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187 The relationship between the European upheavals of 1848 and the American reaction beginning in 1849, the disruption of the American political system in the 1850s, and the North’s prosecution of the Civil War may be recapitulated by a focus on two Northern antislavery men, John Brown and Abraham Lincoln. Brown was considered insane by some contemporaries and earlier historians, although scholars have more recently asserted his unflinching commitment to the antislavery cause and his apparently rational view of what his raid at Harpers Ferry, whether or not it sparked a slave uprising, would do to exacerbate sectional hostility.1 While historians have restored Brown’s sanity, however, until recently they have overlooked his manifestation of ideas and actions grounded in European politics and warfare. His guerrilla military tactics, as well as his sense of the stakes of America’s impending sectional conflict, should be emphasized: they locate Brown as a “cis-Atlantic” revolutionary, observing radical developments in the Atlantic world and applying interpretations of those developments to American conditions.2 Before he went to Kansas , Brown acquainted himself with guerrilla warfare in European history, reading accounts of Portuguese and Spanish resistance to Napoleon in the Pyrenees Mountains. He traveled to Europe in 1849 on a business trip but took time to study notable battlefields. He gathered around himself associates sharing experience in the 1848 revolutions, including Hugh Forbes, a British soldier who had served under Giuseppe Garibaldi; Charles Leonhardt , a Polish revolutionary; the Bavarian Charles Kaiser and August Bondi of Vienna, two soldiers who had fought with Louis Kossuth; and Richard Hinton, who had fled England to avoid arrest for his Chartist activities . Brown’s notorious tactics in Kansas—the size of his guerrilla band, his belief in the capacity of slaves to rise up and organize, once inspired; and his choice of Virginia terrain for his anticipated slave rebellion—all Epilogue From 1848 to 1863 188 Distant Revolutions reflect, as historians have noted, his admiration for enslaved Africans who had overthrown their masters and established free communities in Florida, Jamaica, and Haiti. But these aspects of his strategy also parallel the doctrines of the Italian revolutionary Giuseppe Mazzini. Brown, like Mazzini, sought to provoke a revolutionary uprising among peasants against despotic authorities, and Brown surrounded himself with sources and individuals that could teach him about the violent nationalist uprisings in Europe.3 In Kansas, moreover, before going east to Virginia, Brown voiced concern that should the new Republican Party somehow gain power, “there will be war,” because Southern proslavery interests “will go out” of the Union. Brown believed the slave power would hardly find itself without allies, however, because it would “get the countenance and aid of the European nations, until American republicanism and freedom are overthrown.” Earlier in the 1850s Brown had joined most other Americans in rejoicing at the arrival of Kossuth in America. “The last news . . . that all Europe will soon again be in a blaze” excited Brown then because of his “full belief that God is carrying out his eternal purpose in them all.” But his later e≠ort to vindicate the antislavery cause through violence and his methods for doing so undoubtedly had some roots in his sense that encroachments of the slave power represented not only the threat but also the arrival of hostile European conditions in America.4 Brown’s trial and especially his execution at Harper’s Ferry provoked a swell of antislavery sympathy in the Northern states and in Europe. Brown became seen as a martyr among antislavery groups on both sides of the Atlantic, a role that Mazzini said a guerrilla revolutionary must be willing to play to encourage nationalist uprising. Virginia state authorities tried and executed Brown for treason, but his fate seemed confirmation of the gathering in America of a malevolent Atlantic host.5 For example, in his “Plea for Captain John Brown,” Henry David Thoreau observed: “We dream of foreign countries, of other times and races of men, placing them at a distance in history or space; but let some signi ficant event like the present occur in our midst, and we discover, often, this distance and this strangeness between us and our nearest neighbors. They are our Austrias, and Chinas, and South Sea Islands.” Thoreau meant to criticize more moderate antislavery supporters’ attempt to distance themselves from Brown’s fanatical scheme and demise. But his words also [18.119.111.9] Project MUSE (2024-04-26 14:31...

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