John Brown, Abolitionist: The Man Who Killed Slavery, Sparked the Civil War, and Seeded Civil Rights [Hardcover]

David S. Reynolds (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: April 19, 2005

A cultural biography of John Brown,  the controversial abolitionist who used violent tactics against slavery and single-handedly changed the course of American history.  Reynolds brings to life the Puritan warrior who gripped slavery by the throat and triggered the Civil War.  Reynolds demonstrates that Brown’s most violent acts—including his killing of proslavery settlers in Kansas and his historic raid on Harpers Ferry, Virginia--were inspired by the slave revolts, guerilla warfare, and revolutionary Christianity of the day.  He shows how Brown seized public attention, polarizing the nation and fueling the tensions that led to the Civil War. Reynolds recounts how Brown permeated American culture during the Civil War and beyond, and how he planted the seeds of the civil rights movement by making a pioneering demand for complete social and political equality for America’s ethnic minorities.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

In the very first paragraphs of this biography, Bancroft Prize-winner Reynolds (Walt Whitman's America) steps back a bit from the grandiose claims of his subtitle. Nevertheless, his book as a whole paints a positive portrait of the Calvinist terrorist Brown (1800-1859)--contrary to virtually all recent scholarship (by Stephen B. Oates and Robert Boyer, among others), which tends to depict Brown as a bloodthirsty zealot and madman who briefly stepped into history but did little to influence it. Reynolds's approach harks back to the hero-worship apparent in earlier books by W.E.B. Du Bois and Brown's surviving associates. John Brown waged a campaign so bloody during the Kansas Civil War--in 1856 he chased men and elder sons from their beds in cabins along the Pottawatomie Creek, and then lopped off their heads with broadswords as sobbing wives and younger children looked on--that fellow Kansas antislavery settlers rebuked him. Even the abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison condemned Brown and his methods. After taking the federal armory and arsenal at Harpers Ferry in October 1859, Brown intended (had he not been swatted like a fly within hours) to raise and arm a large force of blacks capable of wreaking a terrible vengeance across Virginia. Yet Reynolds insists that "it is misleading to identify Brown with modern terrorists." Really? 25 b&w illus. (Apr. 21)
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From Bookmarks Magazine

The claims of Reynolds’s subtitle strike many as inflated; while John Brown certainly grew into a towering folkloric figure after his death, the historians who review the book note that his actions were less a direct cause than an important symbolic precursor to the Civil War. Some critics believe Reynolds, winner of the Bancroft Prize for Walt Whitman’s America, is overly sympathetic to Brown’s use of violence. Though other reviewers counter that the author never turns full-scale apologist, the question of whether violence is an acceptable response to injustice—even one as grave as slavery—hangs over the text, especially as Reynolds examines the parallels between Brown’s actions and our current understanding of terrorism. One thing is certain: John Brown’s legacy is as unstable a part of our national history as ever.

Copyright © 2004 Phillips & Nelson Media, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 592 pages
• Publisher: Knopf; 1 edition (April 19, 2005)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0375411887
• ISBN-13: 978-0375411885
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 6.6 x 1.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2.2 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 3.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (39 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #631,483 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

David S. Reynolds, a Distinguished Professor at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, is the author or editor of 15 books, including "Mightier than the Sword: Uncle Tom's Cabin and the Battle for America," "Walt Whitman's America," "John Brown, Abolitionist," "Waking Giant: America in the Age of Jackson," "George Lippard," "Faith in Fiction," and "Beneath the American Renaissance." He is the winner of the Bancroft Prize, the Christian Gauss Award, the Ambassador Book Award, the Gustavus Myers Outstanding Book Award, and finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. He has been interviewed some 80 times on radio and TV, on shows including NPR's "Fresh Air," "Weekend Edition," and "The Diane Rehm Show," ABC's "The John Batchelor Show," and C-SPAN's "After Words," Brian Lamb's "Book Notes," and "Book TV." He is a regular contributor to "The New York Times Book Review" and is included in "Who's Who in America," "Who's Who in American Education," and "Who's Who in the World." David Reynolds was born in Providence, Rhode Island. For much of his childhood he lived in West Barrington, Rhode Island in a home attached to the Nayatt Point Lighthouse (built in 1828). His father, Paul Reynolds, sold life insurance and later became an artist. His mother, Adelaide Koch Reynolds, was an artist, art teacher, and sometime illustrator who designed newspapers ads and Hallmark greeting cards. David Reynolds attended the Providence Country Day School, where he later taught for a year after his graduation from college. He received the B.A. magna cum laude from Amherst College and the Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley. He has taught American literature and American Studies at Northwestern University, Barnard College, New York University, Rutgers University, Baruch College, and the Sorbonne-Paris III. Since 2006, he has been at the CUNY Graduate Center. Besides writing and teaching, he enjoys songwriting and tennis as hobbies.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

