{"product_id":"john-brown-abolitionist-isbn-9780375726156","title":"John Brown, Abolitionist","description":"An authoritative new examination of John Brown and his deep impact on American history.Bancroft Prize-winning cultural historian David S. Reynolds presents an informative and richly considered new exploration of the paradox of a man steeped in the Bible but more than willing to kill for his abolitionist cause. Reynolds locates Brown within the currents of nineteenth-century life and compares him to modern terrorists, civil-rights activists, and freedom fighters. Ultimately, he finds neither a wild-eyed fanatic nor a Christ-like martyr, but a passionate opponent of racism so dedicated to eradicating slavery that he realized only blood could scour it from the country he loved. By stiffening the backbone of Northerners and showing Southerners there were those who would fight for their cause, he hastened the coming of the Civil War. This is a vivid and startling story of a man and an age on the verge of calamity.\u003ci\u003ePreface \u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e1. The Party\u003cbr\u003e2. The Puritan \u003cbr\u003e3. The Pioneer\u003cbr\u003e4. The Patriarch\u003cbr\u003e5. The Pauper \u003cbr\u003e6. The Plan \u003cbr\u003e7. Pottawatomie \u003cbr\u003e8. Pariah and Legend \u003cbr\u003e9. The Promoter \u003cbr\u003e10. Plotting Multiculturally \u003cbr\u003e11. Practice\u003cbr\u003e12. Preparation \u003cbr\u003e13. Problems \u003cbr\u003e14. Pilloried, Prosecuted, and Praised \u003cbr\u003e15. The Passion \u003cbr\u003e16. Positions and Politics \u003cbr\u003e17. The Prophet \u003cbr\u003e18. Posterity \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003ci\u003eNotes\u003cbr\u003eAcknowledgments \u003cbr\u003eIndex \u003c\/i\u003e“Almost every page forces you to think hard, and in new ways, about American violence, American history, and what used to be called the American character.” –\u003ci\u003eThe New Yorker\u003c\/i\u003e“A rich, nuanced and exhaustively researched ‘life and times’ that positions the abolitionist firmly in the context of 19th-century American culture. . . . Impeccably written.” –\u003ci\u003eSan Francisco Chronicle\u003c\/i\u003e“Splendidly written. . . . Reynolds is that rarest of authors who knows how to write well and who successfully presents a life-size image of Brown, warts and all.” –\u003ci\u003eDenver Post\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e“The most complete word on Brown as man and myth. . . . Nobody knows more about American society and culture in the first two-thirds of the 19th century than Reynolds. . . . Vivid and convincing. . . . The best volume we now have on that incendiary figure.”–\u003ci\u003eThe Providence Journal\u003c\/i\u003e“Absorbing.”–\u003ci\u003eNew York Times Book Review\u003c\/i\u003e“ This well-researched book . . . peels away some of the extreme interpretations of Brown and offers a generally balanced and objective assessment of why he should matter.”–\u003ci\u003eSt. Louis Post-Dispatch\u003c\/i\u003e“Great sensitivity, thorough research, and some marvelous narrative.”–\u003ci\u003eWashington Post Book World\u003c\/i\u003e“A rich, nuanced and exhaustively researched ‘life and times’ that positions the abolitionist firmly in the context of 19th century American culture . . . impeccably written.”–\u003ci\u003eSan Francisco Chronicle\u003c\/i\u003e“A masterful exploration of a fascinating, flawed character and his cultural impact.”–\u003ci\u003eAtlanta Journal-Constitution\u003c\/i\u003e“Absorbing, well written and beautifully documented.”–\u003ci\u003eThe Nation\u003c\/i\u003eDavid S. Reynolds is Distinguished Professor of English and American Studies at the Graduate Center and Baruch College of the City University of New York. He received his B.A. from Amherst College and his Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley. He has taught at Rutgers University, New York University, Barnard College, and Northwestern University. His \u003ci\u003eWalt Whitman's America\u003c\/i\u003e won the Bancroft Prize, the Ambassador Book Award, and was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. \u003ci\u003eBeneath the American Renaissance\u003c\/i\u003e won Phi Beta Kappa's Christian Gauss.\u003cb\u003eThe Party\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eOne of the most symbolic events of the Civil War occurred in a mansion.  The event was the reception held on January 1, 1863, at the Medford,  Massachusetts, estate of the businessman George L. Stearns to celebrate  the Emancipation Proclamation, which had been issued that afternoon by  President Lincoln.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eStearns called the affair \"the John Brown Party.\" The highlight of the  evening was the unveiling of a marble bust of John Brown, the  antislavery martyr who had died on a scaffold three years earlier after  his doomed, heroic effort to free the slaves by leading a  twenty-two-man raid on Harpers Ferry, Virginia.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eBrown's presence was felt elsewhere in America that day. The Union  general Robert H. Milroy, stationed near Harpers Ferry, read Lincoln's  proclamation aloud to his regiment, which spontaneously thundered forth  the war song \"John Brown's Body,\" with its heady chorus about Brown  \"mouldering in the grave\" while \"his soul keeps marching on.