"He Was Not A Bigoted Man"

Fergus M. Bordewich, of whom I had never heard and from whom I never expect to hear again, writes in Smithsonian magazine (Oct. 2009) that John Brown, abolitionist, was effectively a living saint who straddled modernity and age-old vengeance traditions and led the United States into the only just war in its history through the deft use of language, symbolism, action, and his own personal, god-like powers. Perhaps I overstate Bordewich's case somewhat. However, he quotes liberally David S. Reynolds, whose biography of John Brown is still the most asinine thing ever put to paper by a cultural studies nitwit, and so I don't trust Bordewich to tell me anything about Brown that I couldn't get from the slurrings of an idiot.

To take Brown as a revolutionary figure is fine. He was certainly that; but in a nation that rather frowns upon revolutionaries outside Washington & Friends, it is curious how often we are asked to re-examine John Brown's insane actions and lend them our approval.

In Bordewich's hands, you might almost believe that Brown was our greatest orator (Reynolds thinks the functionally illiterate Brown was our greatest author!) and hero, the symbolic leader of the free nation.

Or, you can go to the historical record.

The raid on Harper's Ferry was not Brown's signature moment, though his harebrained fans seem to think so. This is because Harper's Ferry was two debacles in one, the second being the ineptitude of the attempt by a young Robert E. Lee to dislodge Brown and his supporters from the armory. This comedy of violence masks the utter bankruptcy of Brown's "plan," to raise a slave army, and his own use of barbaric violence against anyone he believe to be his ideological opponent. "Ideological opposition" is, in fact, the key to understanding Brown. He didn't so much challenge slavery or wage war on the institution, as he did on people who agreed with the institution -- quite literally doing what I have threatened to do many times: take a club and go out in the streets and beat the other side's supporters to death. I understand the impulse, but I also know that Republicans (in my case) aren't solely defined by the things about the GOP that piss me off. Do I think Republicans are bad people? Sure. Do I think they waste their brains and talents on abortive political efforts? You bet. But do I hold the rank-and-file responsible for the leadership and traditions of the entire party, or do I hold the leaders and traditions of the party responsible? In other words, am I an intelligent political actor operating within a culture or am I a barbarian?

The visceral, disorienting experiences that can dislodge a subject from his place within a polity make for interesting studies. Brown's experiences are no exception. But don't make him the hero he cannot be; murderers aren't "controversial," their places in history aren't so "disputed" that we have to make fools of ourselves pretending to weigh the "cause" against what really happened. John Brown was a crackpot -- a perfect analog for Conrad's Kurtz, gone seemingly "mad" in his clumsy lunge at primitivity and a certain kind of freedom; truly mad, though, in all the terms that matter to thinking, political beings. A little off-point, of course, as an observation since (and Conrad's readers, Coppola's viewers, and Brown's acolytes always forget this) Kurtz/Brown isn't the most important, or even interesting, character in the story. The Africans are the objects of fascination and the impetus for madness.

"What are they going to say when he's gone, that he was a kind man? That he was a wise man?" They wouldn't say it about Kurtz and no one should be saying it about Brown, another man without a country intellectually, morally, and by his choice.

Brown was compelled to launch his bloody career as a terrorist by the "sacking of Lawrence, Kansas," an event where perhaps a thousand supporters of slavery in the territory attacked Lawrence, destroyed the anti-slavery newspapers, burned down the governor's house, and almost got away without killing anyone, until a piece of falling stone struck and killed an anti-slavery man who was apparently standing right next to a collapsing building.

The fact that no pro-slavery person had actually killed anyone in Lawrence made no difference to Brown, who became further enraged when Preston Brooks beat Charles Sumner (though recent work suggests strongly that Sumner, no fool at political theater, exaggerated his injuries for months in order to keep abolitionists at a fever pitch) and assembled his own small posse, including four of his sons, to get revenge on...well, somebody.

During the late night of May 24, 1856, the lynching party made its way to the Pottawatomie creek area, forced its way into the homes of three known or suspected advocates of slavery (not slave owners, mind you, just people who agreed with the totally legal practice of owning slaves), removed five adult men, and hacked them to death with swords, in at least one case in full view of the man's family. Just swell! For this brave action, as David S. Reynolds and Fergus Bordewich, among many Brown cheerleaders, will tell you, our hero was vilified and treated like a common criminal! Jesus wept!

Becoming a posthumous American hero apparently depends entirely upon the declining intelligence of historians and pop writers approximately 150 years after one's demise. You need not be consistent, or even rational. Your cause need not have focus, structure, or bear any resemblance to the accepted norms of protest -- even extreme protest -- of the dominant culture. One may apparently absent oneself from that culture, at any time, declare oneself a prodigy and literally hack one's opponents to death for espousing an idea in support of a lawful behavior, regardless of whether said victims -- I mean, opponents -- act on that support, and one will be transformed into a crusader for the justice of God and man, the inducer of any subsequent event (like a Civil War) that settles the issue that, in hindsight, clearly justified murder, and the originator of all good things remotely related (like the Civil Rights Movement). Basically, everyone since John Brown has done jack shit. It was him all along!

Or, reasonable people might wish to begin drawing some boundaries with the worship of America's most historical terrorist. John Brown's cause, as ragged and sloppy as it was in his hands, was just. But he was not. He was a murderer and a psychopath whose hate for something too big for his mind to comprehend was so debilitating that he attacked only its most junior, albeit accessible, minions. Brown was a crazed hunter whose psychic breakup not only drove him into the mouth of a tiger, but caused him to hold human life so cheaply that he ensured all his followers were eaten up, too.

And yet, the editor of Smithsonian: "For his part, Bordewich came away from the story surprised by Brown's personal tolerance: 'That is to say, he had among his friends and followers people of various religious persuasions, as well as atheists and agnostics. He hated slavery, but he was not a bigoted man.'" But naturally, one is always driven to cold-blooded murder by something other than bigotry. Great fucking God.