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).
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.
Thank you for your note, Len. I hope this is useful in your continued study and reflection.--LD
4 comments:
Thank you Louis for your response. As always, you certainly make exceptional points and again thank you for taking the time to respond. To be honest, I still have questions. As I've mentioned, Brown was connected to wealthy abolitionists who also were wealthy capitalists. I believe Brown's crusade also has to be placed in the context of the industrializing North. Those wealthy abolitionists, or for that matter the entire Northern economic elite, were certainly opposed to plantation slavery but certainly not opposed to wage slavery. I'm not only questioning Brown's crusade again slavery but essentially the entire Northern opposition to plantation slavery. The great English historian Eric Hobsbawm said it best about the American Civil War, it was a struggle between Northern and Southern capital. Yes, plantation slavery had to be destroyed, and good riddance. However, the post-war experience of blacks in the South and the conditions of the working class in the North suggests the engine of oppression was essentially capitalism itself in the antebellum and post-war period, which Douglass and the abolitionists did not question. Capitalism can be reformed (hence, Brown's crusade), as the Bernie Sanders' and the pseudo-left maintain today. Anyway, I guess I've said my peace long enough, lol. I look forward to the next show on the John Brown podcast. Thanks again! Len Bussanich
Hi Len,
I appreciate your response and respect the point you are making. On one hand, it's probably impossible to excuse Brown from the capitalist context, just as it is impossible to excise his family history from the "frontier" expansion that spelled such destruction to indigenous communities. On the other hand, I think there are biographical limits to the charge that puts Brown and even some of his wealthy associates in the company of abusive northern capitalists. Indeed, I think you're painting with an awfully big brush. I would argue that Brown was not a revolutionary but rather a radical reformer, and insofar as that is true, I'd agree with your point. Certainly it was never Brown's intention to abolish capitalism, and he seems to have believed free markets could function to the betterment of society, but he was neither a political nor economic theorist. Still, I hardly think Brown's ideas about economics in the North put him in the company of the wool manufacturers, for instance, the very men who drove him out of business in the 1840s when he tried to intercede for the struggling wool growers. The rich industrialists of New England, for instance, are hardly the same stripe as Brown's "secret six," particularly Gerrit Smith and George L. Stearns, the two wealthiest of the six. Indeed, some of those capitalists later turned on Brown's legacy (in the later 19th century), like Eli Thayer and Amos Lawrence. While Smith and Stearns were beneficiaries of capitalism, along with abolitionists like the businessmen Tappan brothers, these were not exploiters of poor white workers as were the industrialists, and Brown was even less complicit than they. So I think you're putting heavier weight on the shoulders of Brown and his associates than is biographically fair, even if they were part of the larger northern capitalist context. Finally, your analysis seems to reduce the challenges they faced in the antebellum era to two versions of the same evil--economic injustice. But economic inequity does not answer the whole issue. Slavery was not just "plantation slavery." It was race-based dehumanization and terrorism, and it guaranteed virtually a permanent status of degredation for all black people, north and south, due to the racial prejudice it engendered. No matter what southern apologists argued contra northern abolitionists, slavery was simply worse because economic exploitation was only part of slavery. Furthermore, we could flip the script and point out that white laborers, including the incoming Irish, were even more virulent opponents of black people in the capitalist north, which is why most African Americans have never been as impressed by the leftist critique of capitalism as if it's the same problem for them as it is for poor white workers. It wasn't then and it's still not so today, even though there are overlapping aspects in regard to economic injustice. Brown understood that the prejudice and organized evil faced by black people was both morally and mortally a greater challenge for his generation and that's what he felt he could try to address. One life can do so much, and anyone biographically can be criticized because they are part of a larger context riddled with contradictions and inequities. So while I'm not entirely differing with you, I just do not think the point is as weighty as you make of it, respectfully.--LD
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.
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.
Agreed Christian, a great discussion indeed! Thank you for your comments.
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