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  • The Tie That Bound Us: The Women of John Brown’s Family and the Legacy of Radical Abolitionism by Bonnie Laughlin-Schultz
  • Angela F. Murphy
The Tie That Bound Us: The Women of John Brown’s Family and the Legacy of Radical Abolitionism. By Bonnie Laughlin-Schultz (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell Univ. Press, 2013. 288pp. Cloth $29.95, isbn 978-0-8014-5161-4.)

The Tie That Bound Us is a collective biography of the women in the immediate family of radical abolitionist John Brown. In it, Bonnie Laughlin-Schultz traces the support that Brown’s wife Mary and his daughters Ruth and Annie provided for his abolitionist activities, including his fateful denouement, the 1859 raid of the federal arsenal in Harpers Ferry, Virginia. As in the best examples of this type of history, Laughlin-Schultz’s uses her subjects’ stories to reflect on both how they helped to shape the times in which they lived and how their circumstances molded each of their own identities and experiences. The author succeeds with both goals.

One of the major accomplishments of Laughlin-Schultz’s work is the way in which she reveals the importance of the Brown women’s “indirect ‘supply side’ support” of Brown’s more public activities (4). The domestic work of his wife and daughters, as well as their sacrifices, made it possible for Brown to pursue his antislavery agenda. Although the women of Brown’s family generally accepted the social prescriptions for women of the time and remained within the private sphere of the home, their activities nevertheless were political ones. By helping to create an antislavery culture within the family and by providing support and [End Page 98] refuge to Brown and his compatriots, they actively supported Brown’s radical goals. Laughlin-Schultz’s revelation of the Brown women’s role is an important contribution to the historiography of abolitionist women, which has remained largely focused on those who joined antislavery societies and who pushed against domestic prescriptions to enter the public sphere. The story of the Brown women shows that even in their domestic roles, women could be political.

A second accomplishment of Laughlin-Schultz’s work is the window she provides into the lives of the Brown women. They were ordinary women who lived extraordinary lives because of their connections to Brown, and all of them labored under his enormous shadow, especially the posthumous one cast after his execution for the Harpers Ferry raid. The Brown women’s stories reveal the class divide within the antislavery movement as the Brown women struggled with poverty and were forced to accept charity, and sometimes direction, from Brown’s supporters. Their stories also reveal their struggles with their own notoriety because of their connections to Brown. Celebrated by some and denigrated by others, the Brown women found that they remained symbols of America’s violent past in the years after the Civil War, and they were never able to live completely private lives.

Laughlin-Schultz has done an admirable job in her reconstruction of the experiences of the Brown women. Although the Brown family left behind some correspondence, their writings were often vague. Mary Brown was especially enigmatic, and Laughlin-Schultz expresses her own frustration at the lack of insight Mary gives into her inner world. Despite this disadvantage, Laughlin-Schultz was able to piece together their stories through archival research that mined this correspondence, the papers of the abolitionist connections of the women, and the local histories of the places in which they lived. She has produced a worthy book that provides a different lens through which to view not only John Brown’s radicalism but the larger culture of nineteenth-century America both before and after the Civil War.

Angela F. Murphy
Texas State University
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