By Kevin D. Williamson
Wednesday, October 15, 2025
You who build these altars now
To sacrifice these children—
You must not do it anymore.
A scheme is not a vision,
And you never have been tempted
By a demon or a god.
You who stand above them now,
Your hatchets blunt and bloody,
You were not there before,
When I lay upon a mountain
And my father’s hand was
trembling
With the beauty of the word.
Leonard Cohen / “The Story
of Isaac,” 1969
CHARLES TOWN, West Virginia—Here on the not-at-all-mean
streets of Charles Town, West Virginia, where there are antiques shops and
upmarket coffee places with pop-Christian praise music on the stereo and
advertisements for nice apartments in the shop windows on the main street and
fine old municipal buildings, and blocks of sturdy stately Victorian homes, the
sidewalks are far from deserted, and if not exactly teeming or bustling
with pedestrian traffic, then certainly far from abandoned as they are in so many
other Appalachian downtowns, and so walking around on a bright brisk weekday
morning with your cappuccino past the Abolitionist Ale Works and Pour Choices
Wine and the storefront missionaries handing out food to the needy who already
are lined up outside, you can observe a fairly generous and representative
selection of both kinds of white people—yoga-mat whites and Marlboro
Light whites—while the smell of fresh and no doubt optionally gluten-free baked
goods in the air can be understood as the olfactory aspect of the literal air
of gentrification settling over the place, which is only about an hour’s drive
from the prosperous Northern Virginia suburbs of Washington, the federal
megapolis that is slowly but steadily incorporating bits and pieces of West
Virginia into the asphalt sprawl of what I guess we can just go ahead and start
calling Leviathan, the officers and agents of which require new bedroom
communities with a CVS and a Starbucks and surely a Whole Foods not far behind
however much the locals complain about the newcomers driving up the cost of
living, the same old exurban thing, all of which is starting to make me think
that maybe I have chosen the wrong place to go hunting for the ghost of John
Brown.
I am not demanding a vision: Sharps rifle in one hand,
Bible in the other, prophetic beard, halo, blood on his boots, radiating
righteousness, black wings of vengeance. No, of course not—while that may be
what I want, it is not what I expect. But I was not expecting
gluten-free scones and generally well-scrubbed good commercial order and two
hours of free parking and hardly a whisper of what happened here. That
Americans at large are only passingly familiar with John Brown’s story is
undeniable: A local historian tells me that many visitors to Charles Town are
surprised to learn that John Brown, who hoped to launch a slave rebellion, was
white.
Thursday is the anniversary of the attack on Harpers
Ferry, in which Brown and his band of radical abolitionists endeavored to seize
a federal arsenal and inspire a slave revolt—an attack that was, depending on
whom you ask, either a “dress rehearsal” for the Civil War or, in effect, its
opening shots.
John Brown’s body lies a-moldering in the grave, as the famous song (you know
its melody as “The Battle Hymn of the Republic”) tells it, but that site is way
far away in North Elba, New York, where he had once been part of a racially
integrated colony; Brown’s most famous exploits were carried out down the road
from Charles Town at Harpers Ferry and, most infamously, 1,200 miles away at
Pottawatomie, Bleeding Kansas. But here in the seat of Jefferson County is
where Brown was jailed, tried, and hanged for treason, the first American to
suffer such a fate—but hanged under Virginia law rather than as a federal
matter, in order to ... expedite the proceedings, if you know what I
mean and I know that you do: Only 45 days passed between Brown’s arrest and
execution. The people who hanged him, who would soon be “levying War” against
the United States of America, had the gobsmacking audacity to charge Brown with
treason to the state of Virginia, which in less than two years would
host the rebel capital of the slave power; Brown argued that he could not
commit treason against Virginia because he was not a Virginian—Q.E.D.
About the murder charges, he had less of a
plausible argument.
The post office here stands where the jail once stood,
and some of the rubble from that structure was incorporated into a monument.
