January 2005 Archives

By Benson Bobrick
553 pages. Simon and Schuster. $15.95

One of the ironies of American history is the overwhelming scholarship and published books related to the War Between the States, while books on the War for American Independence have lagged far behind in number and quality. There are many reasons for the intense interest in the Civil War, including the wealth of primary sources available and the sense among some that the issues of that war have not been resolved. There are many people living today who knew Civil War veterans, an immediacy that is lacking in the distant war of the eighteenth century.

Until recently, good battle studies of the “Rev War” were hard to come by — those military engagements did not capture the imagination in the same way as Gettysburg or Shiloh. In the last fifteen years, however, excellent works on battles such as Lexington and Concord, Saratoga, the Cowpens, and the battles around New York City have shed new light on the personalities and combat in the fight for independence.

Just as there has been a dearth of work on the battles of independence, so too have there been few good narrative histories of the entire conflict, books that capture the imagination and give the reader the accents of command and the smell of powder. I have always appreciated and enjoyed Redcoats and Rebels by Christopher Hibbert which presents the War for American Independence through British eyes. Several other excellent studies have emerged in the ’90s and more recently. One of the best is Angel in the Whirlwind: The Triumph of the American Revolution by Benson Bobrick, who dedicated this work to his ancestors who fought on both sides in the conflict.

The author’s previous books provide little indication of an interest in the American “Revolution,” but his other works were not a “hearkening to the voice of my own ancestral heritage.” Professor Bobrick’s forebears fought and died on both sides in the war, including men of English, Dutch, and Huguenot ancestry. He hopes his loyalist fathers will “forgive my own patriot bias.” The author’s diverse and contentious ancestors reflected what historians of the conflict have long known — that Americans were sharply divided — perhaps one third staunchly loyal to the crown, one third committed to independence, and one third (in the beginning) neutral.

In a chapter entitled “Nabour Against Nabour,” the conflict is described as more of civil war than a revolution; that is “there was no attempt to overturn the existing social order or to effect a radical redistribution of wealth and opportunity; nor as a colonial rebellion did it involve a subject people of different ethnic stock asserting its national identity against an alien imperial power.” The correspondence of high ranking British officers indicates that they assumed that the majority of Americans were on their side through most of the war. Many families were split down the middle.

The author builds a solid summary of colonial history before launching into the formation of a new government and war in 1775-76. He describes the social and cultural variations among Americans of the period, especially their religious diversity. By the 1750s, “at least 14 different languages were spoken on the streets of New York and at a tavern in Philadelphia, one Scottish visitor found himself in ‘very mixed company ... there were Scots, English, Dutch, Germans, and Irish; there were Roman Catholics, Churchmen, Presbyterians, Quakers, Newlightmen, Methodists, Seventhday men, Moravians, Anabaptists, and one Jew.’” The main topic of conversation was politics except for the Quakers, who were arguing about the price of flour!

He asserts that among the most important forces of the century was the Great Awakening which “helped bind Americans together with a shared sense of their spirituality as a people and, perhaps ‘prepared them’ in the words of one historian, ‘for the coming ordeal of sacrifice and war.’”

Bobrick follows the traditional paths of interpretation, citing the various tyrannies by the English government against the colonies, and the variety of ways the colonists resisted. He tells both the story of the hot-heads and malcontents of Boston and the conservative and restrained geniuses of the Continental Congress. He stresses the constitutional nature of the founders’ thinking and rhetoric but includes the passion of their resistance:

After Congress disbanded, John Adams took Patrick Henry aside and told him he thought all their “resolves, declarations of rights, enumeration of wrongs, petitions, remonstrances, and addresses, associations, and non-importation agreements ... would be but waste paper in England.” Henry agreed and said the best they could hope for was that their efforts might help sway English public opinion to their side. Adams then rather daringly showed Henry a letter from a militia major in Massachusetts that concluded, “after all, we must fight.” At those words, according to Adams, Henry “raised his head, and with an energy and vehemence that I can never forget, broke out with: ‘By God, I am of that man’s mind!’”

And fight they did. The title of the book comes from a letter to Thomas Jefferson from John Page in which he wrote on July 20, 1776, “We know the Race is not to the swift nor the Battle to the Strong. Do you not think an Angel rides in the Whirlwind and directs this Storm.” Dr. Bobrick’s best writing is his narrative of the whirlwinds and storms of battle and central to his account are telling quotes from primary source records.

Of the storming of Breed’s Hill, where 1,600 Massachusetts and New Hampshire men, supplied with bullets made from the lead pipes of the organ at Christ’s Church, squared off with an equal number of British regulars, Bobrick writes:

[British General] Howe’s first and second assaults had been thrown back with equal slaughter, and he experienced, he said, ‘a moment that I never felt before’ as he glimpsed what failure might mean. With a kind of stunned simplicity, he said to his officers, ‘To be forced to give up Boston would, gentlemen, be very disagreeable to us all.’

