Trump and Republicans' revolutionary (?) means

A report about vandalizing a statue fits in well with an issue I've been thinking about, which is how Trump and the Republicans are willing to use "revolutionary" means to achieve their ends, while the Democratic Party tends to be phobic about the word "revolution," except when they are pushing for regime change in a foreign country whose government has fallen out of favor with them.

This is the vandalism I mean: Katy Bergen, Historic John Brown statue in KCK vandalized with racial slurs and a swastika Kansas City Star 03/18/2018; updated 03/18/2018. More on this below.

I'm more reserved than ever about easy generalizations on typical ways democracy in other countries is eroded. That's because so much of it is proposed in service of some regime-change agenda. And the international reporting in the mainstream US media is often so spotty or just plain bad, I try to be careful about jumping to conclusions.

Having said that, it's generally understood that some kind of independence of the judiciary and law-enforcement agencies is necessary for the rule of law to function. And at some point, attempts to influence the justice system for political reasons does become an overriding of the rule of law.

You can tell this isn't a straight polemic, because I'm putting so many qualifications out there. But the lines can be confusing. I have serious doubts about lifetime appointment of federal judges, for instance. But electing judges is also a bad idea because that inevitably politicizes the justice system to so extent. But every system of selecting judges depends for its effectiveness on the participants taking their responsibilities seriously. The Dred Scott decision was clearly a political decision with massive consequences. It was an instance where the judicial system tossed its responsibilities and the rule of law overboard for a political cause: slavery, a cause of the worst kind.

Another famous situation where these issues were raised was Franklin Roosevelt's fight against the Nine Old Men of the 1930s Supreme Court. (William Leuchtenburg, When Franklin Roosevelt Clashed with the Supreme Court – and Lost Smithsonian Magazine May 2005) A reactionary Supreme Court was knocking down law after law passed by Congress that were aimed at improving economic conditions after the devastating Great Depression. Leuchtenburg gives a measured judgment on the practical lessons that historians and politicians have drawn from that fight:

The 168-day contest also has bequeathed some salutary lessons. It instructs presidents to think twice before tampering with the Supreme Court. FDR’s scheme, said the Senate Judiciary Committee, was “a measure which should be so emphatically rejected that its parallel will never again be presented to the free representatives of the free people of America.” And it never has been. At the same time, it teaches the justices that if they unreasonably impede the functioning of the democratic branches, they may precipitate a crisis with unpredictable consequences. In his dissent in the AAA case in 1936, Justice Stone reminded his brethren, “Courts are not the only agency of government that must be assumed to have capacity to govern.” These are lessons— for the president and for the court — as salient today as they were in 1937.

The conventional wisdom is that FDR overstepped and tried to improperly interfere with the Court by his proposal to appoint additional Justices, remembered mainly by the pejorative label of Roosevelt's "court-packing scheme." But the CW also holds that FDR's public fight against the Court jolted them into a (genuinely) more judicially reasonable position on New Deal legislation.

Roosevelt's proposals in that situation were a very different thing from what's going on now in Pennsylvania, where the Radical Republicans are trying to impeach the state supreme court justices who struck down an extreme, partisan gerrymandering scheme the Republicans put in place. (Sam Levine, Pennsylvania GOP Moves To Impeach Supreme Court Democrats For Gerrymandering Ruling Huffpost 03/20/2018)

The Republicans are willing to use impeachment for the most crass partisan purposes. But the Democrats never bothered to even hold Congressional hearings on strong indications of what looked an awful lot like improprieties by Supreme Court Justices Clalrence Thomas and Antonin Scalia. The symbolism of this is sadly ironic: "When Justice Scalia died two weeks ago, he was staying, again for free, at a West Texas hunting lodge owned by a businessman whose company had recently had a matter before the Supreme Court." (Eric Lipton, Scalia Took Dozens of Trips Funded by Private Sponsors New York Times 02/26/2016) See also: Ujala Sehgal, A Brief History of Clarence Thomas' Ethical Entanglements The Atlantic 06/19/2011.

Currently, we have a Republican Party that is committed to appointing highly activist judges and is willing to toss normal procedural and normative practices out the window in order to get rightwing ideologues entrenched throughout the federal judiciary. (See Garland, Merrick) In 2016, the Republicans in Congress effectively nullified the Constitutional procedure for selecting Supreme Court Justices. But when Trump nominated Neil Gorsuch to the Court, there was no resistance on the Democratic side remotely comparable. The net result is that the Republicans have dominance of the selection of federal judges entirely out of proportion to the number of American voters who support their party.

As bad as that is, I wouldn't call that a "revolutionary" method. Trump's blatant threatening and bullying of the FBI and the Justice Department over the Mueller investigation is. From his public statements and the firings of James Comey and Andrew McCabe, Trump has made it very clear that he wants the Justice Department to act on his behalf in much the same way his political mentor and longtime attorney, mob lawyer Roy Cohn, did for years (Ron Elving, President Trump Called For Roy Cohn, But Roy Cohn Was Gone NPR 01/08/2018):

This much is clear: Cohn was Trump's model in the handling of public relationships and media warfare.

Cohn's code was built on self-interest and loyalty; his style was all about intensity. If he was your lawyer, he was prepared to do anything for you; if he was your adversary, no holds were barred.

The title of the NPR article refers to a Trump quote reported by Michael Schmidt in the New York Times, “Where’s my Roy Cohn?” (Obstruction Inquiry Shows Trump’s Struggle to Keep Grip on Russia Investigation 01/04/2018)

As Schmidt reminds us, Cohn "had been Senator Joseph R. McCarthy’s top aide during the investigations into communist activity in the 1950s and died in 1986." So Joe McCarthy's authoritarian heritage that was willing to ignore democratic and Constitutional rights and norms has now come to the White House is a potent form via Roy Cohn's political protege Donald Trump. (For more on Cohn, see also: Jonathan Mahler and Matt Flegenheimer, What Donald Trump Learned From Joseph McCarthy’s Right-Hand Man New York Times 06/20/2016; Marie Brenner, How Donald Trum and roy Cohn's Ruthless Symbiosis Changed America Vanity Fair Aug 2017; Robert O'Harrow Jr. and Shawn Boburg; The man who showed Donald Trump how to exploit power and instill fear Washington Post 06/17/2016)

Seve Bannon has rotated out of Trumpian favor for the moment. But his declaration that his goal in February 2017 when he was still a White House strategist that his goal is the "deconstruction of the administrative state" echoes the advocates of the Conservative Revolution in the 1920s, from which he draws some of his ideas and perspective. Francis Wilkerson reported last year (Bannon's Requiem for the Administrative State Business Insider 03/27/2017):

It's unclear so far what Bannon's phrase "administrative state" means, or what "deconstructing" it would entail. Deregulation is surely a key element of it. But Obamacare seems about as clear an example of the administrative state as you can get. It's a vast and highly complex regulatory regime that administers intrusive and often restrictive rules while transferring payments and benefits from some Americans to others via federal and state governments.

In effect, Obamacare is the leading edge of what National Review writer David French called a "vast and bloated executive branch -- existing through its alphabet soup of agencies such as the EPA, IRS, DOE, ATF, and the like."

The "administrative state," in other words, is all the structures and functions of government that conservatives dislike, an alien force that, as French said, "intrudes into virtually every aspect of American life." [my emphasis]

This certainly is a goal that has a "revolutionary" edge to it, though in the sense of "conservative revolution," i.e, overthrowing the existing legal order by extralegal means to establish an authoritarian order.

There is a rich and contentious history of debate and polemics over what how revolution should be defined which I'm not addressing here. But the Republicans have invoked revolutionary rhetoric for decades. The Reagan Administration and its policies were referred to by Republicans as the Reagan Revolution, a term the mainstream press didn't find alarmingly inappropriate. The official White House website still contains this: "At the end of his two terms in office, Ronald Reagan viewed with satisfaction the achievements of his innovative program known as the Reagan Revolution, which aimed to reinvigorate the American people and reduce their reliance upon Government." (my emphsis) 40: Ronald Reagan (n/d; accessed 03/20/2018; sourced to “The Presidents of the United States of America,” by Frank Freidel and Hugh Sidey; 2006)

Later there was the "Gingrich Revolution" of 1994, also called the "Republican Revolution," in which the Republicans under Newt Gingrich's leadership won control of the House of Representative. (Andrea Stone, Republican Revolution fades USA Today 01/19/2003; updated 01/22/2003) Steven Gillon in 2016 characterized the Gingrich Revolution by its highly abrasive, transgressive style of politics that failed " to appreciate the distinction between means and ends." (The Gingrich Revolution and the Roots of Republican Dysfunction Huffpost 10/12/2016) He writes:

The person most responsible for injecting [the current] virulent strain of partisanship into the Republican party was another dethroned House Speaker — Newt Gingrich. The firebrand conservative leaders today are Gingrich’s children. Gingrich rose to power in the 1980s as the pied piper of a new assertive conservatism that merged the moralistic rhetoric of the New Right, and the mystical conservative faith in tax cuts, into a powerful ideological message. It was Gingrich who manufactured the hyper-partisanship that defines modern politics.

And when Republican donors like the Koch Brothers decided in 2009 they needed an Astroturf movement to publicly protest Obama, it quickly became branded as the Tea Party, i.e., a familiar patriotic symbol of the American Revoluiton.

