John Brown: The Abolitionist and His Legacy

New York Historical Society, “John Brown:  The Abolitionist and His Legacy”

The echoes have nearly faded from “Black History Month.”  Cliches from King’s “I Have a Dream” speech were (as always) endlessly invoked as scripture, so it is both timely and appropriate that a small exhibit about abolitionist John Brown’s life and his 1859 raid on Harper’s Ferry renews debate about the controversial and violent actions in the struggle for equality.  To give the show the recognition it deserves—before John Brown goes marching on after Thursday, March, 25--here’s one last gut-busting shout-out:  “Go see the New York Historical Society’s John Brown:  The Abolitionist and His Legacy! “

The slave-freeing Brown was born a Connecticut Yankee and raised as a provincial pioneer.  Reared with the understanding of equality of all before God, his concern for blacks was matched by his empathy for Native Americans.  The exhibit’s letters, artifacts, and daguerreotypes reveal a man with a Puritan’s zeal.  Through the documents on display, readers will see not an academic (Brown’s spelling is awful) but his inner fire burns through letters which even his friends like Thoreau and Emerson were impressed by.  But as selfless as he seems today, he was a self-lacerating Protestant, convinced that his life was “mostly filled with vanity.” 

In late-antebellum America, “doughfaces” like Presidents Buchanan and Pierce appeased the South while Lincoln’s Secretary Seward hoped to contain it.  Even the future warrior-in-chief nervously maintained in his debates with Stephen Douglas that, “There is no danger of our going [down South] and making war upon them.”  It was Brown’s act which brought the nation to the shots at Sumpter.  And though supported by abolitionist intellectuals of his day and “Secret Six” financiers, it was Brown’s singular raid which demonstrated that violence—and only violence—could crack the back of the Southern slavocracy. 

While undersized the text-heavy but fascinating case display tells the story of Brown’s doomed but nation-rocking raid on Harper’s Ferry Virginia in 1859.  Triumphant and remorseless even when meeting the final drop of the gallows, Brown went to his death criticized even by anti-slavery enthusiasts like William Lloyd Garrison.  The Liberator’s editor called Brown’s raid “a misguided, wild, and apparently insane, though disinterested and well intended effort.” 

While Thomas Hovenden’s 1884 “The Last Moments of John Brown” is a superior painting to the  exhibit’s own colorful central portrait, the image is still a moving depiction of the death scene.  Glowing behind dark glass, it shows a frowzy and grandfatherly Brown fondly looking on a black mother and child on his journey to the rope.  Yet, looking at this or other sentimental images of Brown one should not beatify a saint, but instead understand a man.  He was a man who’s seemingly futile and principled actions clanged the death knell of America’s first (but certainly not last) age of anxiety.  One who’s conviction to justice demands that his heirs forever weigh the costs of war beside the price of peace.  By 1859, that price was too high and Brown, ablaze, seemed to shout through his actions what William Lloyd Garrison bellowed in sweaty debate, “Of course I’m on fire; I have mountains of ice to melt!”