John Brown Still Lives!: America’s Long Reckoning with Violence, Equality, and Change

4 A SAINT IN SUSPENSE: Competing Visions of John Brown

4 A SAINT IN SUSPENSE Competing Visions of John Brown On December 3, 1860, a riot broke out at Boston’sTremont Temple. Harper’s Weekly provided a vivid illustration of the incident, revealing the tensions consuming the nation on the eve of the Civil War (figure 4.1). The event was meant to be a peaceful celebration for the abolitionist martyr John Brown. However, when free blacks began entering the hall, a group of white Bostonians , outraged that the country was on the brink of war, began attacking them. Over chants of “Put the niggers out!,” Frederick Douglass (shown in a rather poor likeness) shouted the kind of radical Brown-inspired rhetoric that was polarizing the nation and had spurred the mob. Slaveholders must feel the threat of “death all around” them, Douglass declared. “All methods” of antislavery agitation were fair game, even “war.”1 But as his fellow blacks were beaten and arrested, Douglass gave up the stage. Testifying to the perverse race relations of 1860s America, the chaos erupted in Boston, the very heart of abolitionist activity, at a memorial for a white man who had given his life to destroy slavery. One of the white audience members at the Tremont Temple celebration, Franklin Sanborn, former ringleader of Brown’s “Secret Six,” believed his old friend must be honored properly or he would be forgotten. Over the next five decades, Sanborn became the loudest voice in the ongoing debate over Brown’s memory. Although he would never dream of actually shouting down Frederick Douglass, Sanborn’s feelings about Brown and racial reform defined a certain paternalistic memory that would echo for many years. Beneath the veneer of honoring the antislavery martyr, men like Sanborn decided that stripping Brown of his violence and radicalism was the [John Brown] was a mild and humble Christian . . . a practical disciple of Jefferson . . . a pioneer and hero of emancipation. —Franklin Sanborn, 1909 56 A Saint in Suspense only way for the abolitionist to join the pantheon of American heroes. Emphasizing Brown’s ideals over his methods soon gained cultural currency, helping establish the paternalistic racial reform that would exact great costs into the twentieth century. The Tremont Temple riot exemplified these costs and underscored just how seriously African Americans’ ideas about Brown differed from white conceptions of the abolitionist. From 1859 to 1920, whites and blacks used Brown to focus the same struggles for social justice and racial equality, but they took different lessons from his radical project of freedom. For many black Americans, Brown could be a violent and heroic liberator, but for whites, he soon became a man of ideals alone. Beyond revealing the growing chasm between African American and white opinions of this polarizing character, the period’s brilliant array of prose, imagery, and memorial exposed the difficulty of interracial partnership in pursuit of Brown’s mission. In 1861, the sole surviving black raider from Harpers Ferry, Osborne Anderson, tried to put forward a positive, forward-looking remembrance Figure 4.1. “Expulsion of Negroes and Abolitionists from Tremont Temple, Boston.” From Harper’s Weekly, December 15, 1860. The Boston Athenaeum. A Saint in Suspense 57 of those means and ends. Although Anderson called his memoir a “plain, unadorned, truthful story,” he dramatically hinted at greater, violent plans for the destruction of slavery; schemes beyond Brown’s that had yet to be consummated. At the outset of the contest over Brown’s memory, Anderson described an “unbroken chain of sentiment and purpose from Moses of the Jews to John Brown of America.” Grouping Brown with the slave rebels Gabriel Prosser and Nat Turner, Anderson identified Brown as the leader of the final American slave rebellion.2 “John Brown did not only capture and hold Harper’s Ferry for twenty hours, but he held the whole South,” Anderson declared, “he captured President Buchanan and his Cabinet, convulsed the whole country, killed Governor Wise, and dug the mine and laid the train which will eventually dissolve the union between Freedom and Slavery.” Brown’s actions in Virginia revealed “the truth,” Anderson concluded . “So let it be!”3 Anderson’s Voice from Harper’s Ferry was more than a first-person account of the raid; it was a radical call to arms inside a prediction and a plea. With this volatile mix of recollection and elegy, Anderson used his own memories of Brown to mediate a broader memory. In so doing, Anderson...