Once more he formed his troops, brought cannon to bear so as to rake the inside of the rebel breastwork, and made one final effort to storm it as the British bombardment from the ships and batteries increased. Just at this juncture, American ammunition gave out. Most of the men had begun the battle with only about fifteen cartridges apiece. Many had only two or three left. As the British surged up the slope, they were met by two tremendous volleys. But then, as they came on, there was only scattered shot. Yet the defenders, with incredible bravery, kept up what fire they could until the British were upon them with bayonets. One British officer recalled, ‘There are few instances of regular troops defending a redoubt till the enemy were in the very ditch of it. And [yet] I myself saw several pop their heads up and fire even after some of our men were upon the berm.’

Such is the author’s descriptive power throughout the records of all the major battles and campaigns.

One of the most stunning and interesting battles of the war occurred on the North and South Carolina border at a place called King’s Mountain. The opposing armies were almost entirely American except for the Tory commander Major Patrick Ferguson and 150 British regulars. The patriot forces were “over-the-mountain-men,” a fierce and colorful band of buckskin-clad stalwarts with hunting knives and “the long Deckard rifle of the Kentucky frontier.” They were said to be able to “travel up to forty miles a day, and march and fight ... for forty-eight hours without food or rest.” The boastful British commander told his Loyalist troops that their chosen position could not be forced “by God Almighty and all the rebels out of hell.” Tempting Providence is always a bad idea. After two assaults were repulsed, “the patriots prevailed on the third try, at which Ferguson’s men, ‘who were falling very fast’ began crying for quarter:

The carnage on the crest had been great. ‘The dead lay in heaps on all sides,’ wrote Collins, ‘while the groans of the wounded were heard in every direction.... On examining the dead body of their great chief [Ferguson], it appeared that almost fifty rifles must have been leveled at him at the same time. Seven rifle balls had passed through his body, both of his arms were broken, and his hat and clothing were literally shot to pieces.’”

The author does not varnish the harshness of the war — after the battle, the patriots hanged nine Tory field officers in retaliation for the torture and execution of forty-one American prisoners at Augusta and Fort Ninety-Six. War is a harsh business and this one saw its share of hard men on both sides.

The book does not end at Yorktown. Two more years of conflict and negotiation ensued until the Treaty of Paris. George Washington remains a central figure throughout the narrative, from his dealings with Congress and the Conway Cabal to the hardships of Valley Forge and the terrible and disappointing defeats on the battlefield. Through it all, one looks for the man to falter, lose faith, or resign his command. George Washington defies deconstruction or revision. He still towers above his contemporaries, a man of honor, courage, perseverance, and loyalty. His ability to keep his dispirited and disgruntled army in the field, win small victories, and display unflagging confidence in the cause made him the master of command, never equaled. Angel in the Whirlwind only increases admiration for the “father of his country” and rekindles an appreciation for the sacrifices all the founders made to recreate and preserve constitutional government. It was not a revolution but a bid to preserve historic liberties and cast them in the unique setting of a free Republic.

Reviewed by William Potter

Posted on January 25, 2005 | Permalink

By Lt. Carey H. Cash, Chaplain Serving with the U.S. Marines
242 pages. Thomas Nelson. $20.00.

In April of 2003, the 1^st Battalion, 5^th Marine Regiment rode, strode, and mowed into downtown Baghdad to capture Saddam Hussein’s Palace. Bullets and grenades came at them in sheets, but remarkably few Americans were killed. Almost miraculously, the marines fought their way through ambushes and total confusion to seize the palace. Even more amazingly, at the end of the combat, those same marines gave thanks and praise to God for His protection. That thanksgiving was not merely foxhole piety; many of those American soldiers had come to faith in Christ in the previous six months. The author of this book, Chaplain Carey Cash, had witnessed a remarkable spiritual awakening in his battalion, beginning in the desert training in the United States and continuing unabated into the deserts of Iraq. This is a story of the saving grace of God in the midst of bitter warfare and seems just as authentic as the well-known record of the conversions to Christ in the armies during the American Civil War.

The military chaplaincy has a long and storied history in our nation. Pastors accompanied the militias as chaplains in colonial wars and more than two hundred served in the American armies during the War for Independence. President George Washington awarded the first permanent chaplaincy commission in the United States Army in 1791. Chaplains accompanied United States troops in the War with Mexico. Many hundreds filled the regimental chaplaincies during the War Between the States and several books have been written about those army pastors who compiled a remarkable record of faithful service. Many souls were brought into God’s kingdom through the gospel ministry of the chaplains, both North and South.

Today, every branch of the United States armed forces contains chaplains, but the historic Protestant, Roman Catholic, and Jewish “faiths” have been joined in recent years by Muslim clerics. The Protestant chaplains fill quotas of “liturgical” or “non-liturgical” denominations. Carey Cash joined the Marines as a “non-liturgical” Baptist chaplain.

The title of this book is taken from the 23^rd Psalm, a most appropriate hymn for the Christian soldier. Whether one is opposed to the war in Iraq or not, the fact remains that the United States is at war in the Middle East and our sons (and most regrettably some daughters) have been called upon to fight and die there. God’s ways are still not our ways and the dark providence of war has proven a fertile spiritual ground for the extension of His kingdom.

