John Brown: Liberator

Popular culture has called him a “12-gauge abolitionist”. Some have called him mad. History remembers him as a militant anti-slavery Christian, dedicated to liberation at all costs. 

Harriet Tubman thought he was “the greatest white man who ever lived.” 

Victor Hugo called his execution “an uncorrectable sin”. 

And Frederick Douglass said his zeal for emancipation of enslaved people “stretched away to the boundless shores of eternity,” and that it was “as the burning sun to my taper light.” 

John Brown’s body was left mouldering in the grave, but his soul still marches on. 

John Brown was an abolitionist, a Christian and an inspiration to those fighting against the Confederacy in a war his actions helped to precipitate. And while you’ve almost certainly heard the song made famous in his honour (John Brown’s Body, which was sanitised into The Battle Hymn of the Republic), the history we are taught tends to ignore John Brown or paint his passion as madness. 

John Brown hated slavery. And he hated it because of his faith. 

A recent popular culture depiction of Brown can be seen in The Good Lord Bird. Worth a watch: 

As a young man, Brown watched a white man beat a black child with a shovel. To Brown’s mind, God was father of that child, and that perspective informed his faith (which was orthodox and passionate enough to make him dog his children who abandoned the faith in later life), his politics and the actions that got him killed. 

The 1850s were defined by the Fugitive Slave Act, which promised severe punishments to anyone helping an enslaved person to escape a life of vicious degradation. Brown started supporting the armed struggle against slavery in 1855, driving a wagonload of weapons to aid anti-slavery militias who were trying to prevent Kansas from being turned into another slavery-tolerating state. He said he wanted “to help defeat Satan and his legions” – white pro-slavery advocates funded by slaveholders, who were pouring into the state. 

Kansas was in a de facto statewide civil war between abolitionists (who often left their farms, jobs and homes to fight for emancipation) and pro-slavery forces. It should be noted that racism and deeply problematic attitudes remained among many anti-slavery communities, and that many enslaved people had freed themselves without the need for white saviours, but also that many abolitionist whites were willing to risk much and go beyond words for the cause. Though most did not go as far as John Brown did. 

In 1856, he joined that struggle – dramatically. A posse of men led by a Southern sheriff destroyed two abolitionist newspapers, and an anti-slavery senator was beaten senseless on the floor of the Senate by a Southern representative. Pro-slavery newspapers wrote that “the carcasses of the abolitionists should be so numerous in the territory as to breed disease”. 

The Northern states dithered helplessly and Brown, enraged, was told to show restraint. He did not. 

“I am eternally tired of hearing the word caution,” he said. “It is nothing but the word of cowardice.” Brown led a raid on a pro-slavery settlement at Pottawatomie Creek, sparing women, children and men who were not fighting for slavery, and killing five militant pro-slavery settlers and slave-hunters, a few in brutal fashion. To the consternation of more moderate anti-slavery voices, Brown replied: “God is my judge.”  

Violent reprisals came and the ‘Bleeding Kansas’ conflict continued, with one of Brown’s own sons being shot by pro-slavery forces. Brown continued fighting, graduating from guerilla acts of terror to full-blown warfare in pursuit of ending the institution which kidnapped, tortured, murdered and raped black people, including children, and condemning future generations to that fate. “I have only a short time to live,” he said at the time, “only one death to die, and I will die fighting for this cause.”

“Brown viewed slavery as a state of war against black people,” says historian and Brown biographer David Reynolds, “and saw himself as a soldier in the army of the Lord against slavery.”

Backed by wealthy abolitionists and inspired by his contact with Harriet Tubman (who he called “General Tubman”), Brown led 12 fugitive enslaved people 1,500 miles to Canada in 82 days, fighting off pro-slavery militias and battling the US Army to do so. 

He had a vision, based on Tubman’s “underground railroad” and informed by his own successful liberation efforts, in which enslaved people would be helped to free themselves and transported to safety via a network of heavily armed forts. His idea was to arm enslaved people to rise up against their oppressors, joined by abolitionists in their struggle, and sought to arm them to achieve their freedom. 

 

In October 1859, Brown led a force of black and white abolitionist soldiers in an attack on a major arms manufacturing town, Harper’s Ferry, with the intention of freeing some 18,000 enslaved people and arming them to join the fight. He declared his intention to free every enslaved black person in the state, saying: “If the citizens interfere with me, I must only burn the town and have blood.”

After some initial success, Brown’s forces were surrounded and eventually defeated by massive pro-slavery reinforcements, many of his closest deputies shot while fleeing or in the process of surrender. 

Brown was arrested and put on trial (he was called “A Prisoner of Jesus Christ” by a Christian newspaper of the time) and eventually sentenced to death.

During his final address to the court brown said:

“This court acknowledges, as I suppose, the validity of the law of God. I see a book kissed here which I suppose to be the Bible, or at least the New Testament. That teaches me that ‘all things whatsoever I would that men should do to me, I should do even so to them’ [Matthew 7:12]. It teaches me, further, to ‘remember them that are in bonds, as bound with them’ [Hebrews 13:3]. I endeavoured to act up to that instruction. I say, I am yet too young to understand that God is any respecter of persons. I believe that to have interfered as I have done as I have always freely admitted I have done in behalf of his despised poor, was not wrong, but right. 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 my children and 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!”

Awaiting execution did not dim Brown’s faith in God or in the cause of liberation. 

“I believe most firmly that God reigns,” he wrote to a clergyman correspondent. “I cannot believe that anything I have done, suffered or may yet suffer, will be lost to the cause of God or of humanity… I now feel entirely reconciled to that… for God’s plan was infinitely better.”

His final recorded words before his execution were:

"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 very much bloodshed it might be done."

Christians of his era were divided on the subject of John Brown, usually along the lines of whether they shared his hatred of slavery. His actions at Harper’s Ferry lit a fire that would become the Civil War and Union soldiers saw Brown as an emblem of their cause. 

As the gains of that war were given away to the interests of white supremacy, and the limited liberty that had been won by the formerly enslaved was systematically revoked, opinion on John Brown began to turn. But it is worth remembering that on learning of Brown’s execution, legendary Christian preacher Charles Spurgeon described him as “immortal in the memories of the good in England,” and saying, “In my heart he lives.”

Today, the pro-liberation side of the Church is perhaps more squeamish than Spurgeon was. Certainly, true pacifists and those committed to active nonviolent resistance might legitimately disapprove of his methods. But most of us, particularly those who see certain militaries as heroic, who honour and respect a Montgomery or Zelenskyy or believe in the existence of the military, should examine the motivation for such scruples. 

Are we truly opposed to violence, or does the brutality and abuse of slavery or other injustice just not merit our strongest reactions? We should interrogate such disconnects and rectify the prejudice that lies at their heart, so that we can join the good fight in accordance with the methods of our conscience. What is needed from all of us in a world of oppression is action. John Brown is watching. 

 

Words: Jonty Langley. From Issue 4 of S(h)ibboleth magazine