John Brown and the Era of Literary Confrontation

Michael Stoneham

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2009
• Print ISBN: 9780415845519
• eBook ISBN: 9781135842253
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: 19th Century History
• Index: History

Radical abolitionist and freedom-fighter John Brown inspired literary America to confrontation during his short but dramatic career as a public figure in antebellum America. Emerging from obscurity during the violent struggle to determine how Kansas would enter the Union in 1856, John Brown captured the imagination of the most prominent Eastern literary figures following his dramatic, though failed raid on Harper's Ferry. Impressed by Brown's forthright defense of his attempt to initiate the end of slavery, Whittier, Whitman, Melville, Longfellow, and Howells responded to the abolitionist with poetic tributes suggesting that Brown was a liberating hero, while Emerson and Thoreau celebrated his effort to inspire the nation to a new moral awareness of the common humanity of all men. Responses, however, were not uniform, as these and other figures debated the merits and meanings of Brown's actions. This exceptional book sheds new light on how John Brown inspired America's most significant intellects to take a public stand against the inertia of moral compromise and social degeneracy, bringing the nation to the brink of civil war.

1
Introduction

I believe John Brown to be the representative man of the century, as Washington was of the last—the Harper’s Ferry affair, and the capacity shown by the Italians for self-government, the great events of this age. One will free Europe, and the other America.¹

George Luther Stearns

Radical abolitionist, freedom-fighter, and terrorist John Brown inspired literary America during his short but dramatic career as public figure in antebellum America. Emerging from obscurity during the violent struggle to determine whether Kansas would enter the Union as a slave or free state in 1856, John Brown captured the imagination of the Eastern intelligentsia in reports of his exploits on behalf of the Free State settlers during the chaotic summer of 1856. He was a bold guerilla fighter committed to ensuring that slavery did not succeed in Kansas, and prominent members of eastern emigration societies and Kansas committees were thrilled by the stories of his heroism at Blackjack and Ossawatomie and eager to entertain the Kansas veteran when he journeyed east during the winter of 1857. Men like Thomas Wentworth Higginson, abolitionist Free Church minister and future mentor to poet Emily Dickinson, was genuinely excited to meet Brown; before a Boston audience gathered to celebrate the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society at Faneuil Hall that January, he likened Brown to a “genuine warrior of the Revolution.” ² According to Higginson, John Brown was the “Ethan Allen, the Israel Putnam” of the day.³ He was a bold man unflinchingly committed to liberty in Kansas, and his fearless opposition to Pro-Slavery Border Ruffians on remote battlefields thrilled attentive eastern opponents of slavery desperate for a victory against the powerful Southern slave caucus. John Brown came to represent the struggle against slavery in Kansas. He became the representative of liberty in the contested territory, and he earned the appreciation and the approbation of prominent eastern intellectuals when Kansas became a free state. As Henry Thoreau would later remark, “it was through [John Brown’s] … agency, far more than any other’s, that Kansas was made free” (262).

Regardless of the considerable liberty that Thoreau exercised when he made this statement, there is no doubt that John Brown inspired many of his countrymen by his resolute commitment to oppose the illegal and often ruthless efforts of Pro-Slavery forces to make Kansas a slave state. Special correspondents for the New York Tribune sent dispatches east reporting the “old man[’s]” willingness to endure both depravation and suffering in order to ensure the eventual triumph of principles in Kansas.⁴ John Brown, himself, sent an account of his forthright conduct at the battle of Black Jack to the New York Tribune.⁵ As Franklin Sanborn records, “all of Concord had heard … of Brown’s fights and escapes in Kansas; and Thoreau, who had his own bone to pick with the civil government … was [particularly] desirous of meeting Brown.”⁶ So were many other leading men and women in Concord: Emerson, Alcott, Hoar, and Sanborn, and Thoreau all attended Brown’s evening lecture in Concord and were moved to contribute toward Brown’s future efforts. After meeting Brown at Thoreau’s dining room, Emerson even invited the captain to his home for a discussion of both his views and experiences, evidently learning to both admire and respect the forthright character who had whole-heartedly dedicated himself to abolition. Likewise, many other men and women in Massachusetts were impressed by the fifty-seven year old man who had dedicated himself to liberty in the contested territories. They eagerly attended events where the Kansas veteran was invited and attentively listened as he narrated accounts of his efforts to oppose the outrages of the Pro-Slavery Border Ruffians.

During the winter of 1857, Brown appealed to individuals as contentious as abolitionists Theodore Parker, William Lloyd Garrison, Wendell Phil-lips, and George Luther Stearns and addressed audiences as diverse as the Massachusetts state legislature. Committed to the end of slavery and convinced that if “slavery goes to Kansas, it goes to all the territories,” Parker even hosted Brown at his home in Boston and joined in his debate with outspoken non-resistance champion William Lloyd Garrison on the biblical injunction “resist not evil with evil.”⁷ Not only did the Reverend Parker believe that “carnal weapons” were absolutely necessary in the fight against those whose will to impose slavery’s stamp on the Kansas territory knew no limits, Parker, like his fellow divine Henry Ward Beecher, had actively supplied Free State settlers with weapons and funding for nearly a year by the time he met Brown.⁸ Unsuccessful in converting his friend, Garrison, to a more violent perspective, Parker was none-the-less not at all disappointed with the opportunity that he had to gain a greater appreciation for the man who had inspired a revolution in sentiment in Kansas and a newfound willingness to combat slavery in New England.

