Crossing Harpers Ferry: Liberal Education and John Brown's Corpus

On the afternoon of his capture at Harpers Ferry, John Brown lay on a bloody pallet in the arsenal paymaster’s office and conducted, for the benefit of U.S. cavalry colonel Robert E. Lee and Virginia Governor Henry Wise, the first of his national seminars on slavery, religious duty, and founding American principles. If the pedagogue, his posture, and the place of this scene of instruction were all “weird” (to borrow the final adjective of Melville’s John Brown poem, “The Portent”), their weirdness fitly expressed, and in a way culminated, the crisis in American education that had been building for more than thirty years. This was a crisis of legitimation as well as an institutional crisis: many of the most committed American scholars and teachers actively defined and pursued their vocation apart from, and in opposition to, established educative institutions—civic, religious, and scholastic. For these intellectuals, as (somewhat differently) for the nation, the explosive meanings and feelings communicated in Brown’s action from principle, his six-week teach-in, and his execution marked a crossing of which they might have said, echoing Whitman: “What the study could not teach—what the preaching could not accomplish is accomplished, is it not?” ¹

In November of 1859, while Brown awaited hanging in Virginia, Thomas Wentworth Higginson traveled to North Elba, New York, the impoverished and harassed farming community in the Adirondacks inhabited mainly by black freedmen and fugitives, and by the family of John Brown. Scion of New England mercantile aristocrats, poet, reluctant minister, sometime schoolteacher, campaigner for public housing and adult literacy, militant abolitionist, Harpers Ferry conspirator, and, later, commander of the first African American Union regiment and Emily Dickinson’s bemused preceptor, Higginson spent one day and night with Mary Brown and her surviving children, their first visitor since the raid. Recounting this visit afterward, he wrote: “Nothing short of knowing them can be called a liberal education.” ²

This essay proceeds from that remark. What does “liberal education” mean to Higginson, and what presumably more conventional senses of the term does his pugnacious sentence tacitly challenge? What is signified by the striking predominance of freelance or heterodox educators among John Brown’s supporters, defenders, and eulogists? ³ And how, more broadly, might Brown, his family, and his career, in life and in literature—both John Brown’s body, that is, and John Brown’s corpus—speak to the meaning and state, past and present, of liberal education in America?

This last curious question, I believe, informs the two most distinguished twentieth-century literary interpretations of Brown’s story. Published 70 years apart, each during a period of acute self-consciousness, if not crisis, in American education, Stephen Vincent Benet’s John Brown’s Body (1928) and Russell Banks’s Cloudsplitter (1998) are works not only of literary and historical imagination but also of pedagogy. Benet’s Pulitzer Prize–winning poem was written in Paris as new American college courses scrambled to define national identity and a famously “lost” generation of writers scrambled to repudiate it. Responding to both of these circumstances, Benet assumes—as Whitman did—a civic and a tutorial responsibility in John Brown’s Body. ⁴ Banks, a professor emeritus in the humanities at Princeton, casts his novel as a scene of instruction—a series of rambling retrospective lectures by Owen Brown, who, throughout his life and long beyond his father’s death, has been to John Brown’s Abraham a zealously faithful yet ever anguished Isaac. Narrated by Owen at the turn of the twentieth century, in a bitterly segregated and sectionalized United States, Cloudsplitter appeared at the turn of the twenty-first century in a country that—in one reading of the distribution of bodies in school classrooms and cafeterias and of cultural identities in university curricula—has chosen, in the struggle for equality, a practical separateness over integration’s difficult dream. ⁵

Chroniclers of division, Benet and Banks...