John Brown: Hero or Terrorist

Great Debates
141

Little Nemo, you keep saying that, and it sounds as if you’re blaming John Brown for the Civil War in the US, as though the South were just aching for a political solution to the problem of slavery, but Brown kept them from reaching it.

I just don’t think that’s accurate. The difference between the US slavery and British slavery wasn’t John Brown: the difference was that there was an entire aristocracy in the South whose very existence was predicated on chattel slavery, and they were the ones who held the political ropes. When it appeared that a political, peaceful, somewhat democratic end to slavery was on the horizon, they started a war rather than let that happen.

Consider also that John Brown’s massacre was against people who were actively preventing a political solution: he attacked people who had burned down abolitionist presses, people who were themselves attacking peaceful, democratic abolitionists. He operated in a climate in which even the most restrictive democratic institutions were in a shambles.

142

Sometimes illustration and exemplification helps or can at least, to those with attention spans that would not be challenged by anything deeper than a fortune cookie, be of interest. For example, the phrase “brevity is the soul of wit” is spoken by Pollonius, a conniver and charlatan and braggadocious character giving hypocritical and specious advice to his son. It comes from Hamlet, the longest play of William Shakespeare, an author known for lengthy plays. The title character of which speaks 1,438 lines of dialogue, which more than 400 years after its first performance is still the most lines of any character in any English language play, and the play lasts 4+ hours when performed in its entirety (which it never is). Does it sound as if Shakespeare was truly arguing in favor of brevity?

Once upon a time there was a prince whose father was murdered. The father’s ghost told the prince "It was my brother, your uncle, who now sleeps with my wife, your mother, and due to the laws of agnatic primogeniture reigns in my place. The prince feigned madness to seek revenge, going mad in the process and leaving a trail of bodies that ultimately included not only the uncle he wanted dead but his mother, his girlfriend, himself, and the bodies of a few schemers as well as several innocent [if not necessarily likable] people.

That’s the same play in under 100 words and it even mentions how Claudius became king. That is brevity. I daresay Shakespeare’s version will be remembered longer.

In any case people act as if “brevity is the sole of wit” is some sort of law. Brevity makes for great one liners and that’s true. It also makes for religious axia and or political beliefs for the intellectually lazy or the congenitally stupid, and much to the point I would argue that the need for quick and easy and concise and rigid answers has caused more damage and suffering in history than slavery, as evidenced by among many other facts brevity of answer was used to justify slavery. (“It’s in the Bible, that’s enough for me.”)

If you are incapable of absorbing more than blip sized information, and I am not saying you are, then I think it goes far to explain the simplicity and logical inconsistencies of your views. Slavery was an extraordinarily complex issue that had no easy answers and that was not, no racial pun intended, a black and white matter (in fact racially it wasn’t either- there were white, Hispanic, American Indian and other colors of slaves in U.S. history).

Slavery no longer legally exists in the U.S. but abortion does. (It existed then as well and was rarely illegal but also rarely practiced before the late 19th century since it so often resulted in the death of the mother.) Anti-abortion activists truly believe that abortion is murder. While I do not share this view, it is easy to understand: a zygote left undisturbed will become a fetus which in due time if born will become a baby, thus it is not hard to see how killing a zygote can be extrapolated into killing a baby. I see enough logical merit to this that while I believe in a woman’s right to choose, I am morally opposed to abortion as birth control in cases where a woman conceived a presumably healthy fetus through carelessness BUT I would never support any initiative to illegalize it.

However, some of their more extreme members find it morally justifiable to murder abortionists. Since they are acting on their views should they be left unprosecuted because abortion is offensive to many people and innocent people (i.e. the unborn, who by definition have harmed nobody) are being killed?

And if you believe they should be prosecuted, and if it is true that murder to end suffering is not morally wrong, why shouldn’t they be prosecuted for murdering an abortionist? Why acknowledge a law you disagree with when you can, or why * bear the whips and scorns of time, the oppressor’s wrong, the proud man’s contumely, the pangs of despised love, the law’s delay, the insolence of office, and the spurns
that patient merit of th’ unworthy takes,*When one might a more just world make with a bare bodkin or semi-automatic?with bare bodkin or automatic weaponry, your own or somebody else’s quietus take?

**The italicized portion * above is borrowed from Shakespeare’s 5,000 line/30,000 word ode to brevity- no wonder the play is so universally condemned and forgotten.