In fact, Parker was so impressed by John Brown and his militant willingness to oppose the inertia of Southern slavery on the battlefield that he committed himself to Brown when the freedom fighter revealed his intention to attack slavery itself. Joining five other ultra-abolitionists in 1858, Parker became one of the primary financial supporters for the event that would electrify the nation—the attack on Harper’s Ferry. He was joined by Worcester reformer Thomas Wentworth Higginson and Concord schoolmaster Franklin Sanborn, both men whose commitment to abolition informed their literary efforts for the next five decades.

However, when news that John Brown had initiated his attack reached the North, these men, like many other Northern abolitionists, did not emerge from the security of their covert complicity to sing Brown’s praises and challenge the inertia of negative public opinion inspired by the conservative press. Instead, they either fled the country or silently—and safely—observed the response of an outraged populous.

Henry Thoreau was appalled by their behavior. Indignant over their behavior and offended by the public response to John Brown’s failed effort, he determined to speak on behalf of John Brown. Disregarding the advice of his well-intentioned neighbors, on Sunday, 30 October, 1859, he announced that he would lecture on the character and actions of Captain John Brown to his Concord neighbors. Having been inspired by reports of Brown’s forthright responses to queries of the government officials and outraged by the paucity of favorable public commentary concerning Brown’s motive, Thoreau confronted his Concord contemporaries that night with a powerful address condemning their collective renunciation of Brown’s actions and demanding a revaluation of Brown’s actions—and their own. Over the next week, the indignant Concord naturalist gave his lecture on two more occasions. Each time he read “On the Character and Actions of John Brown,” he confronted an audience with a strong historical abolitionist sentiment and a significant connection to one of the more prominent abolitionists among Brown’s primary supporters.

Both incisive and disconcerting, Thoreau makes his nineteenth century listener understand the vast difference between the passive social role that he or she may have played in the fight to end slavery and the active confrontational role that John Brown played at Harper’s Ferry. The one, Thoreau intimates, does little more than ensure stasis; the other, he insists, compels individuals to re-examine their own moral fiber and commit to an activism that denies compromise.

Acknowledging the appropriateness of Thoreau’s speech on John Brown, Emerson did not take long to proclaim his own sympathy with the Kansas veteran.⁹ On 8 November, he publicly proclaimed that John Brown was a “new saint awaiting his martyrdom” to a packed audience at the Parker Fraternity, the same forum that Henry Thoreau had explored during the second of his three presentations of “On the Character and Actions of Captain John Brown.”¹⁰ Emerson’s brief reference to Brown during his lecture on “Courage” was not, however, altogether satisfying for the Concord sage. Inspired by Brown and convinced that the conditions that had compelled the “pure idealist” were brought on by the culture of compromise that had dominated American public life for the past ten years, Emerson spoke most poignantly at the meeting to “Aid John Brown’s Family” on 18 November, 1859.¹¹

Using the freedom fighter as a kind of touchstone, Emerson perspicaciously confronted his errant contemporaries with their complicity in the enslavement of four million African-Americans in the United States. He insisted that each American was responsible for the existence of slavery and its paradoxical presence in a nation established upon the principles of liberty and justice. Collectively, Emerson assured the Tremont Temple audience, Americans had had many opportunities to ensure the end of slavery; however, they failed to eradicate the blight upon the nation because they were more interested in political power, material wealth, and social influence than in moral righteousness. Juxtaposing Brown with the “men of talent” who occupied positions of political power in America, Emerson exposed both the elected and the appointed representatives who had brought the nation to ruin by their devotion to compromise, appeasement, and convention.¹² Asserting that they had consistently privileged political expediency at the expense of morality, Emerson suggested that they imperiled the lives of the citizens throughout the nation by securing a government that demanded the enforcement of immoral laws, hence compromised the future of the nation by denying the validity of the primary philosophical premise upon which the nation was established—that government exists to secure the “unalienable rights” of men.¹³ For Emerson, John Brown embraced an incorruptible morality gained not by political association or fawning admiration of existing legal precedent, but by a right reliance. He was, according to Emerson, a model self-reliant man who acted upon his uncorrupted convictions for the universal good, hence offered a model of moral engagement for all of America. Indeed, Emerson constructed Brown as a kind of restorative who, by his commitment to universal laws and public demonstration of virtue, could inspire the errant mass of American representatives to right public engagement.

