Last evening, the first installment of season three of “Legends & Lies”premiered on the Fox News Channel. According to Fox News Insider: “The 12-episode miniseries, hosted by Brian Kilmeade, vividly recounts America’s epic struggle over slavery and freedom through the stories of the war’s greatest heroes and villains, including Abraham Lincoln, Robert E. Lee, Ulysses S. Grant, Stonewall Jackson, John Wilkes Booth and Frederick Douglass.”
Overall,
“Legends & Lies” (heretofore, L/L) has much to commend it. For the most part, its dramatic representations
of history are nicely done, and despite some notable errors, the guiding
narrative scripted for Kilmeade leans toward fairness, and in some places is quite satisfying in comparison to the documentaries on Brown that have preceded over the past twenty years. Indeed, one gets
the impression from the full run of this episode that those who produced it actually recognize that antislavery violence may be justified, particularly given by the
expansive evil that was “the crime of slavery.” This is not something that has ever been stated in documentaries on PBS or The History Channel.
Despite
the criticisms that follow, L/L's John Brown episode did not leave me unsettled or annoyed on
the whole. To be sure, the
actor who was cast as John Brown was too young and too stout, and really did not look
anything like the abolitionist. In contrast, the producers of L/L did a
much better job of casting for Lincoln, so this was a visual
disappointment. On the other hand,
there were small details that impressed me.
At the time of the Harper’s Ferry raid, Brown is shown wearing some kind of fur hat, and although he looks more like Daniel Boone than John Brown, at least the producers of L/L did their homework and tried: at Harper's Ferry, Brown was described as having worn an otter skin cap. In the execution scene, a woman wearing a bonnet is seen watching Brown’s
on the gallows, although the narrator points out that no civilians were present. As far as the visuals go, this L/L episode really merits commendation. I was particularly impressed by the moving panorama of antebellum New York City portrayed just before Abraham Lincoln is pictured speaking at the Cooper Union. Having appreciated some aspects of L/L, a good many things came up that merit closer consideration if not criticism.
Juxtapositions: Pottawatomie, a Boyhood Memory, and the Sumner Caning Fiction
Following
the conventional narrative, L/L also connects the Pottawatomie killings to
the beating of Massachusetts Sen. Charles Sumner by Rep. Preston Brooks of
South Carolina on May 22, 1856, in Washington D.C. This mistaken notion was addressed on this
blog by my able associate and contributor H. Scott Wolfe in 2011 [Aug. 6], when
he wrote with well-place sarcasm:
The ruffians sack Lawrence on the 21st, right?
Sumner is caned in Washington, D.C. on the afternoon of the 22nd. How does
Brown, on the plains of frontier Kansas, learn of it on the same day? Did the New York Tribune rent a Space Shuttle?
The telegraph ended at St. Louis…and the tracks to St. Joseph would not be
finished until the ‘60s. What did they do? Hire an Olympic swimmer at St.
Charles and have him paddle up the Missouri with a message in his trunks?”
In
the Pottawatomie portion, L/L also features some interesting
misrepresentations of a secondary nature.
First, the episode shows an enslaved man cowering on the edge of the
scene as Brown’s men kill their victims.
Secondly, it also shows Brown shooting one of his fallen foes, who lies
moaning at his feet. The man allegedly
shot was James Doyle, one of the local proslavery thugs who intended to attack
Brown and his sons but was surprised when his intended victims struck first.
Bullet
to the Head
The
claim (based on one unreliable source) that Brown killed Doyle by shooting him
in the head, actually flies in the face of evidence and testimony, and the most
intensive scholarly investigations have found to the contrary. There is no doubt that Brown actually shot
the head of Doyle’s corpse, but the motivation for the act and its meaning to
Brown even eluded his sons. The best
discussion on this point is found in McGlone, John Brown’s War Against Slavery (pp. 139-41). Even Oswald Villard, who was absolutely
critical of Brown’s actions at Pottawatomie, concluded that the old man had shot
Doyle’s corpse. We may only speculate as to why Brown would shoot a
corpse. One theory is that Brown’s
single shot in the night was a signal to the others, still out in the darkness,
finishing the bloody work at Pottawatomie. Another theory is that Brown might have been
gripped by the sudden notion that Doyle was still alive, and he shot him to put
him out of his misery. However, I would
prefer to think that the shot in the head of Doyle’s corpse was a personal and
ceremonial act of desecration—a statement, as it were, from one father to another. Doyle and his two sons had plotted to kill
the Brown boys for their outspoken abolitionism, but the good father had
intervened and killed the bad father.
