The Kansas Territorial Experience - John Brown: The Legend Revisited

Jon Earle: It's my pleasure to be here tonight to talk about John Brown and Merrill Peterson's interesting book John Brown: TheLegend Revisited, which was published in 2002. I haven't had the chance to assign this to my students at KU yet, so this will be an opportunity for me to see how people think this book works. In some ways it works really well, and in some ways it doesn't work as well. It certainly is a way to get "into the head of John Brown," to see what people have written and thought about him in the 150 years since his death.

Has anyone here heard me give my talk on Brown for the Kansas Humanities Council? I've given it 15-20 times all over the state. It seems to be a popular subject as the sesquicentennial of our state draws nearer. In this talk—which I prepared before Peterson's book came out—I do a similar thing. I talk about John Brown through the ages, the way people in Kansas especially have viewed him since Harpers Ferry and since Osawatomie, when he became a national figure. I start with an editorial that I found back in the Lawrence Journal, our hometown paper and the forerunner of the Journal World. It commemorates John Brown's 100 th birthday. It speaks to what Peterson's doing in this book.

This anonymous editorial writer says, "Wednesday was the 100 th anniversary of the birth of John Brown, and it was celebrated by his worshippers." You can already tell which way this is going to go. "The charitable thing to say of Brown is that he was a lunatic. He was a disturber, even in the East, a deadbeat, a swindler, his hands were bloody, and his nature was that of a wolf. His desire was to kill and to slay. It is time to remove the halo from the head of John Brown and sell it to the junkman."

What's clear from these few lines of this editorial is that our hometown, the free-state town of Lawrence, had turned against its self-appointed protector from 45 years before. In fact, I've found in my talks from Wakeeney to Osawatomie to Topeka that it's really hard to get people in our state to speak of John Brown without emotion. People have made up their minds already, one way or the other, on whether he was a horse thief and a swindler, God's instrument to free the slaves, a martyr, or a hero. It's very hard to change Kansans' minds about John Brown because they have thought one way or another about him for so long. That's why I think this kind of book is so interesting. It's not just about John Brown's life.

What did you think of this book? Was it what you expected? A lot of it is not about John Brown's life.

Participant: It was what I expected, and I think it's a good introduction to Brown. I think it's a good place to begin. I found myself taking prodigious notes about all the things that I wanted to read—to spin off after I had read this.

I found Peterson's comments about Cloudsplitter most compelling—and I know that this book influenced him. I've got Cloudsplitter at home and haven't read it. I was just trying to keep from reading it until I finished this.

Jon Earle: Maybe one of the reasons why my Kansas Humanities Council's talk is in some ways so similar to Peterson's book is because we both—I wrote my little talk, and he wrote this book—after reading Russell Banks' historical novel Cloudsplitter. Is this a book that people here are familiar with? It came out in the late 1990s. It's very long. It took me an entire summer to read. But it's also very rewarding. It's a wonderful book, and it's written from the perspective of John Brown's third son, Owen, who survived Kansas troubles and the raid on Harpers Ferry and ended up living out his life in the hills above the Rose Bowl in Pasadena, California.

I agree that it's a great way to get into Brown's life. Was anybody surprised by what many of these chapters in Peterson's book were about?

Participant: Yes. One of the things I wrote down is how the people in Missouri, from the South, referred to the lawless New England transcendentalists. I didn't know that people thought of Emerson in that way, for instance.

Jon Earle: Emerson is really complicated. When students ask me who Ralph Waldo Emerson was, I say, "We don't have any public intellectuals like Emerson today. There's no academic, professor, or intellectual type who can say something and then it gets reprinted in newspapers all over the country, to be derided in the South and to be praised in the North."

Did anyone else notice how people from the South and the North had such different views of Emerson?

Participant: I thought it was fascinating. John Brown is also a controversial person. We looked at how different artists, historians, his contemporaries, the plays, the books portrayed his life. This helped to build a mosaic that I felt ended up being a fair and balanced view because there are so many different opinions from so many different people who had so many different experiences.

Participant: I thought it was interesting that some people would have one opinion for forty years and then they would change their minds about Brown.

Jon Earle: We all know that historians like me are in some ways, writing about our own present when we write a book or an article. I'm sure that the next John Brown book that comes out will be about terrorism, for example. But I agree with you that people change their own minds about him just as often. Who are some of the people? Certainly the Robinsons became adamant haters of John Brown and his legacy that they saw taking away from their own. There is this competition, the zero sum game that we Kansas know so well.

Jon Earle: It's a hatchet job. Has anyone read Hill Peebles Wilson's John Brown, Soldier of Fortune: A Critique? It's a book that attacks Brown every step of the way. So I think Sara Robinson was trying to burnish her deceased husband's reputation by chipping away at Brown's.

Participant: The border ruffians seemed to me like they should be the villains.

Participant: Through my life, I have read from the border ruffians' perspective, feeling it was a tit-for-tat situation. This book was very enlightening to see him as a human. I was very surprised.

Participant: One of my favorite books is The Survivors of the Quantrill Society. They put together little narratives of their remembrances of Quantrill and their escapades. It was as human as this book.

Jon Earle: I think John Brown, for many people, is hard to view as a normal person or as a human. If I were going to write a biography, one of the last people I'd want to write a biography about is John Brown. He's really interesting, but we've had 150 years of people in my business trying to "get inside his head," and I don't think we've done a very good job at all.

Participant: Why is there so much discussion of whether he was crazy or not?

Jon Earle: I think that might be a biproduct of what I was just talking about. If you can't figure someone out, if you read all the available evidence, all the published letters, all the speeches, all the commentary and you still don't have a sharp sense of someone, maybe you just say, "Well, he's crazy."

