Introduction:
One of the points I’ve made many times in my writing, and one I find myself returning to again and again, is the importance of examining historical individuals with a critical eye. Too often people of historical import are reduced to heroes and villains, easily understood and one dimensional caricatures representing what used to be a real person at one point. Obviously, a person could both be a hero, or a villain, depending who you ask. Either way, however, creating a caricature of someone involves removing whatever parts of their life conflicts with the caricature being created. This makes history, and the people in it, a lot simpler, but simple does not mean factual. In fact, if you ask me, the more one simplifies historical actors, the more one distorts them.
For the purpose of this discussion, I want to instead create four broad categories that most people of historical significance could likely belong in. Before anyone points this out, yes I am fully aware of the irony of this. I don’t like people being labeled as heroes or villains, but I will force them into four arbitrary categories that I made up. How is that better? I don’t intend for these categories to be bulletproof, and they are far from a complete list. In addition, I will use some examples below, but which person belongs in what category is also open to argument and interpretation. However, even with those caveats in place, I still think the list below is more robust and retains more nuance than a binary of hero or villain.
Category 1: The Inarguable Bad: These are the sort of people who committed such heinous and inexcusable acts that no one respectable would ever defend them. An example that immediately springs to mind for me is Joseph Mengele, the infamous “Angel of Death.” I hope everyone reading would readily agree that a “doctor” that was an active participant in the genocide carried out at the Auschwitz concentration camp is indefensible.
Category 2: The Argued Over: The people in this category also are responsible for mass death and suffering, but the issue of whether or not they were “good” or “bad” is debated though not necessarily debatable. Often these are the sort of people who became the authoritarian rulers of states, and the cult of personality they created around themselves can linger and affect public or academic discourse for generations to come. I would put Stalin in this category, specifically because there are still people who make excuses or justifications for the tens of millions of deaths he is responsible for. Time and distance might change who gets put into this category. As the world gets further away from the suffering someone caused, it becomes easier to ignore it or downplay it as an unavoidable consequence of great people changing history.
Category 3: The Inarguable Good: In my opinion almost no one of great historical significance belongs in this category, it is an extremely small club. Crucially I said people of historical significance, I am certain there were plenty of people throughout history who were unusually kind and generous, but never made it into history because humanity’s obsessions revolve around drama and violence. People who belong in this category will also change over time. As cultural norms and values change, people who were once moral paragons might become despicable.
Category 4: Messy or Uncertain: This classification is vague enough that it can fit most historical figures under its umbrella. These are the sort of people whose qualities and actions both recommend them and damn them. This category also reflects what people are most often like in lived reality, complicated, with a laundry list of overlapping or conflicting motivations and beliefs.
For this piece, I wanted to pick an example of someone I believe belongs in category 4, John Brown (for anyone who is unfamiliar with him I’ll provide a brief biography below). However, depending on who you ask he could belong in any of the other 3 categories. I was inspired to write about John Brown because there are a lot of qualities I admire about him, but almost as many that give me pause. Some of his actions I cannot praise highly enough, and others on basic principle I have to object to. He was a radical for his time, both in his beliefs and his deeds. His radical beliefs were more authentically American than most of his contemporaries, but his radical deeds left many dead in his shadow. In all honesty, John Brown is a man I want to like, but I am unsure if I should.
A Brief Biography
For those totally unaware of who John Brown was and the time period he lived in I’ll try to provide a succinct biography of the man and the world he lived in. For those of us interested in history we are lucky that John Brown was a grown man when the first cameras were coming into use in the 19th century. Even without knowing anything about him the photograph above reveals a man possessing a unique energy. He had one of the most generic names in the English language, and yet he remains “the” John Brown, not “a” John Brown.
John Brown lived from 1800 to 1859. He was a man of intense religious devotion. Just as important as his religious faith, was his abolitionist views. A fact that many people today misunderstand about the first half of 19th century America is that abolitionists were considered radicals among those of “respectable opinion.” John Brown was a radical among radicals, and he believed in violence to achieve his goals. The two events he is most famous for is a massacre he led in Kansas in 1856, and a raid on a federal armory in what is today West Virginia in 1859.
I’ll try to be brief, but the Pottawatomie Massacre in the Kansas territory stemmed from tension that was present in so many aspects of US politics before the Civil War, the struggle between slave states and free states. The question was always posed when new territories wanted to join the Union: should they allow slavery in their borders when they were incorporated into the Union? There were different attempts at compromises and solutions that conveniently dodged the question of whether slavery should exist at all. The period in Kansas in which John Brown carried out his massacre is known to history as “Bleeding Kansas.” Over a period of years there was basically a miniature civil war in Kansas between people who wanted Kansas to be a free state, and those who wanted it to be a slave state. John Brown and the other perpetrators of the Pottawatomie Massacre targeted pro-slavery supporters in retaliation to an attack against abolitionist newspapers in Lawrence, Kansas shortly before.
