One of the outstanding achievements of David Reynolds's new biography, John Brown, Abolitionist, is to provide what is by far the fullest documentation to date of Brown's endorsement of full equality in every area of life for black people (he further demanded, incidentally, that girls be educated in the same way and in the same subjects as boys, and he was a compassionate sympathizer with the problems of working-class people and the elderly, as well as with the suffering of animals). For John Brown equality was not a theoretical stance but a daily practice. He forbade his family from ever discriminating in any way against people of color, had close friendships with many black people, deeply admired their culture and insisted on racial integration at every level. While living in Springfield, Massachusetts, in the late 1840s, he wrote a column for a black newspaper, tried to establish an "African high school" and in 1851 founded a black cadre called the League of Gileadites to combat the recent Fugitive Slave Act, which required white citizens to cooperate with authorities in recapturing escaped runaways. When the Brown family moved to North Elba, New York, they lived and worked in a colony of black people who cooperated in maintaining a subsistence economy.

Reynolds helps us to see how extraordinary John Brown's racial views were by placing them within the context of his day, a context where white people everywhere assumed that blacks were intrinsically inferior and their natural state one of subordination. He quotes from both the popular press and the scientific journals of the day to demonstrate how pervasive such views were. The respected so-called science of phrenology, for example, "conclusively" demonstrated in its charts and arguments that Caucasians were properly associated with the ability to reason logically and to cultivate the arts, and Africans were rightly linked to unbridled passion, indolence and stupidity. Even some of those active in the antislavery movement could nonetheless be venomously racist; Reynolds cites the claim of the antislavery orator Cassius Clay that "I have studied the Negro character. They lack self-reliance--we can make nothing out of them. God has made them for the sun and the banana!"

Reynolds's biography is not the first to show some sympathy for John Brown; in recent years several professional historians have published books that at least partially defend his character and his actions (the most notable is probably Stephen Oates's To Purge This Land With Blood). Nor is Reynolds's biography itself an unguarded, unqualified vindication of Brown. Some of the author's ambivalence about aspects of Brown's career, particularly the events at Pottawatomie, Kansas, in 1856, seems warranted, though now and then merely indecisive.

As a work of historical writing, John Brown, Abolitionist is not without flaws. The book's first hundred pages are slow going indeed; as one plows through them, an impression may take root that Reynolds has limited stylistic flair and less narrative drive. But the impression is wrong, and I urge the reader to persevere; the bulk of the book proves to be absorbing, well written and beautifully documented. The only other place where I longed for a stronger editorial hand was during the attenuated discussion much later in the book of Brown's influence on American writers; the unduly long excursion seems more the product of an English professor's own specialty than any intrinsic necessity.

Interpretively, my only serious quarrel with Reynolds is over his treatment of Abraham Lincoln. Throughout the book I think he overestimates Lincoln's desire in the years immediately preceding the Civil War to hold the Union together and underestimates his antislavery convictions. Reynolds never once mentions either the Crittenden Compromise or Lincoln's decision to reprovision Charleston Harbor's Fort Sumter--a decision that precipitated war. The Crittenden Compromise in all likelihood would have passed the Congress and succeeded in holding the Union together--but at the expense of further extending slavery; Lincoln intervened directly with several Congressmen to help defeat the measure, an action strongly suggesting (as does his decision at Sumter) that in his actual, if unannounced, hierarchy of values preventing the spread of slavery came first and the Union second.

But not all historians would agree with me; and even if they did, my complaints, taken together, amount to little when compared with the many strengths of Reynolds's book. Perhaps these are best seen by focusing on how he treats the most controversial episode in Brown's career: the killings at Pottawatomie during the height of the mini civil war there between those struggling to bring the territory into the Union as a free or slave state. Reynolds, first of all, does a superb job of contextualizing the episode, of making it clear that during the struggle over statehood violence was everywhere employed. Thousands of Missourians (the so-called "border ruffians") had poured into Kansas in a determined effort to swing the area, when it came time to elect a territorial legislature, into the proslavery column.

The border ruffians showed no hesitation in terrorizing polling officials, employing massive electoral fraud, using outright violence to silence antislavery settlers (one free-state leader was hacked to death in front of his wife) and, once finally in control of the legislature, passing "black laws" that mandated sentences of years of hard labor for anyone who dared to write, or even had in their possession, antislavery literature. President Franklin Pierce and his Administration overlooked such proslavery atrocities and publicly announced that nothing either illegal or immoral had taken place in Kansas; Pierce even declared the fraudulently elected proslavery legislature to be unquestionably legitimate and denounced the opposition to it as treasonable.

As if to emphasize the point that the federal government was determined to defend the institution of slavery, it was at just this time that South Carolina Senator Preston Brooks approached the desk of Massachusetts Senator Charles Sumner, the outspoken antislavery orator, on the floor of the Senate and caned him so viciously that he broke his hard gutta-percha walking stick into splinters and left a seriously injured Sumner unconscious. Brooks's violent act made him an instant hero throughout the South, where the culture of vigilante justice, including the slow burning of offending slaves over a banked fire, had long been associated with "chivalric" manliness. The South's leading newspaper, the Richmond Enquirer, in hailing Brooks's murderous assault, declared that "impudent" antislavery senators were "a pack of curs" who "must be lashed into submission."

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