John Brown was a militant American abolitionist who believed that slavery must be overthrown by force. He was instrumental in heightening sectional animosities in the months prior to the U.S. Civil War. In October 1859, he led an unsuccessful raid against the federal arsenal in Harpers Ferry, Virginia, hoping to spark a regional slave rebellion. The assault failed and Brown was captured, tried, and executed for treason on December 2, 1859. Considered a martyr to the antislavery cause, the myth of John Brown began shortly after his death, when abolitionists extolled him as an American saint. A long procession of biographies, poems, and novels has perpetuated the legend from 1860 down to the last half of the twentieth century.
A militant abolitionist, John Brown (1800–1859) led a doomed raid against the federal arsenal in Harpers Ferry, Virginia, on October 16, 1859. While Brown failed to spark the slave rebellion he had intended to foment, his capture and execution set the stage for the Civil War. (National Archives)
But the John Brown who launched ruthless military actions was not the character that would settle into popular American memory, for the search for a kindly and peaceful martyr had begun in earnest even before Brown’s execution. One particular myth vividly illustrates this scenario and underscores the cultural obstructions facing those who sought to pursue more revolutionary depictions of Brown. The abolitionist newspaper New York Tribune had assigned a special correspondent, Edward H. House, to cover Brown’s trial. On December 5, 1859, an article carrying House’s byline appeared in the Tribune’s account of an episode that occurred as Brown was being led from the jail to the wagon that would carry him to the gallows:
As he stepped out of the door, a black woman, with a little child in her arms, stood near his way. The twain were of the despised race for whose emancipation and elevation to the dignity of children of God he was about to lay down his life. His thought at that moment none can know except as his acts interpret them. He stopped for a moment in his course, stooped over, and with the tenderness of one whose love is as broad as the brotherhood of man kissed it affectionately. That mother will be proud of that mark of distinction of her offspring; and some day, when over the ashes of John Brown the temple of Virginia liberty is reared, she may join in the joyful song of praise which on that soil will be justice to his memory. (Seelye 1998, 357)
The passage was indeed dramatic, but it never took place; House was not even present for Brown’s execution. He had fled to Baltimore after his earlier dispatches prompted death threats. Henry S. Olcott, the Tribune’s Southern agricultural correspondent, invented the scene, and the story instantly gained credibility in the eyes of Brown’s followers. Some three weeks later, abolitionist poet John Greenleaf Whittier immortalized the apocryphal scene in verse. Whittier’s Brown of Osawatomie described the martyr on the way to his execution, when “a poor slave-mother with her little child” approached. Shirking off “the jeering ranks” Brown “kissed the negro’s child!” and in his “Christian’s sacrifice” Brown achieved his “generous purpose unstained with human blood!” Whittier’s florid poetry was not especially notable in the din of Northern eulogies, but he gave the kissing tale a staying power that contemporaries such as Emerson, Thoreau, and Melville never matched with their metaphorical flights. Whittier’s poem, distributed widely across the Northeast, provided yet additional substance to Brown’s saintly status.
However, in the competition for the most admiring compositions that followed Brown’s execution, none were more studied than those of James Redpath, one of Brown’s journalist friends. An antislavery activist, in many ways Redpath obsessed over his old companion, publicizing Brown’s name and cause along with his own. As soon as Brown was captured, Redpath began soliciting material for a biography at the suggestion of abolitionist publisher Eli Thayer. However, Redpath’s solicitations were not without bias, and his Public Life of Captain John Brown, the first original biography, began with three preeminent nineteenth-century personalities offering their thoughts. Ralph Waldo Emerson eulogized Brown as “the Saint … [who] will make the gallows glorious like the Cross.” Henry David Thoreau declared, “No man in America has ever stood up so persistently for the dignity of human nature.” Finally, Wendell Phillips, a brilliant orator and leading figure in New York’s Anti-Slavery Society, argued that it was unimportant “whether the old man succeeded in a worldly sense or not [because] he stood a representative of law, of government, of right, of justice, of religion, and they were pirates that gathered about him, and sought to wreak vengeance by taking his life.”
