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Thursday, May 23, 2024
The Apple Doesn't Fall Far from the Tree
Monday, December 04, 2023
My Latest--John Brown's Expert: Boyd B. Stutler & His Unfinished Biography of John Brown
Early in my study of John Brown, I spent a delightfully rigorous few days working in the wonderful archive of the Hudson Library and Historical Society in Hudson, Ohio. Hudson, you may recall, was John Brown's hometown after his family moved there in 1805 from Torrington, Connecticut. Today it hosts a wonderful historical society that has, among its treasures, the papers of the Reverend Clarence S. Gee. Gee was one of two leading John Brown researchers in the twentieth century. His friend and corresponded, Boyd B. Stutler, carried on a wonderful correspondence for half a century and shared from their extensive collecting. Stutler was a journalist and editor of The American Legion Magazine, and Gee was a clergyman with the Congregational and Presbyterian churches. Gee's interest began as an interest in the Brown family genealogy and Owen Brown, father of our man Brown. Stutler began as a collector of old books and articles, Brown being part of his native West Virginia history. However, both men grew intensely interested in John Brown over the years, and without their contributions, our research would be considerably less than it has been.
In the early 1950s Stutler took on a biographical project under a publisher's contract. He never finished the work, and the only material surviving from the biography is six chapters and an outline that he shared with Gee (the original subsequently turned up in West Virginia too, but for many years it was not apparently known by archivists and historians there).
In 2000, when I was researching Gee's papers, I copied that unfinished manuscript and used it as a source for my first book on our subject, Fire from the Midst of You: A Religious Life of John Brown (NYU Press). Over the years, however, I so frequently relied upon Stutler's materials and revisited many of his research ventures, that I became more conscious of his life and contributions and thought it an obligation to bring the manuscript to publication someday.
Boyd B. Stutler (West Virginia State Archives) |
John Brown's Expert can be ordered from Amazon, Barnes & Noble, or directly from Lulu Publishing.
Endorsements for John Brown’s Expert
DeCaro has brought us another gem! Veering slightly from his own John Brown biographies, DeCaro critically explores the life and work of Boyd Stutler, a passionate, conservative mid-twentieth-century editor and zealous chronicler of Brown’s immensely important life. Like a detective, DeCaro follows Stutler’s steps through decades of work, piecing together the man’s long journey scouring libraries, archives, museums, and private collections to compose, but ultimately never finish his much-anticipated Brown biography. DeCaro has done it for him. Rich and pleasurable, a must-read!
Kate Clifford Larson, author of Walk With Me: A Biography of Fannie Lou Hamer, and Bound For the Promised Land: Harriet Tubman, Portrait of an American Hero
***
Louis A. DeCaro, Jr., one of the all-time top authorities on the antislavery warrior John Brown, has performed a great service by issuing the unfinished biography of John Brown by the late Boyd Stutler (1889-1970), another all-time top authority. To date, scholars have known Boyd Stutler through the West Virginia Memory Project, the finest online resource for primary materials on Brown. In John Brown’s Expert, DeCaro provides us not only with Stutler’s previously unpublished narrative of Brown’s pre-Kansas years but also with a richly detailed account of Stutler’s own life, including his fascinating exchanges with publishers, scholars, and general Brown aficionados. Anyone seriously interested in the history of abolitionism will want to read John Brown’s Expert.
David S. Reynolds, author of John Brown, Abolitionist, and Abe: Abraham Lincoln in His Times
***
In John Brown’s Expert, author Louis DeCaro has ably raised from obscurity the pre-eminent researcher into the life of the famed abolitionist. Stutler comes across as an old-fashioned just-the-facts newspaperman loath to take sides in the debate over Brown’s rightful place in history. He never completed his intended Brown biography, but his legacy lives on in the massive amount of research he left behind and in DeCaro's important book.
Eugene L. Meyer, author of Five for Freedom: The African American Soldiers in John Brown’s Army
Wednesday, April 19, 2023
"Why Was Brown Silent on the Conditions of Free Labor in the 19th Century?": A John Brown Scholar Responds
In response to an article on this blog, "Why Was Brown Silent on the Conditions of Free Labor in the 19th Century?" (Oct. 31, 2022), another reader, Christian Chiakulus, has responded to Len Bussanich, who originally posed the question. Initially, Len wrote:
John Brown lived and worked in Springfield, MA. He must have known or heard about the conditions in the factories. I guess my question now is, why is there no examination of Brown's actions in the context of the industrializing North? Why would he-or the abolitionists-remain silent to the same oppressive conditions wracking the labor force in the North and not question, challenge or even confront the same capital dynamics that shaped the South as well as the North[?]
