Mods…forgive me if this should have gone in IMHO. Please move if you see fit.
John Browns plan was to free enough slaves to mount an army that would retreat to the mountains and fight a guerilla war against the slave states. Based in different enclaves thoughout the Appalachians.
Would it have stopped the Civil War?
Would the north and the southern militias joined forces to fight him? Remember it was the federals that put down his Harpers Ferry raid.
Seeing as I don’t believe the main reason for the Civil War was slavery I think at the most it would have postponed the start.
But who knows…maybe both sides working together to fight against Brown’s army may have smoothed some of the real reasons for the war.
“Succeeded” how? A sustainable, large-scale militia movement may have postponed (or even voided) the war, though the ramifications of something like that seem, to me, completely unknowable. A smaller “uprising” – say, a few hundred disorganized guerillas – would probably have only escalated tensions. Of course, neither scenario was ever realistic.
Be prepared to catch hell for this, as well you should. It seems perfectly clear to me that slavery was not only the main point of contention, but also the root cause of most secondary points of contention.
Because he lacked the constitutional authority to do so. His authority to free slaves in territorries “in rebellion” was based on a military commander-in-chief’s traditional (and, at that time, unquestioned) right to dispose of the property of the conquered, without compensation.
John Brown’s strategy was so poor it’s hard to envision anyway it could have succeeded. In fact, considering how poor the planning was, it actually was an amazing success that he managed to hold a few buildings for a couple of days. For example, while Brown was trying to stir up a nationwide uprising, he made no plans to communicate to slaves or distribute the weapons he captured.
Re the OP, Brown’s ultimate goal apparently was a successful slave uprising across the South – like the Haitian revolution of 1791-1804, on a wider scale. That could never have succeeded. Slaves formed the majority of the population in some Southern counties, but not the utterly overwhelming majority they had in Haiti. And the slaveowners (and Southern whites generally) were better-organized, better-armed, and had some actual experience in war (multiple Indian wars, and the Mexican-American war). Poor and near-poor whites who owned no slaves would have joined forces with the gentry to put down the uprising. A genuine race-war would have ended in the blacks being massacred by the millions. Would that have stopped the Civil War? Well, on the one hand it would have presented the spectacle of Horrible Dangerous Negro Cannibals and swung a lot of fence-sitting Northerners against abolitionism; OTOH, it would have produced a slave shortage that would have devastated the South’s economy. It would have hit the landowning aristocracy especially hard, dependent as their incomes were on slave labor; they would have been forced to hire free whites to work their cotton plantations, at a reduced margin of profit. The conditions leading up to the war would have been fundamentally changed; hard to speculate whether it would have killed Southern secessionism entirely.
If Brown had failed to incite a general uprising, but just gathered enough arms and followers to mount a low-intensity-conflict guerilla insurgency, I have no doubt the U.S. Army and state militias would have put it down quickly, with very little dissension in the ranks, even from New England abolitionist officers.
Saying the main cause of the Civil War was slavery is not the same as saying the war was about freeing the slaves. Slavery was both a proximate cause ( as MEBuckner for one has repeatedly shown by pointing to various letters of secession by southern states ) and an underlying cause of the war. But the Union was most emphatically not fighting to free the slaves. Or at least certainly not at first.
As Tamerlane pointed out, the North didn’t get into the war to free the slaves, but to keep the South from seceding. But slavery was why the South seceded. If there had been no slavery, there would have been no war. Therefore, the war was primarily about slavery.
Slavery was not the only point of difference between the Northern and Southern states, but practically all such conflicts were rooted in slavery directly or indirectly. For instance, the South resented the North using its numerical/political strength to impose protective tariffs that nurtured Northern industries by driving up the price of imported manufactured goods, screwing Southerners who consumed but did not manufacture such goods in great quantity. But why was the South not a center of industry? Partly because most of the coal mines were in Northern or Border states, but also because the South’s economy was based mostly on slavery and large-scale plantation agriculture – a system which, offering few profitable opportunities to free white laborers, tended to discourage immigration and freeze out industrialization. And since that system was essential to the landed gentry’s wealth, power and social prestige, they refused to consider any change, and were willing to risk war to preserve their “peculiar institution.”
