JOHN BROWN
1854, Kansas-Nebraska Act.
1856, Bleeding Kansas, 1854-1859. Also referred to as the small civil war.
Brown, a strict Calvinist, and [radical] abolitionist, once remarked that “God had raised him up on purpose to break the jaws of the wicked.” Brown and his posse went to the homes of proslavery settlers near Pottawatomie Creek, announcing they were the “Northern Army.” They burst into the cabin of proslavery Tennessean James Doyle and abducted him and two of his sons. Brown and his sons then brutally executed the Doyles and two other nearby proslavery settlers. None of the people Brown and his followers executed owned slaves or were involved in the incident at Lawrence.
Brown’s actions precipitated a new wave of violence; Kansas soon became known as “Bleeding Kansas.”
1859, Raid on Harper’s Ferry, West Virginia, October 16-18, 1859, two years before the start of the American Civil War, 1861-1865.
His book on the Secret Six gained positive reviews from a few people, but it enraged the Left. The book is a detailed account of the terrorist and the six New England abolitionists who financed him after he savagely murdered an innocent family in Kansas. They knew what he had done. They did not care.
Scott’s contribution was unique. As a journalist, he understood the power of the press. He showed how parts of the Northern press elevated Brown to a saint. This persuaded the South that the North was ready to invade. Brown self-consciously was trying to foment a slave rebellion at Harper’s Ferry in 1859. The South became paranoid. Scott said the power of the American press to support revolution began in 1859. Chamberlain wrote:
To Mr. Scott, the real scandal of the whole Brown story was the behavior of the Massachusetts intellectuals. The Concord group was particularly blameworthy for making Brown a hero. Ralph Waldo Emerson excused the Kansas violence by saying “better that a whole generation of men, women and children should pass away by a violent death, than that one word” of the Golden Rule and the Declaration of Independence “should be violated in this country.” Henry David Thoreau agreed with Emerson that Brown was a “transcendentalist saint.”
This image of Brown as a messiah figure was exactly what Brown had created. His final words to the court before he was hanged were masterful in their rhetoric, an astounding performance from a man without formal education or previous literary experience. His “last will and testament” was reprinted all over the North.
This court acknowledges, as I suppose, the validity of the law of God. I see a book kissed here which I suppose to be the Bible, or at least the New Testament. That teaches me that all things whatsoever I would that men should do to me, I should do even so to them. It teaches me, further, to “remember them that are in bonds, as bound with them.” I endeavored to act up to that instruction. I say, I am yet too young to understand that God is any respecter of persons. I believe that to have interfered as I have done as I have always freely admitted I have done in behalf of His despised poor, was not wrong, but right. Now, if it is deemed necessary that I should forfeit my life for the furtherance of the ends of justice, and mingle my blood further with the blood of my children and with the blood of millions in this slave country whose rights are disregarded by wicked, cruel, and unjust enactments, I submit; so let it be done!
This was all a pose for public relations purposes. There had been no trace of Christianity in his life, yet Northern radicals, then and now, have presented him as a pious Christian seeking justice.
More than any man in American history, John Brown was a wolf in sheep’s clothing. Northern abolitionists accepted his own self-assessment as gospel. This is what frightened the South. It made the leaders ready for secession after Lincoln’s election less than a year later. This led to the deaths of 750,000 men and the abolition of slavery in 1865. Brown got what he wanted: social revolution.
John Brown and the Legend of Fifty-Six, James Claude Malin, 1942.
Lincoln was a man of his age, and it was an age of unashamed empire building and of the coercion of independent political societies into consolidated unions.
“Anti-Slavery Zealot, John Brown, Is No Hero,” James Bovard, July 9, 2020. “Yet poets Thoreau and Emerson made him a god and helped spark the Civil War.”
San Gabriel Tutor 