You can go down to the local museum and see the wagon in which John Brown and
his fellows were hauled off to their hanging, an item that the curator
identifies as the most popular artifact in the collection. I’d have guessed it
would have been the rifles from the Harpers Ferry arsenal: All red-blooded
Americans love guns and the Bible, and we have been known to go spelunking dimly
around in the latter in search of a warrant for using the former—and, to that
extent, John Brown was a very familiar American type, like Patrick Henry or
David Koresh.
I am not sentimental, but I do get funny little feelings
about places sometimes—I have never been inside Ford’s Theatre, for example,
and I always feel a little sick walking by the place. But John Brown does not
seem to have left very many metaphysical footprints here. There are signs—I
mean, literal signs: “JEFFERSON COUNTY COURTHOUSE WHERE JOHN BROWN WAS TRIED.
In this courthouse, John Brown, the abolitionist, was tried and found guilty of
treason, conspiracy, and murder. He was hanged four blocks from here on
December 2, 1859. Visitors are Welcome.”
But not the kind of signs I am looking for, I guess.
***
As advertised, four blocks away, where the infamous if
needful deed was done, stands the Gibson-Todd House, another of those stately
Victorians, this one built by John Thomas Gibson, who led the Jefferson County
militia in the first armed response to Brown’s attack on Harpers Ferry, which
began on October 16, 1859. Gibson handled security for the hanging and later
became mayor of Charles Town. In attendance at Brown’s death were future
Confederate generals Stonewall Jackson and J.E.B. Stuart, as well as—plainly
visible in one photograph—a certain John Wilkes Booth. Gibson built a splendid
house on the place where Brown was put to death, possibly (this is the view of
some locals) in order to keep the place from becoming a pilgrimage site for
Brown’s admirers. Standing there, you might not get much of a feel for the
spiritual climate of the 1850s, but you can read the shifting political winds
of the 20th and 21st centuries: In 1932, the Historical
Society of West Virginia put up a very neutral-sounding plaque, reading:
“WITHIN THESE GROUNDS A SHORT DISTANCE EAST OF THIS MARKER IS THE SITE OF THE
SCAFFOLD ON WHICH JOHN BROWN, LEADER OF THE HARPERS FERRY RAID, WAS EXECUTED
DECEMBER THE SECOND, 1859.” A plaque put up in 2025 takes a rather more
definite view of the deaths of Shields Green and John Copeland Jr., fellow
abolitionists and raiders—black men—who were hanged alongside Brown:
“Abolitionists Shields Green and John Copeland Jr. were sacrificed at the
gallows on December 16, 1859 for their pursuit of freedom for all Americans.
Young Green and Copeland were two of the five African American men who
participated in the revolt against slavery along with John Brown in Harpers
Ferry in 1859.” It seems that many Americans, at least the minority who are
familiar with the case, are more comfortable thinking of Green and Copeland as
freedom fighters, men who had more in common with Alexander Hamilton or Crispus
Attucks than Timothy McVeigh or Charles Manson.
Something about John Brown still makes us a little
nervous.
Almost everybody I talk to here—everybody who is speaking
in some official capacity—is very, very careful when discussing the legacy of
John Brown. “Controversial” seems to be the safe word they have all agreed to
adopt. Some controversies stay controversies—and what to think about John Brown
is one of the enduring ones.
Son of the South William Faulkner famously insisted: “The
past is never dead. It’s not even past.” In that Green-Copeland plaque from
2025 it is impossible to miss an echo of the Black Lives Matter protests from a
few years before it was put up. And I am here walking around talking to people
about John Brown and the question of political violence two weeks after Charlie
Kirk’s memorial service, which included brandished crucifixes and declarations
of war on behalf of the right-wing provocateur and social-media figure
assassinated by a very-online degenerate with a vintage Mauser M98. “The light
will defeat the dark,” declared Stephen Miller, the mayonnaise-addicted
Nosferatu who surely would be personally inconvenienced by the triumph of the
light, should it come to pass. “We will prevail over the forces of wickedness
and evil. They cannot imagine what they have awakened. They cannot conceive of
the army that they have arisen in all of us, because we stand for what is good,
what is virtuous, what is noble.” FBI Director Kash Patel, who was sworn into
office with his hand on the Bhagavad Gita and apparently having
forgotten which religion he supposedly practices and which entirely
different religion was associated with Kirk’s faith-based entrepreneurship,
declared, in heathen fashion: “See you in Valhalla.” Donald Trump showed up to
praise Kirk as a “martyr” and then casually announced: “I think we found an
answer to autism.” Praise ... Odin, I guess? Or Shiva or maybe Western
civilization or RFK Jr. or Whomever? Let the God of All-Natural Homeopathic
Herbal Alternatives to Tylenol be God.
