A Transcendentalist Above All

David S. Reynolds. John Brown, Abolitionist: The Man Who Killed Slavery, Sparked the Civil War, and Seeded Civil Rights. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2005. x + 506 pp. Notes and index. $35.00 (cloth); $17.00 (paper).

"It has been impossible to keep the name & fame of John Brown out of the war from first to last," Emerson noted in 1865. The men responsible for Brown's execution had faded from public sight, he added, but "John Brown's soul is marching on." David Reynolds's recent book suggests that Emerson might have beamed with personal satisfaction as he recorded in his journal the lyric echoing from the triumphant Union army. Along with his associate Thoreau, the Sage of Concord "had been chiefly responsible for rescuing Brown from infamy and oblivion" (p. 4). While some scholars making similar observations have argued that the intellectuals invented a hero who primarily reflected their own wishes and anxieties, Reynolds stresses the extent to which they correctly recognized that "in his heart [Brown] was an Emersonian, evidently without having read Emerson" (p. 67). Indeed, he indicates, they should have admired more of his virtues. Reynolds accordingly centers his story on Brown, combining a biography with a sketch of his posthumous image. At the same time, he finds it impossible to keep the name and fame of Emerson out of the book from first to last.

Reynolds describes his work as "emphatically a cultural biography," a genre that in his view "takes an Emersonian approach to the human subject" in its examination of the ways in which an individual absorbed influences from the surrounding world to develop a unique and compelling angle of vision (p. 9). This statement of purpose invites comparison with Reynolds's prize-winning Walt Whitman's America: A Cultural Biography (1991), which offered fascinating accounts of the Bowery world and contemporary music that inspired the poet. But his portrait of Brown focuses more narrowly on its subject, somewhat surprisingly in light of the limited personal materials available from the long foreground of Brown's career. Although Brown spent years working in various aspects of the livestock trade, for example, Reynolds does not provide much detail on those settings. He is content to note the character traits expressed in Brown's empathy for his flocks, his idealistic pluck in organizing a producers' cooperative, and his stubborn inflexibility in negotiating prices. Depicting Brown not merely as a farmer but as an Emersonian "Man on the farm," Reynolds summarizes the economic transformations of the early nineteenth century with a few broad brushstrokes and pronounces them incompatible with self-reliance (p. 68).

Part of Reynolds's disregard for the specific context of Brown's activities might be called Emersonian in a different sense. As his hyperbolic subtitle indicates, Reynolds endorses the premise that "all history resolves itself very easily into the biography of a few stout and earnest persons" (p. 11). Although he distinguishes his position from an argument that Brown personally brought about the Civil War or emancipation or the civil rights movement, he insists that Brown "had an impact on the course of national events matched by few in American history" (p. x). In applying this claim to particular situations, Reynolds relies more on assertion than engagement with the scholarship that has analyzed the conflict over slavery from broader perspectives. He reports that Brown's contribution was decisive in the triumph of free-state forces in Kansas and that his attack on Harpers Ferry led more or less directly to such results as the nomination of Lincoln rather than Seward, the secession of the South, and the unification of the North in active opposition to slavery. In each of these instances, he discounts the institutional dynamics that helped to shape events, such as the administration of the territorial government in Kansas and the partisan and factional machinations of politics in the North and South. Reynolds charges that historians have underestimated Brown's influence because they have undervalued...