John Brown’s War against Slavery (review)

For more than a century and a half biographers, scholars, and amateurs have failed to reach consensus on John Brown, his place in the history of the sectional crisis, his motivations at the Pottawatomie Massacre, and the import of his raid on the federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry. In this meticulously researched book—his first—Robert E. McGlone gets as close as anyone in a generation to producing a comprehensive analysis of Brown’s motivations and actions.

More than two decades in the making, McGlone’s book refocuses on sources that other Brown scholars have eschewed, including the “Old Man”’s own letters and writings. This reengagement with Brown’s own words that have long been passed over by historians in favor of sources left behind by his contemporaries allows a figure to emerge from the page at odds with many recent (and not-so-recent) portraits. Instead of the timeworn trope of a raging seventeenth-century Calvinist who believed he was God’s instrument to destroy slavery, what we get here is a more nuanced John Brown, moved to action by both secular concerns and sincere (and sane) religious beliefs. McGlone’s John Brown is “a thoughtful, often even circumspect doctrinaire” (9).

Of course Brown believed he was doing the Lord’s work. But he was not the wild-eyed and delusional would-be prophet presented in numerous biographies, textbooks, and, perhaps most famously, John Steuart Curry’s portrait in the Kansas State Capitol Building. Instead, John Brown was a committed and radical abolitionist who, convinced electoral politics and petition drives would never defeat slavery or its allies, thoughtfully turned to violence to achieve his ends.

McGlone’s portrait of Brown is decidedly at odds with those presented in former studies, from James C. Malin’s hit job, John Brown and the Legend of Fifty-Six (1942), and Allan Nevins’s famous depiction of a paranoid psychotic in The Emergence of Lincoln (1950) to biographies by Oswald Garrison Villard (John Brown, 1800–1859: A Biography Fifty Years After [1910]) and Stephen B. Oates (To Purge This Land with Blood: A Biography of John Brown [1970]). In what is perhaps a side effect of the book’s long gestation period, McGlone tends to engage more with these authors than with twenty-first-century Brown biographers like Evan Carton and David Reynolds. This opens him up to legitimate criticism from the latter (who have moved far beyond Villard and Oates in their examinations of Brown) and dampens some of his claims to definitive innovations in the field. I especially wish that McGlone had engaged in some of the recent debates about Brown’s place in the long and multicontinental histories of slave rebellions and guerrilla warfare.

But these shortcomings do not lessen the impact of the more believable and ultimately comprehensible John Brown who emerges from McGlone’s study, often in Brown’s own (decidedly nonfanatical) words. McGlone, who has engaged in a long-running debate with Louis A. DeCaro (whose Fire from the Midst of You: A Religious Life of John Brown [2002] strongly argues for the religious origins of nearly all of Brown’s beliefs) over the value of psychological evidence in the case of John Brown, sticks to a personality-centered view of Brown’s life and relationships, especially with his family. The last thing we need is to subject our most interesting nineteenth-century subjects to post-Freudian psychoanalysis and rigid personality tests. But in McGlone’s hands, readers are given a deep and careful understanding of Brown’s private relationships. Far from the angry loner and familial outcast, his Brown is a present father, husband, and leader of a dedicated and expansive abolitionist family, which included twenty children by two different mothers, plus wives, husbands, significant others, and various hangers-on.

Brought to Kansas by the tangible threat to his family by increasingly violent proslavery settlers, John Brown was transformed into a true warrior against slavery. McGlone’s Kansas section may...