Did I ever tell you about the time I woke up after a party in a bathtub full of ice? 
The people killed with broadswords were unarmed and pretty much randomly chosen from among the pro-slavery citizens.
Three were a father (about 45 years old) and his two sons aged 22 and 20 who were marched from their house while their mother, sister, and little brothers were held at gunpoint. After the father and sons were worked over with broadswords (one of the sons was decapitated) Brown shot the father in the head at point blank range to make sure he was dead and sent his own sons to steal the men’s horses. That’s straight up Manson shit, so I can’t count it as a plus.
I think John Brown was insane, a man whose goals- however noble- were too convoluted and bathed in blood to work. Harriet Tubman- whom he gave general’s stars to (it’s uncertain where he got them but they were legit)- described him pretty much the same way: brave, fearless, devout, sincere, and nucking futs. Invariably first hand accounts of him, by his enemies and his admirers, describe his “zealous” and “fiery” eyes, which I read as “one look and you know this guy’s a lunatic”.
A lot’s been written in recent years about the Secret Six. They were later instrumental in bailing Jefferson Davis out of prison. I have theories as to why Brown admirers were anxious to help out Jeff Davis after the war but that’s a very long story that has little to do with slavery and a lot to do with Cornelius Vanderbilt, but that’s a hijack.
One of Brown’s admirers you might not guess: John Wilkes Booth. He attended Brown’s hanging (which occurred not very far from the Booth farm, Tudor Hall) and said the man was phenomenal in person and brave the last drop. While Booth was a fanatic on the other end of the spectrum and as militantly pro slavery/white supremacist as Brown was anti both, he admired the fact that unlike many abolitionists who wrote passionate pleas and poems and editorials about the topic Brown- and his worst enemy can’t take this away from him- had the courage of his convictions, as Booth himself would one day have for his conviction that Lincoln needed killing (though for an actor his timing was attrocious to help the Confederacy).
Brown’s farm and burial place in NYC is in danger of closing due to budget cuts, incidentally.
Apologies if it’s been mentioned, but interesting trivia: when Brown was arrested he was holding a sword and had a flintlock pistol in his belt, both sword and pistol having once belonged to George Washington. He had stolen them from Washington’s great grandnephew Lewis William Washington, whose plantation (Beal Air) in (what is now West) Virginia he had raided en route. He had taken Washington himself hostage and three of Washington’s slaves joined him. Washington was released unharmed after the fall of Harper’s Ferry to (Washington’s cousin-in-law several different ways) Robert E. Lee.
Brown was, imho, most definitely more terrorist than hero. The merits of the cause of abolition pale beside his methodology.
I mentioned the Secret Sixearlier- in case anybody doesn’t know who they were they were Brown supporters who funneled him money and arms while he was still the fiery eyed prophetic countenanced abolitionist and then went nearly nuts with paranoia and legitimate fear when he raided Harper’s Ferry. They hired a lawyer to confer with Brown whose real purpose had nothing to do with the trial but more to do with finding any papers Brown may have on his possession connecting him to them.
They were:
Gerrit Smith- Jefferson Davis attempted to have Smith tried for treason and hanged after Harper’s Ferry. Smith had a nervous breakdown and had to be confined due to the stress after Harper’s Ferry. Smith later was one of the guarantors of Davis’s $100,000 bail.
Thomas Wentworth Higginson- by far the bravest of the lot where association with Brown was concerned, he alone did not flee or attempt to distance himself from Brown after HF. He later served as a colonel of an all black (save for the officers) regiment.
Samuel Gridley Howe- along with his more famous today wife, Julia Ward Howe, he fled to Canada after Harper’s Ferry for fear of arrest. He returned before the Civil War.
F. B. Sanborn- also fled to Canada temporarily.
G.L. Stearns- was the man who supplied the rifles and pikes Brown carried (though he’d intended them for use in Kansas) and another who fled to Canada. Later wrote a lengthy letter denouncing himself as a coward and comparing himself to Peter denying Christ for having later recanted his relationship with Brown (though he did so after the war). Like Higginson he served in the war as an officer in a black regiment.
Theo Parker- Unitarian minister. He praised Brown in press before and after his raid on Harper’s Ferry but moved around constantly to safehouses when it was uncertain whether he himself would be prosecuted. A very active conductor on the Underground Railroad throughout the post Fugitive Slave Act era.
The slavers were monsters and deserved no sympathy. And I see no reason to think they’d have stopped without the application of force. And in the meantime, they’d still have had slaves.
Hardly. Just because they were American doesn’t make their evil less.
nm
There is a pretty sizable moral gap between enslaving a race as workers and exterminating a race. Neither is moral, but to think of the two as equivalent is ludicrous, and to regard slavery as worse than extermination (as you seem to be arguing) is beyond preposterous.
The Confederates being American has nothing to do with the question.