Jon Earle: I think you're right, that there's a difference between fanaticism and sanity. Did anybody notice in this book (p. 154) there was an excerpt from an interview with Kenneth Clark, a famous African American psychologist? Kenneth Clark had a role in Kansas history as well because he was one of the star witnesses in the Brown vs. Board of Education of Topeka case. He's the one who came up with the doll studies that they used to prove that segregated schools were not equal. He's being interviewed here by the great playwright Robert Penn Warren. Warren asked him, "Do you think John Brown was insane?"

Warren: What do you think of John Brown, by the way? Morally and psychologically? Or both?

Clark: Well, psychologically, the simple denigration of John Brown might be too simple—he was a fanatic, a neurotic, a literalist, an absolutist, a man so totally committed that nothing, including reality, stood in his way.

Warren: How do you treat a man like that in ordinary society?

Clark: Society can take care of itself with a man like that it always has—see what it did to Christ.

Warren: Do you equate Christ with John Brown?

Clark: Unquestionably. Boy, you certainly are fascinated with John Brown, and he is one of the most—

Warren: You brought him up—I didn't.

Jon Earle: Robert Penn Warren, who obviously is a Southern white man, wrote a biography of John Brown many years before this exchange took place. So here we have one of the few places where John Brown's sanity is discussed explicitly in Peterson's book. So what do you make of this exchange between the gifted Southern white playwright and the prominent African American psychologist?

Participant: I think race is what comes up. The question of race makes Americans a little bit crazy. White Americans know that John Brown, a white man, was willing to sacrifice his life on behalf of African Americans. This almost requires him to be crazy from this white point of view.

Jon Earle: This is an exchange from the mid-1960s, so it's in the middle of the civil rights revolution.

Participant: Could we widen the picture a little bit and comment on Benjamin Quarles's book Allies for Freedom: Blacks and John Brown (1974)? One of the things that's fascinated me about Quarles' book is how blacks have seen John Brown as a Christ figure.

Jon Earle: Absolutely. African Americans such as W. E. B. Du Bois and Langston Hughes kept the idea of Brown the hero alive until the Civil Rights Movement. People like Stephen Oates in the 1970s, another white man, discovered him and said, "He was a hero." It does come down to race. Maybe that's one of the things that makes it so difficult for historians, for novelists, for just ordinary folks to understand John Brown. His ideas about race were radically different from those of people of his day, and even today. He was a true racial egalitarian, or as close to one as I can find from the nineteenth century.

Participant: He was willing to die for what he believed, which, in a way, made him a revolutionary. I think he had a religious fire in his gut that he founded his beliefs on. If you operate outside the law, you may be called crazy, even if you're right or you believe you're right.

Jon Earle: I agree that he was willing to die for black freedom. He also, I think, was willing to kill for it.

Jon Earle: For him, it was a holy war. Many Americans did not understand as long as John Brown lived that slavery was a big problem, but maybe it could be solved with legislation, compromises, or territorial lines and maps. John Brown seemed to say, at least by the time he was in prison, "No, it's not going to happen without much bloodshed."

Jon Earle: Absolutely. Abolitionists were not violent people usually. The average abolitionist—which John Brown was not—was also deeply religious, came from an American evangelical protestant tradition, did not believe in violence, believed that the way slavery would and should be stopped was to convince slaveholders to realize that they were sinning and to manumit their slaves. That's what William Garrison believed, Julia Ward Howe believed, and many of these people that we call abolitionists believed. Brown started out as a mainstream abolitionist with one difference: he wasn't an evangelical protestant. He was kind of a throw-back. He was a Calvinist. He was an eye-for-an-eye, tooth-for-a-tooth, all-of-us-are-sinners, and God-is-very-angry-type person.

Participant: When Owen told his story in Cloudsplitter (pp. 166-68 in Peterson's book), you see how the family members started their mornings together when he and his brothers worshipped with his father. You see what carried John Brown through every day.

Jon Earle: There's a famous episode in John Brown's family life where his son disappoints him. Of course, if you're a strict father, your sons are going to disappoint you all the time. He beat his son with a stick and then took off his own shirt and had his son beat him back so he could learn the lesson. That's not a lesson many of us taught or learned even if we had strict parents who practiced corporal punishment on us. I've never seen that elsewhere in my research. He did not come from the same religious tradition as many American abolitionists. That I think is significant.

Participant: This part that I'm looking at is on p. 166 when Owen and his brothers climbed out on the roof of the house hoping to escape the oppressive confinement. Owen fell and injured his arm, and he portrayed his father as a mad "man inflamed." That was good wording. Increasingly, slavery fueled that flame.

Jon Earle: A lot of us who had conscientious parents grew up having our parents read to us before bed. The bedtime reading in the Brown household was Theodore Dwight Weld's American Slavery As It Is: Testimony of a Thousand Witnesses (1839), a brilliant piece of abolitionist propaganda that lists atrocities in American slavery. Imagine that the last thing you hear before you drift off to sleep is about lashings and families being split up and murders and brutality, naked human brutality.

Participant: One of the things that surprised me was the Secret Six. I had never known about the Secret Six before, although I knew about Harpers Ferry and John Brown and what happened here in Kansas. I'm interested in knowing more about the Secret Six.