The above was also why the North won the war. The Southerners were generally better fighters one-to-one, since they had a martial tradition and more military experience. ([gone with the wind] "Gennlemen can always fight better’n rabble! [/gwtw]) But (as Rhett Butler predicted) it wasn’t nearly enough. The North had better trains, better factories, better weapons, better infrastructure to keep the army supplied, and a much larger population (including immigrants) to provide troops. All the South had was “slaves, and cotton, and . . . arrogance!”
Forget slave armies, what about if he had survived Harper’s Ferry. Fredrick Douglas, his good friend, refused to go, since he knew it would be a suicide mission. However, what if Brown somehow didn’t die, but escaped, with all his men, and killed a great deal of enemy troups?. (Or rather, what if he limped off, was presumed dead, recovered, and found new followers.)
Would his reappearance a few months later bring public opinion back towards his side? Would we hear more abolitionists speaking in favor of violent actions?
(Sorry to attempt a hijacking, but this scenario sounds more like an intermediate, slightly plausible step to me.)
Well, Brown survived Harper’s Ferry. He just didn’t survive having his neck in a noose and falling. So, hypothetically, if he escaped and turned up in public again a few months later, he’d just be arrested by Virginia (or somewhere else and sent to Virginia), convicted of treason, and hanged.
John Brown was a nutter. He had already proved this with his massacre of unarmed pro-slavery settlers in Kansas (a crime for which he was still wanted at the time of the Harper’s Ferry raid).
Only a delusional egomaniac could have believed that Brown’s scheme would work. He planned to arm his guerrilla army, at least in part, with 1000 pikes he had obtained from a supplier in Connecticut. Pikes!
The egomaniacal part comes where he assumes that legions of slaves would flock to the banner of an old white man, eager to be led by him, and somehow (having no prior experience with weapons or warfare) assume the shape of a disciplined fighting force.
His goal of freeing the slaves was admirable, but his “plan” was ludicrous.
His purpose, his goal was to move the slavery discussion to the center of the national agenda and use his small force to spark a movement that would free all the slaves. I make the analogy with Osama Ben Laden. He lacks the military power to defeat The West, but can hope that he will spark a war that will bring down his enemy.
Discussion wasn’t what John Brown had in mind. At least not originally. He really did expect to spark a Haiti-style slave revolt and win the freedom of the slaves by violent action.
Only *after he was captured * and gained the attention and sympathy of the abolitionist press did it occur to him that a (now very public) discussion might be advantageous.
Do you have evidence to suggest that’s what Brown had in mind all along?
Okay, somebody has to ask: What *was * the main reason, then?
I’d say that, in the broad sense, Brown *did * succeed. He wanted to end slavery immediately, that meant militarily, and that’s what the next four years were about.
When he began planning his rebellion, Brown planned to establish a self-governing haven for escaped slaves in the mountains of western Virginia. He had read and written about the ability of guerrilla bands to hold out against larger armies in mountainous terrain, and he even went so far as to draw up a provisional constitution for the republic he envisioned (I can’t find the full text online.)
By the time he launched the raid, however, he seems to have embraced the more modest goal of martyrdom and publicity. His last letters before the raid are fatalistic, and the planning was so amateurish as to suggest he had abandoned much hope of succeeding.
If he had established his mountain haven, we would have had a situation like we saw in the early Nineteenth Century when Spain allowed runaway slaves to establish settlements in Spanish Florida. It was a tremendous irritant to area slaveowners, but hardly a fatal blow to slavery. Most likely Southern demands to spare no expense in extirpating the republic would have been just one more sectional irritant.
The most interesting question might have been whether the former slaves would have wanted to rejoin the United States after the Civil War. If they could foresee the century of Jim Crow that was coming, they certainly wouldn’t!
Wars are about a lot of things. People being people, money usually comes in somewhere. But then, one could say much the same thing about pride, power, fear, or a host of toher things.
The Southern states felt used, economically speaking, by the North, but that wasn’t their first motive. They already were very wealthy and had enjoyed a booming economy for years.