question was, in the United States, still a race question. Du Bois’s biography of John Brown is cognate with his preoccupation with labor rights for blacks. Du Bois thinks beyond the Harper’s Ferry raid in his research into Brown’s attempts at a wool collective: “Brown and Smith were convinced that freed slaves would need to own their own capital as well.” In such research, Du Bois shows that John Brown had his eye not just on the imminent conflict but also on the

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necessity for black economic freedom after the conflict. Du Bois also enacts the necessity of overturning pejorative words: he talks about Brown’s “Lost Cause” as freedom for blacks. Du Bois was writing against contemporaries such as Thomas Dixon, Jr. who hated Brown to the degree that he loved the Klan. It is as though Du Bois read Melville as well; Husband notes that “veil” is a significant term for Du Bois, who was “shut out from their [white] world by a vast veil,” and who deplores the veil of John Brown’s fate. The veil is what Christ had to rend in the temple, in an act of destruction and violence in the middle of a holy place; Du Bois unites with Brown in Christ-like fighting. Bruce Ronda reads Muriel Rukeyser’s poetry in the context of the economic problems of her time, a Depression that also produced a number of works about John Brown (Michael Gold and Michael Blankfort’s play Battle Hymn was sponsored by the Works Project Administration as were Arthur Covey’s paintings, Episodes in the Life of John Brown, in the Torrington, Connecticut post office, among others). Rukeyser registers the agony of the man through her intelligent line-breaks and allusion to Melville: “Deep in the prophet’s eyes, a wish to be again / Threatened alive, in agonies of decision / Part of our nation of our fanatic sun.” John Brown does not wish to be—to exist—again; he wishes to exist in resistance, to exist in conscience. These are “agonies of decision” that cause him pain, not “agonies of death.” Tyler Hoffman brings to light a number of children’s stories about John Brown. It is personal history as well as history that matter here—Brown brought his family to his cause and he is reported to have kissed a black child on the way to his death. In Gwen Everett’s children’s story it is Annie who tells the tale; in Russell Banks’s Cloudsplitter it is Owen Brown. Kimberly Rae Connor shows how Banks’s fictional reworking of Brown’s story is attentive to racial paradoxes, to the uneasy pairing of abolition and minstrelsy, and the “guilty pleasure” of “racial transgression when it is cast as righteousness.” In his “slave narrative” in whiteface, the triumph over privations is not triumphant. Banks brings “neither editorial clarity nor factual verification” to the tale but presents the paradox of extreme selfhood and the giving up of self. John Brown is considered a marginal figure in part because of the daring of his actions; this is a measure of others’ courage, not his own. Is the same said of civil war soldiers? Writers must struggle still to return him to heroism. Some of the legacy of John Brown is the halfway concession but there is nothing halfway about John Brown; it is interesting that such an unequivocal action has such a variety of responses. In this book there are no detractors from “black” assessments of John Brown but many responses to whites’ half-measures.

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John Brown is still hanging; judgment about him is not fixed. There are many reasons to dig Brown’s body up again because we live in only a generation after the ebbing of the questions fought out and avoided during the Civil War. Many answers to why Brown’s afterlife is fraught have little to do with Brown: there is much past assessment to correct; his action asks a lot in answer; for many it is difficult facing up to what the United States was; many live passively with the lingering consequences of Reconstruction. However, much of Brown’s afterlife shows continued celebration, in biographies, paintings, novels, plays, songs, poetry, speeches, and films. The fact that many of these need to be retold as our understanding deepens and our acceptance advances means that John Brown needs to live on. In a sense, Robert Penn Warren was right: only in the Civil War did the United States come into being, to “feel” its history. The United States was not true to principles until slavery was abolished; it was in suspension until the question was settled by the president, by the war’s end, and in the Constitution. The inequalities John Brown worked against were not settled in state law for another three generations, and they are not settled yet in our society. Righting those wrongs now seems a long way off from the gaunt shadow of John Brown. John Brown’s body revives whenever the United States shames itself, when the body politic bears wounds, when it imprisons citizens without trial or prosecutes an unjust war in an unjust manner. In this, the “drama” of the United States is the drama of humanity bent on violence yet attempting to better itself. John Brown’s action does not provide an unthinking template and answer to the questions, When is the right moment and what is the right manner of violence? John Brown is dead— we must live up to him before we die.

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Black People’s Ally,White People’s Bogeyman: A John Brown Story Louis A. DeCaro, Jr.

ohn Brown is one of the most vexing figures in American history,” writes historian William McFeely. Interestingly, he makes this declaration in the first line of an introduction written especially for the reissue of Benjamin Quarles’s classic study of African Americans and John Brown, Allies for Freedom (1974). But if Brown seemed austere, reticent, and even humorless to many of his black associates, probably none of them would have shared McFeely’s opinion. The divided opinion regarding Brown has often been a matter of black and white. Malcolm X recognized this in 1964 when he concluded that white society had unfairly portrayed Brown as a “nut.”1 As seen in this essay, from the time of his death in 1859 until the present, John Brown has often been rejected by many white Americans because he does not conform to the accepted paradigm of national virtue: he was too close to blacks, and all too eager to win for them by force what many of their forefathers had withheld from them by force. John Brown was born on May 9, 1800, the son of devout evangelical Calvinists of Connecticut background. Brown’s father and mother were strongly antislavery from the late eighteenth century and carried these sentiments with them, along with other Puritan families, to the Western Reserve of northeastern Ohio in the early 1800s. The Brown family was notable for their strong abolition views, and John followed his father in working on the local underground railroad and in supporting political figures who opposed slavery. John Brown’s business endeavors of over three decades were mediocre at best, though his attempts at success were

“J

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thwarted as much by current economic trends and crises as by his own misjudgments and errors. Yet Brown’s consistent plan from young adulthood was to use business success to advance the cause of abolition, and his business and family concerns were often interwoven with efforts on behalf of the troubled African American community. Brown came to national prominence as a fighter in the 1850s, when the newly opened Kansas territory was torn by civil strife between proslavery and free state settlers. Constant, violent intrusion and interference by Southern forces in the political processes of the new territory in 1855–1856 finally brought a violent response from the free state side, including the militant Browns. In later years it was fully revealed that Brown, several of his sons, and some other free state men had led a night raid on proslavery neighbors, leaving five mutilated bodies along the Pottawatomie Creek. Brown and others contended that the killings were essential given the collaboration of proslavery neighbors with Southern terrorists camped in the area. Their apprehensions were well founded. While all free state settlers were generally endangered by proslavery terrorism, outright abolitionists such as the Browns were particularly marked for attack. John Brown and his associates gathered sufficient evidence to conclude that free state people in their area—especially his outspoken sons—were in danger of imminent assault. Their bloody strike was preemptive, not vengeful, particularly since there was no territorial or federal constabulary to provide them protection from proslavery terrorism. This violent response was extremely distasteful to conservative free state settlers, who were either too fearful or naive in the hope that the proslavery government in Washington, DC would intervene to bring justice. Since Brown’s leadership in the Pottawatomie killings was largely unknown back East, his well-earned reputation as a guerilla was not tainted in the Northern press. This proved expedient to his later efforts to raise funds—ultimately for his own independent strike against slavery at Harper’s Ferry, a small town in Virginia that stood at the doorstep of the South and hosted the only government armory in the slave states. Brown’s plan was to use the vast Allegheny mountain system that stretched downward into the South as a means to move his men and black recruits into the heartland of slavery. As he later insisted, his intention was never to ignite an insurrection but to lead away increasing numbers of the enslaved—with minimal violence—until his liberation movement had become so widespread as to collapse the economy of the South. But John Brown’s mountain campaign never begun. Despite a favorable response to the raid from the local enslaved community, his own apprehensions and errors stranded him and his men in Harper’s Ferry beyond the hour of escape.2

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John Brown, Nonviolence, and the Abolitionist Legacy Instead of being allowed to launch his liberation scheme, Brown was tried and hanged on December 2, 1859. Yet his raid inspired bold acts of defiance and liberation in the slave community, traumatized slave masters, and generally infuriated the South. In reaction, many white Northerners—who would never otherwise have identified with black suffering—were gripped by the drama of a heroic white man’s imprisonment and execution. The abolitionists were thus provided a martyr to use for their own purposes, something that Brown himself perceived in the days prior to his hanging. “I have been whiped [sic] as the saying is,” he wrote to his wife,“but am sure I can recover all the lost capital occasioned by that disaster; by only hanging a few moments by the neck; & I feel quite determined to make the utmost possible out of a defeat.”3 Brown’s fleeting final weeks of notoriety and his high profile execution undoubtedly helped speed the nation toward civil war, and in death he now seemed invincible. “The John Brown Song” (“John Brown’s body lies a-moldering in the grave”), which actually began as a soldier’s spoof about another soldier, was soon appropriated in memory of John Brown of Harper’s Ferry. It became the fighting anthem of the North, and its tune was finally adapted for the visionary “Battle Hymn of the Republic” by Julia Ward Howe (the wife of one of Brown’s famed “Secret Six” supporters). Even slaves learned “the John Brown song,” and as the war progressed they sang it in defiance of the collapsing South. One witness recalled hearing some Virginia slaves singing “John Brown’s body” while working in the fields. He asked the master why they were permitted to sing the song, and the man replied that he could not stop them.4 In life John Brown had neither affiliated himself with white abolitionist organizations, nor had he subscribed to the prominent pacifism of the abolitionist movement. Insistent on his own strategy and program, he preferred to align himself with black abolitionists and former slaves, and he had a certain contempt for oratorical abolitionism. Brown once surprised a companion by saying that he wished that all the leading abolitionist orators would have their tongues cut out. Being “good, conscientious people,” he explained, “if they couldn’t say anything, they would do something.” To another associate, Brown said that he found most white and black Northerners alike to be cowardly. He was primarily interested in gathering fighting men, Brown declared, not money. He was probably never so moved as he was at the thought of militant black men arising in the tradition of Haiti’s Toussaint L’Ouverture and Virginia’s Nat Turner. After reading a militant letter by black abolitionist Jermain Loguen in an abolitionist newspaper, Brown wrote to the editor, promising that when he

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finally met Loguen, he would shake his hand so hard it would snap (Brown 1853, 3; Loguen 1853, 3; Redpath 1886, 2; Rollin 1969, 86). As a matter of record, whites generally disapproved of arming blacks but abolitionists too feared what might happen if African Americans chose to become warriors instead of passive martyrs. Like the civil rights movement of the 1960s, the antebellum abolitionist movement of the nineteenth century was overwhelmingly nonviolent. White abolitionists not only dreaded explosions of black rage, they generally held the doctrine of passive protest to be morally inviolable. In 1837, when the militant white antislavery editor and clergyman Elijah Lovejoy was killed by racists in Illinois, many abolitionists criticized him for having taken up arms to defend himself. The orator Wendell Phillips wrote that the death of Lovejoy had “scattered a world of dreams”—no doubt including the dream of triumphing over slavery with nonviolence (quoted in Dillon 1961, 178). With his execution John Brown was proclaimed a martyred saint by the nonviolent abolitionists he had tended to avoid and abjure. Following the lead of these orators, early biographers reflected the same heroic, uncritical approach in their treatment of Brown’s life and public activity.5 But later in the nineteenth century, in the era of the decline of Reconstruction and the unleashing of Southern rage against blacks, John Brown was also attacked in exposés pertaining to the Kansas killings that he had supervised in 1856.6 While personal resentments and jealousy fueled much of this early assault, it was no doubt consistent with the times that the memory of John Brown, an extremely supportive ally of the African American community, should suffer along with the besieged ex-slave community. The debate between pro- and anti-Brown writers continued for the rest of the nineteenth century and after.

John Brown and the Garrisons In the decades prior to the Civil War, William Lloyd Garrison was the leading abolitionist leader in the United States. Highly religious and devotedly antislavery, Garrison established and sustained the foremost abolitionist publication, The Liberator, throughout the antebellum years and during the war. As a young journalist, Garrison led the vanguard of a growing abolitionist movement that called for immediate emancipation and the end of political union with slaveholding states. In his early years, the colonization movement prevailed as the self-proclaimed advocate of the slave. Patronizing at best, colonizationists were often driven by racist assumptions in their call for gradual emancipation and relocation of blacks to Africa. But Garrison discredited the colonization movement in

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a brilliant campaign of the printed word, bringing nonviolent abolitionism to prominence at a time when John Brown was still struggling with business efforts and building private alliances in the black community.7 Brown knew Garrison’s writings, but he preferred African American publications, especially Willis Hodges’s Ram’s Horn and Frederick Douglass’s North Star (later, Frederick Douglass’ Paper). He increasingly disdained abolitionist nonviolence and undoubtedly questioned these notions as expressed in The Liberator. Brown too was an old-style Calvinist, and this set him apart from the theologically innovative Garrison. They met only once in 1857, as guests in the home of Boston’s prominent abolitionist clergyman, Theodore Parker. By this time, Brown was renowned as a freedom fighter in the Kansas territory and Garrison undoubtedly considered him a man of blood. The scant record of their meeting salvages nothing of their conversation but there is no reason to think Brown would have shown disrespect to Garrison, given his significant contributions to the abolitionist effort. Yet it is hard to imagine that they did not at least cross scriptures in cordial debate. Certainly they parted without changing either of their opinions regarding nonviolence.8 Though given to stylization, Douglass recounted his relationship with Brown in his final autobiography, The Life and Times of Frederick Douglass, Written By Himself (1881); Brown met Garrison at Theodore Parker’s home in January 1857 (Mayer 1998, 475). An interesting footnote to this episode is that, prior to the Harper’s Ferry raid, John Brown was reading The Life of Jehudi Ashmun (1835) by Garrison’s old nemesis, Ralph Gurley, the head of the American Colonization Society. Gurley opposed the immediate emancipation doctrine of Garrison, attacking him as a “mad incendiary.” Given his own plans to establish a predominately black mountain-based community in his assault on slavery, Brown undoubtedly had his own reasons for studying the book, which chronicled a white leader’s experience of colonizing blacks in Liberia. Yet his willingness to read Gurley’s work also suggests Brown’s independence of thought, his refusal to accept the presumptions of the Garrisonians, and perhaps even an emerging black nationalist sympathy (see Villard 1929, 401 and Gurley 1969). After news of the Harper’s Ferry raid broke in 1859, Garrison showed double-mindedness. In biblical terms, he diminished Brown by saying he might approximate an Old Testament warrior but never a New Testament apostle. But even Garrison could not resist the “powerful magnetic field created by the Brown affair” and ended up not only proclaiming him a martyr but affirming slave insurrections. But this sentimental contradiction did not last; Garrison returned to his conviction that it was immoral for the captains of justice to use violence in their sacred struggle against slavery (Mayer 1998, 494–505). Despite Garrison’s eloquent and

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determined efforts to undermine slavery for three decades, John Brown had stolen his thunder by blundering his raid and hanging from a gallows. Not surprisingly, one of Garrison’s sons made it his mission to revise the Brown legacy in the late nineteenth century. In an essay published in The Andover Review, Wendell Phillips Garrison diminished the legend of John Brown’s life-long purpose to end slavery by claiming that he really had no such plans until his later years. But Garrison’s evidence was thin and self-serving, largely premised on the notion that Brown had visited Boston in 1838 and had made no effort to meet his father.9 Given his independent spirit, his decided self-assurance, and his disdain for nonviolent abolitionism, it would actually be more curious if John Brown had sought an audience with Garrison. Even when they met years later it was by the design of others, when Brown was fund-raising in New England with an obvious agenda of his own. Far different from hostile Southerners and free state turncoats who labored so strenuously in their attacks on Brown in the later nineteenth century, the Garrisons could not help but admire the principles and self-sacrifice of John Brown and his family. Their spiritual union as abolitionists was indivisible and their devotion to black equality and justice for the ex-slave placed the Browns and Garrisons in the same political vicinity. Yet neither could they could approve of Brown’s belief in the use of just force, and even if there was no resentment on the part of Garrison himself, his heirs perhaps felt ambivalent toward Brown because of his popularity in the black community and his posthumous image as the abolitionist par excellence.

Oswald Garrison Villard and the John Brown Legacy In 1910, Oswald Garrison Villard, a white philanthropist, editor, and civil rights activist, won wide acclaim for his new biography of John Brown, marking 50 years since his death on a Virginia gallows. What made the author all the more interesting was that he was the grandson of William Lloyd Garrison. Villard’s father was the German-born Ferdinand Heinrich Hilgard, who immigrated to the United States in 1853 and changed his name to Henry Villard. The immigrant journalist became prominent in covering the Lincoln–Douglas debates, the Pikes Peak gold rush, and the Civil War. Villard married William Lloyd Garrison’s daughter Helen Frances (Fanny) and later emerged as a successful railroad promoter, financier, and president of the General Electric Company. Henry Villard also acquired controlling interests in the New York Evening Post and The Nation (Mayer 1998, 134–143; Lewis 1993, 197).

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Following his wealthy and “high-minded father,” Oswald Garrison Villard personified what David Levering Lewis calls the “Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendment reformers, the privileged white people who championed the constitutional rights of black people but were distinctly unsympathetic to aspirations of social equality.” Inheriting his father’s wealth and controlling both the Evening Post and The Nation, Villard was the quintessential “white liberal,” raising thousands of dollars for black charities. His uncle Francis Garrison thus assured him that he was “the natural successor to the custodianship of the family’s abolitionist tradition” (see the dedication page in Villard 1929; Lewis 1993, 397, 477–478). In the preface of John Brown: A Biography, author Villard proclaimed his work was “free from bias, from the errors in taste and fact of the mere panegyrist, and from the blind prejudice of those who can see in John Brown nothing but a criminal.” He likewise boasted new findings from research and authoritative interviews with many of Brown’s family and associates. Besides the extensive research supporting his work (most of which was done by a paid assistant), Villard’s biography provided an extensive chronology and fact-check of previous writings, making it indispensable for twentieth-century scholars. To be sure, it superseded all previous biographies of Brown, and Villard—a Harvard-trained editor— made painstaking efforts to reproduce primary sources and provide the first modern scholarly biography of the hero of Harper’s Ferry. The author disdained the earlier works of Franklin Sanborn and Richard Hinton, former associates of Brown, because their details were not always trustworthy and because they had taken too many editorial liberties with primary documents. Furthermore, Villard considered their works partisan and announced that his intention was to test Brown fairly “by accepted ethical standards” and to “pass a deliberate and accurate historical judgment” upon him. In reality, Villard’s interpretation of Brown was apropos of his conscious role as “the natural successor to the custodianship” of the Garrison legacy. Like his grandfather and uncle before him, Villard’s work smacked of ambivalence toward Brown—on the one hand uplifting his valor and sincerity as an opponent of slavery, on the other diminishing him for his use of violence in Kansas and at Harper’s Ferry. In style, Garrison’s manuscript proved tedious and flat, “stitched together with lengthy quotations and full to the brim with moralizing.”10 Those who knew Brown resented Villard’s portrayal of him as a restless soul, and none were pleased with his conclusions about the killings of the proslavery collaborators on Pottawatomie Creek in Kansas. If others failed to recognize Villard’s motivation, John Brown’s surviving children did not. Salmon Brown, now quite elderly, read Villard’s new biography and wrote with disgust: “Your attempt to pose as a historian with your God forsaken

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ideas of resistance to tyrants will not go down with the old revolutionary stock in the best government in the world, nor with our old soldiers that put down the slave holders[’] rebelion [sic].” He insinuated that Villard’s famous grandfather and his followers had evaded danger “under cover of their nonresistant views” only to “let others defend their rights with their blood and treasure.” Hurt and offended, John Brown’s son concluded, “I am saying this to a live man, not about an old man that has been dead over fifty years.” Although Villard claimed objectivity, he had assumed the task of interpreting Brown for the sake of his family’s legacy, and while he framed his approach with a kind of sympathetic admiration, he was quietly plotting what he assumed would be the ultimate rejoinder to the militant Brown legacy. In sketching his conclusions about the bloody strike by Brown’s men in Kansas, Villard wrote to an associate: “Sanborn and the others who have made of John Brown a demigod will not like my book. The more I study Pottowattomie [sic] the less excuse I find for it.” Yet he was anything but unbiased when it came to his discussion about the killings of 1856. In his biography, he contended that John Brown had no actual justification for the violent assault on his proslavery neighbors, making him a kind of idealistic murderer motivated by an unselfish ambition to free the enslaved.11 Yet in private correspondence with another scholar, Villard seemed almost to gloat over the apparent moral advantage that he could use against John Brown for the sake of his own famous progenitor, William Lloyd Garrison. “But you see, my grandfather never thought it necessary for the sake of freedom to take men from their homes in the dead of night and dispatch them in cold blood.”12 Despite his professional treatment of the Pottawatomie killings and the marshaling of evidence and testimony in an unprecedented manner, Villard nevertheless read the “facts” in a selfserving way. Determined that Brown could have had only a “general reason or previous conviction” as a basis for killing five men, he lightly dismissed evidence (some of which his own assistant had gathered for the first time) that the Browns were in real danger and had no recourse to protection from the law. He took as confirmation his own presumptions and drew the conclusion that he had apparently held from the onset. Annie Brown Adams, another of Brown’s aged children, could not have been taken by surprise. Two years before Villard’s book was released, they had debated in correspondence regarding the issue of her father’s use of force. “You look at this matter from a Garrisonian point of view while I look at it from John Brown’s and his men’s point of view”: Moral suasion and non resistance are excellent doctrines to preach in times of peace. But often in troublous times, some one has to fight for peace—and

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fight hard too. And then endure the remarks that are made by the carpet knights and quill-drivers who were not in the fray but staid [sic] peacefully at home enjoying the after benefits derived from other’s exertions. I am not trying to apologize for my father or his friends (followers is a better word) but to show you what, from their point of view, led on to Pottawatomie.13

Of course, to Oswald Garrison Villard, scion of the Garrison legacy and an enthusiastic pacifist in his own right, no killing—not even in selfdefense—could be justified. Using the biography, Villard chastened John Brown in order to retrieve his grandfather’s pacifist legacy from the shadows of history. A Tale of Two Biographies If Villard drew on his family heritage in formulating a lukewarm interpretation of John Brown, he also drew on their economic and political clout to diminish a more favorable biography of John Brown written by the African American scholar W.E.B. Du Bois. Du Bois, then at Atlanta University, produced his John Brown amidst a demanding schedule of teaching, lecturing, editing, and activism, completing it in late 1908—over a year ahead of Villard. Admittedly, Du Bois’s work had its flaws, particularly due to his inclination to lean on earlier biographies and sources that were being reevaluated and corrected by Villard and others in the early twentieth century. Yet Du Bois had never intended to produce the kind of biography that Villard was preparing, having set out to write about the famed abolitionist Frederick Douglass. When that project was undermined by the interference of the powerful Booker T. Washington, Du Bois then turned enthusiastically to the idea of doing a biography of Nat Turner, the leader of the most famous slave revolt in the history of the United States. The Turner book was likewise undermined by editorial politics and a John Brown biography was proposed to Du Bois instead. As David Levering Lewis writes, “John Brown was a milestone, revealing Du Bois’s increasing willingness to commingle advocacy with scholarship, to envelop history and social science in judgment and prophecy” (Lewis 1993, 358). The strength of his work was its discerning interpretation of John Brown the man and his meaning. Reflective of his community’s experience and understanding of his subject’s role in the antiracist struggle, Du Bois’s interpretation of Brown could stand assuredly on its own two feet. Furthermore, Du Bois always thought highly of his own work, even though he was all too aware that his reliance upon older sources had led him astray as to certain facts and dates.14 As Herbert Aptheker concludes, despite John Brown’s “factual slips” the book “has yet to be surpassed in terms of

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analysis and portrayal” (Du Bois 1999, 153). But at the time of its publication, Villard did not make such gracious distinctions in reviewing Du Bois’s work. In fact, despite their collegial rapport, he went out of his way to bash the book. Villard and Du Bois wrote their respective John Brown biographies in two entirely different contexts. Both were activist scholars, but Villard’s work was essentially an elitist production and interpretation. He may have castigated Du Bois for an uncritical use of older sources, but most of Villard’s research was done by his paid assistant, Katherine Mayo. Mayo was a better writer and probably understood John Brown’s legacy better than him, and Villard could not make “full use of her gatherings.” Anyone who has made an extensive survey of Villard’s papers (as I have) would agree that Villard fell far short in using the wealth of primary historical material provided by his assistant. When Mayo later acquired a name for herself as an author, she did nothing to disclaim rumors that she had written the milestone biography. Villard was annoyed but made no public comment about the rumor (there is no doubt that he is the author, his handwritten manuscript still exists). Yet he could scarcely have done better than Du Bois without the luxury of being able to afford paying someone to do his research for him.15 As owner of The Nation and the New York Evening Post, Villard took full advantage of his position as a publisher to prepare a harsh, unsigned review of Du Bois’s John Brown and placed it in both publications.16 When the author wrote in protest, Villard left the task of responding to The Nation’s editor Paul More, who condescendingly lectured Du Bois about writing history and the proper use of sources. Du Bois countered that since Villard, being the author of a new book on John Brown, had crept “behind anonymity” to give his book an “unfair drubbing,” it would not look good for his paper to refuse him a chance to respond in print. Despite repeated appeals, Du Bois was refused the opportunity to publish his response, although he ably defended his John Brown as “an accurate historical picture.”17 Beyond this unsatisfying correspondence, nothing more came of the issue and soon Du Bois’s book was overshadowed by Villard’s widely acclaimed biography, published in 1910. Villard and Du Bois managed to work cooperatively in civil rights efforts thereafter, but “rancor would always exist between them just below the surface.” More revealing, Du Bois later commented that to “a white philanthropist like Villard, a Negro was quite naturally expected to be humble and thankful or certainly not assertive or aggressive” (Lewis 1993, 361). If Villard expected black scholarly colleagues to be passive, he also opposed the notion of African Americans defending themselves in the face of racist violence. In a speech he made on John Brown’s birthday in 1925, Villard stood near Brown’s

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grave and praised him with the same sort of ambivalence that he applied to his biography over a decade before. “However one feels about John Brown, whether one believes in his doctrine of violence or not,” Villard lectured, “there is one thing about him which we can all join in admiring, and that is his devotion to his cause.” Though lamenting the deprivation of black people’s constitutional rights, he continued Again I do not uphold his methods of force. Being utterly opposed to the use of arms for any purpose, and believing human life inviolable, I counsel only peaceful methods. I do not even believe that the colored people when attacked by any mobs should use the pistol and the rifle. That way destruction lies. If it were futile for John Brown, it is a thousand times more futile today. But I do urge whole-heartedly that the colored people of America make of John Brown the moral crusader their inspiration and their model, and that they devote themselves without stint and without question to the cause of freedom which was but half won when Lee surrendered, and emancipation became a reality. (Villard 1925, 118; emphasis mine)

Here was Villard, virtually standing on top of John Brown’s resting place, praising him as a “moral crusader” and “model” for African Americans, while at the same time prophesying destruction and futility over his work or any work of its kind. Whatever African Americans thought of such counsel, it was clear that Villard was asking them to suffer violence and oppression rather than resist by force—a notion that would have made John Brown turn over in his grave. From Flawed Hero to Terrorist Despite Villard’s negative interpretation of his subject as an idealistic murderer, he is often considered John Brown’s last and best friend in twentieth-century biography. Those following him were outrightly antagonistic, either out of Southern sympathies or because of political prejudice. Albert Fried insightfully points out that following Villard’s era, the major works on Brown were published between 1912 and 1942, a period when racism and xenophobia blossomed, the virtual heyday of legalized segregation. American historians and writers from this period tended to revisit the Civil War with a grudge against the Republican and antislavery North, while styling the South with sympathy and romance. The worst writings that came forth in this period had no value except to those who hated John Brown with blind prejudice, while others fused political vendetta with Villard’s valuable research. By mid-twentieth century, many white historians looked back at the era of slavery, allegedly without emotion and bias,

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and concluded that it was extremists on both sides of the issue who brought ruin upon the nation. Thus, the abolitionists of the North and the militant proslavery forces of the South were to blame. In 1951, Allan Nevins suggested that the Civil War might even have been avoided except for “[p]assionate unreason among large sections of the population.” John Brown’s raid was thus a “crazy” action, thoroughly “malign in its effect on opinion, North and South” (Fried 1978, 7–13, 114–129; Nevins 1962, 29–30). Modern, “scientific” historians like Nevins had managed to transform the prevalent view of Brown from a well-meaning fanatic to a dangerously aberrant criminal. In doing so they preferred to draw on the most peccant anti-Brown works written in the first part of the twentieth century. The academic biases of white scholars were complemented by the grossly prejudiced interpretation of Brown in the popular film, Santa Fe Trail (1940). The screenplay for the Warner Brothers production was based on a biography of the Confederate military hero J.E.B. Stuart and followed the notion that the Civil War was ultimately needless, and that the issue of slavery would have been resolved if the North and its troublesome abolitionists would have left the South alone. The film featured leading actors of the day, including Errol Flynn, Olivia De Havilland, Van Heflin, and Ronald Reagan. But the most interesting—and frightening—figure of the movie was the delusional, dangerous John Brown, portrayed by Raymond Massey. In Santa Fe Trail, one of Brown’s adult sons complains of being afraid of his father, and the film is riddled with remarks like “That murderous John Brown is on the loose.” Largely erroneous as far as history is concerned, it nevertheless laid the groundwork for the popular conception of Brown as a crazy fanatic that still persists today. When the film was released, one of John Brown’s grandchildren tried to bring suit against Warner Brothers, charging that the film was a “vilifying misrepresentation.” Though her case was dismissed by a federal judge, she wrote that the producers had “made of my grandfather a ruthless killer, a renegade, and a madman.” Fifteen years later, Raymond Massey reprised his role as John Brown, starring in a more sympathetic interpretation, mistakenly entitled Seven Angry Men (Allied Artists, 1955). Despite its central focus on the righteous conflict of the Brown family with slavery, the film was also fraught with historical errors—including the invention of a daughter-in-law who criticized John Brown’s plan and tried to dissuade her husband, Owen Brown, from participating in the Harper’s Ferry raid (the film might better have been entitled “One Angry Daughter-in-Law”). Seven Angry Men did not effectively challenge popular misconception, and the dangerous fanatic of Santa Fe Trail remained the standard for John Brown in cinema. The 1971 film Skin Game once more portrayed Brown in vignette as a frightening, frenzied raider and murderer. During the 1980s, the character

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of Brown appeared in two television Civil War movies, portrayed by Sterling Hayden (The Blue and the Gray) and Johnny Cash (North and South). But nothing from Hollywood has yet overcome the older image of a crazed fanatic.18 In recent years, the academy, largely informed by the writings of past anti-Brown scholars as well as the “crazy” image of popular culture, has refined the “dangerous fanatic” view of Brown in keeping with contemporary concerns over terrorism. Academic seminars and discussions are overloaded with the notion that John Brown somehow fathered domestic terrorism in the United States. For example, one multidisciplinary John Brown symposium held at Penn State University in 1996 featured papers with themes such as “John Brown and Terrorism” and the “Legitimation of Terrorism by National Elites” (i.e., the abolitionists).19 Unfortunately almost every contemporary academic effort on Brown will include a terrorism component even though it can be argued, historically and philosophically, that his efforts would be better categorized under counterterrorism. Current interpretations in the media, such as the “PBS American Experience” documentary John Brown’s Holy War (2000), not only leaned too heavily on the commentary of novelists instead of historians, but also minimized the African American record on Brown and skewed his spirituality. Misrepresenting him as a man given to religious fantasy and deadly delusion, Holy War was more an adventure in interpretation and imagination than a responsible historical documentary.

“Beyond Black and White” The most critical black observer of John Brown was undoubtedly Benjamin Quarles, an African American scholar who produced seminal works on the interrelationship between the controversial figure and the black community. Two years after the release of his collection, Blacks on John Brown (1972), an anthology of letters, essays, and writings by black authors, Quarles published Allies for Freedom, which showcased his own original research and analysis. Although Quarles was highly sympathetic to John Brown, at certain points he seemed too strenuous in his “objective” criticisms, as if he were trying to avoid being accused of sentimentality by white scholars. Quarles evidently trusted Villard’s “friendly” analysis of John Brown too much, especially regarding the Pottawatomie killings. Instead of defending Brown, he followed Villard by calling the killings “unpardonable,” though reminding his readers that African Americans tend to diminish Brown’s guilt against the backdrop of the expansive violence and terrorism perpetrated upon them by whites. Quarles also

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minimized Brown’s underground railroad leadership and even suggested that he had suffered from “chronic melancholia,” and was both “flawed” and “[w]arped in many ways.” Nevertheless, Benjamin Quarles provided the first scholarly black analysis of Brown since Du Bois in 1909, providing front-line research and insights into John Brown’s much-neglected alliance with the African American community. Most importantly, Quarles made clear what Du Bois had illustrated nearly 70 years before—that African Americans befriended John Brown without apology because he had stood by them in crisis. “To post-Civil War blacks,” Quarles wrote, “his was a name to conjure with, almost a presence to be summoned.” To succeeding generations, Quarles concluded, John Brown “possessed one towering trait that would command the respect of the most militant black today, as it endeared the man to preceding generations of black Americans. This was his love of freedom, a principle by which he lived and for which he died” (Quarles 2001, 11, 34, 54–55, 197). But other contemporaries of Quarles in the black community did not compromise even the edges of Brown’s besieged image. The writer John Oliver Killens defended Brown while taking a meaningful swipe at the “Great Emancipator” figure so preferred by white Americans: Even our white hero symbols are different from yours. You give us moody Abe Lincoln, but many of us prefer John Brown, whom most of you hold in contempt as a fanatic; meaning, of course, that the firm dedication of any white man to the freedom of the black man is prima-facie evidence of perversion or insanity. (Killens 1965, 23–24)

Even more definitive was the searing, defiant summation of historian Lerone Bennett, Jr. who called John Brown a man “beyond good and evil, beyond tea and sympathy, beyond black and white.” To Bennett, Brown had so completely identified himself with the oppressed that it could be said that he “was a Negro, and it was in this aspect that he suffered.” Following Frederick Douglass’s own admission, Bennett concluded that Brown had suffered with the slave “more than any other Negro leader” and in so doing “made of himself an act of transcendence” (quoted in Quarles 2001, 140, 143). As the popular proverb about history suggests, perhaps the story of John Brown biography has only repeated itself. In the days of the Civil War, abolitionist admirers found in him an icon to inspire those fighting in defense of the Union and in opposition to the spread of slavery. With the passing of these concerns and the demise of Reconstruction, Brown’s legacy fell prey to the same hostile spirit that had set about to reconfigure white supremacy in the South and blame the war on the friends of black

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liberation. His image suffered throughout the era of Jim Crow and legalized segregation, and only with the rise of the civil rights era did John Brown enjoy some outspoken admirers among blacks and their dissenting white allies. With the waning of the civil rights era and the renaissance of conservative politics (as well as the rampant materialism that now defines American society), white society has become all the more alienated from John Brown—pushing him off the porch onto the backyard of history like a naughty neighbor boy. Yet John Brown will not easily surrender his place in American memory, nor will his spirit be intimidated by “terrorist” labels and ivory tower psycho-historical analyses. To such label makers, the fanatic of Harper’s Ferry inevitably stands like a bogeyman at the window of naive American “patriotism.” But to those who desire racial justice, whether white or black, John Brown remains as a lit candle—his flame flickering stubbornly in the cold prairie wind, a passionate little light defying the dark landscape of our national denial. Notes 1. The edition for which McFeely writes is actually a compilation of two works by the prodigious African American scholar on John Brown that have fortunately been reissued. See Quarles 2001, v and Malcolm X, 1985, 81–82. 2. The biographical sketch provided here is based on Louis A. DeCaro Jr., “Fire From the Midst of You”: A Religious Life of John Brown (2002). 3. Typewritten transcript of letter from John Brown to Mary Brown, November 10, 1859, in John Brown Letters 1859 folder, Box 5, Oswald Garrison Villard Papers, Rare Books and Manuscripts Collection of the Columbia University Library, New York (hereinafter “OGV”); later that month Brown wrote to his wife: “I am waiting the hour of my public murder with great composure of mind, & cheerfulness; feeling the strongest assurance that in no other possible way could I be used to so much advance the cause of God” (Letter of John Brown to Mary Brown, November 30, 1859, quoted in Ruchames 1959, 156). 4. Cohen 1999, 152–153; “Slaves Singing the John Brown Chorus,” Providence Journal (October 30, 1862), clipping in Sanborn Scrapbook, Reel 5, Boyd B. Stutler John Brown Collection on microfilm, Ohio State University, Columbus, Ohio (hereinafter “BBS”). 5. The journalist James Redpath rushed out his biography of John Brown in 1860, dedicating it to Wendell Phillips, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Henry D. Thoreau—all of whom had laid the groundwork for a heroic interpretation of Brown (see Redpath 1860). 6. The first major attacks on Brown were: G.W. Brown, Reminiscences of Old Brown: Thrilling Incidents of Border Life in Kansas (1880) and David N. Utter, “John Brown of Osawatomie” (1883). Both were easily refuted by John Brown’s contemporaries and family members.

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7. See the definitive biography by Henry Mayer, All on Fire: William Lloyd Garrison and the Abolition of Slavery (1998). 8. Brown’s relationship with editor Willis Hodges is documented in Willard B. Gatewood, Jr. (ed.) Free Man of Color: The Autobiography of Willis Augustus Hodges (1982). 9. Wendell Phillips Garrison, “The Preludes of Harper’s Ferry; I. John Brown, Practical Shepherd,” The Andover Review (reprint from December 1890), 3–4, in Harper’s Ferry Raid Preludes folder, Box 9, OGV. 10. Villard 1929, vii–viii; see Franklin B. Sanborn, The Life and Letters of John Brown, Liberator of Kansas, and Martyr of Virginia (1885) and Richard J. Hinton, John Brown and His Men (1894); Lewis 1993, 361. 11. Letter from Salmon Brown to Oswald G. Villard, November 2, 1910, in Folder B, Miscellaneous Correspondence, Box 19, OGV; typewritten copy of letter from Oswald G. Villard to Thomas Featherstonaugh, January 29, 1909, in Folder B, Miscellaneous Correspondence, Box 19, OGV; Villard 1929, 185. 12. Letter of Oswald G. Villard to William E. Connelley, April 16, 1909, in Folder C, Miscellaneous Correspondence, Box 19, OGV. 13. Letter of Annie Brown Adams to Oswald G. Villard, March 25, 1908, in Annie Brown Adams folder, Box 1, OGV. 14. Thomas Featherstonaugh to Oswald G. Villard, November 4, 1909, Thomas Featherstonaugh folder, Box 8, OGV. 15. Boyd B. Stutler to George Marshall, June 16, 1962, RP08-0063, in John Brown/Boyd B. Stutler Collection Database of the West Virginia State Archives, http://129.71.134.132/imisintro.html. 16. See Villard’s anonymous review of Du Bois’s John Brown (Villard 1909, 405). 17. Du Bois 1999, 153–154; Lewis 1993, 360–361; W.E.B. Du Bois to Paul E. More, November 20, 1909 (Du Bois 1979). 18. See the section, “John Brown in Movies, Plays and Literature” in Cohen 1999, 131–140; Nellie Brown Groves, “Do Movies Distort History,” undated, typed manuscript in BBS, reel 8. 19. I refer to a symposium which I attended, “John Brown: The Man, the Legend, the Legacy,” which was convened at the Mont Alto, Pennsylvania, campus of Pennsylvania State University, in July 1996. While it was wonderfully produced and directed in many respects, with few exceptions, the papers were largely illustrative of the distorted view of Brown that is deeply rooted in the academy and the media.

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“The Blood of Millions”: John Brown’s Body, Public Violence, and Political Community Franny Nudelman

ccustomed to the overnight successes, unexpected comebacks, and sudden reversals of celebrity culture, we might still find cause to wonder at the course of John Brown’s fame. At the time of his capture in October 1859, Brown was a pariah, a fanatic, a blunderer of enormous proportions. By the summer of 1861 he was a mascot of sorts for the Union army—his death commemorated time and again as soldiers prepared to fight, his name synonymous with bravery, self-sacrifice, and patriotism. No one was more aggrieved by this transformation than John Wilkes Booth. Writing to his brother-in-law in 1864 he lamented, “what was a crime in poor John Brown is now considered (by themselves) as the greatest and only virtue of the whole Republican Party. Strange transmigration!”1 From Sunday, May 12, 1861, when it was first sung at Fort Warren, “John Brown’s Body” quickly became a Union favorite:

A

John Brown’s body lies a-mouldering in the grave, John Brown’s body lies a-mouldering in the grave, John Brown’s body lies a-mouldering in the grave, His soul is marching on. CHORUS: Glory, glory, hallelujah! Glory, glory, hallelujah! Glory, glory, hallelujah! His soul is marching on.

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He’s gone to be a soldier in the army of the Lord, He’s gone to be a soldier in the army of the Lord, He’s gone to be a soldier in the army of the Lord, His soul is marching on! John Brown’s knapsack is strapped upon his back, John Brown’s knapsack is strapped upon his back, John Brown’s knapsack is strapped upon his back, His soul is marching on! His pet lambs will meet him on the way, His pet lambs will meet him on the way, His pet lambs will meet him on the way, They go marching on! They will hang Jeff Davis to a sour apple tree, They will hang Jeff Davis to a sour apple tree, They will hang Jeff Davis to a sour apple tree, As they march along! Now, three rousing cheers for the Union, Now, three rousing cheers for the Union, Now, three rousing cheers for the Union, As we are marching on!2

Offering a secular rendition of Christ’s burial and resurrection, “John Brown’s Body” puts religion to work in the service of wartime nationalism. Opening with the graphic “John Brown’s body lies a-mouldering in the grave,” the song proceeds to describe the transformation of Brown’s corpse; he becomes a foot soldier in “the army of the Lord,” and finally a martyr. As Brown’s body decays, his spirit is reborn and, in turn, donates new life to the army and the nation it serves. Singing this song, soldiers celebrated the power of Brown’s body, as it disappeared, to produce a spirited community that found expression in “three rousing cheers for the Union.” And yet, even as the song translated death into martial enthusiasm, reminding soldiers that they died on behalf of a greater cause, it did not allow them to ignore the difficult reality of violent death. Brown’s body could not be forgotten long; each time the song was sung his rotting corpse was brought back into view. When soldiers sang “John Brown’s Body” they did not simply celebrate Brown’s death or its redemptive aftermath, but rather the very process of transformation through which corpses, in all their gruesome and seemingly intractable materiality, are reinterpreted as group spirit: the song schooled soldiers in the abstraction of bodily suffering that allows for the amplification of the body’s social meaning.3

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Keeping the rotting corpse firmly in view, the song speaks to the problem, at once psychological and political, posed by war: how can citizens and soldiers believe that the losses they suffer, individually and collectively, are worthwhile? More dramatically, why do soldiers continue to fight once exposed to the deaths of their comrades and the harrowing experience of combat? Imaginatively reversing the effects of violence, granting both agency and meaning to the process of decay, the song suggests that progress begins with the body’s demise. In this way, Brown’s example may have helped soldiers envision their own deaths as a source of collective rejuvenation; the song encouraged soldiers to believe that an individual’s death might enable the larger community—the people or nation—to endure. While “John Brown’s Body” put Brown’s death to work in service of the state, Brown, championing the cause of the enslaved, died the state’s enemy. Many versions of the song, like the one cited above, make no mention of slavery, the cause for which Brown chose to martyr himself.4 Brown’s wartime incarnation as a martyred hero does not, however, represent the erasure of his abolitionist past, but rather its translation: in its emphasis on physical suffering as the basis of political community the song remains faithful to the principles, if not the purposes, that structured Brown’s abolitionism and led him to radical action at Harper’s Ferry. Like other abolitionists, Brown saw slave suffering as a catalyst for identifications that might further the resistance to slavery. In the weeks before his execution, he described his impending death as the consequence of his sympathy for slaves, and hoped that his public suffering would prompt others to action. When applied to the problem of wartime nationalism— how to create an affective bond between state and citizen strong enough to compel the citizen’s willing self-sacrifice—Brown’s own belief that pain produces political community substantiated a vision of the nation rejuvenated by the deaths of soldiers. Brown’s martyrdom, an instance of the radical consequences of compassion, culminates a tradition of abolitionist sympathy; in turn, his death is one of the founding moments in the development of a Northern nationalism based on the affective power of self-sacrifice. Analyzing the relationship between reformist efforts to cultivate compassion and nationalist efforts to rationalize mass violence, I will not contend that one leads inexorably to the other, or that the two are fundamentally opposed. Instead, I hope to use a set of discrete historical events to demonstrate that the production of sympathetic feeling can check or further violent practice. I will examine the construction of Brown’s martyrdom—by friends and foes, the press, and Brown himself—in the weeks preceding and following what he liked to call his “public murder.” The struggle over the

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significance of Brown’s death was, most broadly, a contest over the political meaning of the violated body—its ability to confer identity on a group and to grant that identity political legitimacy. Abolitionists who supported Brown took their cues from Brown himself: describing the raid on Harper’s Ferry as an example of sympathy put into practice, they viewed the violence initiated and suffered by Brown as a model for further antislavery activism. Embracing Brown’s resistance to unjust laws, they rededicated their commitment to a “higher law” and renewed their sense of collective purpose. By contrast, state authorities reasserted the power of the law in the face of Brown’s incendiary violence and, in doing so, sent a warning to insurrectionaries North and South: disobedience would not be tolerated. They hoped that the spectacle of execution would sever public identification with Brown and put an end to the inflammatory potential of his example. This essay reconsiders the legend of Brown, canonized by “John Brown’s Body,” in light of the sweeping influence of antislavery rhetoric during the prewar years and, more locally, the logistics of his widely publicized execution. Poised between two of the great crises of the nineteenthcentury United States—slavery and the Civil War—Brown’s martyrdom suggests the expansive tendency of sympathy, which leads inevitably toward abstraction, and the impotence of the state to halt this process. Indeed, the government failed to discipline the radical sympathies of Northern abolitionists or the insurrectionary aspirations of secessionists; providing a rallying point for the antislavery community, Brown’s execution only aggravated Southerners inclined to secede. During war, however, the state derived its authority from the escalation of violence rather than the ability to control it. As “John Brown’s Body” suggests, the state was ultimately fortified by the logic of sympathy that initially posed a threat to the rule of law: Brown’s martyrdom prefigured a wartime nationalism that relied on individual self-sacrifice and took the escalation of violence as a source of collective identity rather than a threat to the state’s integrity. When Booth, serving in a Virginia regiment, witnessed Brown’s execution, he may have assumed that Brown’s career as an agitator had come to an end. Brown himself, however, understood that a traitor put to death by the state might exert untold influence. Accustomed to struggle and disappointment—the death of his first wife and 10 of his 20 children, failed business ventures, dislocation, and poverty—Brown greeted his capture, imprisonment, and execution with exuberance. Writing from prison, Brown assured his cousin, the Reverend Luther Humphrey, “No part of my life has been more happily spent than that I have spent here.” In another, he exclaimed “I certainly think I was never more cheerful in my life.” Brown was happy, at least in part, because he saw an opportunity for public

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influence that had never before been available to him: “I am worth inconceivably more to hang than for any other purpose” (quoted in Sanborn 1969, 588, 594, 610). Brown recognized that his body, subject to the violence of the state, had become a source of public meaning. During the month between his sentencing and his execution, he seized every opportunity to address a Northern audience from the courtroom, the cell, and finally the scaffold; his words and gestures carried great significance as they circulated in the Northern press. Brown was aware that he had the power to move his audience, and he used it masterfully. As Henry David Thoreau described it, “They did not hang him at once, but reserved him to preach to them . . . and so his victory was prolonged and completed. No theatrical manager could have arranged things so wisely to give effect to his behavior and words.”5 On November 2, 1859, Brown, having been convicted of treason, conspiring with slaves to rebel, and murder in the first degree, was given an opportunity to address the court. In this speech, he went some distance toward shaping the meaning of his death for his contemporaries as well as future historians. Brown embraced his impending execution with the following words: “Now, 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!” (Scheidenhelm 1972, 36–37). In a sweeping rhetorical gesture made meaningful by his impending death on the scaffold, Brown used the figure of blood to ally his extraordinary fate with the routine abuse of slaves. Blood, imagined here as a sort of universal fluid, unites Brown, his family, and countless slaves.6 Combining his lifeblood with the “blood of millions,” Brown participates in, and radicalizes, a tradition of abolitionist sympathy that describes slave suffering in an effort to mobilize readers. Putting sympathetic epistemology into practice, Brown dramatizes his own capacity to feel the pain of others and to act on their behalf.7 Antislavery authors and orators hoped to convert audiences to the cause by conveying the slave’s physical and emotional pain: they imagined representations of slave suffering setting in motion a chain of responsive anguish which would culminate in the eradication of slavery itself. In “The Story of Uncle Tom’s Cabin” (1878), Harriet Beecher Stowe describes the composition of her antislavery novel as the result of a mysterious encounter with a brutalized slave. She tells her readers that the “first part of the book committed to writing was the death of Uncle Tom.” While taking communion at a small church in Brunswick, Maine, Stowe received a vision of Tom’s death. She was “perfectly overcome by it, and could scarcely

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restrain the convulsion of tears and sobbings that shook her frame” (Stowe 1965, x–xxv, xix). This encounter initiates a series of exchanges in which Tom’s suffering, conveyed through the medium of fiction, causes others to suffer. After receiving her vision, Stowe rushed home and put the scene down on paper. When she read it aloud to her sons they too broke down in “convulsions of weeping, one of them saying, through his sobs, ‘O mamma, slavery is the most cursed thing in the world!’ ”(xix). Once published, the novel was so popular that “eight power-presses, running day and night” barely satisfied public demand. As Stowe’s unaccountable vision is transmitted in ever widening circles, the anguish “that had long weighed on her soul, seemed to pass off from her and into the readers of the book” (xxi–xxii). Describing an encounter between the abused, black male body and the responsive feminine imagination as the source of her abolitionist fiction, Stowe maintains that narrated pain, transmitted through the vulnerable body of the sympathetic listener or reader, will produce a compassionate community.8 Such extraordinary confidence in the power of narration to bridge experiential distance helped antislavery writers to cope with their own ignorance. Northern abolitionists stood at a vast remove from the scene of slavery; by and large, they lacked firsthand knowledge of the institution they sought to dismantle. They addressed an audience that, likewise, gained its knowledge of slavery through oral and written testimony. Stowe herself faltered in the face of inexperience. When Tom boarded a steamboat headed South, Stowe missed her weekly installment in the National Era and appealed to Frederick Douglass for information about plantation life (Hedrick 1994, 219). While Stowe’s lack of firsthand knowledge caused her some anxiety, one might argue that her inexperience accounts for much of the novel’s power. At its most effective, abolitionist writing makes a virtue out of necessity by transforming the condition of geographical dislocation into an epistemological challenge: how can one feel for strangers over great distances? Or, to put it another way, how can one feel the pain of a suffering body when the body itself is absent? In keeping with her inability to deliver up the body of the suffering slave, Stowe renders Tom’s death without graphic detail. His deathblow is described in one sentence: “Legree, foaming with rage, smote his victim to the ground.” In the next, Stowe tells us “Scenes of blood and cruelty are shocking to our ear and heart. What man has nerve to do, man has not nerve to hear” (Stowe 1965, 415). At Tom’s deathbed, Stowe again turns our attention away from his physical suffering and toward the redemptive sorrow of those moved by Tom’s example: Sambo, Quimbo, Cassy, and others are converted to Christianity by Tom’s death. Rather than allowing us full access to her mystical encounter, Stowe reproduces the

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absence of firsthand experience that prompts and structures abolitionist writing. If Stowe is constrained by her distance from the scene of slavery, this distance becomes, in turn, a great resource: antislavery writing can be viewed as a sustained meditation on the power of the imagination, and its limitations, in the face of inexperience. In lieu of the actual body of the suffering slave, the body of the witness, who imitates the slave’s pain in the process of identifying with her, often becomes the object of scrutiny in abolitionist texts. Anatomizing the process of readerly identification, Elizabeth Margaret Chandler used the term mental metempsychosis. Metempsychosis, a word that derives from spiritualist practice, describes the soul’s migration, after death, into another body. Chandler applies the concept to the imaginative migrations of the abolitionist reader. If her audience could “imagine themselves for a few moments in his [the slave’s] . . . circumstances . . . enter into his feelings . . . transform themselves mentally into his very self,” compassion would surely follow. In particular, readers must strive to reenact the physical pain of punishment. Chandler asks her readers to “let the fetter lie with its wearing weight upon their wrists . . . and the successive strokes of the keen thong fall upon their shoulders till the flesh rises in long welts beneath it, and the spouting blood follows every blow” (Chandler 1836, 117, 118). As this passage suggests, in the face of their distance from the scene of slavery and the consequent absence of the slave’s abused body, abolitionist authors and readers are compelled by imagined pain: the suffering conjured by the abolitionist author or reader takes place in her own mind. At its most successful, identification loses sight of its object, and sympathy begins to appear a closed circle in which the reader’s projections give rise to her experience of pain. Here, as elsewhere, the practice of sympathetic identification presents a certain dilemma: should we understand mental metempsychosis as an exercise in solipsism, in which sympathy produces a particularly acute experience of one’s own body, or as an imaginative encounter that briefly shatters the very bounds of identity?9 Shirley Samuels describes the “corporealizing and transcendentalizing double impulse of sentimental discourse” (Samuels 1992, 160). Indeed, it is this double impulse that allows the reader to acknowledge the suffering of others and to absorb it as if it were her own. Yet rather than viewing both impulses as integral to sympathetic epistemology, critics tend to praise a sentimental interest in embodiment while taking a more critical view of the urge to abstraction. Reform minded sentimentalists demonstrated that certain groups of people were excluded from the privileges of citizenship on the basis of their bodily characteristics. In this way, they provided a corrective to political discourse that viewed democratic citizens as disembodied.

