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Workers Vanguard No. 946
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6 November 2009
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TROTSKY
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LENIN
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From the Archives of Marxism
150th Anniversary of Harpers Ferry Raid
Honor John Brown
On the wet, moonless night of 16 October 1859, John Brown led an
armed, multiracial band in a daring raid on Harpers Ferry in what was then
Virginia. His objective was to procure arms from the federal arsenal there, free
slaves in the nearby area, and, like Spartacus and Toussaint L’Ouverture before
him, lead his army into the mountains where they could establish a liberated
area and, if need be, wage war against the accursed slave masters. On that
night, John Brown struck a blow for black freedom, a blow that reverberates even
now for all who struggle for that cause.
On the 150th anniversary of the Harpers Ferry raid, comrades and
friends of the Spartacist League went to North Elba, New York, where Brown is
buried, to pay tribute to this heroic fighter. Our comrades sang “John Brown’s
Body” and the “Internationale,” and laid a wreath at his gravesite, which, in
the name of the Spartacist League, declared, “Finish the Civil War! For Black
Liberation Through Socialist Revolution!”
Militarily, Brown’s mission was a failure. But politically, Brown’s
raid was, as one comrade stated in a speech in North Elba, a “thunderbolt” that
was heard around the country, opening the road for the Civil War that smashed
slavery. As black scholar W.E.B. DuBois noted, “From the day John Brown was
captured to the day he died, and after, it was the South and slavery that was on
trial—not John Brown.”
Brown’s heroic raid galvanized both sides for the soon-to-come
Second American Revolution, the Civil War of 1861-65. His opponents vilified him
as a fanatical, vindictive lunatic. One of the few to rush to Brown’s defense in
the immediate aftermath of the raid was the American transcendentalist Henry
David Thoreau. In a 30 October 1859 speech, Thoreau praised those in Brown’s
small army as men of “principle, of rare courage, and devoted humanity,” who
“alone were ready to step between the oppressor and the oppressed.” Speaking of
Brown himself, Thoreau declared, “It was his peculiar doctrine that a man has a
perfect right to interfere by force with the slaveholder, in order to rescue the
slave. I agree with him.”
The Harpers Ferry raid, as much as any single act, helped to
precipitate the irrepressible conflict between the industrializing bourgeoisie
of the North and the agrarian-based mercantile slavocracy of the South. Karl
Marx wrote to his comrade Friedrich Engels in January 1860, “In my view, the
most momentous thing happening in the world today is the slave movement—on the
one hand, in America, started by the death of Brown, and in Russia, on the
other…. Thus, a ‘social’ movement has been started both in the West and in the
East.” Frederick Douglass, Brown’s cohort in the radical wing of the
abolitionist movement, said after the Civil War:
“If John Brown did not end the war that ended slavery, he did, at
least, begin the war that ended slavery. If we look over the dates, places, and
men for which this honor is claimed, we shall find that not Carolina, but
Virginia, not Fort Sumter, but Harpers Ferry and the arsenal, not Major
Anderson, but John Brown began the war that ended American slavery.”
It took the blood and iron of the Civil War, including the crucial
role played by 200,000 black soldiers and sailors, to finally destroy American
chattel slavery. But with the final undoing of Radical Reconstruction—a
turbulent decade of interracial bourgeois democracy in the South, the most
egalitarian experiment in U.S. history—the promise of black equality was
betrayed by the Northern bourgeoisie. Racial oppression has always been and
remains in the very marrow of American capitalism. It will take a third American
revolution to burn this cancer out of the body politic and allow for the first
time the full integration of black people into an egalitarian socialist America.
As we said in Black History and the Class Struggle No. 1 (August
1983):
“We stand in the revolutionary tradition of Frederick Douglass and
John Brown. To complete the unfinished democratic tasks of the Civil War, we
look to the multi-racial American working class. In this period of imperialist
decay, there is no longer a radical or ‘progressive’ wing of the capitalist
ruling class; the whole system stands squarely counterposed to black freedom.
