So John Brown was a good guy?
No, he was a great guy.
And again, the same people can act as the good guys in one conflict and the bad guys in the other. There’s nothing paradoxical about that. Grant and the US army were definitely the good guys in the Civil War. They were definitely the bad guys in the Mexican American war, as Grant himself would have happily told you - he called it “one of the most unjust ever waged by a stronger against a weaker nation.”
Including the murders in the name of abolition?
I thought about bringing up this example as a parallel.
It’s crystal clear in both conflicts that there is a central issue, and that that central issues is (1) interconnected with all of the major and minor side issues, and that it (2) has a definitely-right and a definitely-wrong side.
Look, if you want to say that the odd war criminal on the “good guys” side doesn’t mitigate the fact that that side was the “good guys,” of course I will agree with you. But if you want to argue that anyone on the “good guys” side is, by definition a “good guy,” then I think history is going to disappoint you.
I just think we’re so keen to have a simple narrative where we can all agree that we don’t want to talk about, say, Black people’s experiences in the North during the period of the Civil War (or just before, or just after). We don’t want to talk about people’s motivations for ending slavery, because some of them are pretty ugly means to a noble end. (Some of them, of course, are noble through and through, and there are amazing people who were way ahead of their time: I don’t think bringing up the fact that it’s complicated takes away from the best of history.)
Killing slavers isn’t murder. You can’t take hundreds or thousands of lives and use them to enrich yourself and then whine about your own life being taken. The only thing John Brown did wrong was fail to kill more slavers.
If John Brown had kicked of a Haitian-style slave revolt across the South, and every slaver was killed by their own slaves, that would have been a great good.
That’s not at all what I was saying. War crimes on the side of the good guys are not OK.
This applies even in the context of someone like John Brown - if he was torturing slavers for pleasure or something, I’d be against him (and there are stories out of Haiti, both of former slaves enacting brutal vengence against their masters and of other former slaves putting them on trial for doing so and executing them). But that’s not what John Brown is criticized for - he’s criticized for taking up arms against slavers, as if by doing so he is introducing or escalating violence. But in fact, enslaving someone is just about the ultimate violence you can inflict against them*, and defending a victim of slavery with deadly force is perfectly justified.
*Perhaps rape or murder are worse than slavery in and of itself, but one of the greatest evils of slavery is that enslavers often rape and murder their slaves under the protection of the twisted codes that pass for laws in slave societies
Heyward Shepherd was a slaver? All this time I thought he was a free Black man.
I think it is also the way he killed the pro-slavers in Pottawatomie. It was gruesome bordering on torture and some might classify it as a war crime that he killed those that surrendered as prisoners. You are free to say that it is OK to do that to slaver but the reality is that most at the time thought his actions to be so extreme as not to be justified.
Most at the time thought slavery was justified, so forgive me if I don’t really give a flying fuck about what they thought.
Heyward Shepherd was the target of the raid on Harper’s Ferry? All this time I thought he was a civilian who came across Brown and his men, assumed they were robbers, and tried to raise the alarm.
And got murdered for it.
Were loyalists killed by the American Revolutionaries also murdered, or does the term not apply when you’re fighting to pay less taxes rather than to free blacks?
Non-sequitur. Heyward Shepherd was not pro-slavery yet he was murdered as a result of John Brown’s Raid. But according to you, John Brown was a great man.
Wasn’t this thread about libraries or something?
Funny how racists tend to parrot each other:
[Quote=wikipedia]
The monument was erected in 1931, after decades of controversy, by the United Daughters of the Confederacy (UDC) and, to a lesser extent, by the Sons of Confederate Veterans
[/quote]
You’re not fooling anyone with your fake concern for Shepherd.
I stand by what I said - Brown was a great man. Unlike all the hypocrites of his era, who claimed to believe that all men are created equal but who owned slaves, or who claimed to oppose slavery but dared to do nothing about it, John Brown correctly identified slavery as an enormous, inexcusable evil and then acted.
Brown’s men tried to reason with Shepherd, but he didn’t believe them - they told him that they were there to raid the armory and start a slave revolt, but he thought they were lying. Should they have just let him alert the slavers?
It got converted.
…and diverted, and thus subverted.
Strictly by the book, you are supposed to take the guy prisoner and set a couple of men to guard him.
Absolutely, that’s fair - although in their specific situation, that’s not really something that was possible for them to do.
I just wanted to note that all the curlicues are the first stroke of a capital letter, which means they were mostly used at the beginning of a sentence.
It may be a case of age and experience. I find writing in cursive much faster than printing, but that may because as a high school and college student, I wrote many long papers in cursive.
Even the papers that had to be typed, my college term papers, I wrote them in cursive and handed them off to a paid typist. Things were really different before computers.
Well, I still had to learn how to type, and how to format a typed paper. Whether or not you use the school’s computer/typewriter or your own, I think nothing is changed: you must type it yourself or pay someone to do it. I suppose you could buy a good text-to-speech program. One change is, no need to prepare a “fair copy” in your own handwriting if you are going to type it yourself from the beginning; the handwriting stops after the notebook/backs of envelopes and grocery receipts/scraps of paper stage. Vladimir Nabokov wrote all his novels on index cards!