John Brown’s Spy: The Adventurous Life and Tragic Confession of John E. Cook by Steven Lubet (review)

Steven Lubet’s study of the life of John E. Cook is a revealing and distracting account of John Brown’s 1859 raid. Because the book focuses on one member of the twenty-two-man army that perpetrated that infamous and ill-fated attack on southern slavery, Lubet is often following the sideshow of a many-ringed circus. Even as Brown was making history in Kansas, Harpers Ferry, and beyond, Lubet narrates Cook’s sometimes fascinating, but often extraneous, comings and goings. To his credit, Lubet’s writing is clear and informative, and he peppers his account with nice selections from the major characters, writers, and politicians of the time. Unfortunately, this book does not make a convincing case that any of the individual raiders, particularly John Cook, deserve more than “an extended magazine article” (269).

Lubet’s own assessment of his protagonist is partly responsible for this dynamic; he provides a glass-half-full description of Cook as a “footloose adventurer” but soon adds that the Connecticut-born Yale dropout was also “a poet, a marksman, a boaster, a dandy, a fighter, a storyteller, and a womanizer, as well as a spy” (6). Nowhere on this list does the word “abolitionist” appear, a telling omission. After more than 150 years, Brown and his men still intrigue us as a singular group of antebellum Americans who took up arms to fight and possibly die to liberate slaves. In this context, Cook’s flash and desire for adventure do not offer much explanatory power. Lubet’s book is convincing on Cook’s boastfulness, his attraction to fancy firearms, and, to a lesser extent, his womanizing; this is surely the only book about John Brown in which readers will encounter the phrase “the couple made love” (43). But even the matter of Cook being a spy seems somewhat suspect. Given the naïve incompetence with which Brown executed the Harpers Ferry raid from start to finish, if Cook was a spy, then Brown should be called an experienced field commander or a tactical genius. To be sure, Brown sent Cook to provide reconnaissance of the town, but the manner in which Cook did so, and Brown’s less-than-inspired selection of this conspicuous fellow for the mission, underscore Brown’s delusions (a meaningful set of characteristics to explore) much more than they testify to Cook’s status or relevance to contemporary readers.

Any commonly known historical narrative poses challenges to an author trying to create suspense. But because Lubet must constantly circle back to his titular character, a man he admits was a braggart and a fair-weather abolitionist, the drama underpinning his eventual betrayal of Brown all but disappears. Furthermore, several aspects of the raid suffer for the book’s focus on Cook. Readers do not learn nearly enough about the wild assortment of characters involved in the assault on Harpers Ferry, Brown’s hopes for his attack not just to end slavery but to clarify the nation’s founding principles, and the way the trial in particular focused the intense prism of national politics. Because the story follows John Cook so closely, these dramas are not given room to develop.

Lubet is right to want to correct the tendency in Brown scholarship to treat members of this interracial force as mere “spear carriers,” but he does not sufficiently demonstrate how Cook’s life “tells a story of moral complexity writ large”(9). That story, of the moral complexities, hypocrisies, and contradictions of Brown, his men, and the institution of slavery, is told to much fuller effect by the journalist Tony Horwitz in Midnight Rising (2011). [In full disclosure, this reviewer assisted Horwitz with the research for that book.] Set against the backdrop of the Civil War rather than focusing on one individual protagonist, Midnight Rising uses Brown as a window...