It is a funny thing, that old-time American religion. For
a time, John Brown belonged to a Congregationalist church in Hudson, Ohio. He
attended a prayer meeting there following the death of abolitionist editor
Elijah Lovejoy, who died defending his printing press from a mob of slavery
supporters. Brown apparently said little or nothing until the end of the
meeting, at which point he stood up and spoke: “Here, before God, in the
presence of these witnesses, from this time I consecrate my life to the destruction
of slavery.”
Unlike those show ponies angling for future Fox News gigs
at Charlie Kirk’s memorial service, John Brown meant it. He was that
most dangerous and terrible sort of American: a believer.
***
Now, my countrymen, if you have
been taught doctrines conflict with the great landmarks of the Declaration of
Independence; if you have listened to suggestions which would take away from
its grandeur and mutilate the fair symmetry of its proportions; if you have
been inclined to believe that all men are not created equal in those
inalienable rights enumerated in our charter of liberty, let me entreat you to
come back. Return to the fountain whose waters spring close by the blood of the
revolution. Think nothing of me—take no thought for the political fate of any
man whomsoever—but come back to the truths that are in the Declaration of
Independence. You may do anything with me you choose, if you will but heed
these sacred principles.
Abraham Lincoln /
Lewistown, Illinois, 1858
George Washington was the father of his country, pater
patriae, but he had no children. There was no George Washington Jr. dodging
musket balls or freezing his toes off at Valley Forge. Yet Gen. Washington did
take a paternal attitude toward the men who fought under him, and the famously
austere general wept when he said goodbye to his comrades at Fraunces Tavern.
John Brown, a father of 20 who outlived all but eight of his children, left
three dead sons on the battlefields of his war of liberation: one at Osawatomie
in 1856, two at Harpers Ferry. Another escaped to exile in sunny California,
thereby adding another great American archetype to the Brown family collection.
Brown’s first wife died in childbirth, with Brown’s seventh child, another son,
dying with her. Abraham Lincoln had four sons and lost two of them before his
own assassination: 3-year-old Eddie died of tuberculosis in 1850, and then
11-year-old Willie was lost to typhoid fever while Lincoln served in the White
House. (A third Lincoln son, Tad, died a few years after his father at 18 years
of age.) It was the most ordinary thing. Fathers lost sons all the time.
These were men who were close to grief, who understood
its true character and knew its seasons, intimately acquainted with the
fickleness of Fortune. It left them with a peculiar—certainly peculiar from the
point of view of Anno Domini 2025—combination of generosity and hardness. More
than 1 million Americans died as a result of the Civil War, including some
700,000 soldiers, but the commander in chief of the Union forces remained
capable of feeling those casualties one at a time. As Lincoln wrote to the young
daughter of an old friend who died in combat at Coffeeville: “In this sad world
of ours, sorrow comes to all; and, to the young, it comes with bitterest agony,
because it takes them unawares. The older have learned to ever expect it. ...
You cannot now realize that you will ever feel better. Is not this so? . ... I
have had experience enough to know what I say.”
The God of the Old Testament stayed Abraham’s hand and
spared Isaac. But “Nature and Nature’s God,” as Thomas Jefferson addressed the
Almighty, cut a brutal swath through the lives of John Brown and Abraham
Lincoln and everyone around them. (That is what Nature and Nature’s God does.)
