John Brown by W.E.B. Du Bois

John Brown Reviews

• 
  Donna Davis

  This title is among my favorite biographies of all time.
  
  The profs teaching the class I took in college featured John Brown as a small figure in American contemporary history and dismissed him fairly quickly. He meant well, but was not stable, they said; in the end, he took extreme, hopeless measures that were destined for doom. He remained a hero to Black families (they admitted), South and North alike, as the first Caucasian man who was willing to die for the rights of Black people. Whereas many White folks (those with enough money for a fireplace and a portrait to go over it) featured a family ancestor or a painting of George Washington, Black homes often had a picture of John Brown.
  
  The problem with the education I received is that no African-American scholars were included in this very central, pivotal part of the prelude to the American Civil War. Few would doubt the credentials of W.E.B. Du Bois, whose urgent and compelling defense of Brown as a selfless but sane man with a perfectly good plan that went wrong due to a couple of the people in key positions of responsibility for the taking of Harper's Ferry. The narrative Du Bois presents here is a compelling one, and it makes much more sense than the version peddled to most history students.
  
  It's tempting to st0p here, but I think I need to give you a couple of instances that may draw you in--if you like history, care about the rights of Black people in the USA--because the oppression that started here is still not over. if you are interested in the Civil War or Brown in particular, you have to read this book.
  
  Tidbits that do not spoil, then: Harriet Tubman planned to be there with him. She became seriously ill and was confined to bed; otherwise, she meant to fight alongside him.
  
  White writers have all assumed that his escape route was impossible. They have the WRONG escape route. Brown did not share the working escape route with Quakers or other Caucasians apart from his family; DuBois tells us the actual route, which he argues could well have worked.
  
  The Underground Railroad was run almost entirely by Black people, some of them wealthy, in the Northern US. DuBois points out that free Blacks owned over a million dollars worth of property, free and clear. Forget the mental image you may have grown up with in which the whole network is run by Quakers; though the Caucasian abolitionists were more Quakers (Friends) than not, they were a minority.
  
  It galls me that even in this, the history of the first liberation struggle of African-Americans, Black folk are excluded from conventional U.S. textbooks.
  
  It was this large body of free Blacks who provided the funding for Brown. He would have had more, if he had not become ill, and the loss of momentum removed most of his Canadian backers. Indeed, DuBois states that Brown most likely went to Harper's Ferry physically ill and "racked with pain", that he was very gaunt due to illness and poverty, but felt that to wait longer would be to lose his support and those he had gathered (a small group) for the initial attack.
  
  To say more might make you feel as if you have little reason to read this book. It is eloquently laid out as only a wordsmith such as DuBois is capable of doing. I am deeply sorry I waited so long to find time for it. This biography holds a permanent position on my favorites list.
• 
  James Klagge