Jon Earle: There's a wonderful book called The Secret Six. Edward Renehan is the author. It came out three or four years ago. He delves into the financial relationships between these Boston philanthropists and Gerrit Smith,

who's a New York philanthropist. John Brown had no money. I'm sure you gathered that he couldn't make money, and he couldn't save money. He wasn't good at raising it until the very end. Yet, here's an irony. A lot of these abolitionists were extremely wealthy. For example, the man for whom our town is named, Amos Lawrence, owned cotton mills in Massachusetts and Dr. Samuel Gridley Howe was a doctor. These abolitionists were becoming frustrated over the course of the 1850s. Things weren't working out. Slaveholders weren't giving up their slaves voluntarily. Moral suasion didn't seem to be working so they turned to other ideas. Brown was very persuasive. He couldn't get many people to open their wallets, but he could certainly get people thinking.

Participant: In terms of bankrolling people like Brown, one of the main criticisms that James Malin makes of him is on page 123: padding his expense account. I'd like to come back to Malin's book on Brown. Brown's most severe critics were right here in Lawrence, Kansas.

Jon Earle: He's my predecessor in the KU history department. I think we still give a prize called the James C. Malin Prize to a promising undergraduate.

Has anybody read the Legend of '56, Malin's excoriation of John Brown? It is a blistering attack. When I write about history, I try to be even-handed, even about something as controversial as slavery. But Malin will have none of that.

Participant: I have the idea that it was an embarrassment. I've been trying to figure out why did a man who had relatively minor actual impact become so important? Why did the abolitionists grab onto this guy? Was it because he was the only way available to present their cause? His impact is relatively small. He's basically a small-time terrorist, a small-time thug. Yet, he's become a national controversy in some circles. Abolitionists grab onto him because he's the only story they've got. Later on, when more noble events came along, people distanced themselves from him. He was an embarrassment.

Participant: Did the abolitionists embrace him at the time? How much did they embrace him? Or, was he used by the anti-abolitionists as an argument to blacken the abolitionists' cause?

Participant: It wasn't the Southerners who were making up the songs and putting up the monuments and having little festivals and anniversaries to him.

Participant: Northern whites did that because of the manner in which he conducted himself after he had been arrested and the way he conducted himself as he was going to be hung. Many historians said that while they admired his spirit, they didn't admire his methods.

Jon Earle: That's a really good point. There's so much on the table. Does anybody know what a mainstream antislavery American like Abraham Lincoln thought of John Brown in the 1850s? There's a little bit about that in Peterson's book. Lincoln came here in 1858, the only time he visited Kansas, and Republicans ran against him so hard. They said, "Look, this is not what we're talking about. We're not talking about raiding federal armories and subterranean passways and siding with slave rebellion." As a matter of fact, the platform of the Republican Party, whose victory in 1860 was the reason the Southern states seceded, was to stop slavery from spreading. It said nothing about getting rid of slavery. Lincoln never said he wanted to get rid of slavery in Virginia, Alabama, or Kentucky. So, I don't think abolitionists did support him. I think people who sympathized with abolitionists later supported his actions. But I think most abolitionists were a little stung by Harpers Ferry and by Bleeding Kansas.

Participant: Did the South make a strategic error in starting the Civil War?

Jon Earle: This is what happens when there is no political center. Because, as you pointed out, some people said, "Brown is Christlike." Ralph Emerson said, "He'll make the gallows holy like the cross." Edmund Ruffin from Virginia said that he's had the whiff of fire and brimstone about him and that he was Satan. Maybe he's neither.

Participant: The national argument over the slavery issue came to a head with John Brown. The North and the South became irreconcilable after this because of the implication of the North in the raid through the Secret Six. The South believed that the conspiracy went even deeper than the Secret Six to a political level. The dialogue became heated after Harpers Ferry even though Harpers Ferry itself might have been a minor military skirmish with the South and it didn't last more than two days. The ramifications of it were that you could no longer come to the table and compromise.

Participant: When we're talking about John Brown, are we talking about the human being or the legend? His character takes on a life of his own as a legend. The complexities get drained away and we're left with a simple figure who then becomes either liked or hated. He might have been judged in a mixed way in Kansas because people may have known more about him, and there may have been a richness of detail that revealed the positive as well as the negative and how those things were intertwined. People in other states never really saw that detail.

Jon Earle: One way that I think we can separate the person from the legend—I suggest this to my students—is to say that if E.T. came to western Virginia in 1859 and didn't know anybody, didn't have any politics, and just started reading the newspapers, what would he think of John Brown? Just from what historians say, not the legend, not the Curry murals in Topeka, what do you think he would notice?

Participant: He'd think Brown was a terrorist. E.T. would think he was a terrorist if he read the Virginia newspapers.

Participant: Isn't there someone who would say, "Oh, but I knew him when—and he's really"—that's just human nature. When anyone becomes a hero, they say, "He's had all these failed businesses and he's crazy."

Participant: When he was condemned to death, as I remember one account in the book, one person clapped and then people in the room sat in dead silence. I assume that would have been reported in the newspapers. I assume that some of the letters he wrote while he was in prison would have been published.

Jon Earle: Many of them were. John Brown wrote five-ten letters a day every day he was in jail. The point I want to make by suggesting this crazy E.T. thing is that depending on where your spaceship lands, you're going to get outrageous views of John Brown. They are absolutely polarized; there is no middle ground at all.

Jon Earle: Absolutely. There was no room for compromise after Harpers Ferry. There couldn't have been anything except violence. Most historians certainly think that.

Jon Earle: Two-bit operating here and there in Eastern Kansas and a raid on a federal arsenal in Virginia—he didn't even pack a lunch the day he raided Harpers Ferry—actually had massive historical ramifications for activities that seem so ill-planned and executed.

Participant: Although Harpers Ferry was not that big a deal, what it symbolized was a big deal. That's interesting when you look at Brown too and the difference between who he really was and the legend. Harpers Ferry has been used to both make him into a hero and to vilify him even though what he really did didn't amount to much in the end. It was the symbolism.