Redpath established a soaring tone for his biography. He presented Brown as an unparalleled Christ-like figure who exposed the hypocrisy and inhumanity of the South. Published just thirty days after Brown’s execution, Public Life was nothing if not a tirade against the slaveholding powers. Although the British De Witt Publishers rushed its The Life, Trial and Execution of Captain John Brown into print, this book was merely a hodgepodge of Harper’s lithographs, court transcripts, and unacknowledged reprints of Redpath’s Tribune columns. In truth, Redpath did aspire to a greater social purpose, and his vision of Brown was disseminated more widely than any other. Brown’s son, Salmon, declared that Redpath was the man above all others to write the life of his beloved father, while Brown’s widow, Mary, observed that since Redpath actually knew her husband, he would do him justice. Mary’s endorsement underscored the crucial distinction between Redpath’s biography and all of those that have since followed: personal acquaintance. Not only did Redpath meet Brown, but he also traveled and even fought alongside him during Brown’s revolutionarily formative experiences in Kansas. Public Life sold forty thousand copies in just five months, and before his publisher, Thayer and Eldridge, went bankrupt, the biography had sold seventy-five thousand copies, which did not include three unauthorized British editions.
In late 1859, the false Tribune tale of Brown kissing the slave child was again transformed, this time into a painting by the artist Louis Liscolm Ransom. Ransom’s John Brown on His Way to Execution was inspired, the artist suggested, by his profound admiration and even veneration for Brown. Ransom kept his studio in New York City, and the canvas enjoyed considerable renown there, even during the Civil War. When P. T. Barnum showed Ransom’s painting at his museum in Manhattan in May 1863, the Harper’s columnist George William Curtis wrote favorably of its exhibition. The painting was lithographed and widely circulated by the printmakers Nathaniel Currier and James Merritt Ives, thus exposing the canvas, and the carefully crafted image of Brown, to an even wider audience.
The popularity of Ransom’s image inspired others to paint the scene, but it was not until 1883 that painter Thomas Hovenden created the defining work of this dubious kiss. With his imposing canvas, The Last Moments of John Brown, Hovenden articulated a heroic and peaceful John Brown for the ages. Classically trained in France, Hovenden arrived in America during the last months of Reconstruction and married into a family of passionate Pennsylvania abolitionists. The New York industrialist Robin Battell appreciated Hovenden’s paintings of episodes from America’s past and commissioned a depiction of Brown’s last moments based upon the spurious Tribune piece from 1859. Although Hovenden was sympathetic to Battell’s subject of choice, the particular scene struck him as invented; but the artist eventually conceded to his benefactor’s request and the resulting product was an enormous canvas, almost seven feet tall and five feet wide, that clearly shows its debts to Ransom but surpasses all previous interpretations of the kiss.
Harpers Ferry
Now the home of a National Historical Park, the site of John Brown’s iconic but abortive attempt to foment a slave rebellion holds a special place in the American mythic imagination. The raid on the Federal Armory at Harpers Ferry on October 16, 1859, as well as Brown’s capture and subsequent execution, set the stage for the Civil War, inflaming passions on both sides and making reconciliation nearly impossible. The fact that John Brown was defeated by Robert E. Lee and J. E. B. Stuart only burnishes the legendary legacy of Harpers Ferry.
C. Fee
While several advocates in recent years have continued to mythologize Brown, the most complete and most impassioned arguments came from the late historical novelist and polemicist Truman Nelson, who continued an ongoing fight against racism. Nelson’s conception of Brown is dramatized in his long novel The Surveyor (1960), an account of Brown as a superhero in Bleeding Kansas. But Nelson’s view is most emphatically stated in his essays for the Nation—“John Brown Revisited” (1957) and “You Have Not Studied Them Right” (1971)—and in his semifictional rant, The Old Man: John Brown at Harper’s Ferry (1973). In his writings, Nelson argues that Brown was not only an unswerving friend of man, but also a determined anarchist, a bold revolutionary who, instead of trying to incite an insurrection at Harpers Ferry, effected a classic coup d’état, which led ultimately to the final Union victory at Appomattox. Conceding that Brown told lies to achieve his ends, Nelson further asserts that his deeds can be now considered ethically compatible with actions and tactics familiar to contemporary revolutionary guerrilla warfare and liberating resistance movements.
As suggested by representations in postbellum art and historical literature, abolitionists may well have attempted to shape the cultural myth of John Brown. However, the reality reflects a contested historical terrain that continues to be reshaped by competing interpretative discussion.