62 of 71 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars "I have only one death to die, & I will die fighting for this cause", July 20, 2005

By 

Theo Logos (Pittsburgh, PA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: John Brown, Abolitionist: The Man Who Killed Slavery, Sparked the Civil War, and Seeded Civil Rights (Hardcover)

John Brown is an American enigma. His life presents a serious challenge to a simple black and white interpretation of ethics, history, and by extrapolation, even current events. He was a man a hundred years ahead of his time in racial ethics - not only opposed to slavery, but unlike almost all other abolitionist of his time, actually a believer in the equality of the races. He was praised honestly by Ralph Waldo Emerson, who wrote of him that he "believed in two articles - the golden rule and the Declaration of Independence." Another contemporary, the black reformer Charles H. Langston praised him saying, "he was a lover of mankind - not of any particular class or color, but of all men...he fully, really and actively believed in the equality and brotherhood of man. ...He is the only American citizen who has lived fully up to the Declaration of Independence." Yet this man who was so dedicated to racial justice was able to direct the cold blooded murders of five pro-slavery men in Kansas who he had ripped from their families in the middle of the night and hacked to death with broadswords without any qualms or regrets. He chillingly stated that "it is better that a whole generation of men, women, and children should be swept away than that this crime of slavery should exist one day longer." Brown's life presents an open question on what if any limits should stand in the way of those attempting to right great societal wrongs and bring about justice. David Reynolds biography may not fully answer that question, but it goes a long way toward putting it into a proper perspective.

Reynolds' biography of Brown is both detailed and fascinating, and is sympathetic without attempting to hide the dark and troubling aspects of Brown's actions. He delves deeply into Brown's Puritan heritage and just what that meant to his life and actions. He makes clear what a unique individual Brown was. While most of the famous abolitionist who were his contemporaries never questioned the basic racism of their time despite their opposition to slavery, Brown believed firmly in racial equality. Black men and women dined with his family, and he worked intimately with them, giving them real positions of authority in the endeavors that he organized - actions unique for his time. Reynolds also explores the fact that Brown was in favor of equal rights for women and humane treatment of American Indians. He notes that while he was a fervently committed Calvinist Christian, he worked closely with others who did not share his faith, including Jews and agnostics. He shows us a man who was not a typical fanatic, but a man who believed fanatically in one basic principle - the literal interpretation of the Declaration of Independence and the Golden Rule. Reynolds also puts Brown's most troubling violence, the murders at Pottawatomie, Kansas, back into the historical context in which they happened. He writes, "Pottawatomie, gruesome and vile as it was, was John Brown's impulsive response to equally vile crimes committed by the proslavery side."

Beyond all of this, Reynolds explores in some depth the importance that the Transcendentalists had in securing John Brown's place in American history. He points out that had not Thoreau and afterwards Emerson come to Brown's public defense, Brown very well could have been forgotten by history - viewed as just one more aberrant crank with misguided and wild schemes. He spends more than one hundred pages exploring the effect Browns actions, capture, and death had on both his contemporaries and on posterity, showing the immediate impact Brown's life and death had on the country in helping to spark the Civil War, and the way it impacted future generations who have both lauded and reviled him.

John Brown's life is a testimony to one man's uncompromising commitment to his ideals, and to the ethical morass that can result from an unrelenting pursuit of those ideals. It makes us question how far one can justifiably go in an attempt to right societal wrongs, and if violence can ever be considered a righteous answer to entrenched evil. Reynolds' book may not answer all of these questions, but it most effectively poses them for our consideration. It is an outstanding biography of a crucially important figure in American history. I highly recommend it, both to those interested in American history, and for anyone who wishes to examine a practical study of the consequence of principled violent action against authority.