After Kansas, Brown eventually made his way to Virginia to lead what turned out to be a foolhardy attempt to secure a federal armory in 1859. Brown intended to use the captured weapons to arm enslaved Black Americans and spread a liberating revolution south. Brown only had a few followers with him, and only a handful of enslaved people actually joined him at the armory. With John Brown and his followers holed up in the armory with some hostages, a standoff and eventual gun fight ultimately lead to the death or capture of Brown’s entire retinue. Brown himself was eventually tried for treason and hanged. The raid was probably never going to work as intended, and at least from some of the books I have read of the Civil War there was speculation that Brown might have been deliberately trying to make a martyr of himself for the cause of abolition.
The raid on Harper’s Ferry in 1859 obviously helped increase tensions before the Civil War. While many abolitionists John Brown spoke before the raid cautioned him against it or refused to participate, after the raid and his execution John Brown did become a hero to abolitionists. His heroism to abolitionists was matched by fear and disgust among enslavers. Whatever people’s opinions about the man, John Brown became a household name, not only for the raid itself, but for his stoic and unshakable belief in his cause during his imprisonment before his execution.
How to Judge John Brown?
There are two important points to remember about the analysis below. 1. This is my own analysis, and in keeping with my theme of the messiness and complexity of history, different people would have different interpretations, and 2. I am basing this discussion off of a brief study of John Brown and his life, if I did a deeper dive into his life story I might come away with different conclusions. I don’t think either of these points detracts from my thesis for this piece. In your own study of history, you will frequently encounter people who do not fit into simple definitions of “good” or “bad.” John Brown’s legacy is both good and bad.
I’ll start with what I consider to be problematic. There’s no getting around that he led a massacre of five people in Kansas. The victims were pro-slavery, but as far as I know, none of them were enslaving anyone at the time of their deaths. Did they deserve to die because of their beliefs, even if those beliefs were abhorrent? Dragging people out of their homes at night and killing them is morally upsetting, no matter how noble the goals and intentions may have been. Anyone who wants to label John Brown a hero has to grapple with this troubling chapter of his life.
An aspect of John Brown’s character I take issue with is his intense religious devotion. I wrote a whole essay in my book about how people need to take the time to seriously and rigorously question their beliefs, to see if they can withstand scrutiny. As a rule, I am cautious towards people of fanatic religious faith. John Brown might be an exception to that rule, however. If you’re going to be a religious fanatic about any cause, ending slavery is probably the best cause to be devoted to. In spite of the deaths he is responsible for, I would also argue that John Brown was more authentically Christian than so-called “Christians” in the south and border states. In the antebellum south it was common for preachers to use the pulpit to justify the institution of slavery, narrowly interpreting whatever Bible verses or doctrines they needed to to make slavery seem “Christian.” John Brown is certainly not without his blemishes, but a man willing to take up the cause of liberation is a lot closer to the values Christianity is supposed to represent than those who would use their religion to justify owning people.
As I said above, John Brown was both a radical of beliefs and radical in deeds. While his abolitionist beliefs do not seem so radical today (Brown is partly responsible for that shift in attitude), leading a massacre and raiding an armory are still considered radical deeds in the 21st century. People can certainly quibble over whether Brown’s actions helped or hurt the cause of abolitionism, but I for one cannot disagree with how Brown envisioned slavery ending. John Brown did not want a gradual end to slavery, where states slowly outlawed it and children of the enslaved were freed when they reached a certain age. John Brown wanted slavery to end immediately, full stop, and he was willing to help arm the enslaved so they could secure their own liberation. There was another proposal on how to end the institution of slavery, President Lincoln suggested it many times, and it was actually used to end slavery in the British Empire, compensation to “owners.” The idea is a simple one: enslavers would free their captives and in exchange, the government would compensate them for their “lost property.” The more I consider this solution, the more I am disgusted, and I want to take an interlude to explain why.
Interlude
If there is such a thing as evil, and slavery is an evil institution, in fundamental opposition to inalienable rights that everyone possesses, how does one put a stop to this evil? I know, how about we pay enslavers a ton of money, and let the people they enslaved fend for themselves with little or no aid. Does that sound like an even remotely just way of ending an evil institution? I sure as hell don’t think so.