The son of a decorated combat pilot from the Vietnam War, and himself a graduate of the Citadel, a college distinguished by its strict military training and the alma mater of many military heroes of the United States, Carey Cash realized an intertwining “desire to serve the Lord and a desire to serve my country.” His active duty navy chaplain father-in-law encouraged him to apply for the naval chaplaincy program. Fully supported by his wife and five children, Chaplain Cash overcame debilitating physical problems and received his commission as a marine chaplain.

After rigorous training in the western United States, Cash’s Marine battalion embarked for forty days of desert training in Kuwait. The chaplains took every opportunity to preach and teach and Cash records that, by the end of six weeks in the Kuwaiti desert, 120 men were involved in Bible studies, fifty-six from Alpha Company, and forty-nine men were baptized as new Christians, thirty-seven from Alpha Company. “The men who responded came from all walks of life, from every racial and socio-economic background, from every educational level. But they shared one thing in common — a desire to know the peace and assurance of personal relationship with God.”

Lieutenant Cash includes excerpts from letters written to the men in the field from Christians at home, recounting the earnest and faithful prayers for their safety and thankfulness for their willingness to put their lives on the line. He reaffirms time and again the importance of prayer for the American warriors in combat and for the efficacy of God’s sovereign grace for their salvation.

Chaplain Cash recounts the chaos and deadly realities for the men at the sharp end of war, but through it all, the nearness of God to those whom He would be pleased to save for eternity. The War in Iraq has taken on new dimensions and controversies since the initial fight for Baghdad in April 2003 and the 5^th Marines have been in more sharp fights, the latest in the city of Fallujah. What hasn’t changed is the power of God to penetrate even the fog of war to reach the hearts of men.

Reviewed by William Potter

Posted on January 13, 2005 | Permalink

By Merrill D. Peterson
172 pages. University of Virginia. $23.95.

Conspiracy is a sinister word and one that engenders strong negative reactions when heard in a news broadcast or a courtroom. The term evokes a sense of evil and malice, secrecy and injustice. There occurred in American history a conspiracy that today is widely applauded and admired and to which several shrines have been dedicated. Hostages were taken, people were murdered, and civil insurrection attempted. The leader of the conspiracy was nationally known for committing grisly murders in another state and already had a price on his head levied by the President of the United States himself.

The revolution failed, the ringleader and several of his gang were captured, tried for treason, and hanged. In response, flags were flown at half-mast in some places and a prominent New England intellectual intoned, in pious prose, that the leader of the revolt had “made the gibbet as glorious as the cross.” The martyr to revolution and mayhem was, of course, John Brown, who tried to inspire a slave rebellion at Harpers Ferry, Virginia in 1859. As in most such plots gone awry, the authorities soon discovered that the killers had been financed by wealthy co-conspirators who lived far from the scene of action and hoped to remain secure in their anonymity, not unlike in today’s terrorist plots.

There have been several excellent biographies of John Brown and the best biographies of them, in my opinion, examine his life within the context of the conspiracy and motivating ideology. Ironically, two of the best works have similar titles: John Brown and the Secret Six by James Renahan and The Secret Six by Otto Scott. In 2002, the highly respected University of Virginia scholar, Merrill D. Peterson, added to the John Brown canon with the book under review here, John Brown: The Legend Revisited. As in Professor Peterson’s best-known books on Thomas Jefferson (1970) and Abraham Lincoln (1992), the theme of this work is how John Brown has been remembered, in fact, celebrated, by Americans “in art, literature, and journalism.” It is a story of how “the flaming abolitionist ... has shed some of the infamy ... to become a symbol of American idealism and fervor to activists along the political spectrum [and how] in the civil rights battles of the Twentieth Century, Brown became a hero to African Americans.” How and why could such a cold-eyed killer and revolutionary achieve the apotheosis accorded him today? The answers are the essence of this book.

John Brown was born in Connecticut at the turn of the nineteenth century and both his father and grandfather were veterans of the War for Independence. Raised in Ohio, Brown learned the Bible inside and out, though his education was otherwise haphazard. He tried his hand at many frontier crafts and started several businesses, all of which failed, leaving angry creditors on his trail. Married twice, he fathered twenty children, thirteen of whom lived to maturity. What turned this unsuccessful peripatetic farmer into a fiery and malevolent assassin was his hatred of slavery in the United States.

By 1859, the enslavement of Africans in North America was at least 175 years old. In 1808, Congress prohibited continued importation of slaves, but the institution itself remained legal in sixteen states, mostly south of the Mason-Dixon line. The acceptance of or mere toleration of slavery, where it already existed in America, still represented the overwhelming majority opinion both North and South until the 1850s. The expansion of slavery into the territories (and thus increased southern political power), however, was increasingly unpopular in the Northeast and Midwest, especially after the war with Mexico in 1848. One result of conflict over the possible creation of new states with legal slavery was the formation of sectional coalitions in Congress and turmoil in the majority Democratic party. Intra-party wrangling over slavery expansion subsided after various legislative compromises in 1820, 1850, and 1854.

