Jim Brown's Raid on Harper's Ferry Essay

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John Brown's Raid On Harper's Ferry

John Brown and his raid at Harper's Ferry have a symbolic importance, as he himself was well aware, to suggest that not all white people counted themselves complicit in the persistence of slavery within the antebellum United States. In other words, Brown was engaged in what old-style Marxist revolutionaries used to refer to as "propaganda of the deed." His letters from prison were consciously intended as propaganda, as he asked for them to be circulated (and indeed published): "Please let all our friends read my letters when you can; & ask them to accept of it as in part for them."(Earle 98). And although his stated intention at Harper's Ferry -- to seize the weaponry there, arm the slaves of western Virginia, and thus begin Spartacus-style uprising -- failed, Brown craved martyrdom as justification, claiming: "I have now no doubt but that our seeming disaster: will ultimately result in the most glorious success." (Earle 101) But I would argue that this symbolic meaning for Brown masks the reality of the man, which is substantially uglier. John Brown was a terrorist.

The sentimental politics involved in defending Brown, of the sort espoused by Henry David Thoreau, are essentially a justification for terrorism. Thoreau, like Emerson and T.W. Higginson (later famous as the "preceptor" of Emily Dickinson), was content to secretly funnel money and provide him with rhetorical justification in the press. Indeed, Thoreau would complain about press bias loudly, claiming that newspapers at the time of Brown's Harper's Ferry raid only wanted to print "pleasant" news:

How then can they print truth? If we do not say pleasant things, they argue, nobody will attend to us. And so they do like some traveling auctioneers, who sing an obscene song in order to draw a crowd around them (Earle 116).

This may very well be the case, but Thoreau's own version of the "truth" about Brown is highly tendentious.

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I will argue that Brown's politics, plus Brown's murder of five men in Kansas several years before Harper's Ferry -- the so-called "Pottawatomie Massacre" -- for which he was never convicted, prove that John Brown more properly belongs to the history of terrorism than the history of human liberty. That Thoreau could praise Brown's "commitment to justice and equality" ignores the fact that in 1856 Brown had already gotten away with murder.

John Brown's radical attempt to foment a slave rebellion -- or so he claimed -- would be put down by the antebellum Union Army, under the command at that point of an antebellum Robert E. Lee. Brown would be tried, convicted and hanged for his actions in December of 1859. Over the three years earlier, he had gotten away with murder. Brown's politics had led him to the Osawatomie community in Kansas, in which agitators on behalf of a "Free Soil" Kansas would station themselves in the debates surrounding the admission of Kansas to the union, and whether or not slavery would be permitted there. While at Osawatomie, Brown and his usual gang of followers and his astonishing number of children sneaked up and murdered five men, suspected of sympathizing with slaveholders, in their sleep. Kansas' status as a "territory" made it essentially a lawless place at that time, and Brown got away with his actions, which were widely publicized. But there was nothing heroic about his role in "Bleeding Kansas," and if it was purely symbolic then he ought to have undergone a symbolic martyrdom at that time. Even if one believes that criminal acts in the name of a greater ideal somehow absolves the perpetrator of the crime, John Brown got away with Pottawatomie. He had already been….....

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