The there was the Neoconservative Revolution, which was heavily influenced by Trotskyism, which became the defining outlook of the Cheney-Bush Administration's foreign policy, including the Iraq War. John Judis wrote about this aspect of the neocons' outlook in the very Establishment journal Foreign Policy in 1995 ("Trotskyism to Anachronism - The Neoconservative Revolution" July/Aug 1995). Noting that the hawkish foreign policy adviser Paul Nitze, who drafted the famous 1950 NSC-68 memorandum during the Truman Administration, was a major influence on the neocons, he also writes:

The other important influence on neoconservatives was the legacy of Trotksyism - a point that other historians and journalists have made about neoconservatism .... Many of the founders of neoconservatism, including The Public Interest founder Irving Kristol and coeditor Nathan Glazer, Sidney Hook, and Albert Wohistetter, were either members of or close to the Trotskyist left in the late 193os and early 194os. Younger neoconservatives, including Penn Kemble, Joshua Muravchik, and Carl Gershman, came through the Socialist Party at a time when former Trotskyist Max Schachtman was still a commanding figure.

What both the older and younger neoconservatives absorbed from their socialist past was an idealistic concept of internationalism. Trotskyists believed that Stalin, in trying to build socialism in one country rather than through world revolution, had created a degenerate workers' state instead of a genuine dictatorship of the proletariat. In the framework of international communism, the Trotskyists were rabid internationalists rather than realists and nationalists. ...

The neoconservatives who went through the Trotskyist and socialist movements came to see foreign policy as a
crusade, the goal of which was first global socialism, then social democracy, and finally democratic capitalism. They never saw foreign policy in terms of national interest or balance of power. Neoconservatism was a kind of inverted Trotskyism, which sought to "export democracy," in Muravchik's words, in the same way that Trotsky originally envisaged exporting socialism. It saw its adversaries on the left as members or representatives of a public sector-based new class. [my emphasis]

The distinction between conventional war and revolutionary war was a familiar one in the 19th century. Conventional war involved fighting to defeat an enemy army, possibly taking over the opposing country or part of it, without seeking to change the basic structure of social relationships in the enemy country. Revolutionary war includes the latter. A model case would be the wars immediately after the French Revolution and then the Napoleonic Wars, in which not just conquest but the implanting of republican governments and the dislocation of feudal social relationships were a part of the goal and practice. When Abraham Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation during the Civil War, that was understood as a shift from conventional war, aimed at removing the rebel governments, to revolutionary war, that intended to undo the slave system that was the foundation of the Southern plantation economy.

The main official justification for the Iraq War was Saddam Hussein's nonexistent "weapons of mass destruction." And Dick Cheney didn't give a flying flip about democracy or freedom or basic human rights in Iraq. But that Administration's policy in the Middle East was also justified as installing democratic governments on the inverted-Trotskyist model.

So the Republican Party has been comfortable with the rhetoric of "revolution," though overthrowing corporate capitalism is certainly no part of their agenda. And the highly partisan approach of Trump and his party toward justice right now is a (conservative) "revolutionary" approach to policy. Joe Conason describes the recent majority report of the House Intelligence Committee on Russiagate as a "surrender of Congressional authority to the White House" of a kind which bears "a sad resemblance to the behavior of bogus legislatures under authoritarian regimes."

The Democrats on the other hand, have become allergic to the whole idea of "revolution," unless it comes in the form of a "color revolution" against a government friendly to Russia or hostile to the United States (and to Israel, in the Middle East.) We see it in the way the Democrats shrink from any favorable invocation of the party's two main founders, Thomas Jefferson and Andrew Jackson. Both of whom fought in the American Revolution and both of whom were key leaders in establishing and expanding democracy. So they leave behind any patriotic imagery or symbols associated with the American Revolution and shrug when the Republicans appropriate the symbolism of the Tea Party or Andrew Jackson.

Yes, in real history there are elements in every period of American history that deserve critical summary, not the least of them slavery and Indian policy. But it's one more element of partisan imbalance when the Democrats are unwilling to claim any of the patriotic heritage of the country prior to 1860 while the Republicans effectively appropriate all of it they want to for their own purposes. The Democrats don't even contest it, for the most part, which is one of the ways they allow the Republicans to define themselves as the party of Real Americans.

In the 2016 Presidential contest, Bernie Sanders straightforwardly talked about his program as a revolution. Which he defined clearly as getting more people to participate in the political process including voting, reducing the massive corporate corruption in American politics which is plain to everyone,establishing a solid social-democratic infrastructure including single-payer healthcare, and a more peace-oriented foreign policy with a smaller military budget. Whether that qualifies as dramatic a change as kicking Britain out of the US in the American Revolution or overthrowing the Slave Power in the Civil War is open to discussion. But it certainly is more deserving of that name than the Reagan Revolution or the Gingrich Revolution.

But the Clinton campaign tried to use the "revolution" label against Sanders. Politics is politics, so of course they were going to do that. So we heard campaign-promoted comments like: revolutions get people killed; we don't want to have a revolution, we want to elect a President; Sanders talking about "revolution" and "socialism" makes Hillary the Electable One for the general election.

This kind of fearful/contemptuous attitude toward the left has been a chronic problem for Democrats since 1972. The 2016 Hillary campaign version of it just reinforced the conservative tone in which the Democrats all too often frame themselves.

It doesn't have to be that way. It wasn't that long ago that Democrats could speak with approval of the Roosevelt Revolution that brought the New Deal. The Dems still will speak sometimes of the "civil rights revolution," though it's typically framed as a series of events in the 1950s and 1960s rather than anything ongoing. And even as non-revolutionary a Democrat as Lyndon Johnson could invoke the song that for the civil rights movement was a hymn invoking militancy and radical change: "And we shall overcome."

And even now, the Democrats as a group are trapped by a toxic centrism with a conservative cast that recently led them to oppose Trump's militant populist rhetoric, which included actual incitements to violence at his rallies, with a bland slogan like Stronger Together. Which goes well with the obsession with Bipartisanship that the Democrats can seem to shake off.

Which brings us to John Brown's statue. If there was any white man in the United States prior to the Civil War who was devoted to democracy, despised slavery and actively tried to end it, considered blacks equal to white and women equal to men - in other words, characteristics that liberals now condemn pretty much every citizen of the US prior to 1860 - it was John Brown.

But will Democratic Party liberals be jumping up and down in outrage over seeing his statue defaced? This is the Democratic Party we're talking about, so the answer is: not many. The reason is illustrated by the opening paragraph of an article on Brown from 2005 by historian Sean Wilentz, who wrote a good short biography of Andrew Jackson that takes a nuanced view of him without falling into anachronisms ("Homegrown Terrorist" New Republic The New Republic 10/24/2005):

John Brown was a violent charismatic anti-slavery terrorist and traitor, capable of cruelty to his family as well as to his foes. Every one of his murderous ventures failed to achieve its larger goals. His most famous exploit, the attack on Harpers Ferry in October 1859, actually backfired. That backfiring, and not Brown’s assault or his later apotheosis by certain abolitionists and Transcendentalists, contributed something, ironically, to the hastening of southern secession and the Civil War. In a topsy-turvy way, Brown may have advanced the anti-slavery cause. Otherwise, he actually damaged the mainstream campaign against slavery, which by the late 1850s was a serious mass political movement contending for national power, and not, as Brown and some of his radical friends saw it, a fraud even more dangerous to the cause of liberty than the slaveholders.

While it's a serious point, Wilentz' argument here bears an uncomfortable resemblance to the notorious "moderate" argument during the 1960s: if blacks actively protest against segregation, it will make whites more resistant and damage their own cause.

John Brown fought in the guerrilla war between the pro- and anti-slavery forces in Kansas Territory. And the operation during which he was captured at Harper's Ferry was one he designed to set up resistance bases in the Appalachian Mountains to encourage and facilitate the flight of slaves from their masters' plantations. But America's center-left party, the Democrats, don't really want to invoke that heritage, either. It might get in the way of Bipartisan cooperation.

I'm not suggesting that the Democratic Party set up guerrilla bases in the mountains. In fact, I can't really envision such a thing in my imagination.

But the Democrats mostly let the Republican have John Brown, too! Antiabortionists invoke John Brown to justify extralegal violence against abortion providers. The racism and anti-woman attitudes so common in that movement would be completely repugnant to Brown.

And the Democrats should be able to recognize that in the face of a Republican Party in power employing revolutionary means to wreck liberal democratic institutions, something more militant than Stronger Together bipartisan bromides is needed. As long as they are allergic to even talking about "revolution" in the sense of getting more people out to vote, they will have a hard time getting there. And unless they can do more than "bipartisan" surrender to Trump and the Republicans on issue after issue, it will be hard to convince voters than the Resistance talk is serious on their part.

On the other hand, for the Democrats to try to imitate the loose talk from the right about "Second Amendment solutions" sounds kind of bizarre. (Ed Kilgore, Democratic Congressman Hints at Armed Rebellion Against Trump New York 03/19/2018) A party that can't organize its Congressional representation to block an ill-conceived bank deregulation law isn't going to be organizing its own popular militia.

The problem for the Democrats is that so many of its leaders and office-holders are stuck in the we-aren't-lefties attitude that establishment Democrats in the 1968-72 period used, even Democrats who were born well after that time. This way too often leads them to frequently adopt conservative framing and conservative arguments for their more liberal/progressive positions. They really need to stop doing that, as George Lakoff has been urgently recommending for years now.

Also, despite their enthusiasm for "color revolutions" today, Democrats have often blundered and sometimes caused great harm in no small part due to their inability to take a practical, nuanced view of homegrown revolutions in other countries, from Woodrow Wilson and the Russian Revolution, to Lyndon Johnson and Vietnam, to Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton on Libya and, to some extent, Syria.

Confederate "Heritage" Month 2015, April 21: John Brown, John Wilkes Booth and political violence

Historian David Reynolds writes about political violence of 150 years ago in John Wilkes Booth and the Higher Law: Was Abraham Lincoln's assassin inspired by the militant abolitionist John Brown? Atlantic Online 04/12/2015.