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This contribution to political thought was compromised, however, by the tendency of the sentimental witness to appropriate the pain of the suffering victim, thus obscuring the particularity of the victim’s experience.10 In this view, an emphasis on the responsive suffering of the spectator or reader evidences of a certain ineffectiveness, even brutality, at the heart of sentimental method.11 Such evaluations of sentimentality assume that pain is most valuable as a means to political change when it remains an unassimilable attribute of the person who has suffered it. Perhaps because we live during an era in which mass movements have been galvanized by appeals to experience, it is hard for us to fathom the depth of a sentimental commitment to intersubjectivity. While critics often view efforts to politicize bodily suffering and efforts to generalize it as fundamentally opposed, sentimentalists regarded the discursive transformation of particular, embodied experience into abstract, collective experience as a means to political change.12 This is not to say, however, that such claims were self-fulfilling or their ethical valence clear-cut. While abolitionists wanted to describe suffering in order to eradicate it, they often narrated its proliferation: representing pain as easily and widely communicable, abolitionists envisioned a community bound not by race, gender, or class identity but by pain itself. The spectator’s response to pain, imitated in turn by the sentimental reader, initiates a chain reaction in which many people potentially suffer as a result of a single act of violence. While the abstraction of pain can enable a broad audience to engage the problem of suffering, it can also allow people to revel in the dramatic prospect of violence without end. I would identify the tendency to use the abstraction of bodily pain to imagine alternately the elimination of suffering and its proliferation as the double impulse that at once characterizes and problematizes abolitionist sentimentality. In “The World’s Homage” (1882), a poem written for Stowe on her seventieth birthday, Oliver Wendell Holmes praised her famous antislavery novel by comparing Uncle Tom to John Brown: All through the conflict, up and down Marched Uncle Tom and Old John Brown, One ghost, one form ideal; And which was false and which was true, And which was mightier of the two, The wisest sibyl never knew, For both alike were real. (Holmes 1892, 277)

Dwelling on the interchangeability of fact and fancy, fictional character and historical actor, Holmes celebrates the political efficacy of Stowe’s

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fiction by comparing Uncle Tom to the maverick Brown. As Elizabeth Barnes has noted, sentimental writing does not distinguish between real and fictional characters “for the simple reason that, based on the principles of sympathy, other people become real to us through our projected sentiments, not by their objective presence in the world” (Barnes 1997, 96). If sympathy aims to reconstruct social division as affective harmony, the relationship between a real reader and a fictional character and, more broadly, between fictional and real worlds, provides an analog to the problem of social difference. Indeed, the process of identifying across the bounds of representation resembles the imaginative work of cultivating feeling for strangers. And yet, while Holmes uses Brown’s example to substantiate the political effect of Uncle Tom, and of sentimental fiction more broadly, it is tempting to reverse this relationship and ask if Brown might not derive credibility from Uncle Tom’s example. A white man who dies on behalf of slaves, a Northerner who encroaches on Southern territory, Brown suggests the practical consequences of the imaginative self-extension Stowe’s novel demands.13 In his courtroom speech, Brown, like Stowe, is concerned with the transformation of victimization into community. But because Brown’s pain is not imagined but real, he is able to realize and extend the premises of abolitionist sympathy. While abolitionists analogized actual and imagined suffering in an effort to produce identifications, Brown literalized this analogy by offering his own body to stand in place of the slave’s. Brown explains that his actions at Harper’s Ferry, as elsewhere, were inspired by the Golden Rule. He tells his audience that the Bible “teaches that all things whatsoever I would that men should do to me, I should do even so to them. It teaches me, further, to ‘remember them that are in bonds, as bound with them.’ I endeavored to act up to that instruction” (Scheidenhelm 1972, 36–37). Brown is, in a sense, the ideal sympathetic reader. Taking to heart the Bible’s injunction to remember those who suffer, he demonstrates the power of identification by placing his own body on the scaffold. Years after his father’s death, John Brown, Jr. told a story that suggests that the principle of substitution had long united his father’s religious and political practice. During an unruly phase in his son’s life, John Brown kept an account of how much punishment was due for John, Jr.’s various infractions: for disobeying his mother, he owed eight lashes; for telling a lie, eight more. When the time came, John, Sr., as anticipated, applied the whip to his son’s back. A third of the way through the allotted number of strokes, however, he stopped, handed the whip to his son, took off his shirt, and demanded that his son finish the beating. John Jr. recounts “I dared not refuse to obey, but at first I did not strike hard. ‘Harder!’ he said; ‘harder,

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harder!’ until he received the balance of the account.” Initially mystified, it is only years later that John Jr. realized that his father was offering a “practical illustration” of the doctrine of atonement—that “justice could be satisfied by inflicting penalty upon the back of the innocent instead of the guilty” (Oates 1970, 24; Sanborn 1969, 91–93). As in the writing of Stowe and Chandler, the scene of punishment provides an opportunity for actual and imagined substitutions. Trading places with his son, Brown seems less interested in the exercise of compassion than in elaborating a certain structural relation, one of equivalence that is realized through substitution and its result—shared pain. Brown’s admirers frequently praised him for submitting to punishment intended for slaves alone; they celebrated his willingness to die for the rights of others. Speaking in New York shortly after Brown’s execution, Wendell Phillips declared, “Heroes of other days died for their own rights. John Brown died for a race in whose blood he had no share.”14 Yet if Phillips believed that Brown was a hero because he was a white man willing to suffer on behalf of slaves, Brown himself saw such substitutions as a means of confounding racial identity altogether. While Phillips uses the language of blood to distinguish between those who die for themselves and those who die for others, Brown refuses this distinction. Blood shed, first by slaves and then by Brown himself, is reinterpreted as one blood, a common fluid that circulates between Brown, his children, and slave millions. An analog to Stowe’s “eight power-presses,” Brown’s blood provides the medium that binds a far-flung imagined community. Envisioning the communication of pain as a means to social transformation, many abolitionist writers, both black and white, drive toward Brown’s apocalyptic figure of common blood. And yet, their rhetoric never abandons racial distinctions. An emphasis on the slave’s corporeal suffering tends to essentialize racial difference: physical pain becomes the province of slaves, and suffering, by extension, a property of blackness. The analogy between physical and emotional pain promises that suffering can be shared across an experiential divide while maintaining a racialized distinction between forms of suffering. Positing a common blood that transcends racial boundaries, Brown dismisses the literal form of the body, white or black, in favor of an emphasis on bodily substance, which, as it flows, inheres in no particular body. Blood signifies a common medium extracted, or abstracted, from the staggering material differences between the enslaved and the unenslaved. Taken to its logical extreme, the figure of mingled blood detaches pain from any concrete bodily or racial referent. Because he is willing to suffer physical rather than emotional pain, the martyr undermines the analogy between physical and psychic suffering that at once associates and divides victim and spectator. In doing so, he

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realizes the most extraordinary and ominous implications of sympathetic thought—that suffering inflicted on one person, or one group of people, will inevitably spread as violence overwhelms distinctions of circumstance and identity. When Lydia Maria Child learned that John Brown had been captured and wounded, she responded with characteristic practicality. She wrote to Virginia Governor Henry Wise to ask for permission to visit Brown in prison. In her letter, she explains that while she does not approve of Brown’s raid, she and “thousands of others” cannot help “feel[ing] a natural impulse of sympathy for the brave and suffering man.” However misguided his actions, Brown now needs “a mother or sister to dress his wounds, and speak soothingly to him.” Praising Wise as a “man of chivalrous sentiments,” she asks, “Will you allow me to perform that mission of humanity?”15 Wise’s reply to Child was nothing if not chivalrous. As Virginia and Massachusetts are “involved in no Civil War,” and as both abide by a constitution that grants the same “privileges and immunities” to all citizens as they travel between states, Wise is “bound to protect” Child if she wishes to visit Virginia for any purpose. “You have the right to visit Charlestown” Wise assures her, “and your mission, being merciful and humane, will not only be allowed, but respected, if not welcomed.” Yet Wise’s studied deference quickly gives way. He continues, “I could not permit an insult even to woman in her walk of charity among us, though it be to one who whetted knives of butchery for our mothers, sisters, daughters, and babes.” Child presents her desire to nurse Brown as a natural and uncalculated expression of sympathy. Wise turns the tables by attacking such feminine feeling as the source of sectional strife. While Virginians, ever cordial, know how to treat a lady visitor, Child must make no mistake—they “have no sympathy with your sentiments of sympathy with Brown.” To the contrary, Brown’s raid “was a natural consequence of your sympathy, and the errors of that sympathy ought to make you doubt its virtue from the effect on his conduct.”16 While Wise’s charge might appear, at first, outlandish, his hardheaded response to Child’s letter asks us to regard Brown’s radicalism, and the consequent escalation of sectional hatred, as one manifestation of sympathy as it was popularized by antislavery activists. He asserts that the violence that characterized the struggle over slavery during the 1850s was the product of a reformist discourse that took compassion as its motive force. Calling claims to an organic and spontaneous outpouring of emotion into question, Wise demands that we consider the strategic uses of sympathy. As sectional hostilities mounted and legal measures failed to produce resolution, Northerners and Southerners feared that violence was

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inevitable. Southerners imagined that Brown and his men were backed by a Northern mob willing to take the law into its own hands. Antislavery Northerners obliged this fear by celebrating Brown’s transgressions, and pledging their dedication to a “higher law.” The status of sympathy—a key term in this conflict—was called into question time and again: was it a transformative power associated with individual and collective renewal, or was it a byword for partisan aggression that stood in opposition to the law? Child’s response to Brown’s raid on Harper’s Ferry was intense. Throughout the fall of 1859, she was preoccupied with the Brown affair. She confessed to friends, “I can think and talk of nothing but Capt John Brown.” Writing to her niece, Child announced, “Recent events have renewed my youth and strength. I am full of electricity” (Child 1982, 329, 339). Indeed, Brown’s action revived Child’s waning abolitionist energy, inaugurating a period of intense political activity (Karcher 1994, 416). Her reaction was not uncharacteristic. While Northerners largely disapproved of Brown’s raid, antislavery radicals—authors, clergymen, and activists— were inspired by his action. Thoreau, for example, described being “so absorbed in him as to be surprised whenever I detected the routine of the natural world surviving still.”17 Brown’s raid, trial, and execution energized the abolitionist community. Supporters were happy to find themselves roused from their daily routines by a vicarious experience of Brown’s millennial commitment. In addition, Brown’s trial and execution provided the impetus for a flurry of political organizing. From the time of Brown’s arrest at Harper’s Ferry until some weeks after he was executed, public meetings were held in many Northern cities to express solidarity with Brown and to commemorate his martyrdom. These meetings gave the era’s most illustrious thinkers and activists an opportunity to renew their assault on slavery. They also provided an occasion for fundraising.18 Those attending were often charged a fee at the door while inside they had a chance to buy Brown paraphernalia— photos of Brown or copies of his courtroom speech featuring a facsimile of his signature on the back. As well as raising money for Brown’s family, these meetings disseminated commemorative objects that materialized, and thus fostered, the community’s attachment to Brown. The speeches delivered at these meetings often celebrated Brown’s raid by describing its restoring effect on a society stupefied by commerce and legalism. Speakers routinely defended Brown’s actions by appealing to a “higher law.” By acting his conscience in defiance of the law, they argued, Brown renewed the legacy of the founders or, more often, that of the austere and devout Puritans who, in the public imagination, so resembled Brown. In either case, Brown’s violence regenerated society by affirming a commitment to original principles that had been degraded by the legal

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compromises of the 1850s. Thoreau, one of Brown’s most ardent supporters, offered an extravagant rendition of these ideas in “A Plea for Captain John Brown.” Less than two weeks after Brown’s capture, Thoreau convened a public meeting in Concord where he delivered a passionate defense of Brown’s raid. Written hastily on the basis of his journal entries, Thoreau’s speech combines unbridled praise for Brown’s character with a vituperative indictment of contemporary life. Brown’s bravery throws the mediocrity of the common citizen into relief; he towers above a people plagued by an “all but universal woodenness of both head and heart” (Thoreau 1906, 120). Free of self-interest and undaunted by the prospect of bodily suffering, Brown has no equal. And yet, even as Thoreau celebrated Brown’s unrivaled individual powers, he imagined that in death Brown would communicate his rare sensibility to the public at large. While others, like Child, hoped Brown would be spared, Thoreau feared to “hear of his deliverance, doubting if a prolonged life, if any life, can do as much good as his death” (Thoreau 1906, 429). In his “Plea,” Thoreau describes the power of Brown’s death to rejuvenate public life as an organic process, proclaiming that “in the moral world, when good seed is planted, good fruit is inevitable . . . when you plant, or bury, a hero in his field, a crop of heroes is sure to spring up.” He portrays the North as a single body through which Brown’s influence, metaphorized as blood, might flow. Echoing Brown’s own insistence on blood as a medium of collective meaning, Thoreau proclaims that Brown’s “acts and words” have “quickened the feeble pulse of the North, and infused . . . generous blood into her veins and heart” (Thoreau 1906, 119, 135). Figuring the blood Brown sheds as a source of collective well-being, Thoreau, like many of Brown’s defenders, imagines the martyr’s death as a life force. If Brown imagined his own representative body infused by the blood of slaves, his followers imagined Brown’s body reinvigorating the antislavery community and inspiring Northerners at large. Brown’s supporters proclaimed the martyr’s power to generate community in opposition to the law. In doing so, they embraced the idea that insurrectionary violence, the natural outcome of a deeply felt sympathy, might renew American political life. While organic images of growth and circulation provided figures for a nascent Northern nationalism, Southern regional community formed in defense of the law. If Brown’s raid prompted increased public demonstration in Northern states, it provoked an unprecedented militarization in the South. In the wake of Brown’s raid, Wise was confronted with a number of difficult decisions. At every juncture he chose to escalate rather than pacify sectional animosity: he decided to have Brown tried by a Virginia court rather than turning him over to federal authorities;

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he repeatedly mobilized the militia during the weeks preceding Brown’s execution, thus contributing to an atmosphere of suspicion and hysteria; and he refused to commute Brown’s death sentence (Oates 1970, 307, 322). During the weeks before Brown’s execution, Wise received countless letters from both Southerners and Northerners urging him not to hang John Brown. They warned that by executing Brown, Wise would insure his martyrdom and, consequently, galvanize the antislavery community. This point of view enraged Wise, who argued that Brown’s raid must be regarded as the result rather than the cause of Northern solidarity. In a speech to the Virginia legislature two days after Brown’s death Wise defended his decision to execute Brown. Wise asked, “will execution of the legal sentence of a humane law make martyrs of such criminals? Do sectional and social masses hallow these crimes? Do whole communities sympathize with the outlaws, instead of sympathizing with the outraged society of a sister sovereignty? If so, then the sympathy is as felonious as the criminals, and is far more dangerous than was the invasion. The threat of martyrdom is a threat against our peace, and demands execution to defy such sympathy and such saints of martyrdom. . . . Sympathy was in insurrection, and had to be subdued more sternly than was John Brown” (Scheidenhelm 1972, 144). In this fierce attack on Northern sympathy, Wise argues that Brown’s raid was not, as Republicans asserted, the work of an extremist, but rather an expression of widespread regional hostility.19 He insists that the raiders were not ruffians or bandits acting alone but representatives of “an extraordinary and actual invasion, by a sectional organization” (Scheidenhelm 1972, 133). In his view, the sympathy expressed by Northerners in response to Brown’s raid was one instance of the regional consensus that made the raid possible in the first place. While Child and Thoreau found themselves transformed by Brown’s unprecedented heroism, Wise, unwilling to accept this model of political influence, maintained that the sensibility of a community generates seemingly extraordinary acts of violence. Like Brown’s supporters, Wise set sympathy in opposition to the law; unlike them he held that the law must be reasserted with force. Orchestrating the circumstances of Brown’s execution, Wise faced an enormous challenge. He not only had to assert the rule of law in an effort to discourage would-be insurrectionaries, but also to defuse the belief— a cornerstone of sympathetic thought and representation—that a single suffering body might radicalize and animate a vast community. On the one hand, Wise had to deter the violence of an anti-Brown lynch mob that would tar Virginia with the brush of vigilante violence. On the other, he needed to guard against the possibility that Brown’s execution would prompt sympathy in a community of spectators. The power of the

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martyred body to generate affect and, consequently, to incite an unruly community, had to be suppressed: organizing Brown’s execution, Wise did his best to insure that Brown’s death would fortify state authority. Emotion ran high in Charlestown as Brown’s execution approached. Rumor had it that abolitionists were preparing to attack the town and break Brown out of jail. All the same, the mood was festive. Drums beat and music played as soldiers poured into town. The graveyard doubled as a campground where soldiers played cards and ate their meals on headstones. Locals who gathered outside the Baptist church to watch a carpenter build Brown’s scaffold hoped to obtain a splinter of wood as a souvenir.20 John Wilkes Booth was so eager to witness Brown’s execution that he borrowed a uniform and talked his friends in the Virginia militia into letting him join them. Passing as a soldier, Booth watched Brown hang.21 A hundred years earlier, the day’s festivities would have extended to the foot of the scaffold. By mid-century, however, executions were, by and large, conducted privately. While executions once provided an occasion for collective admonition and instruction, people now feared that public punishment would promote unrest and undermine the power of the law.22 While Brown’s execution was conducted publicly, every effort was made to keep witnesses at a distance. In an attempt to insure against public violence, Wise stopped just short of imposing martial law in Charlestown. He circulated a proclamation cautioning citizens to remain at home, guarding their property. The army took over the Winchester and Potomac railroads, refusing passage to civilians and arresting “strangers” who could not account for themselves. Further militarizing the scene of Brown’s execution, Wise deployed 1,500 troops around the scaffold. These preparations insured that unruly crowds would not gather at the site. A crowd of vengeful residents was hardly more attractive to authorities than a crowd of unruly sympathizers. Virginia represented the law in the face of Brown’s lawless aggression and, more significantly, the irreverence and hostility of antislavery Northerners. To allow for any expression of violence from civilians would suggest Brown’s power to disrupt civic order and recall the disreputable vigilante customs that had given anti-abolitionism a bad name. In his eyewitness account of Brown’s execution, David Hunter Strother, the southern illustrator more commonly known by his pseudonym Porte Crayon, emphasized the difference between the frenetic wrath of a mob and the austere composure of the law in action. He writes, “No man capable of reflection could have witnessed that scene without being deeply impressed with the truth that then and there was exhibited, not the vengeance of an outraged people, but the awful majesty of the law.”23 Guarding against public disorder, Wise also hoped to deny Brown access to the press and, through the press, the Northern public. Reversing

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a lax policy that had allowed Brown’s words and deeds to flow freely to the Northern press, Wise tried to make sure that Northern newspapers would not convey Brown’s heroism in death. It was not only the spectacle of Brown’s execution Wise hoped to suppress, but also the power of his public speech. Although Wise claimed he didn’t want witnesses caught in the crossfire in the event of a rescue attempt, members of the Northern press believed that witnesses were kept away from the scaffold so that no one would hear what Brown might say in the moments before his death. Noting that only military men would be permitted “within hearing of what Brown may say,” a reporter speculated “why this jealous caution? Can it be that it is feared this old man’s sturdy truths and simple eloquence will stir a fever in the blood of all who listen, that shall break down the barriers of prejudice, and shatter their feeble principles like glass?”24 While Brown promised that he would not speak from the scaffold, Wise could not be sure; with the influence of Brown’s courtroom speech still fresh in mind, Wise was determined to avoid a repeat performance. Sentenced to die, Brown attained a certain authority. From the day of his sentencing until the moment of his execution, the condemned man speaks from the midst of a violent act suspended and attenuated; the victim of certain violence that is yet to be performed, the prisoner awaiting execution can narrate anticipated suffering. Indeed, Brown did all he could to dramatize his pain. Throughout his trial he lay on a cot in the middle of the courtroom. At times he closed his eyes or let out a pained groan. Visual representations of Brown that circulated in the illustrated press often show him lying prone, emphasizing his weak and injured body. These illustrations construct the weeks preceding Brown’s execution as an extended and eventful deathbed scene (see figures 2.1 and 2.2). As if to suppress any emotions that the spectacle of Brown’s suffering might provoke, Wise deployed a crowd of armed spectators at the scene of Brown’s death; these soldiers, standing “mute and motionless,” expressed the power of the state.25 In the end, however, Wise’s order forbidding journalists near the scaffold was “partially rescinded” and a handful of reporters were allowed a position near the Major-General’s staff.26 It is difficult to understand why, at the last moment, they were allowed on the scene. One suspects that while authorities wanted to deny Northern readers access to the pathos of Brown’s execution they also wanted to use newspaper publicity to display Virginia’s military power. Such a display would impress Northerners with the military might of a Southern state while also representing Federal authority in the face of treason. The massive military spectacle at the foot of the scaffold might convince spectators near and far that Virginia could bring force and efficiency to its defense of the law. Eyewitness Major Preston testified to the awesome spectacle of state violence: “The field of execution was a rising ground that commanded

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Figure 2.1 Alfred Berghaus, “Carrying Prisoners from the Armory to the Railroad Station.” Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper, November 12, 1859. West Virginia State Archives, Boyd B. Stutler Collection.

Figure 2.2 W.S.L. Jewett, “Trial of Ossawattamie [sic] Brown.” Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper, November 12, 1859. West Virginia State Archives, Boyd B. Stutler Collection.

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the out-stretching valley from mountain to mountain, and their still grandeur gave sublimity to the outline. . . . Before us was the greatest array of disciplined forces ever seen in Virginia, infantry, cavalry, and artillery combined, composed of the old Commonwealth’s choicest sons, and commanded by her best officers, and the great canopy of the sky, overarching all, came to add its sublimity” (Allan 1903, 114). Ideally then, a huge military presence would at once impress spectators with Virginia’s might and serve as a buffer to keep spectators from getting too close to the scene of execution.27 Spectators could, however, watch Brown’s execution from afar. One journalist noted that the field of execution, which he saw from his window, was open to public view. He observed, “Not a tree, save one solitary antiquated thorn tree in the centre, is there to intercept the view so that many of the residents of Charlestown can enjoy the prospect of John Brown’s strangulation without leaving their homes.”28 While witnesses were kept from getting too close, Brown’s execution remained an emphatically public event. Accordingly, “The Death of John Brown,” published in Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper on December 10, depicts the execution from a distance (see figure 2.3). We view the scaffold from the far end of the

Figure 2.3 “The Death of John Brown.” Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper, December 10, 1859. Negative #29062, Collection of The New-York Historical Society.

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field, looking across hundreds of soldiers standing in formation. The foreground is occupied by two groups of civilians who stand chatting, seemingly uninterested in the proceedings. They stand just behind a line of cavalry soldiers. Only a few of these men appear to be interested in Brown’s hanging. Others glance off to the side, distracted by something happening nearby, or engage in casual conversation. At some distance from these observers—whose posture and expression we are able to examine in some detail—we see troops lined up around the scaffold, their disciplined gaze trained on the victim. These soldiers appear to us in miniature—we note their rigid posture as they stand at attention, but cannot discern their expressions. The interested viewer must traverse a field of spectatorial models before arriving at the body in question. When our gaze reaches Brown himself, we may be somewhat disappointed: his body is an undifferentiated black splotch at the far side of this military display. Although the executioner is engaged in some action, we cannot tell whether he is letting Brown’s body fall, or raising it up again. The features of Brown’s body, and of the event itself, are subordinated to an examination of the crowd that gathers at the scaffold. Wise imagines the community of Northern sympathizers as yet another violent mob that must be kept at a distance from the prisoner. What he doesn’t understand is that the space between Brown’s body and the spectating community may incite, rather than suppress, a potentially inflammatory sympathy. While “The Death of John Brown” turns its attention away from Brown’s corpse and toward the display of military power, this distance may urge the viewer to work harder to imagine Brown’s death. As I have argued, sentimental representations of suffering rely on the distance between victim and viewer to provoke the viewer’s imaginative exertions. Far from diluting the effect of Brown’s execution, the military barrier presents a familiar challenge to those schooled in the conventions of sentimental reading: how to envision the suffering body that is not in full view. The vast space between scaffold and spectator allows for the abstraction of the body that is the essence of martyrdom. Melville’s poem “The Portent (1859)” anatomizes the process through which the absent body acquires meaning. Nowhere is the elision of Brown’s corpse expressed with more formal precision and linked more explicitly to the breadth of its political meaning. Melville begins with a lurid evocation of Brown’s body, Hanging from the beam, Slowly swaying (such the law), Gaunt the shadow on your green, Shenendoah! (Melville 1996, 11)

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There is, however, no subject in these opening lines, no noun or pronoun to realize the body’s presence in language. Instead of “the corpse” or “his body” we are offered “the shadow.” Brown’s body is available only in the darkness cast on the land (“Shenendoah!”) by its passing. In the second stanza Brown’s face is again “Hidden in the cap” and analogized to Virginia’s “veiled” future. In the absence of the literal body, the meaning of Brown’s corpse grows. It comes to signify a future of apocalyptic violence. In retrospect, the military spectacle intended to control Brown’s power seems instead to embody it; standing in for Brown’s body this group of soldiers—yet another community brought into being by Brown’s actions—testifies, unwittingly, to his influence. On December 2, one month after delivering his courtroom speech, Brown was escorted to the scaffold where, surrounded by 1,500 cavalry and militia, he was executed. According to Harper’s Weekly, by the time Brown reached the field, “the military had already full possession. Pickets were established, and citizens kept back, at the point of bayonet, from taking any position but that assigned to them.”29 Brown expressed his dismay that citizens were not allowed near the scaffold. But he was not about to miss his last opportunity to speak to the public he had recently cultivated. Outsmarting the governor was probably the last thing on Brown’s mind, but once again he managed to dwarf Wise’s appeal to law and order. Leaving prison, he handed a scrap of paper to one of his guards. It read: “I John Brown am now quite certain that the crimes of this guilty land: will never be purged away; but with Blood. I had as I now think: vainly flattered myself that without verry [sic] much bloodshed; it might be done.”30 On the morning of his execution Brown spoke not in imitation of Christ’s selfless love, but with the unrelenting voice of his own Calvinist God: in his last public utterance blood was not the medium of sympathy but of retribution. On the scaffold, Brown represented both a suffering slave population and a guilty white nation. Because he was a white man, the act of selfsacrifice doubled as an act of penance; to suffer in concert with slaves was also to pay a historical debt for the injuries whites have inflicted on slaves. Pointing toward the massive violence of the Civil War, this statement has been read as prophetic. When read alongside Brown’s courtroom address, it suggests the transformation that the rhetoric of suffering undergoes during the war years. As the bodies mounted, a theological emphasis on Christ’s love as a model for human compassion failed to account for the crisis. Those responsible for narrating the war—from politicians to poets—conjured a punitive God who exacts obedience in the form of human suffering. While Brown’s courtroom speech imagines the eradication of suffering, his final statement predicts its nationalization. As I have argued, however, these two renderings of blood sacrifice are not as different as they might

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first appear. Indeed, when Brown proclaims that bloodshed will “purge” the nation’s guilt, he extends the implications of his courtroom speech, which imagines blood as the medium of common pain. Sympathetic identification entails the imagined dissemination of violence, as represented pain is communicated to an un-implicated reader. Valorizing substitutions in which those who have not suffered stand in for those who have, the practice of sympathy lays the cultural groundwork for a nationalist vision of martyrdom as the basis for collective unity.31 In both contexts, pain, transformed from a singular into a universal condition, provides a source of common identity. In a sermon commemorating Brown’s death, Fales Henry Newhall used blood to represent the transformation of slave suffering into national suffering: “For years and generations God has been bottling these tears [of slaves], and if he returns them to us in showers of blood, who will dare to murmur at his justice? The tears and the blood of the strong and of the weak, of the white and of the black, are alike to Him ‘who hath made of one blood all nations of men’ ” (Newhall 1860, 203). Here blood at once punishes the errant community and substantiates a biblical rendering of national identity in which all are “alike” in God’s view. Brown expressed a similar view of the relationship between violence, equality, and national identity when he explained to Franklin Sanborn that the Golden Rule and the Declaration of Independence, identical in their thoroughgoing commitment to equality, augured apocalyptic destruction. “That is the doctrine, sir,” he announced, referring to sacred and secular laws in a single breath, “and rather than have that fail in the world, or in these States, ’t would be better for a whole generation to die a violent death” (Sanborn 1969, 620). Violence, in Newhall’s view and in Brown’s own, realizes a God given homogeneity that is, in turn, the source of national identity. Retributive violence not only visits bloodshed on a guilty community, thus evening the historical score, but it also redistributes and equalizes pain, suggesting the possibility of commonality achieved not, for example, through property ownership, but through violence applied evenly, over time, to blacks and whites. On the occasion of Abraham Lincoln’s death, Ralph Waldo Emerson compared Brown’s courtroom speech to the Gettysburg Address (Villard 1929, 646). Indeed, both are powerful meditations on the power of the martyred body, stripped of its particular identity, to generate political community. At Gettysburg, Lincoln asked living patriots to rededicate themselves to the unfinished business of war by following the example of the anonymous dead who “gave their lives so that the nation might live” (Lincoln 1989, 405). While Lincoln struck the perfect note at Gettysburg, he had been thinking about the relationship between physical

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suffering and political community for a long time. In his address to the Young Men’s Lyceum of Springfield, delivered in 1838, Lincoln imagined that the spectacular suffering of wounded soldiers might contribute to national stability. Worried over the prospect of civic unrest in postrevolutionary America, Lincoln argued for obedience to the law. And yet, his shrill insistence on the virtue of the law and his sensational renderings of the dangers that assail it suggest Lincoln’s uneasiness about the law’s power to maintain stability. Toward the end of the speech, he turns to the wounded bodies of Revolutionary War veterans, describing their power to unify a national public. “At the close of that struggle,” Lincoln recounts, “every adult male had been a participator in some of its scenes. The consequence was, that of those scenes, in the form of a husband, a father, a son or a brother, a living history was to be found in every family—a history bearing the indubitable testimonies of its own authenticity, in the limbs mangled, in the scars of wounds received, in the midst of the very scenes related.” Lincoln imagines that during the Revolutionary era the bodies of wounded war veterans rededicated citizens to founding principles. Unlike the abstruse text of the law, or the arcane history book, these illustrative bodies offered a history that could be “read and understood alike by all, the wise and the ignorant, the learned and the unlearned.” Lincoln is concerned, however, over what will happen when these bodies disappear and “can be read no more forever.” Comparing the old soldiers to giant oaks leveled by a hurricane, Lincoln laments that while one now finds “here and there, a lonely trunk,” soon they all will “sink, and be no more.”32 Extolling the power of the soldier’s wounded body to attach citizens to the state, Lincoln mourns the disappearance of that body. By the time that Lincoln arrived in Gettysburg, however, he understood that the features of the body—dead or wounded—had little to do with its capacity to motivate an audience. Lincoln’s brief speech makes no mention of the particulars of the battle, or the actions and identities of individual soldiers. Years earlier, Lincoln had longed for the distinctive bodies of wounded soldiers whose scars would tell the story of war to the uninitiated. Invested in the form of the wounded body, Lincoln assumed that when the body disappeared its communicative powers were lost. At Gettysburg, the identity of the dead body and the particulars of its demise have no place. What remains important, however, is the ability of the dead to sustain community. The brevity of Lincoln’s address suggests humility: what is there to say, he implies, in the face of such profound loss? Observing that “in a larger sense, we can not dedicate—we can not consecrate—we can not hallow— this ground,” Lincoln describes a nation of mourners similarly humbled by the spectacle of mass death. While Lincoln portrays himself and his fellows as nearly immobilized by the tragedy of war, he grants tremendous agency

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to those buried at Gettysburg. Having declared his inability to commemorate the dead adequately, Lincoln asks those gathered to take “from these honored dead . . . increased devotion.” This devotion, directed to the Union cause, insures that the nation will have “a new birth of freedom” (Lincoln 1989, 536). In the absence of any individualizing features, the Gettysburg dead exert great influence. As in “John Brown’s Body,” which enacts the power of the martyred body to inspire a living army, these unidentified corpses nourish the will of the community. During the war years, Lincoln reconceptualizes citizenship as a form of dependence based not on the individual’s claim to rights but on the “heroism of self-subordination” (Wald 1995, 71). Abstracting the materiality of violent death and redefining national citizenship as an exercise in selfsurrender, Lincoln not only enables identifications between the living and the dead indispensable to the war’s continuation, but also disavows the state’s responsibility for wartime losses. The power of the dead to inspire the living effectively obscures the power of the state to inflict violence on its citizens: in the Gettysburg Address, the nation appears to be (re)generated by the sacrifices it, in truth, demands. Civil War scholars have often subjected the war itself to a similar abstraction, viewing wartime violence as the source of a revitalized national identity. Robert Penn Warren, for example, asserted that the Civil War created the nation as we know it. “Before the Civil War,” he writes, “we had no history in the deepest and most inward sense.” The “dream of freedom” articulated by both the Declaration and the Constitution remained unrealized; the founding fathers had failed to “create a nation except on paper.” Violence was needed to transform these abstractions, which existed only in language, into “ ‘felt’ history—history lived in the national imagination.” Only through the direct and costly experience of war did America gain a “real” past and, consequently, a “real” identity: the vision of the founders “became a reality, and we became a nation, only with the Civil War” (Warren 1961, 3–4). If war violence gave body to founding abstractions, it in turn transformed the materiality of historical event into an edifying ideal. While the Civil War offers ample evidence of “rancor, self-righteousness, spite, pride . . . and complacency,” out of the “complex and confused motives of men and the blind ruck of event,” the ideal of union emerged (108). Although this ideal remained unrealized, it, in Warren’s view, continued to orient and inspire the way Americans thought about themselves and their nation. Violence converts historical event, in all its messy complexity and contradiction, into consensus regarding the possibility, if not the reality, of an American community.33 By imagining dead bodies transformed into collective spirit, both “John Brown’s Body” and the Gettysburg Address make the counterintuitive, if familiar, claim that violence gives life, creating community rather than

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destroying it. During the Civil War, an organic model of civic unity, governed by the principles of transformation and growth, helped to convince the public that self-sacrifice was a source of collective renewal. I have retold the story of Brown’s death, situated between a period of intense struggle over slavery and the war itself, in an effort to historicize and interrogate the belief that suffering creates community. Rather than suggesting, as Warren does, that mass death generates new ideas, I have tried to show how certain ideas and rhetorical conventions, popular before the war began, helped to make violence possible. The notion that the deaths of thousands of soldiers can generate national identity is indebted, in part, to the work of abolitionists, including Brown himself, who tried to figure out how to transform pain into political agency. Brown employed the conventions of sympathy, used by abolitionists to represent the violence done to slaves, to describe his own death. Both abolitionists and soldiers, in turn, took up his martyrdom as the source of their political commitment and camaraderie. Yet the consequences of the appropriation and abstraction of slave suffering were by no means uniform; if sympathy reliably intimates the power of individual suffering to generate group identity, its applications vary widely. In Brown’s hands, the substitution of white bodies for black was the cornerstone of white militancy—a commitment to ending slavery through violence. By contrast, in the context of a wartime rhetoric of self-sacrifice and redemption, the absence of black bodies suggests the tendency of wartime culture to suppress the importance of slavery while taking the suffering of slaves as a model for the suffering of soldiers. As the enduring popularity of “John Brown’s Body” suggests, Governor Wise failed to subdue Brown; in the months following his execution, Brown’s public stature continued to grow. Indeed, in 1861 Wise himself urged fellow Southerners to “take a lesson from John Brown” and resist a Northern invasion with force.34 While Brown’s execution failed to fortify the rule of law in the face of insurrection, his death sustained the state during war. “John Brown’s Body” is one expression of a wartime nationalism that derives not from the law’s ability to maintain order or implement justice but from the willingness of citizens to sacrifice themselves in the name of the state. Abolitionists disseminated the pain of slaves in an effort to build a community that would put an end to slavery. But as the war approached and the cause of antislavery dovetailed with a growing sectional antagonism, violence began to appear to abolitionists and others as a solution to the conflicts at hand. In the context of war, the insistent abstraction of violence, performed by sympathy and nationalism alike, goes hand in hand with its actual proliferation: the martyred bodies of slaves and soldiers fuel an apocalyptic nationalism that takes violence as the basis for collectivity rather than imagining collectivity as a means of putting suffering to rest.

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Notes 1. “To John S. Clark, 1864,” New York Tribune, April 20, 1865. In his essay “John Brown’s Body: Elites, Heroic Embodiment, and the Legitimation of Political Violence,” Gary Alan Fine also takes up the legitimation, indeed the “veneration,” of Brown’s insurrectionary violence during the war years. He asks, “Given the low esteem in which violent insurgents are held, how is it that John Brown could become for many a model of courage and morality?” He argues that Brown’s stature was facilitated by his links to cultural and political elites as well as the secession of Southern states, which left “the reputational field open for Brown’s supporters” (Fine 1999, 225–249, 1–2). 2. Browne 1919, 180. Some scholars claim that the John Brown of the song’s title was a sergeant at Fort Warren, not the John Brown of Harper’s Ferry fame. Nonetheless, as soldiers began to take up this tune they certainly had John Brown’s historic martyrdom in mind. While there are countless versions of the song, all of them begin, “John Brown’s body lies a-mouldering in the grave / His soul is marching on,” and include the verse “He’s gone to be a soldier in the army of the Lord, / His soul is marching on.” On the genesis and development of “John Brown’s Body” see Browne 1919, 181–199 and Stutler 1958, 251–261. 3. A student of Civil War culture soon recognizes the extent to which “John Brown’s Body” permeated army life. John Ketcham, a Union soldier, lost his brother Edward at Gettysburg. Describing Edward’s burial to their mother he wrote, “In a little grove behind the batteries, under an oak tree, in his soldier’s uniform, wrapped in a shelter-tent, lies all the earthly remains of my brother. ‘He has gone to be a soldier in the army of the Lord’ ” (Tapert 1989, 151). 4. Priscilla Wald and Kirk Savage discuss the tendency of nationalist art and rhetoric to exclude African Americans; both argue that representations of citizenship are shaped by these omissions. In Wald’s view, “official narratives,” which endow particular groups with citizenship, are “haunted” by the disenfranchised. The process of exclusion gives the lie to egalitarian rhetoric, making it obvious that rights are not natural but bestowed selectively. Addressing the dearth of public monuments to slavery and emancipation, Savage argues that the failure to represent black agency in postwar sculpture went hand in hand with the failure to institute a new “interracial order.” This absence at once enabled the emergence of the white “citizen-soldier” that dominated postwar memorial sculpture and rendered this figure obsolete. Similarly, I believe that representations of martyred slaves continued to exert influence as they were absorbed, and nearly eclipsed, by representations of martyred white soldiers (Savage 1997; Wald 1995, 1–13). 5. Thoreau had been invited to attend a memorial service for Brown held in North Elba on July 4, 1860. Instead, he sent an essay, “The Last Days of John Brown,” and it was read out loud at the ceremony (Thoreau 1973, 145–153, 151). 6. Brown found the notion of a biracial family, in which he figured as patriarch, compelling. In 1834 he told his brother Frederick that he would like to adopt and educate a slave boy. Always short of funds, Brown hoped that some

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7.

8.

9.

10.

11.

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“Christian slaveholder” would donate a child to his family. If not, however, he and his family would be willing to “submit to considerable privation in order to buy one.” Years later, Brown led a raid on the homes of two Missouri planters and liberated their slaves. As the group retreated to Kansas one of the fugitives gave birth to a boy who, according to Osborne Anderson, “the old Captain named . . . John Brown, after himself ” (Anderson 1972, 16–17; Oates 1970, 32). John Stauffer uses the figure of a “black heart” to describe Brown’s effort to identify so entirely with black people that he might “blur racial categories” and set the stage for universal equality. While Brown’s attempt to acquire a “black heart” should not be interpreted as an instance of “blacking up,” the performative nature of Brown’s efforts to identify with black people suggests that his cultivation of racial indeterminacy is, among other things, a means to expanded public relevance. Eric Lott’s analysis of blackface minstrelsy helps us to see Brown’s investment in biracial identity as an attribute of whiteness and as a political variant on a history of white performance that stages the interpenetration of racial identities (Lott 1993; Stauffer 2002, 6; see also Menand 2002). My account of Stowe’s “The Story of Uncle Tom’s Cabin,” and of sentimental method more generally, is indebted to Philip Fisher’s Hard Facts. In Fisher’s analysis, the responsive anguish of the witness to trauma—both characters in sentimental novels and readers of them—reproduces suffering across time and space. Arguing that sentimentality experiments with “the extension of full and complete humanity to classes of figures from whom it has been socially withheld,” Fisher trains our attention on the spectator who, by virtue of identifying with socially marginalized figures, finds her sense of relatedness substantially expanded. Responding to Fisher’s argument, Laura Wexler has pointed out that for the victim in question there is nothing radical or transformative about having her feelings acknowledged by others. Indeed, prisoners, madmen, children, and slaves can only feel bewildered by the sentimental spectator’s sense of discovery as “primary feeling is their normal state.” Wexler’s comments underscore what Fisher’s analysis acknowledges more obliquely—sentimental narration, while concerned with the plight of the oppressed, remains relatively uninterested in exploring the experience of victimization (Fisher 1987, 99; Wexler 2000, 104–105). Glenn Hendler addresses this problem in his discussion of Louisa May Alcott’s novel Work. He observes that, at its most extreme, sympathetic identification combines a nearly psychotic loss of self with narcissistic self-absorption (Hendler 2001, 120). Discussing the tendency of white feminist-abolitionists to appropriate the experience of slaves even as they agitated against oppression and exclusion, Karen Sanchez-Eppler concludes, “The discovery that these efforts to liberate the body result in its repression . . . attests to the difficulties and resistance inherent in acknowledging the corporeality of personhood” (Sánchez-Eppler 1993, 49). Considering the relationship between sentimentality and national identity, Lauren Berlant argues that far from eradicating violence, sympathetic identification provides the grounds for its proliferation. Sympathetic feeling, and corresponding claims to its world-transforming effects, conceals a

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12.

13.

14. 15.

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self-congratulatory passivity that allows violence to spread. While Fisher also sees the reader’s passivity as a constitutive feature of sentimental narration, he views this inaction as an honest expression not only of the limits of sentimentality but of representation more generally. Limiting the “goal of art to the revision of images rather than to the incitement to action,” sentimental narration may espouse “cautious and questionable” politics but it “assumes a healthy and modest account of the limited and interior consequences of art.” By claiming that sentimentality asks readers to dwell, at least momentarily, on the inadequacy of their own imaginative endeavor, I hope to suggest that far from promoting self-congratulation sentimental art may, in certain instances, cultivate dissatisfaction with representation as a means to political change (Berlant 1998, 656–657; Fisher 1987, 122). Elaine Scarry’s analysis of the ways that pain can be detached from the body of the person who suffers provides a useful corrective to both a utopian nineteenthcentury view of the benevolent consequences of identification and a contemporary tendency to view identification as a form of violence. Scarry makes valuable distinctions between those who appropriate the suffering of their victims as a source of their own authority and those who represent the pain of others in an effort to alleviate it. Viewing the separation of pain from the particular body as an essential attribute of human activity, and recognizing the abstraction of bodily pain as a source of political effect, Scarry invites us to deliberate on the consequences of this process in any given instance (The Body in Pain [1985]). Like Holmes, Lincoln dramatized the remarkable impact of Uncle Tom’s Cabin in a similar way when he allegedly greeted Stowe as “the little woman who made this great war.” Elizabeth Young discusses the origin of this story and pursues its relevance to literary critics by proposing to “take Lincoln’s tribute . . . seriously” and “interpret Uncle Tom’s Cabin as a cultural artifact of, if not actually about, the Civil War” (Young 1999, 29). Wendell Phillips,“Address,” December 15, 1859, in Scheidenhelm 1972, 60–75, 63. Child 1882, 104. This was not the first time that Child had longed to rush to the bedside of a man wounded in the name of antislavery. After Massachusetts Senator Charles Sumner was beaten nearly to death on the Senate floor by Representative Preston Brooks of South Carolina, Sumner received a distraught letter from Child. “My first impulse,” she writes “was to rush directly to Washington, to ascertain whether I could not supply to you, in some small degree, the absence of a mother’s or sister’s care.” As her letter continues, however, it seems that her desire to rush to Sumner’s bedside expresses a frustrated urge toward more radical action. Child, like Sumner, feels a “burning indignation” over the war in Kansas. She writes, “I have so longed to seize a signal-torch, and rush over all the mountains, and through all the valleys, summoning the friends of freedom to the rescue!” In sympathy with Sumner, Child imagines herself lighting out on an expedition very similar to the one that Brown will undertake three years later. In reality, even Child’s more temperate desire to nurse wounded heroes is thwarted by the responsibilities of domestic life: she is unable to visit Sumner as she is needed at the bedside of her own aging father. Child concludes her letter to Sumner with some

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16.

17.

18.

19.

20.

21.

22. 23. 24. 25. 26.

27.

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bitterness: “At times, my old heart swells almost to bursting, in view of all these things; for it is the heart of a man imprisoned within a woman’s destiny” (Child 1982, 283). Child 1982, 106–107. In early 1860, the American Anti-Slavery Society published a volume that contained Child’s correspondence with Wise, Brown, and Margaretta Mason who, like Wise, objected to Child’s proposed visit. Correspondence between Lydia Maria Child and Gov. Wise and Mrs. Mason, of Virginia sold an extraordinary 300,000 copies and was, in Child’s estimation, “the most notable of all my anti-slavery doings” (Child 1982, 474). Thoreau 1973, 145. For a collection of Northern speeches, poetry, letters, and sermons written in response to Brown’s raid and execution see James Redpath et al., Echoes of Harper’s Ferry (1860). Addressing the reaction of transcendentalists, George Fredrickson argues that Brown helped Emerson and Thoreau reconcile inner vision with the practical demands of social life. At Harper’s Ferry John Brown proved that “Action could be as sublime as thought” (Fredrickson 1993, 40). Brown asked Child not to visit him in prison. He suggested, however, that there was “another channel” through which her sympathy might reach him: he asked Child to raise money to help support his wife and children after his death (Child 1982, 118–119). Abraham Lincoln, for example, dismissed Brown’s raid, claiming that it did not interest the slaves that it was intended to liberate. In his Cooper Union Address, Lincoln points out that “John Brown’s effort was not a slave insurrection. It was an attempt by white men to get up a revolt among slaves, in which the slaves refused to participate. In fact, it was so absurd that the slaves, with all their ignorance, saw plainly enough it could not succeed” (Lincoln 1989, 125). These details are drawn from “Our Charlestown Correspondence,” New York Herald, December 2 and 3, 1859, 1; “The Execution of John Brown,” New York Daily Tribune, December 3, 1859, 7. While Booth opposed Brown’s cause and deplored his actions, he, like so many others, could not help admiring the man. Indeed, Booth described Brown to his sister Asia as “the grandest character of this century” (Steers 2001, 36). On the purpose of public executions and their disappearance see Foucault 1995, 3–131; Halttunen 1998, 7–32; Masur 1989; and Rothman 1990, 3–108. David Hunter Strother, “John Brown’s Death and Last Words,” Ms 78–1. Boyd B. Stutler Collection, West Virginia State Archives, Charleston, West Virginia. “The Execution of John Brown,” New York Daily Tribune. Strother 11. “Execution of John Brown.” In addition, a number of journalists found ways to skirt checkpoints undetected by disguising themselves or relying on personal connections to get closer to the scaffold. See Stutler, “The Hanging of John Brown,” Ms 78–1, 5–6 and Ruffin, 1972, 368–369. As Foucault has observed, the show of force enacted during public executions intimates the power of the state to make war against its enemies. The relationship between punishment and war is all too obvious at the scene of Brown’s execution: in the context of the looming secession crisis, this display of

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28. 29. 30.

31.

32.

33.

34.

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military power expressed the intolerance of the federal government and the potential aggression of Southern states simultaneously (Foucault 1995, 48–50). “Scenes In Charlestown,” New York Herald, December 3, 1859, 1. “Domestic Intelligence,” Harper’s Weekly, December 10, 1859, 794. Ruchames 1969, 167. This message, loosely paraphrased, was published in some Northern newspapers. It does not, however, appear to have been as widely reproduced or as influential as Brown’s courtroom speech. According to Richard Slotkin, “There is no more succinct statement of that principle of regeneration through violence.” Although Brown uses the “myth of blood atonement” to affiliate his own death with Christ’s, in an American context, he argues, the language of blood is also tied to theories of racial difference and thus implies “racially oriented violence” as the particular condition for collective redemption (Slotkin 1985, 262, 275). Timothy Sweet helps us understand the logic of substitution as it applies to representations of war violence. Analyzing the “rhetorical operations” used during the Civil War to transform “the body of the soldier” into “the ideological discourse of the state,” he observes that the rhetoric of national unity, specifically the galvanizing image of the body politic, is based on a substitution whereby “millions of actual bodies are transformed into a single, powerful figure” (Sweet 1990, 6, 12–13). Lincoln 1989, 35–36. As others have noticed, Lincoln’s stated intention in this speech—to encourage obedience to the law and thus preserve the founders’ legacy—is repeatedly undermined. The rhetorical energy he devotes to describing the mobs and tyrants that threaten national stability outstrips the persuasive power of his proposed solution. Scholars have interpreted Lincoln’s half-hearted defense of the law as a sign of his own “parricidal” urges—does he really want to play the part of the obedient son? Regarding Lincoln’s meditation on the law as an expression of filial ambivalence, we may fail to notice that Lincoln is confused not only about his relationship to the past but also about the role of law in the present: is law the most effective way of defining political community? Might violence, if more costly, bind citizens more firmly to the state? Arguments that foreground genealogy domesticate the difficult questions this speech raises about Lincoln’s attitudes toward the political uses of violence. See Castronovo 1995, 1–10; Forgie 1979, 55–87; Sundquist 1985, 4–6. Examining the work of historian James McPherson and filmmaker Ken Burns, Edward Ayers notes that the struggle and uncertainty of war recede as soldiers appear to “kill each other for the common purpose of discovering the depth and the nature of their nationalism.” These narratives, and others like them, lend support to the notion that wars are “engines of beneficial social change” and that the Civil War was “good for the country in the long run” (Ayers 1998, 145–165, 149, 157). Villard 1929, 465–466. Dramatizing his complex relationship to Brown, as well as the volatility of political allegiances at this point in time, Wise organized a successful raid on the federal arsenal at Harper’s Ferry on April 16, 1861. See Wise 1899, 274–281.

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3

John Brown, Bearded Patriarch Jean Libby

he afterlife of John Brown is most associated with his bearded countenance. He emerged with the beard at a convention in Canada in May 1858 that was organized at Brown’s request by Dr. Martin R. Delany, the “father of black nationalism.” The purpose of the convention was to ratify the Provisional Constitution and Ordinances for the People of the United States and to recruit leaders for his vanguard army that he intended to lead through the South to liberate slaves. It is often noted among historical records that John Brown began growing his beard as a disguise in early 1858. The beard was quite luxuriant by the Chatham Convention, as noted in the narrative of Osborne P. Anderson, a member of the Provisional Government and printer for the Provincial Freeman who went to battle with John Brown at Harper’s Ferry in 1859 and became the only member of his army to escape from the town successfully:

T

The first visit of John Brown to Chatham was in April, 1858. Wherever he went around, although an entire stranger, he made a profound impression upon those who saw or became acquainted with him. Some supposed him to be a staid but modernized Quaker; others, a solid business man, from “somewhere,” and without question a philanthropist. His long white beard, thoughtful and reverent brow and physiognomy, his sturdy, measured tread, as he circulated about with hands, as portrayed in the best lithograph, under the pendant oval-skirt of plain brown Tweed, with other garments to match, revived to those honored with his acquaintance not knowing his history, the memory of a Puritan of the most exalted type.1

John Brown was recorded again with the beard in June 1858 at a meeting in Lawrence, Kansas, by James Redpath and Richard Hinton, his

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comrades and later biographers. It is during this period that evidence of a mild stroke appears on a daguerreotype by J.A. Whipple and J.W. Black— the “mad photograph”—which is erroneously dated 1857 (Libby 2004, 42). The bearded patriarch is the image of John Brown most often seen in artworks made after his execution—the reference to a lithograph in Anderson’s account is probably to Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Weekly on November 19, 1859, in which it covered much of the front page. That lithograph was identified as from a photograph taken by M.M. Lawrence of New York City. Therein lies the historical controversy of the bearded photographs of John Brown. Is this the same photograph that was taken in May 1859 in Boston that is registered at the copyright office attributed to J.W. Black? Is it the same photograph in cropped and vignetted cabinet card form that John Brown brought to his son John Brown, Jr. in Ohio in June 1859 on his way to make war on slavery in Virginia?2 Are there one, two, or even three original photographs of the bearded John Brown? The author is in agreement with most experts that there was only one original photograph, or sitting, of the bearded John Brown. That original sitting is attributed to Martin M. Lawrence in New York, James W. Black in Boston, and John B. Heywood in Boston. Attribution to M.M. Lawrence is first seen in Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Weekly, November 19, 1859 (while Brown was awaiting execution in Virginia); attribution to J.W. Black in the copyright registration of the print in Washington on December 12, 1859 (10 days after his execution); and to J.B. Heywood from a statement made by him in Kansas long after the event: “Before the execution of Brown, his wife came to Boston and was brought to my place. If my recollection serves me right, she had one or two children with her. She was then on her way to Virginia to take charge of her husband’s body, after the execution. I disposed of my business afterwards to J.W. Black. This original negative was with the collection into her hands. J.B. Heywood, Greencastle, Mo.”3 The common practice of making negatives from daguerreotypes and calling it a new image—and vice versa—makes the photographer of the original sitting more difficult to determine. A daguerreotype copied from a negative will have the correct visual face orientation. Mary Day Brown had a daguerreotype of her husband in her possession when she emigrated to California with her daughters Annie, Sarah, and Ellen and surviving son Salmon in 1863 (Libby 1989, 14–19, 22–23). Mary Brown asked an artist whom she met on the Overland Trail, Helen Tanner Brodt, to make an oil painting on canvas and a ceramic or metal plate in 1864. The original plate (donated to Storer College, a black school in Harper’s Ferry which closed in the 1950s and is now part of the Harper’s

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Ferry National Historic Park) is missing; the fragile oil painting, 6 x 8 inches, is in the John Brown Collection in the Prints and Photographs Division at the Library of Congress in Washington, DC.4 This is its first publication since 1924 (figure 3.1). Most compelling of the “only one” theory is that of Boyd B. Stutler, a collector and historian in West Virginia whose amassed John Brown materials are at the West Virginia Division of Culture and History in Charleston (not to be confused, as it often is, with Charles Town, West Virginia, where John Brown was tried and executed while it was still in the Commonwealth of Virginia). Stutler wrote in 1926 that “the [photo] made by J.W. Black & Company, Boston, the latter part of May, 1859, is the only photo made from life showing the long flowing beard, as familiar in all the sketches, paintings and engravings made later. This latter likeness has been used as the base for all such pictures.”5 Equally compelling is the opinion of forensic anthropologist Eileen Barrow at the FACES (Forensic Anthropology and Computer Enhancement Services) Laboratory at Louisiana State University Baton Rouge that there is only one bearded portrait, made after computer elevation of the various portions of Brown’s head, especially the eyes, with four other versions of the copyright registration print at the Library of Congress.6 An original salt print was registered at the U.S. Copyright Office by James Wallace Black and Perez M. Batchelder on December 12, 1859, 10 days after Brown’s execution (see figure 3.2).7 This registration does not prove that this was the original sitting. It could be a copy of an original daguerreotype made in May 1859, printed in life orientation. Black and/or Whipple made two daguerreotypes of Brown in Boston in 1857 and 1858, both of which, as previously discussed, are extant at archives in Boston.8 The original sitting could also have been for a positive portrait. The two photographers, especially James Black, were pioneers of the first wet-plate and paper processing photography as well as expert daguerreotypists. It is interesting to note that Black and Whipple split their longtime partnership in the autumn of 1859, the time of John Brown’s raid and trial (Pierce 1987). Contradictory evidence to the single-portrait theory is in James Redpath’s letter to William F. Poole in February 1864, when he states “those with the beard will probably be the historical portraits.” Dr. Thomas H. Webb of Boston was the secretary of the Kansas Emigrant Aid Committee; his materials are at the Kansas State Historical Society.9 It was Webb (not to be confused with Richard Webb of Ireland, Redpath points out in underlined text) who owned the full-length portrait that was photographed on canvas and painted by Nathan Onthank, which was “bought by Thaddeus Hyatt and in his name I presented it to ‘The People of Hayti,’ through

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Figure 3.1 Oil painting by Helen Tanner Brodt from a portrait owned by Mary Brown, 1864. The original had been given by her husband to Henry David Thoreau (Goulder 1964, 223). Courtesy of the Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division, LC-USZC4-11789.

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Figure 3.2 John Brown in Boston, May 1859. Library of Congress Fine Arts Collection, LC UZ62-4272. Copyright registered December 12, 1859. Print courtesy Professor John M. Lawlor, Jr.

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President Geffrard. The artist made another copy, which Mr. Phillips [Wendell Phillips] pronounced better than the first; but I have not seen it. An effort was made to buy it for presentation in the Athenaeum; you know whether it was successful or not.”10 In New York, Thaddeus Hyatt of the National Kansas Committee made mass prints of the full-figure bearded image and sold them for $1 for the benefit of the Brown family. They were appended with a signature by John Brown from prison in Virginia.11 While one can go round and round with the historical data and minute comparison of the details of the photo portrait versions, the best way to understand the portrait is to follow John Brown in May and June 1859. This was a man in a hurry, welding his army and supporters into action and adding recruits for the war of liberation that he hoped to inaugurate on the fourth of July. Instead it was postponed to October because of his logistics needs and possibly some inkling of the plans among authorities in Philadelphia who regularly watched free blacks.12 There would be no time for additional sittings, even days apart, for there were pikes to be gathered that Brown suddenly found were not actually manufactured, delaying the start of the planned movement that would distribute the defensive weapons on plantations in areas to be secured by the vanguard army led by free African Americans and his Kansas guerilla warfare veterans. This army was to be augmented with revolutionary slaves who joined the march, but the leader was captured at Harper’s Ferry on October 18, 1859, preventing that movement south. John Brown brought this cropped and vignetted copy of the new photograph for recruitment back in Canada to John Brown, Jr. in Ohio on June 18, 1859, which was the last day he saw his father (see figure 3.3). John Brown, Jr. spoke of that day for the biographers: In the winter of 1857–58 I brought the arms from the railroad at Conneaut to Cherry Valley, stored them in the furniture warerooms of the King brothers, and covered the boxes with a lot of ready-made coffins. . . . I moved the arms by night to the western part of the next township of Wayne, and stored them in the barn of a farmer named William Coleman, who helped me by night to build a little store-room under his hay-mow. There they remained perfectly secreted (his wife, even, did not know it) until I took them, again by night, to the canal at Hartstown, Penn., early in the summer of 1859, and shipped them as hardware to Chambersburg. (Webb 1861, 494)

Within the period of May and June, 1859, John Brown traveled by train and wagon to Boston, New York (both city and upstate), Chicago, Iowa, and Kansas. He left another copy of the cropped portrait with Salmon Brown, who printed it in a genealogical format, greatly retouched, in the 1890s.13

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Figure 3.3 Vignette donated by John Brown, Jr. to the Western Reserve Historical Society in Cleveland in 1908. Courtesy of the Western Reserve Historical Society.

Sarah Brown, in California, used the same portrait as a model for a charcoal sketch likeness of her father, attributing it to J.W. Black. It is now at the Saratoga (California) Historical Foundation Museum (see figure 3.4).14 The daughter of John and Mary Brown also sketched an

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Figure 3.4 Sarah Brown’s charcoal portrait courtesy of the Saratoga Historical Foundation, California.

age-matching portrait of her mother from a photograph made by Isaiah Taber in San Francisco ca. 1880, when Mary and Sarah had a small farm on 17th Street, Mission District, which was then a farming community.15 The portraits are now in the process of conservation at the Palace of the Legion

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of Honor in San Francisco along with other original art by Sarah Brown that was donated to the Saratoga Historical Foundation by Mary Fablinger, the daughter of Brown’s youngest child, Ellen, after her death in the early 1960s (Nalty 1996, 88–89). John Brown directed his photographed image to work for the abolition of slavery. He knew the effect his face had upon his supporters, black and white, and used the most modern technology available to present it. The time periods of his photo portraits fall readily into the history of his abolition work: development of the Underground Railroad and resistance to the Fugitive Slave Law; captain of a guerilla militia in the Civil War in Kansas; and patriarch of a movement to a “good Town” of citizenship rights for African Americans that would fulfill the Declaration of Independence of the United States.16 Because photographs and daguerreotypes are a physical afterlife, the presence of the subject can be felt in later times. John Brown belongs to all of us, and all have the right to interpret him, although professionals, especially those who publish textbooks, should do so with factual information about time and place and purpose developed with standard historical methodology. In his day John Brown belonged to the radical abolitionists, the populist revolutionaries in his country and abroad, the upstanding American grain that will be sown with the wind. Merrill D. Peterson describes that broad-based modern interpretation of Brown this way: “It remains malleable, still open to contingency and challenge” (Peterson 2002, 172). The bearded images of John Brown provide this contingency and challenge for continued life. Notes 1. Anderson 1861, 9. Osborne Anderson was assisted in writing by Provincial Freeman editor Mary Ann Shadd after he escaped from the battles in Harper’s Ferry with Albert Hazlett, a white Pennsylvanian. The two separated at Chambersburg for fear of suspicion as a black and white man together; Hazlett was captured and brought to prison in Charlestown, Virginia. He was tried and hanged with Aaron D. Stevens on January 15, 1860. For a transcribed version of Anderson’s narrative (from a copy at the Kansas State Historical Society) see Libby 1979. 2. John Brown, Jr. donated this photograph to the Western Reserve Historical Society in Cleveland in 1908. He also donated a charcoal drawing made from it (which now hangs in the museum). The WRHS states that the photographer was M.M. Lawrence, and that all photographs of John Brown with a beard are derivatives of the M.M. Lawrence image. 3. The Heywood statement was found on the back of a print at the Kansas State Historical Society in Topeka by Karl Gridley of the Territorial Kansas Heritage Alliance, who sent it to Sally Pierce, photographs curator at the Boston Athenaeum. Ms. Pierce was convinced of its authenticity and amended the

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5.