  Today happens to be the 158th anniversary of John Brown's ill-fated raid on Harper's Ferry. I was there just a month ago, and took that as a motive to read this bio by Du Bois. Du Bois is an excellent, literary writer, and it was a great book. It was published in 1909, commemorating the 50th anniversary of the raid, and offering an African-American perspective. I have not read any more recent or more scholarly bios, but this relied primarily on letters written by Brown or others who knew him, so it at least offers an important personal perspective.
  Brown moved around a lot as a youth and adult, but he often lived in Richfield or Hudson, Ohio. That is very near where I grew up, and some of my family now live in Richfield. I have been to one of the houses (now an antique store) where he once lived. Thinking back on his time there, when he was later living in Massachusetts, he wrote (p. 37): "I can look back to our log cabin at the centre of Richfield with a supper of porridge and johnny cake as a place of far more interest to me than the Massasoit of Springfield."
  At age 12 Brown drove a herd of cattle hundreds of miles through wooded wilderness, and was given hospitality along the way by a pleasant and friendly man (p. 10). While staying there Brown befriended the man's young slave boy, who was about the same age as him. He felt the slave boy was "fully if not more than his equal." But the host family regularly berated the slave boy, and Brown witnessed them beat him mercilessly with a shovel. Slaves had no human father to look after them, and Brown wondered "Is God their Father?" Then he determined to do something for slaves.
  Brown was as close as there is to a modern-day Old Testament prophet. Certain in theology; humble in demeanor. "I have never made any business arrangement which would prevent me at any time answering the call of the Lord....I have permitted nothing to be in the way of my duty, neither my wife, my children, nor worldly goods. Whenever the occasion offered, I was ready. The hour is very near at hand, and all who are willing to act should be ready" (p. 111).
  Much of his adult life was preparation for his raid. He had read all the books on insurrectionary warfare, and studied the guerrilla warfare of the Spanish chieftains against the Romans, and the Circassians against the Russians (p. 127). He lived and fought in Kansas, preventing it from becoming a slave-state. Many of his allies there were racists who fought slavery there b/c they didn't want ANY blacks in the state! So Brown was a pragmatist. Brown renounced non-violence as a form of cowardice (p. 88): "It seemed to Brown nothing less than a crime for men to lie down and be kicked by ruffians." In response to terrorism by pro-slavery forces he oversaw the capture of 5 of the worst of them and "raised his hand and at the signal the victims were hacked to death with broadswords" (p. 90 & 79). Brown said (p. 91), "God is my witness, we were justified under the circumstances....I believe I was doing God's service....He has used me as an instrument to kill men, and if I live, I think he will use me as an instrument to kill a good many more." "To recognize an evil and not strike it was to John Brown sinful. 'Talk, talk, talk,' he said derisively" (p. 204).
  His plan for Harper's Ferry was to create a defensible independent community for blacks in the Appalachian mountains. It was well-thought-out, with a constitution and officers. But his main problem was convincing people to take the risk. One of his great personal friends and supporters was Frederick Douglass--but Douglass would not endorse the raid b/c he saw no way for it to succeed (pp. 177ff). Of course, he was right, and the raid lasted less than 24 hours. Brown's legacy stemmed more from his death than from his plan. Douglass claimed (p. 211): "John Brown began the war that ended American slavery, and made this a free republic."
  An echo into the present:
  p. 152: Brown recruited freed and escaped slaves in Canada to fight with him. "The question came up as to what flag should be used; [they] said they would never think of fighting under the hated 'Stars and Stripes'....But Brown said the old flag was good enough for him; under it freedom had been won from the tyrants of the Old World for white men; now he intended to make it do duty for the black men. He declared emphatically that he would not give up the Stars and Stripes. That settled the question." This reminded me of present-day supporters of the Confederate battle flag who argue that slavery long existed under the US flag.
  Two months ago I was present in Charlottesville, VA, as part of the counter-protest against the Alt-right demonstration supporting the confederate monuments there. I went as part of a group of 8 who committed to non-violence. But the chaos there was such that I have to confess I was thankful for the presence of antifa groups, one of which called itself the Sons of John Brown.
• 
  Aurélien Thomas

  Fanatics? Hero? Terrorist? Martyr? Criminal mystic? John Brown, for sure, has never left anybody indifferent. Even W.E.B. Du Bois, in fact, dedicated him this biography! But what about it?
  
  Well, it's a very strong portrait. It hints towards the lyricism, and it offers, unabashedly, the view of a man painted as nothing less but a visionary, who gave his life in the name of a greater, noble, cause. Written and first published at a time when Brown was, by any account, considered as a murderous madman (1909), such portrayal was clearly a challenge to common prejudices, to say the least! But then again: isn't such a character still highly controversial, despite his good intent?
  
  This is not a proper historical essay by any mean (it's far too emotional for that), but, as a brick thrown into a wall and by an intellectual whose legacy was no less impactful, it surely deserves to be discovered. John Brown, after all, still is a contentious figure.
• 
  William West

  This early work by W.E.B. Du Bois shows the author transitioning from an academic historian to a political writer. Ostensibly a biography, this is more revolutionary propaganda than historical document. However one chooses to categorize it, it is a worthwhile and entertaining work.
  
  Du Bois is not here trying to humanize Brown in response to the demonization that most American historians had to that point, and to a degree still, treated Brown. Rather, Du Bois is using fire and brimstone to fight fire and brimstone. His Brown is neither demon nor man but an angelic incarnation of avenging decency.
  
  Du Bois wants to make Brown not just morally great, but strategically brilliant as well. Some of the least convincing parts of the book attempt to convince the reader that were it not for bad luck, the raid on Harper's Ferry might well have been a success. The fact is that most every abolitionist leader of the day, particularly the African-American ones, with the notable exception of Harriet Tubman, considered Brown's attack on Harper's Ferry to be a suicide mission. Du Bois's attempts to retroactively prove them all wrong seem hollow. The authorial claim that does ring more true is Du Bois's assertion that Brown's raid was a decisive precursor to the Civil War. Without the terror Brown inflicted in Southern hearts, the slave states may have at least waited to succeed.
  
  Modern readers might at first be a bit put off by the Victorian tone of Du Bois's prose. However, the dramatic thrust of the book is powerful enough that one quickly acclimates oneself to the writing style. This is stirring stuff.
• 
  Marley

  I've always been intrested in John Brown and the Raid on Harper's Ferry. I have ancestors who were involved with Brown (though not the raid) and my parents are buried across from Edwin Coppoc who was executed for taking part in it. My gguncle brought Coppoc's body back to Salem, Ohio. I've also not read a lot of W E B DuBois, and as a trained historian I should. So I took this opportunity to catch up a bit.
  