Jon Earle: I completely agree with that. Let's not forget that John Brown had several weeks before he was hung. During that time, he was his own mythmaker in some ways. It surprised many people that he made such eloquent speeches in his trial, that he wrote letters that were widely published and that people know quite well. They were in newspapers. He started an effective propaganda machine. It was effective both in brandishing his own reputation in the Northern states and in bringing the nation closer to conflict.

Participant: I thought of Martin Luther King's "Letter from Birmingham Jail" through the whole book and then in the end when Peterson is summarizing, he says King did not embrace nor mention John Brown because of his violence. I missed that and I always wondered why.

Jon Earle: They are definitely different traditions. Black militants, however, are very quick to embrace John Brown.

Participant: The thing for me is the imagery. If anybody in this country thinks of Kansas images, they're going to think of two things: Dorothy and John Brown.

Jon Earle: What is so iconic about John Brown? Why is he so identified with a place when he really didn't spend a whole lot of time here?

Participant: That period was so important to Kansas and he just happened to be here then.

Participant: I think you could make an argument that he was an uncanny strategist to figure out a way to start the Civil War to end slavery. He was the lynchpin to start the war, so that made him famous.

Jon Earle: I'm not sure that when he came out to Kansas for the first time that was what he was thinking. It's easier to argue that Harpers Ferry served that purpose.

Participant: Kansas was the battleground with the Kansas-Nebraska Act and all that was going on here. This was where the action was. His sons came first; he followed.

Participant: He set up a training camp in Iowa and hired somebody from Italy who fought with Garibaldi to train the people. This says to me that he was definitely planning a violent action. He says in his own writings that it's going to cause bloodshed that will lead to war.

Participant: At that time he was training people to take an action back in the Appalachians.

Jon Earle: He was going to have the subterranean passway. He makes outlandish claims that the Appalachian Mountains are like Thermopylae and he was going to be Leonides holding off Xerxes. Have any of you been to Thermopylae? It doesn't look like Harpers Ferry. John Brown actually was a fairly well-traveled man for his time.

Jon Earle: Very primitive. At home and I think he went to school a little bit but had no real formal education. He was going to be a tanner like his father.

Participant: Didn't Peterson mention when he was twelve years old he found a runaway slave and that was the turning point?

Jon Earle: He writes very explicitly. A couple of letters that he published point to this event when he was twelve. He was given significant responsibility during the War of 1812, as a twelve year old. He was leading his father's flock of sheep to army bases to sell. He came upon a slaveholder and his young slave at an inn and saw the slave savagely beaten. He said that's what did it. Also he grew up in a house where his father, Owen Brown, always preached that slavery was a sin and wrong and would bring down God's wrath.

Participant: I think he was really disappointed with Harpers Ferry and how it didn't turn out as he thought it would. He thought all the blacks would respond and start the war that needed to happen.

Jon Earle: Some think that it was a plan to start a civil war; others argue that he thought all the slaves of Virginia would rise up. Could it be both?

Jon Earle: He had a few. His group of followers was integrated, five blacks and twelve whites, I think.

Participant: Another important event in his life was when he had a religious experience in which he dropped to his knees and went into a trance. He then told his family that he was dedicating his life from that point forward to freeing the slaves.

Jon Earle: He said that, I know. But then he went to England to sell wool. And I agree that was a pivotal moment for a lot of American abolitionists. The pivotal event for Brown was when an abolitionist editor, Elijah Lovejoy, in Alton, Illinois, was savagely murdered in 1837 by a proslavery mob, and his printing press was thrown in the Mississippi. This was an event that shocked people. It shocked people who had stayed out of the mix and said, "I'm not really an abolitionist, I'm not proslavery, I don't really care, let's just go on to something else." When events like this happen, they really pull Americans in. Brown had always been very hostile to slavery. He grew up in a household that hated slavery. He had seen brutality against African Americans, but this event and then hearing someone come to his church to say, "We have to do something about this" made him dedicate the rest of his life to freeing the slaves.

Participant: His grandfather participated in the Revolutionary War, and he must have been very cognizant about what our Declaration of Independence says about men being equal. That may have also influenced him, although some historians that Peterson mentions thought that was not an important factor.

Participant: He did use the patriots to justify his violent tendencies. I think Peterson refers to Brown's question, "What if the founding fathers had never engaged in an arms struggle?"

Participant: When he went back to Boston after his year in Kansas to do some fund raising, he was very disappointed with the Boston elite and the literati because they were so proud of their Plymouth Rock and their Bunker Hill monuments, and they were celebrating these dead symbols for revolution. He felt the revolution was yet to come, or the second revolution was yet to come.

Jon Earle: This was brilliant propagandizing because that's what got a lot of support. Amos Lawrence was not at all antislavery until 1854. He points to another one of these pivotal moments in the antislavery struggle that drew him over to the antislavery side in his diary.

Participant: Speaking of Boston, I had a strong sense in several places in this book of people that I thought I admired until I read this, the Secret Six, were sometimes wimps.

Participant: With the one exception, Franklin Sanborn. One of them went crazy. They ran away. They didn't circle around the wagons. They just disappeared. Their response to Harpers Ferry was ineffective.

Jon Earle: These are people of the highest social standing. I told my students when we discussed this last semester that it's like finding out that Bill Gates and Kenny Lay are funding radicals. Can this possibly be true? They have a lot to lose. I might make the point that they were actually kind of courageous. They put their money where their mouths were more than some of the other Boston groups. But you're right. A lot of them did turn tail.

