John Brown: Hero or Terrorist

[Sampiro]

[QUOTE=Der Trihs]
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.
[/QUOTE]

This is true- I can’t imagine what incentives the north could have given to convince southerners to end slavery. At Hampton Roads conference in February 1865 Lincoln unofficially offered each slaveowner $100 per slave- which while admittedly this was a fraction of their worth this was at a time when nobody but Jeff Davis believed the Confederacy had a snowball’s chance in hell of surviving even until summer- and southern leaders still scoffed. Lincoln said outright that if the southern states returned to the union their senators and Congressmen would immediately be readmitted to the Capitol and he at very least bluntly hinted there were ways the 13th Amendment (which began ratification by the states that week) could be undone and blocked, at least temporarily. Still a no-go in Richmond.

[Guinastasia]

@Der_Trihs

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.

@Guinastasia

And no trial, either. Hey, why not throw them in a prison for years, no trial – with simulated drowning!

@Der_Trihs

What are you talking about?

Your comment struck me as being strangely smiliar to those who claim that suspected terrorists should just be tossed into Gitmo for years, and hey, what does it matter if they’re tortured – they’re evil.

You may not have meant it that way, but that’s how it sounded to me.

[Left_Hand_of_Dorkness]

@Sampiro

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?

I wish folks would stake out positions instead of trying to convince me to stake them out for them. What do YOU think about someone who holds an innocent person captive under the threat of torture, mutilation, and death if they try to escape, and does so over the person’s entire lifetime, and raises their kids in the same captivity? Is this okay? A harmless pecadillo? What do YOU think about it?

[Der_Trihs]

@Sampiro

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.

Don’t be ridiculous. It had nothing to do with race, and everything to do with being subjected to generations of systematic terror and brutality, and indoctrinated with a religion that taught them obedience and to never kill themselves.

@Guinastasia

Your comment struck me as being strangely smiliar to those who claim that suspected terrorists should just be tossed into Gitmo for years, and hey, what does it matter if they’re tortured – they’re evil.

You may not have meant it that way, but that’s how it sounded to me.

Except that holding slaves is worse than terrorism, and because I didn’t say anything about “suspected” slavers.

[Siam_Sam]

Interesting. so there is, after all, a threshhold after which you would condone Gitmo-type treatment.

[foolsguinea]

Sampiro, everyone then thought it was about THE John Brown, & the song became popular because they sang it about him. Whatever the origin of the first lyrics, folks weren’t singing about some random dude named John Brown, they were singing about the legendary John Brown.

[Little_Nemo]

@Der_Trihs

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.

Really? You feel there was a lot of attempts at ending slavery that were tried and failed?

[Qin_Shi_Huangdi]

@Der_Trihs

Don’t be ridiculous. It had nothing to do with race, and everything to do with being subjected to generations of systematic terror and brutality, and indoctrinated with a religion that taught them obedience and to never kill themselves.

So would you kill yourself if you were enslaved? It might sound nice in rhetoric but I think most people would prefer enslavement to death due to the simple instinct of self-preservation.

Except that holding slaves is worse than terrorism, and because I didn’t say anything about “suspected” slavers.

So would the torture of Osama Bin Laden or other proven terrorist be justified? Also I suspect most people would prefer to be an Antebellum plantation slave than be killed in a terrorist attack.

Also if freeing the slaves was justified by any means was starting World War 3 to defeat the Soviet Union and free hundreds of millions of people from Communist tyranny at the risk of nuclear war be justified?

[Guinastasia]

The way women were treated under Taliban rule was effectively slavery.

[The_Tao_s_Revenge]

@Koxinga

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.

John Paul Jones leads American raid on Whitehaven, England | April 23, 1778 |...

While not signer, certainly a hero, per the person you quoted.

At 11 p.m. on this day in 1778, Commander John Paul Jones leads a small detachment of two boats from his ship, the USS Ranger, to raid the shallow port at Whitehaven, England, where, by his own account, 400 British merchant ships are anchored. Jones was hoping to reach the port at midnight, when ebb tide would leave the shops at their most vulnerable.

Jones and his 30 volunteers had greater difficulty than anticipated rowing to the port, which was protected by two forts. They did not arrive until dawn. Jones’ boat successfully took the southern fort, disabling its cannon, but the other boat returned without attempting an attack on the northern fort, after the sailors claimed to have been frightened away by a noise. To compensate, Jones set fire to the southern fort, which subsequently engulfed the entire town.

Jones went on to establish himself as one of the great naval commanders in history; he is remembered, along with John Barry, as a Father of the American Navy. He is buried in a crypt in the U.S. Naval Academy Chapel at Annapolis, Maryland, where a Marine honor guard stands at attention in his honor whenever the crypt is open to the public.