  From all reports, this is not one of DuBois's best books. He wrote it over a long period of time and it is not typical of his work apparently That's OK. I see the flaws, including his emotional attachment to Brown, but still it's a good read. Being influenced by Raymond Massey as John Brown in the movies, I had no idea that Brown has been so "respectable" and well-to-do (except during Panics) most of is life and that he was certainly not crazy. Obsessed with ending slavery--yes. (Frederick Douglass declared that when Brown stayed with him a few weeks he became a total bore unable to talk about anything else but freeing slaves). But crazy? No. I also found it surprising that almost Mansonlike (sorry!) he claimed never to have killed anyone; only taught others how to do it. Well, we'll let that one. I need to read more on Brown, but he sure played is part in Kansas. Brown's bio is full of surprises, the bigget that so many people, many of them prominent such as Frederick Douglass and Gerrit Smith knew all about the plans for raid (Smith financialy supported Brown to the tune of $1000 and Douglass thought the plan was pure folly), but that nothing happened to any of these people afterwards. Today our Homeland Security thugs would have hauled everyone to the slammer. I was also surprised to read that Brown was apparently a very kind man who loved children and animals.
  
  It's hard to say if the raid could have succeeded if some of Brown's own men hadn't dawddled the day away (and it wasn't crackbrained as we sometmies hear), but it certainly set the stage for the War Between the States (my favored term for the Civil War, since civil wars are something a bit different).
  
  The last few chapters of the book are riveting and elegant (unfortunatley DuBois sets a rather flowering tone through most of the book) and the last chapter, which Debois added decades later, places John Brown in the context of contemporary movements and politics.
  
  Brown was certainly corrrect at the end believing that his execution would bring about what the raid never did.
• 
  Maughn Gregory

  "John Brown taught us that the cheapest price to pay for liberty is what it costs today" (p. 237).
  
  John Brown's method of principled violence against entrenched systems of violent injustice must be taken seriously in dialogue with the non-violent methods of the Quakers, Gandhi and King. Du Bois brings beautiful writing and careful analysis to this pivotal episode in US history. And his concluding essay turning social Darwinism on its head is brilliant.
  
  "These were the men - idealists, dreamers, soldiers and avengers, varying from the silent and thoughtful to the quick and impulsive; from the cold and biter to the ignorant and faithful. They believed in God, in spirits, in fate, in liberty. To them the world was a wild, young unregulated thing, and they were born to set it right. It was a veritable band of crusaders, and while it had much of weakness and extravagance, it had nothing nasty or unclean" (p. 171).
  
  
• 
  Shira

  "The cost of liberty is less than the price of repression."
  
  This was the refrain that Du Bois repeated, particularly in the last chapter of this surprising biography. I listened to it, and upon finishing, immediately had the urge to read much of it over again at once, in print, especially the beautiful citations of poetry from the Hebrew scriptures, and the last sections in which Du Bois points up the legacy left by Brown which continued into his day, and indeed, even into our own day. Du Bois shows how the collusion of industrial interests and the racial interpretation of social relations, applied to Darwin's work as a means of using the power developed during Brown's time, the same power that drove him, a good and principled man, out of business, to prevent the existing hegemony from being changed, actually works to the detriment of all humanity. He ties up the implications of John Brown's life's work versus that interpretation of Darwin as a negation of the eugenics programs and all that led to those programs. Brown, much to my surprise, was described as a thoughtful man, initially stern, but eventually becoming a kind man, one who abhorred the shedding of blood, and believed deeply in the mutual obligations and respect due to every human being. Du Bois shows how the beginnings of Brown's plan were intended to be as non-violent as possible, and only reluctantly evolved into the raid on the federal arsenal, while remaining a project of killing only when absolutely necessary. Witnesses describe a community with by-laws drawn up to run much as the first century Christians are described as living in the book of Acts, and of Brown's insistence upon gentlemanly and respectful conduct, even to captured prisoners. This made him, it seems, a man well ahead of his times. But, also a bit of a dreamer. Du Bois describes Brown as attempting to convince other leaders, but finding them more skeptical of his plans. I was very impressed with Du Bois delving into military science to show that, had every member of Brown's group acted in strict accordance with his plan, the raid on the Armory would very likely have succeeded. Yet, a plan that depends on each man acting selflessly is, it seems, the plan of a dreamer. By the time I had finished Du Bois' devastating final chapter, I felt not only moved for the dream and strongly felt duty of Brown, but also for the life of honest and courageous integrity that was laid down as a willing martyr for the cause of Abolition. He used his trial as a means of putting the very South herself, and her Peculiar Institution in particular, on trial, quite successfully. Why are we not taught about the details of this trial, and his words at that trial, in school? This biography should be required reading in every High School history classroom in the United States. Please, please, please, read this book, perhaps starting with the final chapter. But read it.
  