Theo Logos

51 of 61 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars A good biography of Brown with important cultural issues, May 23, 2005

By 

Craig Matteson (Saline, MI) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: John Brown, Abolitionist: The Man Who Killed Slavery, Sparked the Civil War, and Seeded Civil Rights (Hardcover)

When I was a child the name of John Brown was a grotesquerie. We sang about his body a moulderin' in the grave, but it was generally understood that he was some kind of crazy man who killed some people over slavery, had something to do with the Civil War, and we just shouldn't talk about it. And I am from Michigan rather than the South so this avoidance wasn't based on region.

In the sixties I was about as removed in time from the Civil War as today's young people are from the First World War. That is, the people who were alive during the war were all but past and the children born to those who had lived through the war were now old. Still, some of the received knowledge of the war came from tradition of those who had life experience rather than from books and scholarship. However, with the Great War in our Grandparent's lives, the Second World War in our parent's lives and the echoes of Korea all around us and Vietnam getting under its bloody way, the Civil War just seemed too long ago to worry about in real life.

I took extra time with this book because I wanted to wrestle with the idea of when a cause is important enough to justify personally initiated violence. In our present state of affairs, it is hard to conceive a wrong so great that righting it would involve action outside the political and judicial processes. At bottom, no matter how certain of the rightness and goodness of our cause, there is still some possibility that there is more to the issue than we understand and that those whom we would kill or murder might actually, in the cosmic view of things, not merit the death we would inflict on them. We have doubts enough with the state rendering a judgment of death, how much more would we doubt the rightness of a private judgment that concluded in the death of a human being.

The author, David Reynolds, does a solid job in telling the story of John Brown. We see Brown as a human being within his time. We see his faith in God, his Puritan sense of destiny, and his fury at the injustice of slavery. As we follow him through his life we understand why he acted as he did and the enslavement and misery of four million souls makes his actions in Kansas and at Harpers Ferry make some sort of awful sense. The last two chapters make clear that this author agrees with W.E.B. DuBois that "Brown was right". Reynolds does take on the modern terrorism of the left and the right. He takes on abortion, the environment, the Islamofacists, and more. He argues that Brown was different and exceptional. He notes the power Brown's words and how his cause was taken on by so many leading into, during, and after the Civil War.

Yet, in my own mind, if I grant that Brown is an exception I have to ask what was he exceptional with? And I note it was his eloquence in words. I still cannot help but disqualify his violence as just. His cause in freeing the slaves was certainly just, but if we allow his violence under what premise do we make that allowance? Abortion has taken millions of lives, environmentalism claims they are saving the whole planet, animal rights claims they are sparing billions of animals, and on and on the fever goes until it reaches into insanity. Whose conscience do we grant the privileged position of spilling everyone's blood?

There is also a difference between the events in Kansas where the anti-slavery people were the victims of pro-slavery aggressors. Many of these murders were committed by Missourians and other non-Kansans to impose their agenda of Salvery Everywhere. While the Kansas events cannot be called self-defense per se, they were at least direct retaliation with self-preservation in mind. Harpers Ferry was an aggressive act by Brown as a complete outsider with the view of starting a national slave rebellion.

Brown had the passion, conscience, and eloquence that he could have used to make a powerful case against slavery as he did after his trial. He would have had, I believe, an even greater impact against slavery with his preaching than with his sword. Remember, every other country in the world abandoned slavery without the violence of our Civil War. And even if we grant that the War freed the slaves in 1865 while a nonviolent approach would have taken decades longer, we also have to admit it was another century of work and too often bloodshed before the descendants of those slaves got close to the civil rights promised them. And don't forget that the man who did the most to move society to accepting those rights was Martin Luther King, Jr. who preached nonviolence. Thurgood Marshall won Brown v. Board of Education with his mind and a briefcase rather than a gun.

Yes, there is more to do. Certainly, there is cruelty and injustice almost more than we can bear in the world. But bear it we must as we work towards a better world. Our methods in that work do matter and we must not become deluded that our personal sense of righteousness actually grants us a special position from which we can deal injustice in the name of a higher cause.

