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thephilosopheroftheboudoir · 5 years ago

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Grim History

The Moral Violence of John Brown: Abolitionism and the Start Of the Civil War

Few acts of violence in American history have been as contentions as John Brown’s massacre at Pottawatomie and the Raid on Harpers Ferry. Had they not been done in the name of the abolition of slavery, they would be remembered, if remembered at all, as acts of gratuitous violence. The high moral purpose behind them, however, casts them in a more ambiguous light.

John Brown, born in 1800, was raised in Ohio. His white family was deeply religious, coming from a strict Puritan and Calvinist background. His father was severe but morally righteous and raised his children with strong values that favored the equality of all people in the sight of God. These anti-racist views were not just progressive and radical but some would even say bizarre for their time. In any case, John Brown’s family made him socialize with Native American children who lived nearby. As he grew older, he also befriended an African-American boy; he had the misfortune of seeing his friend get beaten by a white man and Brown grew up, as a result, with a smoldering hatred for slavery and racial injustice.

When he grew older John Brown moved on to the progressive northern city of Springfield, Massachusetts. He set up a tanning business and quickly immersed himself in the Abolitionist political movement. Springfield was a hotbed of Abolitionism and a major stop on the Underground Railroad. It was here that Brown met Frederick Douglass and went to work helping escaped slaves move onwards to Canada were freedom waited for them. At about this time, the US government ratified the Fugitive Slave Act, making the capture and return of runaway slaves to their owners compulsory, even in the northern states where slavery was illegal. In response, John Brown set up a clandestine militant group called the League of Gileadites to assist the freed slaves evade capture by bounty hunters. By this point, Brown saw the futility of the Abolitionist movement which was mostly comprised of pacifists who thought that slavery would eventually die out. He began to advocate for the violent overthrow of southern plantations at Abolitionist meetings; the response was one of sympathy but not support.

In Springfield, Brown got married to a woman who would soon die; they started having a lot of children. His business failed. They moved to New York state and bought land near Lake Placid where he set up a homestead that welcomed freed slaves with open arms. In his sparse living conditions, black people and his white family members all slept side by side and no one had a bed that was better than anyone else’s; everybody was given equal amounts of work, pay, and food. John Brown built up a reputation as being a white man who truly trusted and loved African-American people.

After establishing the farm in New York, John Brown moved to Ohio and got re-married after his first wife died. They went on to have about twenty children, almost half of which died. He tried to make it as a land speculator but failed at that so he moved on to Kansas where three of his brothers were running a farm. Kansas was a newly admitted territory to the USA at that time. Both pro- and anti-slavery factions saw it as up for grabs; the stage was set for the skirmishes that later came to be known as Bloody Kansas. Brown arrived at the beginning of that era when pro-slavery landowners would routinely hire border ruffians from Missouri to cross the state line and raid the farms of Free State abolitionists; sometimes the border ruffians were paid to cross into Kansas to vote illegally in local elections as well, thus ensuring that pro-slavery politicians stayed in power. The petty raids eventually turned into a larger scale attack; in 1856 the thugs from Missouri, led by a local sheriff, sacked Lawrence, burning down a Free State news agency and a hotel as a warning that Abolitionists would not be tolerated in Kansas. After the destruction, John Brown started to arm his family in preparation for military conflict. The pro-slavery farmers continuously made threats to the Free State supporters. John Brown at that point had simply had enough.

One night at the end of May 1956, Brown led three of his sons and a band of settlers to Pottawatomie Creek. Armed with swords, they dragged five men, all of them supporters of slavery, out of their beds and into a field where they proceeded to slice them up with their blades. Brown turned his back and stared off into the night while the posse went to work, slashing and stabbing their victims until they were nothing but a bloody pile of corpses in the moonlight. The families of the dead racists quickly identified the ring leader as John Brown so he escaped with his men to live in the forest until things cooled off. Meanwhile, the battles of Bloody Kansas began in response.

