John Brown's Journey: Notes and Reflections on His America and Mine (review)

BOOK REVIEWS273 important publications such as the National Intelligencer and The Gazette of the United States for detailed analysis. Smith also discusses other important areas. In addition to favorable postal rates and improved transportation systems for encouraging the development of the press, Smith treats subjects such as the extensive time that Congress expended periodically in its choice of a printer. As political history, the work would have been improved had the author employed roll-call analysis in examining congressional attitudes and actions. A Guttman Scale, for example, might have revealed certain relationships in voting patterns over the choice of a printer that are otherwise obscured through the use of more traditional methodology. This minor criticism, however, should not detract from the overall caliber of this work. The author's statements are generally welldocumented . He not only examined newspapers and personal manuscript collections, but the records of the State Department in the National Archives as well. The book is rich both in detail and interpretation. Among the conclusions, Smith contends that the press survived political corruption while it simultaneously, through the use of patronage, provided an essential link between government and an increasingly dispersed population. The Press, Politics, and Patronage will remain as the standard work on this subject for a long time to come. James W. Geary Kent State University John Brown's Journey: Notes and Reflections on HisAmerica and Mine. By Albert Fried. (Garden City, N.Y.: Anchor Press/Doubleday, 1978. Pp. 293. $10.00.) This is not the book Albert Fried originally set out to write. In 1968, he signed on with Doubleday to do an actual biography of Brown, but then abandoned the project for reasons that are not clear. Several years later, after five other studies of Brown had appeared, Fried returned to his notes and produced the present volume, a phenomenological account of the time he spent in 1967-1968 doing background reading on Brown in the New York Public Library. Based almostentirely on secondary works and frankly conjectural, it is a strange book, a chronicle of Fried's thoughts about Brown and his era, all interwoven with the turmoil (the ghetto riots, the Vietnamese War) of Fried's own time. Written in the manner of a journal, the volume recounts Fried's reactions to the literature about Brown, from the legend-building biographies of James Redpath and Franklin Sanborn down to the antiBrown writings of James C. Malin and Allan Nevins. Fried goes on to reflect that the Secret Six supported Harpers Ferry for political reasons (they believed it would radicalize the North) and to contend that racism underlay the Republican response to the peculiar institution (a simplistic 274CIVIL WAR HISTORY argument which distorts the Republican position on slavery before the war, ignoring the fact that Lincoln and his colleagues hoped that slavery would ultimately perish if contained in the South. The last section of the book is an outline of Fried's final speculations about Brown himself and the tortuous path he traveled to Harpers Ferry. In his passages on Brown's formative years, Fried relates how he grew up a staunch Calvinist, how he sympathized with black people and hated slavery because it was monstrously cruel to them, and how he was swept up in the speculative, go-for-broke spirit of Jacksonian America. He blames Brown's business failures, not on any criminal action or emotional instability on Brown's part, but on the vicissitudes of the American market place. In all, Fried provides a fair-minded appraisal of Brown's early years, rightly rejecting the hostile, inaccurate assessments of Malin and Nevins. But in his account of the inception and purpose of Harpers Ferry, Fried goes badly astray. He insists that Brown planned to function solely as a "guerrilla provocateur" in the South, intending "not so much to create a slave revolt as generate a cycle of provocations and retaliations leading to sectional warfare and through sectional warfare, emancipation " (pp. 208-209). True, Brown hoped to foment a sectional crisis and argued that his raid would do so whether it succeeded or failed. But there is massive and irrefutable evidence that Brown also planned to incite a full-scale slave...