I think Brown had a pretty clear plan, and a realistic one, at that. His goal was to seize weapons in Harper’s Ferry, escape from town and go into the Appalachians in the South. There he would set up guerrilla camps in the mountains and make raids to free slaves. He hoped some of the slaves would join him in the effort. His goal was to destabilize the slavery system.
He was certainly aware that the slaveowners and many non-slaveowning Southern whites had a grossly exaggerated fear of "servile insurrection", and that the kind of raids he planned would fan those fears. Which is a big part of the reason even small raids to free slaves would be destabilizing to the system.
But Brown wasn’t trying to stir up a mass slave insurrection. He planned a long-term guerrilla campaign in the mountains, where he could apply the practical skills at "slave-stealing" and guerrilla warfare he had learned in Kansas.
But apparently he did hope that more slaves would abandon their owners on the night of the Harper’s Ferry raid and come together with his core group. That’s probably at least one reason why he delayed so fatally in taking the captured weapons and moving South out of town into the mountains. He also made a deadly tactical error by allowing the passenger train that came into town to leave, because the train crew and passengers were then able to quickly spread the alarm.
And while it’s true that Brown struggled in his various businesses for much of his life, he was actually fairly successful in his early years at tanning and farming. But he got land-speculation fever, borrowed too much money, and the 1837 recession was devastating for him. He continued to struggle economically after that with less success than before.
But he wasn’t the ne’er-do-well scoundrel that advocates of the Lost Cause view like the early Robert Penn Warren tried to make him out to be. His record in business and farming probably compares well to others of his time in similar circumstances. That he didn’t become a large plantation owner or a millionaire industrialist is scarcely the sign of moral depravity that Warren and others tried to portray.
Brown’s egalitarian relationships with blacks - and his commitment to the equality of women - is an important part of his story. Part of the Lost Cause scam is to point to the white supremacist notions common to Northerners and to say, look, they were racists, too, so they couldn’t possibly have cared about slavery. The trick there is to project today’s standards back on the antebellum North and confuse people who might logically think that whites who opposed slavery would also have favored something like equal rights for African-Americans then. In actual fact, white supremacist attitudes actually very often went hand-in-hand with opposition to slavery, even bitter opposition, as in Hinton Helper’s case.
John Brown, on the other hand, was one of the few whites in America who in the 1850s clearly articulated notions of racial and gender equality that 21st century Americans would find to be contemporary. This also raises a big question for me about the accusation that Brown was “crazy”. In fact, Brown had a sacrifice-oriented Calvinist religious faith that he took very seriously. And as part of that, he recognized blacks and women as equals in a way that was unusual for his time, but which we today recognize as being ahead of his time in his democratic outlook.
So, whatever clinical mental health issues he may have had - and I’m not convinced on any of the arguments I’ve seen about that - neither his passionate desire to end slavery (which was shared by many less militant Northerners) nor his guerrilla warfare plan that he initiated at Harper’s Ferry are evidence of any such condition.
Finally, I’m not sure that Virginia’s trial of a wounded Brown who was still so ill he had to lie on a cot during much of it is very strong evidence of Virginia’s dedication to the rule of law in a broader sense. After all, it was a year and a half or so later that they agreed to a bloody rebellion against their own country. So I would say their devotion to the rule of law in general was less profound than their devotion to preserving the Peculiar Institution.
Tags: john brown, slavery, us civil war
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