John Brown’s War against Slavery (review)

This new study of John Brown, the famous abolitionist leader of the raid on Harper’s Ferry in 1859, is a major contribution to American studies. McGlone’s distinctive contribution is his use of psychological theory in both the evaluation of evidence and the interpretation of his subject. For example, he questions the reliability of the personal reminiscences on which many biographers have relied, since research has shown that such accounts often include “rescripting” of the past—that is, “gaps in memory . . . filled by ‘default’ data from ‘scripts’ or standardized expectations” (114). More broadly, McGlone draws on psychology in the quest to understand Brown’s personality and motives. After the raid, the popular assumption was that Brown was insane, or, at least, as a common diagnosis of the era put it, a “monomaniac,” unable to think or act rationally on the subject of slavery. Some historians have made similar arguments: Nevins, for one, wrote that Brown suffered from “reasoning insanity, a branch of paranoia.”¹ McGlone turns to the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders to assess such claims.² He argues, plausibly, that by using Brown’s own correspondence and other evidence, “the historian may gather data that permits” an approximation of the sort of interview that a clinician would use to diagnose mental disorder (388, n. 8). His conclusion is that in neither his writings nor his behavior did Brown exhibit symptoms that would lead today to a diagnosis of serious mental illness.

If not illness, then what was behind Brown’s actions? McGlone stresses family—not just Brown’s large immediate family but the extensive Brown “connection” headed by his father, Owen. John, Owen’s eldest surviving son, grew up with, but failed to meet, his father’s high expectations for him. He never completed schooling for the ministry and failed in many business ventures. In his most original and effective analysis, McGlone turns to the classic writings of William James to suggest that Brown, whose “imagination was essentially religious,” was a kind of “‘sick soul’ for whom the vanity of mortal things, the sense of sin, and the perception that the natural world was ‘double-faced and un-homelike’ could produce despondency” (197–198).

Brown followed his grown sons to Kansas in 1856, to help them settle and only secondarily to help to keep Kansas a free territory. Not long after he arrived, Owen died, releasing John from one burden but replacing it with a patriarchal burden. McGlone argues that the notorious murders of five unarmed pro-slavery settlers, by Brown and a few followers, was Brown’s response to perceived threats against his family from the five victims. In Kansas, Brown “found a calling that reconciled his ambitions, healed his psyche, and renewed his purpose” (198). He would become “God’s Reaper,” a destroyer of slavery. He began with plans to promote widespread escapes of slaves into Canada and then came up with the idea of a raid that would culminate in the establishment of an area of freedom in the Appalachians. Controlled by freed slaves, this area would become a magnet for runaways and eventually trigger slavery’s collapse. McGlone also speculates that Brown may have believed that the raid itself would terrorize southern slaveholders. When the raid failed, Brown “lifted his cause to the heights by embracing death as a martyr” (198).

McGlone’s study is the product of many years of research and writing. He has thought carefully about both psychology and the historian’s methods; his judgments are always reasonable and usually convincing. He has come as close to an understanding of the enigmatic figure of John Brown as anyone is likely to get in the foreseeable future.