Last month, I noted that Christian, who is doing graduate work on John Brown, responded to Len quite insightfully, and rather than append his response to the original post, I thought it was worth presenting here. His response to Len is substantial and is reproduced completely as follows:
Thanks for these comments, this is a great discussion to have. Len, for what it's worth, Brown frequently did lament the state of "the poor" generally in America, not only that of slaves. In an 1855 letter from Ohio (so not a slave state), he wrote "I believe there is ten times the suffering amongst the poor in this State that ever existed before... Should God send famine, pestilence, and war upon this guilty hypocritical nation to destroy it, we need not be surprised."* Mr. DeCaro's point about Brown's agrarianism is the most pertinent, in my opinion; Brown seems to have been almost Jeffersonian in his lionization of agrarianism as the best way of life. He also didn't live to see the industrial revolution really take hold in the US, so while of course he would've been aware of factory conditions in New England, they had not yet reached the appalling heights of exploitation and prevalence that they would a few decades after his death. To add to LD's point about the racism among the white working class in the antebellum era, DuBois in Black Reconstruction outlines the extent to which the nascent socialist movement in the US capitulated to anti-black attitudes generally and even to the Slave Power itself to a degree. Socialist leaders here were well to the right of Marx and Engels on the issue.
John Brown and the Working Man (AI art)
While I also would love it if John Brown had come out strongly and openly against capitalism, I think he still did enough to earn the title of a hero to the working-class. His broad concern for the poor, advocacy for small wool growers, and Biblical belief in holding all property in common (see for example the Provisional Constitution) are solid evidence that, at least towards the end of the life, he was moving in that direction. [CK]
Christian's succinct and substantial response is appreciated.--LD
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*Christian quotes from John Brown to Henry & Ruth Brown Thompson, Jan. 23, 1855, in Chicago History Museum Collection.
John Brown Invited to "The Cookout" by Journalist Touré
So, the journalist Touré writes in The Grio (Apr. 19) that John Brown is one of thirteen "white folks" who get invited to "The Cookout." Why he chose thirteen is unclear, except perhaps he could not get his list narrowed down to the conventional ten names. At any rate, Touré even places the Old Man as No. 1 on the invitation list. That's the upside.
The downside is that John Brown is on a list with coaches, musicians, Prince Harry, and Bill Clinton. Really, Touré, is that the best you could do?So, how would I parse this story?
Well, on one hand, it's kind of sad that a short list of so-called whites that might be invited to the quintessential African American "Cookout" is more cultural and contemporary than historically substantive. To his credit, I suppose Touré is only greasing the palm that feeds him because he knows that his readership is more geared to the contemporary, and so he's playing that game. But imagine if, in a couple hundred years, someone were to read this list and take it as a real social and political gauge of what it meant to be a good "ally" in the struggle for justice--well, it leaves a lot to be desired.
On the other hand, I'm impressed that even in a generation that tends to forget the past and revel in celebrity culture, John Brown still manages to get noticed and get his invitation in the mail. I must be honest: it's even a bit surprising to me because the cues as of late have been quite otherwise. The black history calendar by Ebony Magazine, which has notations for every day of the year, completely overlooked the Old Man, acknowledging neither his birthday (May 9) or his date of execution (Dec. 2)--two dates that African Americans in previous generations would never have overlooked. I just figured that's the process of time and change and that Brown is now a dusty figure in the attic of black memory. But I guess I was being pessimistic.
So, Captain Brown (as black people in the 19th century referred to him), have a great time at "The Cookout." You're still one in a million.
Wednesday, December 28, 2022
A Response to Mark Tapscott's Anti-Brown Screed
Mr. Tapscott |
Whose Evangelicalism?
white evangelicals (made on dream.ai) |
instance, one may be a socially conservative evangelical and hold to Democratic Socialism in many respects. European evangelicals are not necessarily right-wing in the way that "American" evangelicals invariably posture themselves. One example of this is found in the book by British historian Carl F. Trueman, Republocrat: Confessions of a Liberal Conservative. In 19th century terms, Brown was a left-of-center evangelical--which is to say that his theology was very conservative while his politics were "radical" compared to proslavery conservatives. In contrast, Mark Tapscott represents a tradition that, in Brown's time, counseled in favor of the legal rights of slaveholders, subordination of black people's human concerns to white people's preeminence, and harshly rejected any demand for immediate emancipation as "radical." So the question for Mark Tapscott is, "whose evangelicalism is really scripturally faithful?"