Forward to the third American Revolution, a proletarian revolution led by a
Trotskyist vanguard party with a strong black leadership component. Finish the
Civil War—For black liberation in a workers’ America!”
We reprint below an appreciation of John Brown’s life by George
Novack, “Homage to John Brown,” that appeared in New International
(January 1938), published by the then-revolutionary Trotskyist Socialist Workers
Party.
John Brown was a revolutionary terrorist. There was nothing alien
or exotic about him; he was a genuine growth of the American soil. The roots of
his family tree on both sides reached back among the first English settlers of
Connecticut. The generations of Browns were pious Protestant pioneers, tough and
upstanding, and singularly consistent in their ideas, characters, and ways of
life. John Brown was the third fighter for freedom of that name in his family
and was himself the parent of a fourth. His grandfather died in service as a
captain in the Revolutionary war. His father was an active abolitionist, a
station-master and conductor on the underground railway.
Born in 1800, the pattern of John Brown’s first fifty years
reproduced the life of his father. His father has married three times and had
sixteen children; John Brown married twice and had twenty children, every living
soul among them pledged to hate and fight black bondage. Like his father, John,
too, was “very quick on the move,” shifting around ten times in the Northeastern
states before his call to Kansas. He was successively—but not very
successfully—a shepherd, tanner, farmer, surveyor, cattle-expert, real estate
speculator, and wool-merchant. In his restlessness, his constant change of
occupation and residence, John Brown was a typical middle-class American citizen
of his time.
How did this ordinary farmer and business man, this pious patriarch
become transformed into a border chieftain and a revolutionary terrorist? John
had inherited his family’s love of liberty and his father’s abolitionism. At an
early age he had sworn eternal war against slavery. His barn at Richmond,
Pennsylvania, where in 1825 he set up a tannery, the first of his commercial
enterprises, was a station on the underground railway. Ten years later he was
discussing plans for the establishment of a Negro school. “If once the
Christians in the Free States would set to work in earnest in teaching the
blacks,” he wrote his brother, “the people of the slaveholding States would find
themselves constitutionally driven to set about the work of emancipation
immediately.”
As the slave power tightened its grip upon the government, John
Brown’s views on emancipation changed radically. “A firm believer in the divine
authenticity of the Bible,” he drew his inspiration and guidance from the Old
Testament rather than the New. He lost sympathy with the abolitionists of the
Garrison school who advocated the Christ-like doctrine of non-resistance to
force. He identified himself with the shepherd Gideon who led his band against
the Midianites and slew them with his own hand.
A project for carrying the war into the enemy’s camp had long been
germinating in John Brown’s mind. By establishing a stronghold in the mountains
bordering Southern territory from which his men could raid the plantations, he
planned to free the slaves, and run them off to Canada. On a tour to Europe in
1851 he inspected fortifications with an eye to future use; he carefully studied
military tactics, especially of guerrilla warfare in mountainous territory.
Notebooks on his reading are still extant.
However, his first assaults upon the slave power were to be made,
not from the mountains of Maryland and West Virginia, but on the plains of
Kansas. In the spring of 1855 his four eldest sons had emigrated to Kansas to
settle there and help win the territory for the free-soil party. In May John
Brown, Jr., sent the following urgent appeal to his father. “While the interest
of despotism has secured to its cause hundreds and thousands of the meanest and
most desperate of men, armed to the teeth...thoroughly organized...under pay
from Slave-holders,—the friends of freedom are not one fourth of
them half armed, and as to Military Organization
among them it no where exists in the territory...” with the result
“that the people here exhibit the most abject and cowardly spirit.... We
propose...that the anti-slavery portion of the inhabitants should
immediately, thoroughly arm, and organize themselves in
military companies. In order to effect this, some persons must begin and
lead in the matter. Here are 5 men of us who are not only anxious to fully
prepare, but are thoroughly determined to fight. We can see no other way to meet
the case. ‘It is no longer a question of negro slavery, but it is the
enslavement of ourselves.’ We want you to get for us these arms. We need them
more than we do bread....”