So the people who fought to the death rather than being enslaved were being "preposterous? The slaves who fought back or ran at risk of thier own death were being "preposterous?
Death is and ending; you die and that’s it, your suffering is gone. Slavery was a torment that went on and and on and on for lifetimes and generations. So yes, I consider slavery a much worse act than genocide.
And no trial, either. Hey, why not throw them in a prison for years, no trial – with simulated drowning!
What are you talking about?
I think the point we’re making is that when you post things like “if the ending slavery inevitably meant “600,000 dead Americans 1861-65.”, well that was the price that had to be paid to end an evil that America inflicted on itself” you start sounding like Pol Pot.
Except that Pol Pot wasn’t ending any evils, he was the evil.
And if I’d commented that “If it took X lives to stop Hitler, then that was the price that had to be to be paid” would I be compared to Pol Pot then? Or is only when the people committing mass atrocities are American that it isn’t worth lives to stop them?
Not all, but some were. Nat Turner claimed God was talking to him and killed men, women and children including babies. Dozens of slaves were killed as a result, not one was freed nor was it logical to assume one would be. That was preposterous. John Brown also got several blacks killed and not a single one freed and there was again no reason to assume his hare brained scheme (which he literally believed God himself would send miracles to assist with) would work.
Very few of the slaves who ran were killed. They were too valuable. Not defending the practice, but let’s not put more horns on the devil.
I doubt many Armenians, European Jews, or the Southern Cheyenne (i.e. people who actually experienced genocides or attempted genocide) would agree with that assessment. Stephen Hawking is unable to move anything below his eyes- he chooses life; people who endured horrors beyond imagining in concentration camps and countless other wars chose life. I think it’s arrogant to assume all of these people do so because they’re ignorant as to the importance of freedom.
If slavery was worse than death then why weren’t there more suicides on plantations? Why did slaves on plantations choose to reproduce? Why, when John Brown and Nat Turner were leading their uprisings, didn’t they flock to them by the thousands? (Brown was very irritated at the refusal of slaves to heed his call to arms.) All seemed to be choosing life.
That slavery was evil is beyond question but it’s ridiculous the degree to which it’s simplified when it was neither a static or simple institution and relationships between slaves and masters and free people were as individual and as emotionally and as intellectually and as sociologically all over the map as the practice itself was.
The ignorance about slavery is not limited to notions of ‘happy darkies singing in the fields’- there’s ignorance by liberals and revisionists and presentists as well. Slavery didn’t mean getting whipped to death and raped everyday- though both happened. It wasn’t all indignity or disrespect or subjugation either. Did you know that in New York City, Williamsburg, Charleston, New Orleans and in other cities in the colonial era there were slave bars? (There still are in NYC and New Orleans of course but a different definition of slave applies.) The 1741 NYC slave rebellion in fact started at Hughson’s Tavern- a drinking establishment that served slaves (and the rebellion itself involved an alliance between black slaves, Irish soldiers, enslaved Hispanics prisoners and a defrocked English priest). In some areas slaves openly carried guns to use for hunting or protecting their masters, in most major port cities north and south slaves were longshoreman and joined guilds that went on strike. Slaves served as sailors both merchant marine and in the Navy, and on the diet and life expectancies of slaves were no worse than those of most poor farmers and substantially better than those of most immigrants.
As for the notion of slaves as picking cotton and being beaten all day, many are surprised to learn that most slaves also did not work primarily as field hands and in fact field hands were the cheapest slaves by far. After the Irish famine many planters took to using Irish for manual laborers because it was a lot cheaper than wasting a slave (any one of whom in reasonably good health and reasonably young was worth more than a farm). Slaves served as domestics, cooks, mechanics, artisans of all kind, blacksmiths, cordwainers, barbers, beauticians, midwives, distillers, boatmen, etc., with some who became famous musicians, architects, surgeons (different meaning then) and even interior decorators in their own lifetime. It was a very complex and multilayered institution and if you’d seen the life of one slave you’d seen the life of one slave.
The point is not that slaves were treated wonderfully- there are mountains of primary sources attesting to the inhumanities they endured. To compare it though to what Jews and Gypsies and Russians endured in Nazi slave labor camps where murder was routine and death from disease and malnutrition was at most a nuisance but never lamented is at best an insincere piece of polemic hyperbole and at worse a disgustingly disrespectful to the memories of those who died under or survived genocide.
It’s easy to be an abolitionist in the 21st century but there’s a reason that many were reviled even in the free states in the antebellum era. There were absolutely no easy answers to ending slavery, and as I’ve said in other threads I don’t think it was possible for it to end without a war, but then as now those who praised Brown praised a murdering lunatic, and most of his greatest acolytes realized this and ran for the hills after Harper’s Ferry.