So, given that evangelical has become associated with politics in the USA, it has increasingly become entangled with the right-wing so that the term has been all but ruined for theological discussions. The wedding and bedding of evangelical by the rightwing whites have thus rendered it increasingly reactionary and hostile toward anything that challenges the status quo as they see it, the culmination of which was the rise of Trump, which some would say has brought utter ruin to the party of Lincoln. Certainly, the fixed intent of conservative evangelical watchdogs like Tapscott is to protect the top-down narrative of US history--a narrative that has treated slavery more as an unpleasant (parenthesis) and made powerful white men the basis of its claims.
This is why Tapscott has sounded the alarm of complaint about my article. It clearly galls him that another Christian, writing in an evangelical publication, should suggest that John Brown should be understood any differently than as a fanatic and killer.
An Authority on the Subject?
Tapscott’s claim to making an authoritative reading of Brown is based on “a great deal of time” spent in the 1970s, when he says he carefully read the scholarship on Brown. In other words—and this is important—Tapscott’s reading of the literature on Brown is out of date at best. What Tapscott read in those days is unclear, but even so, he's running on the fumes of his own past. I wonder, has Tapscott read my religious life of John Brown? Has he read the epic cultural biography by David S. Reynolds? Probably not.
Tapscott also stakes his authoritative voice on having read “the coverage and commentary” on the 1859 Harper’s Ferry raid in “the nation’s top newspapers of that day.” Indeed, Tapscott continues, he had intended to do a doctoral dissertation on John Brown, although clearly (and thankfully) he changed course and went on to other things. Tapscott reveals, in fact, that he set aside his doctoral work in its third draft because he was called higher up—that is, he was summoned to serve in two of Reagan's presidential campaigns and other services to the actor-turned-president. Tapscott even provides the unseemly title of his unfinished opus: “John Brown and Gnostic Millenarianism in the American Political Regime.” Gnostic millennarianism?
I have never admired Ronald Reagan. I am old enough to remember his presidency and I know about his reputation as a governor before that, and I believe his record on race and racial justice exemplify the larger problem of conservativism in the US. So if this is the man to whom he devoted his youthful energies, it is really no surprise that Tapscott has taken issue with my piece in CT. Still, I am at least grateful to Reagan that he so prevailed upon a young Tapscott that he was obliged to abandon that travesty of a dissertation project, and left poor John Brown alone. Unfortunately, he has now found occasion in my article to take up his attack once again.
A Thankfully Unfinished Work
"a fabrication of his own mind" (made on dream.ai) |
Underestimation Too
Furthermore, in overestimating his own knowledge of the topic, Tapscott also underestimates me when he writes: “I know aspects of John Brown’s life that apparently escaped Professor DeCaro and which render as absurd and dangerous his encouragement that evangelicals adopt as a hero. (I should note here that Tapscott consistently misspells my name throughout his screed, which suggests how little he did his homework.) Perhaps, then, had he actually considered my work on Brown, he would not suggest that “aspects of John Brown’s life” have “apparently” escaped my attention. Quite to the contrary, the problem for Tapscott is that he has not sufficiently studied either the Pottawatomie episode of 1856 or the Harper’s Ferry raid of 1859. In fact, it appears that Tapscott’s understanding of Brown’s actions in Kansas and Virginia is skewed and misinformed by selective reading and biased presupposition—something quite typical of anti-Brown conservatives. Tapscott, like others, simply does not know what he does not know, yet he presumes his conclusions are all that there is to say about the subject. I think this is called hubris.Pottawatomie, Again
Along these lines, then, Tapscott then charges that I have obscured the record of Brown, who was a “vicious killer and a political radical with a seething desire for dictatorial power.” Of course, Tapscott is twice wrong here. Brown was not a vicious killer and the circumstances of Pottawatomie attest that his response to the proslavery terrorism that threatened his family in 1856 was harsh but tactical and delimited. As I have consistently argued, Brown and his family were literally living under the threat of imminent, murderous assault and were without appeal to protection from either territorial or federal constabularies. His harsh action in killing five pro-slavery thugs was essentially preemptive and did function to save his family in the immediate sense (his son Frederick was afterward murdered, in the summer of that same year, at the onset of a surprise proslavery invasion upon Osawatomie.) The fact that Brown and his family were alive and able to depart the Kansas territory in late 1856 is in large part due to the Pottawatomie strike. Furthermore, apart from this special incident, I would ask Tapscott where Brown figures in the record as a “vicious killer.”"Seething Desire"?