6. 7.

8.

9.

10. 11.

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catalog record. It was also noticed in Kansas by historian Merrill D. Peterson, who published it in John Brown, the Legend Revisited (2002). The painting was published by Harry Noyes Pratt in “A Woman Pioneer on Lassen’s Peak,” Overland Monthly and Out West Magazine 82.11 (1924): 488–490. This is the first publication since 1924; its location had been lost to John Brown literature until the author’s 2003 research trip to the Library of Congress. Boyd B. Stutler to Hon. W.A. MacCorkle, May 4, 1926. Boyd Stutler Collection, West Virginia State Archives. Governor MacCorkle of West Virginia had invited Stutler to view a picture of John Brown which he owned. Ms. Barrow’s opinions were made from a CD-Rom prepared by the author from copies purchased from the archives who own the portraits on June 3, 2003. The original salt print was deposited by James Wallace Black and Perez Mann Bachelder on December 12, 1859, ten days after John Brown’s execution. The photograph is now featured on the American Memory site, http:// memory. loc.gov/ammem/ John Brown’s face in both the extant daguerreotypes is unbearded. One, ca. 1856–1857, was donated to the Massachusetts Historical Society by Amos A. Lawrence in 1869; the other (the “mad” daguerreotype, now known to show indications of mild stroke) was donated to the Boston Athenaeum by James Redpath in 1860 concurrent with publication of The Public Life of Captain John Brown, which has an engraved frontispiece made by J.C. Buttre from the image. Redpath refers to the possible existence of more than one photograph with a beard in his letter to William H. Poole, archivist at the Boston Athenaeum, in February 1864. See Libby 2004, 40–43. Dr. Thomas H. Webb and the photograph history is briefly described in Sanborn 1885, 216, 612. Sanborn uses the cropped vignette of the portrait as the frontispiece, and firmly dates it “May 1859.” James Redpath to William F. Poole, February 27, 1864, in Whitehill, 269. According to Whitehill, the portrait is indeed at the Athenaeum. A copy is in the F.G. Logan Collection at the Chicago Historical Society, with an undated note on the back from H.N. Rust, who was involved with the making of John Brown’s pikes and was later a steadfast friend of Ruth and Henry Thompson in California. The Thompsons collected $2000 for the benefit of the Brown family. On July 4, 1859, John Brown was in the audience of the Benjamin Banneker Institute listening to a lecture by William H. Johnson, an African American from Virginia. According to Johnson’s Autobiography (1900), Brown met members of the militia group the Frank Johnson Guards (named for the outstanding Revolutionary War era black musician) and asked them to stop openly drilling with guns for the upcoming parades that celebrated British emancipation on August 1st. According to Johnson (and Osborne Anderson’s 1861 narrative) Frederick Douglass was included in this meeting, and spoke against the plan. John Brown and Aaron Stephens met again in Philadelphia on October 13 with a core group of activist African Americans, telling them that they were planning to move on October 24th. The raid was put forward

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14.

15. 16.

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a week to October 16 when Dangerfield Newby, a black raider, learned of a planned search of the farmhouse headquarters in Maryland. William H. Johnson was born of free parents in Alexandria. He came to Albany, New York, in 1851 but had moved to Philadelphia in 1856. He returned to Albany after Brown’s raid and is the author of the Civil Rights bill in New York that ended school segregation. John Brown was correct in his assessment that the black men were being watched: on October 24, 1859 the Chambersburg, Pa. Valley Spirit reported that the “colored men who were parading last summer” had their rifles confiscated following Brown’s raid. The author’s original print of this composite photograph is the frontispiece of Stan Cohen’s John Brown “The Thundering Voice of Jehovah” (1999). It was donated to the Saratoga Historical Foundation in California. The Sarah Brown drawing is the frontispiece of Damon G. Nalty, The Browns of Madronia (1996). See also Libby (1989) and Mary Brown’s interview by the reporter of the New York Tribune following her visit to her husband in prison the night before his execution on December 2, 1859. The portrait is presently at the Palace of the Legion of Honor (San Francisco) Conservation Laboratory. Lucy Higgins of Santa Clara was a longtime friend of Sarah Brown and a fellow artist. This terminology was used by Brown in a letter from Boston to Jermain Loguen, African American minister of Syracuse, New York, on May 17, 1859, the time when his bearded portrait was made. Loguen appended the letter to his 1859 biography, The Rev. J.W. Loguen, as a Freeman: A Narrative of a Real Life: “My Dear Sir:—I will just whisper in your private ear that I have no doubt you will soon have a call from God to minister at a different location. I trust you will obey that call; as, unless we can secure a strong religious influence among the early settlers, we may just as well abandon the idea at once of having a good Town” (451).

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4

“Earth Feels the Time of Prophet-Song”: John Brown and Public Poetry Joe Lockard

uring the weeks between the raid on Harper’s Ferry on October 16, 1859, and the execution of John Brown on December 2 of that year, popular and antislavery newspapers in the Northern states published an extraordinary effusion of poetry, first praising Brown’s acts and then memorializing his death in heroic tropes. This outpouring of poetry continued for months after the execution; it forms a unique literary response, one that functioned to translate rapid political shifts into familiar cultural rhetoric. However, John Brown poetry did more: it constituted a metaphorical revolution that prepared the American nation for coming bloodiness. Individual metaphors—enchained slaves, sacrificial altars, prophetic voices, and a suffering and corrupt Southern landscape calling for liberation—had all appeared previously. With the “meteoric” appearance of John Brown,1 that same metaphoric economy in antislavery poetry coalesced around his radicalized figure. The initial search for an interpretive metaphor portended Brown’s poetic career. One of the first and most persistent of poetic responses to John Brown was to recast his persona and presence as that of an Old Testament prophet. William Lloyd Garrison’s newspaper, The Liberator, especially encouraged such comparisons both in its editorial and poetry columns. Indicative of the editorial mood, one poem published shortly after the raid proposed the need for a precipitating national prophet— “Day dawns at last on mental night, / And Samson girds him for the fight.”2 In Brown’s career as a militant abolitionist, contributors to

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newspaper poetry columns discovered in him the mold of a prophet engaged in active confrontation with moral corruption and essential evil. A succession of poems compared Brown to Moses,3 Martin Luther,4 and to Jesus Christ: John Brown is gone, that good old man, Who ne’er the poor refused; Like him of Nazereth, he set At liberty the bruised.5

Many of these political elegies metaphorically transform the gallows into an altar,6 surround the condemned man with an angelic escort, and treat the event as an epochal moment of salvational sacrifice. Following Brown’s execution, a more secular-spirited set of poems emerged that depicted Brown’s ascension of the scaffold as a moment of national transformation, the promise of an imminent cleansing of social evil, or as a testimony of white racial sacrifice on behalf of black slaves,7 rather than as explicit religious martyrdom. Brown appeared as the inevitably triumphant spirit of national freedom, rather than as a predominantly prophetic figure. Recourse to religious and biblical rhetoric, while it continues, declines as nationalist declamations of historical fame emerge. Some poems evidence a hybridization of religious and national sentiment, invoking “A sacrifice at Moloch’s shrine,” promising new and equally revolutionary Samsons, and celebrating Brown’s death as an act of true citizenship.8 Using the weekly poetry columns of The Liberator for primary evidence, the present essay argues that this body of John Brown poetry from the contemporary press manifests the creation of a public afterlife in which the Harper’s Ferry revolt could be elevated from the ugliness of armed conflict into new civic nobility. This is a particularly suitable body of poetry for discussion as a whole, since during this period The Liberator’s poetry column expanded greatly as impassioned writers—or local newspaper readers’ poems on John Brown—sent a wave of antislavery verse to the leading national antislavery weekly. An occasional poet himself and sensitive to the public uses of poetry, William Lloyd Garrison chose other exemplars from the press. The group includes 34 poems published over six months from November 4, 1859 to April 13, 1860. Its authors include famed writers (Lydia Maria Child, John Greenleaf Whittier, and the not-yet-famous Louisa May Alcott); writers well known within the antislavery movement (Jane Ashby, Anna Gardner, Edmund Hamilton Sears);9 little-known local writers; ten poems from pseudonymous writers and

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eight from anonymous writers; and writers from the United States, Canada, and England.10 It is an overwhelmingly white group of writers, with only one identifiable black poet (Alfred Gibbs Campbell), although there may be other unidentified black writers represented. Much of the poetry was copied from other journals, an editorial exchange practice that characterized The Liberator from its beginning and that was common to journals of the period, so the Liberator’s poetry column incorporated a sampling of both popular and religious presses. None of this poetry joined such standards as the Union Army marching song “John Brown’s Body” (converted to “The Battle Hymn of the Republic” by Julia Ward Howe, wife of a Brown coconspirator, Samuel Gridley Howe)11 or Melville’s “The Portent,” although Whittier’s “Brown of Osawatomie” is occasionally anthologized.12 In largest part the column did not publish John Brown poetry that was to become well known, but rather the public poetry that arose spontaneously in reaction to the Harper’s Ferry events and their aftermath.13 Production of poetry at this historic juncture enabled the militant antislavery movement in particular to ennoble its own transit from Garrisonian pacifism, or political unwillingness to engage in violent opposition to slavery, into a movement now fully conscious of the impending necessity of violence. The aestheticization of violence via poetic celebration of John Brown provided a model for Civil War poetry of soldiers sacrificed upon the national altar. As a small expressive body, John Brown topical poetry during the very late antebellum period anticipates themes and motifs of the large body of Civil War poetry that soon was to begin emerging. Moreover—and here we reach a central argument—hymnal and poetic celebrations of John Brown, a man regarded as either a traitor or mad throughout most American political discourse, broke a public-sphere taboo against multiracial and violent resistance against slavery. To write verse praising an antislavery insurrectionist was to join his uprising in words, if not in legally indictable direct acts. The novelist Russell Banks wrote that John Brown was “a man who stands more exactly than any other white American on the line that divides our historical imagination. To almost all Americans who regard themselves as white, John Brown was a madman, a fanatic (in spite of his good intentions, they sometimes add). To Americans who do not view themselves as white, he was and will always be a hero of the first order” (Banks 2000, 253). Despite the basic validity of Banks’s statement, regard for John Brown’s heroism was never so limited. As will be emphasized here, there were many poets ready to praise treason against the state, which was loyalty to humanity.

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Pre-Execution Poetry G.D. Whitmore’s post-trial, pre-execution poem “John Brown of Osawatomie,”14 published a week before Brown’s execution, paints the trial as a scene of both national and universal justice. If there is no immediate justice for Brown, runs the poem’s argument, then a ghostly heroism forms a backdrop to the scene, one that finally will arise triumphant. “So you’ve convicted old John Brown!” the poem begins, “And you gave him such a chivalrous trial, lying groaning on the floor, / With his belly ripped with gashes, deaf with pain from sabre slashes.” Whitmore’s poem works to reverse the scene of judgment: Brown represents a threat that must be surrounded and subdued, but he represents an elemental force that cannot be subordinated by the mere confines of a courtroom and guards. “Round him guns, with lighted matches, judge and lawyers pale as ashes”—the law fears revolutionary justice here. The reversal-in-progress refigures John Brown as prophetic judge rather than defendant, hence the courtroom is a limitless and open space where “the world has been his jury.” This trial has become a global event where judgment by Virginia’s authorities is trivial compared to that of the ascendant prophecy that Brown represents. State authority, constituted of a “brutal, cowardly crew,” requires an unattainable counterforce against Brown’s moral leadership. In the poem, Brown’s appeal to revolutionary forces to overturn slavery constitutes both a timeless prophetic presence and a rupture in American history. He brings a redeeming energy to abolitionism—“No longer the taunt, our history’s new,‘our hero is yet to come’ ”—and introduces a massive leap of political evolution—“We’ve suddenly leaped a thousand years beyond the rolling sun!” Through his impending prospective martyrdom, Brown’s sacrifice recapitulates Christ’s taking of an “immortal crown” in order to provide succor to the poor and oppressed. His execution will become the holocaust offering altar upon which individual sacrifice will translate into permanent banishment of satanic slavery, an act wherein temporary conflict “black smoke obscures the sun.” Whitmore offers a heroic eschatology, one that promises that a new age will supersede such present traumas as Brown’s execution portends. The poet adopts a retrospective voice, one that looks backward from the future so as to see Brown as a father of militant legions following after his example to enlighten the meanings of historical justice. Although they are dead, the legions live: “Whose ghosts rise up from Harper’s gorge, Missouri’s plains, and far away / Where Kansas’ grains wave tinged with their blood, will the column rise!” The classic praise-function of the poet concludes “John Brown of Osawatomie” with the lines “The Poet’s song and History’s page will the deeds prolong of John of Osawatomie, / The Martyr to Truth and Right!,”

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an ending that subtly invokes another John’s death, that of John the Baptist. In this conclusion Whitmore takes up the work of merging poetry and future history, so that imminent events gain their explanation even before they occur. This is a poem that begins with a legal conviction and finishes with a teleological conviction, one where John Brown appears as the precursor of a moral conflagration. Death stares at Brown as an individual citizen, but will visit the entirety of American society immediately following his execution. In this vision, Whitmore invokes millennialist rhetoric to explain Brown’s death as a necessary redemptive passage through social evil in the United States. Brown himself did not share this same passionate and prophetic millennialism, for although there were millennialist elements in his writing, as Louis DeCaro, Jr. suggests, postmillennialist expectations were common and “one kind of leaven in the rising loaf of abolitionism” (DeCaro, Jr. 2002, 60). A corresponding theme of fresh-arriving redemption characterizes a poem written on November 6 and published on the nineteenth of the same month, or just over a month after the Harper’s Ferry raid, by an anonymous writer from Worcester, Massachusetts. This poem, “The Message to Pharror,” casts Brown as the combined Moses and Jesus of the American people. It contains an early appearance of what was emerging as a common comparative poetic trope of Brown as a Hebrew prophet.15 The poem’s descriptive scene opens with the self-doubt of Moses before the burning bush, a leader who nonetheless finds his spirit, resolution, and manhood from divine inspiration. This Moses possesses a dialogic relationship with God that inspires and fortifies his demand of the Pharaoh for liberation: “Send thy slaves forth in freedom! The Lord hears their moan!” Brown and his small band opposing the State of Virginia become the redemptive contemporary equivalent of Moses standing alone before the throne of Pharaoh. Through this analogy, Brown’s seizure of a federal arsenal is no more suicidal than Moses bringing plagues and death to the court of Egypt rulers. Any state—Virginia, the United States, or Egypt— that opposed express divine will and sanctioned enslavement would be defeated amid “the wild swelling chorus of Israel’s daughters.” Yet because this analogy is inexact, for the biblical Moses leads his people to freedom whereas John Brown has been imprisoned and will be sentenced to hang, the poem moves toward the incorporation of a selfsacrificial Christ to explaining Brown’s apparent suicidal strategy. It is an American nation that cannot recognize its new Christ that crucifies and hangs John Brown: The truth of God flashes like flame through the nation; The Priests cry, “Blasphemer! This fellow must die!”

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The Rich hate the rebel to wealth and to station; The People he works for shout forth, “Crucify!”

Deep into its text, the poem rises toward declamatory fury before naming John Brown as its Moses-Christ: “This wonderful Moses! We bow down before him.” An “old man,” together with “Brave sons, with their stout hearts for freedom enkindled, / In manliest manhood stood staunch by his side,” has enacted a divine mandate to relieve the people of bondage. Crucially, the anonymous writer constructs four repeated references to “people” without mention of race, suggesting a universalized mandate encompassing all who live within a slave society. John Brown becomes identified not only with manifest divine will, but simultaneously with a nonracial popular demand for liberation from social bondage in its entirety.“ ‘The Lord will provide,—but his world must be free!’ ” speaks the modern Moses before the battle. It is this understanding of human freedom as an indivisible continuum, an interrelationship that determines the nature of a social collectivity irrespective of race, that informs the poem’s understanding of Brown. As James Baldwin, another modern admirer of John Brown, phrased this understanding, “There was something special about John Brown. He attacked the bastions of the federal government— not to liberate black slaves, but to liberate a whole country from a disastrous way of life. And as horrible as it may sound, it was an act of love” (quoted in Banks 2000, 264). “The Message to Pharror” is a poem trapped between the evangelical faith of its expression and the secularism of its advocacy, for it recognizes that it is not the divine power that will end slavery, but rather it is the human agents—especially one whose “rifle gleams out from afar”—and governments that must assume the task. If John Brown’s ideology reflected no small element of Perfectionism’s rejection of external law in order to create a new covenant based on obedience to Christ’s moral laws, in this version Brown has become a synthesis of Old and New Covenants who transcends the claims of state authority and law. Moses-Christ-Brown is a mediating character whose purpose lies in the figuration and crossing of obstacles dividing between moral conscience and the state; he is a religious prophet who addresses civil government in a language of antistate violence. The anonymous poet’s prophetic figuration arrives with the title of “message.” As a “message,” the poem adopts a powerful biblical narrative in order to forewarn slavery’s defenders of their fate in opposing divine will, even if they hold sufficient sway to succeed in the present temporal world. John Brown, anointed as a divine messenger, rises above his apparent defeat at Harper’s Ferry. Yet this is also a “message” to antislavery readers,

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a message that enables them to locate Brown’s defeat within a belief that revealed divine purposes will translate inevitably into secular history. “They say that he failed!” the poem reports, but it goes on to argue against material interpretation of the battle at Harper’s Ferry, for its significance lies at the metaphysical level of a greater truth found in resistance against an oppressive order prophesied to fall. Where “They fetter his limbs! They may lead him to death!” these are signs of divine ennoblement such that Brown becomes “Deliverer, and Savior of men.” The poet tacitly acknowledges that Brown, called traitor rather than savior, will likely hang, but hears a prophet’s voice calling from prison, offering himself “uplifted” as a martyr to the antislavery cause. Brown’s martyrdom not only creates a symbolic bridge between religious and secular definitions of social power, but his sacrifice acts to protect those faithful to divine law. In the penultimate stanza appears a startling metaphor, one that suggests it will be the blood of John Brown that marks where “The Angel of Death shall pass over, pass over,—/ The blood on our door-posts our safety assure.” John Brown will provide the signing lamb’s blood that will save homes from loss of their firstborn, a plague that will arrive together with the coming civil slaughter in the United States of Egypt. Thus the poem’s conclusion that future children “Shall read through their tears of thy wonderful story / And feel their hearts thrill at the name of John Brown!” promises that this passage of history will be repeated to coming American generations as a new Passover story. Whitmore and the above anonymous poet shared their sense of anticipated redemption with David Barker, an attorney from Exeter, Maine, whose brief twenty-line poem “To John Brown”16 appeared in The Liberator and other newspapers prior to Brown’s execution. Where Whitmore’s poem offers an eschatological exegesis of the execution’s significance, however, Barker is more concerned with counsel to the condemned. In this poem Brown figures as an individual in extremis; he is far less mythic, and far more humanly susceptible to the world’s torments. Barker calls upon Brown to “Stand firm . . . till your fate is o’er” in the first line and each succeeding cadenza line. As poetic argument, these verses rehearse familiar Puritan imagery of outer and inner persona, and of an “Old Outer John Brown” (italics in original) who is about to become “food for the worm.” Despite standing on the precipice of mortality, though, “Neither death nor the worm can harm Inner John Brown.” John Brown has a worldly mission to accomplish through his symbolic death, one that guarantees a political immortality to his soul. Those who “will torture and kill” the physical John Brown and, using dispassionate third-person pronoun references to that physical form, “tumble it into its grave,” are the

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same oppressors as will be troubled by the metaphysical martyred spirit and its capacity to stir slave rebellion. Although extension of the poem’s argument suggests that the battle against slavery will be won if, like John Brown, the poem’s readers “stand firm” in death’s face, this remains absent from the text and remains for readers to induce. Barker’s poem frames the question of John Brown’s service as a symbol not only of violent rebellion against slavery, but also of further steadfastness.17 If poets like Whitmore and Barker are honoring an about-to-be-martyred spirit, they are also demanding a resoluteness of sacrifice against slavery. Pre-execution poetry announces an economy of expectation: Captain Brown will die, meet the expectations of martyrdom, and transfer his steadfast spirit to those among the antislavery militants. This is a narrative economy that states “we expect you to die heroically” because the looming national schism is creating a death culture where “we may have to die heroically.” Public apostrophes to Brown’s fortitude in the face of death thus carry deeply personal, anticipatory freight. Not only does Brown’s demeanor under sentence of death characterize an antislavery faith, but its steadfastness models anticipations for many more potential deaths. When the famed Hutchinson Family singers performed George W. Putnam’s trotting iambic poem “The Irrepressible Conflict”18 at antislavery meetings during this period, they captured this call for steadfastness in the phrases of religious apocalypse: They’re gathering on the mountain, They’re gathering on the plain; And ’neath the tramp of Freedom’s host, The broad earth shakes again. And this their glorious rallying-cry, Whose firm hearts never quail: God and the people! On for right,— There’s no such word as fail!

If Brown’s execution was a culmination it was simultaneously a preface, and The Liberator’s editorial choice of poetry at the eve of his execution reinforced such messages that “firm hearts never fail.” The militant poetic aesthetic—equally visible in modern and contemporary Palestinian resistance and martyr poetry, for example19—seeks to transfer and infuse a radical acceptance of individual self-sacrifice for life-giving collective purpose. Immediately behind the sacrificial subject arrive the assembled hosts who will sanctify and celebrate the calm self-possession with which their hero greeted death. In embracing this militant aesthetic, Brown’s pre-execution poetry established the radical tropes of the body of post-execution poetry.

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Post-Execution Poetry The Liberator published a group of five John Brown poems in its edition of December 9, 1859, the first edition printed after the execution. One of this new wave, a dirge by an anonymous author, recorded as having been sung at a meeting in Concord, Massachusetts on the December 2 execution day, is the most religious of the trio.20 In its quasi-biographical appreciation, the poem suggests that Brown’s act had a foundation of patriotism—it invokes with little reflection the Pilgrim Fathers, Washington, and Jefferson—but the poem proceeds to suggest that it was a foundation overlaid heavily with a Hebraic passion for the law: But chiefly on the Hebrew page He read Jehovah’s law, And this from youth to hoary age Obeyed with love and awe.

Following the prophetic spirit of accepting divine judgment, the poem accepts Brown’s execution as an expression of divine justice: “And though our eyes with tears dim, / We know that God is just.” Brown is here more of a pious servant to divine will than the human vehicle of divine rage and antislavery revolution that he is to become in subsequent poetry. Another of this initial post-execution group, Alfred Gibbs Campbell’s “Old John Brown,”21 voices a fierce, ironic attack against Virginia’s hangmen. Campbell, an African American editor and poet, had published a brief-lived temperance newspaper, The Alarm Bell (1851–1852), in Patterson, New Jersey at the beginning of the decade. Campbell’s poetry was characterized by its militant defense of African American rights, a pursuit he takes up here with ironic false-voice advocacy. “Swing up the traitor! Let him die! / Truth, honer [sic] and sincerity / Are treason to Virginia’s laws” begins the poem. It renders the conflict into one between the state’s assertion of sovereignty in defense of slavery and a prophetic annunciation of freedom. Brown’s rebellion against state authority is too pure a patriotism for the state to recognize; therefore, patriotism becomes treason. Thus where freedom is absent “the gallows tree” has become an abysmal emblem of state sovereignty. Similar imagistic and rhetorical reversals define Campbell’s poem, for example, “though he be / Captive, yet conqueror is he!” and “Oh! glorious traitor!” Two months later, Massachusetts reform activist Anna Gardner echoed Campbell’s glorification of “treason,” writing of Brown “Insurgent! Traitor! terms for him sublime!”22

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Campbell emphasizes not only Brown’s role as a prophet, but the damage his militant action has caused to Virginia and the terror that his spirit will cause: The blow he struck destroyed your power, And prophesied the coming hour When Heaven’s avenging wrath shall fall, And wrap your land in ruin’s pall.

Brown gains transformation into a force of secular terror, one whose prophecy derives from a gathering Northern civic storm as much as from divine will: “Your lips with terror become white; / For every North wind’s breath ye feel; / Now seems your certain doom to seal.” Brown’s tomb will become an echo-chamber of horror for slaveholders and the legal system that condemned his revolutionary spirit. Campbell, like other poets appearing in The Liberator during this period, entirely rejects the widespread label of “traitor” that was attached to Brown and instead declares that as a rebel against slavery he has “Made treason holy and sublime!” Like other writers, the “Message to Pharror” poet, for instance, Campbell envisions a land seized with terror as the result of the conflicting forces Brown has unchained. Although the proximity of Civil War was not immediately apparent, its onrush was plainly visible. As one pseudonymous Boston poet in the same issue phrased this vision of Brown’s effect on the near future, once again invoking a Hebrew prophet: And through the future untold years The weak and blasted life ye take Shall rise a Samson to your fears . . .23

While there is an enthusiasm attaching to Campbell’s declaration concerning Brown, one not shared by the publics of Northern and Western states despite a rising tide of antislavery opinion among them,24 he no longer writes as an entire political isolate. His position as an African American writer favoring active, militant, and national resistance against slavery, not long ago beyond the pale even among Garrisonians, had become more acceptable through the political precipitation that characterized these several months of 1859–1860. One writer who refused to give cognizance to this change was John Greenleaf Whittier. It was not that he was incapable of such vision: Whittier had recognized the unbridgeable contradiction between pacifist principles and the probable trajectory of the antislavery struggle years earlier. With the approach of civil apocalypse, Whittier adopted in his poetry

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a prophetic voice that characterized the conflict less as one of racial justice, and more as one of divine justice. In this vein Whittier had a momentary vision in his garden several years prior to the Civil War, went into his house and quickly wrote out the poem, and then appalled at its apocalyptic images, placed it in a desk drawer. First titled “The Furnace Blast,” then retitled “Ein Feste Burg Ist Unser Gott” for its modeling after Martin Luther’s hymn, Whittier’s poem was a preeminent antebellum example of poetic recognition of war’s proximity. He published the poem only in June 1861, after the war’s first battles had begun, noting his own incongruity with the times in a letter where he wrote “I do not think it is strange that a Quaker’s song should be thought out of place in the army.”25 Yet the day that Brown died in Virginia, Whittier wrote to his friend and protégé, the poet Lucy Larcom, “I feel deep sympathy for John Brown but deplore from my heart his rash and insane attempt. It injures the cause he sought to serve.”26 In this expression Whittier reiterated his previous expressions to abolitionist friends expressing his horror of Brown’s raid. To Lydia Maria Child he had already written an earlier letter in late October stating “as friends of peace, as well as believers in the Sermon on the Mount, we dare not lend any countenance to such attempts as that at Harper’s Ferry.”27 Whittier continually emphasized himself as bound by peace principles, sending another letter to William Lloyd Garrison protesting at vigorous length a Garrison essay that cited other Whittier poems for their martial spirit, and suggesting “Brown of Osawatomie” failed to recognize Brown’s heroism.28 Whittier himself had been dissatisfied. He had sent his Brown poem to his friend Theodore Tilton, editor of the New York Independent, for which Whittier likely received his usual payment of $100, quite a considerable compensation for the day.29 However, Whittier was unhappy with the poem and quickly wrote again to Tilton asking that it be returned because “It is not what it ought to be and I wd ask the favor if it is not too late to have the privilege of rewriting it.”30 There is no further mention of the source of Whittier’s discontent, but that may be surmised easily as laying in an issue of the poem’s balance of consideration between the writer’s pacifism and Brown’s violent method. Given that the poem appeared in print on December 22, it appears that Whittier was unable to revise the poem: the source of his dissatisfaction never had an opportunity for editorial revision. “Brown of Osawatomie” is a poem that contends with itself, creating a hagiographic scene where, on the evidence of his correspondence, its author saw none. The poem’s politics emerge through its rendering of Brown before execution as a figure in need of repentance. If, however, the poem posits that Brown requires benefit of absolution for his sin, then

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Brown’s acts were deserving of punishment. In the body of his antislavery writings, Whittier had proved himself capable of identifying the violence of slavery but incapable of comprehending resistance or self-defense. He was a purist unable to distinguish between a theological argument that Christ’s inner peace was immanent within all human souls and needed realization, and the social reality of violence as a logical consequence of having suffered violence. Nonetheless, for the political benefit of the abolitionist cause, Whittier undertook the task of converting Brown into an acceptable character, and more, into one worthy of high praise. Praying together with any local minister is impossible for Brown because, as Whittier paraphrases Brown’s own sentiments,31 “I will not have to shrive my soul a priest in Slavery’s pay.” The agency of black slaves as moral benefactors who ennoble white endeavors on their behalf comes to the fore instead in the form of a black slave child, one innocent and without consciousness of what Brown represents.32 Conscious absolution from an adult aware of Brown’s purposes would constitute forgiveness of his violent means, whereas if that same act of absolution comes from a child not yet conscious of the world, then questions of forgiveness and absolution are not relevant. So the adopted device of a kiss from “the negro’s child,” a transparent journalistic invention, serves this function of resolution, both for the poem’s version of Brown and for a credulous Whittier. Through that kiss “The shadows of his stormy life / That moment fell apart” and, before execution, Brown achieves the consolation of a “loving heart.” Whittier’s phrasing reveals the difficulty he had in arguing for Brown as a martyr, for the phrasing is that of a profoundly reluctant redemption: “That kiss from all its guilty means / Redeemed the good intent,” making this scene more one of mitigation than martyrdom. The final three stanzas, the second half of the poem, are dedicated to Whittier’s invocation against civil violence. As a rebel, John Brown represents for Whittier a prime example of the forces that must be eliminated from American society: “Perish with him the folly / That seeks through evil good!” There can be no civil benefit achieved through violence, the poem argues, but rather only through the example of Christian nonresistance: “Not the outlaw’s pride of daring, / But the Christian sacrifice.” Whittier rejects any form of civil revolt, whether coming from the “Northern rifle” or “the negro’s spear,” racializing circumstances of weaponry. Instead of human action against slavery, the resolution Whittier invokes is that of the Angel of Truth revealing justice and love to all sides, causing them to lay aside weapons. It is a poem that posits, in essence, that Southern slave-owners would comply and lay aside their institution peacefully upon realizing a divinely revealed message contained in Brown’s martyrdom.

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Whittier was living in a self-willed dream world by now, deliberately blinkering himself toward civil conflict. But abolitionist thought was in the midst of transformation, even if Whittier resisted and sought to retain an older pacifist vision. In his Tremont Temple address on the evening of Brown’s death, Garrison had recognized this change and declaimed “Success to every slave insurrection at the South, and in every slave country.”33 One of those changing was the indefatigable reform writer Lydia Maria Child. When the American Anti-Slavery Society convened at Boston’s Music Hall on January 26 for a “subscription anniversary,” the program included a musical version of Child’s “The Hero’s Heart”34 and The Liberator published the poem in its February 3 issue. Contradictory impulses had possessed Child from the beginning upon learning of events at Harper’s Ferry, a contradiction that she shared with many Garrisonian abolitionists. If on the one hand she deplored Brown’s violence, she simultaneously prized his motivation of liberating slaves. As she wrote to Brown, “Believing in peace principles, I cannot sympathize with the method you chose to advance the cause of freedom. But I honor your generous intentions.”35 That honoring grew into a nationally read public exchange over Brown’s attack on Harper’s Ferry. After Child wrote to Virginia’s governor Henry Wise requesting permission to nurse the wounded Brown, she received a response assuring her of such permission but asserting that as an abolitionist she was as guilty as Brown of having “whetted knives of butchery for our Mothers, sisters, daughters and babes,” and that “His attempt was a natural consequence of your sympathy.”36 Wise provided copies of his exchange to the press; Child replied to Wise, including prison correspondence she had received from Brown; and the entire correspondence was published as a tract of which some 300,000 copies were sold at a nickel apiece.37 For Child, Brown was the moral embodiment of pure antislavery, a man who was willing to die for that principle, and who by dying framed slavery as a burning moral issue in its in-kind reply to slave-owners who employed violence to establish and maintain slavery. “The Hero’s Heart” remains one of the most pacific of Brown poems, choosing to emphasize a soul at peace with the world as he met death and to de-emphasize Brown as a militant abolitionist-in-arms. The tropes of a “tender heart,” a “kind old man,” the reworked black child of Whittier’s poem, another departing kiss, a golden light, and hovering angels with harps locate this poem within the classic territory of sentimentalist narratives and their death scenes. A good soul leaves the earth to go to a reward in better places, so a death scene is a passage and not an end. Witnesses to the scene are both human and immaterial, waiting to send off and to welcome a soul with divine love. In order to achieve that passage

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easily, however, earthbound souls must compose themselves with grace for their departure from earth. In the poem, the winter landscape is “still and bright” even if in Virginia “Infernal passions festered there, / Where peaceful Nature looked so fair.” State authority, a passing phenomenon compared to nature and the divine, appears briefly as a “glittering bayonet and gun.” Greatest focus is given to the state of grace and composure with which, in the midst of hostility, Brown meets his death. There are two witnesses of importance, the first being a small black girl who serves as a vital connection to the truth contained in Brown’s heart: As that dark brow to his up-turned, The tender heart within him yearned; And, fondly stooping o’er her face, He kissed her, for her injured race.

Brown not only finds his emotional solace, but in the act of kissing the child also finds the human and political purpose of his death. It is a kiss of love and apology for his forced departure from the world, and a kiss of racial reconciliation for those who remain in the world. For Whittier, the effect of the kiss was to spark Brown’s realization of his sinful recourse to violence; for Child, its effect is to evidence the principle of love from out of which he acted. Watching from heaven above, the second witness, Jesus Christ, smiles at the gesture and says, “He did it unto me!” The spirit of Christ has been transmogrified into a black child’s body, and to recognize this divine presence is to enter Christ’s kingdom directly as unenlightened hangmen wrench a soul from its human form. An execution scene thus becomes an apotheosis for John Brown’s soul, with the gates of heaven opened by a sign of interracial love. In the corpus of John Brown poetry appearing in The Liberator, Whittier’s and Child’s poems retain an engagement with the language of religious prophecy that was being overtaken increasingly by secular national prophecies. Yet the strength of that religious prophetic language heavily infuses and informs poetry that sought to derive meanings, sustenance, and comfort provided by antislavery public poetry during the approach of war. As one pseudonymous poet characterized the prophetic meaning of John Brown after his execution: Earth feels the time of prophet-song— When lives from land to land shall say— And think it praise enough to say— “We are too just to bide with Wrong.”

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Oh, comes a deeper wisdom then,— And owns that in our golden year, One fire-anointed soul was clear To glass God’s image forth to men.38

APPENDIX A: John Brown Poems in The Liberator, November 4, 1859–April 13, 1860 Poems originally published in The Liberator, unless otherwise stated. November 4, 1859 “Song, Supposed to be sung by Slaves in Insurrection,” William J. Snelling November 18, 1859 “The Message of Pharror,” anonymous November 25, 1859 “John Brown of Osawatomie,” G.D. Whitmore “John Brown’s Invasion,” anonymous “John Brown,” A.P.C. [reprinted from Anti-Slavery Standard] December 2, 1859 “To John Brown,” David Barker [reprinted from The Jeffersonian and Times (Maine)] December 9, 1859 “The Virginia Scaffold,” anonymous [reprinted from New York Independent] “Old John Brown,” “Gibbs A. Campbell” (Alfred Gibbs Campbell) [reprinted from Patterson Guardian] “John Brown’s Final Victory,” G.W. Light “The Quaking South,” anonymous “The Execution of John Brown,” A.D.A.B. “Dirge,” anonymous December 16, 1859 “Woe, Woe to Virginia!” anonymous “John Brown of Harper’s Ferry,” C.P.H. [reprinted from New York Independent] December 23, 1859 “The Martyr of December 2d, 1859,” Carrie “Old John Brown,” attrib. Edmund Sears [reprinted from Monthly Religious Magazine] “The Death of John Brown,” anonymous January 1, 1860 “To Capt. John Brown, of Harper’s Ferry,” Jane Ashby “Lines,” Carrie January 13, 1860 “Sonnets—To John Brown,” Jane Ashby “John Brown,” S.N. “The Martyr of Harper’s Ferry,” D.R.

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“Brown of Osawatomie,” John Greenleaf Whittier [reprinted from New York Independent] January 20, 1860 “John Brown is Gone!” E.W.T. “The Virginia Lady’s Lament,” Jane Ashby “With a Rose, That bloomed on the day of John Brown’s martyrdom,” Louisa May Alcott “The Dragon and the Knight,” anonymous [reprinted from Halifax Sun] February 3, 1860 “The Hero’s Heart,” Lydia Maria Child February 10, 1860 “Elba,” Justitia “The Martyr of Dec. 2d, 1859,” Anna Gardner [reprinted from Nantucket Mirror] March 30, 1860 “The Virginia Martyrs,” Justitia “The Fatal Friday,” D.R. April 13, 1860 “Freedom,” J.T. Powers

Notes 1. Melville, Thoreau, and Whitman all employed “meteoric” in reference to the career of John Brown (see Ljungquist 1989). 2. William J. Snelling, “Song, Supposed to be sung by Slaves in Insurrection,” The Liberator, November 4, 1859; Anonymous, “Woe, Woe to Virginia!” The Liberator, December 16, 1859. 3. “The Message to Pharror,” The Liberator, November 19, 1859. Analogies to Moses were commonplace in prose relating to Brown. Osborn Perry Anderson, one of Brown’s black comrades at Harper’s Ferry, endorsed this comparison in A Voice from Harper’s Ferry (1861), stating that the command to Pharaoh to free the Hebrew slaves was the biblical foundation of the raid. Of this imperative, Anderson wrote “Its nationality is universal; its language every where understood by the haters of tyranny; and those that accept its mission, every where understand each other” (cited in Quarles 1972, 40–41). That same universalism attracted Polish romantic poet Cyprian Norwid, who lived briefly in the United States during the 1850s and who also wrote poetry with similar analogies of Brown to Moses (“Mojzesz Murzynow”—Moses of the Negroes). See Dickinson and Japola 1990. 4. G.D. Whitmore, “John Brown of Osawatomie,” The Liberator, November 25, 1859. Analogies to a revolutionary Christ were employed more famously by Victor Hugo in his “Letter on John Brown,” London News, December 9, 1859, reprinted in The Liberator, December 31, 1859 and in Pierre Vésnier’s Le martyr de la liberté des nègres; ou, John Brown, le Christ des noirs (1864). For further details, see Drescher 1993 and Hoffman 1987–1988. 5. E.W.T., “John Brown is Gone,” The Liberator, January 20, 1860.

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6. “The Virginia Scaffold,” The Liberator, December 9, 1859, reprinted from the New York Independent. 7. See John Greenleaf Whittier, “Brown of Osawatomie,” The Liberator, January 13, 1860 and Lydia Maria Child, “The Hero’s Heart,” The Liberator, February 3, 1860. 8. A.D.A.B., “The Execution of John Brown,” The Liberator, December 9, 1859, reprinted from the Boston Transcript. 9. Jane Ashby was a British Quaker and frequent poetry contributor to The Liberator. Anna Gardner (1816–1901) began her career as a teacher at Nantucket’s African School, and became a writer and secretary of the New England Anti-Slavery Society. Her poetry was collected in Harvest Gleanings: In Prose and Verse (1881) and The Golden Rod and Other Poems (1892). Edmund Hamilton Sears (1810–1876) was a Unitarian minister, editor of The Monthly Religious Magazine (1856–1873), and author of the popular Athanasia, or Foregleams of Immortality (1857) and numerous religious texts. 10. See Appendix A for list of John Brown-related topical poems published in The Liberator from November 4, 1859 to April 13, 1860. 11. For further history on Howe’s use of the poem, see Abels 1971, 391–392. For early history of the “John Brown’s Body” popular song, see Silber 1960, 7–11. 12. The two most anthologized of Whittier’s antislavery poems have been “Ichabod,” his slashing condemnation of Webster and the 1850 Compromise, and the lyrical “Song of Slaves in the Desert,” perhaps reflecting their directness and absence of equivocation, unlike his more problematic “Brown of Osawatomie.” 13. Early studies of Civil War-era poetry assumed untenable class, race, and gender-based genre distinctions between literary poetry and popular, folkloristic ballads that addressed current events. Over a century ago early folklorist Alfred Williams wrote concerning Civil War poetry, for instance, that “The illiterate poets were as busy as those of higher education; and those who did not seek the public through the pages of the fashionable magazine, or even the poet’s corner of the country newspaper, or through the badly printed sheet of the penny street ballad, or the mouth of the Negro minstrel, contributed almost as largely to the poetry as their brothers” (Williams 1892, 267). Similar characterizations as made by Alfred Williams segregated antislavery poetry according to its perceived class origins, with Whittier’s productions regarded as literature proper and almost all others as “popular” poetry at best. The poetry column published in The Liberator, while certainly reflecting the aesthetic biases of its middle-class reform editor and the journal’s readers, represents a heavy intermixture of ballads, homilistic verse, and belletristic poetry produced by a wide variety of differently-voiced writers. Due to the anonymous or pseudonymous nature of many of the writers, the proportion of working-class poets remains unknown. However, it is indicative that one postexecution poem, “John Brown” by an unknown “S.N.” (The Liberator, January 13, 1860), a Connecticut mill hand, was published with a forwarding note to Garrison that provided information on its original reading at one of the hundreds of John Brown meetings that took place during these months: “Friend

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14. 15.

16.

17.

18.

19.

20. 21.

22. 23. 24.

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Garrison—I send you a few lines that were read, the other evening, in this place, upon the character of John Brown, the martyr. It is the production of a mechanic while at work at his lathe—a man of no education. It had a good effect upon the audience. J.C.N. Plainville, (Ct.) Jan. 2, 1860.” Class-based characterizations or genre divisions of antislavery poetry between “popular” and “literary” would recapitulate problems of nineteenth-century critical discussion. For this reason, we employ the term “public poetry” to discuss antislavery poetry as a body. This usage, as Mary Loeffelholz argues in reference to Boston poetry of the early 1860s, “underlines poetry’s role in the constitution of a nineteenth-century aestheticized public sphere” (Loeffelholz 2001, 213). G.D. Whitmore,“John Brown of Osawatomie,” The Liberator, November 25, 1859. Brown’s admirers sent him similarly-phrased appreciations in prison, as with one Quaker woman’s letter comparing him to a Moses who “led out the thousands of Jewish slaves from their bondage” (Sanborn 1885, 581–582). David Barker, “To John Brown,” The Liberator, December 2, 1859. In a letter dated November 25, 1859, a subscriber forwards the poem with a prefatory note that the poem had also appeared in “the Jeffersonian (Republican) and Times, (Douglas-Democrat).” The poem was reprinted in the New York Times, January 1, 1865. Barker published a single collection of his work, Poems, with Historical Sketch by Hon. John E. Godfrey (1876). Barker’s “On John Brown” was read at a Brown memorial meeting held on December 2, the evening of his execution, in Florence, Massachusetts. The Liberator, December 31, 1859. George W. Putnam, “The Irrepressible Conflict,” The Liberator, December 9, 1859. Putnam, a Boston figure who had served as secretary to Charles Dickens during the first tour of the United States in 1842, was an antislavery poet who collaborated with both Garrison and Hutchinson. An interesting comparison may be made here to the militant poetry of Tewfik Zayyad, Mahmud Darwish, Ghassan Zaqtan, ’Umar Shabana and others who explore similar topics of self-sacrifice for freedom. Anonymous, “Dirge,” The Liberator, December 9, 1859. Gibbs A. Campbell, “Old John Brown,” The Liberator, December 9, 1859. Reprinted from the Patterson Guardian (NJ). The Liberator noticed him as “Gibbs A. Campbell” rather than his correct name, Alfred Gibbs Campbell, possibly indicating that he was not a familiar figure to them in Boston. This poem was reprinted in Campbell’s Poems (1883). The volume contains one other memorial poem to Brown, a postwar hymn entitled “Victory.” Anna Gardner, “The Martyr of Dec. 2d, 1859,” The Liberator, February 10, 1860. The poem was reprinted from the Nantucket Mirror. A.D.A.B.,“The Execution of John Brown,” The Liberator, December 9, 1859, 196. Noting here Lincoln’s representative mainstream opinion, expressed some two months after Brown’s execution, in a February 27, 1860 speech at the Cooper Institute in New York City, suggesting “that affair, in its philosophy, corresponds with the many attempts related in history to the assassination of kings and emperors” (Lincoln 1905–1906, 5, 142).

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25. Whittier to John Wallace Hutchinson, March 6, 1862, in Pickard 1975, 3, 29–30. In writing an antislavery revision of “Ein Feste Burg Ist Unser Gott,” Martin Luther’s song (based on Psalm 46) that was an anthem of Protestant armies during the Hundred Years’ War, Whittier chose a martial song quite different from “a Quaker’s song.” The poem was banned from Union camps after a performance by the Hutchinson Family singers that created a stir among soldiers, but Lincoln read the poem to his cabinet, stated that there “were just the songs he wanted his soldiers to hear,” and lifted the performance ban. Lincoln later credited the poem with influencing the issuance of the Emancipation Proclamation. See discussion in Pickard 1975, ibid. As emphasized earlier, in antislavery poems where Whittier provided a clear vision, not a contradicted one, his work was far more popular. 26. Whittier to Lucy Larcom, December 2, 1859 (Whittier 1975, 440). 27. Whittier to Lydia Maria Child, 21 Oct. 1859 (Whittier 1975, 435–36). 28. Whittier to Garrison, 15 Jan. 1860 (Whittier 1975, 447–49). 29. Whittier to Tilton, 29 Dec. 1859 (Whittier 1975, 443), mentioning the prevailing rate per poem. 30. Whittier to Tilton, 11 Dec. 1859, (Whittier 1975, 441). 31. Brown to Rev. J.W. McFarland, November 23, 1859, The Liberator, January 13, 1860, 7. 32. The myth of Brown—who was closely surrounded by militia as he went to his execution kissing a black child—apparently arose in a December 5 New York Tribune article by Edwin House. James Redpath, Brown’s first biographer, repeated the story. See Abels 1971, 367–368. Paul Finkelman analyzes this myth more comprehensively in his chapter “Manufacturing Martyrdom: The Antislavery Response to John Brown’s Raid” (Finkelman 1995, 50–52). 33. The Liberator, December 16, 1859, 198–99. 34. Lydia Maria Child, “The Hero’s Heart,” The Liberator, February 3, 1860, 20. For Child’s alterations of the poem, see Swennes 1969. 35. Child to John Brown, October 26, 1859, in Child 1982, 324. 36. Henry Wise to Child, October 29, 1859, quoted in Karcher 1994, 420, 713. 37. Lydia Maria Child, Correspondence between Lydia Maria Child and Gov. Wise and Mrs. Mason, of Virginia (1860). Karcher 1994, 419–25 provides a full account of this correspondence and its publication. 38. C.P.H., “John Brown of Harper’s Ferry,” The Liberator, December 16, 1859, 200. Reprinted from the New York Independent.

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5

Consenting to Violence: Henry David Thoreau, John Brown, and the Transcendent Intellectual Andrew Taylor

n Henry David Thoreau’s most extensive commentary on the Harper’s Ferry episode, his 1859 address “A Plea for Captain John Brown,” we find a curious but, I want to suggest, telling temporal anomaly. Discussing Brown’s “immortality,” his transfiguration from “Old Brown” to “an Angel of Light,” Thoreau declares: “I see now that it was necessary that the bravest and humanest man in all the country should be hung . . . I almost fear that I may yet hear of his deliverance, doubting if a prolonged life, if any life, can do as much good as his death” (Thoreau 1996, 156). These lines, of course, announce Thoreau’s sense of the inevitability of Brown’s fate; yet they also locate Brown’s execution as a completed deed, not as something still to be enacted. Thoreau’s address was delivered in Concord on October 30; Brown was hanged on December 2. The deployment of a past tense here (“was necessary”) is indicative of the degree to which Brown’s life takes on a trajectory for Thoreau that transcends the problematic particularities of it. To read Brown’s narrative as a completed, teleological arc allows Thoreau to dispense with those elements of his radicalism that might challenge conventional notions of the relationship between acts of individual, often violent will and the necessity for social and legal structures to regulate and, at times, prevent such acts. In “A Plea,” Thoreau’s need to interpret John Brown as a figure who has managed to escape the oscillating dialectic of self and society leads to an explicit admission of temporal disregard: “I am aware that I anticipate a

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little, that he was still, at the last accounts, alive at the hands of his foes; but that being the case, I have all along found myself thinking and speaking of him as physically dead” (148). The phrase “but that being the case” is an important hinge here, for what we might call Brown’s textual death takes on greater importance than the biological fact of his actual living. Despite evidence to the contrary, Thoreau is keen to frame Brown in a past tense that initiates an “afterlife.” I want to suggest in this essay that the form this afterlife takes for Thoreau is that of the idealized dissenting critic, the principled intellectual uncontaminated by material and local forces, whose actions offer a model for our better selves. Yet such a position is complicated by the recognition that the idea of a transcendent space is politically problematic, at the same time as it is epistemologically essential. Thoreau’s fascination with John Brown derives, in part, from his belief that, in death, Brown had achieved the most effective form of cultural critique possible. If it is the role of the intellectual to diagnose and prescribe, Brown’s deliberate act of martyrdom represents its most radical manifestation. There is no little element of self-promotion involved in all this as well: as Brown’s steadfast interpreter, one of the very few who has managed to read him correctly, Thoreau takes up the mantle that a prematurely deceased Brown has lain down. Theorists within the burgeoning academic study of terrorism have increasingly addressed the vexed relationship between instances of violence and their subsequent cultural mediation. Violence and discourse are viewed as conjoined components in the performance of terror, where the significance of the “event” is established in the subsequent “process” of narrating it. Anthony Kubiak, in his book Stages of Terror (1991), highlights the role played by various forms of media in offering terrorists and their acts an afterlife. Kubiak suggests that acts of violence depend upon their cultural mediation to give them an afterlife; indeed, for most people, violence is only experienced as something framed and narrated after the moment itself is over. “Terrorism first appears in culture as a media event,” he writes. “The terrorist, consequently, does not exist before the media image, and only exists subsequently as a media image in culture” (Kubiak 1991, 1). As he recognizes, however, the danger attendant in both this time lag between act and interpretation, and the apparent prioritizing of the latter as that which makes sense of the former, is the occlusion of violence as an immediate experience. “For us, the terror of mediated terrorism does not exist, because it has been obliterated by the repetitions of its own abstracted image. This repetition deadens the initial impact” (2). The sharp moment of terrorism, as felt by its victims, runs the risk of being neutralized by the proliferation of narratives that transform it into theory, archetype, or telos; or, as in the case of Thoreau, mediate the events at

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Harper’s Ferry as interventions of untarnished nonconformity. As Thoreau writes of Brown, “I shall not be forward to think him mistaken in his method who quickest succeeds to liberate the slave”: I know that the mass of my countrymen think that the only righteous use that can be made of Sharps’ rifles and revolvers is to fight duels with them, when we are insulted by nations, or to hunt Indians, or shoot fugitive slaves with them, or the like. I think that for once the Sharps’ rifles and the revolvers were employed in a righteous cause. (153)

As Lewis Hyde has recently noted, there is a “grim confusion” here between “eloquence and literal statement” (Hyde 2002, 143). The effectiveness of Thoreau’s rhetorical disdain of certain forms of violence is matched by his apparently uncomplicated advocacy of it when performed under the rubric of a “righteous cause.” The pressure he places here on such a homiletic word as “righteous” is typical of Thoreau’s wider insistence that we think more carefully about the kind of language we use. Yet the unsettling of consensual definitions of words, however useful that may be as a rhetorical and ideological tactic, is not the same as being able to distinguish successfully between them so as to assert forms of moral superiority. The slide from “righteous use” to “righteous cause” in this passage, with the latter viewed as a just usage of the word and the former a corrupting of it, glosses over the bloody effects of tangible violence common to both. Thoreau’s allegiance to Brown was not immediate. He met and heard him twice, in March 1857 and in May 1859, on the first occasion willing to contribute a small sum of money but irritated by Brown’s unwillingness to specify what the money was to fund. Following Harper’s Ferry, Thoreau made an entry in his journal: “I subscribed a trifle when he was there three years ago, I had so much confidence in the man,—that he would do right,— but it would seem that he had not confidence enough in me, or in anybody else that I know, to communicate his plans to us” (Thoreau 1906, 437). This statement reveals the distance of Thoreau’s self-proclaimed position of ignorance from what was happening around him in Concord and Boston. Brown’s insurrectionary intentions were circulating—if in an ill-defined form—among reformist circles, specifically the “Secret Six” of Franklin Sanborn (later to be Thoreau’s biographer), Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Theodore Parker, Gerrit Smith, Samuel Gridley Howe, and George Luther Stearns. Thoreau’s eventual preoccupation with Brown has a belated element about it, which perhaps accounts in part for its unwavering zeal. What is beyond question is that by the time of Harper’s Ferry in 1859, Thoreau’s engagement with the political crisis of the moment had grown more focused and his textual response consequently more adamant.

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“A Plea” is a powerful piece of rhetoric that occludes as much as it asserts. As we shall see, it assumes a position of righteous anger at the way in which Brown’s acts are mediated and distorted within the culture, through the pulpit and in newspaper reports. However, Thoreau’s clarity of perspective, his unwavering belief that Brown has undertaken “a brave and humane deed” (146), detaches the story of Harper’s Ferry from the problems of political philosophy and moral accountability that this episode explicitly raises. If we adhere to Thoreau’s position, if we give our consent to his reading of Brown’s narrative as a viable and just one, we are faced with the potentially troubling dilemma in which a principle (such as an ethics of antislavery) is upheld by (perhaps unprincipled?) acts of violence. As Stephen Mulhall has argued, the granting of consent brings with it the necessity for conversations about degree and amount. Consent—and its etymological relative “consensus”—is not an absolute position, but rather a contested one. In such situations we need, Mulhall writes, “to discover how far our consent reaches, for what it makes us responsible, and to what we are prepared to continue to consent” (Mulhall 1994, 275). John Brown’s nonconformism, the profound absoluteness of his position, demands just this kind of attention, for it sets in play the possibility that others might feel similarly mandated to act with extreme violence on the basis of a conviction not necessarily widely shared. At the heart of this essay are two related concerns: does Thoreau’s admiring consent to Brown’s actions distort them, to the extent that the principles upon which action can be based overrun and outweigh the extreme manner by which those principles are promulgated? In other words, can acts of terrorism ever be principled? In their book Crimes of Art and Terror, Frank Lentricchia and Jody McAuliffe explore the interconnectedness of political extremism and romantic artistic endeavor. Both, they argue, derive from a principled desire to overturn “the West’s economic and cultural order,” to induce a “terrifying awakening” by standing outside that order, “so much the better to violate and subvert the regime itself ” (Lentricchia and McAuliffe 2003, 2–3). Both transgressive artistic desire and acts that we might call “terrorism” are generated, the authors suggest, at and beyond the margins of the mainstream, by individuals who refuse to conceive of themselves as “quintessential insiders, cultural enforcers, comfortably contracted” (19). Such a projection of the artist/terrorist as a deracinated exile, freed from the constraints of social interaction and deformation in the interests of artistic/ ideological purity, suggests an affinity with a version of the intellectual figure as self-fashioned and autonomous, one whose critique is all the more powerful because of its uncompromised status. Julien Benda’s influential 1927 work La Trahison des Clercs (The Betrayal of the Intellectuals) asserted

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this position of detachment as axiomatic. The true intellectual, Benda thought, must be indifferent to the passions and associations of ordinary men and women, to the extent that “he plays human passions instead of living them.” He (and for Benda the intellectual is always gendered such) is “guided by the desire for truth alone, apart from any concern with the demands of society” (Benda 1955, 30, 122). Intellectuals must resist the temptations of governing structures and institutional forces through a geographical or ontological position of distance, an embraced alienation from the centers of power. In this sense, then, Lentricchia and McAuliffe’s thesis opens up the possibility of viewing the writer/terrorist as a kind of intellectual figure, if by that we understand the term to mean one whose exile from the mainstream authorizes forms of critique and whose diagnoses enact patterns of textual/actual resistance. Crimes of Art and Terror cites the transgressive acts of the Unabomber, Theodore Kaczynski, as indicative of the terrorist’s impulse to oppose what is believed to be “a corpsed world”: Kaczynski offers himself as “the one undegraded opponent” of a corrupt and corporatized culture (22). Such a transcendent position, disdainful of the dehumanizing impulses at work within the social and political body, recalls Thoreau’s words in his 1849 essay “Resistance to Civil Government”: The mass of men serve the State thus, not as men mainly, but as machines, with their bodies. They are the standing army, and the militia, jailers, constables, posse comitatus &c. In most cases there is no free exercise whatever of the judgement or of the moral sense; but they put themselves on a level with wood and earth and stones, and wooden men can perhaps be manufactured that will serve the purpose as well.