Perhaps the bullet to Doyle’s corpse punctuated the conclusion of the
matter as Brown saw it. He thereafter
repeatedly and denied that he had taken part in the killings, and one should
understand his claims in the most literal sense. He was present and commanded the attack, but
he had raised his hand against no man alive nor taken a life.
In
the end, L/L’s use of the Pottawatomie affair is somewhat better than it
has been presented in other TV documentaries, although we have yet to see a
television narrative that appreciates the extent of danger that the Browns were
facing from proslavery invasion in May 1856.
What was interesting was not that Brown escaped being compared to a
terrorist, but that he was described as “equal parts prophet and terrorist.”
Miscellaneous
Errors
One
important misrepresentation of this L/L episode was the historical premise
that following the revolution, the United States had become two nations within
one. According to L/L, the North had
become dependent upon industry, and the South had become dependent upon
cotton. This is a skewed and misleading
statement and is only true insofar as it reflects the cultural differences that
continued to define the contrast between industrialized northern cities and
rural southern life. However, economic
and political terms, there was no such contrast. Northern industry and commerce was directly
linked to and dependent upon Southern slavery.
This was no more evident than in the case of New York City, where
proslavery interest in business was rife.
As I’ve shown in Freedom’s Dawn:
The Last Days of John Brown, the uproar against Brown and against possible
southern secession (i.e., for the sustenance of the status quo, including
slavery) was fueled largely by political and economic interests in the North.
Another
error is made in Kilmeade’s narrative about Harriet Tubman and the underground
railroad, when he says that “few know that John Brown was part of the same organization of abolitionists.” Of course, the underground railroad was not an
“organization,” but a collaborative system at best. The underground railroad had no
organizational structure, nor officers, nor political documents. The abolitionist organization that did exist most expansively was William Lloyd’s Garrison’s
American Antislavery Society, and John Brown was never a member of this or any
organization. (A
minor detail regarding Brown and Tubman in Canada is the misspelling of “St.
Catherines,” which actually is “St. Catharines” (but now I’m being picky).
Tubman and Brown
Interestingly,
perhaps the worst feature in this episode of L/L pertains to Harriet
Tubman. It comes in the form of a frankly
stupid, biased, and gratuitous interpolation by Kirk Ellis, the screenplay
writing “historian” who is included as one of the program’s “talking heads.” Ellis’ remark comes in relating the
mysterious dream that Harriet Tubman had prior to meeting John Brown, in which
she saw the old man and his sons defeated.
Tubman’s dream was symbolic, and in “Fire
from the Midst of You,” I have offered an interpretation of the strange
imagery of that dream, in which she saw an old, bearded white man as a serpent
in the wilderness (see p. 263). 
In
L/L, Ellis contorts this religious dimension in Harriet Tubman’s life,
referring to her premonitory dream of Brown as a “vision,” which he attributes to a head wound that she had sustained years before while in slavery. “As a result,” Ellis opines, “she was subject to what we now think was temporal lobe epilepsy, which would give her these stunningly realistic premonitory visions.” I wonder, who the “we” is who “now think” that Tubman’s spirituality can be summed up by a head wound? This is a silly speculation, and the subject matter—Harriet’s prophetic dream of John Brown—would have been better left as a mystery of her biography.
Harper’s
Ferry and Some Weak Links
As
to the Harper’s Ferry raid, L/L’s screenplay-historian Ellis reiterates the
old Virginia myth that Brown intended to seize the arsenal weapons in order to
get guns for the slaves. He tag-teams
this nonsense with David Eisenbach of Columbia University, who then rants: “[Brown
is] going to send out his men, they’re going to liberate the slaves, give them
guns, and then those slaves are going to go out
and take over more plantations and get more slaves with guns, he’s going
to build this sizable army and then they’re going to march into the South armed
to the teeth.” To the contrary, John Brown was not trying to build an army and
march into the south “armed to the teeth.”