That final act, designated the “Kansas-Nebraska Act” galvanized the anti-slavery movement in the north and brought to the historical stage both the Republican party and violent leaders of criminal gangs among whom emerged John Brown. As the Kansas territory struggled to become a state, anti-slavery forces contended for political control. Brown came to Kansas with six of his sons. They stole horses, and in response to pro-slavery raids on Lawrence, targeted several families known to have emigrated from Tennessee. In the middle of the night, Brown and his gang hacked to death several fathers and sons. Several other shootouts occurred with pursuing posses and one of his sons was killed.

Brown and his gang fled Kansas, turning up in New York and Massachusetts where a nationwide manhunt failed to track them down. Brown’s exploits came to the attention of a coterie of New England abolitionist intellectuals, including the popular radical Unitarian preachers Theodore Parker and Thomas Wentworth Higginson, who “wore the words treason, fanaticism, and infidelity as badges of honor.” Further support of Brown came from the largest property owner in the United States, Gerritt Smith, and author, educator, and scientist Franklin Sanborn who once said, “I am irresistibly drawn to the image of the South in flames.” The “secret six” was rounded out by millionaire Luther Stearns who founded an organization to kill U.S. marshals in Springfield, Massachusetts and gave Brown a credit line to buy weapons and recruit. Stearns was married to a millionaire’s daughter, Julia Ward, author of The Battle Hymn of the Republic.

John Brown and his backers seem to have given up on abolishing slavery through means pacific or political and turned to direct action. Gathering his cabal of killers about him, Brown moved on the Potomac River town of Harpers Ferry, Virginia with the intent of inspiring the slaves of Virginia to leave their farms and flee to the mountain kingdom of freedom that Brown envisioned for them. Ironically, the first man killed by the raiders was a free black man who worked for the railroad that ran through the town. When the slave revolt did not materialize, Brown’s troops seized hostages and barricaded themselves in the Harpers Ferry fire engine house.

Militias from surrounding areas kept them pinned down until the United States Marines arrived, commanded by Colonel Robert E. Lee. The barricaded position was stormed, and Brown and a number of the raiders were captured, a few escaped, and the rest were killed. A trial was held at the county seat of Charles Town, and Brown and fellow conspirators were convicted of treason against Virginia and shortly thereafter hanged. The historiographical saga of John Brown was only beginning.

Brown had turned his incarceration into a public-relations triumph among his followers in the north, and his martyrdom sparked hundreds of sermons the following Sunday in sympathetic churches. From Boston to Cleveland to Lawrence, came a swelling chorus of tolling bells, hymns of praise, minute salutes, and poetry of adoration. The philosophy that slavery was the greatest evil known to man and that its eradication by bloodshed was a noble deed, shocked and horrified many Northerners and all Southerners, eighty percent of whom were not slave holders. “The Northern salute upon the death of John Brown ... was met with astonishment and dismay in the South. In weighing the effects of Harpers Ferry on the southern mind, it is imperative to distinguish between the raid, which was a small affair, and the northern response to it, which roared like thunder across the South.”

The hero was buried in Elba, New York, but the eulogies and commemorations continued unabated. Busts were sculpted, plays were written and performed, a biography was penned by a prominent historian. A basic presupposition of old Brown lived on in the hearts of his admirers. Slavery was unmitigated evil, and any means to eradicate it, and if necessary, exterminate its perpetrators, should be pursued. The ends justify the means.

Leaders of the Republican Party distanced themselves from John Brown, as did a number of abolitionists of a more pacifist stripe. The United States Congress investigated the Secret Six, but no meaningful action was taken. But the die had been cast; with the conspirators in their graves and public opinion inflamed beyond redemption, the North and South went to war.

During the conflict, Brown’s memory was fondly remembered in a popular song entitled John Brown’s Body, the tune of which was borrowed by Julia Ward How for the The Battle Hymn of the Republic, a popular and violent patriotic marching song enjoyed by the northern troops and civilians alike. Among the freed slaves, John Brown’s memory assumed mythic proportions. Likened to various Old Testament prophets, especially Moses, songs were sung of his martyrdom and several fictional paintings of Brown kissing a black child on his way to the gallows, graced many a fireplace mantle.

Two sacred shrines were visited by thousands over the years following the war: his grave at Elba, which became a state park, and the engine house at Harpers Ferry where the revolutionary made his last stand. Today it is fully restored and interpreted with the reverence of a religious shrine by the National Park Service.

In 1877, ten thousand people attended the dedication of a monument to the fallen heroes of the “Battle of Oswatamie, Kansas, in which Brown participated with the Free State settlers. Governor Charles Robinson reminded the people of John Brown’s importance:

The soul of John Brown was the inspiration of the Union armies in the emancipation war, and it will be the inspiration of all men in the present and distant future who may revolt against tyranny and oppression.... To the superficial observer John Brown was a failure. So was Jesus of Nazareth. Both suffered ignominious death as traitors to the government, yet one is now hailed as the Savior of the world from sin, and the other of a race from bondage.

As the years passed in Kansas and the truth of Brown’s role in the Pottawatomie Massacre was confirmed and his influence in bringing about the war was increasingly recognized, historians in that state rose to challenge the martyrdom myth and declare Brown a murdering scoundrel. In the chapter entitled “The Kansas Imbroglio,” the author concludes that by the twentieth century, Brown’s soul was still marching on in glory in Kansas historiography.