143

There was never a slave-owning majority in any state or in the nation as a whole. So slave-owners could never rely on democracy alone to protect slavery (a fact they full well knew). I think slavery could have been abolished in the United States (as it was in most other countries) by seperated pro-slavery interests from other interests and by helping those other interests to act independently. When you isolated the slave-owning minority you could then end slavery by normal democratic means. They wouldn’t have been happy (any more than the slave-owners in Maryland or Missouri were happy when slavery was abolished in their states) but it wouldn’t have been a cause for war.

144

tp;dr

145

And yet, when that started to happen, the slavers started a war over it.

146

Thus proving that 1860 was a little late in the process.

But that doesn’t invalidate my point. Dozens of states were able to abolish slavery without causing a war. So obviously it was possible.

147

Not surprising. Some should stick to bumper stickers. Hopefully the same some don’t vote or, God forbid, home school their kids. A pity though as you’d have learned not to use quotes without knowing their context, but at least woeful ignorance prevents people from knowing how much they embarrassing themselves.

148

P=patronizing. You’re assuming facts not in evidence, and when challenged on your propensity to pad your posts with smug, self-satisfied irrelevancies, your response isn’t to tighten your prose, but rather to lash out, assuming that anyone who doesn’t appreciate your peacock-displays of brilliance must be stupid. Knock yourself out, Sampiro; I’ll continue the discussion with those less desperate to display their erudition in every sentence, those willing to stick to the topic at hand.

(“Hand”, of course, is derived from a middle-English word “hand,” which itself come from the Old English “hande.” If you say that someone works with their hands, you’re referencing a 16th-century idiom. “Hands-up!” dates to the 19th century).

149

No, because they are factually wrong; a fetus isn’t a person, while slaves are.

And the actual goal of anti-abortionists is to torment and oppress women, not “save babies”; they are closer to the slavers than to the abolitionists. Everything they do is aimed at making life as miserable as possible for women or killing them, not preventing abortions.

150

The reason for secession wasn’t a hatred of Lincoln per se as some seem to assume (who, again, was not an abolitionist- he was an anti-expansionist- huge difference). Most southerners couldn’t have picked Lincoln out of a line-up unless the others were all short- he was a one term Congressman from Illinois and that more than a decade before and he was mainly known for a speech (Cooper Union) and a series of debates when seeking an office that wasn’t elected by popular vote and in which he was unsuccessful.

What majorly p.o.d the south was that he won without receiving a single electoral vote from a slave state, while Breckinridge swept the south and won every state in the Deep South and only got 72 of the 303 electoral votes. All of the slave states combined had only 123 votes, and the population non-slave states were growing much faster than those of the slave states. Douglas meanwhile got the second highest number of votes in the election- close to 1.4 million, or roughly 75% of the votes Lincoln got, yet he got only 11 electoral votes, or 6%, of the electoral votes Lincoln got. This is what enraged the South.

Obviously the south wasn’t going to start a war on principle against the Electoral College, but it was what the electoral votes represented. Electoral votes are of course decided by Senate seats plus House seats. In 1860 there were 33 states (West Virginia not having yet split from Virginia). Of those 13 allowed slavery, 20 did not, so if every slave state voted in lock step that would assure only 26 Senate votes against the free states 40, so they were damned there. There were 237 Representatives, and every single representative from every single slave state (not just the Deep South but Kentucky, Maryland, Tennessee [which was more divided than the border states] and Missouri) would have to vote in lock step to win the simplest minority in the House, and then as now this meant crossing party lines several different ways. The south had less than 1/3 of the population already, and with the 1860 Census it was already known that another reapportionment that would greatly benefit the northern states (with their enormous immigration population that was making them grow at incomparably higher rates than the south) and this meant that the slave states, even if every single rep DID vote in unison (which would never happen) would lose any hope whatever of getting enough votes to win a measure.

While large slaveholders (owners of 20 or more) were a tiny minority of the southern population, some things worth remembering:

1- This tiny minority was grossly overrepresented in policymakers, a huge number of whom were either members of this class or were backed by/closely related to people who were
2- Senators were not elected in most states, they were appointed
3- Only men with property could vote in most states and
4- of 3, many who could vote didn’t because of the inconvenience of it

So the interests of the large slaveholders was far more represented in both houses than the interest of yeoman farmers and merchants and townfolk.

So, while Lincoln was not an abolitionist he was an anti-expansionist, which meant that there would not be any more slave states coming into the Union, and there were lots and lots more immigrants coming and there were territories becoming states and the like, so the slave state minority in the House was only going to get smaller and smaller with each election. Add to this that if Lincoln ever DID become abolitionist, or if any abolitionist senator or Representative ever DID propose a bill, the slave states- even if they voted in unison and the Reps most certainly wouldn’t have- had absolutely no chance whatever of defeating it and would have to do whatever the North said.

