Two Ends of a Chain?

“My sympathy with the oppressed and the wronged….”

            God told him to kill his enemies. Nothing could be clearer than that. He, his sons, and their followers dragged evil ones from their beds and hacked them to death with swords. That was only the beginning. He schemed for years, developing a mad plan to throw his country into turmoil, causing mayhem everywhere. 

Towards that end, a shadowy cabal of wealthy supporters aided him. They all lived far from where the violence would occur. They secretly gave him weapons and huge sums of money. When this evil genius carried out his bloody plot, it failed. He was hanged. Most of his money men fled the country, denying any knowledge of his scheme. 

This man lit a fuse. Months after his execution a war ripped the country in two.
The wife of one the money men wrote a blood-curdling anthem praising him. It compared him to God. The regime’s soldiers marched into battle singing her blasphemous lyrics.
The nation's leader was another bearded radical. His political opponents accused him of being secretly allied with the madman, but even this leader called him “insane.” 
Six years later an assassin who witnessed the execution killed this war-weary leader. As evil as the assassin was, even he called this fanatic a “terrorizer."

***

            This radical religious terrorist was John Brown. He was he most controversial figure in American history, a man who committed acts of terrible violence and martyred himself for the cause he believed in—the end of slavery.

            The future leader? Abraham Lincoln. Shortly after his election in December 1861, he denounced Brown—and any effort to free slaves—saying, “Emancipation would be the equivalent to a John Brown raid, on a gigantic scale.” What's more, Lincoln said all the accusations that attempted to link him and the Republican Party to Brown were "inexecusable" and "malicious slander."

Piercing Eyes

            Brown was a compelling figure. Well spoken and lean with piercing eyes, he had a hawk-like nose, a massive white beard, and a shock of white hair. A radical Abolitionist, he had pursued the goal of ending slavery for years with the white-hot religious passion that Americans would today associate with a radical Islamic terrorist like Osama bin-Laden. 
            In a letter Brown sent from prison shortly before his execution, he wrote a Quaker woman who disapproved of his violent tactics, “You know that Christ once armed Peter. So also in my case I think he put a sword in my hand, there continued it so long as he saw best, and kindly took it from me. I mean when I first went to Kansas.”

            In the 1850s, pro-slavery and anti-slavery settlers flooded the new territory of Kansas which would soon seek statehood. Whether it would be a free or slave state was unclear. Around the nation, people called it “Bloody Kansas” or “Bleeding Kansas” because of the violence there. 

            The most notorious event occurred in May 1856. Brown and his raiders butchered five pro-slavery settlers in the middle of the night, slashing and stabbing their defenseless victims. 
           Brown himself performed the coup de grace on one victim, shooting a wounded man in the head at close range. This lurid event shocked the nation and became known as the Pottawatomie Massacre after the site where it occurred.

            For the next few years Brown traveled extensively in New England, secretly meeting supporters. His most prominent backers became known as the “Secret Six.” They gave him thousands of dollars, weapons, and ammunition. One of its members was Boston physician Samuel Gridley Howe. His wife Julia Ward, a banker’s daughter, wrote “The Battle Hymn of the Republic” in 1862. 

            It took three years for Brown to plan for his raid on the federal weapons depot at Harpers Ferry. There he planned to seize thousands of rifles and huge quantities of ammunition. (Although Harpers Ferry is now in present day West Virginia, at the time it was in the slave state of Virginia.) He also chose the town because of its strategic location. The Potomac and Shenandoah rivers met there, and it served as a railroad hub for trains going both north and south and east and west. 

           Years later his daughter Anna recalled how her father explained the plan and its goals. He said he would ”secure firearms to arm the slaves, and to strike terror into the hearts of the slaveholders; then to immediately start for the plantations, gather up the negroes, and retreat to the mountains, send out armed squads from there to gather more, and eventually to spread out his forces until the slaves would come to them, or the slaveholders would surrender to them to gain peace.” 

            On October 16, 1859, Brown and 18 other men botched the plan. They took at least 30 hostages in the armory, killing four and wounding nine people in the process. Instead of becoming a guerilla warrior, he and his men became trapped within its walls.. 

            Upon seizing the building, Brown told its watchman, “I came here from Kansas, and this is a slave State; I want to free all the Negroes in this State; I have possession of the United States armory, and if the citizens interfere with me I must only burn the town and have blood.”

            Soon 90 Marines arrived. In one of American history’s great ironies, the troops were led by Brevet Colonel Robert E. Lee, then an officer in the Union Army. He, in turn, sent his aide J.E.B Stuart, a future Confederate general, to order Brown to surrender. (Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson then a student at the Virginia Military Institute (later a Confederate general) would witness Brown’s execution.)

            The Marines attacked. Brown was stabbed by a sword in the abdomen, injuring a kidney. After his capture, Henry Wise, the governor of Virginia, and military leaders interrogated him. Although all these men were pro-slavery and loathed Brown, they were all impressed by his steely demeanor, calmness, and mastery of theological issues.

            His questioning had the flavor of a religious inquisition. Some of the dialogue recalls what Jesus experienced in his last hours. 
            “Upon what principle do you justify yourself?” Brown was asked.