Professional historians took varying opinions on John Brown himself, agreeing only that he was a “Puritan born out of time” and that he made a contribution to the coming of the War Between the States. A number of historical novels were written in the early twentieth century which played fast and loose with the facts, but in 1910 came, “the greatest American historical biography yet written,” the seven-hundred-page John Brown, 1800-1859: A Biography 50 Years After. The author, Oswald Garrison Villard, editor of the New York Post, interviewed survivors of the secret six, many Kansas immigrants, and members of Brown’s family. His research was nothing if not absolutely thorough. His admiration of Brown came through often, though he was critical of the Kansas massacre and of most of the accessories before the fact — the secret six.

By the middle of the twentieth century, historians’ opinions of John Brown had hardened. Revisionists challenged his heroic status and a few even decided that Brown was insane. As historians downplayed slavery’s importance as a cause of the war, and others who viewed the conflict as needlessly started by fanatical abolitionists and southern “fire-eaters,” so did Brown’s role diminish. “After the last of the children, Annie, died, the Brown industry, as far as there ever was one, came to depend on collectors, librarians, memorial associations, and, of course, authors and artists.”

As Brown’s star waned among historians, he was kept alive in popular memory by artists and sculptors. Several murals and statues were dedicated to him in Kansas, Connecticut, and New York during the mid-century. As the centennial of the war approached, Brown’s memory was celebrated and burnished only by a few black writers like Langston Hughes and Herbert Aptheker, who “wrote within the Marxist paradigm.”

Throughout the celebrations of the centennial, John Brown remained the “bloodthirsty fanatic.” As Bruce Catton observed, “John Brown was a brutal murderer if there ever was one ... unbalanced to the point of outright madness, he had touched a profound moral issue, an issue that ran so deep that he took on a strange and moving dignity when he stood on the scaffold.” Two favorable plays about the old conspirator, however, made it to Broadway during that period.

In the 1960s and ’70s, civil rights activists wrote admiringly of Brown, “the blackest white man anyone had ever known,” and his name was often linked with Abraham Lincoln. Among the more radical civil rights crowd, Lincoln was a white supremacist but Brown truly embraced racial equality. Both Malcolm X and H. Rap Brown invoked Brown’s name. “Leonard Jeffries once made bold to propose ‘the John Brown test’ to identify true friends among white people.” Peterson observes that Martin Luther King rarely mentioned Brown in his civic discourse “doubtless owing to his deep commitment to nonviolence.” He also suggests “his [King’s] commitment apparently did not bar the violence of the Civil War, however.” Nonetheless, with the invoking of John Brown’s name and legacy in the civil rights decade, a spate of scholarly reappraisals of the martyr were published in the 1970s.

One historian attributed Brown’s ideas and actions to “his Calvinism and belief in predestination” (Stephan Oates). The second intoned that “warts and all, his story impresses me as an inspiring saga of what one human being ... [with] indomitable will to fight the devil ... can do to shake the national will” (Jules Abels). More plays, poetry, and historical novels have followed in the last three decades.

Peterson’s book concludes with the two-hundredth year celebrations of John Brown’s birth in 2000. The Public Broadcasting System (PBS) gave the old radical “more exposure to the American public than he ever had through the pages of a book” with a ninety-minute primetime documentary entitled John Brown’s Holy War. He was described as a “radical reformer ‘fighting for the American creed’ in the spirit of Thomas Jefferson.” Today, one can join the annual pilgrimage to John Brown’s grave in North Elba, New York on John Brown Day, May 9.

Merrill Peterson’s excellent overview of the legend of John Brown ought not leave the reader with moral ambiguity concerning murder and revolution. The assumed justice or nobility of one’s cause does not create some kind of moral symmetry to commit evil deeds. John Brown was part of a larger historical movement of which he was hardly aware. Historian Otto Scott best summarized the nature of the radicalism exhibited by John Brown and his supporters:

In the late 1850’s a new type of political assassin appeared in the United States. He did not murder the mighty — but the obscure. He did not pursue officials, or leaders, or persons in the public eye; he murdered at random, among the innocent. Yet his purposes were the same as those of his classic predecessors: to force the nation into a new political pattern by creating terror.

Unlike those who murdered innocent people in the past, this new type of assassin was praised by many journalists and hailed by some as a hero of the people. His murders were blended, by skillful propaganda, into praises of the cause he claimed to represent and this, too, was a departure from standards of judgment that had distinguished civilization from barbarity throughout the centuries.

The Abolitionism of the Secret Six had subsumed all other “reforms” that had previously captivated the imaginations of many like-minded Americans, but it also portended continuing revolution in other movements, and is still with us today. Otto Scott, in The Secret Six, reminds us why we ought to study history in general and John Brown in particular:

The movement continued. It had channeled all its reforming efforts before the war against slavery; afterward it branched into prohibition, trade unionism, socialism, anarchism, and other causes.... They were, of course, fools. Their rejection of the accumulated wisdom of the human race led them to repeat ancient follies, and inspire others down grisly paths they considered noble.... The movement for which he became a symbol has not yet ended; it continues to imperil religion and confuse millions. As in the case of John Brown and Secret Six, its rhetoric is lofty and its methods base, but — despite noisy triumphs — its destiny is doomed by its dead fruit.