made on dream.ai |
The Real John Brown
To be sure, Brown was personally (and by his own admission) at times given toward imperiousness. But Tapscott is subverting biography in his claims, presuming in particular that it is lust for power and wealth that drove Brown to Harper's Ferry. But this is something that no capable biographer has ever argued. Were Tapscott at least fair, he would have pointed out that abundance of evidence that John Brown was also a humane, devoted man. This lack of balance is everywhere present in Tapscott's screed. He concedes nothing, even in fairness, and insists that his 1970s thesis is all we need to accept.Quite to the contrary, had Brown successfully operated a regime of fugitives in the Allegheny mountains, he would not have proven a “seething dictator” as Tapscott says, but rather as a brave and self-sacrificing leader. His devotion to the rule of law, and the values of the US. republic and the principles of his forebears would also have been significant to his leadership, even as they were throughout his efforts in Kansas and Virginia. But Tapscott ignores all of this because he is intent only on impugning Brown and making a mockery of my argument as a biographer.
Misreading Brown Reading Scripture
Title page of Brown's Prison Bible (Chicago History Museum) |
Prescient and Prophetic
Now, whether one agrees with this theological shop talk or not (and I do not assume that all my readers do), I only point this out because Tapscott says Brown tragically misunderstood this text. He claims this is so based upon Brown's famous last written words, where he says that he believed that “the crimes of this guilty land will never be purged away but with blood.” These are indeed Brown’s last written words, for he believed slavery was an immense and wicked sin that had overcome the nation. As a result, Brown held that a vast measure of slavery’s crimes was so extensive that, absent repentance on the part of slaveholders, divine justice would require judgment upon the US. Accordingly, he believed that justice would require the shedding of blood. This position was not unique, and the specter of God's judgment had haunted the nation since the early days of the nation. Perhaps the most famous evidence of this is found in the words of the slaveholder president, Thomas Jefferson, who famously wrote: "Indeed I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just: that his justice cannot sleep for ever. . . ." Many abolitionists in Brown's time apprehended that God's justice might be heaped upon the nation with the result of bloodshed. So why Tapscott makes so much of this indicates the desperation of his effort. Furthermore, Brown's only point in his last written words was that, in attempting to subvert slavery without engaging in full-scale insurrection, he had failed. It would now take far more bloodshed, Brown concluded, to end slavery. John Brown was right, for it would take a civil war and a national bloodletting for slavery to end. Certainly, Tapscott is wrong in his reading of Brown's words.
Wrong, Wrong, Wrong
In fact, it is quite amazing that Tapscott is so blind to the prescient even prophetic vision of John Brown. The abolitionist understood that slavery was so wicked that it would result in bloodshed on a wide national scale. But this was not simply a political reading of the signs of the times, but also a theologically-grounded survey of the country, which Brown rightly referred to as a "slave nation" in his last days. Brown recognized that the nation was heading toward civil war and that the South would rather perish than surrender its slave power and stolen black labor. Again, Brown was right and Tapscott is wrong.
And Tapscott is wrong on all accounts. His charge that Brown was a “radical ideologue” is an implicit admission that he sides with the conservative slaveholders, his forebears. Apparently, Tapscott does not see that those Christians who were opposed to black liberation all along have been the real radical, ideological demagogues, and that it is they who have brought shame upon the evangelical heritage.
made on dream.ai |
Of all the ham-handed, misinformed charges against Brown by Tapscott, this is probably the most contemptible because it is essentially accusatory and judgmental while ignoring the principles and history of the man. Brown practiced reparations when liberating enslaved people and he believed that enslaved people deserved more than freedom. He believed they deserved to receive wages for their stolen labor and the injustice heaped upon them. That Tapscott should charge that Brown had an eye on wealth and power for their own sake is completely antithetical to the biographical record and to the man. It is a baseless accusation against a man long dead in spite of the evidence. It is a false witness.
