John Brown madman or hero?

JOHN BROWN: VISIONARY ANGEL OR CRAZY TERRORIST?

John Brown is arguably the man who started the Civil War with his failed raid on HARPER’S FERRY, VIRGINIA in 1859 to start of “slave insurrection.” Previous to this Brown and his sons successfully fought forces fighting to turn Kansas and Nebraska into slave states. At one point he and his sons hacked 5 pro-slavery men to death with swords. He started integrated communities in upstate New York and was planning to do the same elsewhere. He was active in the underground railroad. Intensely religious, some thought him a maniac and a man with “Christ-like” fantasies to become a martyr.

In 1856, three years before his celebrated raid on Harpers Ferry, John Brown, with four of his sons and three others, dragged five unarmed men and boys from their homes along Kansas’s Pottawatomie Creek and hacked and dismembered their bodies as if they were cattle being butchered in a stockyard. Two years later, Brown led a raid into Missouri, where he and his followers killed a planter and freed eleven slaves. Brown’s party also absconded with wagons, mules, harnesses, and horses—a pattern of plunder that Brown followed in other forays. During his 1859 raid on Harpers Ferry, seventeen people died. The first was a black railroad baggage handler; others shot and killed by Brown’s men included the town’s popular mayor and two townsfolk.

-Historian James C. Malin argued that Brown was little more than an indiscriminate murderer, swindler, and petty horse thief, who had little genuine interest in anti-slavery or in the rights of African Americans. 

- Historian Bruce Catton called him “unbalanced to the verge of outright madness”—and denounced his attack on Harpers Ferry as an act of treason.

-Marxist historian Herbert Aptheker, who argued that Brown’s rage against slavery grew out of his fury over market capitalism, which had reduced his family to poverty. In the 1960s a new generation of scholars viewed Brown as an uncompromising idealist, a principled agitator, and a genuine revolutionary who envisioned an America free of racial prejudice.

-Historian David S. Reynolds wrote that at a time when white supremacy was the norm, Brown was one of a handful of white Americans who could interact with black Americans on a level of true intimacy and equality. Second, although some of Brown’s acts strike present-day observers as barbaric, these acts of violence were “ultimately noble,” because they were necessary to promote the cause of human liberty. Reynolds contends that the murders Brown and his sons committed in Kansas were designed to terrify the pro-slavery forces and make it clear that anti-slavery Kansas would not remain passive in the face of insults and threats. By placing the killings in the context of their times—which witnessed the murders of five anti-slavery Kansans; the burning and pillaging of Lawrence, Kansas, by “border ruffians” from Missouri; and the caning of Senator Charles Sumner in the US Capitol—Reynolds seeks to diminish Brown’s guilt.

-Brown was widely denounced in the North as a murderer, criminal, and madman, leading conservative unionists to feel confident that his actions would unite the nation against extremists, South and North. One wrote Brown was a “brutal, heartless and willful murderer.” But during the forty-five days between his capture and execution, he was transformed, in the eyes of thousands of northerners, from a brutal terrorist into a prophet and avenging angel. The deification of Brown as a heroic martyr outraged many white southerners, who felt that Brown expressed the North’s secret will: to foment race war in the South.

YOUR TURN: WAS JOHN BROWN A HERO OR A MANIAC? GIVE AT LEAST 3 REASONS FOR, 3 REASONS AGAINST AND THEN STATE YOUR OPINION AND GIVE 3 REASONS WHY?