Reviewed by William Potter

Posted on January 11, 2005 | Permalink

By Tom Hiney
367 pages. Atlantic Monthly Press. $25.00.
Available for Purchase from VisionForum.com

Imagine leaving home, perhaps alone, traveling by boat across dangerous seas, to a distant country filled with tribal people of alien culture, undecipherable language, and violent temperament. You are delivered to the foreign shore by a ship that might return to check on you in a few years or it might never return. You can’t send letters home, the natives do not accept your national currency, and the endemic diseases of the place have no cure. Welcome to the missionary world of The London Missionary Society (LMS) of the nineteenth century.

The stories of many of those missionaries are known to us because of the curiosity of a British historian who providentially explored an abandoned pile of documents sticking out of a box near the British Museum in London. Thomas Hiney discovered the discarded records of the LMS among which were the remarkable diaries of two LMS missionaries who had been sent on an amazing journey to find out what happened to the men and women of the Society who had been commissioned to take the Gospel to foreign lands from 1792 to 1800.

Mr. Hiney’s research resulted in the publication of On the Missionary Trail: A Journey through Polynesia, Asia, and Africa with the London Missionary Society, published in 2000. The two men who made the journey found thousands upon thousands of Christian converts across Polynesia and the other lands of their travels. They also found to their horror that, in Australia, a government-approved pastor of the Anglican Church had condoned the slaughter of aboriginal people and that the progress of the gospel was virtually non-existent. In that regard, author Hiney quotes the convicting comment of Mahatma Gandhi that, “all the world would be Christian, were not Christians so unlike their Christ.”

The London Missionary Society was founded in 1792 after an English indigo-planter and clandestine missionary in India named William Carey wrote to a friend in England of the perishing millions in Asia, strangers to the Gospel of Christ. He believed a non-denominational missionary society should be formed to send preachers to foreign fields. Carey’s friends advertised for people willing to carry the Gospel to unreached people in places as far apart as the Kalahari desert, the South Sea Islands, China, and Australia. Dozens of missionaries were commissioned and sent out from about 1794 to 1800.

Among the dedicated and sometimes eccentric missionaries deputized by the Society were the German William Ringeltraub who became the first post-Reformation Christian to carry the Gospel to Southern India, the Welshman David Jones who sailed to the warring tribes of Madagascar, and the brilliant Robert Morrison of Newcastle who spent most of his time in China in disguise while he translated the New Testament into Mandarin. Their stories and many more are among the records uncovered by Tom Hiney.

The failure of the LMS to communicate with their missionaries was caused by the Napoleonic Wars which cut off all contact with foreign fields. The British and French navies squared off for fifteen years and fought naval engagements on the oceans of the world. With the French emperor exiled finally to the Island of Elba, peace returned and normal world travel recommenced. In 1821, the LMS called upon two men who were willing to forsake all, pledge their lives and fortunes, and embark on a venture to contact and survey missionaries who had not been heard from for many years.

One recruit was a forty-four year old bachelor, George Bennett, a “stout and reserved Yorkshire philanthropist” who had been a founding member of the national Sunday School Union and a financial backer of the Society. He was a man in excellent health and of sound evangelical beliefs, but doubtful of his ability to rise to the task. The other man was forty-nine year old Daniel Tyerman, a pastor and widower of four years with four children at home. Both men accepted their commission and, with three other missionaries, set off on their remarkable voyage aboard the Tuscan.

In our own age, missionaries can travel to the remotest corners of the globe within several days and all the while maintain instant communication with anyone else on earth. We can hardly appreciate the agonizing travel conditions of the age of sail. What they hoped would be a two- or three-year trip consumed eight years of Bennett and Tyerman’s lives and one of them perished in the attempt. What those two men discovered in Tahiti, New Zealand, India, China, Oahu, and Madagascar trivializes any travelogue I have heretofore read. I am astounded by their bravery and fortitude and am surprised, though I ought not to be, by the extent of God’s kingdom in the earliest days of worldwide evangelical missionary enterprise.

Bennett and Tyerman visited remote mission stations around the world and were constantly surprised at what they found. They found in Tahiti, for instance, not only that many Tahitians had embraced the Christian faith and been educated in biblical truth by the missionaries, but that the natives had installed a Christian monarch. Even more astounding, the Christian Polynesians themselves had sent out missionaries to the Islands of Eimeo, Huahine, Raiatea, Tahaa, Bora-Bora, Maupiti, Tetaroa, Maiaoiti, Tubuai, Raivavae, and Rurutu, all of which now had growing Christian communities. Not only had the missionaries been blessed with new converts, they themselves had thrived as well. The deputation recorded the following about the Crook family, missionaries on Pape: “The Crooks had nine children, ‘yet the comfort of their habitation, the order of the indoors, and the behaving of every member of their family, reflect the highest credit on their prudence and economy.... But though we had perceived much admirable foresight managing affairs during the day, we still wondered where and how we were all to be lodged for the night. Without any bustle, and seemingly with little difficulty on the part of Mrs. Crook, sufficiently commodious berths were found for every one of us — thirty-two persons, young and old; and a peaceful night followed a gladsome day.’”