He was trying to build a growing movement of associated armed cadres that would conduct armed rescues throughout
the south, leading enslaved people off and destabilizing slavery from Virginia to the Gulf of Mexico--without large military conflicts. But Eisenbach can be forgiven because
he is the weakest link in the program. As an
accomplished scholar of contemporary history and culture, Eisenbach simply
doesn’t know jack-squat about John Brown—his specializations apparently being the
pornographer Larry Flynt, the gay rights movement, and media studies.
The
Raid and Civil War "Experts"
Overall
the portion about the Harper’s Ferry raid presented by L/L is an extremely
condensed version, but not badly done. In L/L, Kilmeade’s commentary
properly observes that Brown wanted to connect his effort with the claims of
the founding fathers, showing the consistency of his liberation movement and the
inconsistency of slavery. L/L also
shows how the men at Harper’s Ferry—who actually were mostly drunken—fired upon
A.D. Stevens under a flag of truce, nearly killing him. On the other hand, however, there is no reason
to believe that John Brown was inside the engine house in the last moments of
his stand, barking to the enemy outside, “God is on our side!”
Far
worse, L/L includes a bona fide Civil War scholar, Brooks D. Simpson,
Ph.D., who predictably weighs in on the raid by stating: “Brown’s raid caught
people by surprise, it was so audacious, it was so daring, and yet it was so
badly planned that it was doomed to failure from the beginning.” What can one
say to such expertise? To borrow a line
from Yogi Berra, “it’s déjà vu all over again!”
Since the 20th century, Civil War military historians have
often been drawn upon as experts on John Brown, although typically scholars
like Simpson know next to nothing about him.
The tendency to mistake Civil War scholars for John Brown experts is a
perennial problem and Professor Simpson is the latest example. Although he’s a brilliant and prolific writer,
Simpson suffers from a proximity presumption.
He imagines that because he studies the Civil War, he is competent to
speak to John Brown’s plans—a very questionable conclusion. Contrary to Simpson, John Brown’s plan was
well made, and only the deity could say that it was “doomed to failure.” Far worse plans have succeeded, and perhaps
far more certain plans have failed. But
Simpson, lacking an indepth study of Brown’s plan and purposes, is simply in no
place to make such judgment, and instead seems to be speaking from unstudied
prejudice.
Lincoln
As
to the man who became the 16th president, L/L is fair enough in
showing that Abraham Lincoln was moderate, and that he defended slavery’s right
to remain in slave states on the legal basis of the U.S. Constitution, and that
he was a gradualist in his view of removing slavery. This honest portrayal of Lincoln surprised
me. He was not candy-coated. At the Cooper Union, he separates himself and
his Republican party from John Brown, his presidential victory sparks a rebel
reaction because, as L/L rightly observe, the southern slaveholders wrongly
assumed that Lincoln was another John Brown.
The
Hanging
For
dramatic effect, no doubt, L/L features JB speaking from the gallows, as he
was made to do in Santa Fe Trail
(1940). L/L overplays the presence
of Lincoln’s assassin, John Wilkes Booth, being in Charlestown, although it is
true that he did join a Virginia militia group in order to participate in the execution. L/L portrays Booth as having words with
Brown in jail, and although this is possible, it is nowhere documented (not
even by Booth). L/L places Booth at
the execution of John Brown, but says he stole a uniform to get there, which is
not the case. Booth actually was friends
with certain Virginia militia men and was enabled by this connection to join
them and go to Charlestown.
At
the conclusion of L/L, Kilmeade makes a thoughtful assessment that frankly
surprised me. “Now from its beginning, America is celebrated as a land of
opportunity, and to many it is. But
while some prosper, millions of African Americans are robbed of their freedom
and their humanity. And when rational argument and appeals to
human decency fail to end the horrors of slavery, it takes a violent demand
that the promise of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness be fulfilled—at
any cost. John Brown’s cry to purge
the land with blood is ultimately answered by the most brutal and bloody time
in American history.” This is worth one
good “Amen.”--LD