This is a thoughtful book and deserves to be read. You will gain a lot from it and wrestling with these awful events will help you clarify what exactly it is you do believe.

17 of 19 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Informative, a bit long, not as objective as one would hope, February 23, 2007

By 

A. Vander Meulen "Omnivorous reader" (Boston, MA USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: John Brown, Abolitionist: The Man Who Killed Slavery, Sparked the Civil War, and Seeded Civil Rights (Paperback)

David S. Reynolds background as a Professor of English Literature shows in this book: although focused on John Brown's life, you can see Professor Reynolds' interest in Mid 19th century literature on almost every page, with frequent and extensive discourses on John Browns' interactions-with and impact on many of the well known authors and orators of the day, such as Walt Whitman, Thoreau, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Melville, and Emily Dickinson.

In general, Reynolds makes the argument that John Brown sparked the Civil War, and that he was a high minded, intensely religious man who was not as crazy, and not as violent, as history has led us to believe. He further argues that Brown was a man a century or more ahead of his time in terms of his attitudes towards racism, and foresaw where the war of words between the North and South over the future of slavery would inevitably lead.

Reynolds does a great job of helping us better understand Brown as a person; and brings to light many facets of his personality and life of which I'd been unaware, such as Brown's total acceptance of African Americans as equals in every respect - a stance that few, if any, whites had at the time (and is a viewpoint that is not as widely accepted as it should be, even today). The author demonstrates, quite rightly, that most other abolitionists of the time were not so much pro-African-American as they were against slavery and its impact upon America. Many were at best dismissive, and at worst rabidly against, accepting blacks as equals.

Reynolds comes across as an apologist for Brown, and seems to be attempting to justify some of Brown's bloodiest and most violent actions as merely being the unavoidable side effects of a man consumed with a passion against slavery. Those side effects included the deaths of several of his sons.

The book's pace is not the best, and hits some really slow spots here and there: especially when it reaches the aftermath of the Harper Ferry raid, where the author launches into a very extensive discourse on the impact of John Brown (and his execution) on American literature, thought, society and politics - again with a focus on the writers and orators of the day. These last chapters could have been reduced in length by half or more, with little loss in terms of content.

I question the author's repeated and strong emphasis on John Brown's strong Puritan faith as being a basis for his actions: this refrain starts to sound hollow after so many repetitions - as if he's hoping we'll get the message if he hits us with it enough times. As an inheritor of several centuries of that same Puritan tradition myself, many of his arguments concerning Brown's faith seem (at best) forced and overstated.

Reynolds' argument that John Brown's raid on Harpers Ferry was the spark that started the Civil War is also overstated: While I think the raid certainly contributed to the paranoia of the time, particularly in the South, Reynolds' arguments that John Brown's attack and behavior following the raid destroyed the South's reputation for chilvalric military prowess and invincibility is not believable. The war was inevitable: Brown's Raid on Harpers Ferry may have raised emotions, but the South was already diligently preparing for war by the time the raid occurred. The attack, at best, hurried things along a bit, but in my view, the country was almost certain to fall apart soon after the election of 1860, regardless of who won the Presidency.

In the end, though with some significant flaws in terms of pacing, facts, and the arguments presented; this book is informative: it does bring out the nature of the man, and it helped me better appreciate his impact on the country and History. Dr. Reynolds' work especially helps us to understand Brown's impact upon many of the thought-leaders of the day, and how regional attitudes and cultural traditions played into the unfolding of events at the time and their impact on John Brown's own career and reputation during the trial, and in the years following his execution.

To better understand how racism changed and evolved after the Civil War, I'd strongly recommend the book "Race and Reunion" by David W. Blight. For a better understanding of the four regional cultures in America at the time (Appalachian, Southern, New England and Mid Atlantic), which play a major role in Reynold's text, I'd recommend "Albion's Seed: Four British Folkways in America" by David Hackett Fischer.

"John Brown, Abolitionist" is a book that is worth the read, though its flaws limit the impact that it could have made, given the strong personality that is its subject. I give it a positive, but limited, recommendation.