Participant: Didn't they consider John Brown expendable? If something happens, they could write him off because he was not part of their social strata.

Jon Earle: Maybe some of them. I know the most about the one New Yorker in the group, Gerrit Smith. All his life, Smith was a very sincere reformer. He didn't write this guy off. He planned to give African Americans land in the Adirondacks; he owned most of New York state. He said, "I'm going to franchise these people by giving them a stake in the community, by giving them land." If you have been to North Elba in the Adirondacks, you know that he gave them pretty marginal land. It's hard to squeeze a living out of the Adirondacks. Very few people actually put their money and their efforts behind their words. I'm not so sure I would call them wimps.

Participant: One of them was George Luther Stearns. I don't think he retreated. He went on to fund the 54 ^th Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry. His interest went far beyond John Brown's failure.

Jon Earle: I'm pretty sure that they felt, "Oh, boy. This is much worse than we thought." The Southern press was inflamed by this. Every abolitionist became another John Brown. This, of course, was preposterous because most abolitionists were docile, reformer, church-goer types. They were not leaders of invading armies.

Jon Earle: He was the one who was killed east of Saint Louis (in Alton, Illinois).

Participant: I felt very sorry for John Brown's second wife, Mary. The two wives had between them twenty children. And they died in his fighting.

Jon Earle: Before I denigrate him as a father, we need to remember that one of the most moving parts of John Brown's life was that he was a very tender nurse. He took care when his kids were sick and when his first wife, Dianthe, was sick. He was very human and touching when he was like that. But, boy, he had lots of kids.

Jon Earle: But it wasn't common to have twenty children. That was still a lot. He started young, and he kept going. He had two very fertile spouses.

Jon Earle: Almost no one knows about Diantha. What about Mary Brown? We do know a little bit about her.

Jon Earle: What did she have to do with constructing the legend of John Brown?

Participant: She gave his papers and letters to the Kansas Historical Society.

Jon Earle: She made sure it was all preserved. Her labors kept a lot of this going. People don't usually notice that.

Participant: She came back from California to raise money to provide markers and statues.

Participant: Sanborn was one of the Secret Six. He wrote about John Brown a lot and stuck with him to the very end and forever after. I believe he had a close relationship with Mary and one of the daughters.

Jon Earle: Franklin Sanborn is the biographer we all wish we had. He went to his grave saying that John Brown had nothing to do with the Pottawatomie massacre, and that he was a good God-fearing man. He gave portions of his profits from his books to Mary Brown. We should all have a Sanborn around.

Participant: I had to look up the word "hagiography." This term does apply to John Brown. It's idolizing someone as you write about them in a biography.

Jon Earle: Has anyone ever read a hagiography of a saint? They talk about the miracles they perform and their wonderful deeds and tragic deaths.

Participant: One of the things I think we should mention is the pronounced and very moving connection between Lawrence and Harpers Ferry. Langston Hughes's great-grandfather, Lewis Sheridan Leary, who died with John Brown at Harpers Ferry, makes that connection for us.

Jon Earle: Peterson has some great poems in this book, but he doesn't have my favorite: Langston Hughes's "October 16 ^th : The Raid," although he does mention Hughes in passing. I think that's the best poem about John Brown ever written.

Perhaps
You will remember
John Brown.
John Brown
Who took his gun,
Took twenty-one companions
White and black,
Went to shoot your way to freedom
Where two rivers meet
And the hills of the
North
And the hills of the
South
Look slow at one another—
And died
For your sake.
Now that you are
Many years free,
And the echo of the Civil War
Has passed away,
And Brown himself
Has long been tried at law,
Hanged by the neck,
And buried in the ground—
Since Harpers Ferry
Is alive with ghosts today,
Immortal raiders
Come again to town—
Perhaps
You will recall
John Brown.

—"October 16: The Raid"

It's both a brilliant poem for its artistry and also a great example of how in the 1930s when, as you saw in Peterson's book, John Brown was held in low regard by scholars and most white Americans. Yet he was being lionized in the African American arts in the Harlem Renaissance.

Participant: I remember when, in the late 1930s, we were asked to bring our money to help fund the John Steuart Curry mural in Topeka. So we heard about him.

Participant: Peterson mentioned that school children were asked to bring pennies.

Jon Earle: They were finished. What we see in the statehouse are finished murals. Some of you were here then. How did you feel about this imbroglio when these murals were finished and the state legislatures didn't like them and the artist got his feelings hurt and left town?

Participant: I remember that one friend of mine and I felt really sad that there was a discussion and the complaints made. I'm sure our teacher talked with us about it.

Participant: As a school child, my impression was that this was good art, but that Kansas didn't want to be seen as a state that had this wild and angry man representing it. People didn't think this typified Kansas. That's why there was a lot of controversy about it. But it stayed.

Jon Earle: The only picture I'd seen from the Topeka statehouse was the mural with John Brown. I didn't realize there were so many. It's not exactly in the most central position. We all know how to get up that staircase now, but it's not like John Brown is front and center and all the others are in the background. Definitely from the minute Curry exhibited this, it was the controversial one.

I want to talk about some of the images in this book because that's what I'm the most jealous of. Peterson has the rights and he got all these beautiful images reprinted. Do any of these strikes you as worth discussing?

Participant: The earliest photograph, the daguerreotype (1847, p. 8), is a very revealing picture of John Brown as a younger man.

Jon Earle: We haven't known about this image for very long, historically speaking. It came to our attention in my lifetime. He's holding up his hand and appears to be taking an oath. What do you notice about that picture?

Jon Earle: I don't think we do. What do you think it probably was? We can make educated guesses. We know about when this was taken. We know where it was taken. We know who took it. It sure doesn't look like an American flag, does it?

