Who John Brown Was

In this excerpt of an interview with the John Brown Project, Dr. Louis A. DeCaro Jr. explains who John Brown was: a man of deep faith, a man who loved his family, and a man who hated the notion of human enslavement.

Transctipt of video:
I’ve been documenting John Brown’s letters. I’ve collected every— not the actual letters, but copies of every letter that survives. There’s no evidence at all of insanity. What there is evidence of is a deep religious faith, a deep love for family, a deep love for country, and a hatred of slavery, along with a belief in human equality as an aspect of his Christianity. That’s all that comes through. Everything else is details about farming and animals. And when he writes about slavery, the whole family understood that. He doesn’t need to preach to the choir, because he reared his children to hate slavery, and they did. Even when they didn’t practice his religion—many of them didn’t practice his Christianity—they all kept up the family religion of hating slavery.

Let him speak for himself. In an 1857 card of introduction, he described himself as “an earnest and steady-minded man.” So this is John Brown telling history, “I’m an earnest and steady-minded man.” In other words, I’m very sincere about the business of fighting slavery, and I’m very steady-minded. I’m consistent. That’s how he defined himself to people he was getting to know.

A child of the post-Revolutionary era

Who he was was really a child of the post-Revolutionary War era who came of age in the antebellum period. You could almost say the arc of his life is really the antebellum period. When he’s a child in the post-Revolutionary era, there’s much more optimism about the end of slavery, even among anti-slavery families like the Browns in Connecticut. But by the last decade of his life, the whole idea that slavery was going to fizzle out or become obsolete had completely disappeared because the slave power had amped up every effort to make slavery permanent and expansive. Abolitionism geared up. Political abolitionism was born in the 1850s, and John Brown grew with that. He was always an anti-slavery man, but he himself grew and changed. When he was younger, he saw slavery as something that might be able to come to an end reasonably. But by the 1840s and ’50s, he had come to the conclusion that slavery would not respond to anything but a big stick. He wasn’t talking about killing slaveholders, but he was talking about the necessity of using force if necessary.

Arming Black communities for self defense

Therefore, he arms Black people even before Kansas—going back to 1850, when the Fugitive Slave Law was passed. Not unlike what’s going on today with ICE agents, he is arming Black people in Springfield, Massachusetts, forming an organization that might be considered a forerunner of the Black Panthers, and talking about just force used in a measured way. He values human life. He’s a very devout Christian of the Protestant, Congregational, and Calvinist stripe. He’s very proud of his Pilgrim, Puritan, and Protestant ancestry. These things were very important to him.

He was somewhat disdainful of Roman Catholicism because he was a Protestant of the antebellum period. When he was in prison in Virginia, a pro-slavery priest came into his jail cell to visit him out of what were likely well intentions. John Brown chased him out—told him to get out. He chased him out not only because he was pro-slavery, but because he was Roman Catholic. So he was a man who was part of his times. He had his foibles and his limitations.

Family life and personal loss

As a parent, he married as a young man. He lost that wife after 12 years, then remarried a young woman who had additional children. A lot of his children died. He went through a lifetime of burying children. He lost over half of the children he had. As a young parent, he was a harsh disciplinarian. As an older parent, he talks about it in his letters. He had grown to lament the fact that he had been such a harsh disciplinarian, and he became more inclined to reason with his children. Again, a very human figure.

He was very passionate about his faith, but his faith was faith in action. He believed, to use a quote from the New Testament, that “faith without works is dead.” If you’re going to be a Christian, you have to act that out in preserving what he called the great family of mankind—the great family of man. For him, fighting for the great family of man in the most immediate sense meant fighting for Black freedom. But it also meant that when he went out to Kansas Territory, he used surveying skills he had taught himself to try to protect Native territories. He and his son sometimes forcefully ejected white squatters from Indian lands.

Conscious of complicity

Admittedly, John Brown was part of the whole wave of white people coming into North America in the first place. So he was part of the problem. But we are all part of a problem for somebody, particularly when you’re talking about white supremacy. Every European, in a broad historical brushstroke, represents a problem. But in the specific sense, he was conscious of that. His father was conscious of that. His father was his greatest influence—an abolitionist, a Christian man. As a family, they worked the Underground Railroad.

Even before it was called the Underground Railroad—since it was only called that after real railroads existed—what did you call it before that? John Brown later used the term “subterranean pathway,” and that may well have been a phrase the family used in the 1820s and 1830s. John Brown even says in a letter, “I’ve been working on the Underground Railroad since I was a boy.” This was a lifetime commitment. It wasn’t a hobby. It wasn’t a white liberal do-good project. It was a passion—what he considered a calling.

Fighting slavery was a Vocation

He lived in a time when people spoke of vocations rather than careers. Today, we have careers, and there’s nothing wrong with that. But in the 19th century, people asked: What am I called to? What am I made to do? John Brown, at a very young age, realized his vocation was to see slavery destroyed. The only difference was that as the conditions of the country worsened, his fire built higher and higher. His methods had to change. Once he saw that slavery was not going to surrender—that it had an insatiable appetite for expansion and for its own brutal, selfish ways—he knew that some measure of force was going to be necessary.

As a Calvinist coming out of the Protestant Reformation tradition, he believed in the sinfulness of humanity. He was not shocked by the behavior of slaveholders. There’s a scene in the family story where one of his little daughters is speaking harshly about slaveholders, and he tells her to be quiet—you have to understand the way they were brought up; they don’t know any better. He was not a man who simply wanted to kill slaveholders. As a matter of fact, he never simply sought to kill them.

Slavery is terrorism

What he understood was that as a community, as a collective body of people, slaveholders were committed to violent suppression. There was nothing more terroristic than slavery in the 19th century. You couldn’t have families. You couldn’t allow enslaved people to be educated. They couldn’t have recognized marriages. If they formed their own marriages, they could be broken up at will. They couldn’t rear their children or keep their wages. For Lincoln, part of the argument was that you shouldn’t live off the wages of somebody else. That’s true. It was stolen Black labor, but it was also stolen Black life. It was Black bodies owned.

John Brown despised this first and foremost because he believed all humans were made in the image of God. That was his credo. Whatever your religion—Jewish, Muslim, Buddhist—it didn’t matter to him. As devoutly evangelical as he was in his own terms, he had no problem marching with people of different religions or no religious views if they were willing to fight injustice. He had a way about him that was open to people. He was a good neighbor—quintessentially a good neighbor to humanity.

John Brown was a cultural prophet

The tragedy is that he has been painted as the vexing problem in our nation’s memory, when in fact the most vexing figures are the moderates, the hypocritical two-faced politicians, and the compromisers. They are the ones who vex humanity. It’s not John Brown. The reason he vexes the memory of this country is the same reason that, in the Hebrew annals of the Old Testament—as Christians call it—the prophets were such a problem to the kings. The kings wanted to do whatever they wanted, and the prophets were there to say, “No, you can’t.” In some respects, John Brown was a cultural prophet to the nation.