In contrast to this image of inanimate rigidity, Thoreau proposes a countervailing model, precious in its rarity. “A very few, as heroes, patriots, martyrs, reformers in the great sense, and men, serve the State with their consciences also, and so necessarily resist it for the most part; and they are commonly treated by it as enemies” (3). Genuine, italicized manhood is to be found in those whose service to the state lies in their opposition to it; Matthew Arnold would later describe it as the mind “refusing to lend itself to any idea of those ulterior, political, practical considerations” that impede the “current of true and fresh ideas” (Arnold 1987, 142). Martyrdom, often the end point of terrorist activity, signifies cultural critique of the profoundest kind. (On the day of Brown’s execution, Thoreau gave an address called “The Martyrdom of John Brown.”) Indeed, Julien Benda’s formulation of the intellectual proposed dissociation from the contingencies of the everyday to such an extent that the intellectual’s most

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potent occasion for influence is a posthumous one: “it seems to me that human affairs can only adopt the religion of the true ‘clerk’ under penalty of becoming divine, i.e., of perishing as a human” (153). Only in death might an intellectual find a vantage point from which to exert influence, and only in the deaths of others might that influence have its desired effect. Such a profound disjunction between the life of the mind and that of everyday existence has been a characteristic element of Western thought from its classical beginnings. Hannah Arendt noted that Plato and Aristotle establish “the enormous superiority of contemplation over activity of any kind,” so that the “later Christian claim to be free from entanglement in worldly affairs, from all the business of this world, was preceded by and originated in the philosophic apolita of late antiquity.” This type of activity (the vita contemplativa) inscribes an ideal mode of ontology that “can reveal itself only in complete human stillness,” apart from and located above “external movement and activity of every kind” (Arendt 1998, 14–15). Such a notion of transcendence, one in which the requirements of the corporeal and socialized self might be left behind, has become a foundational element in defining the terms by which an idea of the “intellectual” might be constituted. What I am suggesting here is the possibility of reading a confluence of perspective that traces connections between the romantic ideal of the writer as transgressive, the terrorist as fired by comparable (if more extreme) notions of disruptive critique, and the intellectual as the descendant of what Lewis Coser calls “those inspired madmen who preached in the wilderness far removed from the institutionalized pieties of court and synagogue,”“biblical prophets . . . who never seem satisfied with things as they are” (Coser 1965, viii). Framing the function of the intellectual in the theocratic language of the jeremiad suits Thoreau’s project of rehabilitating Brown. Thoreau’s Brown creates and inscribes a holy narrative. His story functions as a scriptural text about an object of veneration whose example of absolute, unsurpassable influence is offered for earthly imitation: “Some eighteen hundred years ago Christ was crucified; this morning, perchance, Captain Brown was hung. These are two ends of a chain which is not without its links” (156). Again we can note the equivocation over Brown’s status—“perchance” he is already dead, in which case the line of succession that tethers him to his revolutionary antecedent can be completed. But if we go back to Thoreau’s words from “Resistance to Civil Government” and look at them a little more closely, there are flickers of qualification that serve to muddy the apparently pristine Manichean opposition between “men . . . as machines” and “men . . . in the great sense.” Cultural critique that attains its authority from transcendent detachment might not be the sole position that Thoreau’s heroes take: even

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his nonconformists can only uphold their “necessarily” purified position “for the most part,” a phrase that highlights the major tension in Thoreau’s work between the desire for self-reliant emancipation and the recognition that material ties are inevitable. Walden (1854) is a text that faces the dissenter’s social entanglement with a comic irony that allows the reader to value the motives behind the experiment of solitary utopian living, even as we recognize, along with Thoreau, the inevitably compromised nature of that utopia. Eric Sundquist has succinctly described how the urge for escape in Thoreau is continually thwarted by a material world that “trails naggingly behind as soon as he shoves off in search of that other . . . he can never have” (Sundquist 1979, 42). With his reading of John Brown, this oscillation between untarnished disconnection from and renewed recognition by the center raises anxious questions about how Brown’s acts might be interpreted and built upon after his death. Thoreau cannot afford to pitch his model of ideal human behavior at too high a level without running the risk of isolating Brown in his own transcendence. Brown’s greatest influence may be exerted after death (what Thoreau calls his “translation” [168]), but for those who continue to live with unpredictable contingency, the intellectual of transfigured power still requires rooting in a recognizable landscape. The emphatic denial of social connections—one that corresponds with Brown’s radical antinomianism—is modified by a conceptual framework that, anticipating Gramsci’s notion of the “traditional” intellectual, relocates those assertions of independence and autonomy (an imagined “social utopia”) into the flux of the everyday. Assumptions of transcendence, Gramsci noted, are “not without consequences in the ideological and political field,” where the power that they generate is exerted in “the complex of superstructures, of which the intellectuals are, precisely, the ‘functionaries’ ” (Gramsci 1971, 7, 12). He advocated “forms of new intellectualism”––“directive” in nature—that were explicitly located in the quotidian (10). While Thoreau would probably regard the idea of the functionary intellectual as an oxymoron, Gramsci’s Marxist revision of Benda’s theory nevertheless lays out the dilemma contained within Thoreau’s response to John Brown. The extreme individualism of Brown’s actions, his total rejection of any form of social or institutional framework by which those actions might be judged, dislodges him from shared cultural discourse. It creates an alienation that is difficult to answer or discuss. As Sam Worley has recently asked, in such a situation where the normative parameters of debate and conversation are explicitly rejected, “how is a society to affirm or extend a gesture that bespeaks complete alienation and opposition?” (Worley 2001, 103). How is Benda’s intellectual to effect a Gramscian reconnection with the society he so disdains?

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The lure of transcendence, and the position of authority it affords, is understandable. In an era in which subjects increasingly conceive of themselves as self-divided, when the national imaginary itself appears to lack coherence, the desire for integration drives intellectual work into a space withdrawn from the unsatisfying and fractured worlds of politics and material interaction. In such a realm the individual can cultivate and project such fantasies of integration and superiority that seem impossible within the contingencies of the everyday. Transcendence becomes, then, the possibility of retaining power in the face of that which would conspire to negate authority and autonomy. Critics who identify themselves on both the “right” and the “left” have argued for the centrality of transcendent values to combat the dangers of skepticism and relativism.1 However conflicted the history of transcendence is, and however politically inflected the idea becomes, the appeal to its values is still fundamental to the work that intellectuals do. Indeed, it might be argued that an idea of transcendence, however variously defined, is essential to any kind of critical thinking in its articulation of a point of view that is set apart from the status quo. This is an uncomfortable position, one in which an aspiration toward the transcendent is acknowledged as the foundation for critical work at the same time as the concept of transcendence becomes invested with politically and historically determined frames. George Konrad and Ivan Szelenyi’s assertion that “we do not wish to deny the existence of transcendent elements in the activity of intellectuals, only to make them relative” encapsulates the paradox that marks what they call a certain “schizophrenia inherent in the intellectual’s role” (Konrad and Szelenyi, 1979, 22). Adorno and Horkheimer’s influential critique of the appeal to a transcendence that lies at the heart of the Enlightenment project theorizes the strategies of occlusion and disenfranchisement that underwrite the acquisition of power and its maintenance. Assertions of transparency and universality, they argue, inevitably mask strong blocs of self-interest that police the borders of social acceptability. For those who find themselves outside the coordinates of prescribed values that acquire the status of normative transcendence, what is generated is discord and resistance to the injustices that might accompany such policing (Adorno and Horkheimer [1989]). Even so, despite our awareness of the dangers inherent in positing transcendence as the location of universal worth, it seems impossible to imagine an act of intellectual intervention that does not, at some level, appeal to it as an idea—something that is absent from a hypothetical present context but whose future possibility offers amelioration or, more radically, transformation. Without the ability to look beyond (and above) the immediate moment, intellectual work cannot take place.

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Such ambivalent doubleness—an understanding of transcendence’s unsavory history and yet the inevitable recourse to its framework—is at the heart of Thoreau’s writing on Brown, and signifies the centrality of the intellectual type to his own self-image and to that which he projects onto his subject. Just as Matthew Arnold’s assertion of intellectual detachment, mentioned earlier, proved to be a position that his later work, Culture and Anarchy (1869), inevitably revised, Thoreau is similarly alive to the dangers of constructing a critique that insists upon a perspective that might appear too aloof. In preserving an image of John Brown that conflates the roles of intellectual, artist, and activist he is keen to reattach him to recognizable coordinates—thus embracing the paradox of a historically grounded transcendence. One of the strategies undertaken to achieve this is an insistent focus on locality and region. In many of the tributes voiced to Brown by abolitionists there is a shared referencing of his New England—specifically Connecticut—heritage. Writing two days before Thoreau delivered “A Plea,” William Lloyd Garrison, although no advocate of Brown’s violent tactics, could nevertheless admire him as a devotee of “the logic of Concord, Lexington and Bunker Hill” (Garrison 1995, 154). Ralph Waldo Emerson similarly asserted that Brown was “a fair specimen of the best stock of New England; having that force of thought and that sense of right which are the warp and woof of greatness.” Not only placed at the heart of the dominant national imaginary, Brown’s American credentials were also reenforced by Emerson’s (arguably specious) reconstruction of his impeccable ancestry: “He was happily a representative of the American Republic. Captain John Brown is a farmer, the fifth in descent from Peter Brown, who came to Plymouth in the Mayflower, in 1620” (Emerson 1903, XI, 279; 267). In judgments such as these, as Joseph Conforti has recently noted, what is at stake is the consolidation of “the nationalist triumph of the Yankee” as “the ascendant signifier of the American character” (Conforti 2001, 171). Reading Brown in such a context has the effect of sidelining anxiety over the moral legitimacy of his actions in favor of promoting his status as a New England saint redivivus, one whose regional identity becomes rapidly synecdochic of national self-fashioning. Brown’s ascension to a place of impregnable, posthumous authority is similarly modulated by Thoreau’s initial, bald resolve in “A Plea” to situate his subject: “First, as to his history.” The lines that follow ingeniously play with the conceit of shared knowledge: “I will endeavour to omit, as much as possible, what you have already read. I need not describe his person to you, for probably most of you have seen and will not soon forget him.” Thoreau establishes a community of the like-minded, taking for granted degrees of interest and sympathy that, although surely present among his listening audience, nevertheless have the effect of pushing rhetorically all

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the members of that audience (and his subsequent readers) into intellectual and ideological alignment. Moreover, Thoreau’s own credentials as documenter of Brown’s history are immediately underscored by framing phrases that suggest or assert personal knowledge, either directly or through reliable sources: “I am told that,” “I heard him say,” “He said that.” Thoreau’s design in these paragraphs is simultaneously to assume shared knowledge and to reveal his own privileged position—evidence of that certain “schizophrenia” of perspective that I discussed earlier. That he is acutely conscious of his constituency is apparent in the address’s opening lines, where he subscribes to the well-worn convention of authorial selfeffacement in introducing his topic. “A Plea” begins on an apologetic note—“I trust that you will pardon me for being here”—and continues with Thoreau seemingly reassuring his audience that what they are about to hear will be in the New England tradition of genteel temperance. He has no desire to “force” his opinions, although with characteristic linguistic playfulness he admits to feeling “forced” himself to express them. Acting out of some kind of moral compulsion, Thoreau wants to insist at the outset (at least) that his role will be to act as a moderator of the interpretative community that has built itself around Brown. Revisionist rather than revolutionary, he would “fain” (i.e., willingly, with pleasure [OED]) correct the widely disseminated image of Brown (“the tone and the statements of the newspapers”) in a modest attempt “to be just,”“at least [to] express our sympathy, and admiration of, him” (my emphasis). There is little suggestion at the start of the speech of the more radical—and more problematically transcendent—position that Thoreau will eventually come to articulate. His concern here instead is to appeal to common values: those held by him and his audience; and those of geography and history that they all share with Brown. Thoreau’s narrative intent, it seems, is not to do anything to disrupt this sense of community; rather, his more reassuring ambition is to adjust its focus in ways that will seem entirely reasonable. This unwillingness to alarm is continued in the way in which Thoreau chooses to represent Brown’s pre-Harper’s Ferry activities. It becomes important, for instance, that Brown’s knowledge of army planning is made explicit: “He learned by experience how armies are supplied and maintained in the field” (137). Instead of leading a group of disorganized, ill-disciplined men (as many of the anti-Brown newspaper reports had suggested), Thoreau wants to insist upon his skill and knowledge, a professional authority based upon recognizable rules and procedures. But more than this, such tactical experience, he asserts, convinced Brown of the righteousness of pacifism: “He saw enough, at any rate, to disgust him with a military life, indeed to excite in him a great abhorrence of it. . . . He then resolved that he would never have anything to do with any war, unless it were a war

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for liberty” (137–138). The combination here of an avowedly nonviolent Brown who nevertheless possessed all the requisite skills to be a successful army leader in the right circumstances is effective or disingenuous— depending upon the degree of intellectual license we are prepared to allow. On the one hand, by asserting professionalism and pacifism Thoreau seeks to neutralize powerful prejudices operating against Brown; on the other, the easy transition from peace to war generated by the word “unless” in the above quotation might cause Brown’s trenchant pacifist assertions to be viewed with more skepticism. With Brown’s actions in Kansas, culminating in the “Pottawatomie Massacre” of five slave-state settlers in May 1856, Thoreau finds it rhetorically and ideologically necessary to slide over what has come to be seen as one of the most controversial aspects of his subject’s career. Michael Meyer has shown that reports of the events at Pottawatomie Creek appeared in many of the Democratic newspapers that Thoreau is known to have read, but that such accounts failed to temper the degree of his support for Brown (Meyer 1980, 301–316). In “A Plea,” this often-violent conflict over questions of settlement and slavery is translated into the less emotive and insistently nonjudgmental phrase, “the troubles in Kansas.” What is elided is the specific event that has come to mark Brown’s intervention in the sectional politics of the state. My interest here is not so much in judging Brown’s actions (others have offered their sentences on him),2 but rather in noticing the textual reconstruction that Thoreau undertakes to position his subject in the role of a principled pacifist. Thoreau is required to clear a space in the historical record to allow for Brown’s reincarnation as a transcendent force, one whose action might serve as a model for our own, inevitably more compromised, acts. To this end, Brown’s intervention is reduced to a more benign one of assistance “with his hand and counsel,” through whose “agency” (a delightfully vague choice of word) “Kansas was set free” (138). In narrating a Brown who oscillates between forms of resemblance and of exceptionalism, Thoreau ascribes to him multiple identities that serve successively to include and exclude his audience. We have already seen how he adopts a familiar strategy of asserting Brown’s shared New England ancestry as a means of establishing a sympathetic willingness in his listeners to consent to what becomes a more disquieting, accusatory speech. Characteristic of this appeal to common values is Thoreau’s account of Brown’s “education”: He did not go to the college called Harvard, good old Alma Mater as she is. He was not fed on the pap that is there furnished. As he phrased it, “I know no more of grammar than one of your claves.” But he went to the great university of the West, where he sedulously pursued the study of Liberty, for

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which he had early betrayed a fondness, and having taken many degrees, he finally commenced the public practice of Humanity in Kansas, as you all know. (139)

Thoreau’s comic resituating of education away from the institutional structures of legitimacy has a double effectiveness. Clearly positioning Brown away from the formal learning to be found at “the college called Harvard” (what other could there be of significance to a Concord crowd?), Thoreau removes the possibility that the traditional privileged centers of intellectual life might alienate Brown’s potential supporters. For Thoreau, genuine intellectual activity happens outside such environments, and the only actions that have the potential to be transformative are those unencumbered by conventional disciplinary parameters. The ineffective “pap” served up at a cloistered Harvard, then, is set against a model of education received on the frontier of the United States where the founding principles of the nation still have a moral currency. The “study of Liberty” prepares Brown for the direct and active “public practice of Humanity.” As Worley has noted, Brown thus becomes a recognizable type, in the mold of such American incarnations of natural nobleness as Daniel Boone and Andrew Jackson (116). But in addition to this, Thoreau begins to construct a powerful taxonomy of intellectual authority, one that insists upon unfettered detachment and a sense of estrangement from the normative practices of society. Harvard, instead of signifying metonymically an ideal of American intellectual life, becomes in the eyes of Thoreau a place of conformity and mediocrity, an unwelcome site against which he exerts a willed alienation. Such a felt sense of exile at the heart of the national imaginary is more explicitly stated later on in the address. “Foreign countries” that are imagined as spaces of difference, provoking feelings of isolated dislocation, are in fact, Thoreau says, to be seen on every street corner. “This strangeness between us and our nearest neighbors” replicates the anxiety we project onto unknown lands. Our fellow citizens, he asserts “are our Austrias, and Chinas, and South Sea Islands,” to the extent that “the thoughtful man” finds himself “a hermit in the thorough-fares of the market-place.” Where the beginning of “A Plea” had sought to reassure with its advancement of a communal identity, now “impassable seas,” “impassable boundaries,” and “difference” are what is most registered. Thoreau’s deployment of “we,” “us,” and “our” at this point still gestures at a notion of group solidarity, but it is one now irrevocably distanced from all forms of organization— religious, legal, educational, governmental—by which life is regulated. In positing such an opposition, it becomes inevitable that Thoreau’s collective “we” is translated into forms of singularity—the distinction to be drawn is one “between individuals and between states” (145). There can be

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little security invested, it seems, in a pronoun that grammatically embodies the risk of reduced selfhood. Indeed, one of the fascinating problems that Thoreau’s “A Plea” presents to its readers is exactly this sense of a shifting subject position: what is the relationship between the speaker and his audience, and how is that relationship mediated by the presence of Brown as both representative and ideal figure? One paragraph in particular illustrates the nature of Thoreau’s pronounal flexibility: Our foes are in our midst and all about us. There is hardly a house but is divided against itself, for our foe is the all but universal woodenness of both head and heart, the want of vitality in man, which is the effect of our vice; and hence are begotten fear, superstition, bigotry, persecution, and slavery of all kinds. We are mere figure-heads upon a hulk, with livers in the place of hearts. The curse is the worship of idols, which at length changes the worshipper into a stone image himself; and the New Englander is just as much an idolater as the Hindoo. This man was an exception, for he did not set up even a political graven image between him and his God. (144)

This passage begins with a clear confrontation between an “our”/“us,” constituting Thoreau and his like-minded friends, and a ubiquitous enemy that is everywhere “about.” However, the plotting of such close yet separately identifiable positions immediately begins to unravel in the next sentence: whereas before the “foes” were “in our midst,” now they are internal to the body (politic) itself. Referencing Lincoln’s “House Divided” speech of June 1858, the possibility of distinguishing between “we” and “they” has disappeared. In its place a nondiscriminating “universal” malaise affecting both mental and emotional faculties has blurred the strict demarcation of adversarial positions. “Our foes” are ourselves, caused by “our vice.” The dubious status for Thoreau of the pronoun “we” as a marker of nonconformist resistance is apparent here: instead of heroic solidarity, “we are mere figure-heads upon a hulk,” toothless cheerleaders for a monstrous and degraded society. At the start of “A Plea,” as we have seen, a New England identity was promoted as representative of certain core national ideals, as something definitively American. Now this is startlingly no longer the case: what was recognizable and cherished has become foreign and idolatrous. If all forms of collective identity have failed in this way, Thoreau’s celebration of Brown depends upon his singular status: “This man was an exception” (again we have the premature past tense), to the extent that Brown was able to transcend the man-made structures that interpose themselves between us and God. The nobleness of an Andrew Jackson or a Daniel Boone is distilled into a pure antinomianism in which Brown is figured as uniquely different from a collective

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identity that, here at least, includes Thoreau himself: “He [Brown] could not have been tried by a jury of his peers, because his peers did not exist.” Brown is identifiable in absolutist national terms (“he was the most American of us all” [147]) and yet remote from that nation’s citizenry (“he was not our representative in any sense” [149]). This unresolved dialectic calls into question those accounts of “A Plea,” such as Worley’s, that seek to smooth out Thoreau’s less reconcilable tensions. While acknowledging that Thoreau might wish the address to be read as a celebration of a form of sociability in which Brown’s identity is “merged” with that of a community that recognizes his value (Worley writes that Brown “represents values that penetrate the entire culture” [122]), it is important to place alongside such “authorized” interpretations those moments of rhetorical or ideological resistance that pull the argument of the text in other, potentially distorting, directions. “A Plea” reveals a movement across and between assertions of uniqueness on the one hand and those that stress Brown’s representative status on the other, an opposition, I have been arguing, that is characteristic of what Pierre Bourdieu calls the “bidimensional” status of the intellectual (Bourdieu 1991, 656). By incorporating into his account of Brown his own acute reading of the culture that he and Brown share, Thoreau manages to effect a relationship with his subject that not only authorizes a version of Brown’s life, but also validates his right to draw on the moral capital that Brown has established. A form of intellectual succession, Thoreau hopes, is performed by the address. Yet it is in perhaps the most epistemologically opaque section of “A Plea” that Thoreau’s ability to wear Brown’s mantle finds itself compromised. Before discussing this passage at some length I want to preface it by returning to the issue of consent as a philosophical and moral problem in the text. What is the value of that which we agree to countenance? Does consenting to acts undertaken with the aim of ushering in a more just society absolve us of responsibility for the form those acts might take? On several occasions in “A Plea” Thoreau raises the issue of consent as a kind of moral weather vane: the health of the individual body and the body politic might be measured by looking at the kind of things to which we, individually and collectively, agree. Thoreau’s examples are usually negative: “The modern Christian is a man who has consented to say all the prayers in the liturgy, provided you will let him go straight to bed and sleep quietly afterward”; “He has consented to perform certain old established charities, too, after a fashion, but he does not wish to hear of any newfangled ones” (144); “when a government takes the life of a man without the consent of his conscience, it is an audacious government, and is taking a step towards its own dissolution” (156). These models are indicative of a narrow, morally bankrupt culture of which Thoreau despairs. Yet at the

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start of what I think is “A Plea” ’s most resistant passage, he assigns to himself a more radical, less compromising form of consent: It was his [Brown’s] peculiar doctrine that a man has a perfect right to interfere by force with the slaveholder, in order to rescue the slave. I agree with him. They who are continually shocked by slavery have some right to be shocked by the violent death of the slaveholder, but no others. Such will be more shocked by his life than by his death. I shall not be forward to think him mistaken in his method who quickest succeeds to liberate the slave. I speak for the slave when I say, that I prefer the philanthropy which neither shoots me nor liberates me. At any rate, I do not think it quite sane for one to spend his whole life in talking or writing about this matter, unless he is continuously inspired, and I have not done so. A man may have other affairs to attend to. I do not wish to kill nor to be killed, but I can foresee circumstances in which both these things would be by me unavoidable. (153)

Brown’s moral position is regarded here as unusual (“peculiar”), in a way that reenforces his transcendent status. Immediately Thoreau gives his consent to it—“I agree with him.” The relationship between the two men is orchestrated around sympathetic recognition: Thoreau is exceptional enough to see beyond the apparent peculiarities of Brown’s stance and is prepared to affirm it in a way that gives it a wider legitimacy. In comparison with the other versions of consent described in the address, Thoreau’s simple four-word sentence asserts itself with bald, bold force. But as we have seen earlier in other passages, clarity begins to waver as the lines proceed, almost as if the troubling personal and moral implications of such a statement begin to obscure the uncompromising view. Only those who (through ignorance?) continue to find slavery shocking, Thoreau continues, have a “right” to be troubled by the killing of a slaveholder, “but no others.” The grammatically imprecise “Such” that begins the next sentence refers, I take it, to those “others” for whom slavery’s horrors elicit no surprise. (The alternative reading, in which the “such” refers back to “they who are continually shocked” makes no sense in the context of what follows.) Thoreau suggests that these “others” are more alarmed by the actions of the slaveholder in life than in the brutal manner of his death. Such a distinction of course sits uneasily alongside the parallel claim that these same people are no longer shocked by slavery’s degradations. It appears that in working with the structuring opposition of life/death here, Thoreau has sacrificed transparency of meaning for rhetorical effect: behind the linguistic playfulness, if we try to follow the logic of his argument, it begins to loosen into contradictions and ambivalences. Perhaps sensing that his prose has lost its way, Thoreau is keen to focus it on that which he might be able to control more effectively—himself.

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As with the earlier “I agree with him,” a second statement of consent is now offered: Thoreau will not criticize any form of action that “quickest succeeds to liberate the slave.” Once again this is directed explicitly at Brown and establishes an alliance between the two men. However, this is immediately followed by what may be the strangest sentence in the address: “I speak for the slave when I say, that I prefer the philanthropy which neither shoots me nor liberates me.” The ambiguity lies in the words “I speak for.” In what sense is Thoreau assuming the moral authority of ventriloquism here? Does the word “for” mean “on behalf of ” or merely “about”? If it is the former, should we perceive it as a Whitmanian gesture of democratic voicing or an act of race- and class-bound appropriation? Given the consent that Thoreau has just offered to Brown’s tactics, why would he or the slave feel more comfortable with an action that does not result in freedom? This line refuses to come into focus, resisting interpretation in a way that is fascinating for literary criticism but damaging for the ideological and moral impetus behind Thoreau’s speech. The apologetic “At any rate” that follows suggests the inadequacy of his position, and a second attempt is made at articulation, this time more securely focused on the “I” pronoun. But instead of returning to the claims of moral equivalency between himself and Brown, Thoreau now chooses to draw attention to what appear to be incompatible interests and lifestyles. Brown’s Ahab-like fixity of purpose that had commended itself to Thoreau earlier in the address becomes something alien to his (Thoreau’s) experience. This is disarmingly honest on Thoreau’s part; as noted earlier, he was a late convert to Brown’s cause, and his politics were always contained within the larger intellectual framework of natural history. Honesty of this kind, however, works against one of the central trajectories of “A Plea”: Thoreau’s acquisition, as Brown’s interpreter and kindred spirit, of his intellectual and moral authority. The wish not to kill or be killed is understandable enough, but in the face of Brown’s intensity of purpose and clarity of vision, the statement “I can foresee circumstances in which both these things would be by me unavoidable” is unimpressive in its lack of principled zeal. I have focused on this passage not with the desire to catch Thoreau out, but to show how “A Plea” as a whole resonates with the kinds of irreducible tensions that can be found in concentrated form here. Thoreau’s admiration for Brown is not in question; what is less clear, for Thoreau and for us, is how he could use Brown’s narrative most effectively as a form of cultural critique. Thoreau’s most individualist self was able to see in Brown’s most antinomian incarnation the possibility of an effective intellectual life, transcendentally unimpaired by material existence. The “sublime spectacle” (153) of Brown’s narrative suggested an image of the dissenter as prophet

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and hero. Yet the Thoreau who in Walden found himself unable to describe nature except through metaphors and analogies from the man-made world is also aware of the inevitably compromised status of transcendence; he strives to connect Brown to a series of recognizable coordinates and types. Lentricchia and McAuliffe’s notion of the terrorist as transformative artist describes a romanticized, utopian paradigm that Thoreau wants to believe in. Yet the text finds itself torn between such a radical model of externally located influence and a need to locate that influence among others. This oscillation between exceptionalism and representativeness never gets to grips, as we have seen, with the key moral problem posed by Brown’s actions. By consenting to violence Thoreau seems to share his subject’s values; yet the paradox of acting immorally in the service of a moral telos is never entirely resolved, however much Thoreau chooses to elide the violent specifics of Brown’s campaign. What resonates is the suggestion that Brown’s purified intellectual, despite its appeal, is finally unsustainable: “A man may have other affairs to attend to” (153). Notes 1. See, for example, Allan Bloom, The Closing of the American Mind: How Higher Education has Failed Democracy and Impoverished the Souls of Today’s Students (1987) and Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of the World Order (1996) on the “right”; and Todd Gitlin, The Twilight of Common Dreams (1995) and Christopher Norris, Uncritical Theory: Postmodernism, Intellectuals, and the Gulf War (1992) on the “left.” 2. Stephen B. Oates’s To Purge this Land with Blood (1970) still offers the best account of the competing readings of this episode.

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Transforming the “Madman into a Saint”: The Cultural Memory Site of John Brown’s Raid on Harper’s Ferry in Antislavery Literature and History Kristen Proehl

I John Brown am now quite certain that the crimes of this guilty land: will never be purged away; but with Blood. John Brown, 1859

n the summer of 1859, John Brown rented a farm across the Potomac River from the federal arsenal at Harper’s Ferry, West Virginia. Disheartened by the slow progress of the antislavery reform movement, Brown concluded that all “moral and political actions against slavery had failed,” and insisted that only violent measures could effectively crush the institution of slavery (McPherson 1982, 114). One evening, he invited black leader and fugitive slave Frederick Douglass into his home and disclosed his scheme for a massive slave insurrection.1 He planned to seize the federal arsenal, arm thousands of slaves, and demand immediate emancipation. Recognizing that he would need assistance to organize this army of slaves, Brown identified Douglass as a special asset: “I want you for a special purpose,” he explained, “When I strike, the bees will begin to swarm, and I shall want you to help hive them” (115). Brown believed that the slaves in surrounding areas would abandon their plantations and fight

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for their own liberation—a factor that proved to be critical to the success of his plan. After listening to Brown’s ambitious plot, Douglass predicted that the raid would be a personal and political failure (Reneham 1995, 190). He even explicitly warned Brown that his plan was a “perfect steel trap” and that he would never get out alive (190). In spite of Douglass’s stern warnings, Brown proceeded with his plans, gathering a select group of white abolitionists to support his insurrection. This group of prominent Northeasterners, who were eventually known as “The Secret Six,” helped both to finance and organize Brown’s raid: Thomas Wentworth Higginson, editor of the Atlantic Monthly; Theodore Parker, a Unitarian minister; educator Franklin Sandborn; physician Samuel Howe; and philanthropic social reformers, Gerrit Smith and George Luther Stearns. Brown’s ability to convince prominent abolitionists to collaborate in his plot illustrates the increased radicalization of many of the antislavery movement’s members in the late 1850s. The chronology of the Harper’s Ferry raid, as well as the American public’s initial response, has been incorporated into the popular mythology surrounding the event. On the evening of October 16, 1859, Brown seized the federal arsenal with a party of eighteen men. As news spread of Brown’s attack, a wave of angry citizens and militiamen surrounded the arsenal. When local militiamen captured Dangerfield Newby, a biracial sentinel for Brown’s party, they shot him, dragged him into the street, and mutilated his body (Reneham 1995, 198). Throughout the day, militia units from nearby towns arrived at Harper’s Ferry. The crowd grew increasingly violent and intoxicated, and began to chant, “Kill them! Kill them!” (200). Under a flag of truce, Brown sent his son, Owen, and Aaron Stevens into the crowd to negotiate, but they were quickly shot down and forced to retire to the shelter of the arsenal building. Owen suffered mortal wounds and reportedly begged his father to end his life (198). Crossfire between Brown’s party and the militiamen killed several onlookers, further agitating the restless crowd. By nightfall, Brown offered to release eleven hostages in exchange for the promise of safe passage across the Potomac River for himself and his party. Military authorities ignored his request. The following morning, Bvt. Colonel Robert E. Lee and Lt. J.E.B. Stuart assumed command of the military effort to thwart the insurrection. When their own attempts to negotiate with Brown failed, they directed soldiers forcibly to remove Brown and his party from the building. In response to this action, the crowd began to chant, “Hang them! Hang them!” (204). The soldiers surrounded Brown’s wounded and exhausted party, shielding them from the mob spectators’ violence (204). Eleven days later, Brown was summoned to trail before a jury of twelve local residents of Harper’s Ferry, Virginia. After three days of trial, Brown was found guilty and

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sentenced to death on December 2, 1859. On December 16, four of Brown’s fellow conspirators were executed for their participation in the Harper’s Ferry raid. Brown and his party were among the first American citizens to be executed for treason. From the vantage point of most antebellum spectators, Brown’s raid appeared to be a dismal failure, since not a single slave joined the insurrection and U.S. soldiers crushed the rebellion just thirty-six hours after it began (McPherson 1982, 115). Regardless of Brown’s failure to summon an army of slaves, the Harper’s Ferry raid generated hysteria throughout the South about slave insurrections and radical abolitionism. The event may have persuaded some Americans that abolitionists were willing to sacrifice their lives, and the lives of Southerners, for the sake of emancipation. Memory of Nat Turner’s slave insurrection directly influenced the American public’s initial response to Brown’s raid. Large-scale insurrections rarely occurred in the United States, but Turner’s actions had inspired fear about the threat of potential rebellions across the South. Southern states created a multitude of new laws and regulations to protect themselves against future slave insurrections.2 In his “Lesson of the Hour” speech, Wendell Phillips links memory of Turner’s and Brown’s insurrections, presenting a Northern vision of how the South might interpret the recent uprising. “Virginia has not slept sound since Nat Turner led an insurrection in 1831,” he reflects, “and she bids fair never to have a nap now” (Phillips 1860, 59). Phillips later implies that the shedding of the “white man’s blood” at Harper’s Ferry had a psychological impact upon the South, dramatically heightening sectional tensions. In the immediate aftermath of the Harper’s Ferry raid, many journalists labeled Brown a “madman” as they reported upon his violent insurrection scheme. Abolitionists recognized that popular understandings of Brown’s raid demanded rapid revision. They began to work to reshape Brown’s raid into a political weapon for the antislavery movement. In the months following the raid, abolitionists solicited prominent American lecturers, writers, and antislavery sympathizers to compose speeches and essays that memorialized Brown’s raid on Harper’s Ferry. Brown’s failed insurrection was a political victory for the antislavery movement, partly because it exposed Northerners and Southerners to the abolitionists’ ideological discourse on violence and reform. Throughout the 1850s, abolitionists debated the use of violence to dismantle the institution of slavery. They often questioned whether slaves would be justified to use violence against their oppressors. Lydia Maria Child, for example, initially advocated nonresistance, but grew uneasy about the case of slaves: “If resistance were ever justifiable,” she wrote, “it would be so in the case of the bereaved and persecuted slave. Nothing but an unrighteous prejudice

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against his color could prevent a consistent vindicator even of defensive war from coming to this conclusion” (Bacon 1994, 282). The background context of the antebellum dialogue on violence rapidly transformed Brown’s raid into one of the most fiercely contested, criticized, and celebrated events in the antislavery movement’s history. This essay explores a variety of different “forms” of memory of Brown’s raid. Many abolitionists, such as Douglass and Higginson, had firsthand experience with Brown, and thus had individual memories of the raid and its aftermath. Before and after the Civil War, literature on Brown’s raid played a role in the formation of a cultural memory of the event. Unlike individual memory, cultural memory is always socially negotiated, as people with a shared history and group identification create meanings from “the past.” In his landmark historiographical essay, “Between Memory and History” (1989), French historian Pierre Nora outlines the theoretical concept of sites of memory or lieux de mémoire: the historical figures, dates, monuments or artwork that a culture invests with symbolic significance (Fabre et al. 1994, 7). They are the places where “memory crystallizes and secretes itself at a particular historical moment” (7). Many early American cultural memory sites, embedded in discrete historical moments, continue to have symbolic significance for twenty-first century Americans: the signing of the Declaration of Independence, the assassination of Abraham Lincoln, or General Robert E. Lee’s surrender at the Appomattox courthouse. As Geneviève Fabre and Robert O’Meally have observed, cultural memory sites emerge from the interaction between memory and history, the personal and the collective (7). Perhaps most importantly, lieux de mémoire are multifaceted historical phenomena, “simple and ambiguous, natural and artificial” and simultaneously “material, symbolic and functional” (Fabre et al. 1994, 295). Literary scholars and historians such as Franny Nudelman and Paul Finkelman have examined symbolic representations of Brown in Civil War America. In her essay in this volume, Nudelman aptly identifies Brown’s body as a site of political contestation. She thus interprets Brown’s raid as a radical consequence of compassion—a culmination of the tradition of abolitionist sympathy. Along similar lines, Paul Finkelman contends that Harper’s Ferry raid prepared the antislavery movement for a national shift from an age of “Christian love and peace to one of Christian visions of an apocalypse and Old Testament notions of a vengeful God” (Finkelman 1995, 59). Rather than examining Brown as a product of sentimentalism, or a Jeremiad figure grounded in Old Testament theology, my essay explores how conflicting representations shaped cultural memory of Brown in the pre- and post–Civil War years. Sentimental and apocalyptic language, Old and New Testament theology, and allusions to Puritanism

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and Transcendentalism worked to transform Brown’s raid into a counterintuitive symbol of American democracy. Close analysis of abolitionists and postbellum reform literature reveals how language shaped cultural memory of Brown’s raid. Several texts are critical to my analysis: Life and Times of Frederick Douglass (1893), an autobiographical slave narrative; Thomas Wentworth Higginson’s essay “A Visit to John Brown’s Household in 1859” and his regimental history, Army Life in a Black Regiment (1869); and James Redpath’s Echoes of Harper’s Ferry (1860), a collection of abolitionist speeches and essay about the legacy of Brown’s raid. As I discuss later, postbellum reform literature and latenineteenth-century African American historical writings suggest that cultural memory of Brown’s raid was linked to social and political equality for African American citizens. Abolitionists generated a plethora of religious representations of Brown that had distinctive functions. References to Brown’s Puritan heritage, for example, positioned him as a distinctly American figure, situating his unorthodox behavior in the context of New England’s history. They repeatedly linked radical abolitionism to the Puritan’s efforts to escape religious persecution. Biblical representations of Brown as either an Old or a New Testament figure were often highly contradictory. Brown was often portrayed as an Old Testament figure seeking vengeance against the South’s refusal to dismantle the institution of slavery. Language thus transformed Brown’s raid into what was arguably the nation’s most effective “jeremiad”—a complex combination of metaphors, themes, and symbols that publicly denounced Southern slavery and condemned Northern tolerance of the institution. In addition to portraying Brown as a religious figure, abolitionists often portrayed the Harper’s Ferry raid as a quintessential American historical moment. In a sermon published in Redpath’s anthology, Unitarian minister Reverend Edwin Wheelock asserts that Brown’s raid “strikes the hour of a new era. It carries American history on its shoulders” (Wheelock 1860, 177). He adds to the gravity of Brown’s actions, by associating the raid with other famous moments in religious history, such as Martin Luther nailing a cross to a church door of Joan of Arc perishing in the flames. But, he also proceeds to situate Brown’s raid in the context of key American geographic sites. As he exclaims, “The banks of the Potomac! Doubly dear now to History and to Man” (Phillips 1860, 56). Similarly, Henry David Thoreau highlights the historical significance of Brown’s raid by envisioning his potential memorial at a government site. As he concludes in his famous essay “A Plea For Captain Brown” (1859): “I do not believe in erecting statues to those who still live in our hearts, whose bones have not yet crumbled in the earth around us, but I would rather see the statue of

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Captain John Brown in the Massachusetts State House yard than that of any other man whom I know. I rejoice that I live in this age—that I am his contemporary” (Thoreau 1860, 31). Thoreau implies that government institutions will ultimately celebrate Brown’s raid, regardless of his failure to operate within established legal institutions. In an effort to rationalize Brown’s violence, abolitionists frequently compared the Harper’s Ferry raid to the American Revolution. “This blow,” Wendell Phillips writes of Brown’s raid, “like the first gun at Lexington, heard around the world—this blow at Harper’s Ferry reveals men” (Phillips 1860, 95). Phillips’s assertion that the “blow” of Harper’s Ferry reveals “men” implies that Brown’s attack on the Federal arsenal, like courage on the battlefield, reveals manhood. By reminding readers that the colonists used violence to establish a democratic Republic, abolitionists worked to normalize Brown’s unorthodox reform strategies. Like the colonists, Phillips implies, Brown was a revolutionary figure with the intellectual capacity to look beyond established political institutions, and the courage to respond to divine inspiration. As abolitionists emphasized the historical significance of Brown’s raid, they repeatedly attested that a desire for fame did not influence Brown and his supporters. In his essay “A Visit to John Brown’s Household in 1859,” Thomas Wentworth Higginson not only highlights Brown’s family’s indifference to fame, but also emphasizes their philosophy of self-sacrifice. As Brown’s family awaited his execution, they expressed sincere concern about how the raid would influence the antislavery cause. Higginson explains that Brown’s family did not ask: “What is the world saying of us?” or “Will the great thinkers of the age affirm that our father will ‘make the gallows glorious like the cross?’ ”or “Will justice be done to the memory of martyrs?” (Higginson 1860, 240). Rather, they were fixated upon one important question:“Does it seem as if freedom were to gain or lose by this?” (240). Higginson’s observations imply that Brown was not determined to “make” history. Instead, he suggests that history will naturally reward Brown and his family for their selfless pursuit of an emancipationist vision. Abolitionists’ references to Brown’s Puritan heritage simultaneously cast him as a religious and American historical figure. Brown’s “theology was Puritan as well as his practice,” Higginson contends, “and as accustomed as we are now to see Puritan doctrines and Puritan virtues separately exhibited, it seems quite strange to behold them combined in one person again” (Higginson 1860, 243). Literary historian Lawrence Buell observes that Puritan ancestry emerged as a common theme throughout nineteenthcentury literature, as American writers transformed the New England region into a literary artifact (Buell 1986, 193). Puritan ancestry gradually became a critical component of New England’s regional identity (193). This

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“reinvention” of Puritanism occurred as New Englanders worked to revive their feelings of national importance (193). Abolitionists thus participated in this nineteenth-century literary revival of the Puritan past. Phillips implies that Brown’s Puritan heritage contributed to his decision to take up arms against the institution of slavery. As he explains, “you cannot expect to put a real Puritan Presbyterian, as John Brown is—in the midst of our New England civilization, that dare not say its soul is its own, nor proclaim that it is wrong to sell a man at auction, and not have him show himself as he is” (Phillips 1860, 90). His negative portrayal of New England “civilization,” and its refusal to condemn the institution of slavery, indirectly prompts the North to take action against the slave system. Phillips also counters representations of Brown as an iconoclastic insurgent by suggesting that his actions were simply the logical product of his religious and cultural heritage. Abolitionists’ portrayal of Brown as an individual who looked beyond established political institutions further connected him to a Puritan tradition. An intense devotion to God, they suggest, guided Brown’s actions and shaped New England’s historical legacy. In 1860, Reverend Edwin Wheelock published a sermon that characterized the Puritans as individuals who recognized the presence of God in their souls, and did not hesitate to respond to his will (108). “Puritanism,” Wheelock concludes, “is action; it is impersonating ideas; it is distrusting and being willing to shake off, at times, what are called institutions” (108). By holding their “ears open for the message of the present hour,” the Puritans were “above words and went out into the wilderness, outside of forms” (108). Brown’s violent refusal to operate “inside of forms,” or within America’s established political institutions, makes him a surprising figure of America’s democratic history. Considering their more prevalent use of moral suasion, abolitionists had to labor intensively to convince the public that Brown’s actions constituted a heroic sacrifice to the antislavery movement. By comparing Brown to the Puritans, abolitionists not only granted the American public a familiar religious framework for interpreting Brown’s actions, but also portrayed the raid as part of America’s democratic tradition. As abolitionists cast Brown as a Puritan figure, they also simultaneously redefined Puritan history. For example, they associated Puritanism with ideals of thrift and simplicity that were already embedded in New England’s regional identity. Descriptions of Brown’s Puritan heritage often emphasized the unsophisticated aesthetics of his New England household. Brown’s simple living arrangements present a symbolic contrast to the decadence of the elite Southern planter class. As Frederick Douglass describes his visit to Brown’s household, he calls attention to the lack of servants. “The mother, daughters and sons did the serving and did it well,”

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he explains, “They were evidently used to it, and had no thought of impropriety or degradation in being their own servants” (Douglass 1888, 716). He also emphasizes the plain décor of Brown’s dining room, when he observes, “innocent of paint, veneering, varnish or table cloth, the table announced itself unmistakingly of pine and the plainest workmanship” (716). Similarly, Higginson notes the simplicity of Brown’s household against the striking backdrop of the Adirondack mountain range. “There stands a little house with no ornament or relief about it,” he remarks, “it needs none with the setting of mountain horizon” (Higginson 1860, 234). Higginson’s vision of Brown’s simple home, nestled alongside the mountain range, subtly associates Brown’s self-reliance with the mythology of the American frontier. Analysis of the cultural memory site of Brown’s raid on Harper’s Ferry provides insight into the major ideological transitions of 1850s America. Just as abolitionists held conflicting beliefs about the use of violence, literature on the Harper’s Ferry raid often presents seemingly contradictory representations of Brown. In the aftermath of Brown’s raid, pacifist abolitionists struggled to retain hope that moral suasion would compel the South to abolish the institution of slavery. Finkelman convincingly contends that Brown’s raid prepared the nation for a shift from sentimental culture to the apocalyptic violence of the Civil War. I would also add, however, that abolitionists capitalized upon different attitudes about violence and reform among the Northern reading public. Sentimental images of Brown as a Christ-like martyr, for instance, may have appealed to Northerners reluctant to use violence to dismantle the institution of slavery. On the other hand, representations of Brown as a Jeremiad figure may have appealed to Northerners growing increasingly agitated with the South. Representations of Brown as a wrathful, Old Testament prophet may have appealed to a segment of the Northern public willing to use violence against Southern slaveholders. Abolitionist essays and speeches often weave together an eclectic assortment of religious images of Brown. Reverend Edwin Wheelock’s sermon on Harper’s Ferry reports that the “bondman has stood face to face with his Moses. The Christ of anti-slavery has brought forth its ‘John’ and forerunner. The solemn exodus of the American slave has begun” (Wheelock 1860, 177). He thus juxtaposes Old Testament images of Brown as a Moses figure with the New Testament image of Brown as Christ. Similarly, the chapter titles of James Redpath’s biography on Brown (e.g., “The Father of the Man,”“Forty Days in Chains,” and “Exodus”) incorporate Old and New Testament references. Ultimately, antislavery literature presents an often idiosyncratic array of religious representations of Brown that transform the Harper’s Ferry raid into a site of diverse metaphors, themes, and

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symbols. In so doing, abolitionists may have again appealed to a diverse, broad Northern readership. Apocalyptic representations of Brown’s raid on Harper’s Ferry functioned as a jeremiad, warning the nation that its continued support of the institution of slavery would culminate in violence. Reverend Fales Henry Newhall asserts that the “smouldering fires carefully trodden down for years and generations, here burst forth in a volcanic blaze, that rises as if to ‘lick the stars’ ” (Newhall 1860, 195). He characterizes Brown’s raid as a cataclysmic event that ignited the “shaking of statesmen and states all over the nation” and even the “throbbing of telegraph wires” (195). After casting Brown’s raid in the context of both modern technology and the wonders of the natural world, he proceeds to present an Old Testament vision of God’s future vengeance against the nation for the sin of slavery. “And now,” he warns, “these words may sound awful in your ears, but they come from my heart,—if God has sent plague, cholera and famine, upon those cities whose wealth has been coined from the sinews of the slave, we could not but bow in meekness and say, ‘It is just’ ” (202). Just as Brown believed that only violent force would dismantle the institution of slavery, Newhall claims that for “years and generations God has been bottling those tears, and if he returns them in showers of blood, who will dare murmur at his justice?” (203). He thus warns that if Americans fail to follow in Brown’s footsteps and attempt to overthrow the slave system, its demise will be a vengeful execution of God’s will. In a personal letter to Francis Jackson in 1860, Theodore Parker invokes similarly apocalyptic imagery to portray the demise of slavery. As he declares, “The South must reap as she sows, where she scatters the wind, the whirlwind will come up . . . what shall put it out? The white man’s blood! . . . You and I prefer the peaceful . . . but I, at least, shall welcome the violent if no other means accomplish the end” (Parker 1860, 17). By claiming that the South must “reap as she sows,” Parker predicts that God will crush the slave system with a vengeful “whirlwind.” His concession that “you and I prefer the peaceful” subtly acknowledges the perspective of pacifist abolitionists who might have objected to Brown’s violent reform tactics. Parker’s words also reflect the ideological transformation within the antislavery movement on the eve of the Civil War. While some abolitionists refused to abandon their pacifist ideologies right up to the war, by the late 1850s, moral suasion clearly appeared to be failing to win the hearts and minds of the American South. Abolitionists like Douglass and Higginson, increasingly contemplated using violence to compel the immediate emancipation of Southern slaves. Different types of religious images of Brown often worked either to feminize or to masculinize his popular persona. In his essay “A Plea for

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Captain Brown,” Thoreau claims, “Some eighteen hundred years ago Christ was crucified; this morning, perchance, Captain Brown was hung. These are the two ends of a chain which are not without its links. He is not Old Brown any longer; he is an angel of light” (41). While this passage obviously emphasizes Brown’s martyrdom, Thoreau’s reference to Brown as an “angel of light” also feminizes him. In so doing, Thoreau’s speech may have appealed to the sympathies of Northern white women as well as proto-feminist, antislavery reformers. In contrast, imagery of Brown as an Old Testament, jeremiad figure typically works to underscore his masculinity. These rather conflicted gendered representations of Brown may have worked to appeal more broadly to men and women of the Northern reading public. Abolitionist writers often linked imagery of Brown’s Christ-like martyrdom to familiar sites of American historical memory, thus linking the “salvation of the individual to the community’s historical enterprise” (Tompkins 1986, 140). Moreover, the construction of Brown as both a historical and a religious icon perpetuates the antebellum cultural belief that religious conversion is a critical component of historical change (140). As Wendell Phillips claimed in 1859, if Brown is “sacrificed, the banks of the Potomac will be doubly dear to history, and to man, for the ashes of Washington rest there, and history will see forever on its bank that old man on his pallet. . . . And if they hang him, the Father of his country will be proud to make room for his ashes beside his grave” (Phillips 1860, 110). Philips thus implies that Brown’s Christ-like “sacrifice” will grant him a hallowed resting place in American historical memory. He gracefully links George Washington to God, John Brown to Christ, and thus implies that Brown’s martyrdom completes an American historical parallel to the Holy Trinity. While religious rhetoric transformed Brown into a Christian martyr, abolitionists’ use of landscape imagery casts Brown as a classic hero of the American wilderness. Higginson begins his essay on Brown with a vivid description of his journey into the “enchanted land of the Adirondacks”— the mountain range surrounding Brown’s homestead. He helps his readers to envision themselves at this natural location, by explaining, “You soon find yourself facing a wall of mountain with only glimpses of one wild gap, through which you must penetrate” (Higginson 1860, 233). Encircled by birch and cedar trees, Higginson expresses the sensation that the wilderness surrounding Brown’s homestead has a supernatural aura. The mythic undertones of Higginson’s descriptions hint that Brown had a predetermined, and perhaps even divine, authority to raid the Federal arsenal. On a more pragmatic level, Douglass and Higginson also emphasize the usefulness of Brown’s unique knowledge of the natural world. As Douglass

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explains, Brown once declared, “I know these mountains well, and could take a body of men into them and keep them there despite all the efforts of Virginia to dislodge them” (Douglass 1881, 718). With his knowledge of the mountain landscape, Brown transformed the natural world into a tool that could be used to dismantle the institution of slavery. On a final note, literary representations of Brown’s divine relationship with the natural world illustrate the intersection of American transcendentalism and cultural memory of Brown. The philosophical influence of transcendentalism in antislavery writing is not surprising, considering that Higginson and Theodore Parker (members of Brown’s Secret Six Party) were involved in the transcendentalist movement. Moreover, in the weeks immediately following the Harper’s Ferry raid, abolitionists solicited prominent transcendentalist writers to offer public support for Brown. Transcendentalist essays and speeches were widely circulated and played a major role in shaping national memory. Some even constructed Brown as a kind of transcendentalist icon. As Henry David Thoreau claimed, Brown was “a man of Spartan habits, and at sixty was scrupulous when he dined at your table . . . a man of rare common sense and directness of speech, as of action; a transcendentalist above all, a man of ideals and principles” (Thoreau 1860, 20–21). This passage reveals how, in their representation of Brown, transcendentalist writers rearticulated their own self-perception. Brown’s ideals and principles are emphasized as central tenets of Brown’s persona and transcendental philosophy. In the post-Civil War years, American historians, journalists, and biographers increasingly assumed the task of defining the cultural significance of Brown’s raid. They often scrutinized and debated the relationship between Brown’s revolutionary actions and the outbreak of Civil War violence. Both Northern and Southern writers frequently identified Brown’s raid as the key event that heightened sectional tension and encouraged Southern secession. For example, Virginian Republican Samuel Vanderslip Leech’s eyewitness historical account, The Raid of John Brown at Harper’s Ferry as I Saw It, proposes a direct relationship between the Civil War and Brown’s raid. “This raid beyond question hastened the Civil War,” he contends, “I have seen Federal regiments marching on to battle enthusiastically singing ‘John Brown’s body lies a moldering in the grave but his soul is marching on’ ” (Leech 1990, 1). Leech reflects that Frederick Douglass expressed a similar understanding of the relationship between Brown’s raid and the onset of the Civil War. He claims Douglass speculated that if “Brown did not end the war that ended slavery, he did at least begin the war that ended slavery. . . . When John Brown stretched forth his arm the sky was cleared, the time for compromise was gone, the armed hosts stood face to face over the chasm of a broken Union and the clash of arms was at hand” (23).

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My study does not endeavor to evaluate the extent to which Brown’s raid influenced the onset of the violence of the Civil War. But nevertheless, it does suggest that some abolitionists invoked memory of Brown’s raid to help prepare the nation for the violent measures they believed would be necessary to crush the institution of slavery. Once the American public learned that Brown would be executed for his actions, many abolitionists (including James Redpath, Wendell Phillips, and Theodore Parker) used Brown’s death to advance the antislavery movement’s reform agenda. Nudelman aptly observes that abolitionists’ celebration of Brown’s martyrdom “prefigured” a “wartime nationalism that relied on individual selfsacrifice and took the escalation of violence as a source of collective identity” (Nudelman 641). In this endeavor, they were enormously successful, as the song “John Brown’s Body” rapidly became a Union favorite. Higginson calls attention to the popularity of the “John Brown’s Body” song in his Army Life in a Black Regiment, a diary of his experiences as colonel of the First South Carolina Volunteers, the first slave regiment to be mustered into service: “Then we marched back to camp,” he observes, “the men singing the ‘John Brown Song’ and all manners of things, as happy creatures as one can conceive” (Higginson, 1869, 45). Marching to the tune of “John Brown’s Body,” Union soldiers were undoubtedly reminded of his alleged martyrdom and prompted to associate his personal sacrifice with their own military duties. In the post–Civil War years, cultural memory of Brown’s raid was repeatedly associated with racial reform agendas. Brown’s raid was just a part of the larger struggles between the North and South over memory of the Civil War and slavery. Late-nineteenth-century African American historians, such as George Washington Williams and Thomas P. Stanford, frequently attested to the historical and cultural significance of Brown’s raid on Harper’s Ferry. Perhaps most importantly, their texts challenge lingering portrayals of Brown as a madman. George Washington Williams, for example, presents a nostalgic vision of Brown’s contribution to African American history in The History of the Negro Race in America (1883). He refutes Southern criticism of Brown’s use of violent tactics, emphasizing that it is crucial to remember Brown as a saint-like martyr. “Distance lends enchantment to the view,” he claims, “What the world condemns today is applauded tomorrow. We must have a ‘fair count’ of the history of yesterday. . . . The events chronicled yesterday, when the imagination was wrought upon by exciting circumstances, need revision today. . . . John Brown is rapidly settling down to his proper place in history, and the ‘madman’ has been transformed into a ‘saint’ ” (Williams 1883, 222). By asserting the need for a “fair count of history,” Williams reveals his awareness that the history of the antislavery movement played a role in late-nineteenth-century race relations. Furthermore, his

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demand for “revision” suggests his self-reflexive awareness that historical writing has shaped cultural memory of Brown. African American historian Thomas P. Stanford presents a similar assessment of cultural memory of Brown’s raid in The Tragedy of the Negro in America (1897). Like Williams, he works to counter representations of Brown’s mental insanity. He even quotes Governor Wise’s assessment of Brown, who contended, “They are mistaken who take Brown to be a madman,” he explains, “He is a bundle of the best nerves I ever saw, cut and thrust, and bleeding and in bonds” (Stanford 1897, 71). Stanford’s dismissal of Brown’s insanity implies that abolitionists only partly succeeded in their efforts to transform him into a saint-like martyr of the antislavery movement. The accusation that Brown was mentally insane implies that his attempt to overthrow the slave system was somehow irrational. Stanford’s insistence upon Brown’s sanity implicitly affirms the value of abolitionists’ previous attempts to reform the South. He envisions Brown as a mentally sane reformer who merely recognized the hypocrisy of the presence of slavery in a democratic republic. By constructing a cultural memory that emphasizes Brown’s sanity, Stanford simultaneously supports the progress of freedmen in the South. In contrast to Stanford, Alexander Crummell expressed some unease about the pervasiveness of cultural memory of Brown’s raid. In 1885, he delivered a speech entitled “The Need of New Ideas and New Aims for a New Era” to the graduating class at Storer College in Harper’s Ferry, West Virginia. His words imply that the geographical site of Harper’s Ferry holds a mysterious power. As he explains, “in such a place as this, full of the most thrilling memories in the history of our race, it seems impossible that any of you could possibly pass over such thoughts. The very hills seem brezzy [sic] with the purposes of old John Brown” (Crummell 1891, 13). After nostalgically meditating upon the virtue of this historical site, he warns of the dangerous possibility that the mind “should be carried back with constant and absorbing interest, especially in those memories and purposes” (13). Crummell’s words imply that it is often unhelpful and even dangerous to focus excessive attention upon the achievements of the past. Ultimately, Crummell invokes memory of Brown’s raid to launch the main argument of his lecture. The African American community, he argues, needs to reorient its turmoiled relationship with the antebellum past. He contends that “DUTY lies in the future,” and although we may receive “inspiration and instruction in the yesterdays of existence, but we cannot healthily live in them” (Crummell 1891, 13). He proceeds to articulate his concern that “there is an irresistible tendency of the Negro mind in this land to dwell morbidly and absorbingly upon the servile past” (14). Crummell’s memories of the antislavery movement are inextricably bound

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to the “dismal and distressful” past of slavery. He believes that the “painful memory of servitude” is a destructive force, which has invaded the freedmen’s schools, and often impedes racial progress. As these passages illustrate, Crummell articulates a vastly different attitude about memory of Brown’s raid than Stanford and Williams. Rather than emphasizing the importance of cultural memory, he asserts that it is necessary to move beyond (and, even actively forget) the slave past. Nevertheless, by contending that memory also functions as a negative force, Crummell inadvertently acknowledges the social importance of antebellum-era cultural memory. Just as abolitionists labored to construct the lieux de mémoire of Brown’s raid in the antebellum years, post-Civil War reformers continued to confront the antislavery past, debating and manipulating its meaning to advance new visions of racial reform. As representations of Brown in postbellum historical literature suggest, abolitionists may have endeavored to shape cultural memory of the Harper’s Ferry raid, but they failed to “manufacture” a unified interpretation of the event. They were never entirely able to control the prolific, and sometimes surprising, representations of Brown that emerged from this memory site. Like most traumatic national events, Brown’s raid rapidly evolved into a contested historical terrain that was continually reshaped by competing discourses. Brown’s raid accumulated social influence precisely because of what Nora termed a “capacity for metamorphosis”—a characteristic that allowed each generation to redefine the symbolic meaning associated with the event (Fabre et al. 1994, 296). Nevertheless, as my analysis of antebellum and postbellum literature on Brown’s raid suggests, nineteenth-century writers repeatedly and creatively enlisted cultural memory to advance their own visions of racial reform. Notes 1. Douglass escaped from slavery in 1838 and shortly thereafter began a life as a public antislavery figure. By 1859, he had begun publishing Frederick Douglass’ Monthly and had already published two autobiographical slave narratives: the Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave (1845) and My Bondage and My Freedom (1855). 2. As James McPherson notes, after 1831 virtually every Southern state passed laws limiting the freedom of speech. In some communities, a “vigilance committee” or “committee of public safety” was established to detect any individual or publication that might instigate insurrection amongst the slaves (46).