\" The  Emancipation Proclamation made General Milroy feel as though John  Brown's spirit had merged with his. \"That hand-bill order,\" he said,  \"gave Freedom to the slaves through and around the region where Old  John Brown was hung. I felt then that I was on duty, in the most  righteous cause that man ever drew sword in.\"\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eIn Boston, a tense wait had ended in midafternoon when the news came  over the wires that the proclamation had been put into effect. At a  Jubilee Concert in Music Hall, Ralph Waldo Emerson read his  Abolitionist poem \"Boston Hymn\" and was followed by performances of  Handel's Hallelujah Chorus, Beethoven's Fifth Symphony, and  Mendelssohn's \"Hymn of Praise.\" That evening at Tremont Temple a huge  crowd cheered as the proclamation was read aloud and exploded into song  when Frederick\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eDouglass led in singing \"Blow Ye the Trumpet, Blow!\" the joyous hymn  that had been Brown's favorite and had been sung at his funeral.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eA number of people missed the Boston celebration because they had gone  to George Stearns's twenty-six-acre estate in nearby Medford for the  John Brown Party. The party was, in its own way, as meaningful as  Lincoln's proclamation. It celebrated the man who had sparked the war  that led to this historic day. Lincoln's proclamation, freeing millions  of enslaved blacks, sped the process that led eventually to civil  rights. John Brown's personal war against slavery had set this process  in motion.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eGathered in Stearns's elegant home was a motley group. Stearns himself,  long-bearded and earnest, had made a fortune manufacturing lead pipes.  His guests included the bald, spectacled William Lloyd Garrison and the  volatile Wendell Phillips, pioneers of Abolitionism; the stately,  reserved philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson, magus of Transcendentalism;  his idealistic cohort Amos Bronson Alcott, who was there with his  daughter, Louisa May, soon to captivate young readers with Little  Women; Franklin Sanborn, the Concord schoolteacher whose students  included children of Emerson, John Brown, and Henry James, Sr.; and the  red-haired, vivacious Julia Ward Howe, writer of \"The Battle Hymn of  the Republic.\" They represented cultural threads that had once been  aimed in various directions but were now unified in their devotion to  the memory of John Brown.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eGarrison and Phillips had since the 1830s called for immediate  emancipation of the slaves or, barring that, separation of the North  and the South. Garrison, long committed to pacifism, had advocated  moral argument as the sole means of fighting slavery until John Brown's  self-sacrificing terrorism inspired him to espouse a more militant  stance. Phillips, long driven by his disgust with slavery to curse the  Constitution and the American Union, had come to espouse Brown's vision  of a unified nation based on rights for people of all ethnicities.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eEmerson had begun his career alienated from the antislavery cause but  had taken it up with growing zeal that culminated in his famous  statement that John Brown would \"make the gallows as glorious as the  cross.\" Along with Thoreau, who had died the previous year, he had been  chiefly responsible for rescuing Brown from infamy and oblivion.  Alcott, too, had played a part in the resuscitation of Brown, whom he  called \"the type and synonym of the Just.\" If, as Alfred Kazin  suggests, without John Brown there would have been no Civil War, we  would add that without the Concord Transcendentalists, John Brown would  have had little cultural impact.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eAnd without Julia Ward Howe, John Brown may not have become fused with  American myth. The wife of Samuel Gridley Howe, one of those who had  financed Brown, she wrote \"The Battle Hymn of the Republic\" to the tune  of \"John Brown's Body,\" retaining its \"Glory, glory hallelujah\" and  changing \"His soul goes marching on\" to \"His truth is marching on.\"  With her memorable images of a just God \"trampling out the vintage  where the grapes of wrath are stored,\" and loosening \"the fateful  lightnings of His terrible swift sword\" against the slaveholding South,  she caught the essence of John Brown, a devout Calvinist who considered  himself predestined to stamp out slavery. She had coupled his  God-inspired antislavery passion with the North's mission and had thus  helped define America.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eAnother of Stearns's guests, Frank Sanborn, helped define John Brown.  In 1857 he had introduced Brown to several reformers who, along with  him, would make up the group of Brown's backers known as the Secret  Six. A zealous Brown booster, he would perpetuate the legend of the  heroic Brown in his writings of the post-Civil War period.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eAs for George Stearns, besides having been the chief contributor of  funds and arms to Brown, he was largely responsible for pushing Brown's  ideal of racial justice toward civil rights. He once declared, \"I  consider it the proudest act of my life that I gave good old John Brown  every pike and rifle he carried to Harper's Ferry.\" Just as Brown had  assigned prominent positions to blacks in his antislavery activities,  so Stearns led the recruitment of blacks for the Union army. After the  war, Stearns would fight for passage of the Fifteenth Amendment, which  gave suffrage to blacks.