Participant: I'd like to mention something about the photograph. It was taken by Augustus Washington, who was an African American. When it came up for auction about three years ago, it had been found at an antique store, and someone had it labeled "local farmer." The person who bought it knew what it was and gave it to Sotheby's or Christy's, and it was auctioned for $150,000. It was the highest price ever paid for a daguerreotype. The National Portrait Gallery bought it through the assistance of Betty Adler Schermer, and it says here, "In honor of her great-grandfather, August M. Bondi." August M. Bondi fought with John Brown in Kansas, and he was at the Battle of Blackjack. He went on to be one of the founders of Salina, Kansas.

Jon Earle: That's an amazing story. You said he looks scary. What about his look?

Jon Earle: Usually not. But most people weren't in abolitionist societies getting their picture taken by African Americans either. Most people went to sit for a portrait, maybe to show off their status. You wore your fancy clothes and brushed your teeth really well that day.

Participant: For the photography at that time they had to stand still for quite a long time and stare straight at the camera because it was time-lapsed. So, to me, he just looks very thoughtful and stern.

Jon Earle: We've talked about the pivotal moment in Ohio when John Brown dedicated his life to slavery in the late 1830s, so he's already dedicated his life to it. But here he's kind of self-consciously posing, taking, swearing an oath.

Many nineteenth-century societies had similarities—from free masonry to abolitionist societies to signing the temperance pledge. They are similar to a church scene, even though there aren't formal sermons preached. You swear things, talk together, and have rituals. I think that's definitely what he's doing in this picture.

Jon Earle: Absolutely. Another irony of organizations like the Klan, for example in the 1920s, is that they were so adamantly against Catholics and yet they had priests and wore robes.

Did anyone notice the painting on page 47? It is Thomas Hovenden's painting of John Brown's walk to the gallows.

Participant: Kissing the little black baby. Do we know whether that really happened?

Jon Earle: Except he looks like Santa Claus. It's certainly not an abstract painting.

Participant: You also can't tell whether John Brown is white or black. I think that's interesting.

Participant: Notice he has something around his neck and around his two arms.

Jon Earle: A lot of people have talked about the jailer's expressions, his contemptuous look.

Participant: I have a naïve question. On page 20 we have the little excerpt from his "last prophecy." Some psychologists and pseudo-psychologists analyze handwriting to help determine one's insanity. His handwriting looks very solid.

Jon Earle: It looks pretty deliberate to me. Did any of you notice in this prophecy that the phrasing is kind of odd, the punctuation is kind of weird?

Jon Earle: He wasn't, but it's quite legible and literate. His speeches are very eloquent. This reminds me of the punctuation and phrasing in Psalms. I think he was very self-consciously trying to mimic Biblical writing, which is translated from Arabic to Greek to Old English to seventeenth-century English. But I think he created this persona when he was in jail.

Participant: We haven't mentioned how audacious he was when the governor told him he should rot in hell for what he's done. He retorted, "Well, you sir should rot in hell for the fact that you have slaves." Many times he turned the situation around. When one of the Presidents put $250 on his head, he put $2.50 on the President's head.

Jon Earle: That's right. There's the audacity. We talk about publicity hounds now, people who are there as soon as the camera goes on. He knew how to craft a sound byte. He knew how to get attention. He knew how to get in the papers.

Jon Earle: Absolutely. Propagandism is very important too. He talked his way into the richest man in America's drawing room wearing an old ripped suit. He talked Gerrit Smith into giving him a free farm, essentially after meeting with him for a few minutes.

Participant: He even had his Southern admirers. Virginia Governor Wise mentions on page 2, at the bottom, "They are mistaken who take him to be a madman. He is a bundle of the best nerves I ever saw—cut and thrust and bleeding in bonds. He is a man of clear head, of courage, of simple ingenuousness. He is cool, collected, and indomitable."

Jon Earle: There's also a great exchange that Julia Ward Howe had with the governor. She wrote, "I hear you are a man of chivalric spirit. Please let me visit the prisoner." People who knew him and people who opposed him didn't think he was crazy, did they? He had ice in his veins.

Participant: I've seen and/or read about the descendants of Thomas Jefferson and George Washington. I've never read about or heard anybody say, "I'm the great-great-grandnephew of John Brown." A man who has twenty children—eight survived to adulthood—there should be plenty of descendants.

Jon Earle: I met one at a talk in Overland Park last year. I hoped he would come today. He came up and said he was a descendant, one of Brown's children. I don't know of any famous descendants.

Participant: Leary's bullet-ridden shroud was given to Hughes's grandmother as a treasured relic in the family.

Participant: Mary, Leary's widow, married another one of Brown's associates from Oberlin named Charles Langston, and they moved to Douglas County in the late 1860s. Mary brought that shirt that Lewis Sheridan Leary had worn at Harpers Ferry. It was pitted and bullet-riddled and had blood on it.

Participant: It was his most valued possession. When his apartment in Harlem was flooded in the 1940s, he lost virtually all his papers, but the one thing he was able to save was that shirt, and he gave it to the Ohio Historical Society.

Jon Earle: Yes. It's a great Lawrence and Douglas County connection to two of Kansas's most famous people.

Jon Earle: It's a pretty tricky thing to figure out. What can we piece together from what we have in this book?

Participant: James Townsley said (pp. 62-63), twenty years later, that he was there and that John Brown himself killed one of the proslavery settlers named Doyle. There were others who said, "No, John Brown didn't do it." Salmon Brown, his son, said that his father came back later and shot Doyle after he was dead. One person said that John Brown had told him personally that he was an accessory to the murders that happened at Pottawatomie.