7

Meteor of War: The John Brown Cycle John Stauffer and Zoe Trodd

I such a man as it takes ages to make, and ages to understand Henry David Thoreau, 1860

After all the noise and drama of his explosive life and death, John Brown’s body finally hanged, eerily silent and ominously swaying in the crisp Virginia air of December 1859. Jacob Lawrence’s interpretation of this eternal moment places Brown between two worlds, the heavens opening behind to let him in (figure 7.1). Lawrence’s Brown is an emblem, a timeless and abstract figure, transformed in death from man to myth, more important for what he represents than for his individual humanity. The white cloud behind the figure suggests a land mass, the blue sky of the ocean around North America, and so Brown feels like a national symbol, lifted above and superimposed onto the United States. It is as though Jacob Lawrence had Frederick Douglass’s famous address on Brown at Storer College in mind when he painted the overpowering sky behind his hanging figure. Douglass’ speech of 1881 returns again and again to images of the sky: “Mighty with the sword of steel, [Brown] was mightier with the sword of the truth, and with this sword he literally swept the horizon. . . . When John Brown stretched forth his arm, ‘the sky was cleared’ ” (Douglass 1881). The abolitionist orator Wendell Phillips saw, like Jacob Lawrence, an archetypal sign and a symbol in the image of sky and gallows. “As time passes, and these hours float back into history, men will see against the clear December sky [those] gallows, and thousands of

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Figure 7.1 Jacob Lawrence, The Life of John Brown No. 22 (1941): John Brown was found “guilty of treason and murder in the 1st degree. He was hanged in Charles Town, Virginia, on December 2, 1859.” The Detroit Institute of Arts. © ARS, NY and DACS, London 2005.

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armed men guarding Virginia from her slaves. . . . Thank God for our emblem,” said Phillips in his eulogy at Brown’s funeral.1 This metaphor that draws on images of the sky is one of John Brown’s most consistent emblematic and symbolic forms. For Henry David Thoreau, Walt Whitman, Herman Melville, Henry Ward Beecher, James Schouler, and the Reverend J.S. Martin, Brown is a meteor, a bright and mysterious element in the wide canvas of the sky. As a being outside of historical or real time, his actions were “[un]connected with a cause or an effect”; he was sent “from the firmament of Providence.”2 “Meteor-like,” Brown crosses the skies of human or national consciousness, a cosmic or universal force, a “flash of radiance,” “transient and strange,” “flashing upon the world’s attention,” or so Thoreau, Whitman, and Schouler perceive (Schouler 1891, 443–444; Thoreau 1973; Whitman 1982, 380). This trail across the sky retraces periodically, for as a universal force, outside of history, Brown is an archetype or prototype, a meteor that recurs comet-like, as Thoreau explained in his essay “The Last Days of John Brown”: I meet him at every turn. He is more alive than ever he was. He has earned immortality. He is not confined to North Elba nor to Kansas. He is no longer working in secret. He works in public, and in the clearest light that shines on this land.

The meteor, as perceived by Brown’s admirers, blazes through time, visible in the skies above Moses, Jesus, and Cromwell before him, and Brown’s continual resurrection and reinterpretation since 1859 confirms that the meteor’s trail blazes forward as well as back into history and myth. Noting this mythical trail, Brown’s friend and biographer, Franklin Sanborn, described the process of myth-making to which he himself had contributed: “[Brown] was one of those rare types, easily passing into the mythical. Born of the people . . . every blow struck at them only made them dearer to the hearts of the humble. . . . In heroes, faults are pardoned, crimes forgotten, exploits magnified—their life becomes a poem or a scripture— they enter on an enviable earthly immortality” (Sanborn 1909, 149). An Atlantic Monthly review of Sanborn’s 1885 biography of John Brown recognized the power of the John Brown myth: Brown’s “apotheosis is due to the fact that his character and deeds have that quality which stirs the imagination, and moves the poetic feeling. He is seen walking far apart from the usual ways of men, in strange and solitary paths . . . seeking a peculiar goal by a forbidden route.” Brown seemed elevated above the earthy plane; he was “like those whom the Greeks of old called heroes” and was “in certain respects elevated above the customary and familiar plane of humanity.”3 Brown belongs, as the review put it, to “the imagination,” to the realm of stories, national memory, and myth-making. Hundreds of biographies,

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novels, poems, plays, speeches, sermons, literary essays, anthologies, and folk ballads have interpreted him. As abstraction and metaphor, Brown becomes kaleidoscopic, a swirl of antonyms: he is humanitarian, genius, saint, and patriot, but also murderer, egomaniac, fanatic, and extremist. For John Wilkes Booth, Lincoln’s assassin, Brown was “a man inspired, the grandest character of the century” but also a despised traitor and murderer. Faced with the enigma that is the John Brown myth, we start to feel that he somehow embodies the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche’s sense about humanity, that man is “material, fragment, excess, filth, nonsense, and chaos. But [he is] also creator, image-maker, hammer-hardness, spectator-divinity, and day of rest.” It is probably due in part to Brown’s unprecedented dependence on a sensational single act for his place in the pantheon of heroes that writers reach so readily for historical and mythic parallels. And these parallels come thick and fast. Through the rhetoric of nineteenth- and twentiethcentury writers and speakers, of the United States, England, and Continental Europe, Brown morphs into Socrates, Spartacus, Martin Luther, John Milton, Charlotte Corday, Oliver Cromwell, William Tell, Sir Walter Raleigh, Washington, Garibaldi, Marquis de Lafayette, Longfellow, Jesus, Moses, David, Saint Paul, and numerous other biblical figures. In an article for the New York Tribune on July 29, 1906, Sanborn predicted that Brown would join King Arthur and Joan of Arc; and the anonymous extended pamphlet of 1859, “The Life, Trial and Execution of Captain John Brown,” ranks Brown with Don Quixote, who was persuaded “that he had a mission to rescue all the persecuted damsels in Spain.” “The World’s Homage,” a poem of 1882 by Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr., makes Brown as unreal, or real, as Harriet Beecher Stowe’s fictional character Uncle Tom: All through the conflict, up and down Marched Uncle Tom and Old John Brown, One ghost, one form ideal; And which was false and which was true, And which was the mightier of the two, The wisest sibyl never knew, For both alike were real.

Yet while myth endows Brown with timelessness, the metaphor of the meteor’s trajectory across the skies recalls a figure whose legend changes as it flashes through history. Both Lawrence’s painting and Herman Melville’s poem, “The Portent (1859),” put their subject into movement: the coattails of Lawrence’s Brown suggest motion, extended as they are on the right.

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For Melville, Brown is “slowly swaying (such the law).” The John Brown legend, born of Bleeding Kansas, that complex struggle between supporters and opponents of slavery in a territory that seemed a mythical microcosm of the American experience, was never taken off the scaffold of history to be lain in firm, still ground. Instead it remains a shape darkly swinging against the sky, as Edna Dean Proctor’s poem, “The Virginia Scaffold,” has it: “They may hang him on the gibbet; they may raise the victor’s cry, / When they see him darkly swinging like a speck against the sky.” A Puritan echo, an Old Testament Patriarch, a warrior-prophet transplanted into the nineteenth century, but also a man ahead of his time, anticipating the course of history and civil war, and reminiscent of late twentieth-century attitudes toward African Americans, Brown seems to belong anywhere but 1859. He wanders through time, as homeless as a meteor. Examining the John Brown myth in all its fluctuations reinforces William James’s assertion that “the world is full of partial stories that run parallel to one another, beginning and ending at odd times. They mutually interlace and interfere at points, but we cannot unify them completely in our minds” (James 1975, 71). John Brown’s myth might also be a fit subject for Nietzsche, who, in The Use and Abuse of History, defines history’s “real value” this way: to see “one thing with another, and weave the elements into a single whole,” to find “ingenious variations on a probably commonplace theme.” Brown, with his Janus face, resembles the “great head” of Melville’s whale that assumes “different aspects, according to your point of view,” or Hawthorne’s scarlet letter that comes to mean something different to everyone (Melville 2002, 265). Muriel Rukeyser’s poem of 1940 offers “three images” of Brown, three versions of the myth.4 But we can identify four phases in the “John Brown cycle,” as the journalist William Allen White called it: the Force of Nature, the Christian Martyr, the Mad Villain, and the American Hero. Exploring these four myths, or phases, of John Brown offers an answer to the question asked by Stephen Vincent Benét in his long poem of 1928, John Brown’s Body: “You can weigh John Brown’s body well enough / But how and in what balance weigh John Brown?” II an elemental force Lerone Bennett, Jr., 1964

The first of these four phases is John Brown the Force of Nature, and it contains as one of its features the idea of Brown as meteor. In this legend,

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Nature, History, or Fate powered Brown in his meteoric flight across the skies, and he was “pure passion, pure transcendence,” “an elemental force like the wind, rain and fire,” “a man for all seasons, a pillar of fire by night, and a cloud by day” (Bennett, Jr. 1964, 100–101, 102). Thoreau, one of several Transcendentalists who helped construct this myth, embraced Brown as a natural force, referring to him in “A Plea for Captain John Brown” as a “volcano,” and “clear as lightning.” The minister Fales Henry Newhall used similar language, calling Brown “a volcanic blaze that rises as if to ‘lick the stars’ ” (Thoreau 1860; Newhall 1860, 195). Another minister, Moncure Conway, echoed these sentiments: “we may as well question the moral propriety of a streak of lightning or an earthquake as of [Brown’s] deed.” Wendell Phillips, in “The Lesson of the Hour,” described Brown as a cosmic force and a “central sun” (Conway 1860, 355). When not an “elemental force,” Brown is the cycle of nature itself, as imagined by Thoreau: “when good seed is planted, good fruit is inevitable, and does not depend on our watering and cultivating it. . . . When you plant or bury a hero in his field, a crop of heroes is sure to spring up” (Thoreau 1860). Closely related to these images of the natural world is the theme of Brown as an episode in an inevitable historical process. In this sense, Brown is not so much a force of nature as a being forced by nature. Wendell Phillips portrays Brown as a catalyst in history with a predefined place in the evolution of the American mind. He is the “Puritan Principle” embodied, and Phillips imagines Brown proclaiming: “Posterity will summon the State to judgment and will admit my principle” (Phillips 1860, 112). Frederick Douglass’s “Address at Storer College” presents Brown as a vessel through whom “the judgment of God” can act. For Douglass, Brown’s meteoric flight has been providentially determined, and so Brown’s character is unimportant, and the details of his life are as irrelevant as the myth-making tends to render him. He is beyond the historical course of the nation. Caught in an inexorable current, Brown is the agent of a larger elemental force. For Transcendentalists like Thoreau, Emerson, and Wendell Phillips, this larger force was History, Nature, and Nature’s God, which established the universal moral law. Brown seemed an agent of universal justice, his actions the embodiment of their political philosophy. These three figures were active spokesmen on Brown’s behalf, lecturing throughout New York and Massachusetts between October 1859 and early 1860. They recognized Brown’s close relationship to Nature, were impressed by his fire for abolitionism, and claimed him as a Transcendentalist. On his trips to New England to raise money, Brown had fashioned himself as a Transcendentalist, and this self-creation served him well from prison. His violent methods seemed relatively unimportant next to the romantic image of a self-educated, self-reliant New England common man, rebelling patriotically against oppressive

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institutions. Brown made the Transcendentalists’ abstractions concrete and in return they made him a Transcendentalist abstraction. He existed above the nation’s law, a force higher than ground level, a moral meteor in the national sky. As an agent and an abstraction, Brown becomes an allegorical and tragic figure in a morality play in Robert Penn Warren’s 1928 biography, John Brown: The Making of a Martyr. Here, Brown’s life and death, like the American Civil War, is a tragedy, the clash of higher law with statutory law. In Warren’s work Brown is ambitious and egocentric, his character tragically flawed, and so is toppled by his own hubris: “He was alone, and always acted alone, for his egotism would permit nothing else” (Warren 1929, 62). In Warren’s representation, Brown has very little self-knowledge, and so, like many of the Greek tragic heroes, makes an arrogant attempt at godhead. His blindness, presumption, and self-worship leads, in Aristotelian terms, to his hamartia, his fatal, destructive error. Other observers set the John Brown story in the mold of a classical drama by Sophocles, whose particular genius was to portray characters who seem to choose their path and yet be helplessly swept along by Fate. Reviewing Oswald Garrison Villard’s compendious biography of Brown in 1910, the Atlantic Monthly noted: “the story has the movement of a Greek tragedy” (Drescher 1993, 507; Morse 1910, 668). With Brown as a tragic Greek figure, Harper’s Ferry became the dramatic link between the climax of war in the 1860s and earlier events like the Missouri Compromise and the Fugitive Slave Law. The traditional mix of pity and terror that defined Greek tragedy infused the accounts of Harper’s Ferry: the madman lying wounded and pathetic in the courtroom, barely able to hear his trial’s proceedings; the murderer penning sad and biblically-infused missives to his cherished family during imprisonment; the monster stooping to kiss a slave child on the way to the gallows. Brown performed the overreaching of Icarus, who flew too close to the sun, and the calm fatalism of Sophocles’s Oedipus, who inflicted damage upon himself in a passion and was serene in the sacrificial aftermath. It is easy to see how the Atlantic Monthly reviewer of 1910 saw “Greek tragedy” in the John Brown story. The strange spectacle of raid, trial, and execution was an almost choreographed process of violence, punishment, conversion, redemption, and catharsis. And through trial and ritual execution, Brown moved from degradation to sainthood. In 1937 John Steuart Curry brought together these three elements of the first phase in the John Brown cycle: force of nature, history, and tragedy. His Kansas mural The Tragic Prelude, which he painted between 1937 and 1942, linked Brown visually to the prairie fire and tornado that rage in the background, so making the ten-foot figure of Brown in the painting’s foreground a powerful force of nature (figure 7.2). Indeed, during his lifetime Brown was popularly known as the “Cyclone of Kansas.”

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Figure 7.2 John Steuart Curry, The Tragic Prelude (1937–1942), detail of John Brown, north wall of the East Corridor, Kansas Statehouse murals. Courtesy of the Kansas State Historical Society.

Curry’s concept of Brown’s actions in Kansas as a “Prelude” to the Civil War also sets down Brown’s life as part of a historical process, like the movement westward enacted by the figures behind Brown as they move across the canvas from right to left. The “Prelude” is laid out like music, one section following inevitably another, as though to suggest that once Brown played his part in Kansas, the Civil War would surely follow. Curry’s title, The Tragic Prelude, infuses the mural with tragedy (William Shakespeare, King Lear, IV, I, 46). Curry adds a religious element too: his Brown is reminiscent of Moses and Christ, so connecting him to the second major phase in the John Brown cycle, Brown as Christian Martyr. III gallows glorious like the cross Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1860

Brown the Force of Nature resembles Brown the Christian Martyr: an instrument of God, rather than of Nature, History, or Fate. Here “the perfectness and glory of [Brown’s] protest—its completeness, its sublimity, its solemnity, and firmness, even to the end”“are at once the work of a Divine Providence, and the impulse of Divine Truth,” as the Unitarian minister George B. Cheever noted (Cheever 1860, 233). This religious persona is one that Brown himself repeatedly offered the world. His prison letters, his

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last speech before the court, and the note that he wrote on the morning of his execution fashioned him as a prophet, and his execution made him a Christ figure. He became a symbol of idealism and self-sacrifice, and his biblical rhetoric resonated with the religiosity deeply embedded in American political culture. Americans recognized a martyr in Brown, as they would in Lincoln and Martin Luther King, Jr. New England ministers, who relished the opportunity to add Brown to the sacred list of historical martyrs, placed him in the tradition of Christ’s disciple Paul, the martyr Saint Stephen, and Joan of Arc. Once Lincoln became Christ in the popular imagination, Brown was more easily portrayed as John the Baptist, “the one who came to tell about the light” (John 1:8), the light being Lincoln. As early as 1859 the black minister J.S. Martin put Brown alongside John the Baptist: Men say that his life was “a failure.” I remember the story of one of the world’s moral heroes, whose life was just such a “failure”. . . . John Brown, like John the Baptist, retired into the hard and stony desert of Kansas, and there, by the weapons of heroism, by the principles of freedom, and the undaunted courage of a man, wrung from the bloody soil the highest encomiums of Freedom and the most base acknowledgements of slavery, that the one was right and the other wrong. I know that John Brown, in thus rebuking our public, in thus facing the monarch, has had to bear just what John the Baptist bore. (Martin 1859)

Two popular parallels parallels to John the Baptist were the figures of Samson and Moses. Frederick Douglass noted that Brown, “like Samson,” “has laid his hands upon the pillars of this great national temple of cruelty and blood, and when he falls, that temple will speedily crumble to its final doom, burying its denizens in its ruins” (Douglass 1859). Franklin Sanborn saw that Brown’s death, “like Samson’s, was to be his last and greatest victory” (Sanborn 1885, 623). Hermann von Holst’s narrative, John Brown (1888), is another text that paints Brown as Samson. Douglass also saw in Brown an American Moses, and commented in a later speech: “forty long years this man was struggling with this one idea; like Moses he was forty years in the wilderness.” “Like Moses, he had made excuses, and as with Moses his excuses were overruled” (Douglass 1881). The parallel also inspired several artists; Charles Sumner observed of Edwin A. Brackett’s marble bust of Brown, sculpted after a visit to Brown in prison: “This is like the Moses of Michelangelo.” The same imagery is at work in de Blezar’s bronze bust of 1870 (figure 7.3).5 John Steuart Curry would use Michelangelo’s “Moses” rather than John Brown himself as a model for Brown in The Tragic Prelude. In his mural Brown’s arms are stretched as wide

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Figure 7.3 Joseph-Charles de Blezar, John Brown (1870). Courtesy of the Library of Congress.

as his myth, which also of course evokes Christ on a cross. Curry’s Brown wears a patriarchal Moses-like beard, which Brown did not in fact have until after the moment in Kansas to which the mural refers. Curry extended the comparison in another work: his painting, Moses and the Eleventh Commandment, is alternatively titled John Brown Depicted as a Saint.

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Figure 7.4 Victor Hugo, frontispiece from John Brown par Victor Hugo (1861). Courtesy of the Lilly Library, Indiana University.

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The most controversial and widespread parallel was to Jesus himself. Commentators made it repeatedly, forging from Brown’s gallows the cross at Calvary, or what the novelist Louisa May Alcott called Brown’s “stepping-stone to heaven.” Victor Hugo’s sketch of Brown on the gallows was inscribed “Pro Christo sicut Christus” (“For Christ just as Christ”) (figure 7.4). After Lincoln’s assassination, Hugo wrote: “Let not America weep for Lincoln. This martyr has his place between John Brown and Jesus Christ as the third redeemer of humanity.” The Italian patriot Garibaldi also remarked on this triumvirate of saints, after the Emancipation Proclamation in 1863, calling Lincoln the “heir of the aspirations of Christ and John Brown.” New England Transcendentalists in particular emphasized the comparison between Brown and Christ. Thoreau wrote that “some eighteen hundred years ago Christ was crucified. This morning perchance John Brown was hung. These are the two ends of a chain, not without links.” Emerson borrowed the words of his friend Mattie Griffith and referred to Brown as “the new saint awaiting his martyrdom, and who, if he shall suffer, will make the gallows glorious like the cross.”6 Several New England ministers saw nothing blasphemous about the comparison, and made it themselves: “The gallows from which he ascends into heaven will be in our politics what the cross is in our religion—the sign and symbol of supreme self-devotedness,” noted Edwin Wheelock. “From his sacrificial blood the temporal salvation of four millions of our people shall yet spring” (Wheelock 1860, 191). In 1861 Charles Robinson gave the link a new twist, calling both Brown and Christ failures on earth but heroes in heaven: “To the superficial observer John Brown was a failure. So was Jesus of Nazareth. Both suffered ignominious death as traitors to the government, yet one is now hailed as the Savior of the world from sin, and the other of a race from bondage.”7 During the twentieth century this link between Brown and Christ remained strong. In 1909 W.E.B. Du Bois reiterated the theme of Brown’s divine sacrifice: “On the second of this month he was crucified, and on the 8th he was buried and on the 25th, fifty years later, let him rise from the dead in every Negro-American house. Jesus Christ gave his life as a sacrifice for the lowly. So did John Brown” (Du Bois 1909). Brown remained a holy hero in the African American tradition for the rest of the twentieth century. In 1959 Langston Hughes insisted that “John Brown’s name is one of the great martyr names of all history,” and Countee Cullen made of Brown an archangel in “A Negro Mother’s Lullaby”: “His sons are high fellows; / An Archangel is he; / And they doff their bright halos / To none but the Three” (Hughes and Cullen quoted in Quarles 1974, 194, 195). Both supporters and opponents of slavery had predicted such longevity for the myth of Brown as martyr. Southern newspapers worried that

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“to hang a fanatic is to make a martyr of him and fledge another brood of the same sort.”8 Abolitionists gloried in the same logic of transformation: “To all outward appearances all is defeat and ruin. Yet in reality what a glorious success! What a splendid martyrdom,” proclaimed Lydia Maria Child a few weeks before Brown’s death (Child 1982, 329). More than anyone, John Brown himself understood the power of the myth of martyrdom. As the journalist and politician William A. Phillips explains, “in his humble way [Brown] endeavored to pattern [himself] after the man of Galilee,” and to make sure the world saw the pattern (Phillips 1890, 6). While in prison, Brown read a copy of Henry Ward Beecher’s sermon at Plymouth Church, given on the Sunday before Brown’s sentencing: Let no man pray that Brown be spared. Let Virginia make him a martyr. Now he had only blundered. His soul was noble; his work miserable. But a cord and a gibbet would redeem all that, and round up Brown’s failure with a heroic success. (in Redpath 1969, 262)

Brown marked “good” in the margin. Brown’s talent for self-dramatization allowed Northern abolitionists to repackage his image for their cause. His prison letters are one of the best sources through which to see the mythologizing process at work. In the letter he wrote to the Reverend McFarland, on November 23, 1859, he compared himself to the apostle Paul while also slipping in a direct but unacknowledged quote from Jesus on the cross (“they know not what they do”): “I think I feel as happy as Paul did when he lay in prison. He knew if they killed him, it would greatly advance the cause of Christ; that was the reason he rejoiced so. On that same ground ‘I do rejoice, yea, and will rejoice.’ Let them hang me; I forgive them, and may God forgive them, for they know not what they do” (in Redpath 1969). For many years Brown had felt himself to be an instrument of God. John, Jr. recalled that his father once began to punish him with lashes for the moral debts accumulated in his “account book” of transgressions, but ended up taking two-thirds of the lashes on his own back to pay his son’s debt and enact the doctrine of Atonement before the eyes of John, Jr. Until October 1859, Brown identified with several roles but in prison was wholly focused on martyrdom. He exchanged his weapon for a pen and shifted from his most recent role of warrior-hero to that of martyr-hero. Brown’s legendary martial prowess and his reputation for terror, when combined with his persistently dignified and calm bearing, lent his trial and execution a sense of exquisite farce—as though he could break free at any moment but simply chose to remain. He worked to give the impression that he chose death willingly; his execution could be a martyrdom only if he seemed to die voluntarily as punishment for his beliefs.

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IV a criminal paranoiac Thomas Dixon, 1921

Brown’s self-conscious martyrdom served the cause of abolitionism. Nowhere is there evidence that he sought a martyr’s death for its own sake or for the sake of vanity. While Brown saw himself as an instrument of God, which indicates the opposite of egomania, his detractors denied his prophecy and attributed his actions to a fiendish ego and destructive monomania. This third, unsympathetic, phase of the “John Brown cycle,” Brown as the Mad Villain, prevailed mainly in the South during the conservative years of post-Reconstruction and McCarthyism in the twentieth century. It proliferated again after the terrorist Timothy McVeigh explicitly cast himself as a modern-day John Brown. Allan Nevins, in The Emergence of Lincoln, published in 1950, portrayed Brown as mentally disturbed, and in the same decade C. Vann Woodward looked at Brown’s family history and concluded that Brown had inherited a genetic disorder. A later commentator, Robert McGlone, claimed in 1988 that Brown was bipolar, and recent critics have speculated about whether or not Brown was a manic-depressive or an obsessive-compulsive.9 Though this hostility toward Brown was particularly pronounced during the 1940s and 50s, Brown had been from the 1920s onwards a lens through which Americans reflected their fears about militant politics and the Russian Revolution in particular. The Torch, Thomas Dixon’s screenplay of 1927, subtitled The Story of the Paranoiac Who Caused a Great War, portrays Brown as a crazed demagogue. (Unlike his novel, The Clansman, upon which D.W. Griffith based The Birth of a Nation twelve years earlier, The Torch was never made into a film.) Dixon’s popular novel, The Man in Gray, made Brown into a “criminal paranoiac” and demagogue bent on corrupting the American people. Brown “could work with his pen the miracle that would transform a nation into the puppets of his will,” Dixon wrote. “His soul on fire with the fixed idea that he had been ordained by God to drench a nation in blood, he joyfully began the task of cementing the mob mind” (Dixon 1921, 90, 94). But not every Brown assailant granted him such significant status as demagogue. Biographies by Hill Peebles Wilson in 1913, Robert Penn Warren in 1929, and James C. Malin in 1942 dismiss everything from the sincerity of Brown’s religious beliefs to his motives for seeking freedom for blacks. For them, Brown was a small-time con-man and hypocrite, an unbalanced but irrelevant lone gunman. Malin cast himself as a

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dispassionate and unbiased historian, and sought to show that the myth of Brown was far larger than the man. Peebles Wilson granted Brown legendary status, though not as a martyr or saint, but rather as a “soldier of fortune” and pirate. Brown was a relative nobody whose greatest insanity was that he thought he was a somebody: a Captain Kidd aspiring to be a Washington or a Jesus (Wilson 1913, 407). All of this attention to Brown’s state of mind came in spite of the observation by one of Brown’s greatest political enemies, Governor Wise, who asserted after interviewing him that those “who take” Brown “to be a madman” are “mistaken”: “He a bundle of the best nerves I ever saw—cut and thrust and bleeding in bonds. He is a man of clear head, of courage, of simple ingenuousness. He is cool, collected, and indomitable.”10 Brown’s Northern backers also considered him a perfectly sound individual, and letters of Brown’s comrades to their families shortly before the Harper’s Ferry raid refer to Brown as passionate but clear-headed, and certainly not hypnotized or willfully suicidal. Affadavits claiming insanity in Brown’s family were presented in his defense by his counsel at the trial, originating from Brown’s friends and neighbors to mitigate his crimes; Brown rejected them vehemently. To be sure, Brown had an active fantasy life and a rich imagination— a sense of alternate reality more common to writers and artists than to militant political leaders—which helped to generate the complex responses to his life. He was attached to a millennialist vision of the world, and did not lose sight of the political situation as it was. Alongside the claim that Brown was insane must be set the possibility that Brown’s tactics were meant to sow the seeds of sectional discord. “As a war measure, John Brown’s murders were beyond doubt successful,” Villard writes of the Pottawatomie massacre. “If Brown intended to set men at each other’s throats, to make every man take sides, to bring matters in Kansas to a head, he was wholly successful” (Villard 1910, 181–182). The very gruesomeness of the murders was meant to prompt reprisal. Pottawatomie was direct action. At Harper’s Ferry, Brown virtually destroyed the possibility of sectional reconciliation. His raid was an acknowledgment that moral suasion was useless. “The people of the North have said John Brown was a madman— I suppose mostly because it is on the eve of an election,” the Reverend J.S. Martin commented, “but if he was mad, his madness not only had a great deal of ‘method’ in it, but a great deal of philosophy and religion” (Martin 1859). The North needed Brown to be a saint or a madman, but not a radical abolitionist; God’s instrument rather than a political force; a martyr from another more romantic era rather than a hardheaded tactician and catalyst. Recognizing that he was more valuable as a martyr than as a

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political leader, Brown refused after his capture to discuss politics and his place in the world of Northern abolitionism. The Republican Party used the myth, and the myth did its work. V in accord with what is best in American character Franklin Sanborn, 1885

John Brown believed that since slavery was an “unjustifiable War of one portion of its citizens upon another,” slaves had a natural right to rebel. He saw himself as a patriot and peace-man, seeking to end civil war by inciting rebellion, eliminating slavery, thus preserving the peace, and uniting the nation (Brown 1858). He acted on Thomas Jefferson’s belief that “the tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants.” He reminded many in the North of Jefferson’s warnings about the inevitability of God’s justice for a slaveholding nation. As a patriot, Brown stood for the power of the individual and so of the American creed. “So much was he in accord with what is best in the American character, that he will stand in history as one type of our people, as Franklin and Lincoln do,” his friend Sanborn claimed. “He embodied the distinctive qualities of the Puritan, but with a strong tincture of the humane sentiments of later times” (Sanborn 1969, 185). Sanborn’s invocation of the Puritans is characteristic of the many responses to Brown that rendered him as a quintessentially American hero. The fourth and final phase of the Brown cycle, the American Hero, casts him as Puritan, revolutionary, and frontiersman. It was a characterization that labor leaders and African Americans in particular repeatedly used in heralding him. New Englanders everywhere called Brown a Puritan, a theological and political descendent of Oliver Cromwell. Emerson was intrigued by Brown’s direct descent from Peter Brown, a Plymouth colonist of the Mayflower, and Wendell Phillips called Brown “a real Puritan Presbyterian”, “a regular Cromwellian dug up for two centuries—in the midst of our New England civilization” (Phillips 1860, 55). Sanborn compared him to both Cromwell and the poet John Milton, and declared that Brown had “entered upon his perilous undertaking with deliberate resolution,” “as did the Pilgrims before they set forth from Holland to colonize America” (Sanborn 1969, 117). Sanborn associated Brown with several myths of American identity: Puritan, frontier hero, and primitive romantic. Brown’s character, he said, encompassed a “homely, Franklin-like wisdom, and Connecticut shrewdness,” with the “romantic spirit” and primitivism of a

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man on an errand into the wilderness (Sanborn 1969, 86, 98). Brown himself encouraged such myths; he dressed like a frontiersman when in New England, and seemed a real-life frontier hero to the Massachusetts intellectuals, who loved his tales of violence and heroism. He was one of their own on the Kansas frontier: Leatherstocking among blacks rather than Indians; a freedom fighter fresh from the frontlines and straight out of a romantic novel; and an American Robin Hood. It is no wonder that New England abolitionists and ministers spoke of him with sectional pride. Harper’s Ferry was “the Bunker Hill of our second Revolution,” and Brown was “true to the logic of Lexington and Concord” (Sanborn 1969, 183, 189). Identifying Brown as a patriot, Wendell Phillips reminded Americans that though Brown’s raid “may be treason,”“the fact is it runs in the blood. We were traitors in 1776.”11 Some commentators went even further, claiming Brown as a greater American patriot than George Washington, “armed only with his faith” and marching on to certain death (in Redpath 1969, 355). This theme of Brown as a soldier and war hero was a part of this fourth phase of Brown, the American hero; it became more common after his death, and was subsumed into the violence of the war. Abolitionists used Brown’s name to prepare the North for a holy war that would visit on the South divine retribution for the crime of slavery, and many claimed that the shots fired at Harper’s Ferry were the first of the Civil War. Wendell Phillips summed up Brown’s role in the abolition movement in his funeral oration for Brown: “History will date Virginia Emancipation from Harper’s Ferry. . . . John Brown has loosened the roots of the slave system. It only breathes—it does not live hereafter.”12 And Frederick Douglass declared that “not Carolina, but Virginia, not Fort Sumter, but Harper’s Ferry and the arsenal, not Col. Anderson, but John Brown, began the war that ended American slavery and made this a free Republic.” That John Brown began the war that ended slavery became a refrain for Douglass, repeated from 1865 until his death in 1895 (Douglass 1881). Once the fighting began, it was “impossible to keep the name of John Brown out of the war,” as Emerson wrote in his journal in 1865 (Emerson 1982, 468). War vindicated Brown and made him a prophet. Union soldiers replaced the unappealing war cry of “preservation of the Union” with the marching song, “John Brown’s Body,” making Brown a symbol of abolition, progress, and sacrifice. If Brown was a Christ-figure, then the death and destruction of war was a holy crusade and, if his soul marched on, then so too could the nation’s soul march, out of the wasteland of war and into victory and reconstruction. “The apotheosis of old John Brown is fast taking place,” noted the Illinois Weekly Mirror in 1862. “All over the country” the John Brown song may be heard at all times of the night or day in the streets

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of Chicago and all other cities; it is the pet song among the soldiers in all our armies.”13 Men needed a hero in order to fight, and as a symbol, Brown helped them stay emotionally committed. As the image of the nation’s soul and the first Unionist fatality of war, John Brown became the quintessential Northern war hero. Theodore Roosevelt, no friend of blacks and radicals, expanded upon the theme of Brown as an American war hero in 1910: John Brown stands to us now as representing the men and the generation who rendered the greatest service ever rendered this country. He stood for heroic valor, grim energy, fierce fidelity to high ideals. A great debt is owed to John Brown because he is one of the most striking figures in the mighty struggle which was to keep us forever a free and united nation, which was to secure the continuance of the most tremendous democratic experiment ever tried. He did much in his life and more in his death; he embodied the aspiration of the men of his generation; his fate furnished the theme of the song which most stirred the hearts of the soldiers. John Brown’s work was brought to completion by the men who bore aloft the banner of the Union. (Roosevelt 1910)

Brown’s mythic role as a symbol of American liberty and democracy was seized upon by labor leaders beginning in the 1880s. Between 1880 and 1940 the Northern worker was often cast as the equivalent of the antebellum Southern slave—shackled by capitalism and by capitalist bosses who were the slave-owners of the era. When labor reformers looked back to abolitionism for a model, Brown seemed the “spirit incarnate of the Revolution,” as Eugene V. Debs explained in his tribute to Brown,“December 2, 1859.” Debs and others in the anarchist and socialist movements frequently invoked Brown, asking, as did Debs, “Who shall be the John Brown of WageSlavery?” On December 2, 1881, the Labor Standard American Auxiliary Association commemorated Brown’s execution and raised him up as a symbol of the aims and struggles of the Association, offering cards on which were written: “Yesterday—the abolition of chattel slavery. Tomorrow—the abolition of wage slavery. His soul is marching on!” The president of the Association referred to Brown as “the labor martyr.”14 The relevance of Brown for labor reformers was challenged for a few years in the late 1920s, after the executions of Sacco and Vanzetti began replacing Brown as leftist symbols and martyrs. But in 1935 Brown appeared as a symbol of leftist politics in Sinclair Lewis’s It Can’t Happen Here and, five years later, in Muriel Rukeyser’s “The Soul and Body of John Brown.” Kenneth Porter, in his poem “To the Jayhawkers of the International Brigade,” equated Brown’s struggles to those of the Left in the Spanish civil war: “John Brown of Kansas . . . goes marching on / his tread is on the plains of Aragon” (Porter 1939, 97). Michael Blankfort and Michael Gold wrote the 1936 play Battle Hymn that connected their present moment to 1856. Blankfort explained the association: “The left

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creative movement had a great burden to bear and that is the Russian burden. Lenin was hero . . . or Trotsky was hero.”“It seemed to us” that “we had to find our own roots in our own revolutionary past” and “Brown was such a perfect example of that because he wasn’t an import”: “He was a rock of American rock” (quoted in Kendall 1986, 82). Many radicals in the 1930s viewed Brown as a proto-Marxist revolutionary, and articles in the New Masses and the Daily Worker frequently mentioned his name. In 1953 a huge crowd in Beijing greeted W.E.B. Du Bois with a rendition of “John Brown’s Body.” For labor leaders, Brown was a potent symbol of revolution and change, able to speak effectively to other working men, precisely because of his “natural” simplicity and “instincts” as one of the common men. As Clarence Darrow put it: [Brown’s] natural instincts were never warped or smoothed or numbed by learning. . . . He was of the type of Cromwell, of Calvin, of Mahomet; not a good type for the peace of the world, but a type that here and there, down through the ages has been needful to kindle a flame that should burn the decaying institutions and ancient wrongs in the crucible of the world’s awakening wrath.15

Once again, Brown becomes a “type,” belonging to the realm of myth and symbol. But for Michael Gold, Brown was also “the greatest man the common people of America have yet produced,” a “hard-working, honest Puritan farmer with a large family, a man worried with the details of poverty,” and though “a legend,” still visible in “the simple, obscure heroes who fight for freedom today in America” (Gold 1960, 3, 4). Brown was especially present when black Americans were “hung or shot down.” In fact blacks are the one group in American history who, from Brown’s death to the present day, have consistently praised him as a hero. More than any other white man in the historical record, Brown devoted his life to their cause and saw in their sufferings his own. He was, as African Americans have always recognized, the blackest white man who ever lived, and many Southern slaves who heard about the Harper’s Ferry raid assumed that Brown was black. In 1882 one of the first black historians, George Washington Williams, recognized the movement of the “John Brown cycle” but thought that Brown, among the world’s greatest heroes, was “rapidly settling down to his proper place in history”:“ ‘the madman’ has been transformed into a ‘saint’ ” (Williams 1968, 214–222). In this third subphase of Brown the American Hero, Brown became the hero of African Americans, and the guardian of America’s democratic experiment. During the Niagara Movement, W.E.B. Du Bois, Reverdy Ransom, and Francis Grimké spoke of Brown’s efforts on behalf of blacks. And at the second annual meeting of the Movement, held at Harper’s Ferry in 1906,

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Ransom compared Brown to Moses, David, Joshua, Cromwell, and Toussaint L’Ouverture. “The Negroes who are aggressively fighting for their rights have the same spirit that animated the founders of this nation. In them the soul of John Brown goes marching on,” Ransom declared (Ransom 1906, 416–417). Du Bois used Brown as a rallying call, asking in his biography of Brown: “Has John Brown no message—no legacy, then, to the twentieth century? He has and it is this great word: the cost of liberty is less than the price of repression.” As an American hero, Brown was still relevant, as Du Bois explained in the last chapter of John Brown: Not only is the cost of repression today large—it is a continually increasing cost: the procuring of coolie labor, the ruling of India, the exploitation of Africa, the problem of the unemployed. . . . The memory of John Brown stands today as a mighty warning to his country. He saw, he felt in his soul the wrong and danger of that most daring and insolent system of human repression known as American slavery. (Du Bois 1909, 366, 384–386)

In the 1930s Muriel Rukeyser reappropriated Brown on behalf of African Americans. The poem, “The Trial,” and the accompanying article, “Trial of the ‘Scottsboro Boys’ ” about the Scottsboro case, have Brown present in the Alabama courtroom. “John Brown, Nat Turner, [and] Toussaint L’Ouverture” watched “the trial from the corner” (Rukeyser 1982). Arthur Covey’s New Deal mural John Brown depicts Brown as a pioneering leader of the black people. In the 1960s, amid centennial commemorations of the Harper’s Ferry raid, civil rights groups plucked Brown from the political wilderness of the 1950s and reclaimed him as a hero to blacks. As debates unfolded on the role of the white man in black America’s struggle for equal rights, it seemed that another civil war loomed unless white America could follow in Brown’s ever-marching footsteps. The activist Truman Nelson, in The Right of Revolution, examined the “John Brown principle” by paraphrasing Malcolm X: “If you are for me and my problem,” then “you have to be willing to do as old John Brown did.” Nelson himself believed that there was a “John Brown in every man’s conscience,” ready to push America to another Harper’s Ferry (Nelson 1968, 3, 6). And Lerone Bennett, Jr., in his essay, “Tea and Sympathy: Liberals and Other White Hopes,” points to the recognition by blacks that Brown identified completely with their people. The essay concludes: There was in John Brown a complete identification with the oppressed. It was his sister that a slave-owner was selling, his wife who was being raped in the gin house. It was not happening to Negroes, it was happening to

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him. . . . John Brown was a Negro, and it was in this aspect that he suffered. (Bennett, Jr. 1964, 100–101)

Brown, in this “complete identification with the oppressed,” was also a hero for black South Africans during the 1960s. In a speech to the UN, on October 9, 1963, R.H. Amonoo of Ghana referred to the “great American whose soul still goes marching on throughout the world.” Amonoo quoted Brown’s words to his captors: “ ‘You may dispose of me very easily; I am nearly disposed of now; but the question—this negro question I mean— the end of that is not yet.’ ” So the fourth and final phase of the “John Brown cycle” encompasses Brown as Puritan and frontier hero of American liberty; Brown as military hero and symbol of America’s greatest conflict; Brown as simple workingclass hero of American labor and reform; and Brown as empathetic hero of oppressed races in America and abroad. He seemed, in Sanborn’s words, “in accord with what is best in American character” and perhaps in all human character and conscience—an eternal principle.

VI the representative man George Stearns, 1860

The persistence of the John Brown cycle as it shifted through four major phases indicates the enormous impact Brown has had on American national consciousness. For Ralph Ellison, the John Brown story was intricately wrapped up with America’s search for identity, a search that was the theme of Invisible Man and was “THE American theme,” as Ellison put it. In the creation of a “national” history, Brown became a cultural symbol and a representative mythical American. His career offered a “usable past” to radical historical nationalists. The fervent search for America’s identity and national character conducted by historians, writers, and artists in the first third of the twentieth century in particular swept the Brown legend along in its wake. He symbolized the crisis of the 1850s and 1860s, connected pre- and post-Civil War America to its revolutionary and heroic Puritan past, and represented the shift from one age to another: as the sentimental age ended and the age of industrial capitalism began, John Brown was a harbinger and, in accordance with the psychologist Carl Jung’s explanation, a “wise man,” a “savior or redeemer” who “is awakened whenever the times are out of joint and a human society is committed to a serious error” (Jung 1933, 197).

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The artists, speech-makers, and commentators who saw in Brown an archetypal tragic character, martyr-figure, or nineteenth-century Samson, Jesus, or Cromwell sought to give shape and meaning to the chaos of their “epoch” and restore through such familiar and “primordial” symbolic imagery a “psychic equilibrium.” Brown then remained a barometer to political climates in America: “I believe John Brown to be the representative man of this century, as Washington was of the last,” said the abolitionist George Stearns in 1860. Frederick Douglass said the same thing, repeatedly referring to Brown as “THE MAN OF THIS NINETEENTH CENTURY.” Brown continued as the “representative man” of twentieth century moments and movements (Stearns 1860). And yet the very persistence of Brown in American consciousness, the extreme responses to his myth, and the contradictions of the dialogue that surrounds his story, also indicate that something in John Brown the “representative man” unsettles America, perhaps precisely because of his representative status. Some of the tensions in his mythology are also those in American history between idealism and pragmatism; the moral and the legal; the individual and community; revolution and evolution; the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. Brown is part of the same Protestant heritage as Emerson and William James, and the ultimate example of a rugged individualist who lived by higher law yet acted in order to reconnect with his fellow men and his nation’s ideals. He is an embodiment of the tension continuously present in American society between patriotism and individual rights, the law and principles, and so he himself remains continuously present. “But was he not a rebel, guilty of sedition and treason?” asked the Reverend Newhall in December 1859. “Yes, all this. But we are to remember that the words ‘rebel’ and ‘treason’ have been made holy in the American language. Are not our children fed on revolutionary reminiscences which make ‘rebel’ and ‘patriot’ synonymous in their childish apprehension?” (Newhall 1860, 204). The combination of treason and patriotism, lawlessness and idealism, in the John Brown story are the threads from which the historical fabric of America is woven, and this makes Brown’s story difficult to confront without recourse to national myths and symbols. Writers and artists return to him with such intensity and controversy, using such mythology and symbolism, because he dramatized a set of conflicts in American history and culture. At the same time, Brown is part of America’s self-image as a violent redeemer nation. The literary critic Harold Bloom writes that “salvation for the American cannot come through the community or the congregation, but is a one-on-one act of confrontation.” In a similar vein, the historian David Brion Davis notes that, as far as Europeans are concerned, America has “glorified personal whim and has ranked hardened killers

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with the greatest of folk heroes,” one of them being John Brown (Bloom 1992, 33; Davis 1957, viii). Personal freedom secured by righteous violence through a sense of biblical mission is part of the national teleology and the biblical narrative behind America’s founding and growth. Brown’s form of violent heroism makes his story difficult for Americans to confront, even through myths and archetypes. Such difficulty helps to explain the large number of contradictory images and reinterpretations in his mythology. Viewed as part of the American culture of righteous violence and frontier justice, Brown’s terrorism might force an acknowledgment of the centrality of violence to American history, from Indian Removal and the brutality of the American West, to slavery and the lynchings of Reconstruction, the oppression of radicals throughout the twentieth century, the assassinations of four presidents and several other leaders, and of course the Civil War. But, as the novelist Toni Morrison pointed out in an interview, America is “the land where the past is always erased,” a country with an “innocent future,” a place where “the past is absent or it is romanticized,” for the “culture doesn’t encourage dwelling on, let alone coming to terms with, the truth about the past” (Morrison 1988, 11). The pervasive extremes of the John Brown myth indicate such an erasure or romanticization of the past, an attempt to cling to a more attractive self-image than that lit up by Brown’s meteor. Distanced and simplified through myth, Brown’s life and legend are prevented from speaking dangerous truths. Symbolism allows an uncomfortable narrative to exist, cloaked but expressed, and so the John Brown cycle beats on, boats against the current. To recognize that he was more than the “weird John Brown” of Melville’s poem, not hero or villain but both and much in between, would be to see in Brown not a meteor out of time but a man whose character and actions were made possible and necessary by his time and his country. In this sense, his meteor’s path was also his nation’s. Notes 1. Wendell Phillips, Eulogy for John Brown, December 8, 1859. 2. Henry Ward Beecher, Sermon of October 30, 1859, at Brooklyn’s Congregationalist Plymouth Church. Reverend J. S. Martin, speech given on John Brown in Boston on December 2, 1859, Martyr Day, The Liberator, December 9, 1859. 3. [Review of Sanborn’s biography], Atlantic Monthly 37 (1886): 272. 4. Muriel Rukeyser, “The Soul and Body of John Brown” (1940): There! tall in October’s fruition-fire stand three images of himself; one as he stood on the ground, one as he stood on sudden air, the third

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receding to our fatal topmost hills faded through dying altitudes, and low through faces living under the dregs of the air, deprived childhood and thwarted youth and change fantastic sweetness gone to rags and incorruptible anger blurred by age. 5. Lydia Maria Child’s account of the creation and reception of Brackett’s bust, reprinted in “Lydia Maria Child: Holographs of ‘The Hero’s Heart’ and ‘Brackett’s Bust of John Brown’ ” by Robert H. Swennes, American Literature 40, no. 4. (1969), 539–542. 6. Henry David Thoreau, “A Plea for Captain John Brown,” October 30, 1859; Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Courage,” Boston, November 8, 1859. 7. Charles Robinson, first governor of Kansas after admission to the Union in 1861, speech at Osawatomie, as reported by New York Tribune, September 1, 1877. 8. New York Journal of Commerce, proslavery newspaper in the North, quoted in Villard 1929, 501. 9. See Bertram Wyatt-Brown, “Volcano Beneath a Mountain of Snow” in His Soul Goes Marching On: Responses to John Brown and the Harper’s Ferry Raid, edited by Paul Finkleman (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1995) for a full discussion of all the different judgments on Brown’s sanity. 10. Governor Henry Wise, speech in Virginia, October 21, 1859. 11. Wendell Phillips, speech on December 15, 1859, New York City. 12. Wendell Phillips, Eulogy for John Brown, December 8, 1859. 13. Editorial in Illinois Weekly Mirror, August 6, 1862. 14. For more details of this meeting, see James C. Malin, John Brown and the Legend of Fifty-Six (Philadelphia: Lancaster Press, 1942), 17. 15. Clarence Darrow, speech in 1913 to the San Francisco Radical Club.

8

Transatlantic Spartacus Janine C. Hartman

Assuredly, if insurrection is ever a sacred duty, it must be when it is directed against Slavery Victor Hugo, “John Brown” letter, December 2, 1859 Privileged?—for those in slavery the time has come to harvest rebellion. Joseph Déjacque, L’Humanisphère 1857

he year 1859 illustrated the fragility of republic in America and reminded émigré Frenchmen of their loss in 1851. Liberal and radical factions in both societies sought social progress and fought conservative forces over the nature of the political fabric and labor structure. The Harper’s Ferry raid and John Brown’s trial, execution, and mythification in the European radical political imagination rehearsed their own recent failures and reinforced a faith in redemptive political gestures, even if immediately futile. Since their mutual eighteenth-century Atlantic revolutions, Frenchmen and Americans had been attempting to reconcile the rhetoric of social equality with the economic realities of class in the old world and the survival of chattel slavery in the new. Each society sustained serious controversy leading to stasis and enforced silence; in France a series of revolutions amid industrialization spawned censorship and Napoleon III’s police state; the United States produced compromises, congressional “gag” rules, the Fugitive Slave Act of 1857, and the guerilla war known as “Bleeding Kansas” where John Brown first came to public notice. Industrial revolutions required large urban workforces to serve the machines, and demanded raw materials that made chattel slavery on

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American cotton plantations lucrative. In France and America, the rhetoric and tradition of democratic revolution called for participation in the nation-state, while emerging capitalism denied that same capacity in workers, both free and slave. The working class was necessary, feared, labeled, and contained. In France, workers, the frequent participants in nineteenth-century revolutionary urban action and protest, were subject to police surveillance, deprived of suffrage, and vital to a modernizing economy. In the United States, urban workers were encouraged to mistrust labor forces of immigrants, blacks, and women. Slaves were immured in a survivalist culture maintaining an appearance of compliance before increasingly stringent slave codes and anxious Southern white populations. The urban working classes, in the United States and France, were also regarded with shrill suspicion by the politicians and editorialists of the possessing classes. Governing elites in France and Virginia feared open challenge from disenfranchised labor forces without a sense of the future and progress that nineteenth-century politicians confidently proclaimed. The coming industrialization of France and the proposed expansion of plantation slavery to the territories—and perhaps Mexico and the Caribbean—presaged a modern world built upon unfree labor. Burgeoning factories filled French cities with a workforce with no civic rights, a sense of grievance, and a heritage of failed reform that found expression in utopian socialism and anarchism. Since 1793 and the first French Republic, urban workers had been disappointed by governments and had uprisen repeatedly, most recently in 1848, twice. Monarchists, socialists, and republicans all worried over redefining society. Pamela Pilbeam lists five factors that determined the makeup of “the social question”: these were “economic inequality, psychological conflicts, problems in the running of the state, spiritual and moral bankruptcy, and the impact of economic change” (Pilbeam 2000, 12). The malaise in the American polity over the future of the republic and the slave question mirrors that analysis. In both societies, the state persisted in forcing silence and compliance upon the working population, which guaranteed lurking discomfort over potential “servile insurrection.” No better exemplar of the disaffected worker and nineteenth-century utopian radical may exist than Joseph Déjacque (1821–1864), poet, anarchist, and inventor of the word “libertarian.”1 Now recognized as one of the first French anarchists and one of those few from the working class, Déjacque rose to notice during the July Monarchy as an unwelcome Parisian worker-poet. A paperhanger and painter by trade, he had received some elementary education at L’Ecole Salives in return for his mother’s services as a laundress. Déjacque did not take hierarchy readily, and appears to have had difficulty while working in shops and before the mast.

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Nautical and workshop coercion were among his recurring topics. The experience of material want and arbitrary economic and political power colored his literary direction. Insurrection, disappointment, prison, and exile would soon define it. While unemployed, Déjacque contributed to the worker’s journal L’Atelier and was one of those who petitioned to prevent destruction of its presses. He was unusual among anarchists for unreserved commitment to full political and social equality for women, attending Pauline Roland’s Club de l’émancipation des femmes and assisting in the editing of their journal La Voix des femmes. Déjacque opposed all social organization that subjugated people, regardless of gender, race, vocation, or class origins, to political or economic institutions that lacked direct democratic accountability. After workers overthrew the July Monarchy in February 1848, Déjacque’s March 1848 publication Aux ci-devant dynastiques, aux tartuffes du people et de liberté, accused the new middle-class officials of the Second Republic of hypocrisy as they took over where Louis-Philippe’s bureaucrats had left off. Sheryl Kroen has demonstrated that invocations of seventeenth-century playwright Moliere’s “Tartuffe” were standard political ploys by the people to challenge the assumed moral authority of church and state during the Restoration. The name “Tartuffe” was synonymous with untrustworthy officialdom, or claims of political legitimacy to Frenchmen of Déjacque’s generation.2 Officialdom took note of the pamphlet and jailed Déjacque on general principles after the June 1848 insurrection. While detained in La Force and the prison ships at Brest, he wrote the first poems for Les Lazaréennes, Fables et poésies sociales (August 1851) with themes typical of the school that became known as the “worker-poets.” A sympathetic Philadelphia journal reports: A SOCIALIST POET.—A man by the name of Déjacque, arrested for participation in the insurrection of June and condemned and transported, but pardoned after an eleven month’s term, has just been tried for the publication of a collection of poems entitled the Lazareénnes, which the Attorney General considers nothing better than a call upon the poor to rise in rebellion against the rich. Mr. Déjacque is a worker in glue by trade, but a man of letters by taste. The preamble of the work was read by the prosecutor, as sustaining the accusation of “exciting the citizens to hatred and contempt of each other.” It runs thus, literally rendered— Lazarus is the poor man, anonymous existence, The needy wretch that sits at the threshold of Opulence: The hungered and athirst that asks a seat at the feast, Where the rich man sits, egotistical and stately;

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Lazarus is a spectre, waving his winding sheet, The great disinherited, Who rises up from the depths of his shivering misery And shouts Equality! A song, supposed to be chanted by the Past, the Present and the Future, was next read by the Government’s attorney. The Present speaks in the following terms:— Working man, under the whip, Under the bit and the spur, All day unceasingly bent, Produce and die for your master. I mean to live on your misery, And under my grinding knee To make you grub in the dirt !”

The item notes that a thousand copies of this “metrical socialism” were printed, and mostly seized by the police. Déjacque was sentenced to two years’ imprisonment and a 2000 franc ($400) fine. His printer received six months (“Familiar Talk With our Readers” 1851, 8, 48). The worker-poets, extensively studied in Frank Paul Bowman’s Le Christ des barricades, 1789–1848, defined the liberal and “red” republican, or socialist, view of political struggle, human progress, and the tyranny of institutions. The anarchist view, drawing upon Roman Catholic education, framed suffering as a sacrament outside that church and liturgy. Worker-poets explained the rage of the new urban masses and dignified their losses before armed authority as the martyrdom of the streets. Shared servitude and a sense of mistrust as well as overt surveillance from the state made empathy with slaves inevitable for the street poets.3 In the popular literary canon of the nineteenth century, their views are vividly represented in the poetry and novels of Victor Hugo (1802–1885), recognized by political liberals and critics alike as the premier French writer of his age, and later regarded as the conscience of the bourgeoisie. Hugo was the son of a Napoleon officer and a Jacobin mother. As a young writer he accepted Royalist patronage, and progressed to liberal republicanism with his economic and social successes. He was a member of the Second Republic’s National Assembly in 1849, and a force behind the progressive newspaper L’Evenement, which ironically endorsed Prince Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte’s socialist candidacy in the presidential election. After Bonaparte overthrew the Second Republic in 1851, Hugo and Déjacque were self-exiled to refugee communities of francophone republicans in Belgium and the Channel Islands. Déjacque uneasily gravitated to

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the working-class refugee community in London and sought employment, while also writing poetry and polemics. He and Hugo were attracted to the Channel Islands where the cost of living was more modest. Numerous republican refugees arrived, and functioned as loose communities of remembrance and opinion while Napoleon’s Second Empire solidified its control over France. Anniversaries of republican action and funerals became occasions for public declaration and dispute over the recent revolutionary past, exile, and utopian legacy. Gustave Lefrançais reports that Déjacque confronted Hugo, the designated eulogist, across the open grave of an exiled woman activist “martyred” by prison fever, or tuberculosis. Déjacque questioned the act of a revolutionary committee nominating Hugo to speak for all, even in a obituary context, as creeping hierarchy that proved the excessive influence of the bourgeoisie in liberal republican circles. It was not Hugo’s address or politics that spawned the attack, but the calcification of political activists into an exile club incapable of further direct political reform activity in France. Hugo established himself and retinue at Hauteville House, Guernsey (where the library contains a presentation copy of Déjacque’s Béranger au pillori), and launched a universalist, anti-Napoleon, one-man publishing industry. From 1855 to 1870, his poetry promoted a mystic religion of human brotherhood and an “Etats-Unis de l’Europe” and campaigned against Napoleon’s dictatorship and the forces of church and state that stifled political expression for the middle classes and economic selfsufficiency for the poor. Hugo’s poetry, journalism, public letters, and romantic novels promoted social empathy, anticlerical spirituality, human equality, social justice, and the end of capital punishment before Brown’s execution, or the success of Les Misérables, his famous opus on the French Revolution of 1789. Hugo’s was the accomplished professional voice of nineteenth-century republicanism, Déjacque’s that of the refugee republican worker, radicalized by police power and alienated from all institutionalized political organization.4 Déjacque would report John Brown’s raid, trial and death in Le Libertaire, the émigré journal he founded in New York; Hugo would immortalize Brown and establish his name in the list of radical martyrs in the mainstream European press. Ending acrimonious sojourns in London and the Channel Islands, Déjacque took passage to the United States in 1854, where he played a vocal role in francophone radical communities in the United States until 1861. Disputes with liberal republican émigrés over ideology, past actions and opinions, the distribution of the meager émigré relief funds from home, and future polities had further radicalized Déjacque.5 With Claude Pelletier and a number of others, Déjacque was among the first French

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signatories to the new International Association, organized in London in 1855. He corresponded with fellow émigré writers in Brussels and moved several times between New Orleans and New York, seeking work as a painter and publishing support for his poetry and utopian novel L’Humanisphère. The glamor for the Creole elite of hosting a worker-poet from metropolitan France soon faded in New Orleans when Déjacque openly opposed all slavery in a public toast at a republican gathering. The toast was made in French, but in any other Southern city he probably would have been immediately lynched. Déjacque also complained later that he was unable to garner enough subscriptions to bring out his abolitionist pamphlet Le Terreur aux Etats-Unis. Though he is not proven to have personally taken up arms in France, Déjacque openly advocated immediate general insurrection as the remedy to the American slavery problem in the South. When he returned to New York, he was able to find sufficient work and donations to take up residence at 17 White Street and to bring out his journal Le Libertaire (1858–1861). In the very first number he editorialized against Louisiana’s corrupt politics and a brutal form of slavery. Through the four-year run of this irregularly issued newspaper, Déjacque commented upon European politics and American events while offering up utopian schemes for the radical egalitarian reorganization of all human societies. His understanding of the “American question” was tied to full civil equality and the right to work, for a fair wage, for all people in America, regardless of color, gender, North or South. He reprinted news from the European radical émigré press, and participated in the avid local discussion of events at home. Déjacque was in New York during the demonstrations over Fabrice Orsini’s execution after the unsuccessful attempt to assassinate LouisNapoleon Bonaparte, now the Emperor Napoleon III. Orsini and a group of comrades, in an attempt to draw attention to the Italian struggle for independence against Bourbon Austria, threw a bomb at Napoleon while the latter was entering the Paris Opéra. Orsini accepted his condemnation and asked Napoleon to intervene politically in Italy, an adventure that finished badly for France and Italy. Orsini’s violent gesture and its motivation fired the romantic imagination. His life and death placed him in the pantheon of political martyrdom, especially for liberal republicans. Orsini’s guillotining was the occasion for a “Grand Torchlight Procession of Frenchmen, Germans, Italians, Hungarians and Other Foreigners” from Union Square to New York City Hall, April 22, 1858. The New York Times estimated attendance at this gathering of “Red Republicans” to be at least 20,000, and noted several French contingents.

