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Introduction CAUSE AND CONSEQUENCE John Brown in Nineteenth-Century America John Brown believed that slavery would meet an end that matched its brutality . In 1859, his bold invasion of Harpers Ferry and polarizing trial by the state of Virginia aroused the sympathy and anger that would spark the Civil War. On the day of his execution, Brown seemed to predict the cause and extent of that conflict. “I John Brown,” he wrote, “am, now quite certain that the crimes of this guilty land will never be purged away, but with Blood.”1 Since December 2, 1859, all manner of writing, art, and memorial have been employed to understand this man.While Brown’s prophesizing underscores his keen understanding of antebellum tensions, the raid on Harpers Ferry ignited a series of debates that have never stopped raging, prompted an endless reckoning with the nature of this man’s character, and provoked swirling questions about the role and meaning of violence, equality, and change. By tracing Brown’s unique and nagging presence in the nation’s memory, this book illuminates the deep roots of America’s continuing struggles with these open questions. In taking up arms to end slavery, Brown has forced generation after generation to clarify the morality and utility of violence. His progressive but paternalistic relationships with black Americans mirror the troubling limits of interracial efforts to redress the nation’s mistakes.2 Brown’s martyrdom, ultimately giving his life to liberate his enslaved brethren, admonishes us to disentangle his web of interracial trailblazing, violent abolitionism, and messianic paternalism to make sense of America’s greatest trauma, slavery. Biographers have tried to locate explanations to these knotty conundrums in the events of Brown’s life, his psychological profile, and the culNothing so charms the American people as personal bravery. . . . The trial for life of one bold, and to some extent successful, man . . . would arouse more sympathy throughout the nation than the accumulated wrongs and sufferings of more than three million [slaves]. —John Brown, “Words of Advice” 2 Introduction tural currents of his time. In contrast, this book focuses on Brown’s final decade and the 150 years since his death in order to reframe the debates over his meaning. When Brown was executed, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow wrote that “this will be a great day in our history, the date of a new revolution , quite as much needed as the old one. . . . [Brown’s death] is sowing the wind to reap the whirlwind, which will soon come.”3 While the following chapters will familiarize readers with Brown’s story, the multigenerational battle over his meaning reveals the true power and relevance of Brown’s place in American memory. Exploring the whirlwinds Brown helped sow broadens our understanding of historical amnesia, systemic racism, and the indelible conservatism at the heart of America’s understanding of its past, present, and future. In 1882, Albion Tourgée, the Reconstruction-era judge and novelist , attempted to account for these contradictions and Brown’s persistent presence. “Monster and Martyr,” Tourgée called Brown in his novel Hot Plowshares, “Conspirator and Saint; Murderer and Liberator; Cause and Consequence! Alerting one-half of the land to emulate his example; stimulating the other to meet aggression; inciting both to shedding of blood!” Tourgée finished with a flourish, trying to situate Brown at the juncture of historical periods; “The climax of one age and the harbinger of another.”4 Merging the contentious dialogues Tourgée so ably described with the endless repercussions that Longfellow predicted, this book explores the many symbolic John Browns and their significance to broader national debates . Incorporating art, literature, and history, the episodes in this book reveal how amnesia, hypocrisy, and conservatism still define America’s perpetual negotiations with its founding principles. Facilitating these conversations , Brown continues to be used as a dynamic platform to debate America’s evolving relationships with violence, equality, and change. Probing Brown’s role as a conduit between these issues and the politics of the present highlights Americans’ desire to maintain long-standing hierarchies of race, class, and gender. By following several generations’ interpretations of Brown’s symbolism, these chapters reveal the nation’s difficulty in building a dynamic and nuanced relationship, in understanding and practice, with the American past. Pithy assessments from Frederick Douglass, Abraham Lincoln, Malcolm X, and countless others testify to Brown’s contentious timelessness, but the abolitionist’s very ubiquity prompts the question of when and where we locate John Brown in American memory. Like any...

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