Terrorists kill innocent people. To argue that slaveholders were innocent, or to equate them with doctors (!) as Tom Tildrum does, is abhorrent.
Slavery was wrong and should have been abolished. But it was legal and had been a normal part of American culture for generations. Slavery should have been abolished by the legal system not by murdering slaveholders.
The two are not mutually exclusive.
Greatest Yank hero except for maybe FDR. His freakin’ ghost won the Civil War. May have started the Civil War, which is a black mark if you think there was a peaceful way out of slavery for the USA. I’m not convinced there was.
Yes, John Brown was a criminal and a murderer.
He didn’t “start the war,” but he did make peaceful resolution of slavery harder. I believe it still could have happened with the right kind of visionary leadership in Washington. After all, almost every other country in the Western hemisphere which had slavery did abolish it peacefully.
Strictly speaking, tactics like burning in effigy are terrorism.* The threat of hot tar was no laughing matter.
Terrorism does not require the slaughter of innocents, first because non-lethal tactics can qualify, and second because the targets need not be innocent.
If the objective, the main intended effect, is fear among those not directly targeted, that is terrorism.
- Because the only violence done is to the effigy, but the objective is fear in the real person depicted, and perhaps the class to which he belongs.
It all depends on if you were behind him or in his way.
So it is completely and always moral to kill slavers? Just how far are you willing to stretch it? Because John Brown did. A lot. He dind’t just kill slaveholders. He killed people related to them, people who were sympathetic to the, and people who had nothing to do with them. He was out for some cosmic justice, but completely ignored any human justice. He was fine with murdering Missourians who might have had nothing to do with any violence there, and he had no regrets to utter about killing a free black man in Harper’s Ferry.
It also suggests that slaveholders deserve the death penalty automatically, without any trial, and regardless fo society or circumstance.
So, yeah, that does sound pretty damn close to Nazis to me: rampant killing of the object of hatred, cold enjoyment of the massacre of anyone around them, a completely objectification of all humanity outside of the cause. No, I really don’t care what ideals motivate a mad dog: I will put down the cur however neccessary.
I second the novel by Fraser as an excellent insight into Brown’s character. I’ve never been able to decide if Brown was an outright crazy or a crazy when it suited him to appear as such. He certainly helped bring matters to a head, there’s no denying that.
Regarding that painting: How did Brown come to be armed with what looks like a lever action carbine while the other combatants had to make do with muzzle loaders?
John Brown was a fanatic moralist and as such had a few qualms. If someone could convince him they were “innocent” ( using Brown’s particular metric ), he’d let them go, as with the teenage son of slave-catcher James Doyle ( who was hacked to death along with his two elder sons ).
However Nat Turner indiscriminately killed women and children and was upfront about his desire to deliberately sow terror. Not so hard to understand - servile revolts are usually pretty nasty. But whatever the righteousness of his cause, there is no question that Turner at least fit every definition of a terrorist.
Innocent until proven guilty, in fact.
A society of laws has no place for the likes of Brown.
Only for values of “agreed” that render the word meaningless. I don’t remember sitting in on that particular meeting, and I don’t see any reasonable way I could have a disagreement with that decision be respected. Enough people with enough guns have said that’s the way it’d be that that’s the way it is, but that’s not sufficient to use first-person plural.
And a society of laws has no place for the likes of George Washington or Thomas Jefferson either, do they?
In any case, I’d much rather live in a society in which people fight slavery illegally than a society in which people keep slaves legally.
I love questions like this, i.e., questions that someone intends to be rhetorical but that aren’t really.
The answer to your question is: no.
There, the entire rest of your post is rendered meaningless. (Although the insistence that vigilante revolutionaries are like Nazis is increasingly funny: it just doesn’t work and is shameless Godwinizing).
I vote terrorist, but one with heroic ideals for his terrorism.
I must say, as cool as that painting is, it would have been 10X cooler if Brown was stomping on the head of the dead confederate in front of him.
He seems to have been delusional and insane-for instance claiming that he was getting visions from God.
How do you know he wasn’t?
Claiming visions from God may have been a useful counter to those who claimed slavery was Biblically justified. Not very strong evidence of insanity, unless you think any opposition to slavery is irrational.
I never ask rhetorical questions. So, you have already accepted that there are moral limits ont he killing of slaveholders. John Brown would not agree, and further he would kill anybody who happened to get in between you and the slaveholders, or anyone associated with them.
So where, if anywhere, do you draw the line?
What, if anything, do you think the Nazis began as, if not vigilante revolutionaries?
Hero. The evil that was slavery is so extreme that it puts way more than a thumb on the scales on this, it puts an entire body - hell even an average Kansan body.
Innocent people died. That’s not a good thing. Many heros, though, have killed innocents. Slavery wasn’t going alway except by force. Brown showed that some people had the balls to bring that force to bear.
Secession did begin while Buchanan was President. No shame in forgetting that, though - it’s not as if the useless man did anything to stop it.
Villa - what number of innocent deaths would be sufficient, in your view, for Brown to deserve the label of “villain”? (I agree that describing him as a terrorist is too politically loaded to be useful).