  My reading updates follow:
  listening via
  https://librivox.org/john-brown-by-w-... ...
  
  British wool tariffs nearly brought the US to consider invading, around 1830?? Wow. I've never heard of that, nor of the fact that Oberlin college was given land in Virginia.
  
  John Brown as a bank director? Who would have thought of this? Ruined, like many, by the Panic of 1837
  
  "Organized economic aggression" by business highwaymen literally forced a good man, John Brown, out of business because he refused to abandon his good principles!
  
  and incredible, of all the poetic language Du Bois uses: "...a great Black phalanx" of escaped slaves and Free People of Color welcoming them into the "cities of refuge" up north and organizing Colored resistance. And John Brown's family sheltering ...
  
  The reverend Lovejoy, from The Simpsons, is named for the murdered Abolitionist preacher Rev. Lovejoy? Who knew!
  
  This murder, and being kicked out of their church for giving their nice seats to the Negro family attending the meeting, catalyzed Brown's 1839 knowledge and support of the Abolitionist movement. In fact, white brutality even against white people planted the seeds.
  
  Section 7: So, Brooks caned Sumner over Missouri's lie about Kansas Territory, and the Civil War actually began in Lawrence, KA.
  
  Shameless forcing of a faux election by Missourians of Kansas lawmakers, and the US Army helping the Southerners with guns and Bowie knives, and canon!? But despite the free-state majority, KA, nearly became a slave-state.
  
  Ch. 7, The Swamp of the Swan, end of Section 8:
  
  This militia formed by Captain John Brown is like David, as he says, but not a band of thugs, as that of David was: no profanity, no corporal punishment, no unkind or ungentlemanly behavior. Wow. Feeling themselves like a family, said his men. These were the Anla'Shok. "All great reforms...based on generous..."
  
  Incredible.
  How his image has been distorted.
  
  ... and why not admit women?
  
  He wrote and had adopted an actual Constitution for his followers down South.
  
  Preamble here:
  https://www.zinnedproject.org/news/td...
  
  Postponement of action, weeping to Schubert...
  
  An indictment on the system of slavery, Brown's speech on the stand ends with
  "Farewell. Farewell."
  
  Du Bois calls his trial “the mightiest Abolition document that America has known” is right, and a beautiful one, by his last words to his family.
  
  "The cost of liberty is less than the price of repression." Clearly, Du Bois wanted this phrase to stay with the reader, and he uses it to devastating effect, particularly in the last section, "The Legacy of John Brown."
  
  Absolutely stunning look at both a deliberately misrepresented man, and a legacy that remains with us, to this very sad day.
  
  Incredible.
  Simply incredible.
• 
  Greg

  Excellent biography of John Brown. History tends to paint him as some kind of murderous rebel, but Du Bois correctly shows he was a patriot hoping to fight a guerilla war to free America's slaves.
• 
  Sugarpunksattack Mick

  W.E.B. Du Bois' biography of John Brown is extremely sympathetic, even partisan, and highly readable account of Captain John Brown's life and legacy. Beyond the basic details of Brown's life, the strength of Du Bois book lies in his partisan presentation explaining Brown's personal actions as they fit into the broad human struggle against oppression. Brown was radicalized by witnessing the unfair treatment of those in bondage, but went further than most folks of the time by activity learning from the example of black resistance. Du Bois explains the influence that the Haitian Revolution and Nat Turner rebellion had on Brown personally, but more importantly in his planning of the raid on Harpers Ferry. Besides elaborating Brown's rationale, Du Bois is seeking to re-contextualize Browns plans to demonstrate that they were well thought through plans that could have succeeded. Likewise, Du Bois is responding to and rebuffing those who want to paint Brown as some irrational lunatic whimsically acting out.
  
  There are many interpretations of Brown that have proliferated since his death. Du Bois does not present and pick apart these various differing accounts perhaps making it a little outdated. However, Du Bois does use large block quotes from John Brown, Fredrick Douglas, and other related characters that allows a reader to have a more complex understanding of Brown. Hopefully, the use of these block quotes will help inoculate the reader against the more obviously reactionary interpretations. Du Bois' biography is the ideal introduction that provides the basic details, the greater context, and an absolutely unapologetic, unabashed account of John Brown's Legacy: "John Brown was right." (254)
• 
  Rebecca DeVendra

  John Brown's half brother summed him up well:
  
  "I urged him to go home to his family and attend to his private affairs; that I feared his course would prove his destruction and that of his boys ... He replied that he was sorry that I did not sympathize with him; that he knew that he was in the line of his duty, and he must pursue it, though it should destroy him and his family. He stated to me that he was satisfied that he was a chosen instrument in the hands of God to eat against slavery."
  