Having already resolved to join his children in Kansas, John Brown
needed no second summons. In the next few months he collected considerable
supplies of arms and sums of money from various sympathetic sources, including
several cases of guns belonging to the state of Ohio, which were “spirited away”
for his use. In August he set out for Kansas from Chicago in a one-horse wagon
loaded with guns and ammunition.
Upon arriving in Ossawatomie, John Brown became the captain of the
local militia company and led it in the bloodless “Wakarusa War.” Then he
plunged into the thick of the struggle for the possession of the territory that
gave it the name of “Bleeding Kansas.” In retaliation for the sacking of
Lawrence by the Border Ruffians, Brown’s men, including four of his sons,
slaughtered five pro-slavery sympathizers in a night raid near Pottawatomie
Creek. Brown took full responsibility for these killings; he fought according to
the scriptural injunction: “An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth.”
Reprisals on one side bred reprisals on the other. The settlement
at Ossawatomie was pillaged and burned; Brown’s son, Frederick, killed; his
forces beaten and scattered. Thereafter John Brown and his band were outlaws,
living on the run, giving the slip to government troops, launching sudden raids
upon the pro-slavery forces. John Brown became a power in Kansas. His name
equaled “an army with banners” in the eyes of the militant Free-Soil colonists;
the whisper of his presence sufficed to break up pro-slavery gatherings. He
continued his guerrilla warfare throughout 1856 until Kansas was pacified by the
Federal troops.
His experiences in Kansas completed the transformation of John
Brown into a revolutionist. “John Brown is a natural production, born on the
soil of Kansas, out of the germinating heats the great contest on the soil of
that territory engendered,” wrote J.S. Pike, the Washington correspondent of the
New York Tribune after the Harper’s Ferry raid. “Before the day of Kansas
outrages and oppression no such person as Ossawatomie Brown existed. No such
person could have existed. He was born of rapine and cruelty and murder....
Kansas deeds, Kansas experiences, Kansas discipline created John Brown as
entirely and completely as the French Revolution created Napoleon Bonaparte. He
is as much the fruit of Kansas as Washington was the fruit of our own
Revolution.”
* * *
Between 1856 and 1858, John Brown shuttled back and forth between
Kansas and the East seeking support for the struggle against the Border
Ruffians. He received supplies, arms, and moral encouragement from many noted
abolitionists, such as Gerrit Smith, the New York philanthropist, and numerous
members of the Massachusetts State Kansas Committee, T.W. Higginson, Theodore
Parker, etc. But there was no place for John Brown in the condition of armed
neutrality that reigned in Kansas after 1856.
No longer needed in Kansas, John Brown reverted to his long
cherished scheme of mountain warfare. To prepare for his enterprise he called a
convention of his followers and free Negroes at Chatham in Canada and outlined
his plans to them. One of the members of the convention reported that, after
invoking the example of Spartacus, of Toussaint L’Ouverture, and other
historical heroes who had fled with their followers into the mountains and there
defied and defeated the expeditions of their adversaries, Brown said that “upon
the first intimation of a plan formed for the liberation of the slaves, they
would immediately rise all over the Southern States. He supposed they would come
into the mountains to join him...and that we should be able to establish
ourselves in the fastnesses, and if any hostile action (as would be) were taken
against us, either by the militia of the separate states or by the armies of the
United States, we purposed to defeat first the militia, and next, if it was
possible, the troops of the United States, and then organize the freed blacks
under the provisional constitution, which would carve out for the locality of
its jurisdiction all that mountainous region in which the blacks were to be
established and in which they were to be taught the useful and mechanical arts,
and to be instructed in all the business of life.... The Negroes were to
constitute the soldiers.”
