Was John Brown's violence justified because it began the "war that ended slavery?"
That was the great Frederick Douglass's take on it. Brown's deadly raid on the Harpers Ferry Arsenal in October 1859, presents an issue of "conscientious lawbreaking" that still we as a nation struggle with according to Drew Gilpin Faust, author and Harvard past president. Writing in the December, 2023 Atlantic article. she observes,"...as a nation, we have not figured out what violence we will condemn and what we will celebrate." "The rule of law..." (for example, Supreme Court gun rulings, and gun-favoring legislation) "...seems historically and inextricably enmeshed in the tolerance - even the encouragement - of violence."
Just a refresher...
John Brown massacred pro-slavery people during the Bloody Kansas fight in 1856, over whether it would be a slave or free state. And then, with financial support from the Secret Society of Six, attacked the U.S. Arsenal at Harpers Ferry. He believed hundreds of slaves would come out and use the rifles to head south and begin enlisting others in their quest for freedom. Instead, ten of his own men died trying to hold the arsenal, others were imprisoned, and Brown was caught and hung.
What's really interesting is who those six were that financed him. Radicalized white abolitionists, five Boston Brahmins, all well educated, of good families, either men of means or influential fundraisers. They went from resisting the fugitive slave law to attraction to Brown's extremism. One, Thomas Higginson, was a Harvard Divinity preacher who reflected on what a duty to morality demands when "law and order" stand on "the wrong side of right and justice." He sent everything from rifles to a cannon to Kansas. These men regarded Brown as the instrument of "necessary violence."
Another important figure that helped to pay for the raid was Mary Ellen Pleasent. She donated $30,000 (equivalent to $1.1 million in 2023), saying it was the "most important and significant act of her life". Estimates are that at least eighty people knew about Brown's planned raid in advance, although Brown did not reveal his total plan to anyone.
Jacob Lawrence depicts John Brown entreating Frederick Douglass to support the raid, but he chose not to because he believed it would fail.
Gilpin states that "Violence is at the heart of our national mythology", from the American revolution through the Civil War. Douglass saw slavery as violence and that the purpose of violence mattered, calling it justified "when all other means have failed, and then there is a "thing worse than" violence that makes it necessary.
Douglass and W.E.B. Dubois held Brown in high esteem and acknowledged his contributions, as have other black rights advocates down through the years.
Notably, Martin Luther King, Jr., was silent on John Brown.
Barack Obama wrote in "The Audacity of Hope," that "Brown's willingness to spill blood" showed that "deliberation alone" would not end slavery. "Pragmatism can sometimes be moral cowardice."
Gilpin concludes her article: "A deep-seated ambivalence about violence defines us still."
In my book Faith on the Mall, we cross paths with the Secret six
Charles Sumner, the great anti-slavery Senator from Massachusetts, who figures prominently in my novel, knew some of the six, as friends and colleagues. He keeps his distance though from funding the raid, as did his colleague Douglass.
My character Frank and his family had their choices too
Frank's uncle and grandfather were both station masters in the Underground Railroad. But Frank went a step further and defied the law by organizing the flight of slaves from Seneca, Maryland, to Washington City on his uncle's C & O canal boat. When pursued by a slave owner, violence ensues. The Civil War was upon them and Frank made his moral choice and stepped into violence on his own, before enlisting in the sanctioned violence of the Civil War.