The question posed in the subtitle seems to invite trite comparisons. And, at first glance, that's what Reynolds seems to provide:

Booth and Brown — and, surprisingly enough, Lincoln himself — were conjoined on a deep level by what in that era was called “the higher law.” They were inclined to follow the dictates of the higher law — moral or religious principle — rather than human law. Reconsidering Booth’s murder of Lincoln in light of John Brown and the higher law leads to troubling questions. When is violence in the name of a higher cause justified, and when is it not? Can we distinguish between bad terrorism and good terrorism?

But he doesn't let the question rest with that pat non-answer.

Reynolds in a single column doesn't come up with what has also eluded the rest of humanity so far, a normative standard that provides clear guidance for the legitimacy of all uses of violence. Or even for the various forms of political violence.

We do have positive law standards that address the issue. One of the criteria of being a successful state as opposed to a "failed state" is whether the state has a "monopoly on violence." Which basically means that it's police and the court and penal systems that enforce the laws, who decide who is breaking the law and who isn't, who goes free and who doesn't. André Munro describes the concept in State monopoly on violence Encyclopædia Britannica Online 04/22/2015:

State monopoly on violence ... [is] the concept that the state alone has the right to use or authorize the use of physical force. It is widely regarded as a defining characteristic of the modern state. ...

As the use of the term legitimate underlines, this concept does not imply that the state is the only actor actually using violence but rather that it is the only actor that can legitimately authorize its use. The state can grant another actor the right to use violence without losing its monopoly, as long as it remains the only source of the right to use violence and that it maintains the capacity to enforce this monopoly. The state monopoly on the legitimate use of violence is also not refuted by the use of illegitimate violence. Criminal organizations may undermine order without being able to challenge the state monopoly and establish themselves as a parallel source of legitimate rule.

And he notes a qualification relevant to Reynold's topic, "The state monopoly on the legitimate use of physical force can be challenged by a number of nonstate actors such as political insurgents or terrorists or by state actors such as the military forces claiming autonomy from the state."

International law also defines what kind of violence is legitimate, as well, in laws regarding the use of force in international relations and in civil conflicts, including the treatment of prisoners of war.

Part of why any comprehensive normative standard regulating political violence is so hard to come by is simply that real political violence takes places in concrete historical circumstances. The border between ethics and pragmatism is difficult if not impossible to define precisely.

Walter Benjamin wrote in his 1921 essay, "Critique of Violence" that neither natural law nor positive law were sufficient his analysis of political violence, declaring that the necessary perspective "can be furnished only by a philosophico-historical view of law."

Reynolds looks at the concept of "higher law," really a variation of natural law, that was shared at least in the abstract by John Brown, Abraham Lincoln and Lincoln's assassin John Wilkes Booth. Booth as a soldier was actually present at Brown's execution by the State of Virginia in 1959, exercising its own political violence via positive law: "For Booth, Lincoln and other antislavery politicians were duplicitous and treacherous. In 1860, as he witnessed the rise of Lincoln and his fellow antislavery Republicans, Booth wrote that John Brown was far nobler than Lincoln, since, in Booth’s words, 'open force is holier than hidden craft.'”

But in the end, the historical significance of the three men, of the history in which their acts of violence took place, has to be judged not just for their individual acts but for their cause and the results. Booth's cause was slavery. John Brown and Lincoln were partisans of democracy and enemies of slavery. Their antislavery cause was the more just from the standpoint of democracy, honest Christianity and common human decency than Booth's was.

Reynolds writes:

And so, on the fateful evening of April 14, 1865, three forms of higher law mingled explosively: that of Brown, who inspired Booth, though from the opposite vantage point of racial equality; that of Booth, who believed God-backed terrorism could preserve white supremacy; and that of Lincoln, who cited “the judgments of the Lord” to promote a holy war against slavery. Of the three, Lincoln has of course been best received by history, and we can say that his form of higher law—channeled as it was through American institutions like the electoral process and presidential proclamations—is indeed the most admirable. The loose-cannon higher law actions of Brown and Booth seem out of bounds, for these men acted outside of institutions, without the sanction of some larger group. To be sure, both Brown and Booth, by turning to violence, succeeded in galvanizing change. Brown did become a martyr in the North and was a major inspiration to Union troops as they marched southward, singing their favorite song, “John Brown’s Body,” quickly adapted by Julia Ward Howe as “The Battle Hymn of the Republic.” That’s why many antislavery leaders attributed the fall of slavery largely to John Brown’s heroic example.

And we winds up with what can legitimately be described as "a philosophico-historical view" of these three practitioners of the "higher law":

... Lincoln is not just a unifying national icon. He is a lasting example of the proper use of the higher law: that is, the principled pursuit of justice through a popularly elected government. Although lone-wolf higher-law types like John Brown and John Wilkes Booth sometimes have positive results, history has shown that the higher law of individuals can also be a slippery slope that leads to unleashed violence. At Gettysburg, Lincoln announced “a new birth of freedom” for “this nation, under God”—a higher law declaration. But in the next breath he expressed a firm commitment to preserving “government of the people, for the people, by the people.” Even the most apparently virtuous aims, Lincoln knew, can be dangerous if they are not channeled through a democratically chosen government.

Reynolds here is more restrained in his judgment of John Brown that I am willing to be. Brown's participation in the Underground Railroad to free slaves was the right thing to do. The pro-democracy, anti-slavery guerrilla war in which he participated in "Bloody Kansas" was the right cause, the pro-democracy cause, and the proslavery cause was both despicable and antidemocratic. Brown's attempt to set up an armed antislavery band in the Appalachians, the plan thwarted by his capture at Harper's Ferry, was also a legitimate and pro-democracy cause, though it's hard to see how positive law could ever specifically sanction his actions.

But the proslavery advocates also were willing to throw positive law to the winds, as Brown saw live and person in Kansas territory. Ultimately they were willing to discard the positive law of the United States entirely and stage a most certainly violent rebellion against the Constitutional government.

Reynolds is the author of John Brown, Abolitionist: The Man Who Killed Slavery, Sparked the Civil War, and Seeded Civil Rights (2005), which I recommend highly.

Confederate "Heritage" Month 2015, April 4: John Brown

I'm two days behind on "daily" posts in this series. So I'll try to catch up today.

A few days ago I commented on a passage from the 1938 book Man Against Himself by psychoanalyst Karl Menninger (1893-1990) dealing with criminal behavior by police.

In another section of that book dealing with ascetics and martyrs, he offered this notably unsympathetic and not especially accurate description of anti-slavery fighter John Brown. His description is an example of the Lost Cause view of the Civil War, coming in this case from a white man who expresses quite liberal views on other issues in the book:

One of the heroes of my state, John Brown, led a famous fight against slavery; for twenty years he went about in poverty, exhorting, pleading, fighting, burning, and killing before he himself was finally hanged, convicted of treason and murder. His was the true martyr spirit; several times before the day of his sentence he said, "I am worth now infinitely more to hang than for any other purpose." It was as if his bent from the first had been to die for the cause to which he had devoted his fierce, hawk-like spirit. His lawyer wrote of him, " . . . He answers that he would not walk out if the jail door were left wide open . .. . Yes, I believe it best to give up hope of rescuing our old friend. For he wants to hang! Heaven save his soul, the old man wants to hang!" [my emphasis]

Old John Brown, performed by the Magpies:

There are numerous good biographies of Brown. I'll mention here David Reynolds' John Brown, Abolitionist: The Man Who Killed Slavery, Sparked the Civil War, and Seeded Civil Rights (2005) and the collection His Soul Goes Marching On: Responses to John Brown and the Harpers Ferry Raid (1995), Paul Finkelman, ed.

I also posted a number of times about John Brown and the events in which he played a key part in my Confederate "Heritage" Month series of 2006, which can be found in the earlier version of this blog starting here, Confederate "Heritage" Month - April 8: The troubles in Kansas (1) 04/08/2006.

Menninger cites his information to Leonard Ehrlich's God's Angry Man (1932). Menninger's brief summary illustrates some of the hazards of psychohistory as well as the influence of the neo-Confederate, Lost Cause version of American history. The facts of Brown's life hardly support the notion that "his bent from the first had been to die for the cause." Brown grew up in an antislavery and religious household. Yet he was well into his thirties before he became particularly engaged in the cause as an adult. Even at Harpers Ferry, Brown's plan had been to take his band of fighters into the Appalachian mountains and organize the escape of slaves as a way to destabilize the slavery system and terrorize the slaveowners. Once he was caught and saw there was no hope of escape, he staged his martyr role very well. But there's little obvious reason to believe that was his conscious intent.

While Brown wandered about the country, pursuing his vision with intrepid and fanatical zeal, his patient wife struggled with cold, hunger, and wretched poverty on a bleak Adirondack farm. There were thirteen children in the family, nine of whom died. They lived in a leaky, unplastered house and came close to starvation in the long hard winters without money or food. When the sons were old enough to be of use to their father he sent for them and bid them sacrifice themselves in his holy war. Their mother's mild protest at giving up the son who had manfully tried to take his father's place as head of the house, assuming responsibilities too heavy for his young shoulders, was ruthlessly thrust aside before the demands of what Brown considered the right.

This picture of Brown as an artitrary fanatic, more-or-less abusive of his passive family, scarcely resembles the real man. One would never know that Mary Brown, his wife, fully shared Brown's active hatred of slavery. Nor that one of the ways both she and he were unusual for that time was that they were also supporters of equal rights for women. And there is good evidence they had a more egalitarian relationship than was common for marriages of their time.

The picture of Brown's economic condition is a favorite part of the Lost Cause image of him as a loser. But he was active in the tanning business he had learned from his father as well as in other business ventures. He was not born into wealth like many famous American leaders like Thomas Jefferson. Who also, by the way, fell on hard economic times late in life.

There is no evidence that he compelled his adult children to participate in the struggle against their will. Though obviously, a father's influence can be great.