The revolutionary spirit of the constitution adopted by the
convention for this projected Free State can be judged from this preamble:
“Whereas, Slavery, throughout its entire existence in the United States is none
other than a most barbarous, unprovoked, and unjustifiable War of one portion of
its citizens upon another portion; the only conditions of which are perpetual
imprisonment, and hopeless servitude or absolute extermination; in utter
disregard and violation of the eternal and self-evident truths set forth in our
Declaration of Independence: Therefore, we citizens of the United
States, and the oppressed people, who, by a recent decision of the Supreme Court
are declared to have no rights which the White Man is bound to respect; together
with all other people degraded by the laws thereof, do, for the time being,
ordain and establish for ourselves the following provisional Constitution and
ordinances, the better to protect our persons, property, lives, and liberties;
and to govern our actions.” John Brown was elected Commander-in-Chief under this
Constitution.
For all its daring, John Brown’s scheme was hopeless from every
point of view and predestined to fail. Its principal flaws were pointed out
beforehand by Hugh Forbes, one of his critical adherents. In the first place,
“no preparatory notice having been given to the slaves...the invitation to rise
might, unless they were already in a state of agitation, meet with no response,
or a feeble one.” Second, even if successful such a sally “would at most be a
mere local explosion...and would assuredly be suppressed.” Finally, John Brown’s
dream of a Northern Convention of his New England partisans which would restore
tranquility and overthrow the pro-slavery administration was “a settled fallacy.
Brown’s New England friends would not have the courage to show themselves so
long as the issue was doubtful.” Forbes’ predictions were fulfilled to the
letter.
Convinced that “God had created him to be the deliverer of slaves
the same as Moses had delivered the children of Israel,” Brown overrode these
objections and proceeded to mobilize his forces. Before he could put his plan
into operation, however, he was compelled to return to Kansas for the last time,
where, under the nom de guerre of Shubel Morgan, he led a raid upon some
plantations across the Missouri border, killing a planter and setting eleven
slaves at liberty. Both the Governor of Kansas and the President of the United
States offered rewards for his arrest. With a price of $3,000 on his head, John
Brown fled to Canada with the freedmen.
Early in the summer of 1859 a farm was rented about five miles from
Harper’s Ferry. There John Brown collected his men and prepared for his coup. On
the night of October 16 they descended upon Harper’s Ferry; took possession of
the United States armories; imprisoned a number of the inhabitants; and
persuaded a few slaves to join them. By noon militia companies arrived from
nearby Charlestown and blocked his only road to escape. The next night a company
of United States marines commanded by Col. Robert E. Lee appeared, and, at dawn,
when Brown refused to surrender, stormed the engine-house in which Brown, his
surviving men, and his prisoners were barricaded. Fighting with matchless
coolness and courage over the body of his dying son, he was overpowered and
arrested.
Ten men had been killed or mortally wounded, among them two of
Brown’s own sons, and eleven captured in the assault.
The reporter of the New York Herald describes the scene
during his cross-examination: “In the midst of enemies, whose home he had
invaded; wounded, a prisoner, surrounded by a small army of officials, and a
more desperate army of angry men; with the gallows staring him full in the face,
he lay on the floor, and, in reply to every question, gave answers that
betokened the spirit that animated him.” John Brown steadfastly insisted that a
single purpose was behind all his actions: to free the Negroes, “the greatest
service a man can render to God.” A bystander interrogated: “Do you consider
yourself an instrument in the hands of Providence?”—“I do.”—“Upon what principle
do you justify your acts?”—“Upon the golden rule. I pity the poor in bondage
that have none to help them; that is why I am here; not to gratify my personal
animosity, revenge, or vindictive spirit. It is my sympathy with the oppressed
and the wronged, that are as good as you and as precious in the sight of
God.”
Indicted for “treason to the Commonwealth” and “conspiring with
slaves to commit treason and murder,” John Brown was promptly tried by a state
court and sentenced to death.