Jon Earle: When you look at the picture on page 8, you can see that he definitely had serious power over people, certainly over his own sons. I'm not sure I believe that John Brown pulled any triggers, but I think he was the leader.

Participant: If someone is inciting you to kill, that person, in a sense, bears the same moral responsibility. It was clear that at various times in his life, he was inciting people to violence.

Jon Earle: It happened within that context. Lawrence was sacked. The Freestate Hotel was burned.

Participant: One person says that he considered it a war at that time, and that these people who were killed had threatened to go up and down the creek and kill all free staters.

Jon Earle: In that same account John Brown later admitted, in 1858, that he was there and said that the massacres saved the free state settlers on the creek. James G. Malin, however, writes that what John Brown was doing was settling old scores, trying to politically assassinate people who were on the grand jury that charged him with treason. There are so many conflicting perspectives.

Participant: I don't think we can accurately assess the level of violence. Right after 9/11 a New Yorker article by MIT and University of Chicago professors mentioned the 1856 terrorist activity in Lawrence, Kansas. Many years later, what comes to mind is the way things were back in the late 1850s right here.

Jon Earle: There is a new history series that's going to be on the History Channel. They're always asking me do I have any ideas for mysteries. One of my favorite mysteries is whether John Brown, on the night of the Pottawatomie massacre, knew about Charles Sumner being caned on the floor of the U.S. Senate. It's really hard to figure this out. Certainly he could've known. He didn't talk about it, but all of these things were happening at once. It was one of these pivotal weeks in American history where things escalated. Certainly that was a new step for him. This was not the Battle of Blackjack.

Jon Earle: There were telegraphs all the way to Independence. Brown's station wasn't so far from information. I'm trying to get the dates right. I think the speech was made on May 19 ^th or 20 ^th.

Participant: This is a quote from Stephen Oates' biography, "Salmon said that while everybody at camp was upset about the beatings of Charles Sumner, he and his father and unmarried brothers went crazy, crazy when they heard the news. It seemed to be the finishing, decisive touch." So Salmon remembers that they knew in camp, but whether it was within that 48-hour period is uncertain.

Jon Earle: I'm not sure when Salmon wrote that. This was a very unusual time. People were extremely volatile. Things were happening. People talk about things now happening at a dizzying pace with the Internet and 24-hour news cycle. Being in eastern Kansas in 1856 must have been a lot like that. You couldn't believe what you heard from one day to the next.

Participant: Why does Quantrill's raid get so much more publicity than the siege?

Jon Earle: More people died. The Civil War is such a hot topic. I think the sack of Lawrence in 1856 is historically far more significant quite frankly. It had national implications. Quantrill's raid was a horrible tragedy, but I'm sure there were many more people killed that day in the Civil War around the country.

This was amazingly important. And John Brown did seem to be everywhere. He knew how to find the hot spots. He spent a lot of time in court with people bringing suits against him, as happens when you lose a lot of money. And there was a forced return of a runaway slave back to slavery that made Amos Lawrence become a stark-raving-mad abolitionist in Boston. John Brown was in Troy, New York, now a two-and-a-half or three-hour drive from Boston. He said, "I've got to go to Boston." "I've got to go stop them from returning Anthony Burns to slavery." As if he thought he could do anything about it. His lawyers said, "You can't go now. You're in the middle of a lawsuit. You're winning. You can't leave." He actually didn't, that one time, get on a train and go to Boston. He couldn't have stopped it. The federal government spent $100,000 in 1854 money to send one guy back to slavery in Virginia.

Participant: I thought it was interesting that he thought that the slaves would rise up as a result of Harpers Ferry. It didn't happen.

Jon Earle: Slave revolts were rare in the old South, but the few times they did happen, they caused huge unrest. If you owned slaves, you didn't sleep well at night. Even if there were relatively few out-and-out slave revolts, the potential was still there. Why didn't slaves rise up in the wake of Harpers Ferry? I think there are some pretty good reasons. Information was hard to circulate in these closed plantation systems. To revolt was suicide in the old South. In Nat Turner's revolt, 125 black people were put to death. That's expensive property to put to death for a slave revolt. Gabriel's rebellion led to the same thing. Also, they might not have known about it because it was not a well-planned endeavor.

Participant: It's interesting that Nat Turner and John Brown were the same age. You don't think of that because Nat Turner died that same year.

Jon Earle: Both felt they were instruments of God. They are very interesting parallels.

Participant: Governor Wise also put out an alert to the population to be exceedingly cautious because there might be uprisings.

Jon Earle: It was illegal for black people to own guns or have a gun after about 1660. So white people had all the money, all the guns, all the power, all the horses. It would be very difficult for what John Brown said he planned to happen to happen.

Jon Earle: Yes, I think he did. Certainly when he's gallivanting around in New England trying to raise money for the subterranean passway plan, I think he thought it did. I'm not so sure that on the morning of October 16 he thought it would.

Participant: African American people were in the minority. When you look at the classic model of revolutions in Europe, the peasants were in the majority. They had sheer numbers and force. Black people did not in the South.

Jon Earle: In South Carolina and Louisiana there were black majorities. Pockets had more black people than white people, but not what is now West Virginia. Western Virginia or the western counties of Virginia had very low slave-to-white population ratios in 1859.

Jon Earle: No. It's very isolated, hilly, and remote. But I think you're right in a sense. Why wasn't there a slave revolt in Louisiana or Charleston, because they had more people? South Carolina was majority black from about 1670 until 1865.

Participant: Revolts require a leader, and the leaders were pretty much discouraged.

Participant: This is what Charles Manson was trying to do. He was trying to cause a revolt of the black people.