            “It is my sympathy with the oppressed and the wronged, that are as good as you and as precious in the sight of God,” Brown replied.

            Governor Wise reviled Brown, calling him and his band “murderers, traitors, robbers, insurrectionists.” Yet he also said Brown was "a man of clear head, of courage, fortitude and simple ingenuousness. He is cool, collected, and indomitable.”

            News of the raid and Brown’s capture hit the nation like lightning, capturing in one blinding, brutal instant the divide the separated Americans. Southerners already lived in fear of slave revolts, and they were appalled when they heard the reaction of prominent Northerners. 

"That new saint…"

            Philosopher Henry Thoreau gave a lecture in Massachusetts two weeks later during Brown's trial, saying “Some eighteen hundred years ago Christ was crucified; this morning perchance John Brown was hung. These are two ends of a chain to which I rejoice to know is not without its links.”

            Essayist Ralph Waldo Emerson, widely regarded as the nation’s most prominent intellectual, was more blunt. He called Brown “that new saint, than whom none purer or more brave was ever led by love of men into conflict and death, —the new saint awaiting his martyrdom, and who, if he shall suffer, will make the gallows glorious like the cross.”

            Meanwhile, a Virginia reporter spoke for many Southerners when he wrote that “Abolitionism…must be strangled and crushed if we are to live together in peace and harmony as members of the same political brotherhood.”

            To Northerners, Brown was a selfless martyr, a new Christ. To Southerners, he was a villain.

            Brown was charged with treason against Virginia, murder, and leading a conspiracy with slaves to overthrow their masters. When he testified at his trial, he said he regretted the loss of life but that the killings were unforeseeable.

            “I did no wrong, but right,” Brown told the court. “Now, if it is deemed necessary that I should forfeit my life for the furtherance of the ends of justice, and mingle my blood further with the blood of millions in this slave country whose rights are disregarded by wicked, cruel and unjust enactments, I submit, so let it be done!”

            Americans found themselves unsettled for another reason on November 15. A fireball blazed across the daytime sky in the eastern U.S. It exploded making the sound of rapid cannon fire. Many took it as an ill omen.

            Brown was hanged on December 2. Among those who witnessed the event was John Wilkes Booth. He wrote in a letter that he thought Brown was a "terrorizer."

            As Brown walked to the gallows, he handed his guard a note which read: “I John Brown 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 verry much bloodshed; it might be done.”

           The next year another eerie celestial portent came to pass. In 1860, a "procession of meteors" (actually one object breaking up in the atmosphere) streamed across the evening sky like a comet. Walt Whitman and Herman Melville both wrote poems about it. Both connected this bizarre celestial happening to Brown. "Year of comets and meteors transient and strange," Whitman wrote in "Year of Meteors."

            During that year’s election campaign, Democrats did their best to convince voters that Republicans had something to do with Brown and his raid. No connection has ever been shown. At the time, candidate Lincoln's proposed policy was to pay slave owners to give up their 'property.' “Even though [Brown] agreed with us in thinking slavery wrong," he said, "that cannot excuse violence, bloodshed, and treason.” 

            Nonetheless, Southerners viewed Lincoln as a radical Abolitionist of the same vein as Brown. They felt they would receive little, if any, sympathy from his administration. Thus, South Carolina seceded on December 26, 1860. On January 9, 1861, its forces fired on the strategically located Ft. Sumter, which guarded the entrance to the harbor in Charleston, a major commercial port. Lincoln was inaugurated on March 4, and he ordered the Navy to defend the fort. On April 12, the north and south fought the first battle of the civil war over its possession. Surrounded, the Union army surrendered the fort.

            Following Brown’s execution, Northerners and Southerners spontaneously began to sing songs about him. Some were sarcastic. Others were humorous. All followed the tune of an existing popular song. 
           The lyrics to “The Battle Hymn of the Republic” came to Julia Ward Howe in her sleep in 1862. Unlike other similar songs, her words linked Brown and his mission with the Union cause and God's will.

            In her hymn, Brown becomes the personification of a God who “hath loosed the fateful lightings of His terrible swift sword.” He angrily “trampl[es] out the vintage where the grapes of wrath are stored.” He delivers “his righteous sentence.” He preaches “a fiery gospel.” He is a threatening God. “With you my grace shall deal” the lyrics warn. It concludes with the chilling vow “As he died to make men holy, let us die to make men free.”

            In Lincoln’s Second Inaugural Address in March 1865, he also viewed the Civil War in a religious context: “Neither party expected for the war the magnitude or the duration which it has already attained….Both read the same Bible and pray to the same God, and each invokes His aid against the other….The prayers of both could not be answered….The Almighty has His own purposes.” 

            Unlike Brown, Lincoln spoke of a forgiving God and not of a nation of Northerners and Southerners but of one people, united in their suffering, their frailties, and their capacity for greatness. 

            “With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in, to bind up the nation’s wounds, to care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow and his orphan, to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations.”

MORAL: Vow to resolve disputes peacefully.

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