Tales Of Men & Women  by Stone Riley                     www.stoneriley.com                     Website Edition © 2007 by Stone Riley, all rights reserved

an historical essay

There's an old song from a hundred and forty years ago, from the American Civil War.  It goes:

John Brown.  The Union soldiers in the Civil War used to sing that song and after a couple years of the war they really took his great cause to their hearts – abolition of human slavery – and they took him as a hero of their struggle.

Maybe you've heard that song and maybe you've heard about John Brown's raid on Harper's Ferry two years before the Civil War.  This was the town of Harper's Ferry in Virginia, and there were several rifle factories there and a U. S.  government weapons warehouse.  He got together a little private army, you see, a little company of white and black fighting men and led them to a battle at this town.  The idea was that their battle there would ignite a great slave rebellion throughout the South, that the people who were so horribly enslaved, so horribly oppressed would rise up at last, irresistibly, with the power of righteous justice, and finally strike their oppressors down.  Such a man was this John Brown.

Of course the battle failed.  Most of the little company holed up in a brick firehouse, took some prisoners, sent out word of their purposes and aims.  They were surrounded immediately by armed citizens and there ensued a shoot-out all that day and all the next.  By the evening of the second day all his fighting men were either captured or dead or helpless with wounds and finally the firehouse was stormed by a company of U. S.  Marines.  He himself was wounded but alive and within a few weeks they gave him a trial and hung him.

The slaves did not rise up.  They did not rise up for the same reason they had never risen up in large numbers: their so-called masters kept them utterly divided and disarmed and uninformed and brutalized.  Slave rebellions in the United States had always been very small and there were really very few.  American slavery was carefully crafted into such a fiercely cruel institution that rebellion was quite impossible.  Slaves were forbidden to read and write, forbidden to leave home without a pass, and so on and so on, and infractions were cruelly, barbarously, punished without any need of a judge and jury.  A typical slave uprising in America involved about five or ten people; they would be quickly caught and they would be either hung slowly or burned alive.  But John Brown somehow did not understand this.  John Brown was misled by divine visions, you see – visions from God, he thought – that misled him to a hopeless violent plan.  Something led him to be eager for an overwhelming war.

He was eager for war and war is horrible.  Let me tell you one fact about their raid on Harper's Ferry.  One little fact.  This is a fact that troubles me deeply.  The first person whom they killed that day was black.  He was a railroad man, out at his job in the wet foggy dawn, walking up alone along the tracks with a lantern.  By chance this colored railroad fellow come up on a place one of the raiders stood on guard and in the foggy half-light of that foggy dawn, that raider fellow shot him dead.  War is horrible.

But this John Brown fellow – by that time he was used to slaughter.  He was fifty-nine by then and he had been at war by then four years already out in Kansas.  "Bleeding Kansas" they called it in his time.  It was a burning question at that time whether slavery or abolition would be the law in Kansas.  There was supposed to be a vote someday among the white settlers there to decide the question.  And as a result of that, certain people hired in bands of murderous thugs to purge the territory, to drive out anyone who might vote for abolition.  The pro-freedom settlers resisted.  And so there was this war back and forth between pro-slavery settlements and pro-freedom settlements, this little civil war in Kansas for several years before the great Civil War engulfed the whole nation.  It was a time of little merciless slaughters from town to town back and forth.  And after one of his sons was murdered, John Brown stood up as the chief commander of the abolition side in Bleeding Kansas.

So what kind of man was this that high ideals and the brutality of others led into brutality himself?  Well, in part, to some degree certainly he was insane.  His mother and grandmother and others had gone mad.  And in part he was extremely cruel.  I mean that he was thoughtless of all others.  He was intolerant, tyrannical and especially hard on his own sons sometimes.  In that firehouse, when one of his sons lay on the floor dying and moaning, Brown told the young man that he ought to just get it done with and shut up.  To his own son he said that.  He was fanatic, given to long fits of obsession when nothing mattered to him but some shining goal.  His mind was fixed on bright ideals and yet he was thoughtless of people and that is the essential definition of human cruelty, is it not?

He was not like Lincoln.  Father Abraham's old soul was wrought with anguish as Brown's was not.  Lincoln, when he was chief commander in his turn, spoke many times about his horror and anguish.  One particular thing sticks in my mind; Lincoln said this to a friend one time: he said, "Here I am a man without the heart to wring a chicken's neck ordering thousands of men to their graves!"  Never did John Brown repent in such a way.  He made a fine speech when they sentenced him to hang in which he only repented of his failure.

There in that courtroom in Virginia where they tried him, standing up to give his final word despite his bleeding wound, John Brown said this: "Now if it be deemed necessary that I forfeit my life for the furtherance of justice – I say, let it be done!"  And waiting in jail for the gallows to be built and the rope to be slung he wrote several letters, one of them saying: "[I have always been] delighted with the doctrine that all men are created equal and the Savior's command 'Love thy neighbor as thyself.' Rather than have the doctrine fail .  .  .  it would be better that a whole generation, men, women and children, should die a violent death!"  Then in the final note he handed to the jailer: "I am now quite certain that the crimes of this guilty land will never be purged away but with blood.  I had vainly flattered myself that without much bloodshed it might be done."

So, what are we to think of him?  He was violent, self-righteous and cruel.  He was ridden by madness.  But still .  .  .  but still .  .  .  John Brown fought against human slavery.  And he fought it with endless courage.  And he gave up everything a human being can have in this world for the fight.