Participant: Slaves were not able to come to John Brown because it happened so quickly. It was less than a 48-hour insurrection. It was put down very quickly. There was just no time. I think what John Brown had in mind, because he had a thousand pikes made, was to get out into the mountains.

Jon Earle: And to sneak out during the night and to come back to the strongholds during the day.

Pikes are sharp things on the end of long sticks. He had an eye for the symbolic weaponry. He didn't shoot the Doyles in the back on Pottawatomie Creek. He split open their heads with broadswords. He got these pikes.

Participant: I thought Frederick Douglass's reaction to the entire affair was very odd. I've always been an admirer of Douglass. He said. "No, this isn't going to work. I'm backing out of this."

Jon Earle: But sometimes you have to live to fight another day if it looks like a really bad plan.

Participant: Douglass seemed to try to make up for it the rest of his life. He was always pushing Lincoln to do more.

Jon Earle: Certainly Frederick Douglass's gifts were as a writer and a speaker. I'd hate to see him shoot a gun.

Participant: I keep putting myself in the position of a person similar to me at that time or bringing John Brown forward into my time. Both Harriet Beecher Stowe and John Brown believed that slavery was against God. It was founded in her religion; it was founded in John Brown's religion. That's where he found the source for saying, "This is a bad thing, and it needs to be stopped." If he were on the radio or on the television saying, "These people need to die for this cause; I'm willing to die for this cause," I'm trying to figure out my reaction. What I would say over the dinner table to my husband, or what I would be thinking as I read? I'm really uncomfortable with the beliefs that I've held about John Brown.

Jon Earle: What would you have probably said at the dinner table? It's a great question.

Participant: I probably would've said, "This guy is kind of scary." I would've said, "I have a hard time believing that. I don't come from that background. I don't have those beliefs." I keep thinking of David Koresh. I don't want to draw too many parallels, but here was a man who was willing to die for his beliefs and took a lot of people with him.

Participant: But slavery is a special case. You've got four million people in chains being brutally treated every single day. It's much different to me than David Koresh and other fanatical religious leaders. John Brown isn't using his religion with a flock this way. He's using it to overcome what he considers a tremendous evil.

Participant: The Civil War is the line. He is prophetic in that 350,000 Americans did die a violent death to realize a goal.

Jon Earle: I understand what you're saying. Remember, people did not think that he was in the mainstream then. I think people today would say, "He's not in the mainstream now."

Participant: Certainly those kinds of people are necessary. I struggle with the fact that I'm not outside the mainstream. I'm uncomfortable with the fact that I'm uncomfortable.

Jon Earle: There are significant differences in the philosophies of Stowe and Brown, even though they're on the same side in the slavery issue. Abraham Lincoln said to Stowe, "So you're the little lady who started this great war." If he'd met John Brown, he might have said, "So you're the bearded guy who made this great war."

Participant: Right after Pottawatomie Creek, I would've been very judgmental and angry that someone was out there killing people and hauling them out of their cabins. But my opinion might have changed over time had I been living in 1900 and known all that had been written about John Brown to that point. I might have had a different opinion.

Jon Earle: I loved what someone said earlier: That the best analysis of John Brown is still cut so deep here in Kansas, because people knew him here. We're related to people who died in the siege of Lawrence, and people were related to the Doyles who died in Pottawatomie Creek. It was still so raw.

But definitely, he was an uncomfortable figure not just for us now, but for people then. I'm sure you noticed in Uncle Tom's Cabin that the portrayals of African Americans are very stereotypical, what we would call racist today. That's the way most people thought about black people. John Brown is the most racially egalitarian person I've come across in my research. He was a racial radical for his day. There are things about John Brown that I would consider racist as well, but he spent his entire life trying to overcome those feelings and really believed that both white people and black people deserve the same.

Participant: It had actually been going on since 1776, and we never really resolved it.

Jon Earle: Congress definitely tried to paper it over. These very smart guys got together in Washington every couple of decades and hammered out a new compromise.

Participant: Didn't they come up with a law at one time that said they weren't even going to discuss it in Congress anymore?

Jon Earle: The famous Gag Rule tabled without any discussion antislavery petitions sent from the little ladies of Lichfield, Connecticut.

I think that was one of the Southern slaveholders' grave mistakes. They silenced abolitionist dissent. Obviously they infringed on the civil liberties of petitioners, speakers, and people trying to send abolitionist material through the mail. People who said, "I don't care about this slavery issue so much," had previously not changed their position. They asserted, "Wait a minute. They killed that Lovejoy guy, and they threw his printing press in the Mississippi. That's not fair play. That's not American."

Participant: It seems puzzling to me that there was such an emphasis on the Pottawatomie massacre when the entire border situation was so volatile. You kept quiet because if at 8:00 A. M. a rider came in and said, "Are you proslavery?" And you answered, "Hmm, fifty/fifty," you might not see 9:00 A. M. One of my favorite books is Black Flag by Goodrich, which talks about the constant turmoil. To single out one incident where five lowly people were killed seems to me an overemphasis on these five folks when there were thousands that were slaughtered at the same time and far more brutally.

Jon Earle: I appreciate what you said. Are you "sound on the goose" was a very tricky question in Eastern Kansas, and you better have the right answer. We're going to have to conclude. Thank you for coming out this cold night.

Credits
John Brown, Amos Lawrence and Battle of Black Jack Memorial photos: used with permission of the Kansas Collection, Kenneth Spencer Research Library, University of Kansas Libraries

Sarah Robinson photo and Anti-slavery Meeting broadside: used with permission of the Kansas State Historical Society, copy and reuse restrictions apply