  What a king. If you love other people the way you ought, others will want to kill you. Brown seems to have known this. What. A. King.
• 
  JC

  I really enjoyed reading this biography of a remarkably austere, sober-minded Calvinist militant set on trying to move forward the cause of abolition. I know the 'biography' is so often such a bourgeois literary form, but I have bourgeois taste in literature and I think Du Bois was also such a good writer. I visited my friend in Guelph back when I was still reading this book. Upon asking me what I was reading, I told him of this book and the revolutionary Calvinist spirit of Brown that Du Bois was able to capture so well, especially in the material he compiled into this biography. An example excerpt that Du Bois includes from an abolitionist and Unitarian minister that funded Brown's guerrilla military plans:
  
  “I never shall forget,” writes Thomas Wentworth Higginson, “the quiet way in which he once told me that ‘God had established the Allegheny Mountains from the foundation of the world that they might one day be a refuge for fugitive slaves.’ I did not know then that his own home was among the Adirondacks.””
  
  Insurrectionary Calvinist geography must be a concocted field of inquiry for which Brown would be the perfect militant subject. As I wandered around Mono Cliffs last weekend staring at all the Allegheny blackberries fruiting among the brambles along the trail, I thought of John Brown imagining God sculpting the Allegheny Mountains as a foundational act of creation. John Brown really thought himself to be an instrument of God in the divine task of liberating slaves. The Ceylon blackberry (of course related to the Allegheny blackberry) native to Asia (from China to the Malay peninsula, where my ancestors are from) is now an invasive species in the Galapagos. It was interesting that Du Bois included some commentary on the context of Victorian science and the publishing of Darwin’s Origin of Species, and the wellspring of eugenicist racism that happened to follow in its wake, which geneticists like Haldane would strongly resist. Darwin himself did not assert the views that would come to be known as ‘social Darwinism’. Darwin had imbibed the staunch abolitionist sentiments from his family, and his diary entries from Brazil for example exuded with indignation of the Portuguese slave system still in effect there). The Harvard historian of science Janet Browne wrote:
  
  “Throughout [Darwin] expressed the view that humans were all brothers under the skin. In fact a strong antipathy to slavery in any form was crucial to his developing views about the unity of all mankind. Anti-slavery politics were integral to his family viewpoint in general, for the first Erasmus Darwin had been an active promoter of emancipation causes in Britain and in his poems publicly praised Josiah Wedgwood’s famous medal emblazoned with the motto ‘Am I not a man and a brother’. Darwin’s father, sisters and cousins all supported the anti-slavery movements of the early nineteenth century – as did he. And the Beagle was travelling the world just when these mass philanthropic movements reached their pinnacle in Britain with the Emancipation Act of 1832.
  
  The only time that Darwin was really angry with Captain FitzRoy was over an incident at a great estância in Brazil, where the slave-owner called all his men before him and asked whether they wished to be free. No, they answered. Talking in the cabin afterwards, FitzRoy complacently took that response as a simple truth until Darwin pointed out that no slave would risk any words to the contrary. ”
  
  Du Bois interestingly remarked that after the publication of Darwin’s Origin of Species, John Brown was seen as a sort of out-dated anomaly with good intentions, but misinformed about the newly discovered scientific realities. Du Bois astutely confronts the bizarre and dubious logical foundations of eugenicists, and his arguments shared striking similarity to those of the geneticist Haldane who found it so ridiculous that eugenicists had the arrogance to believe they knew what were the highest qualities of humanity and their confidence to throw out all the rest of human genetic diversity because they believed they themselves happened to be the current pinnacle of human evolution. Du Bois writes:
  
  “…first, assuming the truth of the unproved dictum that there are stocks of human beings whose elimination the best welfare of the world demands it is certainly questionable if these stocks include the majority of mankind; and it is indefensible and monstrous to pretend that we know to-day with any reasonable assurance which these stocks are. We can point to degenerate individuals and families here and there among all races, but there is not the slightest warrant for assuming that there does not lie among the Chinese and Hindus, the African Bantus and American Indians as lofty possibilities of human culture as any European race has ever exhibited. It is, to be sure, puzzling to know why the Soudan should linger a thousand years in culture behind the valley of the Seine, but it is no more puzzling than the fact that the valley of the Thames was miserably backward as compared with the banks of the Tiber. Climate, human contact, facilities of communication and what we call accident, have played a great part in the rise of culture among nations: to ignore these and assert dogmatically that the present distribution of culture is a fair index of the distribution of human ability and desert, is to make an assertion for which there is not the slightest scientific warrant.”
  
