John Brown Still Lives! America’s Long Reckoning with Violence, Equality, and Change by R. Blakeslee Gilpin (review)

R. Blakeslee Gilpin’s John Brown Still Lives! is an ambitious, persuasive study of the historical role that the popular memory of the martyred abolitionist has played in America in times of social tension, notably during episodes when “long-standing hierarchies of race, class, and gender” have been at issue (2). Indebted to David Blight’s path-breaking research on the collective memory of the Civil War and John Stauffer’s work on Brown, Gilpin’s readable, sometimes witty, study of Brown’s social memory won the C. Vann Woodward Dissertation Prize of the Southern Historical Association.

His thesis is straightforward if, as his subtitle implies, complex. Hanged by the state of Virginia on December 2, 1859, for crimes arising from his abortive attempt to free Virginia’s slaves by seizing Harpers Ferry, John Brown has been used repeatedly through the generations since that “invasion” as a “dynamic platform” for discussions involving the confrontation of violence and egalitarianism disputes that portended dramatic change (1, 2). Gilpin says the episodes he relates reveal that “amnesia, hypocrisy, and conservatism still define America’s perpetual negotiations with its founding principles” (2). But if Americans have long defended social hierarchies, as he claims, they have also repudiated privileged orders, as he shows. Quoting Barack Obama’s The Audacity of Hope, Gilpin acknowledges that the “spirit of liberty” proclaimed in Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence did not presumably extend to slaves (194). Given the role that the founders’ principles ostensibly played in the tumultuous years after Brown’s death, Gilpin might have articulated those revered doctrines more explicitly.

Gilpin has thought carefully about his method. He states that recent Brown biographies have shown “the inherent limitations and diminishing returns of biography” (5). Consequently, he avoids “purely biographical explanations in order to explore Brown’s place in America’s historical memory” (6). But it is unclear to this reader how that distinction helps when he turns to narrating Brown’s antislavery career.

Thus Gilpin devotes chapter 1 to Brown’s “Early Life,” noting his “long series of catastrophic business failures” and claiming (mistakenly) that Brown’s “true radicalization seemed to coincide with his most severe financial disappointments” (12–13). In chapter 2, Gilpin traces Brown’s role in the struggle to win Bleeding Kansas for the Free Soil cause. He summarizes the “brutal escapade on the Pottawatomie” in which Brown directed a small party of free-state volunteers in slaying five unarmed proslavery settlers with broadswords on a Sabbath night in 1856, in what Brown claimed was a preemptive strike. Soon after, a young Scots journalist, James Redpath, began to “manipulate the old man’s protomythic stature,” Gilpin says, and Brown’s “overwhelming talent for manipulating his own symbolism” enabled him to “embody, in some grand sense, abolitionism”(28–29).

Chapter 3 narrates the Harpers Ferry raid, “the launching pad for Brown’s immortality” (33). In light of Gilpin’s focus on the popular memory of John Brown, it is perhaps not surprising that his treatment of the raid is quite spare. But brevity here leads to distortions in our reading of Brown’s behavior and purpose. Gilpin suggests, for example, that during the first night of the raid, Brown sent out a party to spread word among the slaves that “their liberator awaited them” (38). In fact, Brown had ordered his party to seize Col. Lewis W. Washington, a great-grandnephew of George Washington and the most prominent citizen in the area. Brown wanted not only Washington but his treasured heirloom sword and brace of pistols, which to Brown symbolized the American Revolution; he planned to wield these openly during the raid.

On returning to Harpers Ferry, Brown’s party arrested another slaveowner, one John Allstadt, and his eighteen-year-old son, John Thomas Allstadt. The recollections of the latter recorded by a researcher fifty years...