And he wasn’t a hero even to most people who were against slavery. The song John Brown’s Body wasn’t about him- it was about a sergeant from the Massachusetts Light Infantry (google it for a cite). His role as hero was latter day and from people who gloss over his cold blooded murders of bound and unarmed men and the fact even Harriet Tubman called him insane.
Slavery was also part of the Holocaust, let’s not forget. And the Holocaust, i.e. the campaign to exterminate the Jews, was not the only evil thing that the Nazis did. Der Trihs didn’t even say slavery was worse than the Holocaust, he said it was worse than Nazi Germany. Nazi Germany, which attempted to impose slavery and death upon half of Europe. They also practiced scientific experiments on living humans, did all kinds of sick things to people…I think even if the Nazis never had any gas chambers, just the medical experiments alone would make them worse than American slavery.
Nope, it’s about him. Since you got this wrong, I suppose you got the rest wrong as well. 
And 600,000 dead people isn’t an evil?
Nobody is saying that slavery shouldn’t have been ended. What we’re saying is that it would have been better to have ended slavery by some means that didn’t involved killing hundreds of thousands of people.
I’m not spoke, but I disagree. If Charles Manson and his “family” who bound and then brutally murdered several people in an insane plot to start a race war had done the same acts in order to strike a blow at the war in Vietnam or retaliation for racism in L.A. or whatever the fact that they were cold blooded murderers would be a bit more important than their cause. Toning it down a bit, nobody sane can deny that pollution and environmental destruction caused by industry are worthy things to fight but few would defend the actions of ELF or log-spikers whose actions result in death (a lot less willful and deliberate than Brown’s victims). Jim Jones did a LOT of great work in getting people off of drugs, many into adequate housing, promoting racial harmony, etc., but the fact that 32 years ago this week he brought about the deaths of hundreds of his followers and ordered the murders of a Congressman and others who probably really were doing exactly what Jones feared they were doing (i.e. going home to recommend Federal intervention with Jonestown) overshadows all good he did. Murder (and I distinguish murder from battlefield deaths) trumps all else, and Brown was a murderer.
Other sources disagree, many of them a bit more credible than wiki. Irwin Silber’s book on Songs of the Civil War is available through google books and contains the history of the song’s origins, and there are articles available from folk music and Civil War journals available through the JSTOR database if you have access that go into more detail than you could ever want. It is definitely true that many thought the song was about him, but the John Brown lyrics (which appropriated the melody of an older hymn) were actually tongue-in-cheek originally about a Scottish born soldier who died on the eve of the Civil War and had a roguish reputation (but was beloved by his comrades). Sgt. Brown’s papers were actually on display at an exhibit I went to in '07 at the Library of Congress, though the only mention of him on their website is from a brief article about Battle Hymn of the Republic (the lyrics to which were written by Secret Six wife Julia Ward Howe, a priestess of Brown- ironic she’d co-opt a song about him] so it only gives passing mention to the differing origins theory, but trust me- it’s been researched rather intensively.
I’ve said before, and I’ll say again: I’m not defending the “hero” side of the equation, but rather attacking the “terrorist” side. Had he succeeded in his goals, “hero” would probably be an apt word for him. It’s the stupidity of his plan that keeps him from being a hero. Killing people who kept slaves isn’t all that relevant, I think.
Actually, I was thinking of the African tribes that fought to the death rather than be enslaved, and as a result the slavers stopped raiding them - no profit in it. in other words, they chose death over slavery, and it worked.
Because they had been systematically beaten down into passivity over generations, eaten up with despair. Because killing yourself is hard when you don’t have easy access to guns or poison. Because they’d been taught a religion tailored to promote slavery and prevent the suicide of its victims. And ultimately because people often are compulsively driven to live even while they long for death.
As for having children, you presume they were allowed to say no.
Except that the South demonstrated that it wasn’t willing to end slavery, to the point of secession and civil war. Which mean that demanding that slavery be ended in a “better” way meas that you are willing to let it continue indefinitely. And all the people paying the price would be slaves.
So killing Ulysses Grant, who was a slaveowner when Brown was planning the raid (he manumitted his slave William sometime in late 1859) would have been justified, since even though he would one day lead the armies in a war that won freedom for 5 million slaves pales next to the fact that he- like Benjamin Franklin (later head of an abolitionist society) and Robert Todd (Mary Lincoln’s slaveowning abolitionist father) is automatically deserving of death?
Regarding Der Trihs take on U.S. History- compelling to say the least: I find the notion that the between four & five million slaves freed in 1865 were conceived because of sex their owners forced them to have and the notion that the slaves would have been dead by their own hand already (you don’t need a gun to kill yourself- any sharp object, rope, poisonous shrumes [available in most states and recognizable as such], or other object will usually do) if they’d had any sense of self worth or ability to think things through- that’s an incomparably more racially insensitive and patronizing sentiment than the Cornerstone Speech.