  Anyway, to return to the issue of John Brown who was actually fare more visionary and wise than the eugenicists who would shortly arrive after his time, another exemplary sample of Brown’s staunch Calvinism I mentioned to my friend was this fascinating slightly humorous austerity of Brown turning down butter at the dinner table confessing that he was not accustomed to such luxuries. Du Bois many times calls Brown a Puritan, and takes time to even trace his Puritan ancestry. My friend had a good chuckle over Brown turning down butter as a luxury though, as we were on his backyard deck luxuriating over takeout korma and vindaloo, along with glasses of Shiraz. I wish I had the sobriety of John Brown but I admittedly like butter on my bread, and a cheap glass of wine once in a while also.
  
  I also mentioned to my friend that Brown’s militancy reminded me of communists I read about. He was infuriated by strict pacifists and non-violent abolitionists, and some of the things he did, or that he permitted his followers to do, I found terrifying. But slavery is a particular social circumstance in a different time, and I supposed he had good justification for his actions. Some of Brown’s fellow comrades would raid the homes of slave owners at night and sometimes they would end up executed. War, insurrection, and revolution are no dinner parties as another revolutionary once suggested.
  
  Du Bois was initially offered the task of writing a biography of Frederick Douglass, which he agreed to, only to be displaced by an agreement by Booker T. Washington to write it. Du Bois counter-proposed to write a biography of Nat Turner, but the publisher was not interested, so Du Bois's next choice was John Brown. Du Bois, in this bioraphy, interestingly includes details of John Brown studying Nat Turner and the strategies of other leaders of slave uprisings while trying to formulate his own ideas. Du Bois writes:
  
  "He studied the census returns and the distribution of the Negroes and made maps of fugitive slave routes with roads, plantations, and supplies. He learned of Isaac, Denmark Vesey, Nat Turner and the Cumberland region insurrections in South Carolina, Virginia, and Tennessee; he knew of the organized resistance to slave-catchers in Pennsylvania, and the history of Hayti and Jamaica."
  
  Du Bois has a fascinating account of Frederick Douglass visiting John Brown’s home and being slightly shocked (even a bit disappointed) at how plain and austere the place was, after seeing Brown’s nice store in town. Douglass wrote:
  
  “It was a small wooden building on a back street, in a neighbourhood chiefly occupied by labouring men and mechanics; respectable enough, to be sure, but not quite the place, I thought, where one would look for the residence of a flourishing and successful merchant. Plain as was the outside of this man’s house, the inside was plainer. Its furniture would have satisfied a Spartan. It would take longer to tell what was not in this house than what was in it. There was an air of plainness about it which almost suggested destitution.”
  
  I like many first encountered John Brown through the folk songs of Pete Seeger, who would sing the old John Brown verse along with the later verses from the Battle Hymn of the Republic. After reading Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath I would play folk renditions of this song over and over to the annoyance of those living with me.
  
  Some of my favourite passages from this book were Brown’s encounters with Harriet Tubman (who befriended Brown and associated him with one of the recurring dreams she had), and Brown actually spent quite a significant amount of time in Canada recruiting runway slaves that had escaped across the border into his military campaign to liberate those enslaved in the South. I would love to take a few day trips out to St. Catherines and Chatham to follow along the trail of Brown in Ontario. Du Bois even records Brown visiting Toronto’s Temperance Hall and the home of Black man named Mr. Holland. Du Bois also mentions Brown staying at the home of the naturalist, ornithologist, physician, and abolitionist Alexander Milton Ross, although some historians question the veracity of some of Ross’s accounts (I suspect some want to distant Brown from Ross because he was somewhat untrustworthy and also an anti-vaxxer). I’d like to some time follow up on two of Du Bois’ sources, especially before taking some day trips to Chatham: “John Brown in Canada” by James Cleland Hamilton and “A Voice from Harper’s Ferry” by Osborne Perry Anderson (the only surviving Black man from Brown’s Harpers Ferry raid) with the help of Mary Ann Shadd Cary (a remarkable Black feminist, abolitionist, lawyer, and publisher). I heard there’s a little cinematic production out there on the Chatham Convention with Ethan Hawke as John Brown, and I should maybe make a film night of it too before heading out to Chatham.
  
  Anyway, Brown was a remarkable soul and who better to capture such a fascinating person than W.E.B. Du Bois.
  