At Pottawatomie, John Brown and his band pulled a father and two of his sons
out of their beds and put them to death as the wife and mother listened to the
dying screams of her husband and children. Abraham Lincoln had a great many
mothers’ sons on his conscience. And maybe that is one of the important ways in
which the 19th century more closely resembled the ancient world than
it does our own time: John Brown’s bloody campaign—his high-minded spiritualized
violence—shocks the modern sensibility even more than it did that of the 19th
century because we are less accustomed to intimate losses. As an admirer of
John Brown’s (I write these words under his portrait) I do not like to think of
this, but: If you want to understand the apparent inhumanity of, say, Hamas or
the Taliban, start with John Brown. Or Timothy McVeigh or the guy who shot
Charlie Kirk or Cliven Bundy or the Unabomber—every bush-league gormless misfit
with an AR-15 and a couple of full magazines of 5.56mm and some toxic pent-up
sexual frustration thinks he is John Brown. Nobody ever thinks he is John
Hinckley Jr.
The John Brown controversy still commands our attention
because John Brown is dead but the issue he raises isn’t. Some people think
they have a really, really good reason for killing a person or a 100,000 of
them or a million—and not all of them are wrong, as you could glean from a
halfway competent biography of Dwight Eisenhower or Ulysses Grant.
Or go straight to the uncut stuff and open your Bible.
That the great man of the 19th century was a
bearded, practically biblical patriarch by the name of “Abraham” feels almost
preordained. (Here, my Calvinist friends may smile.) The parallels were not
lost on the 16th president’s admirers and partisans, who marched
into battle singing “We Are Coming, Father Abraham!” So many sons sacrificed
under the hesitant blade of that American Abraham—the God of Democracy is a God
even more jealous than the God of the Old Testament—so many sons and then
“300,000 more,” as that perversely jaunty song reports the data. Lincoln
himself appreciated the biblical overtones of his times, and perhaps he even
had an idea of what that might mean for him personally. In contrast to the
thoroughly pagan political deification of George Washington, whose imperial
apotheosis is depicted in that ghastly Constantino Brumidi painting on the
Capitol dome, Lincoln became the ultimate great atoning human sacrifice of the
Civil War—shot on Good Friday, no less, in case History wasn’t making the point
pointy enough for you. The clergymen of his day got the point, and many
of the Sunday sermons following Lincoln’s death had St. Paul’s words
thundering from the pulpit: “Without the shedding of blood is no remission.”
If you have the right kind of American eyes, it may seem
equally preordained that the prophet who came before the Christly figure of
that American Abraham just as inevitably bore the name “John,” a fugitive voice
crying in the wilderness, wild-eyed and full of holy terror and uncompromising,
and marked for a divine appointment with Herod’s executioners. John Brown was,
among other things, a former shepherd, for Pete’s sake. But there were
complications and limits to the biblical parallels: John Brown’s great long
patriarchal beard, familiar from the famous portraits, was a disguise—most of
his life, he was clean-shaven, or at least as often as he could be in his
vagrant circumstances. And when that American prophet traveled to Harpers
Ferry, he did not sign his name “John” while securing accommodations for his
holy insurgents—then, he was “Isaac,” presumably after the son of the free
woman who ultimately would cast out his half-brother, Ismael, the son of the
slave. One suspects that the choice of a nom de guerre was far from
accidental. “This is an allegory,” St. Paul wrote to the Galatians. “These
women represent two covenants. One covenant is given on Mount Sinai and bears
children who are born into slavery ... Now you, brethren, are, like Isaac, the
children of the promise. ... We are the
children not of the slave woman but of the free woman.”
Lincoln—who belonged to no church but planned to spend at
least part of his retirement in the Holy Land—was too fond of quoting
Scripture, at least in Stephen Douglas’ judgment. But Lincoln understood the
American context, which begins with understanding that the Declaration of
Independence, even authored as it was by the unorthodox Thomas Jefferson, is a
fundamentally Christian document and arguably a Puritan one at that, the
implications of which for the matter of slavery could be seen as early as the
drafting of the Constitution, with its provision for the abolition of the
African slave trade. That constitutional settlement, as Lincoln noted in
an 1859 speech in Illinois, was the work of:
representatives of American
liberty from thirteen States of the confederacy — twelve of which were
slaveholding communities. … These communities, by their representatives in old
Independence Hall, said to the whole world of men: ‘We hold these truths to be
self evident: that all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their
Creator with certain unalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty and
the pursuit of happiness.’ This was their majestic interpretation of the
economy of the Universe. This was their lofty, and wise, and noble
understanding of the justice of the Creator to His creatures. Yes, gentlemen,
to all His creatures, to the whole great family of man. In their
enlightened belief, nothing stamped with the Divine image and likeness was sent
into the world to be trodden on, and degraded, and imbruted by its fellows.