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The Steuben House, the Committee’s headquarters, was illuminated by window transparencies of “Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité” and the “Goddess of Reason—embracing a white man and a Negro under the auspices of the Universal Republic, and the names of all the ‘Martyrs of Liberty.’ ” An Egyptian catafalque, draped in black and surrounded by an Italian honor guard, was drawn through the streets. Numerous émigrés made speeches about noble sacrifice and quoted admiringly Orsini’s final words, “Vive la République Universelle” (“The Orsini and Pierri Demonstration” 1858). Déjacque, who frequently made rhetorical demands for immediate redemptive violence in his class analysis of contemporary labor problems, expressed reservations over Orsini’s consecration. He rightly denounced a lesser commemoration for Orsini’s companions, who also suffered capital punishment for their action and beliefs, and stated with great severity that Italian nationalism and toleration for Roman Catholicism compromised Orsini’s great gesture. Déjacque was disturbed by the emergence of a possible class system of martyrs and a ritual calendar of political memory and dialogue, with distinct political hierarchy among political revolutionaries. Save for internal discussion and anniversaries, socialism was entering what Professor Pilbeam has called “the silent years, 1851–1870.” This stagnation, and relegation to passive witness, coincided with great material progress in the world. Déjacque applauded the installation of the first Atlantic telegraph cable in his editorials and salted his utopian essays with paeans to the ease that machines and technology, properly deployed, could bring to all people. Victor Hugo, still domiciled at Guernsey, used the telegraph to release humanitarian manifestoes and publish poems praising the benefits of steamboats. Steel engravings and daguerreotypes shortly distributed the images of political leaders as well as the revolutionaries who rose against them. Garibaldi, a perennial Italian revolutionary and political prisoner, became a celebrity and cultural icon through the reproduction and distribution of news, his interviews and image in the mass press feeding a middle-class audience. This contradictory use of images, opinion, and events in industrial society had full sway with the Crimean War (another unfortunate episode for Napoleon) and in the United States with the “Bleeding Kansas” Free Soil guerilla conflicts that culminated in the raid on Harper’s Ferry. The political impact and cultural distribution of the trial, execution, and aftermath of Brown’s gesture were present in the émigré radical community as in mainstream society. Déjacque, who frequently referred to deeds as “fulminate of mercury,” recognized the Harper’s Ferry raid as a political detonation of the slavery question, as well as a challenge to the dominion of Southern politicians and all bosses, personified in Virginia.

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Emigré communities sustained themselves during the deserts of political reaction and exile from a larger public by discussing the aftermaths of failed “acts” or “attentats” and by evaluating their own sense of commitment, residual political acuity, and remaining influence. In the year preceding Brown’s action, Déjacque’s editorial commentary had insisted upon constancy of purpose from socialist writers and politicians in Europe. His discussion of Orsini’s legacy and Italian nationalists Mazzini and Garibaldi’s ongoing efforts was concerned with violent political change and intent upon ending a social order that only reinforced the present allocation of property and power. Déjacque called for a continued commitment to general insurrection in Europe and derided antislavery commissioner and exiled liberal republican Victor Schoelcher for his moderation. Seymour Drescher, in his key article “John Brown’s Body in Europe,” points out that European interest in abolitionism was largely an Anglophone concern, fueled by the commercial and literary ties of societies linked by Atlantic trade and framed by the notion of “civilization.” In all of Déjacque’s writing, “the civilized” is a term of scorn for a dictatorship by the propertied, who deny economic opportunity, political autonomy, and a humane respect to those who labor, whether as chattel, or for uncertain wages. Déjacque’s report on the Harper’s Ferry raid was headlined “La Guerre Servile.” He, as would Victor Hugo, immediately called Brown “Spartacus,” a gladiator attempting to free the slaves and touch off a conflagration: “John Brown is the Spartacus who called upon modern helots to strike off their irons and for the blacks to take up arms.”6 He noted that the slaves did not respond, the banner of revolt was covered in the blood of those raising it, and insisted that black and white labor must both rise in rebellion, making barricades and opposing soldiers who are the civil assassins representing bourgeois order of Washington or Paris. In no uncertain terms he claimed total community; wherever the flag of bourgeois republics appeared, there was Déjacque. He announced solidarity with all Brown’s acts, “What strikes him, strikes me—VENDETTA!! Harper’s Ferry may melt like snow in the sun, but snow conducts electricity, Liberty!” Socialist Armand Barbès’s abortive 1839 coup attempt against LouisPhilippe’s unrepresentative Paris government linked directly to Brown.7 Déjacque drew the comparison for the forces of authority: The privileged treated Barbès like a madman and an assassin, as they insensately treat Brown as a bandit. Like Barbès in ’39, Brown is a heroic fanatic, a fiery abolitionist who acts without thought to success or failure. The one was bourgeois, the other [American] white, both [attempting] to enfranchise the enslaved. Both more men of feeling than ideas, enflamed by

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passion, each judged the moment opportune, the place favorable for action, and acted. Certainly, it is not for me to blame them.

He noted the extravagant press response to the free soilers, “those who struggle for liberty, their valiance in the face of the enemy should merit respect. Are there any imperial or royal soldiers who can say ‘Honor to the brave but unfortunate’? The free soilers are soldiers of freedom who will be judicially murdered; another gibbet, eighteen hundred years later; and they (scribes aspersing ink) are flinging bloody foul words in the face of another bleeding Christ!” Déjacque did not believe that a black and white insurrection freeing the slaves was possible in the United States, and pointed out that the initiative must come from the slaves themselves. The white man is suspect to the black due to helotism and the blows of their masters. He added, “in free states, men of color are treated like dogs, they cannot walk freely, use public conveyances, nor go to the theater, but are treated as lepers.” Freedom in this labor system would not be of particular benefit as the worker has “The freedom to die of hunger . . . the freedom of the proletarian. Scant reason to risk life to be even more miserable when liberty was his greatest desire.” Brown assailed the crime of slavery: “One man owning another is a killer, the most horrible of criminals.” Déjacque said that from slaves to masters, it must be a “war of extermination, iron and fire in the plantations, no quarter!” The planter would never give up the means of production—his slaves; planters were guilty of crimes against humanity. John Brown wished to proclaim a “constitution of human justice, Progress and Natural Law! . . . In 1860, the world will rise, in a dawn of great revolutionary movements.” In America he foresaw servile and proletarian war, with Northern proletarians and Southern slaves facing “the master, our enemy,” and then “the old and new continent will raise their voices as brothers in a cry of social insurrection, and human conscience for LIBERTY!” He listed all the Harper’s Ferry raiders as martyrs to conscience and unjust laws, and thundered for a time of redemption and vengeance. These sorts of remarks may have made this number of Le Libertaire the one that reportedly was confiscated by authorities in New Orleans, though there was no such response in New York. Eighty copies of at least one were suppressed, but Déjacque’s coverage of Brown and the slavery debate did not soften. Brown entered a ritual cycle all too familiar to European radicals and the social elites they challenged. The Harper’s Ferry raiders’ imprisonment, trial, and execution, reported with outrage, for different reasons, in the American North and South, mirrored the European disputes about the

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legitimacy of state authority, who was a citizen, and most importantly, the continued social acceptance of the legal basis for social hierarchy, property, and labor. Déjacque based his fiery commentary upon the francophone coverage available in the Courrier de Louisiane (New Orleans) and Revue de l’Ouest (St. Louis, Missouri), though he mistrusted Southern newspapers (Lehning 1951, 16–19). The mainstream European press, preoccupied with Napoleon III and the Italian question, did not emphasize the Brown controversy and trial. Seymour Drescher reports that Hugo’s was the most celebrated European response and that the British editors of The Annual Register for World Events, 1859 edition, did not list the raid or trial. Drescher’s survey of the contemporary English press finds descriptions of the raid referring to Roman slave revolts and servile insurrection. Brown later figured as a Protestant or Spartan revolutionary, the Puritan, Ironsides, Cromwell, for these journals: “Few European newspapers discussed the evidence that might have clashed with the image of a flight to freedom. Brown’s invocation of divine law received the broadest coverage, making him both victim and judge of an all-too-inhumane institution” (Drescher 1993, 508–509). Despite his raging anticlericalism, Déjacque was not concerned with Brown’s Protestantism and granted his organic and text-based religiosity exemption from the continental revolutionary’s frequent distrust of social views connected with Christianity. The state of Virginia’s treatment of Brown in jail and dock reinforced Christ-like comparisons and matched radical Europeans’ expectations. Déjacque inveighed against heavyhanded warders and suggested that the jurors’ slave cooks salt their masters’ dinners with arsenic. Admittedly hysterical state legislatures and editors—not always Southern—fed Déjacque’s commentary. He reported new punitive slave laws, mob actions destroying the abolitionist press Free South in Newport, Kentucky and abuse of an interracial couple in Collinsville, Illinois. As the cycle of revolutionary attempt-trial-execration-execution advanced, Déjacque called for a gory mass insurrection, while decrying capital punishment. Victor Hugo, with different hopes, wrote President Buchanan a famous appeal widely circulated throughout Europe. Hugo invoked Washington and cited the “monstrous inconsistencies” of Southern slavery with American rhetoric. Like Déjacque, he states clearly, “Assuredly, if insurrection is ever a sacred duty, it must be when it is directed against slavery.” Hugo exclaims at the conduct of the trial and security measures, including “two cannon loaded with canister stationed in the Court, orders given to the jailer to shoot the prisoners if they sought to escape, forty minutes of deliberation and three men sentenced to die. I declare on my honor that all this took place, not in [Ottoman] Turkey, but

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in America.” He pleaded with the United States to stay its hand and not stain the Republic. The federal power, not intervening in Virginia’s death sentence “becomes a participator in its guilt.” He pleaded for America’s conscience more than Brown’s life, declaiming, “You preserve your infamy, but you sacrifice your glory.” As desperate as the frustrated worker-poet in New York, Hugo ended, “there is something more terrible than Cain slaying Abel; it is Washington slaying Spartacus!” (Hugo 1859). Hugo’s letter was received with reverence in the North and howls in the South. Sales of his books, previously popular due to their romanticism, slumped. When Southerners read Hugo again, it was his novel of the oppressed Les Misérables (1862), while gathered around Confederate Army campfires, during what became the largest industrial war of the nineteenth century.8 Both Déjacque and Hugo had predicted a civil conflagration. After Brown’s execution, Déjacque grew more dispirited. He wrote Pierre Vésinier, exiled in Switzerland, that “Past events make this country far from being a refuge of freedom. As on the old continent, there are revolutionary elements here, but in fragments and latency. Militant libertarians are a small minority. John Brown, one of those courageous exceptions as you know, was hanged, to the applause of the slaveholders, and more sadly, disowned by the majority of the party that passed for abolitionist.” Déjacque denounced American polity as cretinous,“following Old Europe, intoxicated by commercial pursuits.” While locating for Vésinier American materials on Brown, he urged “You’re in Europe, stay there, it is for the best, it is not possible that it could be as horrid as living in America.” He tells Vésinier “the New World isn’t a new society and progressive men are martyred.” In his newspaper, Déjacque noted with approval Brown’s jailhouse refusal of religious counsel, and invoked the executions of the Knight Templar Jacques Demolay, French revolutionary poet André Chénier, and Christ, to place Brown’s death in the pantheon of political martyrdom. Privately he wrote Vésinier emphasizing Brown’s primitive Christianity, his resolution before the scaffold, and poignant farewell to two slave children also often noted in contemporary popular culture references. The presidential election of 1860 chose Abraham Lincoln, largely without the participation of the Southern states, which often didn’t place his name on the ballot. Though Lincoln’s presidency and assassination are important in European middle-class journals, Déjacque has left no record of his response to the election or Lincoln’s policies. As an exiled radical utopian, it is unlikely that he would have appreciated Lincoln’s attempts at compromise and measured policies where revolution was so clearly warranted. New York in 1860 was the scene of burgeoning military muster,

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logistical business response, and nationalist popular culture responses. For an unemployed workman exiled from country, language, and political action by civil disorder, the American Civil War’s beginnings may have seemed all too familiar. Déjacque returned to France after 1861, taking advantage of an amnesty and probably died, mad, in 1864. Pierre Vésinier produced the major immediate European work on John Brown, Le martyr de la liberté des négres, ou John Brown, le Christ de noirs (1864), published in Belgium. Vésinier’s book ran to hundreds of pages of insurrectional histories and called for a mass black uprising in the United States, ironically as black Union soldiers were participating in the bloodiest year of the American Civil War (Lehning 1951). Hugo remained at Hauteville House until 1870, responding to death sentences and political repression with clemency appeals and references to John Brown’s death. Brown’s name, usually as a second Christ, appears in 27 of his poems or prose works, Henry Dupont wrote in 1952 (Drescher 1993, 262; Dupont 1952, 26). Brown was the essence of the American idea for Hugo, the universal humanitarian ideal invoked when he sought clemency for Irish Fenian rebels or the dethroned and condemned Emperor Maximilian in Mexico. In 1867, Hugo saluted President Juarez, who had expelled the Napoleonic armies backing the Austrian archduke, as a second John Brown, freeing a republic instead of slaves. After Appomatox, General Grant had sent General Sheridan, men, and arms to the Juaristas, ending Napoleon III’s Mexican incursion, and volunteered an opinion of Bonaparte’s legitimacy in his memoirs, “He succeeded in stealing the government of his country, and made a change in its form against the wishes and instincts of his people. He tried to play the role of the first Napoleon, without the ability to sustain that role” (Grant 1999, 636).9 Hugo was urging Juarez to allow the Emperor Maximilian, a bit player amid the wreckage of yet another Napoleonic military collapse, to live “by the grace of the Republic.” It would have been an elegant gesture, but the letter, telegraphed by the Austrian government, arrived too late (Hugo 1895, 376–381).10 What Sudhir Hazareesingh calls the nineteenth-century socialist cycle of “redemption and death” continued. Maximilian was shot. When Napoleon III abdicated while losing the Franco-Prussian War in 1870, Hugo returned to Paris. Parisian workers formed the Commune government and attempted to continue the war. Vésinier was a Communard official, surviving the fall of Paris to the Versailles interim French government, mass reprisals, and subsequent deportation to French Guyana. In 1874 a committee of republicans still at liberty, including Hugo, sent a gold medal to Brown’s widow.

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Action challenged institutions. European radicals and Brown had attempted repeatedly to disrupt order. They succeeded in dispelling quiet resignation, forcing response from authority and fomenting public discussion. Subsequent events toppled the actual institutions. The protracted American electoral crisis elected Abraham Lincoln in 1860. A final Napoleonic military loss ended the Second Empire in 1870. These were malfunctions of political process and basic military competency that revived the political opportunity for discussion, innovation, and reform. Brown’s attentat reminded American and European abolitionists that the issue was dignity, immediate and human, not which government commission report was suitable, or when to implement a gradualist attrition of chattel labor. Worker-poets and middle-class men of letters were reminded of Christ and of Europe’s political need to redeem the labor relations of industrial society. Déjacque uses “civilization” as a shorthand term for a political order privileging property’s ownership over labor’s citizenship. The necessity to civilize (in the conventional sense) the Industrial Revolution would drive further evolution of both republics. Martyr dramas of failed liberation sustained the faith of liberal and radical republicans that the will to oppose injustice still existed. The actions of John Brown, and of the workers of the Commune insurrection, triggered civil conflicts in the United States and France over those social questions most significant to Déjacque and Hugo, the individual’s free labor, voice, and role in a more humane social order. Notes 1. See “Déjacque, Joseph” in Michel Cordillot’s La Sociale en Amérique 2002, 141–143. Déjacque’s novel, poems, and pamphlets were collected in a definitive edition: Joseph Déjacque, A bas les chefs, edited by Valentin Pelosse (Paris: Editions Champ Libre, 1971). Pelosse established Déjacque as the coiner of “libertarian” (Pelosse 1972). Twentieth century anarchists have translated Déjacque into Spanish and German; his newspaper Le Libertaire, Journal du mouvement Sociale (1858–1861) is in the process of being completely posted by Pelosse at http://joseph.dejacque.free.fr/libertaire. All English translations herein are mine unless otherwise noted. 2. See Sheryl Kroen, Politics and Theater: The Crisis of Legitimacy in Restoration France, 1815–1830 (2000). Good summaries of successive punitive political repressions by French governments are found in Barton L. Ingraham, Political Crime in Europe: A Comparative Study of France, Germany and England (1979) and Pamela M. Pilbeam, Republicanism in Nineteenth Century France, 1814–1871 (1995). 3. For Déjacque’s sentence, see the tribunal lists in the Gazette de Tribunaux, October 23, 1851. Some of these poems are translated in Shapiro 2004, 33–45.

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For worker-poets, see Frank Paul Bowman, Le Christ des barricades, 1789–1848 (1987). For the specific liberal republican reaction against the workers of June 1848, see John M. Merriman, The Agony of the Republic: The Repression of the Left in Revolutionary France, 1848–1851 (1978). For the poet’s milieu and its influence upon professional middle class writers, see Dolf Oehler, Le spleen contre l’oubli Juin 1848: Baudelaire, Flaubert, Heine, Herzen (1996). See Henri Peña-Ruiz and Jean-Paul Scot, Une poéte en politique: les combats de Victor Hugo (2000) for the most recent study of Hugo’s political writing; also Graham Robb, Victor Hugo (1997). A good analysis of the ideology evolved among the exiles is Edward Berenson’s Populist Religion and Left-Wing Politics in France, 1830–1852 (1984). For an understanding of émigré self-suffocation, see Adam Zamoyski, Romantics, Patriots and Revolutionaries, 1776–1871 (1999). Le Libertaire 18 (1859). Déjacque mentions Brown in nos.18, 19, 20, 21, and reports the death sentence in no. 22, and describes the execution in no. 23 as a “White Orgy.” A thorough understanding of French popular cultural coding of ritual death as blood sacrifice and neo-Christian martyrdom, both for metropolitan France and in terms of the French horror of the Haitian revolution, is in Richard D. E. Burton’s excellent study Blood in the City: Violence and Revelation in Paris, 1789–1945 (2001). An appeal to Louis-Philippe resulted in Barbès’s pardon for the 1839 attempted uprising. The latter praised Hugo’s anti-capital punishment campaign, which began with French justice and became an international campaign. See Hugo 1895, 274–278. For Hugo’s history with American slavery and politics as themes, and responses from the American press, the definitive study is still Monique Labreton-Savigny’s Victor Hugo et les Américains, 1825–1885 (1971). Napoleon III had fostered a European incursion into the republic of Mexico and the invention of an empire, with the Austrian Archduke as figurehead, while the Civil War prevented Secretary Seward from enforcing the “no European interference in the Western hemisphere” of the Monroe Doctrine. Grant saw it as a violation of the Mexican Republic as much as a challenge to North American power. After the death sentence was passed, all prisoners became for Hugo “the hanged man.” Capital punishment trumps specific politics in defining the hopeful beneficiaries of Hugo’s pleas for clemency. The abolition of the death penalty, slavery, and universal suffrage are all components for Hugo’s hope for a “United States of Europe.” All of Hugo’s clemency and political letters for this period are collected in Actes et paroles (1895).

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W.E.B. Du Bois’s John Brown: Placing Racial Justice at the Center of a Socialist Politics Julie Husband

hen a rival John Brown biographer asked for advice on sources, the young African American scholar William E.B. Du Bois wrote that his would not be a standard biography. Instead of an exhaustive investigation of new material, he would create “an interpretation” (Du Bois 1973, 9). Du Bois’s interpretation, written during the crucial five-year period coinciding with his Niagara Movement experiment, interrogates the nature of slavery—and all forms of labor—under laissez-faire capitalism. Du Bois made Brown a prescient critic of the monopoly distortions of the free market that were to shape post–Civil War race and class relations. Through writing his biography of John Brown, Du Bois clarified his own mission and strategy as an emerging race leader. During this period of his political consolidation, between 1904 and 1909, Du Bois could identify with Brown as the shepherd who tried to organize wool farmers against manufacturers, the activist whose slim resources prohibited an effective mass movement, and the husband and father whose family suffered neglect and privation for his commitment to African American freedom and civil rights. In fact, Du Bois’s identification with Brown permitted a reading of Brown’s political and professional life no other biographer has dared. For Du Bois, John Brown is significant because he recognized that “the price of repression is greater than the cost of liberty” and because he extended this credo beyond slaves to all workers at the mercy of an entrenched, oligarchic capitalist class. Like many Brown biographers, Du Bois makes Brown a prophet of the Civil War; but unlike others, Du Bois also makes Brown a prophet of the new forms of economic

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exploitation African Americans faced following the Civil War—sharecropping and discrimination within the labor movement. The legend of John Brown enabled Du Bois to place the struggle for African American civil rights at the center of a socialist politics. Moreover, working on his biography of John Brown allowed Du Bois to envision his own tumultuous transformation from reflective, transcendental scholar to political activist. The Biography The advertisement for the American Crisis Biographies series, under whose imprint John Brown appeared, announces the editor’s intention that this be an “impartial” history. An interesting feature of the undertaking is that the series is to be impartial, Southern writers having been assigned to Southern subjects and Northern writers to Northern subjects, but all will belong to the younger generation of writers, thus assuring freedom from any suspicion of wartime prejudice. (Du Bois 1909)

The contradictory nature of this explanation aside (why, after all, is it necessary to link writers and their subjects by section if wartime prejudice is not a factor?), it is clear that the editor, historian Ellis Paxson Oberholtzer, intended the writers to treat their subjects as their individual Civil War antecedents. Thomas H. Clay, for example, penned the biography of his father, “the Great Compromiser,” southerner Henry Clay. Consequently, it is noteworthy that Du Bois was initially approached in 1903 to write a biography of Frederick Douglass. Douglass was an eloquent speaker, a gifted writer, and the leading African American activist of the nineteenth century. Du Bois’s nemesis during this period, Booker T. Washington, was offered Blanche K. Bruce as a biographical subject. An ex-slave and educator, Bruce mediated between the interests of freedmen and whites as Superintendent of Education for Bolivar County, Mississippi. He went on to become a wealthy landowner and U.S. senator who exercised considerable power over Mississippi’s Republican political appointments. Washington, possibly sensitive to accusations that he operated a political machine out of Tuskegee Institute, turned down the Bruce biography, requesting to write about Douglass. Eager to have a contribution from Washington, Oberholtzer wrote back to Du Bois and claimed that he had offered the Douglass biography to Washington first. Du Bois never found out this was untrue, and he quickly offered an alternative—Nat Turner. “Around him would center the slave trade, foreign and internal, Negro insurrections from Toussaint down to John Brown,

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the beginnings of abolitionism, the movement of free Negroes of the North and the whole plantation economy which was changing critically in the thirties, and the general subjective Negro point of view of the system of slavery” (quoted in Aptheker 1989, 89). Even as early as 1904, Du Bois was interested in writing a materialist history, looking at the relationship between economic changes in the antebellum period and the rise of abolition. The rehabilitation of such a controversial figure, however, was not what the editor had in mind and Oberholtzer counteroffered John Brown. Du Bois consented and the contract was signed early in 1904. While Du Bois’s biographer, David Levering Lewis, has mourned the biographies Du Bois never wrote—and they would have been fascinating—John Brown offered an opportunity to confront two essential questions for Du Bois during this period. Through Brown, Du Bois asked whether revolution could be morally defended and what labor’s relation to African Americans was (Lewis 1993, 356). Douglass’s leadership style, resting upon the politics of a representative man more than on a political organization, would not have permitted Du Bois the opportunity to interrogate his own role as an emerging organizer. In a Nat Turner biography Du Bois would have analyzed the changing economy of the plantation. But through the Brown biography, Du Bois analyzed a more contemporary economic issue, the conflicts arising from monopoly capitalism and racism. His reading of Brown reveals as much about Du Bois’s analysis of African American life at the “nadir”1 as it does his analysis of African American resistance on the eve of the Civil War. The study of John Brown is in many ways similar to Du Bois’s seminal revisionary history, Black Reconstruction in America: 1860–1880. In both works Du Bois builds upon existing scholarship to reinterpret the significance of familiar events. In Black Reconstruction (1935), Du Bois attacks the Dunning school that characterized Radical Reconstruction as a failure due to corruption. Du Bois persuasively shows its successes, striking because of the powerful resistance to African American civil and political rights, and the tragic injustice of “Southern Redemption.” Similarly, Du Bois counters images of John Brown as a mentally deranged religious fanatic with this materialist analysis of his project. Du Bois abbreviates the first forty years of Brown’s life and then divides the last crucial years into three important phases. Between 1841 and 1854 Brown was a sheep farmer, an occupation that provided him with the time to contemplate issues about which he felt strongly, especially slavery. During this period he traveled widely, organizing a wool collective and meeting African American leaders and abolitionists. In the Kansas phase, between 1854 and 1856, Brown and five of his sons moved to the controversial territory as free-state and pro-slavery forces collided. Brown

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became notorious in 1856 when he presided over the brutal murders of five pro-slavery leaders who had led attacks on the free-state press, hotel, and citizens of Lawrence, Kansas. Brown is, of course, most famous for his third phase. Between 1857 and 1859 Brown toured New England and Canada, collecting funds from wealthy abolitionists and recruiting young men (and Harriet Tubman) to attack the U.S. weapons arsenal at Harper’s Ferry, Virginia. Brown bought arms and led an attack on the arsenal in the hopes of arming slaves, running them off to the nearby Allegheny Mountains and eventually leading them up to Canada. Brown and 22 men attacked the town on October 17, 1859, but they failed to escape with the arms. Brown was hanged on December 2, 1859. The truly groundbreaking section of the biography is the section covering Brown’s shepherd phase between 1841 and 1854. John Brown and Simon Perkins, Jr. organized a wool farmers’ collective in the early 1840s to counter the exploitative power of the cloth manufacturers who had a monopoly on the market for wool. Most biographers of John Brown, and in turn critics of Du Bois’s biography, have focused on Brown’s two violent forays against slave interests, first in Kansas in 1855 and then at Harper’s Ferry in 1859. Other biographies have minimized the shepherd years. Even the most sympathetic biographers have tended to cast John Brown as a poor businessman; less sympathetic biographers have concluded he was dishonest.2 Oswald Garrison Villard, in his 1910 biography, blamed the collective’s failure on Brown’s poor business sense and obstinacy. The collective took in wool from isolated farmers, graded and priced it, and then reimbursed the farmers, minus commission, after the wool’s sale. A year after Du Bois’s vilification of the manufacturers, Villard sarcastically wrote: The wicked manufacturers continued, however, to make trouble for the wool-growers and the commission house of Perkins & Brown, whose eventual retirement from the wool business is still laid at their doors. They did not wish the wool-growers to organize and unite; but in all fairness to the manufacturers, the final failure should as well be shared by Perkins & Brown themselves. . . . [Brown] did not know how to trade, being far too rigid in his prices. He waited to make them until he had all his wool sorted; then, when the prices were finally fixed, the manufacturers had bought elsewhere. (60–61)

Villard punctuated this analysis with quotations from family friends and Brown’s children testifying to Brown’s tendency to borrow and speculate. In contrast, Du Bois portrays Brown at this time as a care-worn martyr to a Christly socialism. To Du Bois’s Brown “business was a philanthropy” (Du Bois 1909, 61). The collective was to benefit wool growers, who were

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ignorant of the relative quality of their product and of the prevailing price, by assuring the growers a fair rate. Du Bois blamed the collective’s failure not only on the manufacturer’s boycott, but also on Brown’s reluctance to force farmers into the collective. If Brown had been able to corner the market on raw material, the manufacturers could not have boycotted Perkins and Brown. It is doubtful whether Brown had the power to do this, but it is clear why Du Bois speculates about the collective’s “countermonopoly” potential. Writing during this, the age of the robber barons, Du Bois could see the dangers of monopolies of wool growers as well as mill owners and manufacturers. They could be forced in by killing off or starving out the ignorant or recalcitrant. This is the modern business method. Its result is arraying two industrial armies in a battle whose victims are paupers and prostitutes, and whose victory comes by compromising, whereby a half-dozen millionaires are born to the philanthropic world. (Du Bois 1909, 64)

Establishing a “counter-monopoly” of wool growers would be to enrich the few and to make paupers of the many. The collective’s failure causes Brown to lose his treasured farm, to uproot his family, and to suffer great humiliation as he lost the wealth and trust of many friends. Du Bois locates the birth of John Brown’s socialist impulses during his shepherd phase, in the agony of his children’s deaths and the humiliation of bankruptcy. This agony and humiliation is figured in Du Bois’s rhetoric as a veil descending upon John Brown, a significant term in Du Bois’s lexicon. In The Souls of Black Folk, Du Bois describes his own coming into racial consciousness as a coming into double consciousness. His visiting card refused by a white classmate, Du Bois suddenly becomes aware of his belonging and not belonging, his status as American and African American: “Then it dawned upon me with a certain suddenness that I was different from the others; or like, mayhap, in heart and life and longing, but shut out from their world by a vast veil” (44). The veil is not only a condition but an experiential event—the veil sweeps across Du Bois and “thereafter [I had] no desire to tear down that veil, to creep through; I held all beyond it in common contempt, and lived above it in a region of blue sky and great wandering shadows” (44). Du Bois experiences the collective rebuff of his classmates as a veil thrown down between them, and he turns toward a transcendent principle for compensation—the blue sky under which he can interrogate the forces shaping social and economic structures his classmates have no immediate reason to question. Brown experiences a similar conversion, according to Du Bois’s narrative, in the midst of his shepherd years. During this period, Brown had the

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opportunity “to think and read. . . . Already he had had a vision of vast service” (Du Bois 1909, 52). In John Brown’s transfiguration, an awareness of racial injustice coincides with an awareness of class injustice. Suffering from personal tragedy and persecuted by lawsuits, Brown, for the first time, clearly sees himself as a victim of the dominant cultural logic of laissez-faire capitalism. Yet the loss of a fortune and the shattering of a dream, the bankruptcy and imprisonment, and the death of five children, while around him whirled the struggle of the churches with slavery and Abolition mobs, all dropped a sombre brooding veil of stern inexorable fate over his spirit—a veil which never lifted. The dark mysterious tragedy of life gripped him with awful intensity—the iron entered his soul. He became sterner and more silent. He brooded and listened for the voice of the avenging God, and girded up his loins in readiness. (Du Bois 1909, 96)

Like Du Bois, Brown views his life as part of a righteous battle as a result of adversity. He rejects the nonresistant measures of the Garrisonians and turns toward the Old Testament “avenging God.” Both receive their calling within the veil, which, far from obscuring their vision, gives them a unique self-consciousness. Seeing themselves through the world’s eyes, eyes estranged from them, both seek purpose in a transcendent mission. For John Brown, a sense of separateness, of citizenship withheld, exposes the intertwined ideologies supporting racism and class privilege. In Du Bois’s schema, John Brown becomes a fellow communicant with the souls of black folk, spirited by the bread of adversity. After the loss of his farm and most of his property, John Brown agreed to share his farming expertise as well as the strength of his many sons with the experimental interracial farming community of North Elba, New York, in the Adirondacks. The community was founded by the wealthy abolitionist Gerrit Smith who sold 100,000 acres of land to free African Americans on easy terms. Brown proposed taking one of the farms and living among these farmers who were unfamiliar with cultivation in the cold mountain climate. While the plan was less successful than it might have been because Smith’s agent cheated some of the new farmers, for Du Bois it reveals Brown’s dedication not only to freeing slaves but to providing them with a viable source of income and independence. This marks a clear departure from many white abolitionists such as Harriet Beecher Stowe and even William Lloyd Garrison, who saw the end of slavery and the promise of equal protection under the law as sufficient remedies to slavery. Brown and Smith were convinced that freed slaves would need to own their own capital as well.

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During this period, Brown increasingly came to identify with African Americans, according to Du Bois. From this remote, difficult-to-reach locale in North Elba, Brown acted as a link in the underground railroad transporting fugitive slaves to Canada. Sharing in the day-to-day lives of African Americans, Brown came to feel increasingly frustrated with the tactics of moral suasion advocated by the Garrisonian abolitionists. In the preface of John Brown, Du Bois claims for Brown a unique position among white Americans. Du Bois promises to study the “inner development of the Negro American” through Brown, who becomes a kind of trickster figure, at times “touching the souls of black folk” and at times actually embodying black identity (Du Bois 1909, 7, 8). As William Cain aptly notes, Du Bois “interprets Brown as a symbol of black achievement and aspiration” (323). Du Bois’s Brown is animated as much by the “spell of Africa” as he is the Spirit of God (Du Bois 1909, 121). He transcends race to become emblematic of African American heroism: Of all inspiration which America owes to Africa, however, the greatest by far is the score of heroic men whom the sorrows of these dark children called to unselfish devotion and heroic self-realization: Benezet, Garrison and Harriet Stowe; Sumner, Douglass and Lincoln—these and others, but above all, John Brown. (15)

Transfigured by the sorrow of Africa’s “dark children,” Brown achieves his heroic, quintessentially American identity. As we shall see, at the time that Du Bois was writing, African Americans were frequently excluded from labor unions and used by powerful industrialists as a surplus labor force to break strikes. Du Bois used his biography of John Brown to make a space for African American activism that would neither be co-opted by Samuel Gomper’s AFL, Eugene Debs’s Socialist Party, nor Booker T. Washington’s Tuskegee machine. Personally, Du Bois was under mounting pressure at this time to avoid politically sensitive scholarship that criticized Booker T. Washington’s approach of industrial education and accommodation to segregation and political disenfranchisement. Wealthy patrons began turning away from Du Bois’s Atlanta University as he challenged existing systems of sharecropping and Jim Crow conventions in his scholarship. His position as scholar and activist was becoming increasingly untenable and Du Bois had to make a decision. Would he educate the “talented tenth” of African Americans or step into the more tumultuous realm of political agitation? In 1910 he chose the latter; he resigned from Atlanta University amidst increasing pressure from the Tuskegee machine, and he became the Director of Publicity and Research at the NAACP.

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The Writer As Du Bois finished the biography, he was turning from the Niagara Movement’s focus on the “talented tenth” to the mass of African American workers. The Niagara Movement was an exclusive African American organization that was, in many ways, an extension of Du Bois’s mission as an educator of elite African Americans at Atlanta University. The Niagara Movement recruited leadership from the “talented tenth” of African American professionals, many of whom were disaffected by Booker T. Washington’s program of industrial education. At its first meeting in 1905 the group outlined a political program demanding the equal enforcement of laws, the protection of the vote, equal economic opportunity, and equal educational opportunities at all levels. It also endorsed agitation rather than dependence on the goodwill of whites. Its second and most successful meeting took place in Harper’s Ferry in 1906 where Brown became an important figure for the Niagara Movement’s path of protest rather than accommodation. Most importantly, the Niagara Movement was a response against Booker T. Washington’s Tuskegee machine. Du Bois had already engaged Booker T. Washington in a disagreement over the Tuskegee industrial educational ideal. Even as early as 1901, Du Bois was criticizing Tuskegee’s exclusive emphasis on industrial education and he specifically lambasted Washington in his 1903 The Souls of Black Folk. Washington failed to recognize the limitation of industrial training in the face of disenfranchisement, inferior status under the law, and exclusionary labor practices. Du Bois wrote, “And so thoroughly did he learn the speech and thought of triumphant commercialism, and the ideals of material prosperity, that the picture of a lone black boy poring over a French grammar amid the weeds and dirt of a neglected home soon seemed to him the acme of absurdities” (Du Bois 1982, 81). Washington had read and adopted Andrew Carnegie’s Gospel of Wealth. Because he believed that wealth would transcend race difference, he failed to see the new pattern of permanent economic and political subordination his program endorsed. His students were trained solely as laborers, albeit skilled ones. Without liberally educated cultural critics and institutions, like his own Atlanta University, Du Bois despaired of changing an American psyche that viewed African Americans as “the Negro problem.” Because African Americans were excluded from labor unions and were the most frequently victimized during economic crises, their financial future was inevitably stunted. Nothing could have dramatized this more than the 1909 railroad firemen’s strike in Georgia. When the white union went on strike against the Georgia Railroad in May, a reserve labor force of African American men,

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paid 50 cents less per hour, was hired. Violence ensued and eventually the strike failed, the railroad fired the African American firemen, and it rehired the white workers. The strike had failed because the union was unwilling to admit African Americans. Du Bois referred to the strike in a 1909 article announcing the formation of the NAACP, saying, “a body of workingmen could not progress ‘half-slave and half-free’ ” (Du Bois 1982, 400). Ultimately, Du Bois found it ineffective to pursue the strategy of scholarly research combined with the education of the African American vanguard embodied by the Niagara Movement. He found that even the pursuit of scholarly research was either enabled or prevented by powerful, monied interests. His projects, in particular, failed to get funding because they challenged the southern landholders who benefited from the reigning historical theories of Reconstruction. According to these theories, the overthrow of African American enfranchisement in the 1870s “redeemed” the South. Moreover, sharecropping, from this point of view, combined benevolent paternalism with free labor. Du Bois had hoped to rewrite the post–Civil War history of African Americans in the South with his 1904 field study of sharecropping in Lowndes County, Alabama. The exhaustively researched field study had been sponsored by the U.S. Department of Labor and involved interviewing 25,000 black farmers as well as reviewing the records from the local courts to uncover a pattern of disenfranchisement and exploitation (Lewis 1993, 354). The report was repressed, Du Bois’s only copy destroyed, and his commission withdrawn in 1908, causing Du Bois extraordinary anguish and frustration. At the same time Atlanta University was losing funding as a result of its controversial professor of economics and history. Recognizing the limits of his initial faith in the power of the truth to overcome racist stereotypes and practices, Du Bois turned to the NAACP as a means of more effectively linking the symbolic battle against racist ideology to his evolving socialist politics. He would release his emotionally evocative interpretation of John Brown in 1909 and his fictional rewriting of the sharecropping study, The Quest of the Silver Fleece, in 1911. Both were designed to appeal to a wider, mass audience rather than to those interested in strictly scholarly studies. While Du Bois would never sacrifice his belief in the importance of liberal education for the black vanguard or his emphasis on representative legal battles, he would increasingly view the African American struggle as, fundamentally, an economic struggle. Just months before John Brown’s publication, Du Bois would speak at the opening meeting of the NAACP on the “new slavery” of African Americans in the South. Economic power was predicated on political representation and could only be secured once the vote was protected and African American civil rights were respected.

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In 1910, the year after the publication of John Brown, Du Bois would leave Atlanta University for full-time political activism, editing the NAACP’s Crisis. By 1911, knowing that the craft unions organized by Samuel Gompers in the AFL would not welcome African Americans, Du Bois would join the more comprehensive Socialist Party led by Eugene Debs. The Socialist Legend of John Brown Mobilizing John Brown’s legacy for the socialist cause was not unique to W.E.B. Du Bois. Eugene Debs, the leader of the Socialist Party at its height during the first two decades of the twentieth century, frequently placed himself within a radical evangelical tradition encompassing Jesus, Thomas Paine, Patrick Henry, and John Brown (Ginger 1949, 202). All, he claimed, were righteous revolutionaries misunderstood and abused during their time. All were passionate, visionary martyrs single-mindedly fighting some form of oppression. Building on the popular union hymn, “John Brown’s Body,” Debs rallied his forces with this unabashed rhapsody in the socialist weekly Appeal to Reason: Realizing that his work was done, he passed serenely, almost with joy, from the scenes of men. His calmness upon the gallows was awe-inspiring; his exaltation supreme. Old John Brown is not dead. His soul marches on, and each passing year weaves new garlands for his brow and adds fresh lustre to his deathless glory. Who will be the John Brown of Wage-Slavery? (281)

Writing in 1907, two years before the publication of Du Bois’s biography, Debs makes Brown the avenger of chattel slavery whose work was completed with a martyrdom that ignited the Civil War. Part of Debs’s appeal to Du Bois at this time was that Debs recognized the organized overthrow of slavery as a model for the organized overthrow of big capital. Du Bois also subscribed to Debs’s understanding that sharecropping was another form of labor exploitation and capitalist oppression. But, unlike Du Bois, Debs did not consider Brown a martyr to “wage slavery.” The distinction is a small but important one. For Du Bois, it was imperative that the African American struggle for full citizenship not end with the Emancipation Proclamation or Union victory in the Civil War. In closing the chapter on chattel slavery and opening the chapter on wage slavery, Debs denies the unique position of African Americans vis-à-vis the contemporary labor movement. For Debs, social inferiority is nothing but “the shriveled fruit of economic inequality” (65). In a 1908 article, “The Negro in the Class Struggle” published in the International Socialist Review, Debs

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claimed, “when the working class have triumphed in the class struggle and stand forth economic as well as political free men, the race problem will forever disappear” (66). Given organized labor’s persistent exclusion of African Americans, Du Bois could not agree that racial struggle could be subsumed within the labor struggle. In his 1912 Crisis article, “Organized Labor,” Du Bois accused white labor of conspiring to “beat or starve the Negro out of his job if you can by keeping him out of the union; or, if you must admit him, do the same thing inside the union lines” (quoted in Lewis 1993, 420). While Du Bois thought Labor’s mission “divine” and Eugene Debs fairminded, he also considered Debs’s view of race limited (420). The legend of John Brown could yoke these two important impulses together without sacrificing the struggle for racial parity to the struggle for economic freedom. To do this, Du Bois recreated John Brown as a crusader against the new forms of exploitation as well as slavery; Du Bois claimed, unlike Debs, that Brown’s mission was still uncompleted. In an amazing revision of the “Lost Cause” rhetoric used in the American Crisis Series advertisement, Du Bois makes Brown, rather than the South, the beautifully martyred idealist who will yet be vindicated. Building on Edward Pollard’s 1867 history of the Civil War, The Lost Cause, post-Confederates claimed the South to be morally superior to the North and warned that the southern social system would ultimately be proven righteous. Pollard concluded his history with a chapter on “The Negro Question” that predicted either the restoration of white rule in the South or the extinction of blacks. In the American Crisis Biographies, Ellis Paxson Oberholtzer, the editor of the series, honored southern feelings by euphemistically referring to the Civil War as the “great event in the history of our nation” and the “sectional struggle.” He explicitly warns that “[t]he Civil War will not be treated as a rebellion” (Du Bois 1909). Du Bois preferred to recreate the Civil War as a holy war against southern rebels, a holy war whose first crusading figure was John Brown. Picture the situation: An old and blood-bespattered man, half-dead from the wounds inflicted but a few hours before; a man lying in the cold and dirt, without sleep for fifty-five nerve-wrecking hours, without food for nearly as long, with the dead bodies of two sons almost before his eyes, the piled corpses of his seven slain comrades near and afar, a wife and a bereaved family listening in vain, and a Lost Cause, the dream of a lifetime, lying dead in his heart. (347; italics mine)

The rhetoric of the “Lost Cause” rehabilitated the South, obscured the cruelty inherent in slavery, and prepared Americans for a perpetuation of “benevolent” white rule in a Jim Crow South. In Du Bois’s rewriting of the

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Lost Cause, it is Brown’s dream of subverting race and class barriers that is sadly defeated, hopefully to rise again in another form. Du Bois rewrites both Debs and other Brown biographers by insisting that Brown’s soul does indeed march onward because that dream is yet unrealized. In the 1962 reprinting of John Brown, Du Bois reaffirms Brown’s position as a proto-socialist. He made four changes to the original edition. All but one of the changes were relatively minor. In an intrusive seven-page essay, Du Bois defends socialist revolution. In the original version, revolution “is always a loss and a lowering of ideals” (395). Added right after this line in the revised version is the following: “But if it is a true revolution it repays all losses and results in the uplift of the human race” (395). While the overtly propagandistic addition overturns Du Bois’s initial stance on revolution, it does not fundamentally alter Du Bois’s interpretation of Brown’s proto-socialism. Du Bois spells out the implications of John Brown’s philanthropic business. He aptly positions Brown between the French Revolution, a bourgeois revolution for individual liberty, and a socialist revolution against the excesses of privatization. The French Revolution had demanded freedom for the individual—the liberty to do as he pleased for what he considered his own good and the consequent good of mankind. But in the Nineteenth Century this freedom rapidly became license for private owners of capital to control industry and income and thus rule mankind. . . . John Brown never read the Communist Manifesto and knew little of the rise of Socialism. But he did realize that a suppressed and exploited part of the laboring class in America—the Negroes—had been deprived by capitalists and land monopolists of the freedom to earn a living. . . . He espoused therefore the freedom of the slave knowing well that freedom alone was not the settlement of the Negro problem. (Du Bois 1973, 397–398)

Brown’s mission yet unfulfilled, his biography operates in Du Bois’s canon as an African American socialist manifesto. Furthermore, Brown’s sympathy with a racially identifiable group dramatizes class conflicts that might otherwise have remained obscure to him. For Brown, as well as Du Bois, race consciousness lays the groundwork for class consciousness. Du Bois’s biography of John Brown was largely ignored by the reading public at its publication and has generally been dismissed by contemporary historians as part of Brown’s hagiography, typical of the biographies published in the first 50 years after Harper’s Ferry.3 Oscar Garrison Villard’s biography of Brown eclipsed Du Bois’s by incorporating new sources—Villard had deeper pockets for hiring researchers—and by approaching Brown, still a controversial figure in the United States, critically. Indeed, Du Bois’s John Brown does not match his own Black

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Reconstruction in systemic analysis or The Souls of Black Folk in lyricism. Nevertheless, it is valuable for, among other things, the ways in which Du Bois deploys the cultural meanings of John Brown’s legacy to negotiate the relationship between African American and working-class struggle. Du Bois also used the biography as a bridge. Through his identification with John Brown, Du Bois gained confidence in his own decision to leave his role as thoughtful “shepherd” guiding his “talented-tenth” students at Atlanta University, and turn to political agitation. Notes 1. Rayford Logan first uses this term to refer to the period between 1890 and 1910, when “Big Business takes over the resources of the South. . . . Populism is crushed, . . . lynchings amount to over a thousand each decade, . . . awful pogroms occur, and . . . the jim-crow system is institutionalized and legalized” (Aptheker 45). 2. In Richard J. Hinton’s 1894 biography, the period is covered in two pages. Brown’s business failure is attributed to a bribed clerk who sold all of the wool for the price of the lowest grade. In James Redpath’s 1860 biography, the collective’s failure is described through two newspaper quotes. Both the quotes accuse the New England manufacturers of combining against Perkins and Brown. Neither Hinton nor Redpath, the two prior biographers Du Bois relied upon most, mention the possibility of a wool growers monopoly and neither accord the episode the prominence Du Bois does. 3. Even Benjamin Quarles dismisses Du Bois’s biography in his 1974 Allies of Freedom: Blacks and John Brown, which builds upon Du Bois’s approach. Quarles, like most Brown scholars, considers Villard’s biography to be a landmark.

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“I see your mouth calling / before the words arrive”: Muriel Rukeyser’s “The Soul and Body of John Brown” and 1930s America Bruce A. Ronda

uccessive generations of readers and activists have recovered the story and significance of John Brown in ways that seemed meaningful to their cultural circumstances. A militant against established forces of state and church, Brown appeared to leftist artists and organizers in the 1930s as a precursor of their own class-based struggle, an American revolutionary. Their appropriation of Brown was part of an even larger effort, from nearly the beginning of the century, to discern the modern relevance of American history and culture. Muriel Rukeyser’s poem “The Soul and Body of John Brown” (1940) reflects both these projects of recovery. It reflects her leftist sympathies evident in her poetry of the 1930s, particularly in her passionate critique of corporate greed, “The Book of the Dead.” But Rukeyser escapes ideological predictability in “John Brown,” writing a poem that celebrates the possibility of spiritual renewal in an anxious America on the eve of war. This appropriation of John Brown by a variety of interpreters, including Muriel Rukeyser, began virtually at the moment of Brown’s public debut. His fierce commitment to abolitionism grew and deepened over his lifetime, beginning, if we may trust his autobiographical fragment, with a childhood experience witnessing racial violence (Ruchames 1959, 35–51). But his public role as abolitionist warrior was limited to the brief period

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of 1855–1859. This apparently sudden eruption onto the public stage has led several generations of commentators, journalists, historians, and biographers to efforts to justify or explain his deeds by filling in cultural and historical context and speculating about Brown’s motivations and obsessions. The same may be said of writers and artists who have taken Brown as their subject or inspiration. For Henry Thoreau and Wendell Phillips, Brown was the Puritan warrior, agent of an angry God; for John Greenleaf Whittier, Brown was a Christ-like martyr, suffering for the sins of his people; for Southern novelists like Elizabeth Meriwether and Thomas Dixon, Brown was an agent of the North’s regional hatred, black sexual violence, and anarchist revolution against order and authority; for Stephen Vincent Benét, Brown signaled the emergence of modern industrial America. From Brown’s own time to the 1880s, narratives of race, region, and religion dominated literary efforts to “familiarize” John Brown. This comes as no surprise, since Brown himself articulated his antislavery and antiracist crusade in Biblical terms of discerning God’s will and establishing a millennial era of racial equality; he inserted both his deeds and his discourse into the sectional struggle of the 1850s. John Stauffer has recently detailed the ways in which Brown’s Edwardsean Calvinism was transformed into a belief in the possibility of human perfectionism and the shaping of a more racially just social order (Stauffer 2002, 121–123). In the following decades, dominated by the Civil War and Reconstruction, it seemed inevitable that literary uses of Brown should follow those racial, regional, and religious narratives laid down by Brown’s original defenders and detractors. In the 1880s, however, a new context for understanding and imagining John Brown, a context that would lead eventually to leftist uses of Brown in the 1930s, began to emerge as Americans experienced wrenching conflicts over the conditions of labor, the rights of workers, and the rapid increase in immigration. The railway strike in 1877, the Haymarket “riot” in 1886, the Homestead lockout in 1892, and the Pullman strike in 1894 were only the most sensational events in a long series of strikes, lockouts, street battles, and strenuous efforts to unionize workers in the last decades of the nineteenth century and beginning of the twentieth. Regularly accused of recruiting foreign workers and introducing “un-American” ideologies of class conflict and atheism into their cause, labor leaders began turning to American symbols of struggle. In 1881, the Labor Standard American Auxiliary Association commemorated the anniversary of Brown’s execution, displaying banners equating chattel slavery and wage slavery (Wardenaar 1974, 318). Perhaps the most powerful appropriation of Brown for the labor cause came in columns written by Eugene Debs in 1907. In a brief comment called “December 2, 1859,” he described Brown as “the spirit incarnate of the Revolution.” A longer passage from the same

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issue of Appeal to Reason contains these words: “From the beginning of his career to its close he had but one idea and one ideal, and that was to destroy chattel slavery: and in that cause he sealed his devotion with his noble blood. . . . Old John Brown is not dead. His soul still marches on, and each passing year weaves new garlands for his brow and adds fresh lustre to his deathless glory. . . . Who shall be the John Brown of Wage-Slavery?” (Debs 1948, 279, 281). This linkage of John Brown the abolitionist guerrilla with labor– management–state conflict was evident not only on labor’s side. Conservative commentators made the same connection but drew the opposite conclusion as they sought to question and dismantle Brown’s reputation as heroic liberator. David Utter, a Chicago clergyman, worked diligently in the 1880s to expose Brown’s role in the Pottowatomie massacres and to reduce his stature from hero to murderer by linking him to current examples of terrorism: “His [Brown’s] principles were those of the Russian nihilists—first make a clean sweep of the present civilization, and let the future build what it can. Surely such a man is not a proper hero for the youth of our country to worship, and we believe that as his true history, too long concealed, becomes known, admiration for him will be changed to disgust, and disgust to anger, that we have been so long deceived” (Utter 1883, 446). Massachusetts industrialist Amos Lawrence, who had made considerable contributions to Brown’s campaigns in Kansas and after whom the free-state capital had been named, had cooled in his views of Brown even before the abolitionist was hanged; by the early 1880s he embraced a far more critical perspective: “But what shall we say of John Brown, who was another representative man [along with Kansas Governor Charles Robinson; portraits of both men were being presented to the Massachusetts Historical Society in May 1884]? His course was the opposite of Robinson’s. He was always armed; he was always disloyal to the United States Government and to all government, except to what he called the ‘higher law.’ He was always ready to shed blood, and he always did shed it without remorse; for without blood, as he often said, ‘there can be no remission’ ” (Lawrence 1884, 182). Leslie Wardenaar has argued that early twentieth-century labor and leftist heroes like Joe Hill, Big Bill Haywood, John Reed, Sacco and Vanzetti, and the Scottsboro Boys easily eclipsed John Brown as symbolic figures because the antebellum leader was simply not very applicable to urban, secular, Socialist, multifaceted movements for social change often led by and certainly populated by recent immigrants (Wardenaar 1974, 340). But Wardenaar clearly underestimates the influence of Brown on radical critiques, particularly in the 1930s, and on the literary and artistic works inspired by those critiques.

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Well before the 1929 stock market crash and subsequent Depression, Mike Gold, leading Communist Party spokesman and journalist, sought to connect John Brown’s story to contemporary events. Gold’s brief biography of Brown, published in 1924, made the abolitionist into a leader sprung from the people: “in his life he was a common man to the end, a hard-working, honest, Puritan farmer with a large family, a man worried with the details of poverty, and obscure as ourselves. . . . John Brown proved that there is another form of success, within the reach of everyone, and that is to devote one’s life to a great and pure cause” (3). Brown’s assault on slavery challenged the same institutional system that was hindering industrial workers: “slavery was respectable . . . to attack slavery was to attack the Constitution, the church, the government, and the institution of private property” (8). Gold’s biography of Brown, as James Bloom reminds us, was part of Gold’s efforts to recover and claim a revolutionary tradition in American culture and letters. “Gold . . . ascribes his socialism to the American Renaissance,” Bloom notes, “and especially to the abolitionist ‘struggle against slavery’ ” (Bloom 1992, 45). Gold locates Brown in the Puritan and revolutionary heritage of New England and in the “Emerson-ThoreauAlcott Concord set” (46). “Gold’s attention to Brown’s unimpeachable ‘Americanness’—to both the sacred Puritan and secular republican strains of Americanness—covertly transforms Gold’s [own] prosaic immigrant marginality, as one of the ‘huddled masses,’ into a promise of heroism” (46).1 Gold was far from alone in his effort to recover and reinterpret Brown and other American literary and historical figures in light of the social crises of the 1930s. The Popular Front in the late 1930s signaled a broad effort on the part of Communist Party activists and sympathizers to build a mass movement and in so doing to interpret the core of American values and expression as progressive and revolutionary. This leftist effort sometimes blended with, sometimes clashed with, government efforts to document, through New Deal agency-sponsored projects, American folklore, customs, traditions, music, and other cultural forms. The search for a “usable past,” as Van Wyck Brooks had phrased it as early as 1918, orbited around the question of the meaning of “America,” as Michael Denning writes: “the figure of ‘America’ became a locus for ideological battles over the trajectory of US history, the meaning of race, ethnicity, and region in the United States, and the relation between ethnic nationalism, Americanism, and internationalism” (129). In this debate over meaning, the figure of John Brown was widespread, not only by the end of the decade, but throughout the 1930s: in W.E.B. Du Bois’s 1935 biography; in Gold’s and Michael Blankfort’s adaptation of Gold’s biography into a WPA-sponsored play, “Battle Hymn”; in several Brown-related poems in

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The Worker and New Masses; in artwork by John Steuart Curry, Arthur Covey, Jacob Lawrence, and Horace Pippin; and more generally in the new interest in and respect for the abolitionist crusade and for Lincoln as the Great Emancipator, signaled most obviously in the name of the American volunteer unit fighting on the nationalist side in the Spanish Civil War, the Abraham Lincoln Brigade (Denning 1996, 130–131, 499; Peterson 2002, 132–139). Among the many drawn to the multiple meanings of John Brown for this era of social and ideological conflict was the young poet and reviewer Muriel Rukeyser. Born in 1913 to a prosperous Manhattan Jewish family of German origin, Rukeyser was drawn into the orbit of the Communist Party-led National Students League in the early 1930s. She convinced Harry Magdoff, editor of the League’s journal, the Student Review, to let her cover the trial of the Scottsboro Boys. Her essay on that notorious event was followed by publication of her poems in that magazine and in New Masses, poems that combined the techniques of literary modernism with the social and cultural critiques associated with political leftism. She was granted a summer residency at Yaddo in 1934, followed by the publication of her first book Theory of Flight in the Yale Younger Poets Series in 1935 (Wald 2002, 299–301). Rukeyser’s long poem, “The Book of the Dead,” part of her volume U.S. 1 published in 1938, illustrates her fusion of modernist technique and cultural criticism. Based on an event in the early 1930s, in which Union Carbide workers in Gauley Bridge, West Virginia, were required to tunnel rapidly through a mountain in order to divert water for a company power plant, inhaled silica, and died of silicosis by the hundreds, perhaps thousands, Rukeyser’s poem takes for its foundation the documentary evidence compiled for a hearing on this catastrophe. “The Book of the Dead” is grounded in a contemporary example of maximizing profits at the expense of human life, but also echoes the ancient Egyptian sacred text. Rukeyser’s efforts to build up a dense structure of allusion not only to politics and ideology, but to cultural history, seemed like so much pamphleteering to her conservative critics, while left-wing commentators like John Wheelwright felt she was simply describing the effects of capitalism rather than its inner logic (Kalaidjian 1993, 163–164). Several critics have offered lengthy discussions of “The Book of the Dead,” but it is worth noting here that Rukeyser evokes John Brown at the end of the poem’s penultimate section, “The Bill.”2 Here she excerpts sections of the Joint Congressional Committee’s final report, fragmenting their words into a collage, as she does throughout the poem, and highlighting the irony of the report’s final words: “If by their suffering and death they will have made a future life safer for work beneath the earth, if they will have been able to establish

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a new and greater regard for human life in industry, their suffering may not have been in vain” (Rukeyser 1982, 101). These pious sentiments are followed by this commentary: Words on a monument. Capitoline thunder. It cannot be enough. The origin of storms is not in clouds, Our lightning strikes when the earth rises, Spillways free authentic power: Dead John Brown’s body walking from a tunnel To break the armored and concluded mind.

