Customer Reviews

John Brown Mysteries

5 star:		(1)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Jean Libby's _John Brown Mysteries_ is an ambitious attempt to continue writing an African-American-centered history of America's most famous and infamous abolitionist, John Brown. It is an important book, because too few historians of Brown pay attention to the role of African Americans in his struggle, despite that obvious facts that his was a struggle against blacks' enslavement and that Brown was personally at ease and friends with black leaders and laymen to a degree rarely seen even in abolitionist circles at the time.

At once an attempt to reintroduce lost or ignored primary sources by African Americans from the time of Brown's raid and an attempt to comment on them and on the discourse at large, _Mysteries_ is a strange book which can not decide what it wants to do, and so fails to do anything effectively. The tension between being a collection of primary sources and a commentary on them and a criticism of past work, all at once, leads to a variety of strange errors in both content and presentation. And none of it is helped by the writing of a committee - the authors are a collection of professional and amateur historians calling themselves "Allies for Freedom," after historian Benjamin Quarles' ground-breaking book. Editor Libby was not aggressive enough in crafting them into a coherent voice.

Presentation first: it is, sadly, simply hard to tell which document one is reading at any particular time, and where it comes from. Divisions between documents are poorly marked, as are the divisions between commentary and primary source. And despite the author's avowed desire to facilitate further research, the entire book is foot-noted half-heartedly. Used solely as a research tool, it is passable in style and quite valuable for its resurrection of rare sources. But read cover to cover, it is jumpy and ill-structured.

These errors in presentation make the content suffer. The authors do not address the context of their documents, drawing little distinction between accounts from the 1850s or the 1870s, even though changes in America between those times are impossible to overstate. They do not adequately examine the underlying factual assumptions of the book, which come from W.E.B. Dubois's 1910 biography _John Brown_. They do not address the latest research on Brown (found concisely in Paul Finkleman's _His Soul Goes Marching On_, 1995). And they do not note the changes in black discourse on Brown from the oratory-dominated 1850s and 1860s to the mainstream publications in 1910 by DuBois.

On the other side, even though the book is a deliberate and welcome attempt to refute white liberal historical accounts of Brown, which largely ignored African Americans except for Frederick Douglass, the authors refer to these accounts only abstractly. Comprehensive historical biographies by Stephen Oates (1984) and Oswald Garrison Villard (1911) have a very different view then biographies-as-eulogies (Franklin Sanborn and James Redpath's books, in 1876 and 1861, respectively), which were starkly at odds with the hatchet jobs coming from Robert Penn Warren and James Malin (1929 and 1940, respectively). They can not be mentioned, much less refuted, together.

So, on both the black and white sides of the discourse, _Mysteries_ oversimplifies. Some of these criticisms are unavoidable; Brown's memory is so complex, no book can fully address it, and _Mysteries_ is an accessible 115 pages. And _Mysteries_ does bring back to the forefront the cutting edge debate on Brown today, which is why anti-racist activists from the white and black communities came to such vastly different conclusions about the facts and implications of his actions. But readers would be better served to go not to _Mysteries_ but directly to its authors' inspirations, W.E.B. Dubois and Benjamin Quarles.

"John Brown Mysteries" focuses on the circumstances and events surrounding the raid on Harper's Ferry, Virginia in 1859. Jean Libby and her fellow historians have written a fascinating book that examines an often misunderstood milestone in American history. Specifically, this collection of essays makes clear the involvement of African Americans in John Brown's famous raid and dispels erroneous historical accounts that downplay or ignore the role of African Americans in Brown's war against slavery.

My knowledge of John Brown was extremely limited until I read this book, and it introduced me to a man who should hold a prominent place in American history and be widely recognized as a role model for civil rights. I was surprised how little I knew about him; however this collection helped me understand that the absence of John Brown from my brain library of important Americans is the result of misrepresentations, omissions, and distortions of John Brown's achievements. Many historical accounts have marginalized Brown as unstable and overly zealous. But a man who was devoted to and gave his life for the abolition of slavery cannot be easily dismissed. "John Brown Mysteries" provides a much needed portrait of this complex and outstanding American, and it will hopefully encourage readers to continue to explore his life and contributions, as I have.

In addition to its valuable text, the book includes many maps, period photographs, drawings and newspaper articles that help bring us into Brown's world. The book also tracks the origins of guns that may have been used at Harper's Ferry, demonstrating the meticulous detective work in which Libby and her associates engage. The collection's attention to historical sources and first-hand accounts of the raid validates it's credibility as an important document of American history.

The group who produced this book is called Allies For Freedom, and their work continues today to research and promote the legacy of John Brown. There is also a documentary by Libby called "Mean To Be Free: John Brown's Black Nation Campaign" that is worth seeking out.