They grasped not only the whole race of man then living, but they reached
forward and seized upon the farthest posterity. The erected a beacon to guide
their children and their children’s children, and the countless myriads who
should inhabit the earth in other ages.
Wise statesmen as they were, they
knew the tendency of prosperity to breed tyrants, and so they established these
great self-evident truths, that when in the distant future some man, some
faction, some interest, should set up the doctrine that none but rich men, or
none but white men, were entitled to life, liberty and pursuit of happiness,
their posterity might look up again to the Declaration of Independence and take
courage to renew the battle which their fathers began — so that truth, and
justice, and mercy, and all the humane and Christian virtues might not be
extinguished from the land; so that no man would hereafter dare to limit and
circumscribe the great principles on which the temple of liberty was being
built.
Fine words. Great words. Important words. Spoken just
over a year before the raid on Harpers Ferry, when John Brown had decided that
fine words would not do.
Brown had plans for his own kind of constitution, a
“Provisional Constitution and Ordinances for the People of the United States,”
to govern his insurgent followers until the realization of that “more perfect
Union” Lincoln would talk about. He raged against the “heaven-daring laws” of
the slaveholding states, echoing abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison’s
denunciation of the Constitution as a “most bloody and heaven-daring
arrangement” between the decent godly free Christians and the idolatrous
slavers.
John Brown’s moral and political reasoning was reasonably
straightforward: He wasn’t launching an attack on anybody—slavery was a de
facto state of war, a war of conquest launched by one group of people with
the aim of oppressing another, and all he proposed to do was to fight back.
This was comprehended by Frederick Douglass, who tried to talk Brown out of his
program of violent insurgency: “In his eye a slave-holding community could not
be peaceable but was, in the nature of the case, in one incessant state of
war,” Douglass said. “To him such a community was not more sacred than a band
of robbers; it was the right of any one to assault it by day or night.”
Brown’s own proposed constitutional preamble reads:
Whereas slavery, throughout its
entire existence in the United States, is none other than a most barbarous,
unprovoked, and unjustifiable war of one portion of its citizens upon another
portion—the only conditions of which are perpetual imprisonment and hopeless
servitude or absolute extermination—in utter disregard and violation of those
eternal and self-evident truths set forth in our Declaration of Independence:
Therefore, we, citizens of the
United States, and the oppressed people who, by a recent decision of the
Supreme Court, are declared to have no rights which the white man is bound to
respect, together with all other people degraded by the laws thereof, do, for
the time being, ordain and establish for ourselves the following Provisional
Constitution and Ordinances, the better to protect our persons, property,
lives, and liberties, and to govern our actions.
Brown’s defense lawyer, Samuel Chilton, introduced this
document at his trial—as evidence of Brown’s insanity. Chilton had hoped
to keep his client off the gallows on grounds of mental incompetence, but Brown
was having none of it. And whatever else Brown was, he was not a pure ideologue
or an irrational religious fanatic. He was not insane, and he was not a coward
who would pretend to be incompetent in order to spare his own neck. Being of
sound mind, Brown almost certainly did not expect a miracle that would somehow
empower him and his 21 men at Harpers Ferry to stage a successful raid
presaging a general slave revolt that would crash through cotton country like a
tsunami. Instead, he had described a reasonably sophisticated economic
strategy—his real target was not slaveholders’ human property per se but the
practical security of their ungodly property rights. “The true object to be
sought is first of all to destroy the money value of slave property; and that
can only be done by rendering such property insecure,” Brown wrote. That,
specifically, was the goal of the raid at Harpers Ferry.