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThat these and assorted other reformers, writers, and society people  would gather on Emancipation Day to honor John Brown was more than  fitting. From their perspective, it was inevitable. Everyone present  believed that without John Brown this day would not have come, at least  not as soon as it did.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eSeveral at the party had doubts about President Lincoln. Despite his  deep hatred of slavery, Lincoln had acted with politic moderation early  in his presidency. Hoping to preserve the Union by conciliating the  South, he had supported the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 (anathema even  to some of the most conservative Northerners), had endorsed a  constitutional amendment preserving slavery where it already existed,  had revoked an emancipation proclamation in Missouri, and had advocated  colonization for blacks, who, he said, could never live on equal terms  with whites in America due to racial differences. In response, Wendell  Phillips had written a bitter article, \"Abraham Lincoln, Slave-hound of  Illinois.\" Garrison was so angry that he wrote of Lincoln, \"He has  evidently not a drop of anti-slavery blood in his veins; and he seems  incapable of uttering a humane or generous sentiment respecting the  enslaved millions in our land.\"\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eAs strange as such statements appear today, they were not so to those  who had known John Brown and had absorbed his progressive racial views.  There was good reason Stearns had organized a John Brown Party instead  of an Abraham Lincoln Party.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eAlthough Stearns and his guests were overjoyed by the president's  proclamation, they saw Lincoln as a latecomer to emancipation, a goal  for which John Brown had given his life. In 1861, two years before  Lincoln's proclamation, Stearns, Sanborn, Phillips, and other followers  of Brown had formed an Emancipation League, whose aim was to win over  Lincoln to the idea that freeing the slaves must be the primary mission  of the Union war effort. The league issued a public document demanding  emancipation \"as a measure of justice, and as a military necessity.\" As  a first step, Stearns wrote in a letter to Lincoln, black troops were  needed to ensure a Union victory. Lincoln accepted the strategy after  Stearns had devoted most of 1862 traveling thousands of miles  throughout the North and organizing ten black regiments, including the  famous 54th Massachusetts, led by Colonel Robert Gould Shaw.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThe use of black soldiers was just one of Brown's forward-looking  measures that impelled George Stearns to single out John Brown for  tribute that evening.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eAlthough the white marble bust of Brown, which Stearns and his wife had  commissioned Edwin A. Brackett to sculpt in 1859 while the imprisoned  Brown awaited execution, had long been a fixture in the Stearns  mansion, unveiling it anew on Emancipation Day gave it fresh  significance. The bust, which many compared to Michelangelo's Moses,  was an idealized rendering. It invested the stern, hatchet-faced Brown  with a calm Jovian dignity. It gleamed against the black walnut  wainscoting on the landing of the Stearns's curved staircase as the  hushed crowd below heard Emerson read his \"Boston Hymn\" and Julia Ward  Howe give a powerful recitation her \"Battle Hymn of the Republic.\"\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThe journalist James Redpath would later see the bust in the Boston  Athenaeum amid Roman statuary and would comment that it might well be  Moses but certainly was not John Brown. True: but, then, who was John  Brown?\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003ePerhaps the most significant meaning of the John Brown Party was that  everyone present was joined by an idealistic vision of a man who, in  other circles, was branded as a murderer, a thief, and an insane  fanatic. The pristine purity of Brackett's bust was as distant from  John Brown's real looks as the starry-eyed hero worship of Stearns's  guests was from a true appraisal of his achievements.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThe fact is that during his life and after it Brown gave rise to  significant misreadings that shaped the course of American history.  Brown himself had misread the slaves and sympathetic whites among the  locals, whom he expected to rally in masses to his side as soon as his  raid on Harpers Ferry began. The blacks he liberated misread him,  since, by most reports, few of them voluntarily joined him in the  battle against the Virginia troops-a fact that may have contributed to  the fatal delay on the part of Brown, who had expected \"the bees to  hive\" as soon as his liberation plan became known among the slaves.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eMost important, Brown himself became the subject of crucial  misreadings. Although after the raid he was at first denounced by most  Northerners, a few influential individuals, especially the  Transcendentalists, salvaged his reputation by placing him on the level  of Christ-a notable misreading of a man who, despite his remarkable  virtues, had violent excesses, as evidenced by the nighttime slaughter  of five proslavery residents he had directed in Pottawatomie, Kansas.  