Dude burned an entire British town because a noise made him late and we have an honor guard for him to this day.

[The_Tao_s_Revenge]

@Tom_Tildrum

Innocent until proven guilty, in fact.

A society of laws has no place for the likes of Brown.

But it did have a place for slavery? Are slaves not human?

[The_Tao_s_Revenge]

@Guinastasia

Your comment struck me as being strangely smiliar to those who claim that suspected terrorists should just be tossed into Gitmo for years, and hey, what does it matter if they’re tortured – they’re evil.

You may not have meant it that way, but that’s how it sounded to me.

Well if the evidence exists there’s legal ways non-torturing ways to turn a suspect into a convict, though torture is always inexcusable no matter the status.

However how do you fight slavery, in a society that allows and encourages it, through legal means? You can’t, but allowing slavery is a less tolerable option. Quite frankly better slavers lose their heads than their Crimes Against Humanity be allowed to continue.

John Brown is an American Hero. The south was full of evil pieces of shit who turned into traitors. Slave owner’s graves should be used for sewage disposal.

[The_Tao_s_Revenge]

@Little_Nemo

Really? You feel there was a lot of attempts at ending slavery that were tried and failed?

The Civil War happened because an abolitionist was elected president, before he even did anything concerning slavery. Does the south sound like reasonable people to you?

[Sampiro]

@Left_Hand_of_Dorkness

I wish folks would stake out positions instead of trying to convince me to stake them out for them. What do YOU think about someone who holds an innocent person captive under the threat of torture, mutilation, and death if they try to escape, and does so over the person’s entire lifetime, and raises their kids in the same captivity? Is this okay? A harmless pecadillo? What do YOU think about it?

I think slavery is wrong. A controversial position but I’ll posit it nonetheless. Genocide is also wrong. And sweeping generalizations. But I’m not asking whether the institution is wrong- I’m asking do you think all slaveowners deserved death?

I think slaveowners were less than supernatural monsters and that murdering one was murder nonetheless and I think sweeping “the only good ______ is a dead ____” are simplistic at best and get increasingly dangerous from there. Ulysses S. Grant, Mrs. Robert E. Lee, Chang & Eng Bunker, Benjamin Franklin, Robert Todd, Thomas Jefferson, Rev. Samuel Parris, Cotton Mather*, Edward Barrett Moulton Barrett**, numerous Indian chiefs***, etc., had next to nothing in common in terms of moral character or intellect or wealth or whatever but they were all slaveowners. Did they all deserve to die just strictly for that completely legal and socially accepted element of their lives and that alone?

Presentism makes for a ridiculous notion of slavery, an institution that had many practitioners who considered it evil (though some considered it little short of divine right) but the elimination of which was not an easy answer. Currently we keep sweatshops in business whose workers probably have lower standards of living when compared to ours than slaves did when compared to their masters- are we deserving of death?

Mather’s advocacy of innoculation came from discussing the African childhood of one of his slaves, this two generations before Edward Jenner
Not a redundancy or typo; father of Elizabeth Barrett BrowningSome Indian tribes purchased black slaves communally and made them tribe members; some purchased them individually the same as white planters. Some chiefs owned hundreds of slaves of difference races.

@The_Tao_s_Revenge

The Civil War happened because an abolitionist was elected president, before he even did anything concerning slavery. Does the south sound like reasonable people to you?

Abraham Lincoln was not an abolitionist and said so repeatedly before, during, and after his presidential campaign. He did not believe that blacks were the equals of whites and proposed emancipation as an act of war and only in the states in rebellion. He initially favored the removal of freed blacks to South America and Africa rather than their incorporation into U.S. society. There was little reasonable in the southern reaction to his election it is true, but the above premise shows infeasible makes any debate on the matter seem futile or unnecessary.

[Left_Hand_of_Dorkness]

@Sampiro

I think slavery is wrong. A controversial position but I’ll posit it nonetheless. Genocide is also wrong. And sweeping generalizations. But I’m not asking whether the institution is wrong- I’m asking do you think all slaveowners deserved death?

I think slaveowners were less than supernatural monsters and that murdering one was murder nonetheless and I think sweeping “the only good ______ is a dead ____” are simplistic at best and get increasingly dangerous from there. Ulysses S. Grant, Mrs. Robert E. Lee, Chang & Eng Bunker, Benjamin Franklin, Robert Todd, Thomas Jefferson, Rev. Samuel Parris, Cotton Mather*, Edward Barrett Moulton Barrett**, numerous Indian chiefs***, etc., had next to nothing in common in terms of moral character or intellect or wealth or whatever but they were all slaveowners. Did they all deserve to die just strictly for that completely legal and socially accepted element of their lives and that alone?