Brown, in that respect, was a classical terrorist. He
knew he was almost certain to fail in achieving any substantive military goal,
but that was beside the point: To establish a climate of fear is not merely to
provoke a certain widespread emotional state—such a climate has practical,
real-world effects. (Ask an American who remembers the country before September
11, 2001, what life used to be like.) And, like any committed terrorist, Brown
could be utterly ruthless, advising that any defectors from the liberationist
militia he was working to establish be hunted down and killed: “All traitors
must die, wherever caught and proven to be guilty.”
Brown wasn’t the man of letters that Lincoln was, but he
was a pithy writer when the spirit was on him, advising his collaborators:
Hold on to your weapons, and
never be persuaded to leave them, part with them, or have them far away from
you. Stand by one another, and by your friends, while a drop of blood remains;
and be hanged, if you must, but tell no tales out of school. Make no confession.
John Brown was a man of God. And a fanatic. And an
abolitionist. And a terrorist. But he was not—whatever the jury in Charles Town
said—a traitor. “As citizens of the United States of America, trusting
in a just and merciful God, whose spirit and all-powerful aid we humbly
implore, we will ever be true to the flag of our beloved country, always acting
under it,” he wrote in his provisional constitution. “Our flag shall be the
same that our fathers fought under in the Revolution.” Both of John Brown’s
grandfathers had served under George Washington. (Small world, you say? Brown’s
father, Owen, once took in a young man needing employment, hiring him as an
apprentice and sharing his home with him. That young man was the father of
Ulysses S. Grant.) In the end, Brown was fighting for the same thing Lincoln
and Grant were fighting for, even if Lincoln had made extensive—and arguably
immoral—efforts to accommodate the slavers and their interests. Frederick
Douglass, who knew both men and lamented Lincoln’s ceaseless appeasement, made
the connection, saying of Brown:
His zeal in the cause of my race
was far greater than mine. It was as the burning sun to my taper light. Mine
was bounded by time; his stretched away to the boundless shores of eternity. I
could live for the slave, but he could die for him... . The armies of the
nation have found it necessary to do on a large scale what John Brown attempted
to do on a small one.
John Brown’s war was Abraham Lincoln’s war and Frederick
Douglass’s war and America’s war—yours and mine.
“In 2009, the park sponsored a seminar commemorating 150th
anniversary of the raid, and one of the topics was ‘Madman or Martyr?’ And it
was very obvious from the passion how even 150 years later, John Brown and his
activity were still able to generate a great deal of feeling on both sides of
the issue. I think that’s the beginning place.”
Doug Perks, who recently retired as the historian of the
Jefferson County Museum, is the sort of person Edmund Burke was talking about
when he wrote about the “little platoons” that make a decent liberal society
possible. He spent his career telling the important stories of the place he
calls home, and he got started early: As a Tenderfoot Scout in 1959, he worked
on a public-service project building a façade of John Brown’s fort for a
reenactment of the raid on its centennial. “That’s where I caught the bug,” he
says. Then came the centennial of the Civil War and a reenactment at Antietam.
“There was a vendor who had a shop at the top of the Bloody Lane, and I bought
a bullet that they guaranteed had been found at the Battle of Antietam,”
he says with a chuckle. “I wonder how many millions of those they sold.
There was a fellow at Harpers who had a booming business selling John Brown’s
pikes, probably enough of them to stretch across the United States.”
In Perks’ view, John Brown’s story is necessarily caught
up in the story of the Puritans and the Pilgrims. “I think you need to start in
Europe,” he says. “Stop and think about it: Why would you get on a boat with
hundreds of other people and sail across the stormy Atlantic Ocean and go to a
land where there were no 7-Elevens and no established farms—territory unknown,
climate unknown—with the anticipation of making a new life? What motivates
people to do that? Why in the world would you risk everything to do what they
did? Start there. That’s where you find the motivation—that’s really how the
spirit of this country grew.” And then, he says, the student of American
history can stir in the rest of the ingredients: the interaction between the
newcomers and the Indians, the evolving relationship between the Old World and
the New World colonies, the preexisting relationships between the European
powers and the African nations whose people would be commodified by the slave
trade. John Brown’s story doesn’t begin in Harpers Ferry or with that solemn
declaration in the Congregationalist church in Hudson among his fellow
abolitionists—because it isn’t John Brown’s story.
