John Brown: One Terrorist who Deserved Hanging
This is the 150th anniversary of the hanging of John Brown. When he attacked Harper’s Ferry with a handful of followers, the butcher of Kansas helped sow the seeds of the Civil War. Few things would have made Brown happier than the thought of hundreds of thousands of people dying for his own Scorched Earth method of moral salvation.
The New York Times op-ed page has a piece today touting Brown as an American hero. It seeks to vindicate him:
He was held in high esteem by many great men of his day. Ralph Waldo Emerson compared him to Jesus, declaring that Brown would “make the gallows as glorious as the cross.” Henry David Thoreau placed Brown above the freedom fighters of the American Revolution.
The fact that Emerson and Thoreau turned into cheerleaders for John Brown was among the worst failings for each of them. Both Emerson and Thoreau started out denouncing politics as a snare and a fraud. And both fell for Brown and his vision of progress via slaughtering innocent people.
Brown’s attempt to create a bloody uprising in Virginia helped close the final door to compromise between the North and the South. His name should be as odious today as those of other people whose violence sparked mass killing.
I can not agree more with your post. Another unintended consequence of his folly was the transformation of the southern militia from a Sunday parade status into the drilled, ready and determined progenitor of the Confederate Army. Brown was a murderous fool.
John Brown was, indeed, a nutcase who killed American soldiers; the fact that the New York Times seeks to vindicate him is appalling—perhaps, even unpatriotic?
If John Brown were alive today he would be bombing abortion clinics, and somehow I doubt our liberal friends would be singing the same tune.
I’m certainly no fan of John Brown, but do we really want to buy into this definition of terrorism as including any attack on American soldiers. Treason yes if done by an American, but terrorism? If I’m not mistaken, Brown was guilty of terrorism against civilians during the Kansas war.
Jefferson Davis was a pro-slavery traitor who presided over a nation that meant to continue an institution of legal ownership, rape and torture of fellow Americans.
Davis not only got pardoned in the 1970s, but has a highway right outside our capital named after him, so I guess I can’t get too upset about pardoning a man, no matter how fanatical, who took up arms to end that institution.
A liberal writer for the NYT praises a white man for killing other white men on behalf of black slaves (and eschewing religion at the gallows). Then the writer includes shocking quotes that may or may not be in context. “W.E.B. Du Bois called Brown the white American who had ‘come nearest to touching the real souls of black folk.” Is murder in the souls of black folk? I hate having these conversations with liberal white men.
The Left is more vicious than even they know.
Blaming Brown for precipitating the War between the States is like blaming the anarchist that killed Archduke Ferdinand for WWI, or Bin Laden for the Afghanistan or Iraq war. Brown killed innocents, and those “guilty” for supporting slavery. He may have been a indiscriminate fanatic, but surely the principle of forceful self-liberation of the enslaved from their enslavers is morally sound. The fact that his terrorism contributed to the fomenting of a tragic, insane total war, is perhaps the fault of the masses who chose to react to his impetus with an insane response.
How can one blame the spark for igniting the powder keg? Look instead to those who filled that keg with powder.
If John Brown and his men are to be called terrorists for taking up arms to end the enslavement of four million black Americans, then perhaps the partisans and resistance fighters who took up arms against the Nazis should also be called terrorists. That’s what the Nazis called them, just as the slaveholders and their political lackeys called John Brown. In 1859, the United States was not a democratic republic: a state-sponsored terrorist regime held power in the South, the U.S. Supreme Court had ruled that black people had “no rights that a white man was bound to respect,” the fugitive slave acts had criminalized the underground railroad, Congress refused even to hear abolitionist petitions, and three decades of peaceful efforts to persuade the slaveholders to end the practice of human bondage had proven useless. John Brown was no more guilty of treason for fighting slavery than our founding fathers were guilty of treason for fighting King George. Brown’s philosophy was based on the Declaration of Independence — the belief that “all men are created equal” — and on Scripture: “Thus saith the Lord God: Let My people go.” To call him a terrorist is to debase the meaning of the word.