My mother-in-law once said, “I don’t see why everyone thinks Einstein was so smart. All he did was that one thing.” I think you’re falling into the same trap. Someone who’s otherwise a fine, upstanding, caring person, and the only thing they do wrong is they force someone to live a life of horrific servitude under the threat of torture, mutilation, or death–that’s not a good person. They’re not supernatural, they’re not inhuman, but only because doing evil shit is a thoroughly natural, human thing to do.

Yes, we’re thinking about it from a present-day perspective. If you’re unwilling to do that, then the thread’s title should have tipped you off that it’s not a place for you to be.

And yes, I actually do think that if someone had killed Ben Franklin in an attempt to free his slaves, that would have been justified. Why on earth wouldn’t it have been: is the person trying to free the slaves supposed to see into the future to see that Franklin will become an abolitionist? For all they knew, they could have been preventing the next Madame LeLaurie.

It’s not that slavers deserved to die. It’s that killing a slaver, in an attempt to free the slaves, is justifiable homicide. A person who kept slaves was no more an innocent bystander in this act of horror than was a person who used Jewish slave labor in their factory during World War II (and let’s leave Schindler out of it unless you’re really unclear what makes that an exceptional case, please). Slavers profited from a horror. And many of them knew it. And those that didn’t were still profiting from a horror, and if their deaths were the way to end the horror, so be it.

[Sampiro]

[QUOTE=The Tao’s Revenge]
John Brown is an American Hero. The south was full of evil pieces of shit who turned into traitors. Slave owner’s graves should be used for sewage disposal.
[/QUOTE]

An interesting aspect of southern culture was the dialect differences for the semi-militia gangs who patrolled the slaveowning areas. In black dialect both syllables were emphasized and they were referred to as “patty-rollers” since that’s how illiterate people heard “patrollers”. To many whites the first syllable was emphasized and they were known as “patties” or “paddies”, still from ‘patrollers’, and by some accounts this is where the term “paddywagon” comes from rather than from the pejorative used for the Irish. In other areas the emphasis fell on the second syllable only and they were simply known as trolls.

While I don’t agree that all slaveowners were evil pieces of shit any more than I think suffering automatically makes one noble, it is true that the patrollers tended to be from the meanest and most vicious stormtrooper like mentalities. Said another way, trolls were particularly ignorant and worthless pieces of shit whose main contribution to anything was their absence.

[The_Tao_s_Revenge]

@Sampiro

An interesting aspect of southern culture was the dialect differences for the semi-militia gangs who patrolled the slaveowning areas. In black dialect both syllables were emphasized and they were referred to as “patty-rollers” since that’s how illiterate people heard “patrollers”. To many whites the first syllable was emphasized and they were known as “patties” or “paddies”, still from ‘patrollers’, and by some accounts this is where the term “paddywagon” comes from rather than from the pejorative used for the Irish. In other areas the emphasis fell on the second syllable only and they were simply known as trolls.

While I don’t agree that all slaveowners were evil pieces of shit any more than I think suffering automatically makes one noble, it is true that the patrollers tended to be from the meanest and most vicious stormtrooper like mentalities. Said another way, trolls were particularly ignorant and worthless pieces of shit whose main contribution to anything was their absence.

(are you attempting to call me a troll? if not why the troll related trivia?)

Answer this question, what did a slave owner do to slaves that dis-obeyed him, or tried to leave? Was it the kind of thing a good person would do to another, or did it include physical assault and mutilations?

If your answer is beatings, rape or limitations, then these are not the actions of a good person, but someone who should be spat upon for being a monster.

[Sampiro]

@Left_Hand_of_Dorkness

My mother-in-law once said, “I don’t see why everyone thinks Einstein was so smart. All he did was that one thing.” I think you’re falling into the same trap.

Your mother-in-law was very wrong- Einstein did far more than the theory of relativity (assuming that’s what she was referring to) and it’s a gross simplification to say that. He did only one thing that she knew about, which goes much to the heart of the matter.

[QUOTE=Left Hand of Dorkness]
Yes, we’re thinking about it from a present-day perspective. If you’re unwilling to do that, then the thread’s title should have tipped you off that it’s not a place for you to be.
[/QUOTE]

John Brown is, imo, a terrorist by our definition AND by the definition of his own time.

[QUOTE=Left Hand of Dorkness]
And yes, I actually do think that if someone had killed Ben Franklin in an attempt to free his slaves, that would have been justified. Why on earth wouldn’t it have been:
[/quote]

Because

1- It would have been murder
2- It would have deprived the world not just of his political achievements but also of his help in advancing the cause of abolition and African-American education
3- What would become of his slaves? Are you freed when your master is killed? No- they’d have gone to Franklin’s wife and children to do with as they saw fit. Kill his wife and children- well, Franklin had 16 brothers and sisters, so they’d likely have been sold to the corners of the wind and the money divided and the slaves would still have been slaves and now probably in the possession of a far worse master, so who ultimately benefits from killing him? Certainly not Franklin and certainly not the slaves, so the only person supposedly made to feel better is the killer while everybody else pays the price.