John Brown and his men participated in two of these fights. In his absence, the army captain Henry Pate burned down his family’s farm and took two of his sons prisoner. The pro-slavery Pate and his army of ruffians from Missouri marched on Lawrence. In the Battle of Black Jack, Brown and his outlaw band emerged from the woods and hijacked Pate’s column. They captured some of Pate’s men and held them for ransom; Brown let them go in exchange for his two imprisoned sons. They took to the woods again and hid out until the Battle of Osawatomie. The backwoodsmen from Missouri led an attack on that town; Brown arrived and saw his group outnumbered so they tried to scare them away by shooting in all directions, making it look like they were a bigger army then they really were. The pro-slavery gang set the town on fire and ran. Brown’s gang scattered in the other direction.

John Brown, under cover of night, secretly escaped to Springfield with two of his sons. Inspired by recent news of Nat Turner’s slave rebellion in the South and Maroon societies living in the hills of Jamaica, he began to scheme up a plan to hatch a rebellion which would end slavery in America. He believed the Abolitionists were not acting aggressively enough so he dreamed up a plan to begin a guerilla war by seizing an arms depot in the South, quickly arming the slaves and sending them on to other plantations to supply other African-Americans with arms in order to kill their masters. All the freed slaves would then escape into the Appalachian Mountains and hide until a later date when they would emerge and establish a country, neither Unionist nor Confederate, where all people white, black, and Native American would live in equality. He even drew up a provisional constitution boldly stating that the first president of the new nation was to be a Black man. Brown began lecturing on the underground circuit, hoping to attract thousands of followers. Although he found no shortage of audiences willing to listen, he only inspired about forty men, both white and black, to join him. However, a group of rich Abolitionists, later to be called the Secret Six, agreed to fund the revolt. Brown and his followers took their money and sneaked off to Ohio where they bought a supply of rifles and pikes to be handed out to slaves once the rebellion started.

John Brown and his small army rented some land near in Virginia (now part of West Virginia) where they began training and drilling for the attack. In October 1859, the amateur soldiers marched on Harpers Ferry. They cut the town’s telegraph wires and a couple men were left at a railroad bridge to prevent anyone from coming or going. As a train came down the tracks, the men blocked the rails and began shooting until it stopped. A porter named Heyward Shepard got off the train to see what was happening. He saw the men with guns and, thinking it was a robbery, began to run. They commanded him to stop and he did not, so they shot him in the back. Shepard was a free African-American man and, ironically, the first casualty in John Brown’s proposed slave rebellion. For some unknown reason, they allowed the train to continue on; it stopped at the next town and a telegraph was sent to a nearby military stating that a raid was taking place.

Meanwhile, John Brown sent some of his followers around to the plantations to tell the slaves a rebellion was taking place and their help was needed. A small number of them reluctantly took guns and went along; most of the slaves refused to join, thinking the idea of a white man leading a slave rebellion to be bizarre and impossible to understand. Brown’s men seized the town’s armory which had been filled with a massive stockpile of weapons which they were planning to hand out to slaves all over the South until all the Black people were armed and ready to fight. Some of the town’s people took to the hills behind the armory and began to fire. Brown’s team killed several of them and held the fort. Then the army started to arrive and Brown decided to move his platoon to the engine house which was closer to the road. A night-long firefight ensued and several people on both sides got shot and killed. Brown knew he was outnumbered; their food and water supply was dwindling so in the morning he sent his son out with a white flag to declare a truce. The soldiers responded with a fusillade of bullets but they did allow the men inside the engine house to surrender and be escorted to the jail.

The Raid on Harpers Ferry had failed.

Fearing that the South was under imminent attack from the North, John Brown and his companions were quickly put on trial. Brown, suffering from a severe head wound, defended himself by stating that he committed a justifiable act of violence because the institution of slavery was an act prohibited by the Christian God whose law was higher than the laws of men. The trial lasted less than a week. Brown and his army were sentenced to hang.

