Disinterring John Brown

...Brown's personality, according to the author, his righteousness and willingness to contemplate violence, can only be understood in this context...

...in Kansas, depicting the violent state of affairs there and asking for arms, Brown delivered a fiery speech at the opening of an abolitionist convention in Syracuse, soliciting funds for weapons and calling for the arming of every free-soiler in Kansas...

...Since the same can be said for the other recent studies of John Brown, a famous lode may at last be petering out...

...Boyer has a novelist's sense of detail-an ear for the speech of the American past, an eye for Amercian shapes and colors, and a nose for American perfumes, from cornmeal to the cowbarn...

...are disposed to go to Kansas or Nebraska to help defeat Satan and his legions in that direction, I have not a word to say but I feel committed to operate in another part of the field...

...Watching this preview of the Civil War from a dessicated Ohio farm, Brown's sons were eager to take a hand on behalf of the free-soilers...

...Frederick tried in his teens to emasculate himself...

...All of these men, says Boyer, "were part-time heroes...

...believed in phrenology, mental telepathy and table-rapping...

...John Jr...

...Now it is Richard O. Boyer's turn, and his offering is a large one...

...Brown was born in Torrington, Connecticut, in 1800, and spent most of his life in a generally antislavery environment, but he wavered in his allegiance between the Bible and his account books...

...Intent upon reaching the historical figure behind the legend, Boyer rejects as myth the image of a man obsessed from birth with the idea of delivering his country from the curse of slavery...

...In the 1840s Brown became involved with the Underground Railroad in Ohio, and in 1850, in Springfield, Massachusetts, he established the United States League of Gileadites, an organization that did much to make Springfield a haven for escaped slaves...

...Boyer's foray into revisionism is thus not merely ridiculous but a rather cheap stab at propitiating the prevailing Zeitgeist...

...Among his sons, for example, Jason spent years trying to construct a flying machine...

...Still, readers must be grateful for a book that treats history as literature instead of mathematics...

...and it is driven home with multitudinous chronicles of duels, mobbings, riots, and murders, as well as by one of the most notorious incidents of the period, the vicious beating of Senator Charles Sumner of Massachusetts by Representative Preston Brooks of South Carolina on the Senate floor in 1856...

...The Bible was to him what theory was to the later Marxist...

...But save for a few biographical details, it is not new history...

...It was not until June 1855, almost a year later, that Brown evidenced a change of heart...

...it integrates biographical and historical material in a way that illumines each more clearly...

...This passage has often been cited to prove that as early as 1854 Brown was contemplating his assault on Harper's Ferry...

...On one occasion, this quality impelled him to abandon his wife to the risks of an unattended labor while he prevented a gang of thieves from robbing an orchard...

...The Legend of John Brown is good history-well-researched and well-documented...

...The thought is reenforced with sketches of the careers of such men as William Walker, the diminutive would-be conqueror of Latin America, and John A. Quitman, who laid plans with the tacit approval of President Franklin Pierce to seize Cuba for slavery...

...Having carefully scrutinized the available correspondence, Boyer is convinced that the other "part of the field" was really "Timbuctoo"-a farming colony for Negroes in the Adirondacks established by the philanthropist Charles S. S. Griffing...

...Never finding that opportunity, he published it after the trial...

...Moreover, when Boyer tries some fancy theoretical footwork, possibly in an attempt to update an old and tired routine, he stumbles over himself...

...It also reveals that Brown and the majority of his antislavery cohorts, however noble their cause, were not personally appealing figures...

...Old Brown of Osawatomie has never been permitted to rest peaceably...

...Theodore Parker, the Massachusetts Unitarian preacher and scholar, on trial for his part in the Burns affair, gave less thought to the welfare of his codefendants than to finding an opportunity to present to the jury his intellectually masterful defense...

...Like many reformers, they were self-righteous, morally arrogant people...

