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Article Excerpt
He knew that he was being called "a madman, a fanatic, a disturber of the peace, a promoter of rebellion," and yet in 1831 William Lloyd Garrison accepted such taunts as the price of being an abolitionist, a voluntary outsider who had rejected normative American notions of racial hierarchy and privilege. Thus to put oneself into empathetic identification with the oppressed Other is at the same time to create and adopt a threatening, even revolutionary alternative self--in effect a new persona, always more or less dramatic, for the new world to come. Such a radical and profoundly imaginative personal transformation, it has been argued, lies at the "black heart" of the abolitionist movement. As John Stauffer has brilliantly shown, the most effective of the abolitionists had each undergone a personal revolution that put them deeply and energetically at odds with their society. "As they transformed themselves and overcame existing social barriers, they re-imagined their country as a pluralist society in which the standard of excellence depended on righteousness and benevolence rather than on skin color, sex, or material wealth." Paul Goodman has likewise argued that immediate abolitionism emerged out of despair over the spiritual sterility of the marketplace revolution and its secular values, prompting numbers of evangelicals to search for ways "to sacralize everyday life" and, as they did so, to become convinced that racial inequality was the main bar to the realization of the millennial kingdom of God in America. Robert H. Abzug has productively suggested that radical reform depended essentially on the ability of individual men and women to suppose that "the very architecture of the cosmos" was open to revision. Thus, in various closely related ways has recent abolitionist historiography emphasized the causal significance of private, revolutionary acts of imagination. (1)
But this compelling line of analysis is not, perhaps, as helpful as it might be in distinguishing among abolitionist careers. The private, conceptual revolution that freed William Lloyd Garrison positionally and rhetorically in the two years before the founding of the Liberator does not make him a revolutionary figure in anything like the sense that John Brown would become. While it may be useful to refer to the acts and influence of both men as "revolutionary" in a very general sense, it is more useful still to insist that the word means something different as allowably applied to each. One has to know, for example, what is meant when, at the end of Stauffer's Black Hearts, we are informed that of Gerrit Smith, Frederick Douglass, James McCune Smith, and John Brown, only the last two were, finally, "true revolutionaries." The great desideratum in confronting the enduringly enigmatic figure of John Brown is a theory of his exceptional standing as a revolutionary. (2)
One very distinctive and largely overlooked feature of Brown's career concerns the influence upon him of the antislavery style adopted by refugees from the English and Continental revolutions of 1848. No other native-born American abolitionist had such consequential contact with these young, displaced revolutionists, among whom the most significant were James Redpath, Richard J. Hinton, Richard Realf, August M. Bondi, and Hugh Forbes.
Although Brown had traveled to England in 1849 in the wake of the Chartist agitation, and on the same trip had visited Paris and made a brief tour of the northern parts of Germany, it was not the revolutions of Europe that were uppermost in his mind at the time; he was instead trying desperately to arrange the sale of a shipment of wool that he had brought with him as partner in the Springfield, Massachusetts, firm of Perkins & Brown. This effort to open a transatlantic market failed, and with it, in due course, the company itself. There is nothing to indicate, given the demands of this commercial mission, that he was more than notationally aware of the state of European politics. Before returning home, however, he did indulge a long-standing curiosity about military history and toured the old battleground of Waterloo. His abiding interest in the Napoleonic Wars prompted him eight years later to read J. H. Stocqueler's Life of Wellington, from which he derived a few tips on guerrilla warfare, and was perhaps reminded that it was this self-same Iron Duke who had led the defense of London against the Chartist mobs in 1848. (3)
The record is silent on Brown's feeling about these more recent and more revolutionary conflicts--until, that is, the end of 1851. On December 22, in a letter to his wife, he wrote of "the great excitement produced [in Boston] by the coming of [Louis] Kossuth, and the last news of a new revolution in France, with the prospect that all Europe will soon again be in a blaze.... I have only to say in regard to these things that I rejoice in them from the full belief that God is carrying out his eternal purpose in them all." (4)
Brown's endorsement accords generally with the support that Kossuth received from the so-called Young Americans; this support assumed the form of a revised doctrine of Manifest Destiny whereby the onward tide of civilization (with all the millennial and perfectionist overtones) was most felt in these revolutionary advances of freedom and self-determination. How heady the enthusiasm was at this time might be indicated in the unguarded statement of an obscure ex-congressman from Illinois named Abraham Lincoln, who, in a series of resolutions supporting Kossuth, maintained that "it is the right of any people, sufficiently numerous for national independence, to throw off, to revolutionize, their existing form of government, and to establish such other in its stead as they may choose." The irony of Lincoln's support for secession has been noted; what has not been noted is that this same Jeffersonian principle could as easily underwrite a revolutionary theory of slave insurrection. Were four million American slaves not "sufficiently numerous for national independence"? It took more imagination than most Americans then had to think so, and yet, as Brown certainly knew, fewer than half a million enslaved and colonized blacks had revolutionized in Haiti a mere fifty years before--in the aftermath of a tumultuous first period of European revolution. (5)
In 1851, when he formed the Springfield "League of the Gileadites" in defensive response to the Fugitive Slave Law, John Brown was scarcely closer than Lincoln to drawing this revolutionary conclusion, and yet before seven years were out he very precisely did draw it--and with such firmness that he could eventually march, with twenty-one others, into the fury of the storm at Harpers Ferry. We cannot know, in precise and conclusive detail, how John Brown's thinking evolved over the intentionally devious and secret last years of his life, but it is certain that at some point, rather late in that interval, he crossed a political boundary into the revolutionary. Brown's organizing of resistance to the Fugitive Slave Law or his more aggressive tactic of slave-stealing, on however grand a scale and however violently conducted--as envisioned in the early project he called the Subterranean Pass Way or as practically exemplified in his liberation of eleven Missouri slaves in 1858--is not revolutionary, but the establishment of a permanent black free state within the borders of the United States clearly is. (6)
That such a transition in Brown's thinking actually occurred has been somewhat obscured by a tendency among earlier commentators to slight the distinction between revolutionary and nonrevolutionary aims, and, among later commentators, to be overly fascinated by the celebrity cast of the late-arriving Secret Six. As Jeffrey Rossbach has amply shown, this group--Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Franklin Benjamin Sanborn, Theodore Parker, Samuel Gridley Howe, George Luther Stearns, and Gerrit Smith--truly were "ambivalent conspirators," to whom, during the Kansas years, Brown principally applied for financial support--and more often than not came away disappointed. These men, radicalized by fugitive slave cases and impatient with the reliance on moral suasion, were nevertheless still conflicted, each in his own way, by loyalties to Free Soil and Republican policies that sought to kill...
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