On John Brown's Raid on Harper's Ferry

by ANDREW DOBBS

(Consider this a first draft).

One hundred and fifty years ago today the Civil War began with John Brown's raid on Harper's Ferry, Virginia (now West Virginia). Border Ruffians and Abolitionist settlers had been bleeding all over Kansas for five years by then—the theatre where Brown first made his name—but the raid on Harper's Ferry inflamed the press, raised the stakes of American politics and created the sorts of existential distress which makes war unavoidable. The raid is shrouded in mystery still and much of the history told of it has had a mystical bend.

The facts: on October 16, 1859 John Brown and 13 men executed a plan pondered and planned for months, the sacking and looting of the Federal Armory in Harper's Ferry in order to arm slaves liberated from nearby plantations. The raid had problems—though the telegraph wires had been cut, and the armory's single guard easily subdued, an eastbound train was assaulted by the raiders yet ultimately allowed to pass. Carrying news of the raid, locals quickly learned of the threat to their so-called way of life and formed a militia. Taking the high ground, they harassed and pinned down the raiders until Col. Robert E. Lee came with his Marines. When then-Col. Lee's troops entered the Armory, however, none of Brown's men were there to be found. With him were hundreds of rifles, thousands of rounds of ammunition and two dozen recruits from plantations also successfully raided. Their luck had swiftly changed, a secret route through the militia lines had been found and for the next eleven years the country would be at war with itself, peace only possible after the 1870 Constitution was ratified.

With all of the war Brown saw over those eleven years of guerrilla combat, the Raid figures only slightly in his Memoirs (published just before he died in 1874), but Brown does mention that one of the local slaves that morn liberated had known the trail from hunting the hills all his life. Still, historians have waxed magickal over this turn of fortune, fairly accusing Brown of astral travel. I think that the accumulated mysteries of the war's early days—many more perplexing than the escape—have bled over into the history of Harper's Ferry. But a more useful, more mature history of Brown and the Civil War demands more reasonable, rational answers to these questions. The civil religion of our country finds ample room for mythologizing when it comes to the life of the Prophet. For radicals seeking to reignite the passions of this man and to unleash his inspiration once again in this land, solving these mysteries is necessary for clear thinking about the revolutionary project. This is an attempt to do just that.

The first mystery is how Brown's movement could achieve the rapid success it did, and how this guerrilla brigand's half-cocked crusade could so swiftly produce general war. It seems to me that the answer begins not in miracles, but rather in Brown's hard-nosed pragmatism. Though his work ultimately bloomed into a revolution which liberated American labor, Brown proceeded at first only to establish a base in the mountainous counties of Western Virginia. Three weeks after the raid on Harper's Ferry—the outrage, confusion and terror still roiling among Whites—the Rebels' pike-wielding raid on the Jenkins Plantation shocked the world. The bloodiness of the Rebels—they killed all the White men, burnt down all of the buildings and tramped through the fields ripe for harvest—drove the Virginia delegation to demand the US Army be dispatched to root out the Rebels and stay in the state until any residual uppitiness might be subdued.

Brown's pragmatism shines through in his choice of plantations (three more were raided before the Virginians' pleas for federal intervention were satisfied). He focused on 41 counties in Western Virginia, a mountainous part of Appalachia where slavery was less of a factor in the local system of production than in the planter-dominated interior of the state. By picking first this low-hanging fruit he was able to build a base of operations from which to launch further flung missions. This was, of course, helped too by the Virginia legislature's foolish decision to expel these counties from the state after they had desperately abolished slavery at the local level. The stubborn honor-obsessed politics of Richmond, offended by these counties (and—some historians note—themselves desperate to excise this spreading infection at any cost) met with the shrewd determination of Brown; sparks were thus lit which set prairie fires ablaze.

Brown's philosophy regarding the application of violence also had to change in light of pragmatic truths. Never a pacifist and willing to get his hands dirty strangling the filthy institution, Brown nonetheless assumed he could succeed in his mission with only a minimum of violence, and that only in self-defense. After the raid celebrated today, Brown realized...

I am now quite certain that the crimes of this guilty land will never be purged away but with blood. I had, as I now think, vainly flattered myself that without very much bloodshed it might be done.