On December 2, an military unit came to Virginia to guard the gallows pole from anyone attempting to rescue Brown at his time of execution. Present in the squadron were Robert E. Lee, Stonewall Jackson, John Wilkes Booth, and Walt Whitman who later wrote a laudatory poem about the hanging, praising John Brown for his courage. John Brown, alongside two of his fellow fighters, were hung at 11:15 am, quickly packed into coffins with the nooses still around their necks, and sent away.

The Raid on Harpers Ferry led to panic and paranoia in the South. Previously, the Southerners thought the Abolitionists were too cowardly and weak to use violence but then the Southern bigots became scared. The Secessionist movement grew rapidly and the Confederacy declared their independence from the USA. Soon the Unionist troops would attack and the Civil War would begin, culminating in the Emancipation Proclamation that freed the slaves. John Brown’s acts of violence are now believed to be the first battles of the Civil War.

The practicality, morality, and sanity of John Brown have been debated ever since. Some of the more militant leaders of the Civil Rights movement hailed Brown as a hero while some historians and scholars have concluded that his violence was rational and sane, even if a bit far-fetched and grandiose, given the context in which they happened. Others say he was delusional, psychotic, and stupid. People of the latter persuasion tend to be Confederate sympathizers who wish to vilify and demonize the man. There have also been some pacifists who claim that Brown’s attacks were unnecessary as they continue to tow the line that slavery would have ended peacefully in the end anyways. That idea is not widely supported by scholars. In the end, if John Brown had never raided Harpers Ferry, the Civil War may never have started which leaves the possibility open that America might still be a legalized slave state to this day. John Brown reminds us that sometimes violence is moral and sometimes violence is necessary.

Reference

Reynolds, David S. John Brown Abolitionist: The Man Who Killed Slavery, Sparked the Civil War and Seeded Civil Rights, Vintage, revised edition 2006.

https://grimhistory.blogspot.com/

#grim history #john brown #civil war #american history #harpers ferry

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bountyofbeads · 5 years ago

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The 1619 Project https://nyti.ms/2Hjvu0L

The 1619 Project is a major initiative from The New York Times observing the 400th anniversary of the beginning of American slavery. It aims to reframe the country’s history, understanding 1619 as our true founding, and placing the consequences of slavery and the contributions of black Americans at the very center of the story we tell ourselves about who we are.

"We asked 16 writers to bring consequential moments in African-American history to life. Here are their poems and stories:"

Published August 14, 2019 | "1619 Project" New York Times | Posted August 16, 2019 |

⬤ August 1619

A poem by Clint Smith

In Aug. 1619, a ship arrived in Point Comfort, Va., carrying more than 20 enslaved Africans, the first on record to be brought to the English colony of Virginia. They were among the 12.5 million Africans forced into the trans-Atlantic slave trade, their journey to the New World today known as the Middle Passage.

Over the course of 350 years,

36,000 slave ships crossed the Atlantic

Ocean. I walk over to the globe & move

my finger back & forth between

the fragile continents. I try to keep

count how many times I drag

my hand across the bristled

hemispheres, but grow weary of chasing

a history that swallowed me.

For every hundred people who were

captured & enslaved, forty died before they

ever reached the New World.

I pull my index finger from Angola

to Brazil & feel the bodies jumping from

the ship.

I drag my thumb from Ghana

to Jamaica & feel the weight of dysentery

make an anvil of my touch.

I slide my ring finger from Senegal

to South Carolina & feel the ocean

separate a million families.

The soft hum of history spins

on its tilted axis. A cavalcade of ghost ships

wash their hands of all they carried.

Clint Smith is a doctoral candidate at Harvard University and the author of the poetry collection “Counting Descent,” as well as a forthcoming nonfiction book, “How the Word Is Passed.” Photo illustration by Jon Key. Diagram: Getty Images.

⬤ March 5, 1770

A poem by Yusef Komunyakaa

In 1770, Crispus Attucks, a fugitive from slavery who worked as dockworker, became the first American to die for the cause of independence after being shot in a clash with British troops.