On the Missionary Trail wonderfully relates the great sacrifices Christian men and women were willing to suffer for the Savior, but it also reminds us that the arguments against bringing the Gospel of Christ to heathen people have not changed much in the last two centuries. LMS missionaries, for instance, were accused of “spoiling idyllic societies” since Christianity transformed those pagan cultures. In answer to those who feared that the missionaries would ruin the “happy islanders” who were “living in a state of nature ... and primitive simplicity,” Tyerman recorded the life of Hawaiian people before the triumph of the Gospel:

Among the worshipped idols in Hawaii had been the shark god, whose spirit was appeased by human sacrifice; the victims were carried on canoes by the priests to shark-infested places. Other gods were appeased in different ways. In 1804 Rihorih’s father had stopped at Oahu with 8,000 troops on his way to Kauai island. Yellow fever broke out among the king’s troops so ferociously that two-thirds of the men were wiped out in less than two weeks. The king consulted the priests at the marae of Wytiti, near Honolulu, and was told he should sacrifice three humans, 400 dogs, 400 coconuts and 400 bunches of plaintain. “Three men, who had been guilty of the enormous turpitude of eating cocoa-nuts with the old queen (the present kings mother), were accordingly seized and led to the marae. But there being yet three days before the offerings could be duly presented, the eyes of the victims were scooped out, the bones of their arms and legs were broken, and they were then deposited in a house to await the coup de grace on the day of sacrifice.... When the time for the sacrifice came, one of them was placed under the legs of the idol and other two were laid with hogs and fruit on the altar. They were beaten with clubs upon the shoulders till they died of the blows.”

The transforming power of the Gospel swept through the Hawaiian Islands and cannibalism disappeared. I suspect that some modern anthropologists who accept the view that all cultures and religions are basically the same and valuable to preserve, actually wish that the British, and later, American, missionaries had stayed home.

A disappointing tale is also borne out in the Bennett and Tyerman records. They found that the depraved behavior of British merchantmen, officials, and even occasional preachers who traded or ruled over Asian peoples had left behind a record of theft, rape, venereal disease, and death. We ought not to fall into the trap of calling all men of Western cultural heritage Christians. Many were not and brought disgrace upon themselves and their nations and further degradation to the natives. God has people among many tribes and nations and we have a faulty idea of the gospel if Christianity is assigned to one people carte blanche.

I would like to give this book an unqualified recommendation but, alas, a caution is in order. The author occasionally subjects the reader to his own commentary on the beliefs of Bennett and Tyerman and of all evangelical Christians of the nineteenth century. For example, he hopes to enlighten us with this little gem regarding archeology and geology: “Archeology would eventually destabilize the authority of Christianity in Europe as much as anything written by Darwin or the geologists, for in 1822 the world was still held to have come into being in 4004 BC.... The idea of a pre-human world was not considered, since dinosaur fossils were presumed to date back to the beginning of human existence. Subsequent discovery, in the century or so that followed, that dinosaur fossils were about eighty million years old and that the earth itself was much older would affect the credibility of the Christian Church, as each new discovery seemed to expose its former ignorance further. This would reach a pitch in 1961, with the uncovering of human fossils in Olduvai Gorge in Tanzania, dating to 1.7 million years earlier. Ironically, the site was discovered by an archeologist called Louis Leakey, who was the son of an English missionary in Kenya.”

We find, in this excerpt, the author revealing his own evolutionary presuppositions and imposing them on the reader. This is not the place to present all the arguments for the biblical view of the above subjects, but we must note the author’s intent to add occasional personal notes as explanations of the supposed ignorance of evangelical Christians of the centuries past. Little does he suspect that his own views are subject to demolition and that the missionaries of his narrative were absolutely correct.

On the Missionary Trail demonstrates once again that God’s ways are not our ways and His plan to redeem a people for His own has no national boundaries and is often past finding out. With this little book, though, we get a glimpse of a bit of His Kingdom in history, extended through the faithfulness of a handful of ordinary Christians who cared not for their own lives.

Posted on January 7, 2005 | Permalink

By Paul Johnson
1,104 pages. HarperCollins Perennial. $20.00.

There are few living historians with an encyclopedic frame of reference, a worldview which admits to the Christian roots of Western Civilization and is glad for it, and has an easily readable narrative writing style which is both crammed with facts and insights and full of wit. Such is the English historian Paul Johnson. This weighty tome adds to his growing canon of brilliant and sometimes controversial works, including Modern Times (1980), The Birth of the Modern (1990), A History of the Jews (1987), and others.

Dr. Johnson dispels, in his introduction, the myth that historians can remain neutral regarding their interpretation of the facts; they all have “opinions”:

“I do not seek, as some historians do, to conceal my opinions. They are there for all to see, and take account of or discount.... I have not bowed to current academic nostrums about nomenclature or accepted the fly-blown phylacteries of Political Correctness. So I do not acknowledge the existence of hyphenated Americans, or Native Americans or any other qualified kind. They are all Americans to me: black, white, red, brown, yellow, thrown together by fate in that swirling maelstrom of history which has produced the most remarkable people the world has ever seen. I love them and salute them, and this is their story.”

