Terrorist. His cause was good but his method was terrorism.
If you’re going to correct someone, please make sure you’re correct first.
And your second question is both trivial and irrelevant. The answer is that plenty of people whose families owned slaves for several generations thought differently: you’re not genetically obligated to hold to your parents’ cultural norms. It’s also irrelevant: John Brown wasn’t trying to get everyone to sing camp songs together, he was trying to free people from abject servitude. Whether the slavers were part of a multi-generation evil or had just come up with it on their own had nothing to do with his goals.
Did he? Flipping through his biography on wikipedia, it seems his group killed pro-slavery settlers in Kansas, but only the (grown) men. I don’t see any reference to his killing woman or children or wiping out families, though maybe I just missed it when scanning the article.
A private war between himself and everyone he didn’t like? The only thing I can say is that he was dangerous close to being a Nazi himself. Everything and everyone was an aspect of his killing spree. That’s all he cared about. At the end of the day, does it matter much if your mad-dog killer has good ideals or bad ones?
Note that he was not insane in any way. He was a bit of a failure due a very abrasive and extreme personality, but there is no evidence he was irrational or delusional in any sense. Well, maybe neurotic or obsessive, but that’s a psychological flaw, not an insanity defense.
No, a very public war between him and anyone in favor of slavery, whether he liked them or not.
He definitely failed in his sheep farming enterprise.
Funny how it’s always the people with nothing to lose who risk all they have.
A private war between yourself and everyone you don’t like describes neither John Brown (who didn’t murder the dude who cut him off on the way to the slaver’s house) nor the Nazis (who were all about volk, not all about private wars). He was nothing like a Nazi–THAT’s some serious Godwinizing. Call him many things, compare him to Operation Rescue FWIW, but not to Nazis. It just doesn’t work.
And yeah, at the end of the day, it matters tremendously if a killer has good ideals. If a killer is killing Jewish kids, that’s really nothing like a killer who kills slavers. Are you suggesting that it DOESN’T matter what ideals motivate the killer?
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/1/15/John_Brown_Painting.JPG
John Brown was the original epic beard man.
Oh dear God. How can anyone have anything bad to say about this man?
He’s like the Chuck Norris of the 19th century.
It’s sort of like if Jim Jones had been an abolitionist convert.
Welcome to the wonderful world of moral relativism.
In fact just the opposite. He was a nutter who was lionized for political reasons by the abolitionists, whose cause needed a martyr.
Try reading To Purge This Land With Blood by Stephen Oates. Oates is a highly-respected historian, and hardly a Southern sympathizer, but he was drawn to the conclusion that Brown had a screw loose.
Brown’s goal may have been just, but that doesn’t mean he wasn’t a loon.
I’ve read David S. Reynolds’ John Brown, Abolitionist: The Man Who Killed Slavery, Sparked the Civil War, and Seeded Civil Rights. This biographer admires Brown, but doesn’t gloss over his foibles.
Some of the charges against John Brown are true. He was selfless and obsessed to the point of sacrificing the needs of his own family. His military and political cunning may not have been excellent. He was a “terrorist.” IANA psychologist but perhaps he indeed suffered from mental disorder. On the most serious charge, “terrorism”, please note that this word has become almost meaningless in post-literate American discourse and many great heroes were “terrorists.” Our heroes of 1776, for example, were terrorists and I’m sure there are many other examples.
In those days I don’t think conditions were right for Gandhi-MLK non-violence. If you think slavery was worth fighting against, you have to admire Brown and condemning him as a “terrorist” is silly. Did innocents die due to his actions? Obviously. (IIRC, the only one his forces killed at Harper’s Ferry was a black!) If killing innocents negates the good one does, figure out how many Abraham Lincoln killed!! :eek:
On the positive side, Brown was a supremely righteous man. Most of the other abolitionists of the day were just as racist as slavers and opposed slavery for reasons other than slaves’ suffering. Brown was one of few who saw them as equal humans. In addition to his “terrorism”, he spent much time assisting the “Undergorund Railroad.”
The effect of Brown’s actions and especially martyrdom in provoking and sustaining the Civil War must not be underestimated. John Brown’s Body was the most popular song of any sort during the War years, and the North would surely have abandoned that horrific war without a sense of righteousness.
“Credit” for bringing Brown’s martyrdom to the attention of the world is shared with Northern intellectuals like Ralph Waldo Emerson, who wrote that Brown was a
(Disclaimer: John Brown is my relatively close relative. That branch of my family tree has other progressive pioneers.)
Well, yeah, if you’re trying to set yourself up as an example of how the word has become meaningless, I suppose you’re making a point. I don’t recall any of the signers of the Declaration of Independence advocating or carrying out slaughter of civilians for the purpose of fomenting terror among the British as a means to a political end.
The available civilians were themselves Americans, among whom Loyalists were tarred, feathered and suffered property damage. (This was before the day of suicide bombers.)
America’s Indian Wars would have been a better example, as suggested by a synopsis of Ferling’s book on the Revolution:
I recommend CLOUDSPLITTER by Russell Banks for a fictionalized (and highly engaging) biography of Brown. He emerges as a unbalanced nut, engaged in a cause that just happened to one we univerally agree with today. But how you can be a Bible-toting religious nut, whose God proclaims slavery to be hunky-dory, and going around slaughtering people because slavery is bad, makes him a hard man to follow, however right his cause was.
I never realized before that it’s John Brown on the cover of the Best of Kansas album.
Regarding the dude himself, I remember reading in The Autobiography of Malcolm X that the only white person Malcom would ever express any admiration for, was . . . John Brown. That’s got to earn JB some badass points.
Hero.
Just like Denmark Vesey, Gabriel, and Nat Turner.
Individually they didn’t succeed in overturning slavery. But they did show Americans that there were people–white and black–who saw the true vileness of slavery and were willing to give their lives to fight it. They were true revolutionaries.
You don’t have to wear a uniform to be a valient warrior.
Also, IIRC, John Brown’s sons were as fervent as their father was. Were they crazy too? I think John Brown was certainly fanatic, but that doesn’t make him crazy. Now Nat Turner on the other hand…
No more moral standing to kill than an abortion clinic bomber. We’ve agreed as a society to entrust certain decisions to our representatives and our courts, including the decision to go to war. Brown’s private value judgments can’t be allowed to override that process any more than anyone else’s can.
The fact that we agree with his cause is seductive but not a justification. He could easily have brought about a wave of pro-slaveholder sympathy, or provoked secession while Buchanan was still president.
Technically true. George Washington didn’t sign the Declaration of Independence. But he did sign these orders:
Over forty Iroquois towns were burned, hundreds of Iroquios starved to death, and many of them fled to Canada. Washington got a nickname “Conotocarious” which means town destroyer. And he called himself that in messages he sent to Indian leaders.
John Brown was admired by Abolitionists, because he was an Abolitionist.
John Brown was also admired by John Wilkes Booth, because he was a swaggering, gun-toting thug. Sarah Vowell makes the case that Booth was inspired to kill Abraham Lincoln by the praise heaped upon Brown.