Posted on 10/16/2018 6:41:01 AM PDT by Bull Snipe
Abolitionist John Brown, leading a force of about 20 men, captures the U.S. Government arsenal at Harpers Ferry, VA. By the 18th, most of Brown's men will be dead, He and a few others are captured by U.S. Marines under the command of LTCOL. R.E. Lee. Brown will be tried for treason by the state of Virginia and hanged.
Brown had been staying at the Kennedy farmhouse on the Maryland side. He left behind papers there detailing his plan for armed insurrection, attack on the armory, slave rebellion, basically a lot of stuff that removed any doubt as to his intentions.
He was certainly guilty of several murders, the first being a free black man who worked for the B&O railroad, so he would have been prosecuted by Virginia for that anyway. Why the court included treason against Virginia isn’t clear to me, although Virginia’s citizens were his intended targets and his plot constituted a guerrilla invasion. Maybe prosecutors liked to overcharge even then. The treason charge apparently was based upon mutual responsibilities between the states, nullifying the defense that he was not a citizen of Virginia.
It’s an excellent book and anyone with a serious interest in the events that led to Civil War would enjoy it. We all know a shorthand version of that history, or think we do, but there’s a lot more to it that rarely gets a mention.
The audio version of the book is also very well done.
The Boston Transcendentalists, the 19th Century’s Hollywood elite, were just as involved in funding John Brown as any of the industrialists.
The idea that they were protected after being exposed isn’t all that accurate. They were terrified of being prosecuted. Some of them left the country one step ahead of the law. One had himself committed to an asylum. Slavery was despised in the North, but so were abolitionists, who were widely considered to be extremists.
Brown’s main backers were known as “The Secret Six”:
Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Samuel Gridley Howe, Theodore Parker, Franklin Benjamin Sanborn, Gerrit Smith, and George Luther Stearns.
Of them, Stearns and Smith were wealthy. Stearns is the only one who was an industrialist.
But they may have collected money from others who supported the abolitionist cause and used it to fund Brown. It’s been years since I studied them and I don’t remember that aspect. Donors outside of the Six wouldn’t have been privy to Brown’s plan.
There’s at least two books going by the title of The Secret Six. The one by Edward Renehan is still reasonably priced, the Otto Scott book is now pretty expensive.
By at least one account Thomas Higginson remained in Boston “defying the government to arrest him.”
Instead of being arrested, he was rewarded with a commission in the Union Army as was co-conspirator George Stearns. Once in federal blue, they could openly attack southerners in ways John Brown could only dream.
True, Gerrit Smith self-committed to an asylum in a strategy later known as the Betty Ford Rehabilitation gambit.
Cross-border murder raids often provoke serious consequences, and rightfully so.
An entry on Wikipedia provides this example: “Following the September 11 attacks in 2001 on the U.S., which President George W. Bush blamed on Osama bin Laden who was living or hiding in Afghanistan, President Bush demanded that the Taliban hand over Osama bin Laden and expel al-Qaeda; bin Laden had already been wanted by the U.S. since 1998.[59] The Taliban declined to extradite him unless they were provided evidence of his involvement in the September 11 attacks and also declined demands to extradite others on the same grounds. The U.S. dismissed the request for evidence as a delaying tactic,[60] and on 7 October 2001 launched Operation Enduring Freedom with the United Kingdom.”
By your count - which I don't dispute - it was not just wealthy industrialists that wanted to violently attack the South in cross-border murder raids.
Your point is well-taken: a cross section of the North was willing to fund and support murder raids. Then, as now, many people defended what was done and contend there was nothing unconstitutional or wrong with the John Brown attack.
How many “murder raids” did the North fund.?
It was not the South that they wanted to attack. It was the institution of slavery. No slaves, no John Brown raid on Harpers Ferry.
“It was not the South that they wanted to attack. It was the institution of slavery.”
That is an interesting comment.
Setting aside for a moment the possibility that attacking slavery was a pretext for destroying political and economic rivals who happened to be in the South; setting that aside, slavery was legal and had a rich history North and South.
In fact, slavery was enshrined in the United States Constitution. Those fighting to overthrow slavery through the use of violence were trying to overthrow the Constitution through the use of violence.
“How many “murder raids” did the North fund.?”
I don’t know if we will ever know the answer to your question.
Certainly John Brown had blood on his hands prior to his Virginia murder raid.
Did the “gang of six” finance these?
In those years, a rising notion that a person should not be owned as one would own a dog or a horse was becoming widely held. Slavery had been outlawed in most Northern States.
Those folks had a moral view that slavery was wrong. It did not matter that it was ensconced in the Constitution.
Just as today, there are those that believe Roe V Wade and it’s consequences are immoral, even though it is the law of the land. There are those that believe that it morally acceptable.
Do you believe that slavery is morally acceptable.
“Lincoln at the time was tall and shaven on that day, we sat close and he grabbed my upper thigh and squeezed. After reading the paper...he looked into my eyes and said John Brown is going down, but is a hero.” -RGB
“Instead of being arrested, he was rewarded with a commission in the Union Army as was co-conspirator George Stearns. “
You’re treating events after the War had started with the days immediately after Brown’s failed revolution. If the Secret Six didn’t fear exposure for conspiracy they wouldn’t have been secret in the first place, and none of them would have fled the country nor had themselves committed.
In between Brown’s execution and the outbreak of the War the Boston literary elite, principally Emerson, had transformed Brown from a murderer into a saint. The Secret Six had no way of predicting that was going to happen.
If the Feds played the role of Pilot, who played the role of Jesus?
John Brown?
“You’re treating events after the War had started with the days immediately after Brown’s failed revolution.”
It was not chronological complexities that prevented the Federal government from pressing charges against those that conspired to attack the federal arsenal at Harper’s Ferry.
The reason the federal government did not attempt to punish the conspirators: they didn’t want to.
There is evidence - strong evidence - that you are right. Many in the North did not care what the Constitution said. They had the bayonets to overthrow the pro-slavery U. S. Constitution and - according to this version of history - they did fight to overthrow it. Or at least substitute a synthetic Constitution.
Famed Lincoln biographer Garry Wills writes it went down like this: “Lincoln, at Gettysburg, performed one of the most daring acts of open-air sleight-of-hand ever witnessed by the unsuspecting. Everyone in that vast throng of thousands was having his or her intellectual pocket picked. The crowd departed with a new thing in its ideological luggage, that new constitution Lincoln had substituted for the one they brought there with them. They walked off, from those curving graves on the hillside, under a changed sky, into a different America. Lincoln had revolutionized the Revolution, giving people a new past to live with that would change their future indefinitely.”
“Just as today, there are those that believe Roe V Wade and it’s consequences are immoral, even though it is the law of the land.”
Correct.
I am opposed to abortion and I’ll tell you this: I have never murdered an abortion doctor and I’ve never burned down the home of an abortion doctor, or destroyed their crops, killed their livestock, or poisoned their wells.
And I’ve never killed an innocent bystander while attempting to kill an abortion doctor.
Do you know why?
So, in your view it would only be a real Constitution if it allowed and supported slavery.
“The reason the federal government did not attempt to punish the conspirators: they didn’t want to.”
I don’t buy that. James Buchanan was President and while a Pennsylvanian he was friendly towards the South. His critics called him a “doughface”, a Northern politician sympathetic to the South.
Moreover Buchanan considered abolitionists to be violent and a danger to the country, and before Harper’s Ferry Buchanan had issued a reward for the capture of John Brown for crimes he had committed in Kansas.
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