Tapscott's Failure
Mark Tapscott’s reactionary screed against Brown is fraught with errors, baseless charges, and half-read history. He presents his article as an expert rejoinder, but he is a ham-handed historian who reads the record through skewed lenses. His old homework on Brown from the 1970s, unfinished and questionable, does not make him competent to address Brown, so his vituperation should not be taken any more seriously than his selective reading of the evidence. A careful reading of John Brown’s life will not find him without flaws. Contrary to Tapscott's article, I nowhere have called for Brown to be canonized. I have called for him to be included in the church because he was a devout believer, no less than "Stonewall" Jackson, his pious Calvinist counterpart in the South. After all, no man is above criticism and no man is without fault. The premise of my piece in CT is one that I continue to defend: John Brown deserves to hold a place in his own Christian society and context. If racists like Whitefield, Edwards, Dabney, and others are to be uncritically assessed and embraced by evangelicals, then John Brown should have a place in the history of the evangelical movement too. Tapscott hates John Brown viscerally and so he barks at any notion that the abolitionist was a Christian, let alone someone who might teach us a lesson about how we treat our fellow man. As Brown might say, Tapscott is "besotted" by the fallacies of his own historical rhetoric.
My argument, that white Christians should open their eyes to Brown's Christian witness, is not going away. The time may yet come when evangelicals of goodwill may turn their eyes back to history to find a devout Christian who made a difference in matters of racial justice.
And John Brown will be there.
Saturday, December 17, 2022
Prompting John Brown: Some Experiments in AI Art
At any rate, I tried putting in various phrases about "John Brown the abolitionist." Interestingly, however, as long as I used "John Brown the abolitionist" I kept getting renderings of Brown as a black man. Here are some of the generated black John Brown images:
Hovendon's "The Last Moments of John Brown" |
While these AI images are all interesting, none of them came close to what I was hoping to get, although it is no surprise. My prompt was simplistic and perhaps I was asking too much. Like other AI images, there's a weirdness to these images although in some sense they do capture Brown's devotion and the pathos of his bond with black people.
Monday, October 31, 2022
Why Was Brown Silent on the Conditions of Free Labor in the 19th Century? Responding to a Thoughtful Reader
A thoughtful listener of my John Brown Today podcast named Len Bussanich has previously submitted his reflections on Old Brown, prompting a response on that platform that I hope was useful. Now, once again, I am pleased to receive a comment from Len on this platform following the last entry. Partly because my response is too long to fit into the comment section, and partly because I think he raised a good question worthy of posting, I thought it best to copy Len's note to me below, followed by my response. I hope that blog readers will find it useful.
Len writes:
I've always been interested in the "dichotomy" between slave labor in the South and industrial/mill labor in the North. The Industrial Revolution essentially began in this country in Massachusetts, also the hotbed of abolitionism. Some of your wealthiest capitalists were also abolitionists. These same abolitionists and their followers were calling for the destruction of slavery in the South but said virtually nothing about the dehumanizing conditions farmer girls turned factory workers endured in the mill factories in Massachusetts and elsewhere in New England. John Brown lived and worked in Springfield, MA. He must have known or heard about the conditions in the factories. I guess my question now is, why is there no examination of Brown's actions in the context of the industrializing North? Why would he-or the abolitionists-remain silent to the same oppressive conditions wracking the labor force in the North and not question, challenge or even confront the same capital dynamics that shaped the South as well as the North. Cotton as we know drove agricultural expansion in the South and industrial expansion in the North.
There was a man however in the North named Brownson who was examining and writing about the brutal conditions in the North, Orestes Brownson and his piece, The Laboring Classes.
Orestes Brownson Perhaps I am asking too much of John Brown, but he detested slavery and yet he essentially remained silent on the dehumanizing nature of industrial labor and wage slavery.<>
Hi Len,
Thank you for writing and for sharing your continued thinking and reflections on John Brown. Your question, as to why Brown seems to have been silent regarding the plight of exploited free laborers is interesting, to be sure.
In my study of his letters, I have never seen any expression of concern over the struggles of free laborers in the factories of the North. I'm not even sure I can recall an incident where his family or biographers recount such concerns.
The closest that Brown comes to fighting for free white labor in the North is his involvement in the wool business on behalf of the wool-growing farmers of Ohio, western Virginia, and Pennsylvania, expressed in his desire to open a wool commission operation in New England that would push back against the abuses of the manufacturers by protecting the interests of the growers. This was a cause that gripped him in the 1840s, although he lost that battle by trying to create a solution. The farmers were not ready to "unionize" (it took another half century before they actually did), the manufacturers were too powerful (and dishonest), and were able to undermine his efforts. Earlier in his life, in northwestern Pennsylvania, Brown interceded on behalf of settlers who were fighting the encroachments of a powerful Philadelphia land company. He felt they were unjustly being treated and tried to stir up a movement against this company. Although his efforts apparently came to naught, he did ruffle the feathers of the company's agent. I unpack these earlier episodes of his struggle for justice in my little book, John Brown--The Cost of Freedom (2007).