I was struck by Menninger's obviously disapproving description of his taking part in the antislavery fight and neglecting his wife and family to do so. Alfred Maund in a 1957 essay on Brown ("John Brown's Legacy" in American Radicals: Some Problems and Personalities, Harvey Goldberg, ed.) notes that he first took a sympathetic view of Brown when he read these words from his famous courtroom speech that are relevant to this point:

Had I interceded in the manner which I admit, and which I admit has been fairly proved ... had I so interfered in behalf of the rich, the powerful, the intelligent, the so-called great, or in behalf of any of their friends, either father, mother, sister, wife or children, or any of that class, and ·suffered and sacrificed what I have in this interference, it would have been all right. Every man in this court would have deemed it an act worthy of reward rather than punishment. ...

I say I am yet too young to understand that God is any respecter of persons. I believe that to have interfered as I have done, as I have always freely admitted I have done, in behalf of His despised poor, I did no wrong, but right. Now, if it is deemed necessary that I should forfeit my life for the furtherance of the ends of justice, and mingle my blood further with the blood of my children and with the blood of millions in this slave country whose rights are disregarded by wicked, cruel, and unjust enactments, I say-Let it be done.

Fanatic or not, martyr complex or not, what he said there was true.

Could we not give the same description of American soldiers today? Especially of the many reservists mobilized for the Iraq War? They often had to leave their wives and husbands and their personal businesses. Family problems and failed businesses were two common problems returning soldiers encountered. But who would describe them as losers and fanatics because of that? On the contrary, every politician and seemingly every private individual bends over backward to "honor the troops" demonstratively. Were Brown's actions and sacrifices in antebellum days against slavery and for democracy really contemptible and self-evidently fanatical in comparison to American soldiers today whose service we honor even when the real-world causes for which they are fighting aren't always so obviously virtuous?

At one time this son wrote his father that his brothers were busy with their own families and would not fight in such a bloody, hopeless cause any more. They had known what it was to be hunted for their lives in Kansas, to be browbeaten by their stern father, "the most dreaded man in the territory," to go to prison for their father's murders, deeds which sickened them. One son had gone mad. Another had been shot. But still their father held them grimly to his purpose. "Tell my sons despite they are set strong against me I do not release them," he wrote. Nor did he, for two of them died terrible deaths at Harpers Ferry under siege. When a thousand men surrounded the town and the odds were hopelessly against Brown's handful of men, he refused to surrender but sent one of his young men out to treat with the enemy to put a stop to the firing. The man was promptly taken prisoner. Brown then sent out his own son, the lad whom his mother had depended upon and tried to keep with her, to negotiate with the troops. He was shot down, fatally wounded before · his father's eyes, and dragged himself painfully back to the arsenal to die a lingering death. Still the old man refused to surrender and was taken by force. There seemed to be in him no pity for his sons, no softening when they begged him to let them go and live in peace.

Over and over again in the histories of the martyrs one finds this insensitiveness to the suffering of loved ones. Great explorers and scientists have thrown aside the closest family ties and responsibilities to undertake lonely expeditions and dangerous missions. [my emphasis]

This last section sheds important light on Menninger's perspective as well as the limitations of psychohistory.

Psychoanalysis looks at the roots of behavior in physically-based instinctual drives and the individual's personal experiences with family and other members of society. Those experiences involve adaptation of impulses to the limitations of the real world. So, as Menninger discusses with a variety of conditions, self-destructive tendencies can be channeled into anti-social and literally self-destructive tendencies and others into more socially constructive kinds of sacrifices.

But describing socially constructive or socially approved self-sacrifice as resulting for some kind of base or irrational motivation is hard to do without casting aspersions on the nature of the activity itself. Talking about deciding to join the US Armed Forces because of sublimated sadism or self-destructive tendencies would probably not be taken generally as praise for the willingness of the soldiers to serve their country.

But talking about the psychological roots of behavior doesn't in themselves invalidate the causes to which people dedicates themselves. The added problem is that psychology tends to have a bias toward the conventional. Conformity is from society's viewpoint generally a successful adaptation to life. Nonconformity of any kind is from society's outlook potentially a bad adaptation, even a threatening one. In some cases, such as serial killers, they very obviously are bad adaptations from a rational point of view.

But judging an individual like John Brown, especially from the vantage point of 2015, can't be adequately done from a perspective that conventional=healthy, unconventional=unhealthy. (I'm oversimplifying for brevity. Karl Menninger was scarcely that simplistic in his approach.)

John Brown in the 1850s believed in the equality of men and women, including black men and women. Today that is such a conventional official ideology in the United States that even advocates of laws permitting discrimination usually feel compelled in public to profess some form of that belief.

But in his own time, those were genuinely radical beliefs whose adherence put one in a small minority in society and a even tinier minority among white men. Even many committed Abolitionists did not believe in the equality of blacks and whites, much less that of women and men. The fact that most white Abolitionists were open to some form of colonization scheme to move freed slaves out of the United States while most black Abolitionist activists flatly opposed it as an obviously bad idea is an illustration of how unconventional Brown was in that regard.

But what he right or wrong in holding those beliefs? By the standards of 2015, he clearly was. And the vast majority of his fellow Americans were less right than he in that perspective. And even ten years after his execution, his ideas of racial equality and especially his hatred of slavery had become far more widely accepted among whites in the North and even the South.

Retroactively evaluating Brown's actions is complex and be no means one on which there is consensus today. I have dealt with that in some detail in earlier posts on him.

But any realistic framework for judging him politically, historically or ethically in his antislavery fight has to take into account that slaveowners understood their system as one that had to expand or die. And representative democracy as established in the Constitution of 1789 was not going to survive the continuing existence of chattel slavery.

Confederate "Heritage" Month 2013, April 24: David Blight on John Brown

For today's entry, a lecture by David Blight of Yale, 9. John Brown's Holy War: Terrorist or Heroic Revolutionary? YouTube date 11/21/2008

From the YouTube caption:

Professor Blight narrates the momentous events of 1857, 1858, and 1859. The lecture opens with an analysis of the famous Lincoln-Douglas debates of 1858. Next, Blight analyzes the Dred Scott decision and discusses what it meant for northerners--particularly African Americans--to live in "the land of the Dred Scott decision." The lecture then shifts to John Brown. Professor Blight begins by discussing the way that John Brown has been remembered in art and literature, and then offers a summary of Brown's life, closing with his raid on Harpers Ferry in October of 1859.

Tags: confederate heritage month 2013, john brown

Anniversary of John Brown's raid on Harper's Ferry

John Brown's fateful raid on Harper's Ferry in 1859 occurred on October 16 and the fighting and standoff last until October 18.

This is a song by Magpie from the album John Brown: Sword of the Spirit (2000), Goodbye to Old Ohio YouTube date 09/03/2009:

Tags: john brown

Confederate "Heritage" Month 2012, April 2: John Steuart Curry's "The Tragic Prelude" mural in the Kansas Statehouse

John Steuart Curry painted a mural for the Kansas Statehouse that has become an iconic image of anti-slavery fighter John Brown, The Tragic Prelude (1937-42):

The painter's design places the towering figure of John Brown between the contending armies of the Civil War. His arms are stretched out in a melodramatic pose, a rifle in the right hand and a Bible (?) in the left, the gun on the side of the Union armies, the Bible on the side of the Confederacy. Brown has a flowing white beard and wild hair blowing in the tumult, looking like some combination of a hellfire-and-brimstone preachers, an angry Greek god, an Old Testament prophet and a raving madman, his mouth bellowing out, what: a sermon? a war cry? a howl of rage?

I find this over-the-top melodramatic image appealing because of its grand sense of historical drama. The ambiguity of Brown's nature in the image and the melodrama of the scene remind me a bit of this not-quite-so-famous image:

How knows, maybe Jack Kirby took some inspiration from The Tragic Prelude in drawing that cover. (And, yes, Hulk fans, he was gray in his first appearance! Get over it.)

In a new collection of essays by R. Blakeslee Gilpin, John Brown Still Lives! America's Long Reckoning with Violence, Equality & Change (2011), Gilpin writes about Curry's creation of the Kansas Statehouse mural and Curry's view of Brown in the essay "Revising Kansas: John Steuart Curry and the Fanaticism of John Brown".

In the design proposal for the mural that was accepted, Curry proposed to show "John Brown in the center of a struggle between pro and anti-slavery forces [which] shows the Osawatomie crusader towering above a struggling crowd." Gilpin writes:

As the artist's wife recalled of the Topeka mural and especially of the centrality of Brown, Curry "thought [Brown] was what represented Kansas."

However, Curry's knowledge ofthe abolitionist was rather meager, consisting mainly of vague schoolboy memories. Moreover, the only written work the artist consulted was a single pamphlet by Alfred A. Santway, "an aged negro," the work's frontispiece described, "who had remembered [Brown] from boyhood and whose family had been liberated through the [abolitionist's] efforts." Regardless of the dubious accuracy of this claim, Santway's 1934 reminiscence laid out the heroic vision of Brown that detractors had decried since 1859. Recalling Albion Tourgeé, Santway described "John Brown, The Traitor, John Brown, The Fanatic, John Brown, The Martyr .... Thus has this man, one of the most dramatic characters of all times, been denounced and acclaimed." Curry ignored that history of acclaim and focused almost exclusively on Brown as a traitor and fanatic. Curry's canvas shows this very man: fire in his eyes, Bible and rifle in hand, amid a sea of destruction. [my emphasis]

But the public and legislative reactions to the mural as it progressed showed, as Gilpin puts it, that "Brown's memory still could have dangerous and unpredictable consequences."

A controversy arose over the expense of some remodeling required to complete additional portions of the Statehouse mural project according to the original design. But Gilpin believes that controversy was really a talking point in support of objections arising to the content as perceived by some Kansans:

The most aggressive denouncers were a collection of civic organizations, the Kansas Council of Women, the American War Mothers, and the Topeka Women's Club, all of whom protested the mural. The groups claimed that the artist's murals, "while true in a sense, do not portray the true Kansas.'"? In highlighting Brown, Kansans were outraged that, as they had feared, the artist had "emphasized the freaks in history."

