![]() His altruism on behalf of black people was not utterly selfless, but he was an extraordinary example of an American, a white American, who put his money where his mouth was - he didn’t have any money - put his life where his mouth was, and took it into the South. John Brown was a troubled man, he was a morbid man, he was an Old Testament man, but he probably was not crazy, as so many people said at the time, and people have said ever since. “I have been whipped,” he wrote to his wife, “as the saying goes, but am sure I can recover all the lost capital occasioned by that disaster by only hanging a few minutes by the neck, and I feel quite determined to make the utmost possible out of my defeat.” I love you dear, but I can’t wait to hang. He wrote this one to his wife, which may be indicative of Brown’s vision of his own acts and a vision that was now going to stick, in some ways, in poetry and in song. I had the great privilege to read a whole batch of the originals once, housed at, of all places, the Pennsylvania Historical Society. He was writing his own epitaph, he was creating his own romantic legend, he was arguing his own case. From jail he wrote approximately 100 letters, all over the country, to newspapers, to editors, to magazines, to members of his family, particularly to his wife. People came from the North and were allowed to visit him, including his wife. He apparently won over his jailer who found John Brown one of the most fascinating characters he had ever seen. From November 2 nd to December 2 nd, that one month - November 2 nd was the last day in court where they sentenced him - he had one month in jail. The jury deliberated for forty-five minutes, returned a verdict of guilty on all three counts, and it was announced he would be hung about a month later, on December 2 nd, 1859. The closing arguments were the 31 st of October. ![]() ![]() He was eventually defended in court by three Northerners, lawyers, who came down to help. This would be drawn and put in lithographs and pictures all over the country. He laid on a cot, because of his injuries and his wounds, in the courtroom. The State of Virginia famously tried to provide a lawyer for John Brown and Brown refused that State’s supplied lawyer. Two, inciting a slave insurrection a pretty serious crime in Virginia. Treason against the United States - it was considered treason to attack a federal arsenal - I suppose it still would be although we don’t try too many people for treason anymore. There were three charges, all of which were punishable by death, at least in Virginia. In that period he would be put on trial, the most celebrated trial, to that point, in American history. He was taken to a jail four miles from Harpers Ferry, Charlestown, Virginia, now West Virginia, and he would reside there for about the next six weeks. It was in some ways a military strategic blunder. Douglass, you’ll remember, had great ambivalence about this man and chose not to join him on the raid at Harpers Ferry. John Brown could die for the slave.” There’s a clarity in that, among the many eulogistic statements about John Brown and the many that Frederick Douglass himself made. Mine was bounded by time, his stretched away to the silent shores of eternity. Mine was a taper light, his was the burning sun. “His zeal in the cause of freedom was infinitely superior to mine. “John Brown’s raid on Harpers Ferry was all his own,” said Frederick Douglass. Either way, whether people came to admire and sort of agonizingly love him, or agonizingly hate him. John Brown would be filtered through a Christian imagination. ![]() ![]() Europe was essentially a Christian civilization. The United States was a Christian country. The most important thing about John Brown, as I tried to say the other day - and I want to conclude with several comments about that now - is in how he died and in the aftermath of his death. There are martyrs of this cause and martyrs of that cause. Martyrdom what is a martyr? It’s a term we hear all over the place now. I wish we had another week, two, three weeks, but we don’t. Professor David Blight: Faster than might seem appropriate, and faster than I wish, we’ve come to the secession crisis. The Civil War and Reconstruction Era, 1845-1877 HIST 119 - Lecture 10 - The Election of 1860 and the Secession Crisis ![]()
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