The Transcendentalist image of Brown spread throughout the North and  was fanned by books, melodramas, poems, and music-culminating in \"John  Brown's Body,\" the inspiring song chanted by tens of thousands of Union  troops as they marched south.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eAt the same time that this misreading swept the North, an opposite one  was pervading the South. The South's initial grudging admiration for  Brown's courage was quickly overwhelmed by a paranoid fear that he was  a malicious aggressor who represented the entire North-a tremendous and  tragic misreading, since virtually everyone in the Northern-led  Republican Party, from Lincoln to Seward, actually disapproved of his  violent tactics. The South's misreading was fanned by Democratic Party  propaganda that unjustifiably smeared the Republicans with  responsibility for Harpers Ferry. In this view, \"Black Republicanism\"  meant not only \"nigger-worship\" but also deep alliance with John Brown,  whom the Democrats characterized as a villain of the blackest dye.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThese dual misreadings, positive and negative, were perpetuated in  biographies of Brown. The early biographers were mainly people who had  known Brown personally and who idolized him-they therefore twisted  facts to make him seem heroic, at times godlike. In reaction, there  arose a school of biographers intent upon exploding this saintly image.  They swung to the other extreme of portraying him as little more than a  cold-blooded murderer, horse thief, inflexible egotist, fanatical  visionary, and shady businessman.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThese extremes of hagiography and vilification were in time answered by  scholarly objectivity. Several biographers-most notably Oswald Garrison  Villard and Stephen B. Oates-present information about Brown's life  factually, unfiltered by partisan bias. Villard and Oates pitilessly  expose Brown's savagery at Pottawatomie and question the wisdom of his  provisional constitution and his attack on Harpers Ferry, even as they  praise his humanitarian aims.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eStill, there is a danger to an overstrict insistence on impartiality.  One reviewer's comment on Villard-i.e., that he \"holds a position of  impartiality, and almost of aloofness\"-speaks for the best modern  biographies. For example, biographers have waffled on the issue of  Brown's sanity, leaving it as an unsolved problem. One can be objective  without remaining impartial about the crucial moral, political, and  human issues that Brown's life poses.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eMy stand on some key issues is: (a) Brown was not insane; instead, he  was a deeply religious, flawed, yet ultimately noble reformer; (b) the  Pottawatomie affair was indeed a crime, but it was a war crime  committed against proslavery settlers by a man who saw slavery itself  as an unprovoked war of one race against another; and (c) neither  Brown's provisional constitution nor the Harpers Ferry raid were  wild-eyed, erratic schemes doomed to failure: instead, they reflect  Brown's overconfidence in whites' ability to rise above racism and in  blacks' willingness to rise up in armed insurrection against their  masters.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThe current book develops these and other arguments by placing Brown  fully in historical context. This is emphatically a cultural biography,  a term that demands explanation. Cultural biography is based on the  idea that human beings have a dynamic, dialogic relationship to many  aspects of their historical surroundings, such as politics, society,  literature, and religion.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThe special province of the cultural biographer is to explore this  relationship, focusing on three questions: How does my subject reflect  his or her era? How does my subject transcend the era-that is, what  makes him or her unique? What impact did my subject have on the era?\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eCultural biography takes an Emersonian approach to the human subject.  As Emerson writes, \"the ideas of the time are in the air, and infect  all who breathe it. . . . We learn of our contemporaries what they know  without effort, and almost through the pores of our skin.\" The cultural  biographer explores the historical \"air\" surrounding the subject and  describes the process by which the air seeped through the pores of his  or her skin. \"Great geniuses are parts of the times,\" Melville wrote;  \"they themselves are the times, and possess a correspondent coloring.\"  Once the biographer accepts the cultural environment as a viable area  of study, new vistas of information and insight open up. John Brown  emerges in cultural biography not as an isolated, insane antislavery  terrorist but as an amalgam of social currents-religious, reformist,  racial, and political-that found explosive realization in him.","brand":"Vintage","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":46303122522341,"sku":"NP9780375726156","price":18.95,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/1842\/7735\/files\/9780375726156.jpg?v=1767730439","url":"https:\/\/k12savings.com\/es\/products\/john-brown-abolitionist-isbn-9780375726156","provider":"K12savings","version":"1.0","type":"link"}