He doesn't expound on the expressed content of the criticism from those groups. But he does quote a state legislator who just didn't like John Brown:

By 1941, Kansas politicians had swung completely behind their incensed citizens. "John Brown's murals may rank tops with the art experts," the Topeka State Journal snidely noted, "but the legislature is thumbs down on them. For the second time during the session the Curry paintings were denounced from the floor." Several state representatives let reporters know just how much they disliked the mural. "I don't know how the rest of you feel about John Brown," Representative Van De Mark explained, "but I think he was [an] erratic, crazy old coot and a murderer."

On an interesting biographical note, Curry felt personally wounded and discouraged by the criticism. While lots of artists would love to generate some controversy. Curry was a well-known painter, though, so maybe he thought he had all the notoriety he wanted already.

Gilpin finds the legislator's criticisms puzzling and an ironic turn:

Van De Mark's comments are jarring. Curry's John Brown was exactly the character the representative described: an erratic, crazy old coot and a murderer. Furthermore, Curry hoped to alert the nation to the danger of such men. If anything, Curry had honored Kansas by showing how Brown had used the territory as a platform to launch an extremist campaign against slavery. However, because these conversations were being mediated through Brown, Curry's painting was totally misunderstood by people outspokenly sympathetic to his interpretation. [my emphasis]

Gilpin's allusion to Curry hoping "to alert the nation to the danger of such men" has to do with what he describes as Curry's isolationist sentiments at a time when the danger of a new general European war was clearly growing. Gilpin believed that Curry baked an isolationist plea into his John Brown mural:

Who was the John Brown that Curry presented? As he described it, "I portray John Brown as a bloodthirsty, god-fearing maniac." Throughout American history, Curry argued, men "like [Brown)" had "brought on" wars. Curry was an isolationist and saw his nation on the "eve of conflict," a second world war in Europe. When decisions were made by "pious cranks" like John Brown, only bloodshed, death, and destruction would ensue."

This is very interesting information, and Curry's own expressed opinions there indicate that he viewed Brown as a dangerous fanatic and that he intended the mural to be an isolationist/antiwar image.

Gilpin's essay, though, makes me more curious about the painting and its reception. For one thing, as I indicate at the start of this post, I find the image far more ambiguous that the raving-madman reading that Gilpin prefers. Even if Curry intended to portray Brown as a destructive madman, as he apparently did, the mural that he actually produced is more complex than that. The background showing images of the westward settlement with the tornado on the left and the prairie fire on the right suggest that the Civil War depicted in the middle was a dramatic high point in a long and tumultuous history of the United States. As much as I try to keep a part of my thinking skeptical of notions of meaning in history, I have more than a little sympathy for ideas like Hegel's concept that the self-development of Freedom is the driving force of history. All such Western theories of history, and not only the Western ones, owe a great deal to the prophetic visions of the Hebrew Bible and the Christian adaptation of them.

And Curry's tableau places John Brown - not Abraham Lincoln, not Jefferson Davis, not George Washington, not Andrew Jackson, not Frederick Douglass - but John Brown at the center of the grand sweep of American history, the man who Curry described as "a bloodthirsty, god-fearing maniac". In some sense, it places the Brown figure as beyond good and evil, a ferocious conductor of the train of history.

I have a major suspicion of any imagery or descriptions of the Civil War that declare some kind of equivalency between the Union and the Confederacy. From any standpoint I would take on the movement of American history, the Union represented the progress of democracy and freedom, the Confederacy the destruction of democracy and the flowering of human slavery. Whatever one thinks of classical liberal notions of democracy (Franklin, Jefferson, Tom Paine) or the centrality of freedom in classical German philosophy in Kant and Hegel, or the notion of some tendency to progress in history, the two sides were not equivalent in their goals and their results. From any point of view that I would consider "the right side of history", the Union was on it, and the Confederacy was trying to destroy it.

So in creating a seeming equivalence between the two sides, Curry's mural does comport with the Lost Cause/neo-Confederate view of history. Which also regards John Brown as Curry described him, one of the "pious cranks",  "a bloodthirsty, god-fearing maniac".

And yet the equivalence suggests that the Civil War was a key turning point, a moment of momentous decisions that far transcended the moment in its significance and effects. And placing John Brown at the center of it, as the "god-fearing" leader (maniacal or not!) who forced the country to confront the historical decision they faced, cannot be entirely comfortable to those who are fond of the Lost Cause view of American history.

See also:

Curry's Kansas PBS Newshour 08/13/1998 (text and audio)

Kansas Historical Society, Cool Things - Curry's Statehouse Studies n/d

Tags: confederate heritage month 2012, john brown, lost cause, neo-confederate

John Brown

It doesn't have to be April (Confederate "Heritage" Month) for me to post about Civil War-related issues. Kevin Levin, who writes my favorite Civil War blog (there's beginning to be a whole sub-genre of them), Civil War Memory, was posting this past week about a Civil War Sesquicentennial conference he attended, including a session about John Brown (Session 3 “Making Sense of John Brown’s Raid” 04/29/09). I left a long comment on his post, and I'm passing along the basic content of it here.

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

Confederate "Heritage" Month 2009, April 18: More from 1861 anti-slavery report

John Brown 1859

The report I previously quoted, The Anti-Slavery History of the John-Brown Year (27th Annual Report of the American Anti-Slavery Society), 1861 [Reprint edition 1969], gives the following description of the panic and ensuing repression against not only blacks but whites, as well, which followed John Brown's raid at Harper's Ferry (pp. 166-7):

The fright which JOHN BROWN gave the whole Slave-region, exacerbated suddenly, to an acute, inflammatory type, the chronic malady of lawless barbarism, so long notoriously prevailing there. In every stranger, especially if known to be from the North, was seen a possible, if not a certain enemy; and even southern birth, or, in the case of northern origin, long, quiet residence at the South, in the pursuit of lawful business, was not always a sure guarantee against suspicion and its terrible consequences. The lightest word implying doubt of the consummate excellence of the "peculiar" system [slavery], the slightest act which could be construed into a leaning toward the doctrine of equal human rights, gave ground sufficient for the charge of Abolitionism, and the prompt execution of Judge Lynch's code. Nay, even silence was suspicious, for it might be but a cover of some deep design. Innocent book-peddlers, who cared no more for Slavery or Anti-Slavery than for the politics of Patagonia [Argentina]; harmless venders of patent and unpatented "Yankee notions," without which scarce the outward show of civilized life could be kept up among the "patriarchs;" school-teachers, thinking only of their spelling-books and grammars and the quarter's bills; "drummers" [salesmen] of northern mercantile establishments, untainted with an "ism;" mechanics, who had never voted any but the Democratic ticket; clergymen, well known in northern parishes as stanch assertors of a Bible warrant for Slave-holding; and many others, no more dangerous than these, were at once transformed, by excited imaginations, into Abolition emissaries, and hunted down with all the keen vindictiveness of fear. The mob was legislator, prosecutor, jury, judge, and executioner. Arrests and summary examinations before self-constituted tribunals, followed by speedy execution of the seldom-failing doom, — brutal abuse, imprisonment, banishment,or death, — became so frequent that hardly could the daily press find room to chronicle the cases. Sometimes, by way of rare variety, the sovereign mob would condescend to leave a victim to the regular enforcement of some tyrannical statute by the established courts. But where no statute could be found to meet the case, that is, where no unlawful act could bo alleged,— no act which even the despotic legislation of a Slave State had forbidden, — the edict of a "Vigilance Committee," or vote of a tumultuous assembly was law enough; and the absurdest tale of malice, or the most unreasonable suspicion of blind terror, was sufficient evidence.

Recurring panics at the rumor of an impending slave revolt had become a chronic feature of life in the slave states.

And even though John Brown's raid in Harper's Ferry didn't incite any immediate slave revolts, the panic following that event was more intense and more widespread than most.

Tags: confederate heritage month 2009, john brown, slavery

Confederate "Heritage" Month, April 27: More on John Brown

Black and white Union sailors serving together

Last year, I devoted a number of posts to the career of the still-controversial John Brown. And I'm still interested to read various views of his actions and impact.

I'm about half-way through William Freehling's new The Road to Disunion, Vol 2: Secessionists Triumphant, 1854-1861 (2007). While Freehling is one of my favorite sources on the antebellum era, he didn't get Brown quite right. Like the reviewer I discussed in yesterday's post, he gives a distorted and misleading version of the Pottawatomie killings of 1854. I looked at those in several posts last year, beginning with this one of 04/14/06, so I won't belabor it here.

Freehling admits to having changed his view over time on the plausibility of Brown's Harpers Ferry mission, specifically in relation to the possibility of attracting local slaves to his fight in Harpers Ferry itself. Freehling's current judgment of the outcome seems reasonable to me:

There transpired one of the most stupendous scenes in American history. In the dark night, Brown's freedom fighters easily captured Harpers Ferry's federal armory, arsenal, and engine house. They sliced the telegraph wires. They halted a train. They dispatched messengers to a nearby plantation, Lewis Washington's (a great-grandnephew of George Washington's), there to alert slaves to spread the invasion. No other first strike has ever been better planned or carried out (which is only to say that John Brown here perfected his lifelong specialty).

No other following tactics have ever been botched so badly (which is only to say that John Brown here succumbed to his lifelong flaw). ...

Where Brown and his men needed to transport Harpers Ferry's potentially highly consequential firearms to the nooks and crannies of the mountains in a great big hurry, the raider stayed in Harpers Ferry's death trap. While whites gathered to hurl themselves at the furious old man, their prey jailed himself inside the most innocuous corner of his caputred fortress, the engine house. There, the self-imprisoned raider found no food.

