Weighing John Brown

In his celebrated epic poem, Stephen Vincent Benét professed, “You can weigh John Brown’s body well enough/But how and in what balance weigh John Brown?”¹ Brown’s character, motivations, and place in American history—the balance in which he weighs—have been heatedly debated since the Harpers Ferry raid in 1859. Last year marked the 150^th anniversary of the Harpers Ferry raid, and though scholars largely celebrated the heroic Brown, he continues to be seen by some as a fanatic or worse. (A Virginia chapter of the Sons of Confederate Veterans hosted “Hayward Shepherd Day”—named for the raid’s first victim, a free African American—to counter the October 2009 commemoration at Harpers Ferry.²) Benét’s oft-quoted lines are especially pertinent in considering the newest Brown biography by Robert McGlone because never, perhaps, has the weighing been so carefully done. Decades of research have paid off in John Brown’s War against Slavery, a finalist for the 2010 Frederick Douglass book prize.

Even before Brown was hanged in December 1859, abolitionists and Brown detractors began warring over his legacy. Transcendentalists glorified Brown as a Christ-like figure, pragmatists such as Lincoln condemned his violent means, and Jefferson Davis and many Southerners vilified him as the worst example of “Black Republicanism.” At the turn of the twentieth century, Brown compatriots such as Franklin Sanborn defended him against a near-army of detractors. By 1928, when Benét penned his famous lines, Brown was most often dismissed as a fanatic or, even worse, a murdering horse thief. James Malin’s biography of Brown cemented this latter claim, and it was only in the era of the civil rights movement that Brown’s circle of supporters expanded to include more than African Americans and radicals. McGlone’s biography continues in the tradition of the most famous work to emerge from that era, Stephen Oates’ To Purge This Land with Blood (1970). This is deliberate: McGlone identifies it as the “best biography” around, and it is clearly both his inspiration and his foil (p. 7).

McGlone opens with Brown’s refusal to withdraw from Harpers Ferry in the face of near-certain failure. Explaining how Brown arrived at this moment—how “the gnarled cords of his inner life” are joined to its end—is McGlone’s primary goal (p. 16). The resulting work is loosely chronological, both a biographical treatment of John Brown and an extended meditation on a series of long-weighed questions about Brown that have “bedevil[ed] historians” (p. 7). The second, more than the first, drives McGlone. What motivated Brown to wage war against slavery? Was Brown a fanatic, and was his plan for the raid at Harpers Ferry well conceived or just plain crazy? Where do the Pottawatomie murders fit? What did Brown intend at Harpers Ferry? And, finally, at his core, who was Brown? Additionally, McGlone adds a critical question: how should we weigh all the evidence that has been used by Brown scholars?

McGlone has long been interested in Brown’s psychological make-up, and here he identifies the task of historians as “to get inside Brown’s mental world” (p. 80). He does not devote as much of his work to Brown’s early life as have recent biographers or, for that matter, novelist Russell Banks. But like most recent Brown scholars, McGlone takes Brown’s antislavery seriously and sees it, rather than any delusional grandeur or malevolent intent, as central. John Brown’s War against Slavery is divided into five parts; the first, “Inclinations of Head and Heart,” chronicles the rise of Brown’s antislavery beliefs. McGlone’s Brown is a sincere adherent, schooled in the cause by his family. McGlone describes patriarch Owen Brown as head of a reforming clan. John Brown’s conversion was thus not the radical turn of Sarah and Angelina Grimké, who abandoned their South Carolina slaveholding family for the company of abolitionists, but rather an adoption of what...