In a World of Brutality, Why is Brown Singled Out for Violence?

Welcome to our first official Browniac Therapy session. Today's presenting issue: the persistent, mainstream delusion that John Brown was a terrorist. Marietta Kruells requests help in talking about so-called Border Ruffians, the Pottawatomie incident, and the racism baked into 19th-century white society—including the anti-slavery kind. Diagnosis follows.

TRANSCRIPT:

Marietta Kruells: I have a question. I'm frustrated about the Kansas story of John Brown just as much as the Harper's Ferry one. We talk about the people who wanted slavery coming from Missouri, and they have this nice little name: the Missouri Ruffians. It sounds like a football team. “They didn't really do anything, they were just roughing people up, and somebody might have incidentally died.”

It wasn't John Brown and his family—who were pacifistic—defending themselves and putting people on notice: "Don't be bothering us. We're playing rough." [The information isn’t isn't easily found.

And I'm very frustrated that that's the tale: that John Brown is the fanatic and the terrorist, and the Border Ruffians were—I don't know. It's confusing to me.

The Doctor is in

Louis A. DeCaro Jr., Ph.D. responds… Yes. This is such an important topic, because from a sociopolitical standpoint, it's a stratified set of errors, one error built on another. At the basis of it, there is a complete misrepresentation about the nature of white society in general in the 19th century. You could have large segments of white people who were anti-slavery racists. You have pro-slavery people, whether they're from the South or from the North, who are explicitly racist. If you read the New York Herald at the time, the n-word is commonplace in the New York Herald. When you go to the South, it's racist.

Then you have Western free state people, or free soil people, who were racist. They didn't want Kansas to have Black people in it. Then you have the abolitionists from the East, and particularly our Brown family, who go out there, and they're like, "We believe in Black equality."

Most antislavery people were racist. Equality was "radical" and therefore dangerous to 19th C. white America

Henry Thompson of North Elba has a conversation with one of the local racists, and the local racist is going on and on about how inferior Black people are. Henry Thompson says, "I know Black people that are so smart compared to you that it would be like you to your dog." What is important about that is the result of that conversation: they were going to kill Thompson. They wanted to. That's how terroristic these people were.

So my argument is, we're letting (frankly, even academia) put John Brown in this terrorist box. What we need to fight about is to say, no, John Brown was not a terrorist. He was a counter-terrorist.

Terrorism was implicit in slavery, genocide, and the everyday language of white society

The terrorism was implicit in slavery, in genocide, and even in the everyday language and the values of white society, especially the pro-slavery people. The man who killed Frederick Brown in August of 1856 (John Brown's son) came to Kansas as a free soil man. He did not want Black people in the territory, and he was so disgusted and alienated by the abolitionists that he moved over to the pro-slavery side.

White historians need to come to grips with racism built into our systems and some of our white heroes' racist 'dark side'

So we have to understand that this is really difficult, and it can even become very problematic, because even people like Abraham Lincoln, who was by no means a hateful man, himself comes out of that tradition of: "Well, it's really a white nation, and we don't want to enslave Black people, we don't want to steal their labor, but let's face it, whites are superior." We have to appreciate also how dangerous it was just to have a politic, or even a religion, of equality.

But I refuse to let anyone call John Brown a terrorist. I think we all need to be very clear that John Brown was a counter-terrorist, and that the circumstances in which he did those killings were ones of no law and order, no protection from local or territorial or federal constabulary.

His family and his community were not only hated because they were free state people, but because they were abolitionists and egalitarians. And the flip side is, those people coming in, as Marietta says, are not ‘ruffians.’ ‘Ruffian’ is a nice word for them. They are terrorists. If these people were running around our society today, we would be arming ourselves. We need to understand the people who were killed. These were not just pro-slavery people. He would never have killed pro-slavery people.

John Brown traded with them. I'm writing about 1856 by itself now. John Brown lived in the territory from October 1855 until the Pottawatomie killings in May 1856. During those months, he traded. He went to Missouri back and forth. He traded with pro-slavery people. He got along. John Brown really believed, as much as possible from the Bible, in living at peace with all people. That was his philosophy.

What would drive a "Golden Rule" Christian to murder five people? That is where the conversation must begin

So for him to do what he did, you have to ask the question. I tried to say this in my first biography, the first book I did: what kind of people, what kind of situation, must it have been to make these kind of people do what they did? That's where we have to start. I understand any good person can do something really rotten. But when you look at the pattern of the family, of their values, of the way they conducted themselves all the way up to the spring of 1856, you have to ask what was going on that would cause these people to do something like this.

You won't get this from PBS. You won't get this from universities. You won't get this from the academics, because they're so fixated on making this a conversation about John Brown and terrorism and the politics of violence. They never talk about the reality that this was a man who did not have a violent inclination.

Brown was not a gun nut, blood thirsty, or generally violent; he was a compassionate peaceful man—who believed in self defense

I'm reading a book by Nicole Etcheson now, a book about Kansas politics, and she calls John Brown something like a gun-happy enthusiast. The man was not a gun-happy enthusiast. He was a peace-loving man. When he went to Kansas, he wasn't going around looking for a fight. He was working on building and taking care of his family. That is the stuff of what we need to understand about this man.

They've done a job on him, because what they did to John Brown is the literary, cultural, historical version of what they were doing to Black people. While they were destroying John Brown's reputation, they were destroying Black people's foundation in Reconstruction.

Our mission to lift up Brown isn't for Brown's sake, it is a rising truth that will lift all boats

What we have to understand is that as John Brown goes down symbolically, as a metaphor, as a representative historically, what is being done to Black people in the here and now? So when we're going to fight for racial justice, we're not really fighting for John Brown's reputation, because no one's going to mess that up anyway. People who know, know. But that's why we're struggling against racial injustice: because as we lift up the truth, John Brown will shine more clearly.

I agree with you, Marietta. We don't need to avoid it. We don't need to circumvent it. We need to talk about it, because most people who had any common sense at all, if they knew the real situation and what was happening in Kansas, they would sympathize with John Brown.

Outro music: "Battle Hymn of the Republic," performed by Chorus Angelicus.