Midnight Rising

John Brown is one of the most vexing figures in American history. Is he hero or villain? Traitor or martyr? Visionary or maniac? By all definitions of the word, he has to be considered a terrorist, but of course that depends on your point of view. As Tony Horwitz writes in Midnight Rising, his excellent book about Brown and the raid on Harpers Ferry in 1859: "Viewed through the lens of 9/11, Harpers Ferry seems an al-Qaeda prequel: a long-bearded fundamentalist, consumed by hatred of the U.S. government, launches nineteen men in a suicidal strike on a symbol of American power. A shocked nation plunges into war."

But of course almost everyone today would view Brown's cause as righteous--he hated slavery, and wished to arm an uprising that would end the pernicious practice. His methods, though, are certainly suspect. Still, to those north of the Mason-Dixon line, he has become a symbol of freedom. Henry David Thoreau, with only a year of retrospect, wrote: "They called him crazy then; who calls him crazy now?"

Brown was born in 1900 and led a peripatetic life, mostly in New York and Pennsylvania. He was a farmer and a very bad businessman, and had two wives and many children. He was also a firm believer in The Bible, and unlike those Southerners who rationalized slavery despite their devoutness, Brown had none of it. He believed in the Golden Rule, and despised the institution. Unlike many abolitionists of the time (including Abraham Lincoln), he also believed in the full equality of the black race with the white.

He ended up in Kansas in the mid-1850s when it was called "Bleeding Kansas;" a state that had both pro- and anti-slavery forces, and "border ruffians" who came into the state from Missouri to wreak havoc. Brown and his sons participated in a raid on a pro-slavery town and committed murder.

Brown would later hatch a plan to take his war into the South, which he called "Africa." He met with Frederick Douglass, who admired his commitment but thought the plan foolish. But Brown was not dissuaded. With a force of both blacks and whites, he moved to Maryland to set his sights on the federal armory at Harpers Ferry, which was across the Potomac in Virginia (today it is West Virginia). In October, 1859, he and his men crept in at night and seized the guns, and went to a few slaveholding households to take hostages.

His plan, though, didn't work to his desired effect: "By all appearances, the mission he called 'the great work of my life' had just ended in abject failure. Instead of a months-long campaign reaching across the South, his attack had withered in thirty-two hours, a stone's throw inside Virginia. The climactic battle lasted five minutes, with the insurrectionists' brick citadel easily breached and its commander beaten to the floor with a parade-ground sword. The few slaves Brown had briefly liberated were now returning to bondage. And two more of his sons had been sacrificed."

But Horwitz speculates that Brown's ultimate goal was achieved. Brown was taken alive, and convicted to sentence to hang. His bravery in going to the gallows, though, won over public sentiment in the North, and he was allowed to make speeches at his trial that galvanized the abolitionist movement: "Now, it if 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 submit. So let it be done!"

Brown was hanged and did become a martyr. He looked the part--a tall, gaunt, severe-looking man, he grew a long white beard as a disguise but this only made him more like an Old Testament prophet (he identified with several, mostly Gideon and Samson). A song set to an old hymn that started "John Brown's body is a-moulderin' in the grave" inspired Julia Ward Howe to write new lyrics to it that became "The Battle Hymn of the Republic." Although the shots fired at Fort Sumter officially started the Civil War, the raid on Harpers Ferry was the spark that lit the fuse.

Horwitz is a great writer--I thoroughly enjoyed his Confederates in the Attic--and the story has a lot of famous cameos. Robert E. Lee and J.E.B. Stuart, future Confederates, were among the small force that retook the armory. Witnesses to Brown's hanging included Thomas Jackson, who would end up being known as Stonewall, and John Wilkes Booth. If Brown started the Civil War, Booth ended it.

There's a really good movie in all this. Horwitz suggests Chris Cooper or Tommy Lee Jones as Brown, I thought of David Strathairn. A little over ten years I paid a visit to Harpers Ferry, which has a National Park devoted to the raid. As I recall, the man has a presence there that makes him much more hero than villain, and after considering the facts I have to agree.