In light of this, I can only offer a couple of thoughts. First, Brown was an agrarian by nature and orientation and this shaped the arc of his life and activities. His most urban experience was in Springfield, Mass., 1846-49, and by then he was primarily caught up in resisting the expansive power of the slaveholders, especially after the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850. I think that despite his forward-looking ways, Brown was more a product of agrarian society, and that was where his treasure was: fighting for settlers against a powerful company, or fighting manufacturers for farmers, and all the while moving steadily toward militant opposition to slavery.
Second, although it may be that Brown did not spend any energy on behalf of the struggling and exploited laborers of the North, I suspect he knew about their plight and sympathized. He was likewise sympathetic to the concerns of women. But if he did not come out in favor of the laborers or of women, it may be because he felt that the problem of slavery was far worse, more politically apocalyptic for the nation.
Perhaps too, he not only felt the concerns of free white labor and women, in general, were secondary to the black struggle, but he was put off by evidence of racism among free white laborers in the North. So, while he was aware of their struggles, perhaps Brown felt he had to prioritize the interest of the black struggle despite the inequities of the North. I know the antebellum apologists of the South often referred to the exploitation of the Northern laboring class, but perhaps in Brown's mind, he felt it was a category error to compare immigrant and poor white laborers in the North to enslaved Africans. The former were greatly exploited but they were free in some sense, whether or not they were despised for reasons of class or ethnicity. Still, this wasn't the same as the wholesale racist treatment of blacks, whether in southern slavery or northern "freedom." (A good book here is the modern classic by Leon Litwack, North of Slavery).
Although the following words are from Frederick Douglass, and not John Brown, it might be a helpful reference point for the question before us, as to Brown's apparent lack of concern for the struggles of poor white laborers in the North. In 1850, Douglass gave a speech in Rochester, New York, in which he reflected upon the plight of struggling Irishmen in Great Britain. I think the parallel here is quite useful:Far be it from me to underrate the sufferings of the Irish people. They have been long oppressed; and the same heart that prompts me to plead the cause of the American bondsman, makes it impossible for me not to sympathize with the oppressed of all lands. Yet I must say that there is no analogy between the two cases. The Irishman is poor, but he is not a slave. He may be in rags, but he is not a slave. He is still the master of his own body . . . . He can write, and speak, and cooperate for the attainment of his rights and the redress of his wrongs." (Dec. 1, 1850)
I do not think I'm stretching it to suggest that if Douglass felt this way about the poor Irishmen living under the British empire, he felt the same about poor white factory workers in New England. They were victims, but only the racist chattel slave system was, in Douglass's words, the "grand aggregation of human horrors." I suspect that this would have been John Brown's sentiments and those of his black and white counterparts within the abolitionist movement.
Brown was a sensitive human being and I believe that he knew about the oppression of northern laborers, but I just don't think he saw their struggle as the "hill to die on." Indeed, by the late 1850s, it was the destruction of the Union and the possibility that four million slaves would be carried into an independent slave nation that caused him consternation. That was the crisis of his generation, not the struggles of poor white laborers. History suggests, in fact, that slavery had to be dealt with before other issues of social justice were brought to the main attention. At the same time, in later years, it seemed all too easy for this nation to turn its back on the concerns of the emancipated community. Perhaps had he lived long enough, John Brown might have undertaken on their behalf, just as did some of his associates who lived into the later 19th century. But Brown lived and died under the shadow of slavery, and it was the end of slavery that determined the boundaries of his life and death. Throughout the 1840s and '50s, John Brown's vision was steadily and intensively focused on slavery, and by the time he was in his late fifties, especially after the trauma of the Kansas territory, I just don't think he could focus his efforts on anything else.Thank you for your note, Len. I hope this is useful in your continued study and reflection.--LD
Saturday, September 17, 2022
Don Pedro, John Brown, and Black Enslavemen
Don Pedro Hagley Museum and Library |
"And cinnamon, and odors, and ointments, and frankincense, and wine, and oil, and fine flour, and wheat, and beasts, and sheep, and horses, and chariots, and slaves, and souls of men."