John Brown, Abolitionist: The Man Who Killed Slavery, Sparked the Civil War, and Seeded Civil Rights

John Brown, Abolitionist: The Man Who Killed Slavery, Sparked the Civil War, and Seeded Civil Rights * David S. Reynolds * New York: Knopf, 2005 * xii, 580 pp. * $35.00

In any rendition of the series of events leading up to secession and Civil War, there is probably no more critical figure than John Brown. His attack on the federal armory at Harpers Ferry, Virginia, on 16 October 1859, thoroughly alarmed slaveholders across the South and brought to life their nightmare scenario: outside invaders, sponsored by a sectionalized Republican Party (and the federal government), waging war by inciting slaves to armed insurrection. Most past biographers have reduced John Brown to a fanatic; some have suggested insanity. In a new, revisionist look, David S. Reynolds provides a highly sympathetic, even neo-abolitionist, portrait that remakes Brown into righteous abolitionist, racial egalitarian, freedom fighter, and prophet of slavery's destruction.

Reynolds connects John Brown to divergent trends of antebellum America, including ongoing black violent resistance, Transcendentalism, the abolitionist movement, and the struggle for black freedom that continued after Brown's hanging. Primarily a radical egalitarian, Brown, argues Reynolds, was convinced that only violence could destroy slavery and that this struggle would involve armed bands of radical white abolitionists and insurrectionary slaves. Conceiving of the Harpers Ferry attack by the early 1850s, Brown became a proto-terrorist whose main training camps were in Bleeding Kansas, where open war raged between pro- and antislavery partisans. John Brown, in Kansas, was best known for the brutal and bloody killings of five proslavery men at Pottawatomie Creek in May 1856. In Reynolds's telling, this massacre, rather than a cold-blooded murder, was a calculated act of political violence in the war against slavery and part of a "revolutionary scheme" that "surged from the heart of racial oppression" (p. 167). Brown's Harpers Ferry attack, rather than suicidal, was a rational plan seeking to ignite a slave uprising and establish hideouts and staging areas in the western Virginia mountains. Based on his skill and experience as a guerrilla fighter, Reynolds concludes, Brown fashioned a battle plan that was realistic. But when Virginia slaves refused to rise up soon after his assault, Brown became paralyzed by inaction and stalled his forces, permitting Virginia and U.S. military forces to surround and capture his band. Martyrs for the cause, Brown and his raiders were tried, convicted, and hanged at Charles Town. During his imprisonment and trial, Brown came to embody the larger struggle against the evil of slavery; in his death, according to Reynolds, Brown drove the white South toward a "secessionist fury" and the anti-slavery North toward "unified action against slavery" (p. 437).

This fine book should immediately become the standard biographical study of John Brown. Reynolds contextualizes his subject thoroughly, placing Brown in the middle of cultural, social, and political developments in antebellum America. More than any previous biography, John Brown, Abolitionist succeeds in reconstructing, humanizing, and ennobling its subject. Still, some readers will wonder whether Reynolds at times loses perspective on his subject. It is possible to exaggerate Brown's role in the coming of the Civil War: most surely, secession would have occurred without him. Virginia, the scene of the Harpers Ferry attack, by a very narrow majority voted in favor of constitutionalist candidate John Bell, and in February 1861 a majority of the state voted for Union in elections for the secession convention. Rather consistently but unnecessarily this book telescopes and exaggerates Brown's role, even though a more judicious presentation would not diminish his significance. Nonetheless, this very readable book is a major accomplishment and has made John Brown more understandable for the general public.

Reviewed by William A. Link, Richard J. Milbauer Professor of History, University of Florida. He is the author of Roots of Secession: Slavery and Politics in Antebellum Virginia (2003).

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