I read this book for the Nonfiction Reading Challenge 2014 reading challenge 2014.
Midnight
Rising: John Brown and the Raid that
Sparked the Civil War – Tony Horwitz
In his memoirs, U. S. Grant mentions that his father
often spoke of John Brown, especially after the radical abolitionist’s raid at
Harper's Ferry. His father knew Brown when they were boys and, Grant says, “regarded
him as a man of great purity of character, of high moral and physical courage,
but a fanatic and extremist in whatever he advocated.“
To end the paragraph, Grant says, “It was certainly the
act of an insane man to attempt the invasion of the South, and the overthrow of
slavery, with less than twenty men.” And the verdict “He must have been crazy”
still stands today. Horwitz’ goal was to study this incident in detail and come
up with more than summary judgments.
The opening chapters sketch a quick overview of US in the
1850s. The pre-Civil War South was not a quaint feudal
place. The aura of the underdog and the lost cause, fostered by Gone with the Wind, starks in stark
contrast to the brutality of slavery and the reality of the economic and
political clout that the antebellum South wielded. Most Americans accepted or
looked away from race-based chattel slavery and accepted pro-slavery
legislation and expansion into new territories. This weakness – this pacifism,
this failure -- in the face of evil enraged John Brown and he vowed to punch
back. Moral suasion against slavery, the main tactic of the Abolitionists, was
not Brown’s forte.
The opening chapters
also focus on a biography of Brown. Raised a strict
Calvinist and a conformist seeker of success, Brown endured many personal and
financial trials till his forties. He and his wives lost nine kids (of 20)
before they were ten years old. He went through bankruptcies in a day when that
spelled “total failure.” Most people would be destroyed by these trials. But
Brown believed in liberty and equality and that the ideals of the founders
could only be achieved through the destruction of slavery, the institution that
betrayed our American essence. In his fifties he took on the great moral issue
of his day and went on a mission from God, dedicating himself to what he truly
believed.
In the 1850s in Kansas, Brown used
guerilla tactics against slavery. In a terrorist attack in Pottawatomie he and his men hacked five men to death with
swords. In Missouri he freed slaves at gunpoint and transported them to Canada.
He also worked on his plan to take the war against slavery to Virginia, seize
arms at the armory at Harper’s Ferry, and lead a slave insurrection.
These next couple of chapters cover
the planning, recruiting, and fundraising
for the raid and the raid itself. We don’t know whether Brown predicted
that the raid would fail. We can’t know if Brown thought the raid would be the
great catalyst that would start a war that would end slavery. Brown took many
missteps once the raid started. He didn’t alert slaves in the nearby area that
an insurrection was going to take place. He didn’t bring wagons to carry guns
and pikes. Militarily speaking, the raid was an amateurish fiasco, despite all
the reading and thinking Brown had done about the topic of uprisings.
After the two raid chapters, Horwitz
details the trial and execution of the insurrectionists. The raid failed but at
the trial and waiting for execution, John Brown triumphed as a man of ideas and
words. At his trial, his speech against slavery was lauded even by Emerson. After
his conviction, calling the whole nation to account for the abomination of
slavery, he wrote letters from prison that expressed his willingness to lay
down his life for his beliefs. He went to the execution ground with a dignity
that even his enemies had to admit they admired.
Brown struck terror into the hearts
of the slave owners. They assumed that if the North lionized Brown and a
lot of abolitionists worked for the formation of the Republican Party, then the Republican platform would lead to abolition,
the North would seek to enforce abolition by arms, and so the
South had better set up its own country.
Horwitz says without the raid, Lincoln would not have been elected.
Lincoln asserted on the stump that the Republican Party was not about beliefs
and tactics like those of John Brown. Lincoln used Brown as a foil, claiming
that Lincoln was the moderate choice and deserving of the nomination. Lincoln’s
mind was not an extremist mind like John Brown’s. So Lincoln was able to move from not interfering
with slavery and ethnic cleansing of blacks through deportation all the way to
a position on emancipation similar to Brown’s.
For all his eschewing of
non-violence, in his opposition to slavery Brown was on the right side of
history. He fought not only for emancipation but racial equality. We have only caught up with him in our own
lifetimes, finally coming to see the Abolitionists more tolerantly too and
getting over the gauzy Gone with the
Wind bunkum. We start to wonder, “How did those 19th century
Americans handle slavery.” This book makes us wonder how the future will see
us. How, they may think, did those early 21st century assholes not
get climate change? How did those losers in 2014 tolerate that there were 10
times as many mentally ill people in American prisons and jails than in state
hospitals?
For John Brown, a higher law trumped
human law, making him an inspiration for figures ranging from H. Rap Brown to
Timothy McVeigh. “John Brown is the
stone in the shoe of American history,” historical novelist Truman
Nelson, making us ponder this polarizing figure, the
terrorist mindset, and the uses of violence in history.
Hopping over from the Nonfiction Reading Challenge...
ReplyDeleteI really enjoyed this review -- very helpful in getting my history straight in this area.
A book that my book club read recently gave me similar questions. It was Sugar in the Blood by Andrea Stuart about slavery in Barbados. The whole topic was handled so even-handedly by the black author that I wondered if our future historians will be as understanding of our 21st century choices, like burning petroleum when we know that there isn't an inexhaustible supply.
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