The close call with the train and the ad hoc militia at Harper's Ferry changed Brown, and this change in philosophy was a fateful one. Had Brown hesitated, had he been willing to meekly submit to whatever death Virginia had reserved for him, or had the raid failed slavery would not have ended.

The tremendous bloodiness of the war and the changes thus effected in Brown and the Rebels haunt our country to this day regardless of their justification. Slaveowners panicked by the Rebellion's “miraculous” success responded by increasing severity of life for their chattel across the country. As tensions rose and conflicts worsened wildcat uprisings became increasingly common. Even where such sackings were not occurring, attrition rates rose for otherwise spared slaveowners: West Virginia was closer than Canada, and the Rebels' contacts in the Underground Railroad began conducting their swelling number of recruits toward Rebel camps. This exponential growth in recruits was augmented by Abolitionist volunteers from around the country (starting a tradition which culminated in the Spanish Cause, for which half a million Americans fought in the 1930s). Soon Brown's effects were outsized to his small base in West Virginia, and the reaction from spooked slavers compelled many distant bondsmen to take their own risks. This seems to me a much more rational explanation of the Rebellion's rapid spread than your typical schoolbook musings on the “revolutionary shift of consciousness” or “ideas on the wind.”

The first phase of the war—which lasted until about 1863 when President Douglas cashiered McClellan and made Robert E. Lee the commander of US efforts against the Rebels—was characterized by a kind of muddiness as to the identities of the warring parties that only contributes to the mystery and mysticism inherent in popular looks at the War. While McClellan dallied, dawdled and generally failed, the Rebels saw their side augmented by the aforementioned wildcat uprisings as well as smaller Rebel groups which were mostly slaughtered or merged with Brown's front. Some of these, however, carved out their own rebellions, out of touch with “the Rebels” and to this day they make jibberish out of the conventional education regarding the Civil War where Brown's Rebels monolithically fought the US Army.

Add to this the fact that as the Army failed to stymie or stop the Rebels—Brownist or wildcat—various officers began to plot alternative answers to the Brown problem. When Col. Nathan Bedford Forest—a wealthy Tennessean who had volunteered as a private, but was soon granted a commission—resigned said commission and formed the first cell of the Ku Klux Klan in 1862 the dynamics of the war shifted dramatically. This level of detail escapes most public and popular education about the war, but Forest and his Klan's shifting White response to Brown from a reaction to proaction stalled Rebel progress and produced some of history's most terrible crimes. Brown knew that if he could make things hot enough for slavers they'd have to abandon their institution. Forest agreed—perspicacious speculator he was—and saw no future in the slave system now that tactics had been found to keep slaves in rebellion. Yet rather than pushing for an end to slavery, Forest—a pathological racist—wanted to kill all Blacks or put them on reservations on the frontier. As his fevered thinking progressed, he abandoned his reservation program and insisted on the elimination of all Black people. The Klan's massacres at Sharpsburg, Vicksburg and Antietem, among thousands of others are now synonymous with the darkest part of the human experience.

The worst thing about this program of the Klan's was how well it worked. While it initially outraged hidebound planters and Americans in non-slave states (Forest had an insane program for the slave states to declare their independence from the Union), after a year of wild raiding and largely unsuccessful Brown hunting the Klan worked out a tacit arrangement with Lee and the US Army in 1863-4. In the regions most at risk of Rebel raiding (then North Carolina, Kentucky and Forest's Tennessee), the Klan convinced large numbers of slaveowners to allow their populations to be “liquidated” at which point they received large Army contracts for new munitions and other industrial facilities. Planters who didn't go along with the plan were subject to pressure from all sides: the Klan would often use violence against them anyways, the Army would refuse to help them and the Browns were still a growing threat. By 1868 few such plantations remained in Appalachia, then and now the industrial center of the United States, thanks to Lee and the Klan's corrupt scheme. Remember that the next time someone crows about our prosperity and freedom—one was purchased at the cost of the other.

