Meant to write “days” and got distracted by a shiny object. :smack:
Russell Banks’ Cloudsplitter, a long novel on the life of John Brown, is one of the great American novels. I don’t say that lightly.
I don’t know that the situation is that clear cut at Pottawatomie. You have to keep in mind pro-Slavery “Border Ruffians” had essentially gotten out of control. They openly spoke of clogging the rivers with the rotting carcasses of abolitionists and Free Staters.
While I personally believe the accounts that say John Brown was personally involved with the Massacre, I should mention there are at least some people out there who believe that Brown wasn’t personally involved but that it was instead his son. Brown himself said he wasn’t personally involved but that he supported the action (obviously the personal story of a man suspected of such a deed is of little evidential weight.)
Anti Slavery forces were getting bolder and bolder in Kansas, they had sacked Lawrence and were getting ever-more violent and aggressive. To many people it was starting to look like expatriates from pro-Slavery Missouri were genuinely going to just drive Free State settlers out of Kansas and establish a new slave state by force. The Federal government had, up to that point, done little to quell the violence. The press in the South was wildly in favor of the thuggery and violence of the Border Ruffians.
It should also be said that John Brown was fighting against a system in which violence, killing, torture and et cetera were used by the slave owners to prevent their slaves from gaining their freedom. I’m no Der Trihs and have long said that any view of Southern slavery is a lot more complicated than “they’re all the definition of evil and there’s no reason to say even one more word about it”, but I also genuinely believe that people fighting for liberty are justified in using violence, killing, and generally aggressive force to obtain that liberty. The genteel slave owner is just as valid a target as the overseer with a whip, and in fact possibly and probably more valid as a target. Likewise, a French local leader who was collaborating with the Nazis, whether a “peaceful civilian political leader” or not was a 100% valid target. I do not see why the nice men in nice clothes should be insulated from the death, torture, deprivation, and violence they directly contribute to or support and only the men holding rifles are valid targets in such war.
When Brown’s posse went around to the houses of pro-Slavery types and killed 5 men, they left men and women in several of those houses. Individuals who they felt were not involved in the Ruffianism or who were not prominent pro-Slavery forces. It was not an indiscriminate mass murder. The wife of one of the men killed even claimed her husband brought evil down on himself through his own actions and his involvement in the pro-Slavery movement, there is even some suggestion that some of these men had targeted John Brown’s family for attack.
The one unambiguous thing Brown did that wasn’t defensible is during the attack on Harper’s Ferry when a train pulled into town they attempted to take it hostage. For no reason at all (he wasn’t resisting or trying to flee) one of Brown’s men shot and killed the conductor of the train (ironically a black former slave.) Brown himself did not, to my knowledge, personally pull the trigger. And it seems that act was basically someone being too quick on the trigger in a tense situation.
1.) They were paid and 2.) Many were coerced…or forced, you could say.
And it may be the case that some in Wisconsin, Iowa, Indiana, etc. (such as my ancestors) had military experience before immigrating.
Not that those are the only reasons people join the military today. 
Sir Walter Scott, though dead since the 1830s, remained a best-selling author until World War I. I don’t have a ready cite, but recall reading that it was he whom Twain had in mind while writing Connecticut Yankee.
One of the two of us deserves a round of applause, and it ain’t me!
Best wishes,
hh
Does this tie in with what I was told in school – that many abolitionists got on board for economic, not moral, reasons? Slave labor is pretty close to impossible to compete with, and I remember my teacher saying that many farmers were at a disadvantage if they couldn’t afford slaves, or could but didn’t want to be slaveowners.
Makes almost no sense.
Slavery was mostly a non-issue in the North by the end of the 18th century. It took a bit longer to eliminate it legally but there were very few slaves both because of antagonism to slavery and for economic reasons.
The return on investment of slaves is one of those issues that is hotly debated, but as a general rule the cost of slaves could be amortized best when large numbers of worker slaves more than made up for the expenses of the non-productive slaves. On a plantation, the field hands and the huge crew of house slaves brought in productivity that outweighed the children, the pregnant women, and the sick and elderly. That slaves bred more slaves also kept the costs low over a lifetime of service. But that also meant that keeping slaves for life was a better economic investment than the typical seven-year length of indentured servitude. Knowing you could leave after a set time also seems to make some difference in attitude…
Where would northerners get such economy of scale? There were far fewer plantations in the north; most farms were small scale. Factories mostly didn’t exist until toward the second half of the 19th century. Immigrant labor was willing to compete for low wages but balked at competing against slaves. Women and children were often hired because they were willing to work for less than men. The difference in wages between low and zero was more than made up by the lack of other costs. The North got almost all the immigration because of this. And some attempts were made to set up public school systems, company-based educational programs, and charitable improvement groups even for the working classes, creating better conditions for them and their children, which the South refused to do for slaves or even free blacks.
It’s true that slaves were proportionally in far greater use as personal servants in the South, but that was cultural more than economic. It’s true that many slaves had useful skills as great as white workers in the North. It’s true that the South was perpetually underslaved so much that smugglers continued to bring slaves in after the official ban. Despite this the meat of the argument is that the North had immigrants and the South had slaves because the two areas were too economically different to support each other’s lifestyles.
And the number of true abolitionists in the North was always tiny. Any noise they made was multiplied both by their friends and their enemies for reasons of their own. The vast majority of Northerners didn’t like Negroes and didn’t like slave conditions either, but not enough to agitate for them. No president even got elected on an abolitionist ticket or needing the support of abolitionists, including Lincoln.
You can’t make that argument work without leaving out so many important things that it starts feeling like a deliberate lie.
Again, these are topics that fill contentious books that I’m boiling down to a paragraph. I’ll defend what I say, but I may have slighted a nuance or two. Alas poor nuance. I knew him Horatio.
In the novel based on my great great grandfather’s life, that motive is ascribed to him. True? False perceptions can be a strong factor.