African & Natick blood-born

known along paths up & down

Boston Harbor, escaped slave,

harpooner & rope maker,

he never dreamt a pursuit of happiness

or destiny, yet rallied

beside patriots who hurled a fury

of snowballs, craggy dirt-frozen

chunks of ice, & oyster shells

at the stout flank of redcoats,

as the 29th Regiment of Foot

aimed muskets, waiting for fire!

How often had he walked, gazing

down at gray timbers of the wharf,

as if to find a lost copper coin?

Wind deviled cold air as he stood

leaning on his hardwood stick,

& then two lead bullets

tore his chest, blood reddening snow

on King Street, March 5, 1770,

first to fall on captain’s command.

Five colonists lay for calling hours

in Faneuil Hall before sharing a grave

at the Granary Burying Ground.

They had laid a foundering stone

for the Minutemen at Lexington

& Concord, first to defy & die,

& an echo of the future rose over

the courtroom as John Adams

defended the Brits, calling the dead

a “motley rabble of saucy boys,

negroes & mulattoes, Irish

teagues & outlandish jacktars,”

who made soldiers fear for their lives,

& at day’s end only two would pay

with the branding of their thumbs.

Yusef Komunyakaa is a poet whose books include “The Emperor of Water Clocks” and “Neon Vernacular,” for which he received the Pulitzer Prize. He teaches at N.Y.U. Photo illustration by Jon Key. Boston Massacre: National Archives. Attucks: Getty Images.

⬤ 1773

A poem by Eve L. Ewing

In 1773, a publishing house in London released “Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral,” by Phillis Wheatley, a 20-year-old enslaved woman in Boston, making her the first African-American to publish a book of poetry.

Pretend I wrote this at your grave.

Pretend the grave is marked. Pretend we know where it is.

Copp’s Hill, say. I have been there and you might be.

Foremother, your name is the boat that brought you.

Pretend I see it in the stone, with a gruesome cherub.

Children come with thin paper and charcoal to touch you.

Pretend it drizzles and a man in an ugly plastic poncho

circles the Mathers, all but sniffing the air warily.

We don’t need to pretend for this part.

There is a plaque in the grass for Increase, and Cotton.

And Samuel, dead at 78, final son, who was there

on the day when they came looking for proof.

Eighteen of them watched you and they signed to say:

the Poems specified in the following Page, were (as we verily believe)

written by Phillis, a young Negro Girl, who was but a few Years since,

brought an uncultivated Barbarian from Africa

and the abolitionists cheered at the blow to Kant

the Negroes of Africa have by nature no feeling that rises above the trifling

and the enlightened ones bellowed at the strike against Hume

no ingenious manufacturers amongst them, no arts, no sciences

Pretend I was there with you, Phillis, when you asked in a letter to no one:

How many iambs to be a real human girl?

Which turn of phrase evidences a righteous heart?

If I know of Ovid may I keep my children?

Pretend that on your grave there is a date

and it is so long before my heroes came along to call you a coon

for the praises you sang of your captors

who took you on discount because they assumed you would die

that it never ever hurt your feelings.

Or pretend you did not love America.

Phillis, I would like to think that after you were released unto the world,

when they jailed your husband for his debts

and you lay in the maid’s quarters at night,

a free and poor woman with your last living boy,

that you thought of the Metamorphoses,

making the sign of Arachne in the tangle of your fingers.

And here, after all, lay the proof:

The man in the plastic runs a thumb over stone. The gray is slick and tough.

Phillis Wheatley: thirty-one. Had misery enough.

Eve L. Ewing is the author of “1919,” the “Ironheart” series, “Ghosts in the Schoolyard: Racism and School Closings on Chicago’s South Side” and “Electric Arches.” She is a professor at the University of Chicago.

⬤ Aug. 30, 1800

Fiction by Barry Jenkins

In 1800, Gabriel Prosser, a 24-year-old literate blacksmith, organized one of the most extensively planned slave rebellions, with the intention of forming an independent black state in Virginia. After other enslaved people shared details of his plot, Gabriel’s Rebellion was thwarted. He was later tried, found guilty and hanged.