Now, there were 4.5 million slaves in 1860 (give or take- some non-Census accounts estimate it at closer to 5 million). Assuming an average worth of around $500 and that’s a really really low estimate, you’re talking about billions of dollars in 1860 money, tens of billions in today’s money if you adjust that for the purchasing power of cash and literally trillions if you go by the ratio of slave value to government income. You’ve seen what a trillion dollar shock does to the economy, can you imagine if 1/3 of the population had to sustain a trillion dollar blow all at once? The economy would have been absolutely destroyed and it wouldn’t have just affected the rich. It would have wiped out the planter class instantly, most of whom were already heavily in debt to bankers, which it also would have wiped out. It would have wiped out the yeoman farmers who were in debt to the planter class AND to the bankers. It would have wiped out the merchants, the shippers, the millers, pretty much everybody, and after the Civil War, that’s exactly what happened.
Divorcing ethics from the matter- and I know that’s hard to do, but try- the notion that slavery could legally be ended overnight without the consent of a single southerner was a horrifying notion, and to none more so than the planter class, but the lower socioeconomic classes had reason to fear it too as did many northerners. (It was war contracts that would save many northern manufacturers from going under due to the loss of the southern market.) Most people are simply not going to financially devastate themselves so that transcendantalists can congratulate themselves over tea.
There were voices of reason in the south saying “not yet, Union uber alles, remember Andy Jackson, the Union must be preserved…”. One of their leaders was, many will know, Jefferson Davis, who was very anti secession and gave speeches all over the north and south preaching reconciliation (because again remember that this breach and splitting of the nation’s foundation wasn’t knew- it had been going on for more than a generation, came close to war several times, then President Pierce put duct tape all over it and Buchanan ignored it altogether while Abraham Lincoln was a name you could scream out loud in any city of the south and nobody would have recognized it, so Lincoln inherited a situation.

Anyway, point is don’t do drugs, must run.

151

I am not displaying my erudition. You are displaying your absolute poverty of knowledge and your wealth of uninformed zealotry.

152

Whether or not a fetus is a person depends on the definition of ‘person’ and even then is largely a matter of opinion There are legal definitions of personhood that they do not meet, but this was also true with slaves. To many people they are very much ensouled human beings, and while I am pro-choice in the extreme I honestly don’t think that the most rabidly pro-life activists (even those who open fire on or bomb abortionists) do so for misogynistic reasons save perhaps for a handful of lunatics. They’re not doing it to harm women but to save the lives of babies. (Again, I disagree with them and my opinions are closer to your own- illegalizing abortion would ruin 10,000 times more lives than it would ‘save’- but most anti-abortion activists really aren’t doing it for malicious reasons.)

153

a number which puts the 600,000 casualties of the Civil War into perspective.

And feeling any concern over that IS an ethical matter, which brings the plight of the slaves right back into it. In other words screw the South; they made their deal with the devil of slavery, let them burn for it.

154

I just don’t see what makes slaveholding (or being the wife or child of a slaveholder, evidently) such a special error of history that so many people think it automatically deserves the death penalty. Should we also go back and kill all the men who had wives who couldn’t vote or own property? What about men who had harems? How wrong do you have to be by modern thinking to deserve to die for it, when what you’re wrong about was the social norm of the day? People who used child labor? Is it okay if it’s on a farm?

155

Only irrational and dishonest definitions. Definitions that exist only for the purpose of self justification and lead to absurdities if taken seriously.

I disagree, I think the overwhelming majority are motivated solely by malice. Again; their actions do not support the theory that they actually care about “babies”.

156

What evidence do you offer for this? A hunch or hard data?

Exactly. If you were a free worker in a factory and lost your arm in an industrial accident that wasn’t your fault, there’s a good chance you’d not only get not a penny of compensation but you’d be docked for the time on that workday after your arm got stuck in the machine. Immigrants literally starved to death in the alleys and gutters of major cities- not “they went hungry from lack of food”- they starved to death. Undertakers made most of their money on coffins for babies and children and there were whole areas of Boston and NYC that specialized in child prostitution. We’re not talking about some Disneyfied land where all was evil on one side of the Mason Dixon line and all was peaches and cream on the other with regards to race or any other factor; being poor and free had as many evils as slavery, they were just different evils.

