Those who Fought to END Slavery " John Brown"

John Brown Meeting the Slave Mother and Her Child on the Steps of Charleston Jail on His Way to Execution, 1863. Published by Currier & Ives. Hand colored lithograph heightened with gum arabic. Graphic Arts Collection GAX 2020- in process.

“Perhaps you will remember John Brown…Since Harpers Ferry Is alive with ghosts today, Immortal raiders Come again to town,” wrote Langston Hughes, one of America’s most beloved poets, in 1931. Seventy-two years earlier, Hughes’ grandfather, Lewis Sheridan Leary, was part of a multiracial group led by abolitionist John Brown which aimed to start a massive slave revolt by seizing weapons from a federal arsenal at Harper’s Ferry and redistributing them to enslaved people across the South.

There are certain facts about this infamous event on which everyone can agree on: the raiders were stopped by the U.S. Marines (led by Robert E. Lee), the raid convinced Southerners that the Republican Party was headed by Black abolitionists, Brown was hanged for treason in December of 1859, and his prophetic statement at the noose “that the crimes of this guilty land will never be purged away, but with Blood” transformed him into a martyr for the Union cause.

But the way John Brown has been remembered has diverged widely across race, class, politics, and historical moment. Examining how vital information about Brown has been twisted or omitted in response to oppressed peoples’ response to him may help us to more truthfully “remember John Brown” and connect him with other “immortal raiders” and activists who have fought white supremacy.

And while it may be easy to assume that historians, artists, and everyday people have grown more sympathetic toward John Brown over time, the contested memory of Brown challenges the myth that Americans have become more progressive on racial politics and education.

Sociologist James W. Loewen, after surveying eighteen textbooks, determined that “From 1890 to about 1970, John Brown was insane. Before 1890 he was perfectly sane, and after 1970 he has slowly been regaining his sanity.” Though 1970 marks somewhat of a shift in portrayals of Brown by predominately white historians, Black people in the United States, as well as some white abolitionists and labor organizers, recognized the heroism of John Brown long before the Civil Rights era.

In the aftermath of Brown’s dramatic execution, many Northern whites (especially abolitionists) considered John Brown to be a Christ-like figure. Ralph Waldo Emerson famously declared in a speech that Brown would “make the gallows holy like the cross.” Henry David Thoreau, in “A Plea for Captain John Brown,” lambasted Christians who condemned Brown as hypocritical and rebuffed pacifists who believed that slavery could be abolished “by the President, or by some political party.”

Across the North, newspapers decrying Brown’s violent tactics were at the same time in awe of his willingness to stoically sacrifice himself for abolitionism. At the height of the Civil War, “John Brown’s Body” became one of the most popular anthems among Union soldiers, who joyously sang about how Brown’s “soul goes marching on,” glorifying and immortalizing him for years to come.

Yet just as many of these singing soldiers were not necessarily dedicated to the cause of anti-slavery, let alone to racial justice, neither were many others who hummed the song or found inspiration in John Brown. Two years after Brown’s execution, writer, suffragist, and free soiler Julia Ward Howe wrote new lyrics to “John Brown’s Body” that preserved the biblical imagery of the original song while also eliminating every mention of Brown and abolitionism.

Her sanitized version became a more general, recognizable patriotic anthem blasted and belted at sports games, parades, and inaugurations: “The Battle Hymn of the Republic.”

Brown’s ubiquity didn’t mean that white Northerners all agreed on his actions. Thousands of white Northerners gathered to hear anti-Brown speeches after his death. Even abolitionist, staunch pacifist, and founder of the American Anti-Slavery Society, William Lloyd Garrison, called Brown’s raid of Harper’s Ferry “misguided, wild, and apparently insane.”

While Garrison and Brown both rejected the notion that slavery could be voted out through political processes, Garrison believed in the power of “moral suasion” – that is, using appeals to the morality of slavery sympathizers – to end slavery, whereas Brown had long been an advocate of using direct, often violent, action to drive fear into the hearts of pro-slavery forces.

Perhaps most revealingly, ex-Whig senator Edward Everett told a crowd in Boston that John Brown wanted to make the United States into a miniature Haiti,
replicating the “midnight burnings, wholesale massacres, and the merciless tortures” which supposedly defined the Haitian Revolution.

Howe, Garrison, and Everett’s beliefs reflected widely-held white fears of a Black armed insurrection rendered Brown an illogical traitor to white Northerners of many political persuasions, but to African Americans, his focus on immediate liberation was welcome and even necessary.

Though Frederick Douglass famously refused to join Brown’s rebellion, he profusely praised Brown and gave a lengthy speech about him at a new college for freedmen erected at Harper’s Ferry, and Harriet Tubman attempted to recruit Black Canadians to participate in Brown’s raid.

African Americans played an integral role in all of John Brown’s ventures to end slavery and, after his death, in keeping his memory alive. During what historian David Blight believes was one of the first Memorial Day celebrations in 1865, a procession of 3,000 Black children held roses and sang “John Brown’s Body” (as would later become a tradition on Juneteenth) as they marched to a cemetery for Union prisoners shortly after the war’s end .

Garrison’s The Liberator reported that after Brown was hanged, many Black citizens of New Bedford, Massachusetts gathered together, pledged to annually celebrate the raid of Harper’s Ferry, and passed a resolution vowing that Brown’s memory would be “indelibly written upon the tablets of our hearts, and when tyrants cease to oppress the enslaved, we will teach our children to revere his name…as being the greatest man in the 19th century.”

Soon after he was buried in the remote North Elba, New York, African Americans, in particular, began making annual pilgrimages to his grave.

As for the raid itself, although many scholars emphasize that Brown’s raid was a “failure” because enslaved people on surrounding plantations did not join him, Osborne Perry Anderson, the only surviving African American member of Brown’s raid, wrote an entire account of the raid which details how in the days leading up to the attack on the arsenal, he and other members of Brown’s party visited plantations and met many enslaved men and women who were eager to join the raid.

Anderson claims that both free and enslaved “colored people, as a body, were well represented” in the raid, guarding prisoners, acting as messengers, and delivering supplies.

However, by the beginning of the twentieth century, with Jim Crow entrenched and Lost Cause historical revisionism reigning supreme, Anderson and other first-hand accounts of John Brown’s raid were overshadowed. With the Civil War firmly in the past, white northerners like William Lloyd Garrison’s son, Oswald Garrison Villard, perpetuated the myth that Brown was well-intentioned but clinically insane, even while maintaining some marginal sympathy for him.

Regardless, Black celebrations of Brown’s actions and memory remained a constant. In 1909, historian, sociologist, and founder of the NAACP, W.E.B. Dubois wrote an extensive, well-researched, and approving biography of John Brown, applauding Brown for his realization that “the cost of liberty was less than the price of repression.”

Throughout the first half of the 20th century, Dubois and the NAACP constantly defended Brown’s legacy, especially against efforts to denounce the raid by the United Daughters of the Confederacy, though his scholarship was dismissed by white academics until the Civil Rights era.