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