  There’s a book coming out this December (Arise Africa, Roar China) by the historian Gao Yunxiang, which has an entire chapter dedicated to Du Bois and his close relationship with Maoist China, and his involvement in internationalist communist politics later in his life. This book on John Brown was published in 1909, decades before Du Bois became a communist, but Du Bois spends a good portion of his last chapter expressing his strong anti-imperialist sentiments long before his communist commitments. I wanted to finish with this wonderful excerpt by Du Bois that comments on the way colonized peoples of the world are exploited by the industrial bourgeoisie:
  
  “No sooner is the question put this way than the defenders of modern caste retire behind a more defensible breastwork. They say: “Yes, we exploit nations for our own advantage purposely—even at times brutally. But only in that way can the high efficiency of the modern industrial process be maintained, and in the long run it benefits the oppressed even more than the oppressor.” This doctrine is as wide-spread as it is false and mischievous. It is true that the bribe of greed will artificially hasten economic development, but it does so at fearful cost, as America itself can testify. We have here a wonderful industrial machine, but a machine quickly rather than carefully built, formed of forcing rather than of growth, involving sinful and unnecessary expense. Better smaller production and more equitable distribution; better fewer miles of railway and more honor, truth, and liberty; better fewer millionaires and more contentment. So it is the world over, where force and fraud and graft have extorted rich reward from writhing millions. Moreover, it is historically unprovable that the advance of undeveloped peoples has been helped by wholesale exploitation at the hands of their richer, stronger, and more unscrupulous neighbors.”
• 
  Mac

  Starts slow, but once Kansas starts bleeding, things start picking up. A judicious but passionate investigation of one of the most important men in the most important periods in American history.
  W.E.B. DuBois' voice is also always a pleasure to read, and his theoretical considerations at the end have profound resonance in our day as well.
• 
  Deborah

  Every American should read this book.
• 
  Dont

  For their second gathering, the leaders of the anti-racist Niagara Movement chose to convene on the campus of Storer College in Harper's Ferry, West Virginia in 1906. Two days after the conference attendees marched barefoot to the "hallowed ground" of John Brown's 1859 raid to free enslaved Americans, W.E.B. Du Bois read his famous "Address to the Country." The choice of location for the important conference that would help set the stage for the founding of the NAACP, the somber promenade to visit the historic landmark of Brown's rebellion, and Du Bois's fiery address, all resonate with the urgency of Du Bois's deep reflections on the life and legacy of the white abolitionist, John Brown.
  
  In the over 150 years since Brown's raid, the name John Brown continues to haunt the American imaginary. As a child, I remember very well my first visit to Harper's Ferry. On the one hand, Brown is presented in the National Park Services official exhibitions as a visionary hero whose religious convictions led him to organize a battalion of vigilantes determined to sacrifice their own lives for liberating enslaved men and women across the South. On the other hand, Brown is portrayed as a fanatic whose extremism promoted violence, murder, and war. The latter view informed John Steuart Curry's famous "Tragic Prelude" painting on the walls of the State Capital building of Kansas. In Curry's mural, Brown bears the visage of a crazed lunatic, driven by religious extremism. For Curry, like many of his generation, it was absolutism on both sides that resulted in the Civil War between the North and the South.
  
  Written between 1904 and completed three years after the Niagara Movement conference in Harper's Ferry, Du Bois's biography of John Brown constructs a representation in which Brown is neither mythic nor lunatic.
  
  Reading Du Bois's book, I kept thinking about the stark difference between his account of Brown's life and the mural by Curry. Where the latter attempts to fix an analysis in a static image with Brown towering over a perfectly balanced the human and natural forces of North and South on either side, Du Bois is less interested in a singular image than in the long road of how one organizes a life committed to liberation. Drawing on his powers as a sociologist, Du Bois extensively consults the available written accounts of witnesses as well as Brown's own correspondences. What emerges is not merely a demythified John Brown, but a singular historical figure situated in an expansive landscape of actors, events, forms of political organization, and competing ideas around strategy and tactics. In other words, Du Bois gives us an exhaustive account of the machinery behind the image. We learn of the extensive networks of abolitionist societies that spanned from New England to the Kansan Territories and deep into Canada. We learn of the volatile coalition between slavery abolitionists, those who saw slaves as an economic threat to White workers, and those who opposed slavery purely out of White Supremacist impulses. We also learn of the role of Quakers in hosting Brown's military training camp where the young men who would lead the assault on Harper's Ferry drilled with arms, studied, and practiced their Christian faith.
  
  Du Bois's sociology, however, does not limit him to providing only descriptive account. Compelled by his own growing hunger for mass political action, Du Bois takes the time to attend to those like Frederick Douglass and others who critiqued Brown's plan for the Harper's Ferry assault on the basis of tactic. In his account of how the actual raid unfolded, Du Bois offers keen insights into the failings of the interventions -- all the while insisting that the plan had the potential to succeed.
  