Brett F. Woods
See also Legends
Further Reading
Etcheson, Nicole. 2009. “John Brown, Terrorist?” American Nineteenth Century History 1: 29–48.
Gilpin, R. Blakeslee. 2011. John Brown Still Lives!: America’s Long Reckoning with Violence, Equality, & Change. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.
Oates, Stephen B. 1979. Our Fiery Trial: Abraham Lincoln, John Brown, and the Civil War Era. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press.
Proehl, Kristen. 2005. “Transforming the ‘Madman’ into a ‘Saint’: The Cultural Memory Site of John Brown’s Raid on Harper’s Ferry in Antislavery Literature and History.” In The Afterlife of John Brown, edited by Andrew Taylor and Eldrid Herrington, 107–120. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
Seelye, John. 1998. Memory’s Nation: The Place of Plymouth Rock. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.
Brown, John—Primary Document
John Brown’s Last Speech (1859)
On October 16, 1859, John Brown led an armed group of militants in a failed attempt to capture a federal armory at Harpers Ferry, Virginia. His goal was to incite a slave uprising and destroy slavery by force. He was captured, convicted of treason, and sentenced to death. His trial gave Brown a national audience for his antislavery principles, and on November 2, he gave his last and most famous speech. After his execution, the magazine The Liberator published Brown’s last speech as a broadside, and its wide circulation helped to turn Brown into a martyr for abolitionism and a legendary figure in American history.
I have, may it please the Court, a few words to say.
In the first place, I deny everything but what I have all along admitted,—the design on my part to free the slave. I intended certainly to have made a clean thing of the matter, as I did last winter, when I went into Missouri and there took slaves without the snapping of a gun on either side, moved them through the country, and finally left them in Canada. I designed to have done the same thing again, on a larger scale. That was all I intended. I never did intend murder, or treason, or the destruction of property, or to excite or incite slaves to rebellion or to make insurrection.
I have another objection; and that is, it is unjust that I should suffer such a penalty. Had I interfered in the manner which I admit, and which I admit has been fairly proved (for I admire the truthfulness and candor of the greater portion of the witnesses who have testified in this case),—had I so interfered in behalf of the rich, the powerful, the intelligent, the so-called great, or in behalf of any of their friends,—either father, mother, brother, sister, wife, or children, or any of that class,—and suffered and sacrificed what I have in this interference, it would have been all right; and every man in this court would have deemed it an act worthy of reward rather than punishment.
This court acknowledges, as I suppose, the validity of the law of God. I see a book kissed here which I suppose to be the bible, or at least the New Testament. That teaches me that all things whatsoever I would that men should do to me, I should do even so to them. It teaches me further, to “remember them that are in bonds as bound with them.” I endeavored to act upon that instruction. I say, I am yet too young to understand that God is any respecter of persons. I believe that to have interfered as I have done—as I have always freely admitted I have done—in behalf of his despised poor, was not wrong, but right. Now, if it is deemed necessary that I should forfeit my life for the furtherance of the ends of justice, and mingle my blood further with the blood of my children and with the blood of millions in this slave country whose rights are disregarded by wicked, cruel, and unjust enactments,—I submit; so let it be done!
Let me say one word further.
I feel entirely satisfied with the treatment I have received on my trial. Considering all the circumstances, it has been more generous than I expected. But I feel no consciousness of guilt. I have stated from the first what was my intention, and what was not. I never had any design against the life of any person, nor any disposition to commit treason, or excite slaves to rebel, or make any general insurrection. I never encouraged any man to do so, but always discouraged any idea of that kind.
Let me say, also, a word in regard to the statements made by some of those connected with me. I hear it has been stated by some of them that I have induced them to join me. But the contrary is true. I do not say this to injure them, but as regretting their weakness. There is not one of them but joined me of his own accord, and the greater part of them at their own expense. A number of them I never saw, and never had a word of conversation with, till the day they came to me; and that was the purpose I have stated.
Now I have done.
Source: “Testimonies of Capt. John Brown, at Harpers Ferry, with his Address to the Court,” Anti-Slavery Tracts, No. 7. New York: American Anti-Slavery Society, 1860, pp. 15–16.