Historians, like everyone else, have a worldview and presuppositions that create the basis for all their judgments regarding the explanations for the who, what, where, when, and whys of the past. The Christian philosopher Rousas Rushdoony argued numerous times that if an historian (or anyone else) believes that man is just a random collocation of atoms with no soul, and that there is no creator-God who directs history through various providential means, his interpretations of events will ineluctably follow from those beliefs. Rushdoony’s mentor, Cornelius Van Til, rightly observed that non-Christian scholars (and everyone else) must, nevertheless, borrow from biblical truth and reality as revealed in the Scriptures in order to have meaning in the universe.

Paul Johnson is generally known as a more “conservative” scholar than most of his contemporaries, but his personal faith and its direct effect on his writings are neither discussed nor overtly stated in this work. His insights and interpretations, however, show that he recognizes that an evangelical and reformed Christian faith of the early founders and of many other Americans since that time, is central to understanding the American people and their history. While his definition of Calvinism is stereotypical and he fails to recognize the theological shifts and nuances of evangelical Christianity in the United States, he still views the influence of Christianity as seminal and pervasive.

For instance, he explores the lives of the Englishmen whose heroic actions in the sixteenth century made settlement in the seventeenth possible. He finds their personal beliefs central to their lives, as in the case of the prototypical naval warrior Sir Francis Drake:

Most of the Elizabethan seadogs were strict Protestants, usually Calvinists, who had strong religious motives for resisting Spanish dominance on the high seas and in the western hemisphere. Drake was typical of them: his family were victims of the papist persecution under Queen Mary, and Drake had been brought up in a Thames-side hulk in consequence, educated to thump the Bible and believe in double-predestination and to proselytize among the heathen and the benighted believers in Romish superstition. He held regular services on his ships, preached sermons to his men, and tried to convert his Spanish prisoners. Next to the Bible itself, his favorite book was Foxe’s Book of Martyrs.

Johnson follows all the threads of the English colonization of North America and time and again observes the common theme of the early founders:

There can be no doubt why they went to America. Among the leading spirits, those venturing out not in the hope of a quick profit but to create something new, valuable, and durable, the overwhelming thrust was religious. But their notions of religious truth and duty did not always agree, and this had its consequences in how they set about emigrating.

In the chapters on the nineteenth century, the author quotes the brilliant French observer of the Americans, Alexis de Tocqueville, whom he claims grasped the moral content of America. He quotes with approval “that most Americans regard religion to be indispensable to the maintenance of republican institutions” and the “fact that the government was minimal was a great source of moral strength.”

Paul Johnson takes to the “nationalist school” of interpretation of American history defined by historian Michael Lind as the belief that “all Americans, except for unacculturated immigrants and enclave minorities like the Amish and the Navajo, belong to a common extra-political cultural nation defined by language, culture, and customs.” At the heart of that culture is the Christian worldview brought from England and molded by the peculiar mix of Europeans who settled the thirteen colonies. Thus, according to Johnson, the first great American was not George Washington or Benjamin Franklin but John Winthrop, the Puritan governor of Massachusetts in the seventeenth century.

To even attempt a summary of such a magisterial tome would be foolish but for a few general observations. He views the Civil War as the “central event in American history” and attributes the dissolution of the union to disagreements over slavery, the tariff, railroad policy, and the nature of capitalism itself. He also calls the war “the most characteristic religious event in American history,” a comment rarely made by historians but one full of truth and insight, as Johnson clearly demonstrates in the text.

I believe the author’s strongest chapters are the ones on the twentieth century, the period about which he has written numerous times in articles and books. Professor Johnson even makes the important (dismal?) subject of economics intelligible and interesting. In his observations concerning the causes of the Great Depression and the American Presidents’ reaction to them seem right on the mark. His analyses of Franklin Roosevelt contrast sharply with the normal hagiography that characterizes most appraisals of FDR by American historians. He notes that FDR was a consummate and continuous liar and he strongly faults him for his moral failures and fateful errors in judgment. To site but one example, Johnson observes that “Roosevelt tended to give Stalin what he wished, thus making possible the immense satellite empire of Communist totalitarian states in eastern Europe which endured until the end of the 1980s” — not a new insight, but one which bears repeating.

There are a few factual errors, most of them forgivable given the fact that no British school he ever attended taught anything about the United States. The enormous amount of sound information is a tribute to his autodidactic genius. Professor Johnson occasionally cites the romantic peccadilloes of American presidents which, on the one hand shows their depraved character, but on the other tells us rather more than we care to know.

Historians often write within one genre of history: economic, military, political, intellectual, or cultural. Paul Johnson integrates them all and the reader will find that “his zesty, irreverent narratives teach more history to more people than all the post-modernist theorists, highbrow critics and dons put together” (Walter McDougal, Times Literary Supplement).

Reviewed by William Potter

Posted on January 4, 2005 | Permalink