The night after Brown struck, U.S. Marines arrived, led by Robert E. Lee. The next day, Lee's assaulters fed Brown's hungry raiders stell for breakfast.

Freehling also gives a good account of the subsequent slave-insurrection panic that spread through the South.

I also want to mention an essay by Bertram Wyatt-Brown that makes the best case I've seen for John Brown having suffered from depression, "'A Volcano Beneath a Mountain of Snow': John Brown and the Problem of Interpretation" in His Soul Goes Marching On: Responses to John Brown and the Harpers Ferry Raid, Paul Finkelman, ed., (1995).

"Psychohistory" is always tricky, and a lot of it isn't worth the paper it's printed on. It's especially tricky in the case of someone like John Brown whose enemies often tried to portray him as a fanatical lunatic. Wyatt-Brown manages to talk about Brown's personal psychology without getting too far out ahead of the available evidence and also without reducing his politics or his religion to a personal quirk. Or, worse, to a personal pathology. He writes:

If Brown's composure under fire at the engine house and his later serenity as he faced the prospect of the gallows testified to his religious strength of character, it also bespeaks his melancholy satisfaction in ending a life of inner rage and darkest mood. He had contemplated his own death for many years, and the issue was now settled. Without having to encounter the moral dilemma of self-destruction, long considered an offense against God's will, Brown could face the terminus of his life with devout tranquility. Thus he entered the most creative period of his antislavery career, fulfilling the role of martyr with almost artistic perfection. ... When asked by by his captors who had sent him, he replied, "It was my own prompting and that of my Maker, or that of the devil, whichever you please to ascribe to it." The sentiment was almost jocular, but one wonders if Brown himself did not feel that he was inspired by both supernatural elements — an amalgamation of the Manichean division that seemed to have empowered him to create the tumult he wished for. ...

Brown's self-possession as he faced death was perhaps the most significant manifestation of the melancholy state of mind with which he had so long contended.

In conclusion, Wyatt-Brown describes John Brown as "a singular, complex, and nigenious agitator" who "profoundly touched the life of a nation". And he observes how "the very depth of Brown's dispondency helped to shape his own creative vocation as a martyr who aspired to free a nation from a moral yoke and a race from its hideous bondage."

I think Brown would be proud to be remembered that way.

Tags: bertram wyatt-brown, john brown, william freehling

Confederate "Heritage" Month, April 26: John Brown's body stays restless

Quarters used by Union forces during the siege of Vicksburg

Here is a review of David Reynolds' recent book on John Brown, called John Brown, Abolitionist, and also of Nicholas Lemann's book, Redemption: The last battle of the Civil War, that focuses on Adelbert Ames' fight to sustain democratic government in Mississippi after the war: John Brown's body and blood by Ari Kelman Times Literary Supplement 02/14/07.

Unfortunately, it starts with a rather fantastic description of John Brown's mission at Harper's Ferry:

Steeled by faith in God’s omnipotence, on October 16, 1859, John Brown set in motion a plan he believed would liberate 4 million slaves throughout the American South. Brown envisioned a biblical flood, not of water, but of people, rising at the confluence of the Potomac and Shenandoah Rivers, as bondsmen rallied to the Harpers Ferry federal arsenal. This army of liberation would break over Dixie in a divine wave, cleansing the the region of sin. At nightfall, Brown and his men seized the armoury and sent patrols to take hostages and alert slaves that the day of jubilee had arrived. The next day, townspeople traded shots with Brown's gang, until marines arrived and ended the rebellion.

Well, the part about Brown getting caught is more-or-less right. Brown was hoping for some slave reinforcements in Harper's Ferry. But he didn't imagine gather in them into an "army of liberation" that "would break over Dixie in a divine wave". He intended to set up a guerrilla operation in the Appalachians that would encourage slaves to escape their masters and facilitate them in doing so.

This description of Ames' battle with the Redeemers isn't quite so bad, although it implies that the occurences at Vicksburg were more a one-time event than an example of a process that occurred through much of the South:

At least for six years: in 1865, the states ratified the Thirteenth Amendment, finally abolishing slavery nationwide. In 1874, that amendment, as well as the Fourteenth, expanding citizenship and promising equal protection under the law, and the Fifteenth, guaranteeing voting rights, prompted another violent upheaval, in Vicksburg, Mississippi. Self-styled white "Redeemers", convinced that freedmen with ballots menaced a divinely sanctioned natural order, disfranchised African Americans by terrorizing them. The Redeemers seized Vicksburg to ensure that an upcoming election would remain a whites-only affair. Mississippi’s Reconstruction governor, Adelbert Ames, then sent African American troops to recapture the town. The white mob held off the militia and killed twenty-nine African Americans. (my emphasis)

And this comparison immediately following is accurate enough:

Separated by sixteen years and a Civil War, John Brown’s raid and the Vicksburg murders are divided by more than that in most histories of the era. Brown, after all, fought for freedom. He was a champion of racial equality, whose righteous ends mitigate, even if they don’t necessarily justify, his bloody means. The Redeemers, by contrast, then, were devoted to an antiquated racial order, and they killed to return to a bygone era. Disparate goals seem to open a gulf between the Redeemers and Brown that not even a shared fondness for bloodshed, underpinned by relevant scriptural passages, can close. (my emphasis)

The review kind of goes downhill from there. He makes an unconvincing attempt to link the religious outlook of the postwar, white-supremacist Redeemers with that of John Brown. Well, Brown and most if not all the "Redeemers" were Christian. But beyond that, there's not a lot of resemblance.

He criticizes Reynolds for supposedly justifying Brown spilling "rivers of blood", a highly questionable metaphor in Brown's case. Describing Brown's most controversial action, the execution of five proslavery settlers in the "Bleeding Kansas" mini-civil war, this way:

On May 24, he and his followers snatched five pro-slavery settlers near Pottawatomie Creek, Kansas. His gang split the captives' skulls with broadswords, biblical retribution gone mad.

Kelman seems to accept the notion of Brown as a crazy religious fanatic. But the Pottawatomie killings, whatever else they may have been, were not "biblical retribution gone mad". They were specific acts done in a particular context of the conflict in Kansas. Kelman at least gives some historical background of the Kansas conflict and even of the Pottawatomie killings.

But he writes, "Even militant abolitionists, like Frederick Douglass, had considered him a dangerous tool, a loaded gun with a hair trigger." Well, no, they didn't. Douglass supported Brown in some of his activities. He declined Brown's invitation to join the Harper's Ferry raid because he thought it was too risky a plan, a judgment which the outcome arguably validated. But he didn't think of Brown as off his rocker or as someone operating on "a hair trigger".

Kelman is correct when he writes of the post "Redeemers":

The Redeemers, along with other Evangelical terrorists in the South, sensed an opening and became the Democratic Party’s de facto military wing.

He also gives a decent definition of the Redeemer strategy that "became known as the Mississippi plan: terrorism backed by biblical metaphors, in service of voter suppression", though I do think he over-emphasizes the religious theme. John Brown was clearly deeply religious. The Redeemers were Christians and no doubt had religious views matching their white supremacist beliefs. But their motivations weren't overtly religious in the way Brown's were.

His closing judgment on Ames is also unfair:

Ames, bumbling and naive, lived in complex times and was swamped by uncertainty. He tried to find the righteous path. But he kept tripping along the way.

No, Ames was not "bumbling and naive". He was not "swamped by uncertainty" but by organized force and violence. And he did find a "righteous path". The Redeemers prevented him from travelling down it.

Tags: adelbert ames, john brown

Confederate"Heritage" Month 2006, April 21: John Brown and antislavery Christianity (1)

John Brown saw the world through Christian eyes. A religious understanding shaped his views of politics, family life, history, business, war.

The early nineteenth century was a more intensely religious period in America than the time of the Revolution.  Thanks to various waves of revivals and and more mundane efforts of Protestant demoninations to save souls and provide churches for the growing flocks, more people were attending church.  And more people were conceptualizing social and political issues in religious terms.

The American Cromwell

John Brown was more intensely religious than the average American of those days, though. His contemporaries often spoke of him as a throwback to two centuries earlier, to the time of Oliver Cromwell. Americans today might generally recognize Cromwell's name, and know that he was some kind of religious or political leader in England. Richard Boyer wrote of Brown's presentation of himself as he became well-known at least in antislavery circles due to his role in the Kansas fighting:

As John Brown told of his victories in Kansas and Missouri over this hitherto invincible figure, it was almost as if he were simultaneously creating in himself and with himself an answering legend to that of the gallant slaveholder, the legend of the Bible-reading, hymn-singing Puritan, fierce throw-back to Cromwell's Ironsides of two centuries before who had defeated the cavaliers of King Charles as Brown would defeat the slaveholders of the South. If he never characterized himself thus, he did not need to. The circumstances of his life and ancestry had combined to so suspend him in time, to so keep him in the Puritan ethic of the seventeenth century, or so his admirers felt and said, that they instantly recognized him as an almost exact reincarnation of Cromwell's warriors. Like them, the rhythms of the Old Testament beat within him, offering him succor and strength on the day of battle, and the psalms of David they had sung or recited around campfires two centuries distant were a part of the very core of John Brown. Sanborn was typical in his reaction to Brown when, in an address to Concord schoolchildren in March 1857, he said,

"I have lately met a person who so well illustrates in himself the Puritan of Cromwell's time that he seems to me worth describing. ... I refer to the justly famous Captain Brown of Kansas, otherwise known as 'Old Brown' and 'Osawatomie Brown' of whom you have no doubt heard something in connection with recent events in Kansas."