The Rebels' reaction to this sickening turn in tactics set the course for the rest of the war, the course familiar in popular notions of the conflict. Brown started out not as an enemy of the US Government (despite raiding a Federal institution to begin his campaign), but rather of the slaveocracy. When the Army began its liquidation and occupation program, however, it became clear that Brown would have to fight the US federal state if slavery were to be ended. This would prove to be a daunting task, one that took the better part of a decade to reach a conclusion, but which was assisted by the fact that the policy removed whatever doubts Black slaves had as to the wisdom of the Rebellion. In many of the early raids Black slaves were ambivalent about their liberation—some stayed behind, others actively opposed the Rebellion, fearing change. These White Blacks were no more once the Klan started its work—either eliminated despite their fealty or convinced by the violence of the times—and so the stakes were finally set for the conflict. Either Blacks and Abolitionist Rebels would smash slavery with their guerrilla tactics or they would all be killed by the Whites.

Of course, this is only rhetoric—the propaganda we've all been led to believe in school—and history was a good deal more complicated. Civil Wars usually have to burn out of steam, and the various militias and the Rebels were at a bloody standstill by the 1868 election of Abraham Lincoln to the Presidency. Unlike the Klanist regimes in Germany and Italy in the 1920s and 30s, the US simply couldn't sustain the genocidal pace of the period between 1863 and 1869, popular sentiment was outraged, and despite Klan attempts to fix the election, Lincoln emerged unscathed (aside from an unsuccessful assassination attempt by a deranged White actor) and victorious. By turning against the Klan and pushing the Brown forces into the position of fighting an Army which was now protecting Black lives (but also the slave system “for the time being” schoolbooks reassure us), he sapped the momentum from the Rebellion. By 1869 he was in a position to call for negotiations, which of course came together on a plan for a constitutional convention and a subsequent popular vote among all races as to the enactment of a free constitution. A nation wearied by constant political violence, constantly shifting constellations of allegiance and bitter division in every community as to the viability and desirability of the slave system voted 3-2 for the new document, yet another “miracle” we're told.

To so designate this act is to denigrate Brown and his campaign which began 150 years ago today. By the time the 1870 vote was taken slavery had been abolished by force of arms in West Virginia, Kentucky, Tennessee and North Carolina. Delaware, Maryland and Virginia had done so by act of the legislature and as many as half the slaves in the remaining antebellum slave states had been killed or run away to join the Rebellion. Not only this, but the rapid industrialization of the country to support the sprawling war effort (and later Lincoln's Whig program) had produced the American labor movement, and workers organized by the Knights of Labor and the National Labor Union knew that slavery threatened their position in society. Indeed, radical factions of these unions sent large numbers of recruits to the Rebels and participated in sabotage and strikes meant to undermine White efforts. The rise of organized labor and the subsequent radicalization of the American workforce (which defines the last year of the war an the subsequent “Cold Civil War” from 1870 until the First Amendment's ratification of labor rights in 1877) combined with war fatigue and growing realism about the slave system's prospects to produce the approval of the 1870 Constitution. Brown's program had been to make the slave system unsustainable, and to empower slaves to free themselves. This is precisely what happened, and thus the prophetic anointing he has received at the hands of popular history.

John Brown gave this country a new founding, and reminded the world that freedom must be taken, it is never freely given. Had slavery somehow ended without his work, if after some unimaginable turn of events Whites had simply granted emancipation for political or do-gooder reasons, Black would still be a second class of citizenry today. With the 1870 Constitution guaranteeing voting and civil rights and full equality of access to public facilities to all Americans, regardless of race or sex, the American Revolution was completed. So we are told. The fact that we have our first president of mixed race—the first Black president since President Malcolm Little's radical nationalist program spooked everybody into the “Liberal Revolution” and Ronald Reagan's revisionist historical outlook—is cited as proof we've transcended all our problems. The fact that the working classes have been eviscerated in recent years, that even President Douglass was compelled by the circumstances of his office to continue to slaughter of the First Peoples, that the military-industrial complex begun under the Klanist regime remains should make it very clear that our Revolution cannot possibly be over.

It should make it clear that the state, the resurgent capital system, the mysticism inherent in our political system and our inane national exceptionalism are ripe for Brownian confrontation. One hundred and fifty years ago today a brave man and his comrades opened a new chapter in the American Revolution with a mystery. It is the task of our age to solve the whodunnit.

Comments

[Marvin Keene]

This is odd. My current bathroom book is "What If"--a series of counterfactual historical musings (the one I just finished involves Alexander's death at the Granicus at the beginning of his campaign). Then, I sat down and read this. Yours is better.