Slavery is evil.
Liberty is necessary for prosperity and peace.
John Brown’s activities meet most definitions of terrorism, including the FBI’s current definition of domestic terrorism: http://www.fbi.gov/publications/terror/terror2000_2001.htm
jbraunstein:
Blaming Brown for precipitating the War between the States is like blaming the anarchist that killed Archduke Ferdinand for WWI, or Bin Laden for the Afghanistan or Iraq war.
No one’s exactly singing their praises either.
Jeffrey Sokolow:
In 1859, the United States was not a democratic republic..
The next year it elected an anti-slavery Republican ticket. There were plenty of legal venues left to oppose slavery, something that was not really true in Nazi Germany, let alone the territories outside of Germany they occupied.
“Brown’s attempt to create a bloody uprising in Virginia helped close the final door to compromise between the North and the South. His name should be as odious today as those of other people whose violence sparked mass killing.”
Overboard. There is no compromise possible between abolishing slavery or not. One side has to lose. The war had dozens of causes much bigger than John Brown. Could he even be called guilty as a proximate cause of the Civil War? I don’t think so.
Jack Tracey, thanks for that FBI link. Great stuff to be reminded of. Why wasn’t the DC sniper listed?
Ohh, how brave, coming out against slavery. Anyone else want to come out against feudalism? Anyone want to show their bona fides by pulling a thermopylae against child labor next? Gimme a break.
Child labor is evil too. Where are the commentators brave enough to condemn it?
Most countries managed to get rid of slavery without getting 600,000 people killed in the process and creating a legacy of hatred which lasted for generations. Slavery would have disappeared in the US by the beginning of the 20th century anyway, just as it did in every other country, but without the slaughter and all the other colateral damage, much of which is still with us.
Generally I hate guilt by association, but regarding slavery I think it’s fair to say that white people caused, maintained and benefited from African slavery, and it was up to white people to stop it. Even at cost of their lives. Being non-religious, I also don’t usually go for metaphysics, but I do believe that in some way the Civil War was an expiation for a terrible crime. I think Lincoln felt that way also.
Slavery would have disappeared by itself? If believing in propositions that can’t be disproved makes you feel good, that’s a good one. Given that it took citizens of African descent fully one hundred years after being freed from slavery to attain anything like the same rights as their fellow citizens, it’s a bit difficult to see slavery coming to a quiet end on its own. More likely it would have morphed into something that was still slavery in all but name.
We owe a great debt to those who lost their lives pushing America to become a civilized country. I don’t know that anyone lost a life opposing child labor, but we also owe a debt to the progressives and liberals who ended that abomination.
Derek Copold, on December 3rd, 2009 at 2:17 pm said: The next year it elected an anti-slavery Republican ticket. There were plenty of legal venues left to oppose slavery, something that was not really true in Nazi Germany, let alone the territories outside of Germany they occupied.
Thanks for the comment. It is certainly true that the election of 1860 changed things because the South reacted to the Republican victory by declaring secession. However, my point was that there were no legal venues to oppose slavery in the South. In any case, Lincoln was elected on a platform to confine slavery to the South, not to abolish it. It was the war and the need to win it by arming blacks that led Lincoln to adopt abolitionist war goals whereas his initial goal was simply to preserve the Union, leaving slavery intact. I think most historians would agree with this assessment.
Kirt Higdon,said “Slavery would have disappeared in the US by the beginning of the 20th century anyway…”
Kirt, not to be personal, but would you have liked your grandparents or their parents to have been slaves? I don’t think so. Black Americans feel the same way you would.
Lincoln said in his second inaugural address: “If we shall suppose that American slavery is one of those offenses which, in the providence of God, must needs come, but which, having continued through his appointed time, he now wills to remove, and that he gives to both North and South this terrible war, as the woe due to those by whom the offense came, shall we discern therein any departure from those divine attributes which the believers in a living God always ascribe to him? Fondly do we hope–fervently do we pray–that this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away. Yet, if God wills that it continue until all the wealth piled by the bondsman’s two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn by the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said, “The judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether.” Like John Brown, Abraham Lincoln was right.