It might have puzzled those who saw John Brown as a latter-day Cromwell, as well as a good many other of his contemporaries, had they known that his role in history was later to be described only as that of a solitary fanatic. To them it seemed as if he were in the mainstream, the victor of Kansas, at the very center of the country's greatest crisis, the man who could act when others only spoke, the man who could wield the authority of the gun when most of his admirers, "not men with fists," as Theodore Parker called them, had only the power of rhetoric. (Boyer; 13-14)

Brown's Outspoken Christianity


Some of his religious statements after his capture became instantly famous. Others were contained in letters that came to light over time. For example:

I think I feel as happy as Paul did when he lay in prison. He knew if they killed him, it would greatly advance the cause of Christ; that was the reason he rejoiced so. On that same ground "I do rejoice, yea, and will rejoice." Let them hang me; I forgive them, and may God forgive them, for they know not what they do. I have no regret for the transaction for which I am condemned. I went against the laws of men, it is true, but "whether it be right to obey God or men, judge ye."

And also:

'He shall begin to deliver Israel out of the hands of the Philistines.' This was said of a poor erring servant many years ago; and for many years I have felt a strong impression that God had given me powers and faculties, unworthy as I was, that He intended to use for a similar purpose. This most unmerited honor He has seen fit to bestow; and whether, like the same poor frail man to whom I allude, my death may not be of vastly more value than my life is,I think quite beyond all human foresight.

Brown's remarkable performance in his interrogation after his capture, wounded and exhausted, at Harpers Ferry, included a number of religious references.  The interrogation was fortunately reported first-hand by a reporter from the New York Herald. It included exchanges such as the following:

Q: "Who sent you - who sent you?"

Brown: "No man sent me - I acknowledge no master in human form!"

Q (from Virginia Gov. Wise): "Mr. Brown, the silver of your hair is reddened by the blood of crime, and you should eschew these hard words and think upon eternity. You are suffering from wounds, perhaps fatal; and should you escape death from these causes, you must submit to a trial which may involve death. Your confessions justify the presumption that you will be found guilty; and even now you are committing a felony under the laws of Virginia, by uttering sentiments like these. It is better you should turn your attention to your eternal future than be dealing in denunciations which can only injure you."

Brown: "Governor, I have from all appearances not more than fifteen or twenty years the start of you in the journey to that eternity of which you kindly warn me; and whether my time here shall be fifteen months, or fifteen days, or fifteen hours, I am equally prepared to go. There is an eternity behind and an eternity before; and this little speck in the centre, however long, is but comparatively a minute. The difference between your tenure and mine is trifling, and I therefore tell you to be prepared. I am prepared. You have a heavy responsibility, and it behooves you to prepare more than it does me."

W.E.B. DuBois also described Brown's attitude toward the Southern slaveholders' version of Christianity at the time he was being held in Virginia for execution:

Against slavery his face is set like flint: "There are no ministers of Christ here. These ministers who profess to be Christian, and hold slaves or advocate slavery, I cannot abide them. My knees will not bend in prayer with them, while their hands are stained with the blood of souls." He said to one Southern clergyman : "I will thank you to leave me alone; your prayers would be an abomination to God." To another he said, "I would not insult God by bowing down in prayer with any one who had the blood of the slave on his skirts." (DuBois; 372)

Earlier Religious Life

For Robert Penn Warren in his 1929 biography of Brown, the antislavery fighter was a scamster and insane to boot. His antislavery activities in Kansas were simply a cover for horse and cattle theft. And his religion was nothing but a way to wrap a phony mantle of self-righteousness around his misdeeds. Warren emphasized what he found to be "one of the most significant keys to John Brown's career and character; his elaborate psychological mechanism for justification which appeared regularly in terms of the thing which friends called Puritanism and enemies called fanaticism." (Warren; 446)

But whatever the psychological roots of Brown's religious feelings and convictions, there is no reason to doubt that he took his religious seriously, and looked at the world through a religious perspective. Stephen Oates gives this account of Brown in 1832, more than two decades before he arrived in Kansas:

Eventually Brown decided that what the township needed was a church of its own. On January 1, 1832, he organized an Independent Congregational Society in New Richmond [Connecticut], drawing up the articles of faith himself. The society held its services on the second floor of Brown's tannery. Sometimes a minister came to deliver the sermon: on other mornings Brown gave it himself, preaching from the works of the older Jonathan Edwards, whose mystical Calvinism, as expressed in such sermons as "The Eternity of Hell Torments," "The Evil of the Wicked Contemplated by the Righteous," and "Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God," had powerfully influenced Brown's own beliefs. He told his congregation one Sunday: "Is not the reflection that full, & complete justice will at last be done enough to make the very Heavens & Earth to tremble?" Before him, on the second floor of his tannery, sat his employees and their families, the Delamaters, and his own wife and children. "Providence," Brown went on in his hairing but imperious manner, "unfolds to our darkened minds, Three cardinal traits in the character of the true God, vis Justice, mercy, & love of propriety." Yet there was one attribute men should have above all others. "Humility," Brown  declared, for "What can so properly become poor dependent, sinning, & self condemned mortals, like us ... as humility?"

He preached about the nature of sin, too, and wrote of how "Our stupidity ingratitude disobedience we have great reason to mourn [&] repent of." He himself felt that he should expect God's judgments because His mercies had not awakened more of Brown's "love & gratitude, zeal for his honor." In his sermons and his morning Bible classes Brown drew his scriptural examples largely from the Old Testament, reminding his listeners how the wrathful Jehovah of ancient Israel brought famine and pestilence to those who did not "fear the Lord thy God" and failed to "serve him and swear by His name." For "the fear of God," as the Preacher taught in the last chapter of Ecclesiastes, "is the whole duty of man." (Oates; 22)

For better or worse, John Brown conceived his antislavery mission in Christian religious terms. That's not to say he was unaware of its political dimension.  Near the end of his life, he explained to George Stearns, one of the Secret Six:

I believe in the Golden Rule, sir, and the Declaration of Independence. I think that both mean the same thing; and it is better that a whole generation should pass off the face of the earth - men, women, and children - by a violent death than that one jot of either should fail in this country, I mean exactly so, sir.

The apocalyptic vision of that comment is dramatic, and could be used as an example of a certain fanaticism. But we don't have to guess at what he might have done in pursuit of such a vision. Even his bloodiest deeds showed that he was highly disciplined and directed in his use of violence. His reference there was surely to biblical symbolism about the authority of God: "than that one jot of either should fail" would have been immediately recognizable to Americans of his time as a refernce to a statement of Jesus about the Jewish law in the King James Bible translation.

However one may judge his deeds or his Christianity, it seems clear to me that his comment about the Golden Rule represented his own values that governed his actions. His conception of his mission in life was both a Christian religious one and a radical-democratic one.

It was consistent with John Brown's own conception of himself and his mission that his admirers defined him in religious imagery:

While John Brown still lived, Wendell Phillips, one of the greatest anti-slavery figures, who himself had prior knowledge of Brown's plan, was comparing him to Huss and Wycliffe, martyrs of the Reformation, "who died violent deaths for breaking the laws of Rome," as well as to George Washington, who, "had he been caught before 1783 would have died on the gibbet, for breaking the laws of his sovereign." And in Kansas, William A. Phillips, another who was privy to the plot, one of the foremost newspaper correspondents of his day and later a soldier and congressman of distinction, was soon declaring that the best of an epoch and its men were combined in John Brown. It was during these days of waiting that Emerson said that if John Brown were hanged he would "make the gallows as glorious as the cross," while Victor Hugo, writing from his exile in Guernsey, was pleading for the life of John Brown, declaring that for Americans to take it was like "Washington slaying Spartacus." (Boyer; 21)

(See Sources on John Brown for references.)

Tags: abolitionism, confederate heritage month 2006, john brown, neo-confederates

The Christian Right and the antislavery movement

The New York Review of Books has recently published two articles on one of my favorite Civil War-related subjects, John Brown. Unfortunately, they haven't made either of them available free on their Web site.

But I'm going to post about the latest one anyway, because it explores some of the bad historical analogies that the Christian Right uses to justify anti-abortion militancy in particular.

In reviewing the new book Bound for Canaan: The Underground Railroad and the War for the Soul of America by Fergus Bordewich, George Fredrickson in "The Long Trek to Freedom", New York Review 07/14/05 issue, writes of John Brown:

There has long been controversy over whether or not he was excessively committed to violence. In Kansas in 1856 he presided over the murder [sic] of five proslavery settlers who neither owned slaves themselves nor were guilty of any known acts of violence against the antislavery settlers with whom they were competing for control of the territory. Recent discussions of Brown have raised the question whether he was a prototype of the modern "terrorist" driven to extreme actions by religious zealotry and by a belief that there was direct divine sanction for his deeds. In his recent biography of Brown, David S. Reynolds tries to distinguish Brown's kind of terrorism from that of modern suicide bombers and plane hijackers. Reynolds argues that Brown's methods can be justified by the need to challenge the need to challenge the enormous and exceptional evil of slavery, by the lack of other means of dealing with it, and by the better society that was envisioned as a result of taking violent action against it.

In his more general discussion, Bordewich compares the religiously inspired abolitionists involved in the more militant actions of the Underground Railroad with contemporary anti-abortion activists, who attack clinics and commit other illegal acts in response to a "higher law." He concedes that "uneasy questions" remain "about what happens when revealed religion collides with a secular society that shares neither its politics nor its reading of the Scriptures." But he concludes that the faith of the "deeply pious activists of the underground ... was also balanced by a generous idealism, and by an uncompromising devotion to the rights of others" that he suggests would be difficult to find among the more militant members of the contemporary anti-abortion movement. The implied argument here is that slavery was an obvious and flagrant denial of personal liberty, while the woman's "right to choose" might be considered an assertion of that liberty. Bordewich does not resolve the question of the legitimacy of violence and civil disobedience but by raising it he brings to his account the moral seriousness it deserves.