During his stay in prison John Brown rose to the most heroic
heights. His dignified bearing, his kindliness won his jailors, his captors, and
his judges. His letters from the prison where he awaited execution were imbued
with the same resolute determination and calm, conscious acceptance of his
sacrifice in the cause of freedom, as the letters of Bartholomeo Vanzetti, his
fellow revolutionist. To friends who contemplated his rescue, he answered: “I am
worth infinitely more to die than to live.” To another he wrote: “I do not feel
conscious of guilt in taking up arms; and had it been in behalf of the rich and
powerful, the intelligent, the great—as men count greatness—of those who form
enactments to suit themselves and corrupt others, or some of their friends, that
I interfered, suffered, sacrificed and fell, it would have been doing very
well.... These light afflictions which endure for a moment shall work out for me
a far more exceeding and eternal weight of glory.... God will
surely attend to his own cause in the best possible way and time, and he will
not forget the work of his own hands.”
On December 2, 1859, a month after his sentence, fifteen hundred
soldiers escorted John Brown to the scaffold in the shadow of the Blue Ridge
Mountains which had for so many years held out to him the promise of freedom for
the slaves. With a single blow of the sheriff’s hatchet, he “hung between heaven
and earth,” the first American executed for treason. The silence was shattered
by the speech of the commander in charge. “So perish all such enemies of
Virginia! All such enemies of the Union. All such foes of the human race!”
* * *
“Let those...who have reproaches to heap upon the authors of the
Harper’s Ferry bloody tumult and general Southern fright, go back to the true
cause of it all. Let them not blame blind and inevitable instruments in the
work, nor falsely malign those who are in nowise implicated, directly or
indirectly; but let them patiently investigate the true source whence this
demonstration arose, and then bestow their curses and anathemas accordingly. It
is childish and absurd for Governor Wise to seize and sit astride the wounded
panting body of Old Brown, and think he has got the villain who set this
mischief on foot. By no means. The head conspirators against the peace of
Virginia are ex-President Franklin Pierce and Senator Douglas. These are the
parties he should apprehend, confine, and try for causing this insurrection.
Next to them he should seize upon Senators Mason and Hunter of Virginia, as
accessories. Let him follow up by apprehending every supporter of the Nebraska
Bill, and when he shall have brought them all to condign punishment, he will
have discharged his duty, but not till then....
“Old Brown is simply a spark of a great fire kindled by
shortsighted mortals.... There is no just responsibility resting anywhere, no
just attribution of causes anywhere, for this violent attempt that does not fall
directly upon the South itself. It has deliberately challenged and wantonly
provoked the elements that have concentred and exploded.” So wrote the same
journalist whose characterization of John Brown we have already quoted.
Little needs to be added to this historical judgment made in the
midst of the events. The Compromisers who attempted to fasten slavery forever
upon the American people against their will, and the representatives of
slaveholders who prompted them were, in the last analysis, responsible for the
raid upon Harper’s Ferry.
John Brown expected the shock of his assault to electrify the
slaves and frighten the slaveholders into freeing their chattels. His experiment
in emancipation ended in complete catastrophe. Instead of weakening slavery, his
raid temporarily fortified the pro-slavery forces by consolidating their ranks,
intensifying their repression, and stiffening their resistance.
John Brown was misled by the apparent effectiveness of his
terrorist activities in Kansas. He did not understand that there his raids and
reprisals were an integral part of the open struggle of the Free-Soil settlers
against the invasion of the slaveholder’s Hessians, and were accessory and
subordinate factors in deciding that protracted contest. That violence alone was
impotent to determine its outcome was demonstrated by the failure of the Border
Ruffians to impose slavery upon the territory.
John Brown’s attempt to impose emancipation upon the South by an
exclusive reliance upon terrorist methods met with equal failure. Other ways and
means were necessary to release, amplify, and control the revolutionary forces
capable of overthrowing the slave power and abolishing slavery.
Yet John Brown’s raid was not wholly reactionary in its effects.
His blow against slavery reverberated throughout the land and inspired those who
were to follow him. The news of his bold deed rang like a fire-bell in the
night, arousing the nation and setting its nerves on edge. Through John Brown
the coming civil war entered into the nerves of the people many months before it
was exhibited in their ideas and actions.