Not his alone, anyway.
The Pilgrims, Perks says, were people who were “willing
to make whatever sacrifice they had to in order to accomplish the goal of what
they believed.” In the same spirit, he says, “John Brown knew that slavery
needed to come to an end. He was willing to do what he did. He sacrificed
members of his own family, his fortune, and his own life for that cause.”
John Brown sacrificed his own sons, three of them, and
plenty of other fathers’ sons, too. Mahala Doyle, the wife and mother of
Brown’s victims in Kansas, sent him a letter before his hanging:
Altho vengeance is not mine, I
confess, that I do feel gratified to hear that you ware stopt in your fiendish
career at Harper’s Ferry, with the loss of your two sons, you can now
appreciate my distress, in Kansas, when you then and there entered my house at midnight
and arrested my husband and two boys and took them out of the yard and in cold
blood shot them dead in my hearing, you cant say you done it to free our
slaves, we had none and never expected to own one, but has only made me a poor
disconsolate widow with helpless children while I feel for your folly. I do
hope & trust that you will meet your just reward. O how it pained my Heart
to hear the dying groans of my Husband and children if this scrawl give you any
consolation you are welcome to it.
It is true that the Doyle family owned no slaves, but
they were not exactly innocent bystanders: They were part of a pro-slavery
militia—known at the time as “Border Ruffians”—whose aim was to overwhelm
Kansas through a determined campaign of political violence in order to ensure
that the state entered the Union as a slave state, thereby fortifying the
slavers’ political position in Washington. They were also, according to some
accounts, slave-hunters, mercenaries who ran down fugitive slaves. The local
Ruffians had made a particular point of promising to murder John Brown’s
abolitionist sons, who had gone to Kansas seeking to improve their personal
fortunes long before their father ever set foot there. They wrote to their
father asking him to send arms and supplies, and he showed up in person to
deliver them—and, finally, to deliver justice as he saw it, to the Doyles and
to the other Ruffians and to the slave power at large. Yes, John Brown was a
terrorist—and so were at least some of his victims.
Lori Wysong, the director of the Jefferson County Museum,
reports that people have come from as far away as Australia and Japan to see
the John Brown collection, to look at the rifles and stand in front of the
death-wagon and take in the other artifacts, inching toward a more historical
understanding of the man and his cause than the one they might have absorbed
from popular culture. John Brown’s myth was shaped with intention. Immediately
following the raid on Harpers Ferry, Wysong says, the propaganda contest got
underway, with northern abolitionists depicting Brown as a spotless martyr and
southern slaveholders painting him as a sadistic villain. Those two versions of
John Brown—neither quite accurate—have been circling one another like wrestlers
for the better part of two centuries now.
For a time, Brown seemed destined to become a kind of
stock villain, appearing as a highly fictionalized, anarchistic
malefactor—think of a kind of proto-Joker—in old serials and films such as Santa
Fe Trail. He takes the lead in Russell Banks’ novel Cloudsplitter and
figures in Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead. He is a fanatical clown in James
McBride’s novel The Good Lord Bird but a more interesting and
sympathetic, if still occasionally ridiculous, figure in Jason Blum’s wonderful
film adaptation of that novel, with Ethan Hawke as Brown. A loosely
organized network of left-wing gun owners calls itself the John Brown Gun
Club. His memory is, as they say, contested.
Brown was the Devil himself for many years in Jefferson
County, which, having a good deal of local slavery, was culturally and
economically closer to Virginia’s plantation culture than were most of the
counties that broke away to form West Virginia in 1863. (There was, in fact, a
failed effort to bring Jefferson County back into Virginia after the war.)
Jefferson County almost certainly would have rejected the referendum to join
West Virginia if the Union army—which had no intention of giving up use of the Baltimore
and Ohio Railroad line running through the town—had not intervened (according
to local historians) by placing the majority of voters under house arrest and
permitting only two friendly precincts to cast ballots. Sometimes the
terrorists are on the right side, and sometimes the voters are on the wrong
side.