That latter paragraph is a bit lacking in its analytical perspective, but it poses a good question. One that calls for a common-sense reality check.

What did anti-slavery activists do and what risks did they run? In the South after 1832, antislavery agitation was nearly completely suppressed. Not even those free whites who opposed slavery - and there were some, though not nearly as many as neo-Confederate fantasists would have us believe - were allowed to agitate publicly. Where laws against inciting "servile rebellion" were insufficient to formally deal with such deviations from the standards of the higher civilization that slaveowners and their propagandists claim to have built, less formal methods of social ostracism, economic reprisal and direct violence were sufficient to make up the difference.

Even nonviolent antislavery activists in the free states were often targets of hostility and outright violence by proslavery mobs. The South did a profitable business in many cities of the North. And many Northerners not directly benefited from such business nevertheless viewed antislavery advocates as dangerous and subversive agitators. Even at times in as thoroughly Yankee a city as Boston. (The neo-Confederate crowd have their own pseudohistorical twist on this phenomenon, as well.) In one of the most notorious incidents, antislavery editor Elijah Lovejoy was killed by a mob in Alton, Illinois.

John Hope Franklin and Alfred Moss, Jr., describe the situation in From Slavery to Freedom (2000 [8th] edition):

Antislavery lecturers often found it difficult to rent halls in which to speak. Even if they succeeded, they could not be certain that their program would go off as planned, for many a meeting was broken up by mobs. Even women who supported the antislavery crusade were in danger of suffering insults and indignities. When Prudence Crandall, a Quaker teacher, admitted a black girl to her school in Canterbury, Connecticut, white patrons boycotted it. After she decided to open a school for black girls, with the aid of abolitionists like [William Lloyd] Garrison and Lewis Tappan, the citizens broke windows, insulted the teacher, and had her arrested for violating a state law that forbade the teaching of blacks who were not residents of the state. Abolitionists could expect little help or protection from the federal government. ...

It was the countenancing of violence by abolitionists that caused many law-abiding citizens to oppose them and rendered utterly hopeless their schemes to obtain government support. Convinced that slaveholders had the law of the land on their side, abolitionists resorted to the principle of a higher law, which they felt justified their circumventing or breaking the law. Garrison and his followers, although nonviolent, pointed out the inevitability of the violence of the Nat Turner insurrection. In 1839 Jabez Hammond of New York said that only force would end slavery and that military schools for blacks should be set up in Canada and Mexico. When slaves revolted aboard the Creole on a voyage from Hampton Roads to New Orleans, Representative Joshua Giddings not only opposed treating the slaves as common criminals but even praised them for seeking freedom. The House of Representatives, shocked by his open defiance of the law, censured Giddings. Forthwith he resigned, went home to Ohio, and was immediately returned to Congress by his antislavery constituency. The redoubtable Giddings later praised other blacks and whites for seeking to abolish slavery, and finally the House became accustomed to his tirades against the institution. By 1850 the philosophy of force was so integral a part of abolitionist doctrine that many viewed it as a movement toward anarchy.

Although the antislavery movement recognized the inevitability of violence to counter the genuine everyday violence of slavery, no notable figure in the abolitionist movement was advocating a violent insurrection against the US government or for servile insurrection." Nor was John Brown.

Brown's plan that was cut short by the failure of his raid on Harper's Ferry was to encourage limited armed resistance and the flight of slaves by setting up a network of resistance bases in the Upper South. It was the Slave Power, the slaveowning planters who controlled the governments of the Southern slave states, that advocated and put into practice a violent overthrow of the American Constitutional government. And that's no rhetorical posture to say that the Slave Power was simply to blame (which they certainly were!), but a description of what happened.

There were a number of turning points in the years 1850-1860. In 1850, a new Fugitive Slave Act became law, outraging many Northerners who weren't particularly sympathetic to the abolitionists. Among its provisions was a requirement that any male citizen in free states could compelled to take part in federal posses hunting for fugitive slaves from slave states. This imported a version of the Southern slave patrols, in which nonslaveowning whites were required to patrol for slaves violating their strict rules, to free states.

It was also plain by then that slavery was in many ways a lawless institution. There were official legal limits on what punishments could be inflicted on a slave. But it was rare indeed for a white person to be punished for any kind of torture or even murder to be inflicted on a slave. And there was no doubt that slavery involved very real cruelty to millions of real live human beings.

In the Kansas crisis in which Brown fought as a guerrilla for the antislavery side, Stephen Douglas' proslavery notion of "popular sovereignty" was put into practice. That was the nominally democratic idea that voters in Kansas could decide whether it would be slave or free. The slaveowners, especially those in Missouri, sent settlers into Kansas Territory in large numbers to insure that it became a slave state. What happened in Kansas was a small-scale guerrilla war, with both sides intending to counter the other by force. The grim fact is, whether it fits a pretty picture of American history or not, is that if the antislavery forces like Brown and his men had not been willing to use force and to use it effectively, they would have been driven out, defeated or killed by the proslavery group. Despite massive fraud by the proslavery side, Kansas was eventually admitted as a free state.

In 1857, the Supreme Court's Dred Scott decision - which antiabortionists liken to Roe v. Wade - effectively eliminated the power of Congress to restrict slavery in the territories. And free states residents feared, with good reason, that the Slave Power intended to use the proslavery Supreme Court to eventually nullify antislavery laws in the free states. In the context of the time, this effectively removed the chances of resolving the slavery dispute without large-scale violence, though most Northern abolitionists and the new Republican Party tried hard to work out such a nonviolent method.

It seems to me that the Christian Right uses the antislavery example for a couple reasons. One is that in American history and popular sentiment, the pro-democracy, antislavery movement looks much more benign than the Slave Power and the Confederacy. Since most antislavery activists claimed Christian religious for their antislavery views, this fits nicely with the Christian Right's position on abortion today - as long as you ignore the fact that the far more violent slaveowners and the proslavery advocates also claimed divine sanction from the Christian God for their actions and their "peculiar institution" of slavery.

Another reason is that the core of the Christian Right are the direct political and ideological heirs of the Southern segregationists of the 1950s and 1960s. There are exceptions, of course. But segregationist and fundamentalists are often obsessive about trying to turn the arguments of their victims around on them. "The whites aren't mistreating the Negroes," they argued in the segregation days. "It's the Yankees and the civil rights outside agitators who are turning the contented Southern Negroes against us white folks and discriminating and promoting prejudice against the (white) South." Although the Christian Right is strikingly unsympathetic to the priorities of civil rights advocates or programs of special interests to minorities today, they like to claim the civil rights movement and the antebellum antislavery movements as their models. It's more of a sneer than anything else.

The quotation from Bordewich in Fredrickson's review seems to recognize that this comparison is as phony as the WMDs in Iraq because most antiabortionists don't show great passion for the freedom, opportunities or general well-being of living, breathing human beings that they profess to have for fetuses at the state in which they are incapable of living except as a part of the mother's body. Also, it takes a whole series of assumptions to make a fetus into a human being. Despite the attempts of some Slave Power propagandists to claim that blacks were biologically inferior to whites, everyone knew very well that they were human beings.

It's also the case that outside of the slave states of the United States and some countries of Latin America, slavery had been abolished as an institution and was rejected as wrong and fundamentally unacceptable by most other countries. Antislavery activists may have been a minority in the US prior to the Civil War. But they also were taking a position that was the same as the generally accepted position of most of what Americans then saw as the civilized world. It is simply not the case that any such consensus exists in the world on abortion.

Even in the United States, it wasn't until about a century ago that laws against abortion began appearing, because the surgical technique just wasn't possible until then. And even then, the motivation for banning it was not because the fetuses were considered as the same as living, breathing humans. It was because the procedure was so risky for the pregnant woman.

But the comparison is also ridiculous because of the nature of the opposition. As described above, antislavery agitators often risked reputation, life and limb to oppose slavery, especially in the South. An antislavery white Southerner in practice either had to keep his or her mouth shut on the subject or move to a free state. And they were dealing with a federal government increasingly dominated by the Slave Power.

What do antiabortion activists do? The campaign for restrictions on abortion, they teach against abortion as being wrong both in the churches and in the "public square" from which they routinely claim they are being excluded, they fight cases in the courts. All of which they are perfectly free to do in every state of the Union. They don't have to risk their livelihood, much less their lives or physical safety to do any of that.

And, instead of facing angry mobs, they, well, they demonstrate against mostly young women at abortion clinics coming for a medical procedure that most of them would prefer not to have. They even get away with setting up abortion-advice services that deliberately lie to clients about the risks of abortion, something ethically bankrupt and legally borderline (or should be). They may stalk employees of abortion clinics and try to create hostility against them in their home communities.

How much guts or fortitude does any of this take? Even in civil-disobedience actions, such as blockading an abortion clinic, what antiabortion demonstrators in the United States ever faced anything remotely comparable to what Bull Conner's police dished out to civil rights demonstrators in Alabama in the 1960s? Good grief, the comparison is just silly.

It's true that some of the more extreme and violent antiabortion fanatics, like those who bomb abortion clinics or murder doctors who perform abortions, are taking some personal risks. But again, how do you compare bombing an abortion clinic to Elijah Lovejoy facing hostile mobs? How is murdering an unarmed doctor in a sneak attack remotely comparable to John Brown fighting it out with Captain Robert E. Lee's federal troops at Harper's Ferry?

In the excerpt above, Frederickson says:

[Bordewich] concedes that "uneasy questions" remain "about what happens when revealed religion collides with a secular society that shares neither its politics nor its reading of the Scriptures."

I guess if you take it to that level of abstraction, there might be some abstract "uneasy questions." But looking at what actually went on the abolition movement with what today's antiabortionists actually do, I don't feel the least bit "uneasy" about saying the comparison is bogus.

Tags: abolitionism, abortion, christian right, john brown