As he approached the Brook Swamp beneath the city of Richmond, Va., Gabriel Prosser looked to the sky. Up above, the clouds coalesced into an impenetrable black, bringing on darkness and a storm the ferocity of which the region had scarcely seen. He may have cried and he may have prayed but the thing Gabriel did not do was turn back. He was expecting fire on this night and would make no concessions for the coming rain.

And he was not alone. A hundred men; 500 men; a thousand men had gathered from all over the state on this 30th day of August 1800. Black men, African men — men from the fields and men from the house, men from the church and the smithy — men who could be called many things but after this night would not be called slaves gathered in the flooding basin armed with scythes, swords, bayonets and smuggled guns.

One of the men tested the rising water, citing the Gospel of John: “For an angel went down at a certain season into the pool, and troubled the water: whosoever then first after the troubling of the water stepped in was made whole of whatsoever disease he had.” But the water would not abate. As the night wore on and the storm persisted, Gabriel was overcome by a dawning truth: The Gospel would not save him. His army could not pass.

Gov. James Monroe was expecting them. Having returned from his appointment to France and built his sweeping Highland plantation on the periphery of Charlottesville, Monroe wrote to his mentor Thomas Jefferson seeking advice on his “fears of a negro insurrection.” When the Negroes Tom and Pharoah of the Sheppard plantation betrayed Gabriel’s plot on a Saturday morning, Monroe was not surprised. By virtue of the privilege bestowed upon him as his birthright, he was expecting them.

Gabriel Prosser was executed Oct. 10, 1800. Eighteen hundred; the year Denmark Vesey bought his freedom, the year of John Brown’s and Nat Turner’s births. As he awaited the gallows near the foot of the James River, Gabriel could see all that was not to be — the first wave of men tasked to set fire to the city perimeter, the second to fell a city weakened by the diversion; the governor’s mansion, James Monroe brought to heel and served a lash for every man, woman and child enslaved on his Highland plantation; the Quakers, Methodists, Frenchmen and poor whites who would take up with his army and create a more perfect union from which they would spread the infection of freedom — Gabriel saw it all.

He even saw Tom and Pharoah, manumitted by the government of Virginia, a thousand dollars to their master as recompense; a thousand dollars for the sabotage of Gabriel’s thousand men. He did not see the other 25 men in his party executed. Instead, he saw Monroe in an audience he wanted no part of and paid little notice to. For Gabriel Prosser the blacksmith, leader of men and accepting no master’s name, had stepped into the troubled water. To the very last, he was whole. He was free.

Barry Jenkins was born and raised in Miami. He is a director and writer known for his adaptation of James Baldwin’s “If Beale Street Could Talk” and “Moonlight,” which won the Academy Award for Best Picture. Photo illustration by Jon Key. House: Sergey Golub via Wikimedia. Landscape, right: Peter Traub via Wikimedia.

⬤ Jan. 1, 1808

Fiction by Jesmyn Ward

In 1808, the Act Prohibiting Importation of Slaves went into effect, banning the importation of enslaved people from abroad. But more than one million enslaved people who could be bought and sold were already in the country, and the breaking up of black families continued.

The whisper run through the quarters like a river swelling to flood. We passed the story to each other in the night in our pallets, in the day over the well, in the fields as we pulled at the fallow earth. They ain’t stealing us from over the water no more. We dreamed of those we was stolen from: our mothers who oiled and braided our hair to our scalps, our fathers who cut our first staffs, our sisters and brothers who we pinched for tattling on us, and we felt a cool light wind move through us for one breath. Felt like ease to imagine they remained, had not been stolen, would never be.

That be a foolish thing. We thought this later when the first Georgia Man come and roped us. Grabbed a girl on her way for morning water. Snatched a boy running to the stables. A woman after she left her babies blinking awake in their sack blankets. A man sharpening a hoe. They always came before dawn for us chosen to be sold south.

