How Villard's 1910 Biography Wounded John Brown's Legacy for a Century

Telling John Brown's story on his own terms means confronting how his reputation was distorted in the first place. In a new reflection on his John Brown Today blog, historian Louis A. DeCaro Jr., the most prolific John Brown biographer in 150 years, examines two figures who shaped how the twentieth century remembered the abolitionist.

Sanborn was a fierce guardian

Franklin B. Sanborn, one of the Secret Six who backed the Harpers Ferry raid, became the fierce guardian of Brown's memory. DeCaro paints him as a contradiction: an arrogant New England patrician who acted as if he alone owned Brown's legacy, yet a scrupulously honest steward of the facts.

His 1885 Life and Letters of John Brown preserved primary evidence no serious scholar can ignore.

Villard sought to cut him down

Oswald Garrison Villard did the opposite. In his 1910 biography, John Brown 1800-1859: A Biography Fifty Years After, the grandson of William Lloyd Garrison and NAACP founder framed Brown as an erratic, reckless fanatic redeemed only by his conduct on the gallows. Because Villard was a Northern liberal and heir to abolitionism, his verdict carried a stamp of impartiality that laundered anti-Brown arguments into the mainstream.

Southern apologists and Lost Cause writers no longer had to invent propaganda. They could simply quote Villard, as Robert Penn Warren did in his 1929 John Brown: The Making of a Martyr.

DeCaro says biographers were still scrubbing the "skunkish odor" of Villard's thesis from Brown's reputation at the dawn of the twenty-first century.

The fight over Brown's legacy (and therefore the fight over The Lost Cause myth) is not settled history, and that is why it matters for John Brown America 250.