I can still remember the first time I ever saw an image of John Brown.
I’m ten years old, and we are touring the Capitol building in Topeka Kansas. We have been learning Kansas history all year, all about Bloody Kansas and the founding of Topeka and the Nebraska-Kansas Act. None of it means anything to me. The Capital building smells funny and is full of weird old men who look like grandfathers, wearing ugly brown suits. It’s the mid-80s and political fashion in Kansas has not left the 1970s. I want to climb the 296 steps to the top, to look out upon the city of my birth, but we are not allowed because they are rehabilitating the old dome. At that very moment, my father’s father is hanging from scaffolding somewhere high above us and installing new windows.
Our tour enters the east wing, and there I see for the first time what is to become one of the most iconic paintings of my entire life, alongside works by Monet, Dali, and van Gough. It depicts a giant of a man, with a long and flowing beard, madness in his piercing eyes, holding a rifle in one hand and an open book, presumably the bible in the other, standing astride two fallen soldiers. Behind him Union and Confederacy forces clash. On the Confederacy and the man’s left, flames fill the sky with dark clouds, and on his right, with the Union, a twister has come down from the sky like God’s own finger. I remember nearly every detail of this painting from that moment on. But it is the eyes of John Brown, the man in the painting, that never leave me. Those mad, mad eyes.
They lecture us in school about John Brown, the abolitionist. His history is framed as a failure. John Brown the abolitionist set out to start an uprising among the slaves. His clash here in Osawatomie where I write this is considered by some to be the first battle of the Civil War. But he was tried and hung in Virginia before the war ever began, and in his specific goals, he was indeed a failure.
I grew up thinking of the man as an tragic comical figure, a fool with a sad end. A man who dreamed of doing something amazing and failing at it. A man who was mad as a hatter, because that is what my teachers said. Madness was the thing I always associated with him. He frightened me, with those eyes, and with his actions of the Pottawatomie Massacre.
But today, I visited the John Brown Museum and I learned things that put John Brown in an entirely different perspective for me. He was many things, but I am not so sure he was a fool.
Most everyone familiar with Civil War history is familiar with the incident at Harper’s Ferry, in which John Brown unsuccessfully led an attack and failed to initiate a slave revolt. He was captured and eventually hung by the state of Virginia. The way the story of Harper’s Ferry was portrayed to me in my schooling at least was that it was a terribly misguided attack, a foolish one, and that only an egomaniacal madman would think such an attack could succeed. Another black eye was that the first casualty of the battle was a freed black man (not among Brown’s men). Brown’s life, like many of the men from the time, was full of a mixture of business success and failures. He tried many paths in making a career for himself. But when his sons were threatened by pro-slavery forces here in Osawatomie, he set out from back east to come and help protect his family and help fight to make Kansas a free state.
At the time, “Border Ruffians” had gathered in the area, all pro-slavery men, mostly from Missouri, around Osawatomie. They intended to attack and wipe out the abolitionist settlement. Brown and his family, acting in I guess what might be a preemptive retaliation, attacked and murdered 5 men, hacking them to death with broadswords, not miles away from the place where I sit and type this entry. This became known as the Pottawatomie Massacre, and it was used to villify Brown in later years. Certainly, it is hard to justify these actions, but they must be understood in the context of the time. Lawrence, my home town, was sacked by pro-slavery forces, and then burned to the ground during the Civil War by Quantrill and his men. It was the common belief among Kansans (and mostly true) that the pro-slavery forces would use violence and any other means to ensure that Kansas became a slavery state (and I am happy to report that they failed).
Brown was not a great military leader, that much I know now. His most successful battle, here in Osawatomie, involved shooting at raiders from the trees, outnumbered 7 to 1, but his defense ultimately failed, he retreated, and Osawatomie was sacked and burned. So his greatest success was a failure.
In America, we like a winner, and when it comes to miltiary action, Brown was not a winner. But I learned today that as an intellectual, he was a man who was willing to take action when few others would. John Brown not only believed and espoused the abolitionist philosophy. He was determined to take action.
Reading a famous bit of Brown’s writing made me realize that he was no madman, but an idealist willing to take any action necessary to support his ideals. He was no blood thirsty killer either. In this newspaper column that was widely reprinted, he compares the public response to the rounding up and summary execution-style shooting of then men from the Lawerence area for being Free State supporters to his freeing of 11 slaves and the death of one slave owner. Read John Brown’s “Parallels” and tell me that those actions speak of an unhinged person. The slander against his name and his cause existed even then, and have only continued to this day.
It was a quote from Fredrick Douglass, a black leader from the time, that finally, irrevocably changed my opinion of the man who many claim started the Civil War:
“Did John Brown fail? John Brown began the war that ended American slavery and made this a free Republic. His zeal in the cause of freedom was infinitely superior to mine. Mine was as the taper light; his was as the burning sun. I could live for the slave; John Brown could die for him.”
Ordinarily we have the upmost respect in the U.S. for those willing to die for freedom. And yet somehow, I learned from the educational system that John Brown was a mentally unbalanced fool who failed at everything he did. Because, I think, more than we like someone who is committed to pure ideals, we hate a loser.
John Brown was no failure. He did not live to see the impact of his actions take hold on the country, but take hold they did. Perhaps we can attribute his actions as the cause of the War, at least, one of many. A horrible war, but necessary, I believe, to begin the long and ongoing process of securing the words and spirit of our Constitution and Bill of Rights. John Brown saw that, and he gave his life for it. He has nothing but my profound respect.
Now when I look at the photographs and at the famous painting by John Steuart Curry, and I look into those eyes, I do not see the madness that was once suggested. I look into those eyes and a see a fierce determination to truth and equality. It should only look like madness to those who oppose such things. It is a stare that should strike fear straight into the hearts of bigots and racists everywhere to this day.