This was exactly the case in John Brown’s crimes.

Now Nzinga, who was considered an evil pagan bitch by European superpowers in her own lifetime, WAS a freedom fighter- she was fighting to protect her people and her land from foreign domination and did a damned good job of it; Angola remained safe for her lifetime.

Harriet Tubman was definitely a hero. She traveled armed and may well have killed during her ‘career’, but if she did you can be reasonably certain it was in self defense. This was a woman who was illiterate, cataplectic (i.e. subject to narcoleptic blackouts), and mean as she had to be, but she was focused and sane. She had endured horrible abuse at the hands of her owners and overseers and would have been justified by temporary insanity if she’d killed her master who made her pull a wagon filled with rocks or the overseer who exposed her brain in a beating (though she’d have been hanged instead if she had killed them). Key differences in her and Brown though: Tubman knew what she could and couldn’t accomplish and if she did kill anybody it was justifiable. She broke the law every time she helped slaves escape to Canada, but this is a case where using presentism OR judging her by the prism of her own society she can still be seen as a heroine and as a freedom fighter. If she killed anybody, and she probably did (several biographers in her lifetime implied she did but obviously if she did they couldn’t say it because even in 1910 she could conceivably have been tried for murder since slavery was legal at the time of the crime) you can be pretty sure it was in self defense or otherwise necessary at the time- she wasn’t just killing people willy nilly because of their allegiances like Brown did in Kansas or for some crazed and doomed-to-fail-not-a-snowball’s-chance-in-hell-chance-of-success scheme like Brown’s at Harper’s Ferry. The biggest difference perhaps: not one person went free because of Brown; dozens did because of Tubman.

If Tubman had called on slaves to kill their masters or if she had killed slaveowners, you can be sure she’d have been killed and so would her followers and those suspected of aiding and abetting her, and not just in Virginia and Maryland but in Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and wherever else she traveled. The fear of armed slaves or armed escaping slaves was not limited to slave states.

[QUOTE=Left Hand of Dorkness]
It’s not that slavers deserved to die. It’s that killing a slaver, in an attempt to free the slaves, is justifiable homicide.
[/QUOTE]

If by slavers you’re referring to the people who transported them, it actually was punishable by death to be a slaver after the early 19th century. They could be fired upon by the patrollers of the African coast, they could be arrested/tried/hanged at sea and several were, and at least one (Nathaniel Gordon) was hanged after reaching a U.S. port (1862- he appealed to Lincoln for a pardon and Lincoln, usually the softest touch on Earth in appeals for clemency, said ‘hang him’). This was accomplished by legal means (maritime law and U.S. law) and did far more to stop the TransAtlantic slave trade than any rebellion.

More later- must run.

[Left_Hand_of_Dorkness]

@Sampiro

Your mother-in-law was very wrong- Einstein did far more than the theory of relativity (assuming that’s what she was referring to) and it’s a gross simplification to say that. He did only one thing that she knew about, which goes much to the heart of the matter.

No, actually, it doesn’t: what goes to the heart of the matter is that slavers (by which, as I’ve already said, I’m correctly referring to anyone who kept humans in slavery) engaged in a repeated and ongoing pattern of terror against other humans. Or do you think that if Ben Franklin’s slaves had tried to leave, he would have wished them godspeed?

John Brown is, imo, a terrorist by our definition AND by the definition of his own time.

Then the Union soldiers who sang John Brown’s body were what, terrorist-worshippers?

1- It would have been murder

By legal standards? Of course, no argument. By moral standards? This is where I disagree. If an innocent person is being terrorized, and the only way to get them free of the really horrifying terror is to kill the terrorist, then yeah, I don’t call that murder. That’s justifiable homicide.

As I’ve said before, Brown’s not a hero, but only because his methods didn’t work.

More later- must run.

Fine, but consider less later–that is, medical diagnoses of Harriet Tubman in the middle of a post, or lectures about Barrett’s surname, or irrelevant tangents about 19th century naval law, tend to inspire the pagedown button. Brevity is the soul of wit and all.

[Little_Nemo]

@The_Tao_s_Revenge

However how do you fight slavery, in a society that allows and encourages it, through legal means? You can’t, but allowing slavery is a less tolerable option. Quite frankly better slavers lose their heads than their Crimes Against Humanity be allowed to continue.

How many people died in the British Civil War that ended slavery? Or when France or Spain or Portugal or the Netherlands abolished slavery? Or Mexico or Brazil or Cuba or Argentina?

Most countries managed to abolish slavery without the massive casualties we had.