The South took alarm. The “acts of the assassin” confirmed their
fears of slave-insurrection provoked by the Northern abolitionists and Black
Republicans. Brown’s personal connections with many prominent abolitionists were
undeniable, and their disclaimers of connivance and their disapprobation of his
actions did not make them any less guilty in the slaveowner’s eyes, but only
more cowardly and hypocritical. The slaveholders were convinced that their
enemies were now taking the offensive in a direct armed attack upon their lives,
their homes, their property. “The conviction became common in the South,” says
Frederic Bancroft, the biographer of Seward, “that John Brown differed from the
majority of the Northerners merely in the boldness and desperateness of his
methods.”
The majority of official opinion in the North condemned John
Brown’s “criminal enterprise” and justified his execution. Big Unionist meetings
exploited the incident for the benefit of the Democratic Party. The Richmond
Enquirer of October 25, 1859, noted with satisfaction that the conservative
pro-slavery press of the North “evinces a determination to make the moral of the
Harper’s invasion an effective weapon to rally all men not fanatics against the
party whose leaders have been implicated directly with the midnight murder of
Virginia citizens and the destruction of government property.” The Republican
leaders, a little less directly but no less decisively, hastened to denounce the
deed and throw holy water over the execution. Said Lincoln: “We cannot object to
the execution,” and Seward echoed, “it was necessary and just.”
But many thousands rallied to John Brown’s side, hailing him as a
martyr in the cause of emancipation. The radical abolitionists spoke up most
boldly in his behalf and most correctly assayed the significance of his life and
death. At John Brown’s funeral service, Wendell Phillips spoke these words:
“Marvelous old man!... He has abolished slavery in Virginia.... True, the slave
is still there. So, when the tempest uproots a pine on your hills, it looks
green for months—a year or two. Still, it is timber, not a tree. John Brown has
loosened the roots of the slave system; it only breathes—it does not
live—hereafter.” Longfellow wrote in his diary on the day of the hanging: “This
will be a great day in our history; the date of a new Revolution—quite as much
needed as the old one. Even now as I write, they are leading old John Brown to
execution in Virginia for attempting to rescue slaves! This is sowing the wind
to reap the whirlwind, which will come soon.”
Finally, Frank P. Stearns, a Boston merchant who had contributed
generously to John Brown’s Kansas campaign, declared before the Senatorial
Investigating Committee: “I should have disapproved of it [the raid] if I had
known of it; but I have since changed my opinion; I believe John Brown to be the
representative man of the century, as Washington was of the last—the Harper’s
Ferry affair, and the capacity shown by the Italians for self-government, the
great events of this age. One will free Europe and the other America.”
On his way to the scaffold John Brown handed this last testament to
a friend. “I John Brown am now quite certain that the crimes of
this guilty land: will never be purged away; but
with blood. I had as I now think: vainly flattered
myself that without very much bloodshed: it might be done.” His
prophetic previsions were soon to be realized.
A year and a half after his execution, John Brown’s revolutionary
spirit was resurrected in the Massachusetts volunteers, who marched through the
streets of Boston, singing the battle hymn that four of them had just
improvised: “John Brown’s body.” Their movements were open and legal; John
Brown’s actions had been hidden and treasonable. Yet the marching men proudly
acknowledged their communion with him, as they left for Virginia.
There the recent defenders of the Union had become disrupters of
the Union; the punishers of treason themselves traitors; the hangmen of rebels
themselves in open rebellion. John Brown’s captor, Robert E. Lee, had already
joined the Confederate army he was to command. Ex-Governor Wise, who had
authorized Brown’s hanging, was conspiring, like him, to seize Harper’s Ferry
arsenal, and, as a crowning irony, exhorted his neighbors at Richmond to emulate
John Brown. “Take a lesson from John Brown, manufacture your blades from old
iron, even though it be the ties of your cart-wheels.”
Thus the opposing forces in the historical process, that John Brown
called God, each in their own way, paid homage to the father of the Second
American Revolution.
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