Here the poet contrasts the bombastic rhetoric of official language, the “Capitoline thunder,” that springs from “the armored and concluded mind,” with a liberating message resurrected from the tunnel of death. Dead John Brown and his emancipatory struggle live again when outrages like Gauley Bridge are exposed and condemned. Instead of the new course of the river that brings profits to the company’s stockholders and owners and death to workers, the poet envisions a life-giving spillway that frees “authentic power.” Probably a member of the Young Communist League in the early 1930s, according to Alan Wald, Rukeyser embraced the anticapitalist and proletarian perspective shared by thousands of writers and artists throughout the decade. She was particularly lauded by critics like Louis Untermeyer, Malcolm Cowley, and Horace Gregory as one of the best poets of her generation (Gregory 1936, 374). At the same time, she remained free of a collective mentality, preferring to express her personal responses to injustice through her art. At the height of her interest in proletarian writing, she refused to join Communist Party members in condemning William Faulkner for the “decadent” and “bourgeois” traits in his writing (Daniels 1996, 250). Rukeyser’s distance from official leftism appeared most clearly in the vicious criticism she received from the Partisan Review after the publication of her poem “Wake Island” in summer 1942. A response to the defense of Wake by American marines and civilian volunteers and the massacre of its surrendered survivors in late December 1941, Rukeyser’s poem places this conflict in the context of global anti-fascism: “fighting as if they were the fist of the world / and they had a world to save.” Weldon Kees’s brief and dismissive review—“There’s one thing you can say about Muriel: she’s not lazy”—was followed by an editorial equating her poem with official propaganda put out by the Office of War Information, for which Rukeyser then worked. Despite a vigorous letter exchange from her defenders, the Partisan Review editors, particularly Delmore Schwartz, maintained

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their dismissive view, and Rukeyser was not reviewed or published in that journal until 1982 (Brock 1999). Rukeyser’s insistence on shaping her own aesthetic and political perspective within a broadly progressive orientation, an insistence that drew condemnation in 1942, is equally evident in an earlier poem, “The Soul and Body of John Brown.” This work, however, drew praise, perhaps because its central figure has already been established as an icon for the Left. Published in Poetry in June 1940, “The Soul and Body of John Brown” later appeared in Rukeyser’s 1944 volume Beast in View. Louis Untermeyer singled out the poem when it first appeared, calling it her “most important work to date” (Untermeyer 1940, 11). The poem’s epigraph is from Joel 3:14, “Multitudes, multitudes in the valley of decision,” part of a prophecy of revenge on the part of the people of Israel against their conquerors, a collective response against oppression. This sense of speaking for the many appears immediately in the first line of the poem: “His life is in the body of the living,” linking Brown’s individual story with a larger identity. That linkage is made stronger in the next lines, which propose that Brown’s “grave was the floating faces / of the crowd” so that the presence of Brown is made real even for those, “the crowd,” who welcomed his death. Melville’s lines from “The Portent”— But the streaming beard is shown (Weird John Brown) The meteor of the war (Melville 1996)

—are transformed in lines 6–8 of Rukeyser’s poem, in which Brown as a “beacon of fierceness” opposes the white prophets of the storm, the streaming meteors of the war.

Rukeyser’s fusion of Brown’s particular story with a larger narrative continues in the next section: Brown wanted freedom. Could not himself be free until more grace reached a corroded world. Our guilt his own.

The poem then evokes three images of Brown: Brown as he stood on the ground, Brown as he stood on sudden air, Brown standing to our fatal topmost hills faded through dying altitudes, and low

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through faces living under the dregs of the air deprived childhood and thwarted youth and change:

Although the poet sees these images illuminated in “October’s fruitionfire,” referring to Brown’s October 1859 raid on Harper’s Ferry, I see these as references to Brown in combat, Brown at the moment of execution in December 1859 as the gallows’ trap is sprung, and Brown’s transformation from individualized actor, with a “deprived childhood and thwarted youth,” to representative man. In the following sections of the poem, Rukeyser evokes the passion of lovers, whose embrace in natural surroundings gives the lie to socially acceptable injustices: “enemies who reply in smiles; mild slavers; moderate whores.” The lovers’ choice of a “brilliant gorge” for their lovemaking echoes “another gorge to remember,” which may be one of many Civil War sites of battle. The naked lovers whose passionate promise of new life becomes Brown’s own nakedness and vulnerability and that of whole “counties of naked who shiver at fires”— They dread the surface of their victim life lying helpless and savage in shade parks,

— is a likely reference to the homelessness and suffering of millions during the Great Depression. This wintry scene is followed by the resurrection of Spring: the great hieroglyph: the mighty, whose first hour collects the winter invalids, whose cloudless pastures train swarms of mutable apple-trees to blond delusions of light . . .

This promise of new life is both private, touching the lovers who “believe in their dreams,” and collective. Here Rukeyser associates collective injustice with individual harm: There is no partial help. Lost in the face of a child, lost in the factory repetitions, lost on the steel plateaus, in a ghost distorted.

All these are “Calling More Life.” That is, the natural and the human outcry against injustice and destruction require some voice, some articulation: I see your mouth calling before the words arrive.

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At the end, however, Rukeyser argues that a commitment to social justice cannot arise only from single, articulate leaders, but must have collective commitment. Earlier in the poem she evokes “country guitars” that play “a wide and subtle music.” In the last lines she returns to that anonymous folk source of entertainment and instruction: Buzz of guitars repeat it in streamy summernoon song, the whitelight of the meaning changed to demand.

She distinguishes between a folk tradition that demands “More life” and one that reinforces the visceral hatreds or thoughtless slogans of region, race, or religion: “More life, challenging / this hatred, this Halleloo—risk it upon yourselves.” This impulse toward freedom seen “deep in the prophet eyes” thus becomes a collective impulse, “part of our nation of our fanatic sun.” Throughout the poem, Rukeyser evokes the figure of Ezekiel, whose visions describe the reasons for the exile of the people of Israel and prophesy the building of a new temple in Jerusalem. Blending condemnation and promise, Ezekiel functions in Rukeyser’s poem in the way the figure of Jeremiah does in earlier American literature (Bercovitch 1978). “Dreaming Ezekiel, threaten me alive!” she writes, suggesting that new life and a heightened sense of danger or vulnerability are inseparable. At the end she writes: The diamond shoals of eyes demanding life Deep in the prophet eyes, a wish to be again Threatened alive, in agonies of decision Part of our nation of our fanatic sun.

Here “threatened alive” is linked not just to particular heroes like John Brown but to an entire nation that may require threat and danger to achieve a new identity. This notion that collective identity, “our nation,” is based on the continued quest for freedom may strike some as “fanatic,” but it is central to the argument of the poem. Written at a time of enormous anxiety about the global situation and the role of the United States in European and Asian wars, and at a moment of conservative backlash against New Deal programs, Rukeyser uses the word “nation” not to suggest a political entity that requires obedience and uniformity but rather to suggest “collectivity” or “country,” individuals joined in common struggle for common ends. Muriel Rukeyser draws together several cultural strands in the shaping of this poem, some of these already noticed. One is the biblical prophetic tradition, references to Hebrew prophets who called the people of Israel to

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account for their failures and reminded them of their larger destiny. A second is the historical circumstance of Brown: we see the scaffold’s trap spring, we hear his quoted words, “I designed to have done the same thing again on a larger scale,” and, “Without the snap of a gun,” words drawn from newspaper interviews with Brown after his arrest. The poem likewise gestures toward the Civil War itself, “where soldiers give terrible answers of lechery after death.” This difficult line may suggest that the sprawled bodies of the dead ironically imitate prone bodies in the act of lovemaking. A third context for Rukeyser’s poem is the circumstance of its composition in 1940, the period between the outbreak of war in Europe and Asia but before the involvement of the United States. The economic depression still gripping the nation echoes in lines such as . . . They shamble in the streets, Blind to the sun-storming image in their eyes. They dread the surface of their victim life, Lying helpless and savage in shade parks, Asking the towers only what beggars dare: Food, fire, water, and air.

Like her fellow modernists in the 1920s and 1930s, Rukeyser engages the question of the adequacy of urban and industrial life to meet the material and spiritual needs of its inhabitants: There is no partial help. Lost in the face of a child, Lost of the factory repetitions, lost On the steel plateaus, in a ghost distorted. Calling More Life. In all the harm calling. Pointing disaster of death and lifting up the bone, Heroic drug and the intoxication gone.

Perhaps most importantly, Rukeyser locates this poem in the context of efforts to recover and reinterpret American history and culture, including the crusade of John Brown, in the light of twentieth-century realities. These efforts on the part of writers, artists, journalists, critics, historians, and politicians were extraordinarily diverse and reflected a wide range of social and political agendas, from Randolph Bourne’s 1914 essay “TransNational America” with its critique of Anglocentrism in American culture to John LaTouche’s and Earl Robinson’s 1939 “Ballad for Americans” to Rodgers and Hammerstein’s 1943 Oklahoma! What began as a sense that American culture had become shallow, un-self-critical, consumerist, and unaware of its own literary and historical resources ended with a sense that the “American Way of Life” was under attack (Sussman 1984, 208). For

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Popular Front artists and critics, making use of an American radical tradition meant joining a broad conversation about the meaning of American culture in shaping a more democratic future and not, as has often been charged, simply exploiting an interest in American roots for narrow partycontrolled ends (see Denning 1996 and Sussman 1984). Muriel Rukeyser reveals this search for a “usable past” in “The Soul and Body of John Brown.” Certainly the poem’s critique of industrial capitalism’s exploitation reflects her leftist orientation, but like the “Wake Island” of two years later, “John Brown” takes up the question of “America” on its own terms rather than on those dictated by party theory. In “Wake Island,” as we have seen, Rukeyser honors fallen American soldiers by linking them to a global struggle against fascism rather than, as some of her leftist colleagues would have it, seeing them as agents of America’s imperial presence in the Pacific. In “John Brown,” Rukeyser does not foreground revolutionary violence, nor does she highlight Brown’s antislavery activism, nor does she make him into a vanguard of proletarian struggle. Rather, in featuring him as did many other artists and writers on the Left in the 1930s, Rukeyser shapes her own distinctive vision: Brown brings a new collective spiritual life through his death. But that death is not so much mythic, as in T.S. Eliot’s version of the dying and rising god in The Waste Land, as historical, and so spirituality has everything to do with the actual material conditions of life rather than offering an escape from materiality: “Under the hooded century drops the trap.” In some not-quite-explicable way Brown’s sacrifice breaks up the logjam of history, whether its participants understand that sacrifice or not: They more and more, secretly, tell their dreams. They listen oftener for certain words, look deeper In faces for features of one remembered image. They almost forget the face. They cannot miss the look. Ultimately, Brown himself is submerged— I know your face, deepdrowned Prophet, and seablown eyes

—lines that echo the song in Shakespeare’s The Tempest—in the larger effort to shape a collective identity that is not only historical and material but spiritual as well: O my scene! My mother! America who offers many births.

Rukeyser’s independent efforts to appropriate American materials for a poem of hope in a moment of national anxiety made it difficult for her

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readers and reviewers to place her in poetic and political categories. Modernist in technique like Hart Crane and William Carlos Williams, Rukeyser shared with those two an interest in American materials and an optimism about their poetic possibilities. Unlike other modernists, however, most notably Eliot and Pound, Rukeyser’s politics were strongly leftist, putting her into alliance with political figures who distrusted and disliked her poetics as elitist and reactionary. “Soul and Body of John Brown” celebrates Brown as an agent of change, but employs no charged political language, claims no advanced political consciousness on the part of the people or their revolutionary vanguard, and reveals no historical necessity. It is exactly this independence that troubled and confused Rukeyser’s readers long after the publication of “John Brown.” “Although she herself was willing to admit the failures of 1930s experiments in political poetry and the folly of signing over one’s poetic allegiance to a central authority,” writes Kate Daniels, “the failures of the decade could not crush her own unassailable belief in the transformative powers of poetry and all art” (Daniels 1996, 256). She does not easily fit into postwar poetic history, Richard Flynn observes, for she neither conformed to the New Critics’ version of modernism nor did she emphasize the identity politics of an emerging feminism (Flynn 1996, 265). In short, Rukeyser’s “Soul and Body of John Brown,” like her career both before and after its publication, is an act of “cultural revision.” Alan Trachtenberg has employed this term as a way of grasping Hart Crane’s project in The Bridge (1930), the appropriation of modern urban industrial society and its artifacts in service to a “higher” spiritual and aesthetic purpose (Trachtenberg 1981, 60). Similarly, Rukeyser gathers up the historical circumstances of Brown’s last days together with the circumstances of the poem’s moment of composition in order to articulate a vision of an alternative future. Scores of writers and artists, well-known and lesser-known, had used the figure of Brown to suggest divisions and conflicts: racial, regional, religious. Brown was the agent of destruction, a “stone,” for Stephen Vincent Benét and a figure of sectional hatred for Edgar Lee Masters and Thomas Dixon. In the 1930s, Brown had become an American emblem of class consciousness and class conflict, a reminder of the strand of radicalism that ran through nineteenth-century American culture. But Muriel Rukeyser only glances at these sites of conflict. For her, Brown gestures toward a new cultural cohesion, formed not on the basis of post-Civil War nationalism or on the basis of 1930s radical critique and demand for social revolution, but grounded in the hope for a spiritual cohesion, a new form of community. Rukeyser envisions a community inspired by Brown’s self-sacrifice and

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rejuvenated by the promise of new life in the face of the threat of war, finding ways of celebrating change itself as the central act of human freedom. Simply opening one’s mouth, she writes, is an act of identity-formation more important than the words that follow: I see your mouth calling Before the words arrive.

Notes 1. A similar effort to interpret the figures of the “American Renaissance”— Emerson, Thoreau, Alcott, Higginson, Parker, Ripley—as transmitters of the eighteenth-century Revolutionary heritage into the modern era may be seen in the novels of Truman Nelson: The Sin of the Prophet (1952), The Passion by the Brook (1953), and The Surveyor (1960). 2. For longer treatments of Rukeyser’s The Book of the Dead, see Davidson, Kalaidjian, Rosenthal, and Thurston.

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John Brown and Children’s Literature Tyler Hoffman

any famous Americans leap to mind as candidates for treatment in historical novels for children, but perhaps not so much John Brown. Deborah Hopkinson, who wrote her series Prairie Skies (a series that includes Pioneer Summer, Cabin in the Snow, and Our Kansas Home) with an eye to second-graders, documents 1855 Kansas and the slavery question that raged there, but never mentions Brown. In a note (November 2004) to me, she explained “I originally thought I would use him [Brown], but deliberately chose not to use Brown in this work after reading more about him. . . . Brown’s activities in Kansas were pretty complex for the audience . . . I did try to give young readers a sense of the period by introducing different viewpoints and characters, but I shied away from including a lot of violence.” Of course, the question of violence is the central “problem” when representing John Brown for young readers, whether the focus is on his activity in Kansas or his raid on Harper’s Ferry. In the last 10 years or so, several writers have chosen to address directly these issues with respect to Brown in a range of historical fiction for children, some of which tells Brown’s story through the eyes of an imagined character and some through the eyes of a fictionalized version of his daughter, Annie Brown. These novels seek either to point up the rightness (and righteousness) of his cause, to take a stand against Brown and his legacy of violence, or to raise questions about his violent means and leave it to the reader to make a final judgment. Despite these different perspectives, one thing all of these bildungsromans have in common is their desire to stage important issues in the moral development of the American child through contact with John Brown. They are

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deeply engaged with questions of personal identity—of what it means to be a man or a woman, black or white, rich or poor in the United States—and suggest that that identity is something performed, that we daily recite socially prescribed roles and modes of conduct, or seek to contest and transcend them. The character of John Brown works to highlight these issues for the youth of these stories, who are trying to find a voice as they grow to accept the responsibilities that come with adulthood. Before we examine contemporary fiction for children involving John Brown, it is instructive to see how such literature was shaped from the beginning. The first children’s book that I have been able to find in which John Brown appears is one where he has no speaking part (his only words are reported secondhand by the narrator). In 1865 Excalibur: A Tale for American Boys was published for the benefit of the Soldiers’ and Sailors’ Home and sold at the Grand Fair in October and November 1865 in Philadelphia. The story is a frame narrative that spans the Civil War (the first part is set in 1860, and the final episode takes place in 1865) in which the fictional Uncle Paul tells his nephews and niece the story of King Arthur’s legendary sword Excalibur and its passage through history. First, we hear about the power of the sword in the hands of King Arthur, then in the hands of the benevolent Prussian monarch Frederick the Great, and then as wielded by George Washington, who hung it in Mount Vernon upon his retirement. Ultimately, the sword finds its way to John Brown, and in the final chapter a successor to Brown is imagined in Lincoln, and, upon Lincoln’s assassination, a new heir is sought, with hope held out for Lincoln’s successor, Andrew Johnson. In the first chapter of the tale Uncle Paul is seized upon by his nephews and niece, and it is the boys who are most in evidence here: we are told that they “charged upon him with trumpets, drums and swords, as if he were a Malakoff, over which their banners must float” (Excalibur 1865, 4). One of the boys suggestively is named Arthur, and Uncle Paul takes Arthur’s toy sword and tells his young audience that Excalibur “never struck but for justice and honor,” that in the time of King Arthur, “it made some strong men—men worthy to be called, as they afterwards were, Saxon, men of rock” (5). This sense of manhood as boldness and heroic violence validates Brown’s actions, placing him in a long line of romantic heroquesters, and gestures toward the nephews, who are imaginatively inclined toward war. Uncle Paul delineates the righteousness of the sword, and through it John Brown’s standing in the pantheon of American freedom fighters. Excalibur, he relates, is “a sword which was sent into this world to fight for the weak against the strong, for the right against the wrong,” “a dangerous one to have in a neighborhood where innocent men and women were held

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in chains, their children taken from their hearts and sold” (15, 16). John Brown and his sons “left their guardian women to pray for them; and, taking their lives in their hands, they went forth, these modern Knights of the Round Table, to strike from human hands every fetter they could reach” (18). With women in the background, away from the field of war, the men’s chivalric assault on the armory at Harper’s Ferry is cheered by America’s founders: “Washington and Jefferson, and Franklin, and old John Adams, and a great host of the Fathers of American Liberty, rose from their graves that day, and were the silent and unseen witnesses of the martyr’s triumph” (22). After his capture and execution, Brown’s soul goes marching on, coming in the dark of night to take his revenge against Governor Wise of Virginia, “sitting upon his breast, with Excalibur in his hand—now a flaming sword” (22). In contemporary fiction, the impression that we get of Brown is usually less assured, less hagiographic; its interest in the performance of gender sheds new light on Brown’s story and the lessons to be learned from it. As opposed to “silent and unseen witnesses,” what we have are voluble eyewitnesses telling their stories and keeping memory alive. No less than three recent novels for children are told from the point of view of John Brown’s daughter, Annie, who must work through feelings of anger, resentment, and worthlessness as a result of her dealings with her father. It is she and not Martha, Annie’s sister-in-law who was also helping to prepare for the raid at Harper’s Ferry, who stars in this fiction, as she is the one with the most difficulty reconciling herself to the man and the myth. Annie’s complicated and ambivalent feelings are explored in this fiction, and her struggle in coming to terms with her relation to her father and his legacy define—and enable—her emergence into womanhood. As the title of Louella Bryant’s novel Father by Blood (1999) suggests, the connection between father and daughter is tenuous at best, a biological relation more than a spiritual or emotional one. The story begins in the attic of Annie’s California home, as her memory is reactivated by going through a trunk of old things, including a pistol her father had given her and a copy of Romeo and Juliet containing an inscription by her brother Oliver, who was killed at Harper’s Ferry. In her old age (Annie was the longest living survivor, and did not die until 1926), Annie carries the burden of her father still and “wanted to make peace with her memories,” to “make peace with John Brown” (3); she cannot help but to continue to question his character and its meaning for her: She was the only child of John Brown left alive; there was no one to help her remember. Some said her father was a villain who led the country into civil war. Others said he was a hero who helped free the slaves. Even after all these

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years, she wasn’t sure she really knew the man called rebel, assassin, man of God, Osawatomie Brown—the man she called Father. . . . Was he a good man? Would a good man have taken his men into hopeless battle? Would a good man have led his own sons to their deaths? People said John Brown’s raid on Harper’s Ferry started the Civil War. She didn’t blame him for wanting to end slavery. But could she ever forgive him for tearing apart her family?

The enigma of Brown is as much hers as it is the country’s, and her memory of his emotional distance remains painful: “I couldn’t remember being held on his knee, and he was rarely there on birthdays or holidays. Being his child meant obedience, loyalty, patience, strength” (100). She is vexed by the fact that Brown seemed to care more for the plight of slaves than for members of his own family, and when her brother, Salmon, refuses to go to Harper’s Ferry, openly defying his father, she reflects: “Fathers were supposed to be right. They were supposed to know what was best for their children and to protect them against harm. Good fathers did these things. Was John Brown a good father?” (34). Annie’s moral qualms extend to her father’s violent methods in the cause of abolition. When her father presents her with the pistol, she muses: “My stomach turned over when I realized Father was telling me to kill someone. How would I know if killing was necessary? I wondered if Father had found it necessary to kill the proslavery men at Osawatomie and to shoot slave owners in Missouri. Then I thought of the black man outside the tavern on our way to Maryland, saw again his swollen face, saw the cold, hard manacles on his wrists and ankles, and I knew the slave trade had to be stopped. I’d always believed that murder could not be justified by any cause, but now I wasn’t so sure” (63–64). Early on, she acknowledges the moral rectitude of her father’s position and quells doubts about the reasonableness of his plans; however, she later wonders, “could it [the freeing of the slaves] be gained any other way?” (82). She comes to believe that “Father’s plan was not about freedom—it was about violence” (88). Later, in a vision she has of her father’s murderous blow against a slave owner in Osawatomie, Kansas, she is convinced that “What I had seen was no battle or part of a moral fight against slavery. It was murder” (72). Through this and other events she is led to fear her father and to question his means: “Obviously, Father did not believe that ‘Thou shalt not kill’ applied to his fight against the slave owners. I didn’t doubt his motives—slavery was wrong and it had to be abolished. But how many would he kill to see it happen?” (72). Her principles are defined against his, her moral sense becoming clearer in her defiance of him. Annie’s growing maturity (she is fifteen at the time of the raid on Harper’s Ferry) reaches crescendo when she ultimately rejects her father’s

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plan for winning freedom for the slaves (“I no longer believed in Father’s plan myself ”). She resolves to speak out openly against her father, no matter the consequence: “All my life I’d been taught not to talk back to my elders, especially to my parents. Now I was speaking to Father as if I were his equal. I knew he would not approve of my lack of humility, but I could think of no better way to get his attention” (94, 104). Her sense of self is sharpened in this confrontation, and in one particularly heated exchange, her father goes so far as to disown her: “ ‘If that is what you believe,’ he said in an icy tone, ‘you are no daughter of John Brown’ ” (105). This edict only formalizes what Annie had been feeling all along. As in many of these novels about John Brown, the idea of gender as a performed identity is prominently staged in Father by Blood. Her anticipation of her father’s disapproval of her “lack of humility” and her own bold performance in voicing her dissent signify the powerful codes that are in place. When Annie receives the pistol from her father, her natural aversion to violence is strong, and she finds herself unable even to kill a rabbit: Women, she concedes, probably are not meant for war (63). In other ways, though, Annie is represented to us as not performing a “normal” gender identity. She is called “My Strange Anna” by her father, a pet name that points up her (perceived) oddness (25), and Annie herself confesses that “I wasn’t nearly as pretty as my sisters,” and that “I would have worn trousers if Mother hadn’t put her foot down against it” (25). Her gender-bending makes her a good match for her intended, Dauphin Thompson, one of Brown’s men who is faced with a similar performative challenge: Of his behavior at the Kennedy farm in the weeks leading up to the raid, Annie observes, “I felt sorry for Dauphin. He was trying so hard to be a man” (90). His attempt to act as a man leads him to his death at Harper’s Ferry. Annie’s refusal to conform—to recite a socially prescribed role—points up the contingency of social identity. Packing away the things from her trunk, Annie finally is able to come to terms with her father in the epilogue, to make “peace with her father’s memory” (116). The cathartic rehearsal of the events leading up to her father’s execution allows Annie to overcome the pain of her life with him, and to heal the wounds that he inflicted upon her. Her moral triumph at the end displaces the moral question of Brown’s actions and is managed through them; she is finally at the center of things, her own story as important as his and her own ethical imagination no longer in the shadow of her father’s or the world’s judgments of her father’s. Ann Rinaldi’s Mine Eyes Have Seen (1998), a novel for grades seven and above, offers another complicated and sympathetic portrait of the 15year-old Annie Brown. The book is written in the voice of Annie, and views Brown through Annie in the context of the Civil War that breaks out less

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than a year after the raid: the novel begins with the firing on Fort Sumter and ends with Annie’s claim that “If not for Pa it [the war] never would have [started]” (265). Rinaldi’s creative rendering of Annie underscores the abusive treatment of her father toward her, and her struggle to come to terms with a man who proves to be a terrible father even as he is apotheosized in the North. It is made clear at the start that Annie has not made her peace with her dead father, and it is her schoolmate, Louisa May Alcott, who sees Annie’s hurt and that she must strive to “fix”“whatever it is in you that’s afflicted” (x). Indeed, Alcott’s presence stresses the power of the pen in the battle not only for abolition but also for self-representation. Annie sees herself, and is seen by others, as a future historian. Her father tells her before the raid, “A lot depends on you and Martha now. You were here with us. Speak kindly of us, Annie” (203). Similarly, one of Brown’s men says to Annie that “There be a time comin’ years hence when you’ll be the only witness.” (232). Early in the novel Annie asserts to Alcott her credibility as an eyewitness to events, discrediting her own younger sister Sarah’s view: “She wasn’t there. Only people in the family who know are me and Owen. And he’s not talking” (ix). The issue of authenticity is central here, and relates to the drive to establish an authentic self-identity, one that is not dependent on the benisons of the father. The very title of the novel points up her status as empowered observer (Mine Eyes Have Seen). The italicized headnotes at the beginning of each chapter (all of them are from Annie’s point of view, in her own hand) suggest the damage that has been inflicted by the world on John Brown (including his many business failures) and his own moral failures in his dealings with his family. The first such headnote, at the entrance to the prologue, states that Brown “considered himself Moses,” that he fashioned aphorisms worthy of Benjamin Franklin. However, at the end of the note, Annie, having recounted her father’s abusive punishment of his sons, states: “Somehow I don’t think Moses or Benjamin Franklin ever did that to their children” (v). The confrontations between Annie and her father are frequent and intense. Annie’s ambivalence toward him is registered most sharply when she says, “My pa was the meanest man I ever saw. And the most honorable, all at the same time”; in the same passage she declares, “I love him and hate him all at the same time. And I don’t know what all to do about it” (x). Martha stirs Annie up when she hears her father talking rudely to her: “ ‘How can you let him speak to you like that?’ ” she asks (36). She exhorts Annie to “stand up to him” and not take any more of his abuse (37). Soon thereafter, Annie does talk back to her father, after he has accused her of lying, saying that they are all “living a lie here [at the Kennedy farm] not telling our real name” (48).

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Mine Eyes Have Seen dramatizes Annie’s coming of age, her development into “Annie-all-growed,” as one of Brown’s men puts it toward the end of the novel; indeed, she is fully self-possessed at the final accounting: “I had myself. Annie Brown. All growed” (197, 199). Up until that point, though, she is struggling to discover her worth, a worth that for too long hinged on the praise of her father. Her invisibility to him (“you don’t see me”), his monomania and concomitant neglect of his children (“He doesn’t care about anything but ending slavery”), drives her to a brutal realization: “What did Pa care about me? All he cared about was the slaves!” (148, 139, 131). The solidarity she feels with Dangerfield Newby, a black raider who “knew about being treated badly,” grows out of this: “I liked him right off . . . for treating me as if I was somebody” (94). Annie recognizes that her “one weakness” was “trying to get Pa to love me” (66), and the fact that her father often speaks to her as if she were his dead daughter Amelia (Annie blames herself for her death by scalding and believes that her father holds her accountable) only deepens Annie’s identity crisis. But whereas in Bryant’s novel Annie is figured as a pawn in her father’s game—a game that will not be won—in Mine Eyes Have Seen Annie is cast as a major player, someone who makes things happen. In Father by Blood Brown senses the snake that Annie does not, and saves Annie from it, which is seen as an omen of his victory. In Mine Eyes Have Seen, it is Annie who sees the snake and alerts her father to it, engineering the moment in order to allow her father the ability to carry on with his mission (181–182). Annie also urges her father not to tell the men that Frederick Douglass is willing to meet with him, rightly thinking it best that they cast their lot with him without that knowledge; as she concludes, “I’d had my part in it, for better or worse” (149). In Rinaldi’s novel, too, gender roles are interrogated in the light of John Brown and his crusade. Annie’s sense of her own womanliness comes out in her reading of Godey’s Lady’s Book. When she sees the pictures and the stylish dress in the magazine, she asks herself: “Did people live like this? What kind of world was out there that I didn’t know about?” (68). The models of womanhood that she has had before her in life are far different from these Godey’s images. Of her mother, we are told, she is a “good specimen of womanhood. . . . That’s what Pa always said. Big boned. Built for times of trouble, Pa said. Good for the distance. He described her as he would a horse. But it was her smile, her inner strength more than her build, that carried us through trouble” (4). Her mother’s performance of her domestic role dehumanizes her in the eyes of her husband; Annie corrects the view, shining light on her strength of character. Annie suffers a gendered “terror of confusion” when she is called “pretty” by Mrs. Nichols, a woman with whom she stays on the way to the Kennedy farm and who

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“fussed over” her: “Pretty? Me? I did not want to be pretty. I wanted to be useful. Where had I failed?” (34). Unsure how she should behave as a woman going off to war, Annie is caught between competing demands and constructions of womanhood, between “what she [Mrs. Nichols] thought I was, and what I knew I wasn’t. Yet what I secretly longed to be” (35). Feeling keenly that her family is not “normal,” she is drawn to a normative femininity, but is challenging it at the same time (50). Mine Eyes Have Seen paints John Brown as a man who is blind to the cause of women’s rights even as he fights for the rights of blacks to be free. We learn in one chapter heading that Mama counted Lucy Stone and Lucretia Mott friends, and they were suffragettes. Mama had gone to the Seneca Falls Convention in New York eleven years ago, where women adopted a Declaration of Independence. It caused a stir in our house, I can tell you. Pa said what did women want with rights? Mama said the same as Negroes wanted. But Pa just couldn’t get a purchase on that idea, that women should be entitled to rights, same as Negroes. (257)

In an earlier scene, Martha says to Annie when her father treats her dismissively: “And to think that your ma is friends with Lucretia Mott” (42). And, as Annie herself comes to see,“I suppose you have to be a man to have a common meeting ground with Pa” (130). She suffers under this patriarchal rule, and Alcott reinforces Annie’s budding feminist sentiments: “ ‘They want us to be womanly,’ she said. ‘Which means to be strong and comforting for them when they need us to be. At the same time they want to crush our intellect, punish our strengths, and encourage our weaknesses so we are dependent upon them’ ” (xii). Both young women see that there are norms of gender behavior to which they are expected to conform, but in doing so they expose the sexist conditions that seek to define them. Notably, it is not just how to behave as a woman, but also how to behave as a man that is at issue in the novel. The code of masculinity is very much in evidence at the death scene of Oliver: “ ‘Be quiet,’ Pa said. ‘If you must die, die like a man’ ” (252). Annie also sees that her betrothed Dauphin is trying to conform to a stereotyped performance of manhood: “I don’t want you to think you have to do this to prove yourself a man to Pa” (26). He frequently is taunted by the other men, who call him “girl” and “Buttercup,” undermining his sense of his masculinity (123). When Hazlett sees him mopping the floor, that is, doing “woman’s work,”he yells,“you finally found your true purpose, I see” (154). When he teases him about his name (“Your mother run outa boys’ names time she got to you?”), Dauphin strikes back (154). He is beaten up fairly badly, but refuses the ministrations of Annie, his manhood more than bruised: “It was clear he didn’t want to be attended to by a girl” (156).

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Rinaldi explains at the end of her novel that “in all the factual books on Brown and his famous raid, Annie appears as a walk-on, a bit player. But she leapt out at me like a star begging to be born” (266). By being positioned in a lead role, Annie is allowed to wield power not only over the raiders at the Kennedy farm, whom she was charged with keeping under control, but also over herself. At the end she is able to make confident judgments about the people who chose to take part in the raid, as well as about those who did not, even though she remains ambivalent toward her father, still “loving and hating him all at the same time.” Invested with agency, this fictionalized Annie is given hope of repairing the damage her father inflicted, and, in a state of calm reflection, is left to “wonder if my aura is healed now that I have written this,” “if,” as she says finally, “I have talked all the fire out” (265). Gwen Everett’s picture book John Brown: One Man Against Slavery (1993) similarly is told from Annie Brown’s point of view, but her wrestling with her father’s violent tactics and legacy is more fully resolved than it is in the work of Rinaldi. The paintings by Jacob Lawrence, which dominate the text, bring to life the graphic nature of the struggle Brown waged. In 1941, Lawrence created a series of gouaches of Brown, the only depiction of the abolitionist’s story in serial form, creating a figure of heroic proportion without ignoring the bloody outcome of Brown’s path. Each painting uses a language of simple geometric shapes and strong color contrasts in depicting an episode in the life of Brown. The primitivism of this portraiture draws attention to the simple faith and raw defiance that Brown put up in the face of slavery and the laws protecting it. In both the visual and verbal text, he appears as a violent hero, but is unblemished by questions about his allegiance to his family, in particular Annie. In Everett’s narrative Annie recounts the story of “Father’s liberation army” and faces her own fears and anxieties about the path her father is traveling: “That night I couldn’t sleep. I wondered whether supplying people with weapons was the best way to end slavery. Why did my father feel the need to use deadly force? Why couldn’t he write about slavery the way Harriet Beecher Stowe did in Uncle Tom’s Cabin?” (5, 7). This consideration—that the pen prevail over the sword—sways her: “Father could choose to use the pen to fight slavery, I decided” (7). She even recommends to him that he write a book about the black and white families of North Elba who live together in harmony (14). The agency of authorship is affirmed here, as it is in Rinaldi’s novel; however, it is for John Brown, not Annie, who remains dutifully in the background, to assume authorship. Everett presents a portrait of a loving daughter, one whose sole concern is for the safety of her father: “The morning he left I hugged him for a long time because I could already imagine the dangers he would face” (25).

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After she is sent home, and the raid is underway, she says, “I wished I could have been there to tell Father how courageous I thought he was” (26). The struggle that she undergoes (“Can one person really make a difference in correcting a national injustice? Is freedom worth dying for?”) is answered affirmatively at the end, where, upon pointing to the fact that the raid “was one of the most important events leading to the Civil War,” her moral certitude rings clear: “Yes indeed, I think to myself, one man against slavery did make a difference” (11, 28). Contemporary historical fiction featuring boys as protagonists takes a somewhat different view of John Brown and his violent tactics, as these tactics serve as backdrop to the initiation of the child into the norms of masculine behavior. Added to this interest in the performance of gender is the recognition of the place of race and class in the lives of these boys, whose relationships with their fathers are filtered through their thoughts and feelings about Brown. The ritual performance of identity that they undergo—their attempts to act and gesture as men— reflect on the ambiguities of Brown’s position, in particular on the role of violence and the meaning of family in a morally complex world. Douglas Rees’s Lightning Time (1997) stars Theodore (Teddy) Worth, a fictional white 14-year-old boy with parents who are united in their opposition to slavery, although they disagree about John Brown. Teddy has a strained relationship with his father, who sees Brown as a murderer, and he assesses the worth of his father in the light of Brown, who poses as a surrogate father to him through much of the novel. In an early scene Teddy is left at home with his mother as a sort of protector in his father’s absence, and reflects, “I was standing in for my father. I liked the feeling” (32). This desire to usurp the place of the father—to be his own man—leads him to voice his dissent over the matter of John Brown and his methods: “John Brown was defending his country, not betraying it. Why couldn’t he see that?” (39). Lashing out at his father, Teddy mocks: “In my head a voice cried, You’ve never done anything in your life to free a single slave, Father. What right have you to sneer at those who have?” (48). When his father criticizes Brown, Teddy rushes to defend him: “John Brown is a man I consider to be principled and heroic. I do not want to hear him insulted” (48). Teddy does not respect his father’s values, and is particularly displeased by his father’s class consciousness: Teddy has been sent to school “to become a proper Bostonian,” and it does not matter to his father that the school is “dull” (42). He rebels against his father’s normative views, asserting the superiority of the moral and spiritual over the material, and turns a deaf ear to his father when he advises, “Money is no little thing, Theodore, as you will discover when you are responsible for making it” (48). In denying a likeness to his father (“I am not my father,” he says bluntly at one point), he is told by Dr. Howe (the husband of Julia Ward

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Howe), “you are not quite your own man, either,” and responds that “I need to find John Brown. . . . I have to find my own way to fight slavery. And I think John Brown is the man to tell me” (91). At the end, after Teddy has been captured in the raid, his father, who has come to get him out of jail, is austere: “ ‘I must advise you to say nothing more concerning your case,’ my father said. ‘You are in trouble enough’ ” (157). No revaluation of the father in light of the events of Harper’s Ferry occurs; rather, Teddy’s esteem for Brown, whom he suspects of sending him on a mission that would keep him from getting wounded or killed, grows, and his father remains unmoved. Distancing himself from his parents (“I do not see things as my family does”), Teddy insists on charting his own course into manhood under the advisement of Brown. Brown actively encourages Teddy’s growth into manhood, stoking his drive for independence by telling Teddy that “A man ought to have an opinion” (with the idea that Teddy is a man already), and he will not be immune to Teddy’s critique (36). Early on, Brown looms as a larger-thanlife presence for Teddy, who wants “war stories” and clearly is intrigued by the violent halo that surrounds Brown: if cornered, he wonders, “would he appear at the landing with weapons in his hands, blazing at the marshal and the police?” (17, 24). This view of Brown begins to break apart when Teddy meets with Brown at his North Elba farmhouse later in the novel; there he noticed for the first time that he was not as big as I had remembered. I recalled him nearly as a giant, but he was almost exactly my height, and I am not tall,” though he “seemed fiercer than ever” (99). As the novel proceeds, Teddy begins to doubt him (“Brown’s plan was brilliant. Brown’s plan could not work”) (127); he critiques the man he once defended absolutely, wondering, “How could Brown, Osawatomie Brown, have been so stupid?” as not to have prepared for a safe retreat from Harper’s Ferry (144). It is significant, though, that he does not question the need for violence, but rather the feasibility of the planned raid and its execution. Despite his qualms, Teddy believes that “somehow, John Brown will free the slaves” and chooses to stay and fight with him, proving by that decision that he is “as free as a man ever is” (129). As his development progresses, Teddy begins to see and understand more fully the moral complexity of the world. For instance, he learns that his grandfather’s wealth is “built on the labor and blood of slaves” and wonders, “Had he [his grandfather] been a hypocrite, or had he simply not been able to see his connection to a thing he knew was wicked? Or had money answered every question for him?” (69, 73). Later, Teddy recognizes that through his participation in the underground railroad his grandfather “had rescued more slaves than old John Brown. He had borne the disdain of other good men and pretended friendship with bad ones, all to save men

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and women from bondage” (87). He learns that money in itself is not wicked, or, more to the point, that even blood money can be redeemed by spending it to defeat the institution that generates it. Issues of class and gender assume center stage in the novel as well, and these two sociological factors are in many ways entangled. Teddy’s father tells him that he will have to give up his hobby of telegraphy, as it does not befit his station in life: “The sort of people who engage in telegraphy, Theodore, are frequently disreputable and are never the sort of people with whom our sort associate” (40). To this, his wife retorts, “As for telegraphers being persons of low worth, I think thee are wrong, my love. It is true they are poorly paid, but they are decent. Remember that this is one of the few things a woman may honestly do to support herself ”; as Teddy feels, “She had my father there. Like Dr. Howe, he was a strong believer in women’s rights” (41). However, this feminist current does not influence the depiction of Annie in the novel. As opposed to other fictional accounts, Annie is shown “adoringly” watching her father and devotedly “wait[ing] on him hand and foot” (99, 100). She defends her father against his critics and at his burial “stared straight into the grave without trying to wipe away her tears, and smiled” (158). She serves as a foil to Teddy, who does not exhibit her filial devotion because he does not have a father like Brown. The issue of class is further explored through Teddy’s relationship with the telegrapher Bob Gibbons, a relationship that highlights the differences between working- and middle-class views on slavery in the nineteenth century. Gibbons’s racist defense of slavery infuriates Teddy (Gibbons thinks Brown should be hanged), and when he asks Gibbons to look into his heart, Gibbons declares, “I’ve got a white man’s heart” (58). At that, Teddy throws his beer in Bob’s face, and in response Bob punches Teddy in the eye, causing him to fall on his back and finally to stumble blindly out of the restaurant. At another point in the novel, when Jacob, a free black man employed at Teddy’s grandparents’ estate, is kidnapped, Teddy, who is powerless to do anything, suffers the taunts of the slave catcher,“For all your fancy clothes, you’re less than a man like me” (81). Here again, Teddy encounters a norm of masculine identity that is coded workingclass, a manhood that is proven by one’s willingness and ability to visit violence upon others. Although his Quaker mother refuses violence as the answer, telling him that “violence is never just, Theodore, even in the best cause,” the world teaches him otherwise: that being a man means defending yourself and others, not being afraid to fight (95). When Bill Leeman, one of Brown’s men, insults Teddy, calling him “the boy,” and later “girly,” Teddy replies with force, “Here’s a man’s fight for you!” hitting Leeman in the nose and making him bleed (119, 122). Notwithstanding this internecine war, Teddy

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enjoys the male bonding that occurs during the months leading up to the raid and after; when he is captured at Harper’s Ferry and thrown into jail, Teddy holds hands with his comrades, Shields and Edwin, declaring, “Live or die, I was one of these men” (149). Their concerted violence binds them together forever. When he leaves Harvard (where he apparently goes without Brown to guide him) to volunteer, along with Bob Gibbons, as an army telegrapher at the start of the Civil War, he further proves that he is his own man, serving in what is regarded by him as a just, if violent, cause. Alan N. Kay’s On the Trail of John Brown’s Body (2001) tells the story of George and David Adams, two Boston cousins who must come to terms with their parents and come to an understanding of what it means to be a man in the world. When the story begins they are plotting to steal money from their grandfather to find a way to recover a slave girl they have seen taken by slave catchers (a similar trope motivates the action in Rees’s novel, with the kidnapping of Jacob). After taking the money, David flees to Kansas where his abolitionist mother and father live; however, George is caught, and he and his father, Sean, go in search of David in an effort to recover a list of names of those who have aided John Brown financially that David unwittingly takes with him to Kansas along with the stolen money. Unlike Rees’s novel, where father and son are emotionally estranged, Kay’s novel foregrounds the father–son relationship in a unique way, showing through its action the vital importance of having a loving father in a boy’s moral development. In their journey west to locate David, George and his father become closer than ever before: “The best thing about this trip was that George and his dad were finally together. . . . Now with David and the rest of the family out of the picture, George had his father all to himself ” (20). We find that on the prairie “George felt the closest to his dad. They were all alone in this beautiful land and they could talk about anything” (28). This intimacy allows George to feel secure, to sense his own value as a person and to make judgments and take on responsibilities accordingly. When they begin to talk about George’s mother, who is dead, the bonding grows intense: “It was the best time George had ever had with his father. Finally, the last barriers were breaking between them. They could talk about anything now, not just the past” (30). The frontier suspends ordinary urban social pressures, which for Sean and George include race prejudice in Boston, and gives them a chance to bond; as George tells his dad, “It’s so stuffy there. I can never do what I want; people are always making fun of us because we’re Irish; and you gotta work so hard that I don’t ever see you. Can’t we go somewhere else or stay here on the prairie?” (40). One of the ways in which fathers and sons connect with each other in the novel is through baseball: “The best times occurred when Charles and his dad [friends of the protagonist in Lawrence, Kansas] would go into

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town to play a game of baseball with David, George, and their fathers. Most of the time the fathers were too busy with their chores; however, on a rare Saturday or Sunday when the weather permitted and the chores were completed, all six of them would walk onto a clear section of the prairie near the house and play a father and son baseball game” (67). Kay describes at length the antics of the boys and men on the field—tickling, giggling, and joking with each other. Just after one game George tells Charles that David’s father often leaves the family without warning to join in abolitionist activities, and David becomes emotional when he is forced to confront the fact that his father “always disappeared, leaving them all alone,” though he defends him from George’s accusations (72); when David says his father has important things to do, George responds, “What’s more important than being with your family?” (73). In contrast to this camaraderie, the acts of physical violence that take place between the boys, and between the fathers, and that stand in for the larger historical field of violence of which Brown is a part, highlight the struggle to define oneself as a man in the world, the pressures to conform to norms of manliness. Indeed, the illustration on the cover of the book makes this point clear: a militant John Brown (reminiscent of the John Steuart Curry mural image, which is reproduced inside the book) hovers over the two boys, David and George, one of whom is bleeding from his nose and the other of whom is pressing his right fist into his open left palm. In the first such episode, George punches David as soon as they meet up in Lawrence for leaving him to take all the blame for stealing the money; the description is graphic: “Suddenly, his face was smashed to the side as a fist pounded his cheek. Blood spurted through his teeth and his body was thrown backwards” (45). George then lands another punch, this one in David’s stomach, before they start to wrestle. This scene is meant to call attention to a culture that equates violence with masculinity. They fight again near the end of the novel in an argument about David’s father’s support of Brown: “ ‘Aaahh,’ George cried as blood from his nose and chin splattered onto David’s shirt. But David didn’t stop. He hit George all the harder making his face move to and fro with each punch” (152). On another occasion, David levels “a deadly blow to Charles’ face,” a blow that results in a bloody nose (76). He is trying to act like a man, that is, to act in the way he has been taught men act. It is the voice of the mother that sounds the note of defiance, laying bare the gendered nature of physical violence in her world. David’s mother, Regina, says to David and George: “You boys, . . . you’re like the men, using your fists to solve all your problems. . . . I sit here and wonder why you men always have to fight” (78). She then ties their behavior to that of her husband, John: “I’ve tried to convince your father to try a different path

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but he doesn’t listen! He’s gone crazy with hatred; he’s gone crazy with a desire to end slavery at all costs. You’ve got to stop him, David. You’ve got to make him see that there is another way” (79). When John heads east to Harper’s Ferry to take part in Brown’s scheduled raid, Sean tries “to stop him without using force,” but a fight breaks out between them when Sean and George catch up with him (111). In the skirmish, John ends up falling over a cliff, and dies. The suggestion would seem to be that violence, directed in whatever way, is self-consuming. Sean, who is injured, tells George he must go on alone to Harper’s Ferry to warn the people of the impending raid; nearing the town, he is captured and held hostage in the armory by Brown and his men. Father and son share “a strong, soft hug” as George departs and, when they finally are reunited, “George hugged him [his father] so tight he almost knocked him down,” a gesture that further signifies the closeness they have achieved and stands as a counterweight to the violence surrounding it in the novel (122, 144). This loving behavior throws into relief John Brown’s ideology of manliness and his austere treatment of his own sons. As Oliver is dying, having been hit during the raid, his father commands coldly: “If you must die, then die like a man!” (138). The scene prompts the following reflection: “ ‘What kind of man is this John Brown?’ George thought to himself, ‘who is willing to watch his own sons die on the floor’ ” (138). Later, with his dad, he continues to struggle with Brown’s callousness to his two dying sons, “ignoring their pain because he wanted to win” (148). In the end, Sean tries to show his son that the world is not in black and white, that true manhood entails an appreciation of the moral ambiguities and ironies as they actually exist. Of John Brown, Sean admits to George that “you have to admire someone who is willing to fight and die for what he believes”; he goes on to address explicitly the issue of gender: “Sometimes being a man comes with certain responsibilities. You can’t always do what you want even if it means your life or your family’s. You got to remember your duty to God and your country as well” (148, 149). In other words, Sean is saying, there is a way to approve of Brown’s conduct. In the face of George’s refusal to see Brown as innocent as some do, he explains that “Life is never that easy,” that “Even though you saw Brown commit his crimes with your own eyes, other people say that the reason he did it makes him innocent” (148). It is through such lessons at the knee of his father that George’s moral sense is shaped, his manhood attested. Left without a father, David loses his bearings; as Brown is led to the gallows, David queries him from the crowd, looking for guidance, but receives no answer: “What should I do now?” he wonders (155). Sean and George are not in doubt about what to do next: in the end, “After seeing Brown praised in the North, George and his father

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were so disgusted with this attitude that they decided to never return to Boston” (157). They take the advice of John Wilkes Booth, whom they meet along the way, and move to Richmond. Although the future assassin of Lincoln is not identified as such, Booth’s appearance here indicates that violence is ingrained in American cultural life and that all sides resort to it. Kay’s novel, in staging a debate about Brown and his tactics, finally asserts the importance of a nurturing family in a morally clouded world, while it seeks to contest and transcend traditional constructions of manhood, in particular the violence associated with it. At issue in contemporary children’s literature about John Brown and his legacy is the performance of personal identity. Through this fiction we see just how contingent social constructions of identity are and how strong is the binary frame of gender, which is often broken, or at least exposed; we watch as characters either reinscribe socially prescribed roles, or, as is more frequently the case, seek to challenge and revise thinking about them. In doing so, the writers point up the enduring modes of conduct that govern our lives—modes that all young people confront as they figure out how and who they will be in the world. They locate in the figure of John Brown and his real or fictive associates a fit lens through which to judge not only the shaping of children’s moral sensibilities in Brown’s day, but in our own.

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More Heat than Light: The Legacy of John Brown in Russell Banks’s Cloudsplitter Kimberly Rae Connor

There was a man sent from God, whose name was John. He came as a witness to testify to the light, so that all might believe through him. He himself was not the light, but he came to testify to the light. John 1:6–8 His zeal for the cause was far greater than mine—it was the burning sun to my taper light Frederick Douglass You can’t stand too near the heat of a character like John Brown. It scalds you. Russell Banks

n 2002 President Bill Clinton was inducted into the Arkansas Black Hall of Fame, the first non-black recognized in the hall’s ten-year history. His election was not surprising to those familiar with Toni Morrison’s claim in a 1998 New Yorker piece—at the height of the former President’s scandal—that “white skin not withstanding, this is our first black President. Blacker than any actual black person who could ever be elected in our children’s lifetime.” Morrison’s criteria for designating Clinton as black include the fact that he

I

displays almost every trope of blackness: single-parent household, born poor, working-class, saxophone-playing, McDonald’s-and-junk-food-loving boy from Arkansas. And when virtually all of the African American Clinton

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appointees began, one by one, to disappear, when the President’s body, his privacy, his unpoliced sexuality became the focus of the persecution, when he was metaphorically seized and body-searched, who could gainsay these black men who knew whereof they spoke? The message was clear: “No matter how smart you are, how hard you work, how much coin you earn for us, we will put you in your place or put you out of the place you have somehow, albeit with our permission, achieved. . . . In short, unless you do as we say (i.e., assimilate at once), your expletives belong to us.” (32)

Morrison’s description of Clinton’s blackness does not valorize it as an achievement; her nod to black tropes of deprivation and victimization demonstrates how limited our cultural view of blackness remains. His election to the Black Hall of Fame is a singular achievement only because he is white. In a reversal of standards that merit hall of fame recognition, what makes Clinton black in public consciousness are stereotypical qualities that promote the most pathological associations with black life and reinscribe the privileges and power of whiteness. The only other white person in history who might, like Clinton, be elected to a Black Hall of Fame is John Brown. Brown, like Clinton, “stands right there where all those fractures in society cross: the racial fracture, class fracture, religious fracture, they all cross right under his feet” (Benvenuto 1998, 26). Criteria for Brown’s selection would be similar to Clinton’s, although more dramatically exemplary. John Brown, too, came from a poor, working-class population and struggled all his life for stability and recognition. Although Clinton’s Ivy League education made him a policy wonk and gave him access to elite circles of power, it did not prevent him from playing Elvis tunes on his saxophone or telling his debate opponent “Bob, that dog won’t hunt.” So too were the distinctions between high and low culture irrelevant to Brown. John Brown was as comfortable in an abolitionist’s Beacon Hill sitting room as he was in an ex-slave’s rustic cabin and he “thought that Milton and Jonathan Edwards were as available to him as penny broadsides” (Faggen 1998, 56). This kind of transgression between race and class lines effected by Clinton and Brown, as Morrison’s comments make clear, is threatening to those in the dominant culture who wish to maintain their place in the social hierarchy. It often leads to persecution of those who would blur the lines as Clinton and Brown did. While Clinton endured humiliating legal scrutiny for his transgressions, Brown’s victimization came at a price even more extreme; Brown actually died as a kind of victim of racism, as a martyr to the cause of abolitionism. In both instances, the power of the dominant culture in determining these men’s fate, whatever their individual accomplishments and achievements, is

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dramatically demonstrated by the fact that both Clinton and Brown inspire in the American public a polarity of opinion. Much of this polarity falls along racial lines, as in both instances the black community has supported each man while the white population is much more divided about their individual merits or the value of their enduring legacies. They are loved or hated, esteemed or ridiculed, extolled or excoriated, held up as role models or denigrated as aberrations because “truth is strictly shaped by the needs of those who wish to receive it” (Banks 1998, 620). Seldom does anyone take a middle road when it comes to Clinton and Brown and the moral ambiguity they represent, while at the same time they presume that their position is, in fact, correct, a phenomena novelist Russell Banks describes as “an especially American hierarchy of value, I think—the predilection for ‘Just the facts, ma’am’ ” (Banks 2000, 3). That same Russell Banks, however, is one who took up a middle road when he published Cloudsplitter, a novel about John Brown and much more because it is a historical novel with resonance in the present. Banks began the novel with “just the facts,” as established by constituents on both sides of the Brown issue. But he understood that his role as a novelist was to “Start with what you know, maybe, but use it to let you write about what you don’t know” (Banks 2000, 7). In writing the novel Banks was all too aware of the mountain of material on Brown but also of its insufficiency. He also appreciated that “you can’t stand too near the heat of a character like John Brown. It scalds you. To see him as other than an icon, you need the distancing that a weaker character provides” (Faggen 1998, 80). So Banks invented Owen Brown as “the perfect narrator” (Faggen 1998, 81). Because he was the only Brown son at Harper’s Ferry to escape but had never told his story, and because he saved his father’s papers, rather than burning them as he was instructed, Owen can do what history has not done for John Brown. He can do what the title of the novel announces in its allusion to the Adirondack Mountain in full view from John Brown’s farm—“clear away, or split, the clouds that surround his father’s actions and character” (Faggen 1998, 80). In the novel Banks shows us how Brown engendered, through his son Owen, “a man of another time: a man of the future . . . a modern man” (Banks 1998, 740). It is this modern man speaking in the period voice of another century who is created by Banks to address the questions begged by the examples of Clinton and Brown. Why is it that only one modern white man enjoys the distinction of being Black-Hall-of-Fame-worthy and why is it that the criteria for blackness remain the same? As one reviewer observed of Cloudsplitter, “Banks is after something more morally severe than historical re-creation. He wants to grasp how one might be a good white man in America” (Malcomson 1998, 100) and maybe how he might become black.