Let me address some potential critiques before continuing. Historians of the US Civil War and the period leading up to it can correctly point out that I am simplifying a lot of very complex history. As I said earlier, abolitionists were often considered radicals, in the 19th century there was a whole spectrum of opinion in the US on slavery. On one extreme of the spectrum some justified slavery as a positive good, some didn’t like slavery but didn’t see a way to end it, some wanted slavery to end but were extremely cautious in how it should end, some wanted to end slavery quickly while still avoiding war, and at the other extreme you had people like John Brown who said damn all caution, end slavery immediately, even if force is required. As with any issue that affects an entire society, and that an entire society is complicit in, there were a million different ideas of how to end slavery, why it should end, and what needed to happen when or if slavery did end. I am having to simplify a lot of history to condense it down into this short essay, but I hope my arguments will still have merit despite that.
The second critique that I anticipate is anyone who has or currently holds a position of power and is somehow reading this will accuse me of being naive and unrealistic. They might say that I don’t understand how the levers of power are deployed, and that I don’t appreciate the difficult compromises that have to be made to do the most good while avoiding as much suffering as possible. This hypothetical person might ask me to imagine an alternate reality where the US was able to avoid the Civil War by paying “owners” to release their captives. They might ask me: “Would paying for the enslaved to be freed be worse than all the death and suffering that was caused by the Civil War?” I don’t think any of us are equipped to answer the question, but it is worth considering. However, I don’t believe I am being naive when I say that the idea of compensating “owners” is catastrophically flawed.
In cases such as the end of slavery, monetary compensation has practical as well as symbolic value. What is being said when an “owner” is paid for their “lost property.” It is being stated clearly that their “property” was indeed property, that the “owners” had a right to own people, and being paid for the “loss” benefits them both financially and symbolically. Ending slavery by paying enslavers is a blatant justification for slavery. Enslavers deserved nothing because they had no right to own anyone in the first place. If enslavers became financially destitute because of the loss of “their” enslaved captives, that’s a good thing. No prosperity should be built on the back of human suffering (that applies just as well to the present as the past). One might point out that ending slavery abruptly would have destabilized the entire US economy, not just in the South. That’s true, but at what point do we become complicit in criminal institutions when we care more about the economy than we do about injustice? How many times have more cautious (read, liberal) people made an excuse such as this: “Yes (fill in the blank) is obviously terrible, but we can’t just stop doing it all at once, that would be too disruptive.” As a result of this overcautious attitude, injustice is allowed to continue unabated.
If anyone deserved financial compensation, and land as well, it was the people being freed from enslavement. They’re the ones who suffered at the hands of their captors, and getting money and land would have gone some way to apologize for their captivity. Additionally, paying “owners” would only entrench wealth and class disparities further. What good is it to end slavery if you force the people freed into circumstances so difficult and so unequal as to be functionally similar to enslavement?
Conclusion
John Brown did not want enslavers paid to end their criminal enterprises. John Brown was willing to fight and die for the cause of freedom. Unlike the founding fathers, who betrayed the basic principle of liberty and enshrined slavery in the constitution to preserve the union, Brown recognized this blatant contradiction and was appalled by it. I want to admire John Brown, being driven to anger about hypocrisy and injustice is a character trait more Americans should have.
On the other hand, admiration and respect should not be blind, as I have said many times before. We can like people in the past while also realizing we might not know much about them, or that they held attitudes and beliefs that would be scandalous in the modern world. Life is messy and uncertain, that is just as true in the past as it is today. What is equally true is that people have always contained multitudes. People’s lives and values can be contradictory and hypocritical. This doesn’t mean we can’t admire people in the past, it just means we need to examine those we admire with a more critical eye.
Postscript: As I was writing this piece I was also reading Malcolm X’s autobiography. In it I read a quote that related to American Christianity that I have to relay here. Above I said that despite John Brown’s violence, I ultimately think that he was a better christian than the enslavers who used their religion to justify slavery. In his autobiography, Malcolm X describes how christian values of nonviolence were twisted to encourage the enslaved to be more docile.
In the quote below, the word “Negro” is capitalized and in quotes in the original text. The word negro in this quotation is being used to refer mixed race people that are being brainwashed to embrace the values of white society and demonize their African heritage.
“This religion taught the “Negro” that black was a curse. It taught him to hate everything black, including himself. It taught him that everything white was good, to be admired, respected, and loved. It brainwashed this “Negro” to think that he was superior if his complexion showed more white pollution of the slave-master. This white man’s Christian religion further deceived and brainwashed this “Negro” to always turn the other cheek, and grin, and scrape, and bow, and be humble, and to sing, and to pray, and to take whatever was dished out by the devilish white man; and to look for his pie in the sky, and for his heaven in the hereafter, while right here on earth the slave-master white man enjoyed his heaven.”
PSS: If you want to find similar critiques of American Christianity that mirror those from Malcolm X’s autobiography I recommend scrolling down this blog feed to the August 2023 discussion of the book From the Deep Woods to Civilization.