Emerson and Thoreau were not the only literary figures inspired to confront their contemporaries as a result of either their intimacy with or awareness of John Brown’s willingness to violently confront slavery. There were many other contemporary literary figures who found themselves inspired after encountering John Brown. Harriet Beecher Stowe was one of them. Perhaps the most well-known abolitionist author in the 1850s, Stowe makes Brown central to her exploration of abolition in her second major novel, Dred: A Tale of the Dismal Swamp. Written during the summer of 1856 when news of the struggle for bloody Kansas dominated the press, Dred is an exploration of the efficacy of the kind of violence that John Brown embraced in his effort to defend the rights of Free Soil settlers against the abuses of Border Ruffians in Kansas. Informed by what was occurring on the frontier and conscious that a degenerate atmosphere must exist in order to inspire men like John Brown to murderous mid-night reprisals, Stowe attempts to demonstrate both the corruption inherent in slavery and the degenerate influence that it exerts upon those subject and witness to its effects. It cannot, she attempts to demonstrate, be the method that abolitionists embrace to end slavery; instead, it is clearly the choice of brutes—not enlightened men privileged by education, religious discourse, and morally informed social engagement. Civilized men and women, Stowe asserts, do not resort to violence except in self-defense.

Confronting her own fears that slaves might eventually adopt the degenerate violence that both Pro-slavery and Free-State militiamen embraced in their fight to win Kansas, Stowe attempts to convince her readers that something must be done to end slavery before the Southern slaves embrace the brutal methods that the violent advocates of slavery had adopted on the frontier. Neither the real violence on the border nor the narratives of slave violence that Stowe knowingly evokes for her less-than informed readers are acceptable. She cannot embrace the “John Brown way” that Frederick Douglass celebrated in Boston almost four years after the publication of Dred, nor can she advocate the degenerate violence inherent in armed insurrection that Nat Turner modeled nearly thirty years before. To embrace violence, Stowe opined, was to embrace brutality. Certainly, it was not the choice of intelligent Americans. John Brown, and men like him on the fringes of civilization, brought Stowe to this realization. The “John Brown way” could not be the only way to reverse the inertia of slave power in America; however, as Stowe reluctantly recognized, it was both the most dramatic and the most likely way that slavery might be brought to an end in America.

Harriet Beecher Stowe did not approve of John Brown, but she did approve of his purpose. In a sense, John Brown tormented Stowe; he represented the violence that slavery inspired, but he also represented a conscious willingness to act against the moral wrong that Stowe had devoted herself to eradicating. He was noble, and he captured the attention of the nation in his devotion to a noble cause. John Brown radicalized Harriet Beecher Stowe; he inspired her to consider advocating violence; he also radicalized Henry Thoreau inspiring him to boldly confront vacillating abolitionists with their cowardly failure to acknowledge the value of John Brown’s attack at Harper’s Ferry; and he inspired Emerson to pointedly challenge the entire political system and demand the renunciation of the corrupt practices that resulted in what Theodore Parker appropriately termed the “national crisis” of 1859. He also compelled countless other contemporary literary figures to defy the inertia of condemnation that initially overwhelmed the nation when news of Brown’s attack first escaped the remote town in West Virginia where Brown chose to begin his gue-rilla campaign. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow translated Brown into an American hero whose date of execution, the “Second of December, 1859 … [was] the date of the new Revolution: quite as much needed as the old one.”¹⁴ John Greenleaf Whittier celebrated Brown’s visible martyrdom by translating a New York Tribune account of Brown’s tender gesture toward a “negro child” whose “poor slave mother [Brown had] … striven to free” into a poetic tribute to the heroic abolitionist.¹⁵ Herman Melville penned a tribute to the fearless abolitionist champion—the man he termed a “meteor of war,” as did Walt Whitman, William Dean Howells, and Julia Maria Child.¹⁶

Many of these tributes to John Brown appear in Echoes of Harper’s Ferry, the 1860 companion book to James Redpath’s biography of Brown, The Public Life of John Brown. What distinguishes most of these tributes from Thoreau’s “Plea for Captain John Brown,” the title his John Brown lecture assumed when it appeared in Redpath’s text, are the form, force, and direction of the work. Thoreau’s lecture, much like Emerson later “Speech at a Meeting to Aid John Brown’s Family,” is an attempt to confront an errant citizenry with their moral complicity in the culture of compromise pervasive in America during the decades that preceded John Brown’s attack on Harper’s Ferry. Both Emerson and Thoreau confront their listeners with the example of John Brown—an idealist who “believed in his ideas to the extent that he put them into action” (119). Both addresses are also distinct petitions calling for individual social reform and moral courage in opposition to the cowardice displayed by public figures charged with guiding the nation toward its millennial destiny. And both Emerson...

Table of contents

• Studies in American Popular History and Culture
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• 1 Introduction
• 2 John Brown
• 3 Translating a Terrorist
• 4 Confronting Conspirators
• 5 “Self-Reliance”
• 6 In the Shadow of John Brown
• 7 Epilogue
• Appendix A
• Appendix B
• Appendix C
• Notes
• Works Cited
• Index