...What, for instance, is to be thought of his speculation that "If slaves had acquiesced in the peculiar institution, insisted that it was right and just within the American framework because they were not men as defined by the Declaration of Independence, it is doubtful if Americans in the North would have suffered to prove them wrong...

...some were a bit daft and nearly all were hopeless poseurs...

...None of these occupations made him rich, however, or even comfortable, and as his hopes for fortune waned, his interest in the cause of abolitionism grew...

...Brown himself at first held back, writing to the boys: "If you...

...The Reverend Thomas Went-worth Higginson, an abettor in the celebrated escape of the slave Anthony Burns, wished as a child for burning buildings, so that he would have the opportunity of saving the occupants...

...He was soon to become a legend...

...He has produced a solid work of the sort that the historical quantifiers and social historians, armed with jargon and computer printouts, can never match...

...If recent historical research has proved anything, it is that, despite passionate attempts to find evidence to the contrary, the slaves in the United States were remarkably docile...

...They "were sufficiently sons of their father to be attracted by both riches and liberty...

...He has been disinterred and dissected perhaps hundreds of times by ghouls, idolators and professors -Most recently in Stephen B. Oates' scholarly biography, To Purge This Land of Blood, published in 1970, and in Jules Abels' somewhat less scholarly effort the following year, Man on Fire...

...This was an epoch, Boyer points out in a fine passage, when "men seemed to savor themselves more fiercely than at a later time, to be more concerned with the flair of their own personalities, more determined that at some point of peril they found themselves capable of a go-to-hell attitude...

...Following the arrival of a letter from John Jr...

...I look forward to volume two with good appetite...

...Boyer cuts his subject down to size by tackling him in a forthright manner, then proceeds to add subtlety to the portrait by hanging it in a gallery of contemporaries-an approach that gives his "biography and history" its scope and color...

...Though a perennial sympathizer with the plight of Southern blacks, he devoted most of his youthful energies to a succession of business ventures-farming, tanning, real estate speculation, banking, sheep raising, lay preaching, and law enforcement (vigilante style...

...Like Rousseau, they had fallen in love with Humanity, while all too often remaining fundamentally insensitive in their private relationships...

...This volume-The first of a two-part study-carries the narrative only as far as 1855, when Brown departed for Kansas and entered history...

...Nevertheless, it has the scope of a Dos Passos novel, the declamatory phraseology of a work by Thomas Wolfe and a cast of characters as full-blown as the dramatis personae of a Verdi opera...

...All of them were backsliders from the Faith in the eyes of their father, whose favorite book was Richard Baxter's The Saints' Everlasting Rest or a Treatise of the Blessed State of the Saints in Their Enjoyment of God and Glory, a work that "went on for some thousand pages to prove the sure-ness of everlasting delight for the virtuous and eternal torment for the wicked...

...But his crusading zeal actually was brought to a head by his sons' reaction to the 1854 dispute between the slave-and free-state parties in Kansas, a conflict that turned the territory into an arena of guerrilla fighting...

...Or take his related suggestion that because of their record of protest and resistance, "It may be that black men and women in slavery will finally be seen as the prime movers of the period's history, as unlikely as that seems to most white scholars...

...In fact, one could not have the first without securing the latter...

...John Brown was a moral egotist, believing that whatever he did was done the right way and for the right reasons...

...If Kansas became a slave state . . . there would be no opportunity for the Browns, and thousands like them, to be independent freeholders in Kansas, or so the current belief went in the North, and probably correctly...

...In addition, The Legend of John Brown attempts to rescue the past from the laboratories of the social "sciences" and return it to the preserves of beautiful letters...

...On another, it led him to Harper's Ferry, and martyrdom...

...Then he set off to join his sons...

...William Lloyd Garrison, editor of The Liberator and an opponent of political (i.e., violent) abolitionism, was described by someone who knew him as a man who could "raise more hell with nonresistance than another might raise with an axe...

...Although Brown seems to have been a loyal and affectionate family man, his moral severity adversely affected his two wives and the 11 of his 20 children who survived infancy...