@ Thomas Schiro: Before you go on and on about how Red the NY Times is, did you read the article that *does* call John Brown a terrorist. Same edition of the paper.
@ Jim Bovard: Many have posted before me to blow this counterfactual “happy compromise” out of the water. I’d just like to add another note: John Brown did not *spark* mass violence. Slavery itself *was* mass violence. Apparently you don’t consider the fatalities associated with transshipment, the brutal work regimines in rice and cane fields, the separation of families during the internal slave trade, and maiming and murder in response to revolutionary plots to be violence. If you did, you would see that the violence of slavery was on a much larger scale than that of those who sought to overthrow it. Tell you what, when you can show proof of slaveowners and Northern industrialists who were poised to give up on the unpaid labor of slaves, then I’ll buy that Brown and other Abolitionists should have waited.
By your logic, the founders should not have rebelled against the George III. They caused massive bloodshed, but it was for a righteous principle, no? Sounds the same in Brown’s case.
Or are you a proponent of “slavery wasn’t all that bad.” If so, God help you.
@ Jim Bovard: I meant to add that, if you read Gordon Wood’s work on the Radicalism of the American Revolution, you will see that over and over again the founders said that continuing under George’s tyranny would make slaves of them. This was their justification for revolution. If mere political disfranchisement would justify revolution, then why would not political disfranchisement combined with stolen labor, not possessing one’s own children or one’s own body?
Jeffrey Sokolow wrote:
In any case, Lincoln was elected on a platform to confine slavery to the South, not to abolish it.
That’s true, but these sorts of victories come in incremental steps. First, confinement, then reduction followed by elimination. An out and out abolition would have created humongous social disruption. This sort of stop and go path was used in the British Empire as well. Brown helped undo that slow but peaceful reform. He was the kind of guy who gave a bad name to a good cause.
The proposition that slavery in pre-Civil War America was undergoing a process of reform heading toward elimination is not supported by the historical record, period. If anything, Southern slave owners were becoming increasingly belligerent in their intent to preserve and even expand slavery, and they were abetted by a series of Northern appeasers like Pierce and Buchanan. The ‘slavery would have died on its own’ blather was smoke blown by southern apologists after the war.
As to the ‘humongous disruption’ caused by outright abolition: Regardless of what their legal status might have been prior to 1863, morally Africans were never the property of others. However convenient a phase-out of slavery might have been for those parasites who lived off slave labor, there is certainly no reason that so repugnant a system should have been preserved an extra day, as its convenience was probably not shared by its victims.
Brown was hanged as a traitor against Virginia, altho’ he could just as easily have been hanged for murder, since he and his band of murderous cutthroats killed several people in Harpers Ferry. Altho’ I am no fan of slavery, there were better ways to end it besides murder of innocent civilians, including free blacks, than Browns.
May he rot in hell.
Regardless of the crimes that John Brown committed, he was no different from the the blood thirsty slave owners of that time that beat and killed innocent black women,Men and children and raped and sold innocent Black women and girls that,emasculated and castrated the innocent Black men who had to stand by and watch as Massa’ raped their wives and daughters. Women kept from their own babies to take care of the master’s children. Children who were fathered by the master were often sold are allowed to die at birth. General Washington was also a slave owner as were many of the rich white men that fathered children by the slave women. This government that was started by the English immigrants did not include rights for the slaves in a country supposedly raised up for free people. Those whose comments are derogatory in nature are no better than the slave owners at that time if John Brown should rot in hell then they that allowed slavery should too. May Yahweh have mercy on all the souls that fought and died for right and wrong and for those who condoned slavery. Yahweh bless the resting soul of Abraham Lincoln and condemn his killer to a burning hell. Yahweh bless John Brown for having the courage to do what God fearing upright citizens would not.