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Provisional answers to these questions are provided by the trinity of quotes that begin this essay and establish the progression of Russell Banks’s literary logic in Cloudsplitter. In history and in the novel, John Brown moves from being a witness to light to becoming a light that burns so bright that his heat scalds. As Owen explains his father’s movement, John Brown went from being a “principled, religious-minded young Northern man agitated by Negro slavery in the South and racialism everywhere,” to middle-age activist, to an old-age “free-booting guerilla, when he moved swiftly on to become a terrorist and finally, astonishingly, a martyr” (674). This movement is moral, racial, and, ultimately for Banks, narrative. The moral and racial contours that shape any understanding of John Brown include the cultural discourse and social forces of the time. Biblical comparisons and religious mythmaking contributed toward portraying Brown as a prophetic martyr. Abolitionism and minstrelsy, the two dominant social forms of racial intercourse “merged with and repelled each other” (Lott 1993, 111) in ways that defined the historical moment in which John Brown appeared. Banks’s narrative method for addressing this moral and racial complexity represented by biblical, abolitionist, and minstrel discourse is to turn to the original form of black literary expression in America as his model: the slave narrative. Banks resolves his narrative dilemma by extending the slave narrative tradition to include the voice of a white man as narrator. As Merrill Peterson’s comprehensive and compact book, John Brown: A Legend Revisited, makes clear, almost without exception John Brown has been held up as a hero for the black community ever since he was hanged for treason at Harper’s Ferry. Peterson explains: “In the course of working out their own black history, they seized upon Brown as a symbol of their rights and their humanity” (Peterson 2002, 153–154). Even among African American leaders where one would expect a more qualified assessment of Brown, as in the case of Malcolm X, one hears such a claim: “If you are for me—when I say me I mean us, our people—then you have to be willing to do as old John Brown did” (quoted in Peterson 2002, 153). Yet Malcolm X’s comment is instructive because it points to the very reason why Brown “is the blackest white man anyone had ever known” (Peterson 2002, 152). Although Brown was known as one who engaged African Americans on a personal level, who was so utterly at ease among blacks that his son Owen observes that “It was as if he secretly believed that at bottom he himself was Negro” (Banks 1998, 415), it was the extremity—the heat—of Brown’s example, his willingness to take up arms and to die, that makes Brown so important. As Peterson observes at the conclusion of his study, Brown “would come to be defined by his martyrdom. The manner of his death was infinitely more important than his life” (171). Identification of his

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martyrdom as the most significant aspect of his identity is a trope that was established well before Malcolm X and most memorably promoted by W.E.B. Du Bois in his biography of John Brown. Brown’s religious fervor—and the setting of his times—naturally invites biblical comparisons like the one made by Du Bois. As Alfred Kazin wrote in God and the American Writer: “One cannot think of the long, long story of black bondage and the war that ended it without a shiver of awe. It is the one chapter in American life that brings us back to biblical history” (quoted in Scott 1998, 27). William Cain particularizes Kazin’s generalization in his study of Du Bois’s biography, “Violence, Revolution, and the Cost of Freedom: John Brown and W.E.B. Du Bois,” when he observes that “Du Bois’s insight into the literary and religious contexts within which Brown lived, and according to which he was interpreted, rightly accents the symbolic dimension of the slavery crisis of the 1850s. It was a period when persons saw themselves as historical agents who performed destined roles and who naturally turned to fatefully momentous events and hugely significant characters in classic texts in order better to enrich and emblazon their conduct” (312). In other words, Brown’s contemporaries found in the Bible a narrative truth around which they shaped his identity, one that Du Bois later recasts in his own recitation of Brown’s life and which Russell Banks extends in his novel, illustrating how Brown himself used similar strategies to shape his own identity. As Owen explains, even as his own faith faded, he was aware of “the unusual degree to which our lives as a family and as individuals were described, prescribed, and subscribed by the Bible. . . . as understood, interpreted, and applied by our father, John Brown. It was almost as if we were characters in the Good Book and had no other lives or destinies than what Father said had been given to us” (32–33). Before Du Bois, Brown had been compared with Samson, Moses, Joshua, David, Gideon, Job, Abraham, and John the Baptist (as well as many secular heroes).1 In the novel, Brown actually compares himself to Aaron as he attempts to persuade Frederick Douglass to play Moses: I would have you be the Moses of your people, sire. Not me, and not any other white man. No, Mister Douglass, I would be Aaron unto thee, anointed and consecrated by thee, and then I would go forth and make the blood sacrifice for both our peoples. The crime against one is the sin of the other, and to avenge the crime is to expunge the sin. (408)

Aaron, of course, was Moses’s brother who despite his backsliding was spared to continue God’s work in liberating the people of Israel and with whom God established his blessing on the people (Numbers 6:27).

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Douglass, however, does not anoint Brown in his lifetime. Twice in the novel, Douglass distances himself from Brown’s liberation schemes. Just before Harper’s Ferry, Owen describes how “for an entire day [Douglass] and Father wrestled like angels, as the one struggled to keep the other from martyrdom, and the other fought to convince the one to save him from martyrdom by joining him there. And that both men lost the fight” (727). Only later in an 1881 address would Douglass claim: “[John Brown’s] zeal for the cause was far greater than mine—it was the burning sun to my taper light” (Peterson 2002, 49). In the Hebrew Bible, Brown, as Aaron, would have fulfilled the role later played by John the Baptist, as one who testifies to but is not the light. But in Du Bois’s recreation, anticipated by Douglass, Brown becomes the light himself. Others had linked Brown to Jesus tangentially, but it was Du Bois who made the comparison explicit and took the prophetic voice of John Brown to its incarnational limit when he said John Brown is “fit to be named with Jesus Christ” (Sundquist 1993, 598). As Cain explains, Du Bois probes “the basis in black experience for the heroism that the white crusader Brown displayed. In John Brown, Du Bois meditates upon his subject and reinterprets it so that it symbolizes black rather than white achievement” (307). One of the ways Du Bois effects this reinterpretation is by turning Brown into a black Christ, a familiar image from the spirituals (a form Du Bois had previously honored in Souls of Black Folk). Du Bois observed that to Brown, “The world was a mighty drama. God was an actor in the play and so was John Brown” (Du Bois 1973, 46). Du Bois specifies the role Brown would act in a piece he wrote for The Horizon, a 1909 essay that prepared the way for the biography he would publish the same year: “This is Christmas time and the time of John Brown. On the second of this month he was crucified, on the 8th he was buried, and on the 25th, fifty years later let him rise from the dead in every Negro-American home. Jesus came not to bring peace but a sword. So did John Brown. Jesus Christ gave his life as a sacrifice for the lowly. So did John Brown” (Cain 1994, 321). In making such a claim for Brown here and later when he links him in a litany of black achievement—“Of all inspiration which America owes to Africa, however, the greatest by far is the score of heroic men whom the sorrows of these dark children called to unselfish devotion and heroic self-realization . . . above all, John Brown” (Du Bois 1973, 7)—Du Bois exchanges whiteness as the measure of a man with blackness. In effect, Du Bois Africanizes American history and white Americans. Russell Banks accomplishes something similar in Cloudsplitter, but with a modern spin. He argues, as Du Bois did, that “blacks showed the way to whites, directed the thoughts of white men such as Brown, and supplied the

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energizing motive for white abolitionism” (Cain 1994, 325). Abolitionism, then, becomes about black initiative that moved whites to help them, about blacks being Moses, and whites their Aaron, just as Banks recreates Brown in his novel, up to a point. Eventually Banks shifts the focus from what is the measure of a man’s virtue to what is the measure of his vice. He investigates not what is pathological in blackness as most social critics do but explores what is pathological in whiteness. He shows us how Brown failed to stay in his role as Aaron, and further, how he consciously contributed to the creation of his own myth with himself as Christ. In his attempt to transgress racial boundaries Brown became “a man who, neither white nor Negro,” was therefore “dangerous” (Banks 1998, 433). His racial confusion combined with his own sense of his religious destiny led him to become “a man of God who would lead God’s chosen people out of Egypt into the promised land, and who would do it even as he denied he was doing it, who would be Moses while claiming merely to be Aaron” (Banks 1998, 432). The riddle John Brown poses for Du Bois, that remains our problem, Eric Sundquist casts in the following way: “How can subsequent generations discover a similar compelling righteousness in their own day?” (Sundquist 1993, 598). But it was Du Bois’s reconfiguration—as well as Brown’s own righteous hubris in leaving his role as Aaron to become not just Moses but Christ—that contributed to the riddle’s perplexity. This recasting of John Brown does not address the fundamental problems that arise when equating Brown with Christ, when he ceases to be the testimony to and becomes the light itself, when one ignores the apostle John’s distinction between John the Baptist and Christ. When John Brown is perceived as he perceived himself, “transformed from a mortal man— an extraordinary and famous man, to be sure, but still, only a man—into a hero bathed in swirls of light,” who uses such a characterization “for his own secret purposes” (Banks 1998, 659), his light becomes heat. The problem with linking Brown with Jesus, therefore, becomes two-fold. First, it reinscribes a concept of redemptive suffering as an appropriate and necessary theological interpretation and response to racism, a position that Anthony Pinn, Victor Anderson, and others have shown to be not just flawed but damaging when applied to African American experience. Pinn, for example, takes strong exception to the notion of redemptive suffering, regarding it as a roadblock to liberation. And Anderson challenges us to ask: “At what point do thriving and flourishing enter the equation of suffering and resistance? An existence that is bound existentially only by the dimensions of struggle and resistance or survival, it seems to me, constitutes a less than fulfilling human existence” (112). Second, offering up Jesus as a model, while certainly a Christian ideal (in current Christian-speak, John Brown probably would have asked

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himself “What Would Jesus Do?”) is one that most, including most Christians, are unlikely to emulate, especially when the emphasis is placed, as Du Bois does, on the avenging and sacrificial Christ, not the peaceful and merciful Christ. Few can assume the religious character of John Brown as assessed by Owen: “Father believed in the incomparable reality of Christ, after all, not the incorporeal idea. Father’s cross was a neatly carpentered scaffold in Virginia, not a spiked pair of rough timbers in Jerusalem” (5). As a model for how we deal with concrete instances of racism, how we develop modes of interracial relationship, how we challenge hegemony, and how we promote positive images of both blackness and whiteness, John Brown doesn’t take us very far. It is this aspect of his legend that Russell Banks so powerfully conveys in Cloudsplitter. By choosing to narrate his story through Brown’s son, Owen, Banks creates a method for exploring simultaneously the personal and historical implications of Brown’s legacy of providing more heat than light. Banks reveals how Brown’s legacy left very little for his heirs, either his actual heirs, like Owen, or generations of Americans who would try to follow Brown’s injunction to his own son: “I sometimes believe that you must become a hotter man than you are” (Banks 1998, 277). The novel makes us appreciate the consequences of this kind of heat, the combustible dynamic between the personal and the political, the public and the private, and the costs and causes of commitment to a cause for a family that “lived every single day in the full glare of his light . . . for, compared to the rest of us, no matter how hotly burned our individual flame, Father’s was a conflagration. He burned and burned, ceaselessly, it seemed, and though we were sometimes scorched by his flame, we were seldom warmed by it” (Banks 1998, 103–104). It was not just the immediate Brown family that was scorched by Brown’s righteous heat. Apart from the abolitionists he eventually inspired from a distance, Brown is portrayed as unsuccessful in his attempts to communicate his abolitionist message to his own community. In one scene in the novel, after a fugitive slave family the community has rescued has been exposed as murderers and slave catchers appear to bring them to justice, Brown’s response to his frightened neighbors is a rambling biblical discourse that does little to enlighten them on interracial relations or the moral complexity of the situation. Rather Brown chastises them and asserts his own righteousness: “We shall live by our principles. You, my good neighbors, may do as you wish” (267). John Brown’s righteousness, therefore, is not one everyone can follow and in Owen’s predicament is not just a case study of a father-son conflict; it is an example of the struggle with the societal conditions and conventions that make a just and decent form of racial transgression impossible. Because John Brown’s “own light burned so brightly that it eclipsed

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the Sun that shone on him,” his son “received only reflected light” (105) that did little to illuminate the path he should take in life. Or as one reviewer observed of Cloudsplitter, “[the novel] gnaws at the moral impossibilities of being white” (Malcomson 1998, 100), an image Owen recreates when he describes his relationship to his father: “anyone who opposes Father as Satan opposes God, could, if I merely questioned Father, prove me a hypocrite. That answer turned me into a trapped animal, a fox with a paw clamped in an iron-toothed jaw; to escape it I would be obliged to gnaw at my own flesh and separate my body from itself. Freed I would be a crippled little beast unable to care for himself, unable even to flee. I would have obtained freedom, yes, but freedom for what?” (268). The problems attendant on Brown’s inability to leave a functional legacy of interracial cooperation do not lie entirely with Brown’s character flaws or his subsequent mythic characterization by others. Historical contingencies and context also set forth very mixed messages about how blacks and whites should or could relate, making it very complicated for Brown to communicate a coherent message to his sons and daughters. The antebellum structure of racial feeling in which John Brown moved was characterized by two polar modes of representing and responding to racial feeling: blackface minstrelsy and abolitionism. As Eric Lott has demonstrated in Love and Theft, minstrelsy is an important index of popular white racial feeling in the United States in the nineteenth century because blackface performance was the first formal public acknowledgment by whites of black culture. Furthermore, “it was based on small but significant crimes against settled ideas of racial demarcation, which indeed appear to be inevitable when white Americans enter the haunted realm of racial fantasy” (4). Minstrelsy, therefore, “brought to public form racialized elements of thought and feeling, tone and impulse, residing at the very edge of semantic availability, which Americans only dimly realized they felt, let alone understood” (6). What performers and audiences did not understand, or chose not to acknowledge, was the erotic tension between “love and theft” that characterized white attraction to black culture and led them simultaneously to draw up and cross over racial boundaries. Minstrel performers often attempted to repress through ridicule their real interest in black cultural practices that they betrayed in minstrelsy’s “mixed erotic economy of celebration and exploitation.” Thus, “the very form of blackface acts—an investiture in black bodies—seems a manifestation of the particular desire to try on the accents of ‘blackness’ and demonstrates the permeability of the color line” (Lott 1993, 6). In a slightly disturbing scene in Cloudsplitter, Banks shows that John Brown was vulnerable to a minstrel mode of racial discourse. Owen Brown

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recalls a time when his father “corked his face, as it were, and actually tried to pass himself off as a Negro” (116) in an essay that he wrote—but was never successful publishing—called “Sambo’s Mistakes.” Brown’s purpose was to “instruct and warn” African Americans on how to lead a good life but to Owen it was “a white man in blackface telling Negroes how to behave” (116). Brown, however, chose to create a black persona because he believed that if he spoke as white he would not be heard. “Racialism infects everybody’s ears, Negro ears as much as white” (116), he explains to Owen. While this observation may be true, Brown’s patronizing attempt to cast himself in blackface demonstrates how he was a man of his time who was unable to find a dignified and effective mode of cross-racial discourse. But it also points, in its arrogance, to how John Brown would eventually find a more resonant form of cross-racial discourse when he abandoned language altogether and took up abolitionist violence as the only form of discourse that whites would hear and blacks would appreciate.2 Unexplored desire coupled with religiously righteous conviction led John Brown to blackface, a form he believed would render permissible topics that otherwise might be taboo, and that in the next generation Owen combines with a violent subtext, passed on by his father, that sabotages any constructive or generative cross-racial discourse. This “mapping of white desire in dark skin” (Lott 1993, 190) also took other forms of expression in the antebellum period and influenced the Brown family. The violent message that Brown conveyed to his children was inspired, in part, by the social discourse on the other side of minstrelsy: abolitionism. Abolitionism did not promote violence as a means to redress the injustices of slavery but its timidity about using more than reason and moral suasion provoked John Brown to a more extreme position. Even as he mimics abolitionist high-mindedness, Brown extends it in righteous superiority because he believes that “under his leadership our work was more crucial to the movement than any other and that it was more rigorous and disciplined, morally clearer, better planned, and more efficiently executed than the work of everyone else—beliefs dangerously close to arrogance and pride” (Banks 1998, 273). In the novel, Brown characterizes the abolitionists as talkers, not doers. All they have is “talk driven and framed by reckless passion, as if being right or wrong on the subject were more important to the debaters than saving people’s lives, not to mention their soul” (307). The Browns are aware that “while the majority did not exactly approve of the enslavement of Negroes, they deeply resented their white neighbors who had chosen to make an issue of it” (320). Whereas whites who enjoyed minstrelsy might tolerate individual blacks but ideologically disavow modes of interracial intercourse; many abolitionists operated in the reverse.

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George Fredrickson in The Black Image in the White Mind explains this kind of contradiction in abolitionism. He demonstrates how abolitionist notions of reform rested on their moral fervor and humanitarian sentiment, their belief that slaveholding was an individual sin that could be redressed by slave owners’ repentance. Reform “became individualized, a matter primarily of personal decision and moral example” (33). When this same principle is extended to black behavior—as John Brown attempted to do in “Sambo’s Mistake”—black behavior is judged not as a result of circumstances but of individual responsibility, carrying with it a kind of moral disapproval of blacks and also casting “doubts on [abolitionists’] basic view of human nature as self-regenerating” (35). Abolitionists’ ambivalence and forms of white outrage Owen characterizes as mostly “spent on stoking their own righteousness and warming themselves before its fire” (425). Because John Brown wants heat, not light—“Action, action, action, Owen! That’s what I want! Enough of this talk, talk, talk” (Banks 1998, 320)—he encourages his son to exploit the weaknesses in abolitionist thought to support his own campaign of fire. As Owen explains, this suited both the abolitionists and the Browns, for once they became “terrorists, we found ourselves almost overnight made emblematic to those remaining white activists who mostly sat in their parlors or at their desks grieving over the loss of their nation. We inspired them, and they encouraged us” (621). Abolitionism was the middle-class white racial discourse; it was minstrelsy’s twin. Abolitionism and minstrelsy became “dialectical partners not only in their literal coincidence but also in their shared ambivalences” (Lott 1993, 111). Because abolitionism was marred by paternalistic condescension toward the people it wished to liberate, like minstrelsy it evoked ambivalence. Together these two modes of interracial social discourse attempted to negotiate contradictions in the culture of antebellum America, providing “imaginary resolutions to intractable social conflicts” (Lott 1993, 29). Minstrelsy brought heat to racial interpretation and abolitionism brought light. What Owen and future generations needed was warmth, the functional blend of heat and light, as a model for racial understanding but, as Cloudsplitter demonstrates, John Brown had his own method in which racial transgression and containment could coexist. Brown knew, along with Frederick Douglass, that a war over slavery “could never be won by white or Negro people alone” (Banks 1998, 727) but, according to the novel, he could never quite understand why others did not see the world as he did. As Owen describes him—“To Father, white and black Americans alike were bound by slavery: the physical condition of the enslaved, he insisted, was the moral condition of the free. This was not some vague, safely abstract principle. . . . No, for Father, quite literally, we

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Americans, white as much as black, Northern as much as Southern, anti-slave as much as pro-, we were, all of us, presently living under the rule of Satan” (254). Despite his ability to “make Negro people believe that their struggle against the evils of slavery and the daily pain and suffering imposed on them by racial prejudice were his as well,” Brown remained “a white man in a preacher’s suit sitting up on a very tall horse” (Banks 1998, 190). The gap that inevitably existed between Brown and blacks was also evident in his relationships with whites because the Browns “would not allow ourselves to be like other white people” (Banks 1998, 414) in racial or religious sentiment. As a result, Brown had little to pass on to his son, Owen, who feels as a Brown that “we were becoming like Negroes, or wanted to become like them. Or, to be honest and exact, we were becoming the kind of men and women that we wanted Negroes themselves to be” (414). This comment reveals the combined influences of Owen’s time and his father: minstrelsy’s erotic ambition to become the other and abolitionism’s moral imperative to make the other like oneself. Owen wishes to transcend his whiteness and, like his father, to enter into the soul of blackness; but in the presence of blacks, he cannot forget his color or its entitlements. Facing a racist crowd in Boston, Owen realizes, “our pale complexions protected us . . . caused me to realize anew that white is as much a color as black. Our flag, our uniform, was our white skin, and while it provoked this attack from our fellow whites, it also shielded us from serious harm” (322). As he repeats several times in the novel, this kind of feeling “angered me in a way that left me secretly ashamed” (6). Owen’s shame is especially amplified in his relationship with Lyman Epps, a freedman associate of John Brown. His attempt to cross racial boundaries with Lyman gets twisted and complicated and redirected in inappropriate ways that neither satisfy him nor lead to any meaningful recovery: I didn’t know how to see around or through a black person’s race, and thus I could not see around or through my own. And whenever I became aware of my whiteness, I was ashamed. Not just because of the horrors of slavery, although that surely provided plenty of reason for any white American to feel ashamed of his race, but because, in the eyes of the God of my father, and most importantly, in the eyes of my father himself, race-consciousness was wrong. Just as wrong as not being able to forget, whenever I found myself in the presence of a woman, that I was a man and not just a fellow human being. It was as if race-consciousness, like sex-consciousness, were some kind of uncontrollable lust that left a white man with no regard for the deep, personal relations of friendship and family. (181)

Owen reveals the guilty pleasure derived from racial transgression when it is cast as righteousness, in his own particular case and through his

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reflection on his father’s life and legacy. But Owen, without the religious faith that sustained his father—“I am a Christian without a God, a fallen man without a Saviour. I am a believer without belief ” (693)—replaces that faith with more unstable impulses of violence, love, and the need for acceptance that he also acquired from his father and they are most memorably personified in his relationship with Epps. Early in the novel, Owen is guilt-ridden after visiting a prostitute and wanders in a “wilderness of tangled desire and rage” (134). Unlike his brother Fred who secluded himself from women and blacks to keep his passions in check, Owen stays with his father and does his duty and becomes what his father wishes, “more lion . . . than lamb” (330). But eventually Owen’s repressed sexuality interacts with the mixed messages about violence he has received, and along with his racial confusion—like his father “he begins dreaming himself as a Negro man” (418)—which leads to his attraction to Epps and a disastrous conclusion. The nature of this conclusion is almost inevitable when one considers Toni Morrison’s observation that “the subject of the dream is the dreamer. The fabrication of an Africanist persona is reflexive; an extraordinary meditation on the self; a powerful exploration of the fears and desires that reside in the writerly conscious. It is an astonishing revelation of longing, of terror, of perplexity, of shame, of magnanimity” (Morrison 1992, 17). As Owen’s wish to be loved and accepted by Epps slowly becomes more than brotherly, Owen is filled with fear, not of homosexuality, but a fear of the impossibility of love that crosses the races in a more sustained and engaged way than John Brown’s martyrdom. Owen wants warmth but all he knows is heat. So when he begins his association with Epps feeling brotherly attraction, his racial guilt intensifies along with his feelings for which he has no model for expression other than violence. When circumstances require they share sleeping quarters—a conventional arrangement in nineteenth-century America—Owen is “rapt with pleasure” by Lyman’s proximity but also by his descriptions of what it is like to be black, “a remnant people settled in the wilderness” (179). Owen’s gentle effort to reach out to Lyman and take his hand leads to a change, to Owen going back to “being white” (184) and acting before Lyman like “a spurned lover” (190). As his relationship with Lyman develops, Owen is unable to direct his feelings of “pride, lust, and envy” (181) in a meaningful way, so he does what a typical white man of his time would do: “I directed my anger not at myself, as I should have, but against the person whose race had made me conscious of my own race or the person whose sex had enflamed me” (182). An argument over farm responsibilities leads to Owen striking Lyman, releasing in himself “something dark and wonderfully satisfying” (467) because he had “done the forbidden thing. I had struck a black man”

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(468). This event leads to a “particular loss of intimacy” (478) not because there is no physical contact but because an awareness of racial distance has come between them. Owen attempts to deal with his conflicted feelings about Lyman by redirecting his feelings towards Susan, Lyman’s wife. When he tries to confess his love to her she gently chastises him, reminding him that they would not be having this conversation if “my husband and I was white people.” She continues: “I know you want to be natural and peaceful and respectful with colored folks. But if you can’t, well, maybe you should stick to your own kind” (513). Owen’s attempt to “neutralize” his powerful feelings for Lyman in his patronizing confession to Susan recalls his father’s bungled attempts to do what he thinks is best for Negroes. Without belonging to any kind and feeling “a strange kind of loneliness, and perhaps a peculiarly American one, to feel cut off from your own race” (422), Owen’s feelings have no conventional model for expression and he is lead to utter frustration over “a manly love finding itself locked inside a white man’s racialist guilt” (519). Reminded by Lyman that Owen “ain’t half the man that your father is” (524), Owen’s guilt, shame, and envy all combine to lead to a situation where he inadvertently kills Lyman. When he looks upon Lyman’s dead body Owen observes that “Lyman could have been a white man or a black—there was no way to tell which. Blood is red . . . but I was the man who had never been able to forget that Lyman, while he lived, was black. Thus, until this moment, I had never truly loved him. He was a dead man now—finally, a man of no race” (529). John Brown’s ideal of living in a world where black and white could freely relate becomes possible for Owen only through Lyman’s death. When Owen observes that “It was as if there had been no other way for me to love him” (529), he eerily recalls the final act of his father whose own love of blacks was “something deep within his soul, regardless of his own skin color, something at the very bottom of his sense of who he was” (416); it could only be demonstrated in his martyrdom. Yet it is not the glory of John Brown’s martyrdom that Russell Banks depicts in Cloudsplitter. The novel is distinguished by the absence of detail about the events in Harper’s Ferry and the exclusion of Brown’s imprisonment and trial. Banks does not recreate Brown’s legendary farewell testament when he consciously accepts the responsibility to “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 of this Slavecountry” (Peterson 2002, 14). What the novel provides instead is a narrative resolution, set forth by an admittedly unreliable narrator whose story risks becoming “a lie itself ” (Banks 1998, 5), but in the complicated context of a society that was called to resolve a paradox: “More than the facts

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of my father’s hectic life, people do need to know if he was sane or not. For if he was sane, then terrible things about race and human nature, especially here in North American, are true” (Banks 1998, 7). The characterization of John Brown in Cloudsplitter is more than a moral and racial problem that brings only heat. The mythmaking about Brown also becomes for the writer Banks a narrative problem when the heat of Brown’s character prevents illumination. Banks is aware that “Living in a nation of people who decided that their world view would combine agendas for individual freedom and mechanisms for devastating racial oppression presents a singular landscape for a writer” (Morrison 1992, xiii). So Banks attempts to create a narrative truth out of a very complicated historical truth that most historians and biographers had avoided because he explores the exoticism and self-indulgence that attends a holy struggle like Brown’s. He strips Brown’s cause of its impenetrable righteousness and reveals the costs and consequences of a revolutionary life. He recasts Brown’s narrative not as the epic by which it is traditionally read and substitutes a tale of everyday lives where people live, love, and sin, even if they do so under extraordinary circumstances with huge influences and consequences.3 Banks’s novel is not so much about what John Brown did, but what he did not do. The novel does not fall into the conventional trap of trying to resolve the saint/sinner, genius/lunatic question about Brown. For Brown, in Banks’s words, “is the last Puritan and the first modern terrorist—it’s the terrible logic of that transition that fascinates me” (Faggen 1998, 82). Banks reveals to us, through Owen’s attempt to narrate the logic of Brown’s transformation, the subsequent condition Brown left behind after he climbed on the cross. While Owen “understood Father’s logic well enough,” he “didn’t always understand his applications of that logic to the specific circumstances, contingencies, and conditions that arose daily in our lives” (255). Owen speaks in nineteenth-century vernacular, but his ambivalent rehearsal of his story displays a modern consciousness of racial issues never resolved by Harper’s Ferry, or the subsequent war, and that still haunt us today. This voice, as Banks describes recreating it, was modeled, in part, on ex-slave narratives and possesses a “simplicity and directness, a precision and eloquence” whereby one is able to say “exactly what they meant, thought, felt, and had personally experienced” (Carnes 2001, 74). The criteria that establish this voice Banks identifies as believing one has something important to say, that one already has the linguistic skills to articulate what is important, and that one would be understood by his reader (Carnes 2001, 74). Owen possesses these traits, but in a qualified way that reflects both the particularities of his personal experience and

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the contingency of his times. When he eventually tells his story he is alone, having lost his “own history without gaining another” (Banks 1998, 424). Without a history, Owen cannot end his story in a conventional nineteenth-century mode, with the wedding of his sister. Owen acknowledges that it would be “a wonderful way to end this story.” He even goes so far as to imagine himself marrying Lyman Epps’s widow, creating “one small family free of all the cruel symbolism of race and the ancient curse of slavery, a white man and a Negro woman and child held dear by a family and community that see them and deal with them solely as family and friends and fellow citizens” (696). But a recognition of his own displaced self forces him to conclude that it is but “fantasy, delusion, dream!” Moreover, it is “a guilty white man’s chimera,” whose spell is broken by the very man who presumed to create such a tableau for America: John Brown, who puts his hands on his son’s shoulders, settles a yoke upon his son, and makes him fulfill his “covenant with the Lord” and “commence the great and terrible work that He hath ordained for us” (696), the violent raid on Harper’s Ferry. One could argue that Russell Banks has created, through Owen’s voice, a new genre: the white slave narrative that tries to tell us how to be a good white man in America. In other words, Banks extends the slave narrative tradition to include a white voice amplifying concerns similar to those explored in slave narratives.4 Like a slave narrative, Owen’s tale is told at the end of a long and painful journey. His story is an extended suicide note, prompted by the inquiries of Miss Mayo, a research assistant for Professor Oswald Garrison Villard, who is writing what will be the first comprehensive biography of Brown. In his self-imposed retreat to California where he spends the years following Harper’s Ferry alone, Owen is an exile in a racial society who has no meaningful way to embody the beliefs his father instilled in him. At first reluctant to revisit his painful and confusing past, Owen finds himself increasingly compelled to reveal the secrets that underlie his obscure and persistent feelings of guilt. Banks takes the great literary tool of abolitionism—the slave narrative—and adapts it to amplify the voice of the sympathetic white man on the other side of the experience. An important scene in the novel that establishes the Brown family’s commitment to abolishing slavery occurs when the family assembles to read from a text of slave testimony. As Owen relates to Miss Mayo: “And there is a particular, important book in our life as a family. . . . The book is called American Slavery as It Is: Testimony of a Thousand Witnesses” (67). Owen proceeds to describe how his father would initiate reading from the text and pass it around so that everyone in the family had to read a portion, creating amongst the family the feeling that “we were together very like a single person—Father, Mary,

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John, Jason, and I bound together by a vision of the charnel house of Negro slavery” (72). But this text was not a crafted narrative like those of Frederick Douglass or Harriet Jacobs. It was a fragmented “litany of suffering,” a recitation of atrocities rendered as news items, that united the family in a shared vision of “the fate of our Negro brethren” (73). American Slavery as It Is provided Owen access to his father’s “private obsession” to overthrow slavery, making it Owen’s obsession as well (77). Yet the fragmented documentation of slave, indeed black, life that Owen receives from this text points to the fragmented way Owen’s own life would unfold and how at the end of his life he would struggle to flesh out a narrative that made sense of his experience. Fragmentation is also evident in the pattern of his family life established by Owen’s father. Because of John Brown’s business failures and obsession with fighting slavery, “he would have to slog and thrash his way forward, a blind man in a blizzard. And he did so for the rest of his life, dragging us along behind” (89). As the family is being dragged along they are always occupying a kind of liminal zone more abstract than their poverty-stricken lives. Combined with this actual state was the family’s feeling “as if the white man’s history were separate from ours” (8), further amplifying their displacement. But the Browns have no other meaningful history to supplant what they lack. So Owen’s fragmented experience is represented in his text in the same way he moved through life: “Thus I was an ordinary fellow struggling with a tangled, profoundly conflicted set of views and feelings, and I came late, slowly, and only partially, and in fits and starts, to a clear understanding of the true nature of my relation to Father and to the family as a whole, and just as often lost my grasp on the subject as I discovered it” (105). While Owen’s racial confusion also contributes to the ambiguity of his narrative—he knew that amongst white people he would have to “hide my true self ” (418)—Owen also faces historical contingencies; the “formation of the nation necessitated coded language and purposeful restrictions to deal with racial disingenuousness and moral frailty at its heart” (Morrison 1992, 6). In slave narratives the technique of hiding one’s true self or using coded language, what Robert Stepto calls “dropping a veil,” served several functions that were entirely dissimilar from the coded language Morrison describes and the alienation Owen feels. One was to protect the identity of the author (who was often a fugitive living in fear) and the other was to protect the sensibilities of readers for whom the shocking reality of slavery was deemed too excruciating to provide in detail. While Banks functions as an abolitionist amanuensis when he employs the conventions of the classic slave narrative form as outlined by Stepto, he is an amanuensis with a twist. Unlike distinguished white people who

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would assist with the composition of or testify to the veracity of a slave narrative, Banks brings neither editorial clarity nor factual verification to his project. The truth he provides is strictly narrative as demonstrated in his adaptation of the slave narrative form to shape Owen’s testimony. In addition to dropping a veil, motifs, or traits of slave narratives identified by Stepto that Banks exploits in his novel include: a vision of the trajectory of one’s life as pointing toward freedom; an identification of one’s self as an autodidact whose life did not lead in a specific direction but was shaped by random choices that led to liberation; a textual emphasis on episodes of violence and physical and social deprivations that lead to isolation; portraits of families attempting to maintain unity; and a quest of literacy or a mode of creative self-expression. These traits also apply to Owen’s narrative and in so doing tell another part of the story of slavery and freedom, showing how each defines the other, embodies the other, and how often one can be free in slavery or enslaved in freedom. As the son of John Brown who “always insisted that we think for ourselves in every way,” Owen also knew that this freedom of thought was permissible “except when we disagreed with him, and that we hold ourselves independent of every man’s will, except his” (Banks 1998, 493). Like a slave narrative, Banks primarily tells the story not of freedom, but of bondage, but this time it is a self-imposed bondage. Owen was tied to John Brown “like a wife, a child, a slave, it seemed, although, of course, I well knew that the chains that bound me to him were entirely of my own making” (307). Owen is a fugitive, trying to escape his past and a chosen form of enslavement and the consequences of a revolutionary life. “After Harper’s Ferry, I went away; I ran as far as the continent ran, to where there was nothing further than the endless, blue Pacific; and climbed a mountain there and built a cabin; and said nothing.” (432). In preparing to write the text he makes actual the ironic move ex-slave narrators made through memory, going back to the site of conflict, from California “where there are no ears to listen, there is no story to tell,” to return to the mountain Cloudsplitter, where his father and others who died at Harper’s Ferry are buried and where he can imagine and come into speech (26). Owen’s vision points toward freedom, but of a very qualified sort. He has abandoned notions of social and earthly liberation—the cause to which he dedicated his life with his father—and instead seeks only the freedom to die in peace that will come not when he exposes a crime, as ex-slave narrators did, but when he confesses a crime: “But now it seems that I am not so much revising history as making a confession of a crime, a terrible, secret crime which—if I had been able to keep to my original intentions and longnurtured desires and had not been obliged to pass beyond them there

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to discover strange, unexpected new intentions and desires—would have remained safely hidden. A crime still known by me alone” (29). Like ex-slave narrators, Owen was not conventionally educated but trained only as John Brown wished him to be, shaped by random events of misfortune and fate but also bearing the mark of the will of his father, who in exhorting Owen to do his duty reminds his son: “Think like a slave, and you are one. A free man doesn’t flee his duty, unless he’s able to do it better someplace else” (196). But Owen has nowhere better to do his duty than to join his father’s violent campaign. So like slave narratives, his text emphasizes the violence, deprivation, and isolation of his life, yet apart from the deprivations of poverty and its consequences, Owen himself manufactures the violence and isolation he experiences; they are not imposed by an unjust system. He also shows his family trying to maintain unity as slave families did but only up to a point where they all surrender the concept of family to the higher ideal of the fight against slavery, as Brown “gave to the family as a whole its character, its defining nature” based on their “difference from other families” (43). And finally, Owen’s quest for self-expression is not an announcement of his arrival or an activity he willingly engages in to give his life meaning and structure as it was for ex-slave narrators. His self-expression comes only as he seeks to depart, at the invitation of someone else, and for purposes other than those of effecting social change. As Banks explains, Owen “realizes that it’s not the writing itself that is important to him and that he is not so much interested in setting the public record straight as he is in telling, and in that way learning, the truth—the personal, private truth of who and what his father was and who, in turn, he is himself ” (Faggen 1998, 82). The truth Owen seeks to reveal is what his father was and what Owen let himself become as a disbeliever who nonetheless was “struck with Father himself for a God” (105). As Owen explains, “there was so much that I could not understand about this man, my father, and the life we led because of him—my thoughts, my questions, were blocked, occluded: by the absolute rightness of his cause, which none of us could question, ever; and by the sheer power of Father’s personality, the relentlessness of it, how it wore us down, until we seemed to have no personalities of our own, even to each other” (251). The novel becomes, as Merrill Peterson describes it, “about the wrenching moral and psychological difficulties of interracial relations” (167) when one confronts the heat of John Brown that scalds the personality of those who try to follow in his vision and who are left only with a consciousness of the “difference between the faces of the oppressors and the oppressed, or the faces of my white-skinned brethren and my black . . . [and] my own bewildering difference from both” (Banks 1998, 332).

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John Brown’s extraordinary identification with blacks, as the novel demonstrates, leads him to lose a sense of proportion about how races can reasonably coexist while also maintaining their difference. At one point in the novel when he is trying to rouse blacks to action, Brown demands of blacks that they speak for themselves but betrays through his unconscious grammar his own arrogance and over-identification that would lead him to martyrdom when Owen hears him “substituting the world ‘we’ for the ‘you’ and ‘I’ of his previous harangue” (429). Ultimately what Brown may not have been able to do what Owen recognizes, but is also unsuccessful accomplishing, is to resist “the privilege of turning colorless.” Only then can a white person free himself, “at least partially, from the sickness of racialism. It’s the only way for a white man finally to clamber up and out of the pit of Negro slavery wherein this nation was unnaturally conceived and born . . . he has to separate himself from the luxurious unconsciousness that characterizes his own race, without claiming as his own the historical experience of the other” (424). It is in these mysteries of racial identity exposed in Cloudsplitter that Banks suggests that no one can be known to satisfaction. What matters is the paradoxical quest for self through passionate involvement in something other than self. As a writer, Banks is conflicted about and confused by John Brown. But as a white American, Banks shares one uncontestable characteristic with John Brown: the basic belief that “I was obliged to address, deliberately, the overlapping social and racial contexts of my life. I’m a white man in a whitedominated, racialized society, therefore, if I want to, I can live my whole life in a racial fantasy. Most white Americans do just that. Because we can. In a color-defined society we are invited to think that white is not a color. We are invited to fantasize, and we act accordingly” (Faggen 1998, 60). In the story of John Brown, a figure who “haunted” Banks because he “significantly figures in the old American weave of violence, politics, religion, race” (Faggen 1998, 79), Banks addresses both his existential and writerly concerns. He confronts the overlapping moral and racial contexts of life by going beyond customary historical accounts in Cloudsplitter where a story is “simply told, and having been told, if it is vivid enough and plausible enough and if its imagery has evoked powerful feelings from deep, previously unplumbed zones of our inner selves, the story has a chance to be absorbed into our imaginative lives sufficiently, one hopes, to change our actual lives” (Carnes 2001, 69). The implications of John Brown’s story are literal and moral, but they are also literary and aesthetic: how to tell a good story that tells us what is good? How to tell us how to be a good white man? There are only provisional answers to these questions but as an author Banks has “faith in humanity that if we only open our eyes and see, then we

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will alter how we treat people. If we can only imagine what it’s like to be somebody else, then we will treat others better. I really believe that” (Reeves 1978, 47). This is the same kind of effort that motivated ex-slaves to write their narratives and is supported by Frederick Douglass’s assertion that “to understand it one must experience it, or imagine himself in similar circumstances” (Douglass 1981, 144). Although slave narratives did not completely rewrite the “master” narrative and John Brown, in trying to be the light rather than leading us to light, burned up much of what his legacy could have contributed, his son, Owen, by not burning his father’s papers, leaves us a place to start imagining John Brown’s great cause all over again. Any biography of John Brown, as Merrill Peterson concludes, is “less an existential thing than a work of intelligence and imagination, ever changing in answer to new questions and purposes” (171) that “remains malleable, still open to contingency and challenge” and still answers “some of the most enduring moral quandaries and dilemmas of our national life” (Peterson 2002, 172). Russell Banks’s own reconfiguration of John Brown’s biography suggests we consider the possibility of imagining, an act “not merely looking or looking at; nor is it taking oneself intact into the other. It is, for the purposes of the work, becoming” (Morrison 1992, 4, emphasis mine). As such, that imaginative work can be a way to begin to change our actual lives. But to create that kind of work is the task not of historians looking for “just the facts, ma’am,” but fiction writers who can “imagine what is not the self, to familiarize the strange and mystify the familiar, [as] the test of their power” (Morrison 1992, 15). Cloudsplitter tells us not what we should know, but how we should imagine. It instructs us not to be the other, but to become the other by way of imagination. The novel gives us a light-infused characterization of John Brown so that we can begin to understand the heat of John Brown’s character. Cloudsplitter reminds us to keep slavery and freedom, Owen and John Brown, and heat and light in tension and in just proportion. It is then that we might be illuminated and warmed rather than blinded and scalded. Notes 1. In a recent interview I conducted with Russell Banks, the author identified Abraham and Isaac as the biblical paradigm he had in mind when creating the characters of John and Owen Brown (O’Connor 2004). 2. Although Owen’s life dramatizes the mixed messages he received from his father in the most extended and dramatic fashion, one other event in the novel underscores what can happen when suppressed desire and admiration are channeled through violent discourse. Owen’s brother Fred, an “innocent” (35), was so afraid of the lusts he carried that he actually castrates himself when Owen

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comes to take him from a secluded life as a shepherd. As Owen observes this act of self-mutilation, he sees Fred go from a “wild, proud expression” to “sudden placidity—a great calm” (547). What follows is crucial, for Owen then decides to take Fred not home but to Kansas where they both will transfer all their confused feelings into antislavery violence and where they become men of action like their father. 3. In counterpoise to what Banks accomplishes in Cloudsplitter is what William Styron did not accomplish in The Confessions of Nat Turner. Styron’s novel veers towards minstrelsy even as the author makes abolitionist claims for it in “More Confessions,” one of the contributions to Novel History. Styron has repeatedly discussed the negative reception his novel received from black academics and continues to feel “resigned contempt.” While he shares with Banks the same racial orientation and novelizes the life of a man who was dangerously split in his personality but whom many African Americans revere, Styron differs from Banks in that his historical protagonist is black. Like Banks he eroticizes aspects of his protagonist’s identity, yet he links Turner with a white woman, thereby exploiting a troubling trope in American culture. It is therefore ironic that in his defense of his book’s resonance with contemporary racial issues, Styron cites all the numerous articles and books that explore the “controversy” of the novel whereas Banks’s novel so far has generated only commentary about the novel itself and no ensuing controversy. 4. For a more complete discussion of the slave narrative tradition and the ways in which it has been extended, elaborated, and refined over time, even so far as to include the voices of nonblacks, see my earlier work on the slave narrative tradition: Imagining Grace: Liberating Theologies in the Slave Narrative Tradition (2000).

Works Cited

Abels, Jules. Man on Fire. New York: Macmillan, 1971. Allan, Elizabeth Preston. The Life and Letters of Margaret Junkin Preston. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1903. Anderson, Osborne P. A Voice From Harper’s Ferry: A Narrative of Events at Harper’s Ferry, 1861. Reprint, Freeport, NY: Books for Libraries Press, 1972. Anderson, Victor. Beyond Ontological Blackness: An Essay on African American Religious and Cultural Criticism. New York: Continuum, 1995. Aptheker, Herbert. Abolitionism: A Revolutionary Movement. Boston: G.K. Hall and Co., 1989. ———. The Literary Legacy of W.E.B. Du Bois. White Plains: Kraus International Publishers, 1989. Arendt, Hannah. The Human Condition, 1958. Reprint, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998. Arnold, Matthew. Selected Prose, edited by P.J. Keating. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1987. Ayers, Edward. “Worrying About the Civil War.” In Moral Problems in American Life: New Perspectives on Cultural History, edited by Karen Halttunen and Lewis Perry, 145–165. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1998. Bacon, Margaret Hope. “By Moral Force Alone: The Antislavery Women and Nonresistance.” In The Abolitionist Sisterhood, edited by Jean Fagan Yellin and John C. Van Horne, 275–297. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994. Banks, Russell. Cloudsplitter. New York: Harper Flamingo, 1998. ———. “John Brown’s Body: James Baldwin and Frank Shatz in Conversation.” Transition 9, no. 1 (2000): 250–256. ———. “On Research.” In Sewanee Writers on Writing, edited by Wyatt Prunty. Baton Rouge, LA: Louisiana State University Press, 2000. Barnes, Elizabeth. States of Sympathy: Seduction and Democracy in the American Novel. New York: Columbia University Press, 1997. Beecher, Henry Ward. “Sermon on October 30, 1859 at Brooklyn’s Congregationalist Plymouth Church.” In Echoes of Harper’s Ferry, edited by James Redpath, 257–279. Boston: Thayer and Eldridge, 1860. Reprint, New York: Arno Press, 1969. Benda, Julien. The Betrayal of the Intellectuals. Translated by Richard Aldington. Boston: Beacon Press, 1955. Bennett, Jr., Lerone. The Negro Mood and Other Essays. Chicago: Johnson, 1964.

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Index

Adorno, Theodor, 96 Alcott, Louisa May, 52, 70, 192 Amonoo, R.H., 141 Anderson, Osborne, 52, 57, 65 Anderson, Victor, 209 Aptheker, Herbert, 19 Arendt, Hannah, 94 Arnold, Matthew, 93, 97 Ashby, Jane, 70, 85 Ayers, Edward, 55 Baldwin, James, 74 Banks, Russell, 9, 71, 203–224 Barbès, Armand, 152 Barker, David, 75–76 Barnes, Elizabeth Phillips, 36 Batchelder, Perez M., 59, 63, 66 Beecher, Henry Ward, 123 Benda, Julien, 92–93, 95 Benét, Stephen Vincent, 174, 184 Bennett, Lerone, Jr., 1, 24, 126, 140–141 Berghaus, Alfred, 43 Berlant, Lauren, 52–53 Black Panthers, 7 Black, J.W., 58, 59, 63, 66 Bloom, Harold, 142 Bloom, James, 176 Blue and the Gray, The, 23 Boone, Daniel, 100, 101 Booth, John Wilkes, 6, 4, 27, 54, 202 Bourne, Randolph, 182 Bowman, Frank Paul, 148 Brackett, Edwin, 129–130 Brodt, Helen Tanner, 58, 60

Brooks, Van Wyck, 176 Brown, Annie (Adams), 18, 189–202 passim Brown, John, Jr., 35, 58, 62 Brown, Martha, 189, 192 Brown, Mary, 58, 60, 67 Brown, Oliver, 190, 194 Brown, Owen, 9, 108, 205–222 Brown, Peter, 136 Brown, Salmon, 17, 62 Brown, Sarah, 63, 65 Brown and appearance, 57–67; biography, 11–26, 159–172; body, blood, 28–50; children’s literature, 187–202; civil rights, 139–141; Europe, 145–158; fiction, 187–224; financial failure, 30; Joan of Arc, 111, 129; labor, 138–141, 145–171 passim, 174–185 passim; law, 39, 40; nationalism, 29; nature, 114, 116; pain, 34–36; poetry, 69–89; Puritanism, 75, 110–119; sympathy, 29, 30, 31, 33; tragedy, 127–128; transcendence, 96–100; wool collective, 161–164 Brown as Aaron, 208; biblical figure, 111, 207, 223; criminal, 123, 134–141, 142, 154; David, 140; Don Quixote, 124; force of nature, 125–128; Franklin, 192; hero, 136–141; insane, 5, 11, 23, 109, 134–141; Jesus Christ, 4, 9, 70, 73–74, 114, 115, 123, 137, 142, 207–211; John the Baptist, 129; Joshua, 140; L’Ouverture, 140;

240

INDEX

Brown as Aaron—continued Luther, 70; martyr, 13, 29, 30, 90–96, 128–133, 168; Moses, 70, 73–74, 114, 123, 129, 140, 192; Paul, 129, 133; Puritan, 136–141, 174, 217; Samson, 129, 142; terrorist, 5, 25, 90–106 passim, 134–141, 143, 217 Brown family, 11, 58 Bryant, Louella, 189–191 Buell, Lawrence, 112 Burns, Ken, 55 Cain, William, 206 Campbell, Alfred Gibbs, 71, 77–78 Carnegie, Andrew, 166 Chandler, Elizabeth Margaret, 33, 36 Cheever, George B., 128 Chénier, André, 155 Child, Lydia Maria, 37, 38, 54, 70, 81–82, 109–110, 133 Clinton, William Jefferson, 203–205 Cohen, Stan, 67 Colonizationists, 15 Conforti, Joseph, 97 Connor, Kimberley Rae, 9, 224 Constitution, 8, 10, 142 Conway, Moncure, 126 Coser, Lewis, 94 Covey, Arthur, 140, 177 Cowley, Malcolm, 178 Crane, Hart, 184 Crummell, Alexander, 119–120 Cullen, Countee, 132 Curry, John Steuart, 3, 8, 127–128, 129–130, 177, 200 Daniels, Kate, 184 Davis, David Brion, 142, 143 de Blezar, Joseph-Charles, 130 De Caro, Louis, Jr., 5, 7, 73 Debs, Eugene V., 138, 165, 168–169, 174–175 Declaration of Independence, 47, 49, 142 Déjacque, Joseph, 8, 145–158 Delany, Martin, 57

Demolay, Jacques, 155 Denning, Michael, 176 Dixon, Thomas, Jr., 9, 134, 174, 184 Douglass, Frederick, 6, 15, 32, 66, 107–108, 113–114, 116–117, 120, 121, 126, 129, 137, 142, 160, 203, 207–208, 213, 218, 223 Drescher, Seymour, 154 Du Bois, W.E.B., 6, 8, 9ff, 132, 139, 139, 140, 159–171, 176, 207, 208, 209 Eliot, T.S., 183 Ellison, Ralph, 141 Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 47, 54, 126, 132, 136, 137, 142 Epps, Lyman, 214–216, 218 Everett, Gwen, 9, 195–196 Excalibur: A Tale for American Boys, 188–189 Fabre, Genevieve, 110 Fine, Gary Allen, 51 Finkelman, Paul, 110 Fisher, Philip, 52 Flynn, Richard, 184 Foucault, Michel, 54–55 Franklin, Benjamin, 136 Fredrickson, George, 54, 213 Fried, Albert, 21 Gandhi, Mahatma, 7 Gardner, Anna, 70 Garrison, William Lloyd, 7, 14, 6–8, 97, 164 Geffrard, Nicholas Fabre, 62 Gold, Michael, 138–139, 176 Gompers, Samuel, 165 Gramsci, Antonio, 95 Gregory, Horace, 178 Griffith, D.W., 134 Grimké, Francis, 140 Gurley, Ralph, 15 Hartman, Janine, 8 Hawthorne, Nathaniel, 125 Haywood, Bill, 175

INDEX

Hazareesingh, Sudhir, 156 Hazlett, Albert, 65 Hendler, Glen, 52 Heywood, John B., 58 Higgins, Lucy, 67 Higginson, Thomas, 111, 112, 114, 116, 117, 118 Hill, Joe, 175 Hinton, Richard J., 17, 171 Hodges, Willis, 15 Hoffman, Tyler, 9 Holmes, Oliver Wendell, Sr., 34, 35 Holst, Hermann von, 129 Hopkinson, Deborah, 187 Horkheimer, Max, 96 Howe, Julia Ward, 4, 13, 71 Howe, Samuel Gridley, 71, 196–197, 198 Hughes, Langston, 132 Hugo, Victor, 8, 131, 145–158 Husband, Julie, 6 Hutchinson Family Singers, 76 Hyatt, Thaddeus, 59–60 Hyde, Lewis, 91 Jackson, Andrew, 100, 101 Jackson, Francis, 115 Jacobs, Harriet, 219 James, William, 5, 142 Jefferson, Thomas, 136 jeremiad, 111, 115, 116 Jewett, W.S.L., 43 “John Brown’s Body,” 4, 13, 27–35, 71, 137, 168 John Brown’s Holy Wars, 23 Johnson, William H., 66–67 juaristas, 156 Jung, Carl, 141 Kay, Alan N., 199–202 Kazin, Alfred, 206 Kees, Weldon, 178 Ketcham, John, 51 Killens, John Oliver, 24 King, Martin Luther, Jr., 7, 129

Konrad, George, 96 Kroen, Sheryl, 147 Kubiak, Anthony, 90 Latouche, John, 182 Lawrence, Amos, 175 Lawrence, Jacob, 3, 121, 122, 124, 177, 195 Lawrence, M.M., 58 Lee, Robert E., 6, 108, 110 Leech, Samuel Vanderslip, 117 Lefrancais, Gustave, 149 Lenin, Vladimir, 139 Lentricchia, Frank, 92, 105 Lewis, David Levering, 19, 161 Lewis, Sinclair, 138 Liberator, The, 14, 69–87 Lincoln, Abraham, 6, 53, 55, 87, 132, 136, 155; Cooper Union address, 54; Gettysburg address, 47–49; “House Divided” speech, 101; Young Men’s Lyceum address, 48 Loeffelholz, Mary, 86 Logan, Rayford, 171 Loguen, Jermain, 13, 67 “Lost Cause,” 9, 169–170 Lott, Eric, 52, 211 L’Ouverture, Toussaint, 13, 160 Lovejoy, Elijah, 14 Luther, Martin, 111 Malin, James C., 134 Martin, J.S., 123, 135 Masters, Edgar Lee, 184 Mayo, Katherine, 20, 218 McAuliffe, Jody, 92, 105 McFeely, William, 11 McGlone, Robert, 134 McPherson, James, 55, 120 McVeigh, Timothy, 5, 134 Melville, Herman, 2, 9, 71, 84, 123, 124–125, 143, 179 Meriwether, Elizabeth, 174 Michael Blankfort, 138–139, 176 Miller, Arthur, 6

241

242

INDEX

Morrison, Toni, 20, 143, 203–204, 215, 217, 219, 223 Mulhall, Stephen, 92 NAACP, 167–168 Nalty, Damon G., 67 Nation, The, 20 Nelson, Truman, 140 Nevins, Allan, 22, 134 Newby, Dangerfield, 67, 108, 193 Newhall, Fales Henry, 47, 115, 142 Niagara Movement, 139–140, 159, 166, 167 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 124, 125 Nora, Pierre, 110, 120 North and South, 23 Nudelman, Franny, 2, 7, 8, 110 Oberholzer, Ellis Paxton, 160–161, 169 O’Meally, Robert, 110 Onthank, Nathan, 59 Orsini, Fabrice, 150 Parker, Theodore, 15, 115, 118 Pelletier, Claude, 149 Perkins, Jr. Simon, 162 Peterson, Merrill, 65, 206, 221, 224 Phillips, Wendell, 7, 14, 62, 109, 112, 113, 118–121, 123, 126, 133, 136, 137, 174 Pilbeam, Pamela, 146 Pinn, Anthony, 209 Pippin, Horace, 3, 177 Pollard, Edward, 169 Porter, Kenneth, 138 Proctor, Edna Dean, 125 Putnam, George W., 76 Quarles, Benjamin, 11, 23, 24, 171 Ransom, Reverdy, 139, 140 Redpath, James, 59, 111, 171 Reed, John, 175 Rees, Douglas, 196–199 Rinaldi, Ann, 191–195 Robinson, Charles, 132 Robinson, Earl, 182

Rodgers and Hammerstein, 182 Roland, Pauline, 147 Ronda, Bruce, 6 Roosevelt, Theodore, 138 Rukeyser, Muriel, 6, 9, 125, 138, 140, 143–144, 173–185 Sacco, Nicola, 138, 175 Samuels, Shirley, 33 Sanborn, Franklin, 17, 47, 123, 124, 136, 137, 141 Sánchez-Eppler, Karen, 52 Sante Fe Trail, 5, 22 Savage, Kirk, 51 Scarry, Elaine, 52 Schouler, James, 123 “Scottsboro Boys,” 175, 177 Sears, Edmund Hamilton, 70 “Secret Six,” 13, 91, 108 Seven Angry Men, 22 Skin Game, 22 Smith, Gerrit, 164 Stanford, Thomas P., 118–120 Stauffer, John, 5, 8, 52, 174 Stearns, George, 141, 142 Stephen, Saint, 129 Stepto, Robert, 219–220 Stevens, Aaron, 65, 108 Stowe, Harriet Beecher, 31, 32, 33, 34, 35, 36, 164, 195 Strother, David Hunter (“Porte Crayon”), 41 Stuart, J.E.B., 6, 22, 108 Stutler, Boyd B., 59 Styron, William, 224 Sumner, Charles, 53, 129 Sundquist, Eric, 95, 208, 209 Sweet, Timothy, 55 Szelenyi, Ivan, 96 Taylor, Andrew, 8 Thompson, Henry, 66 Thompson, Ruth, 66 Thoreau, Henry David, 3, 7, 31, 39, 51, 54, 64, 84, 89–105, 111–112, 116, 117, 123–126, 174

INDEX

Trachtenberg, Alan, 184 Trodd, Zoe, 5, 8 Trotsky, Leon, 139 Tubman, Harriet, 162 Turner, Nat, 13, 109, 160, 161 Unabomber (Kaczynski, Theodore), 93 Untermeyer, Louis, 178, 179 Utter, David, 175 Vanzetti, Bartolomeo, 138, 175 Vésinier, Pierre, 155, 156 Villard, Oswald Garrison, 7, 16–20, 127, 135, 162, 170, 218 Wald, Alan, 178 Wald, Priscilla, 51 Wardenaar, Leslie, 175 Warren, Robert Penn, 7, 10, 49, 127, 134 Washington, Booker T., 19, 160, 165, 166

243

Washington, George, 137 Webb, Thomas, 59 Wexler, Laura, 52 Wheelock, Edwin, 113, 114, 132 White, William Allen, 125 Whitman, Walt, 84, 123 Whitmore, G.D., 72–75 Whittier, John Greenleaf, 70, 71, 78–81, 82, 85, 174 Williams, Alfred, 85 Williams, George Washington, 118, 120, 139 Williams, William Carlos, 184 Wilson, Hill Peebles, 134, 135 Wise, Henry, 5, 37–42, 45, 50, 54, 55, 81, 134 WPA, 9 X, Malcolm, 11, 140, 206 Young, Elizabeth, 53