We didn’t understand what it would be like, couldn’t think beyond the panic, the prying, the crying, the begging and the screaming, the endless screaming from the mouth and beyond. Sounding through the whole body, breaking the heart with its volume. A blood keen. But the ones that owned and sold us was deaf to it. Was unfeeling of the tugging the children did on their fathers’ arms or the glance of a sister’s palm over her sold sister’s face for the last time. But we was all feeling, all seeing, all hearing, all smelling: We felt it for the terrible dying it was. Knowed we was walking out of one life and into another. An afterlife in a burning place.

The farther we marched, the hotter it got. Our skin grew around the rope. Our muscles melted to nothing. Our fat to bone. The land rolled to a flat bog, and in the middle of it, a city called New Orleans. When we shuffled into that town of the dead, they put us in pens. Fattened us. Tried to disguise our limps, oiled the pallor of sickness out of our skins, raped us to assess our soft parts, then told us lies about ourselves to make us into easier sells. Was told to answer yes when they asked us if we were master seamstresses, blacksmiths or lady’s maids. Was told to disavow the wives we thought we heard calling our names when we first woke in the morning, the husbands we imagined lying with us, chest to back, while the night’s torches burned, the children whose eyelashes we thought we could still feel on our cheeks when the rain turned to a fine mist while we stood in lines outside the pens waiting for our next hell to take legs and seek us out.

Trade our past lives for new deaths.

Jesmyn Ward is the author of “Sing, Unburied, Sing,” which won a National Book Award. She was a 2017 MacArthur fellow. Photo illustration by Jon Key. Landscape: Peter Traub via Wikimedia.

⬤ July 27, 1816

A poem by Tyehimba Jess

In 1816, American troops attacked Negro Fort, a stockade in Spanish Florida established by the British and left to the Black Seminoles, a Native American nation of Creek refugees, free black people and fugitives from slavery. Nearly all the soldiers, women and children in the fort were killed.

They weren’t headed north to freedom —

They fled away from the North Star,

turned their back on the Mason-Dixon line,

put their feet to freedom by fleeing

further south to Florida.

Ran to where ’gator and viper roamed

free in the mosquito swarm of Suwannee.

They slipped out deep after sunset,

shadow to shadow, shoulder to shoulder,

stealthing southward, stealing themselves,

steeling their souls to run steel

through any slave catcher who’d dare

try stealing them back north.

They billeted in swamp mud,

saw grass and cypress —

they waded through waves

of water lily and duckweed.

They thinned themselves in thickets

and thorn bush hiding their young

from thieves of black skin marauding

under moonlight and cloud cover.

Many once knew another shore

an ocean away, whose language,

songs, stories were outlawed

on plantation ground. In swampland,

they raised flags of their native tongues

above whisper smoke

into billowing bonfires

of chant, drum and chatter.

They remembered themselves

with their own words

bleeding into English,

bonding into Spanish,

singing in Creek and Creole.

With their sweat

forging farms in

unforgiving heat,

never forgetting scars

of the lash, fighting

battle after battle

for generations.

Creeks called them Seminole

when they bonded with renegade Creeks.

Spaniards called them cimarrones,

runaways — escapees from Carolina

plantation death-prisons.

English simply called them maroons,

flattening the Spanish to make them

seem alone, abandoned, adrift —

but they were bonded,

side by side,

Black and Red,

in a blood red hue —

maroon.

Sovereignty soldiers,

Black refugees,

self-abolitionists, fighting

through America’s history,

marooned in a land

they made their own,

acre after acre,

plot after plot,

war after war,

life after life.

They fought only

for America to let them be

marooned — left alone —

in their own unchained,

singing,

worthy

blood.

Tyehimba Jess is a poet from Detroit who teaches at the College of Staten Island. He is the author of two books of poetry, “Leadbelly” and “Olio,” for which he received the 2017 Pulitzer Prize. Photo illustration by Jon Key. Cypress: Ron Clausen via Wikimedia

#african american history #american history #history #poetry #1619 #1619project

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