The Avenging Angel (Page 3)

It was at this point, and in this climate, that an outraged John Brown decided to go on the offensive. As a contemporary journalist quoted by Reynolds put it, he "brought Southern tactics to the Northern side." Brown hadn't gone to Kansas (as a host of hostile white historians have insisted) with the specific intent of waging war. But now, with the murder of antislavery men continuing in the territory and with the federal government overtly siding with those determined to spread the barbaric institution, John Brown decided that the time for retaliation had come. He led a small band of supporters, including several of his sons, who singled out five men active in terrorizing antislavery settlers, dragged them from their homes and killed them. Brown claimed--and Reynolds persuades us that "by the best evidence" his claim is true--that he himself did not participate in the killings. But he did direct them.

Retaliatory violence is violence nonetheless. There can be no prettifying the fact that John Brown, deliberately and proactively, saw to it that five people were slaughtered at Pottawatomie. To the principled pacifist, for whom the taking of human life is never acceptable, that must remain the bottom line and disapproval must remain unqualified. I feel closer to that position than to any other. But then, I've never been a brutalized slave, a Jew in a concentration camp, an abused prisoner of war or a hunted Native American. But neither was John Brown. The chief indignity he'd suffered had been to his Calvinist conscience and to his compassion for the suffering of the op pressed. Reynolds concludes that "the Pottawatomie affair was indeed a crime, but it was a war crime committed against proslavery settlers by a man who saw slavery itself as an unprovoked war of one race against another."

I can't do better than that, though I wish Reynolds had taken the argument to another level and posed some of the difficult questions that are intrinsic to any discussion of the utility and morality of violence as a tool for producing social change. Most of the populace seems content most of the time to let the state decide when the taking of life is justified; state-sponsored wars produce "heroes," not "criminals." But by what authority, human or divine, does the state decide what countries are to be invaded, what villages bombed, which individuals tortured or executed? And why do so many of us, with a mix of relief and indifference, leave such decisions in the hands of those who rarely suffer any personal consequences from them?

In line with this, I can't help but wonder whether Reynolds, who calls Brown's action at Pottawatomie a "crime," would apply the same label to the Warsaw Ghetto uprising? Or the fight against Franco in Spain? Or, during the colonial period, to the actions of anyone who joined Toussaint L'Ouverture in fighting the French in Haiti? The questions, to be sure, are in a sense unfair: Reynolds is not a professional philosopher or an ethicist. Still, we all, inescapably, spin theories and pass judgments. This is especially true of historians claiming to "objectively" re-create the past; when we select evidence and decide which portions of it to emphasize, we are inevitably engaged in crafting narratives--though most historians prefer to ignore the fact--that are crowded with implicit, if usually unconscious and unexamined, value judgments.

When it comes to John Brown's more celebrated attack on Harpers Ferry, Rey nolds has little trouble issuing judgments, and he does so brilliantly. I found his intricate argument that John Brown's raid was neither poorly conceived nor quixotic entirely persuasive, even though Brown's hesitation at a critical moment to escape into the mountains does continue to seem mystifying (to Reynolds, too). Where Brown went astray was in his optimistic expectation that local blacks would quickly join his band and, their ranks thus enlarged, turn the insurrection into a swelling tide. Brown had perhaps overstudied the successful slave rebellions in the West Indies (the uprising in Jamaica, L'Ouverture's liberation of Haiti) and underplayed the peculiar conditions of the heavily fortified South. Blacks were indeed as shrewd and as fiercely desirous of freedom as John Brown thought--but that meant shrewd enough to realize that the chances for success were slight and that their subsequent punishment would be ferociously brutal.

David Reynolds, to his enormous credit, has restored to us a man "too honest to succeed as a capitalist," too attuned to the sufferings of others to tend closely to his own, too principled to be easily recognized as an American hero. At the close of his biography, Reynolds, in a profoundly moving way, recounts Brown's nobility of behavior in jail, on trial and awaiting the gallows. No madman or fraud could conceivably have matched his astonishing eloquence and spiritual grandeur. This was a special man indeed, made so by the utter sincerity of his egalitarian convictions and his willingness to sacrifice all in their name. Reynolds has managed--long after someone else should have--to restore to us a flawed but deeply impressive humanitarian figure who makes the moral midgets currently dominating our national discourse appear, by contrast, the ignoble specks they actually are.

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