The picture of John Brown that hangs on my wall in my
home office is the one with the Mosaic beard—the prophet incognito.
Below his picture is one of Abraham Lincoln; across from it is a painting of
St. Jerome (an excellent portrait by Judith Kudlow and one of my most prized
possessions). Next to these is a case with my Winchester rifle and a couple of
No. 1 Rugers. (All unloaded, of course. The ammunition and the less lovely
firearms, including the loaded ones, are kept under biometric lock.) All of
this is supposed to add up to something, I suppose, but I am not sure I could
really explain to you what that is, and it is my office. I think I have about
the same capacity for violence and fanaticism as any other American—I am sure I
could bake Vladimir Putin into a pie à la mode (de Titus Andronicus)
and never lose a minute’s sleep over it—and if I have been kept from some
violent extremity it surely is through no particular virtue of my own: I am
very much aware of being a man with much to lose. Is there a cause into which I
would throw myself, body and soul? I like to think there is.
But I think of those dead sons left on the
battlefield—the Brown boys, the Doyle boys, all those uncounted Union and
Confederate soldiers, the typhoid fever that (along with dysentery and measles
and other infections) killed more soldiers than did rifles and bayonets and
cannon all combined and that reached all the way into the White House to take
the life of 11-year-old Willie Lincoln. I think of Abraham and Isaac and am,
like any sensible bourgeois father with a pretty wife in a comfortable house on
a safe street in a quiet little town, fundamentally repulsed by the God who
would demand such a thing of anyone, much less of those who most love Him. But
I also wonder whether that is my conviction speaking or only my comfort and my
complacency.
Do I believe what John Brown believed?
I believe in the Golden Rule and
the Declaration of Independence. I think they both mean the same thing; and it
is better that a whole generation should pass off the earth, men, women, and
children, by a violent death, than that one jot of either should fail, in this
country.
No, I do not believe that. But, then, John Brown’s
example makes me wonder whether I really believe anything at all, even Oliver
Cromwell’s maxim: “Trust in God and keep your powder dry!” I live in a world in which both war and
religion have been thoroughly bureaucratized and sanitized—at least at the
commanding heights: Dwight Eisenhower, the great man who led the liberation of
Europe from forces of genuine darkness, never personally saw combat. Our
generals, like our popes, mainly write memos and attend committee meetings. We
do not even have the courage of our convictions in sufficient measure to
forthrightly hang such a man as John Brown in public today, preferring instead
to cower behind the prison walls and pretend that what is going on in the execution
chamber is some kind of medical procedure. There is much to be said for
prudence and balance—if a society that has slavery has to have a John Brown,
then a society that has the rule of law has to hang him. But prudence can also
be a hiding place.
Frederick Douglass had a definite view of this:
Did John Brown draw his sword
against slavery and thereby lose his life in vain? And to this I answer ten
thousand times: No! No man fails, or can fail who so grandly gives himself and
all he has to a righteous cause.
... If John Brown did not end the
war that ended slavery, he did at least begin the war that ended slavery. John
Brown began the war that ended American slavery and made this a free republic.
Until this blow was struck, the prospect for freedom was dim, shadowy and
uncertain. The irrepressible conflict was one of words, votes and compromises.
When John Brown stretched forth his arm the sky was cleared. The time for
compromises was gone; the armed hosts of freedom stood face to face over the
chasm of a broken Union; and the clash of arms was at hand. The South staked
all upon getting possession of the federal government, and failing to do that,
drew the sword of rebellion and thus made her own, and not Brown’s, the lost
cause of the century.
John Brown died a martyr’s death. Abraham Lincoln, too.
Frederick Douglass, who had endured life as a slave, surely had earned the
right to die in his bed. And I suppose that the question John Brown’s defiant
face on my wall at home really raises for me is whether I have earned that
right and, if not, what I have to do to earn it. There are no answers here in
Charles Town, and not even John Brown’s body, only the wagon they hauled him
away to the gallows in.
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