People have way too sanitary a view of the past and what was and wasn’t acceptable. As recently as when the Golden Gate Bridge was being built the builders were paid $8 per day and had to sign forms releasing the state from liability if they fell to their deaths (which at least 11 men did). This was so recently that a few of the laborers are still alive.

I hate the simplification of history. Case in point: I was in a bookstore the other night where Bowling for Columbine was playing and it came to the cartoon that portrays the Pilgrims as a bunch of cowards who killed the Indians out of fear. College age kids were laughing at this and saying “that’s pretty true”… I didn’t start a scene but had to leave. Were the Pilgrims religious radicals? Yep, sure were. Were they cowards? Well, if you consider people whose religious faith is so strong that they’ll board a tiny wood ship in an ocean known for hurricanes and terrible storms and Protestant hating Spanish and the occasional pirate and head out for a wilderness where they know they’ll be surrounded hundreds to one by Indians, where the only other English speaking colony is Jamestown which in 13 short years has buried more than 1,200 of the 2,000 or so people who have emigrated there, then yeah, they were cowards. As for relationships with the Indians, it really wasn’t “get off the boat, take what they have and then start shooting”- it was a lot more- here’s that word again- complicated.

I suppose there’s some need to see good guys and bad guys with clear delineation marks: it gets hard when you read history and realize there were a lot of slaveowners who cared greatly about the welfare of their slaves, and a lot of northerners who hated non-whites, or see that Indians weren’t always nice and whites weren’t always the aggressors. It takes a world of arrogance to say you know better than slaves whether or not their lives were worth living or what you would have done in their case and it takes as much ignorance to say everybody who held slaves was to the core evil and deserving of death- where’s the outrage over the owners of the textile mills or manufacturers of trade goods for southern plantations? Or what of Sherman who in addition to declaring war on civilians was one of the most outspoken racist generals on either side of the war- was he better than or worse than a slaveowner whose slaves regarded him/her as humane (and there were many who did regard their owners as such)?

I mention that Harriet Tubman considered John Brown a misguided lunatic in a thread about perceptions of John Brown and it’s considered ‘irrelevant trivia’ by somebody who from the safety of the 21st century knows better than she does.

I read an article recently by a military historian who trashed Nathan B. Forrest as a borderline incompetent not at all deserving of his reputation. This guy, whatever his credentials (he’s an ex-serviceman and a research professor) is second guessing almost 150 years later Sherman and Grant, both of whom had to deal directly with Forrest in the field, both of whom were no slumps themselves in the military accolades department, both of whom had the disadvantage of not looking back a century and a half later, and both of whom said to each other and to Lincoln that Forrest was the greatest cavalry general they’d ever seen and that it was worth 10,000 Union deaths to kill him. This professor is guilty of an educated arrogance that is near laughable, but I find it a hundred times preferable I think to ignorant arrogance.

157

“And who holds the other end of that filthy purse string, Mister Adams? Or haven’t you heard, clink clink…”

What about the north? They had slavery for 200 years. It wasn’t tenderness as much as economy that began abolition and most of the major slaveowners when slavery was abolished in their states cut their losses by selling their slaves south. What of the African tribes that sold the slaves in the first place, have they suffered enough? What of Brazil, Cuba, Guyana, Panama and all of the other places?

What of the Creeks and Cherokees and Chickasaws and others who owned African slaves- should they burn as well? Does it make their forced removal more justifiable or the theft of their land hurt a little less?

158

FWIW, I’m taking a different stance from Der Trihs (big surprise). I’m not calling for mass executions–rather, I’m saying that killing a slaver in an attempt to free a slave is justifiable homicide.

Turn the question around: if a slave–let’s say a slave with a 2-year-old toddler–in attempting to free herself and her child from a life of slavery, kills the person who terrorizes her into bondage, is that homicide justifiable?

I certainly think it is, whether it was 150 years ago or today.

And if it’s justifiable for the slave to free herself through violence, why is it not justifiable for someone else to attempt to free her through violence?

159

Kind of a hijack, but here’s a list of actors who’ve played John Brown. I’d agree that Raymond Massey’s was the definative Brown, but Johnny Cash? Wasn’t Merle Haggard available?

160

While the idea that a slave is a person is undisputable the idea that slavery and thus should be banned is immoral is a moral viewpoint. The same goes for views on abortion.

For Beria’s sake, have you even talked to a pro-lifer or read a pro-lifer article/opinion piece whatnot? Perhaps the abolitionists real goal was to remove economic competition with whites [1]

[1] This certainly was the actual motivation for some slavery opponents