  The lesson we take from John Brown is not a warning against fanaticism per se. Citing in detail the transcripts from the court proceedings that sentenced Brown and his surviving fighters to the gallows, Du Bois clearly shows that the abolitionist aimed to free slaves as a strategy for breaking the slavery system. War, murder, and sedition were not in any way his purpose. From his experience in Kansas fighting against pro-slavery ruffians, Brown had no delusions about the reaction from those with the most to lose from the defeat of the slavery system. Rather, as Du Bois takes pains to demonstrate, there is something absolutely rational about Brown's strategy and his means, long-cultivated in the battlefields of Kansas and in the dialogue with those most connected to the anti-slavery movement.
  
  It is true that there are many accounts of John Brown life. In either biography, history, or comic novel, he remains a crucial figure in how we grapple with the contradictions of American promise and American injustice. And yet Du Bois's book offers something uniquely priceless in terms of reading a biography of a white abolitionist who took up arms written by one of the most significant architects of the freedom struggle. What does Du Bois think about Brown, the white Northerner, acting upon his convictions for the liberation of the oppressed? What does the historical account of John Brown suggest for the foundation of solidarity between the races in the struggle against oppression and exploitation? How does Du Bois make sense of Brown's tactical use of armed rebellion in the fight against a social-economic system? What is Du Bois's analysis of the larger abolitionist movement that could claim such diverse figures and strategies from the underground railroad to those advocating extraction? And since Du Bois is writing at precisely the same moment the Niagara Movement takes up its debate against the conciliatory tendency of Booker T. Washington, Du Bois's John Brown becomes as much a radical voice for 1906 as a figure of the mid-1800s.
  
  In many respects, the above questions linger even today for anyone committed to the struggle for freedom. But at a time when identity -- particularly Whiteness -- becomes a growing alibi for indifference and lethal resentment, Du Bois's John Brown provides a challenge for how we might think about the agency of solidarity; one in which the old problem of fanaticism succumbs to the urgent question of what it means to take militant action when the severity of the risks fall unevenly on people of color as on Whites, on the poor as on the propertied, on the enslaved as on the free, and on the citizen as on the noncitizen.
  
  According to Du Bois, the reality that Blacks would suffer more than Brown himself from taking armed action served as the basis for Frederick Douglass's decision to decline Brown's call to join the raid on Harper's Ferry. Even in the final hour, standing in a quarry facing the entreaties of Brown and his plans for a sustained attack on slavery, Douglass would not follow his old friend into battle. Interestingly, as Du Bois points out, whatever reservations Douglass felt were not shared by Harriet Tubman. In fact, had it not be for a debilitating illness, Tubman would have been at Harper's Ferry, and the would have been the only woman present (and permitted by Captain Brown).
  
  In the immediate wake of the raid, Douglass watched and listened as shockwaves rippled through the fabric of American discourse and consciousness. In time, Douglass would come to see Brown's assault as not the ending of slavery that Brown may have intended but as the beginning of that ending. Furthermore, Douglass would some come to believe that only revolution would shake America free from the system of slavery.
  
  As for me, a reader of Du Bois's John Brown, it is not so much Frederick Douglass or even John Brown that haunts me after reading the last page. Rather, and here I think Du Bois too felt so inclined, I cannot shake from my thoughts Du Bois's depiction of Shields Green. An illiterate former slave, Green listens to Douglass's counsel on the eve of the raid not to partake in Brown's foolish suicide mission. Yet after hearing the entreaties of the leader of the freedom struggle, Green responded, "I'll go with the old man," and thus elected to go into battle and to his death. As Du Bois repeats continually throughout the book, "The cost of liberty is less than the price of repression." These words, these terrible words, could so easily be dismissed as fanatical. But what is fanaticism to those oppressed by centuries of suffering in a society whose wealth and elites stand erect on the toil and dehumanization of the working masses?
  
  Calling such thinking and acting fanaticism serves as a convenient way to not have to ask these questions of ourselves in the time we have on earth.
• 
  J. Alfred

  "When a prophet like John Brown appears, how must we of the world receive him?"
  John Brown is one of the more enigmatic figures in history because he, unlike most of us, knew absolutely what he believed, and unlike almost all of us, wouldn't compromise on what he knew. And so, knowing that slavery was wrong and that violence was an acceptable means to defeat the evil of slavery he got a bunch of people killed in a sort of insane raid the intention of which was to create an armed highway of black exodus from slavery through the mountains. Is he a hero for this? Or an insane person? Or do our normal categories not apply?
  I tend to think the world is thicker and stronger because John Brown lived in it once.
  
  Thanks is due to Marilynne Robinson, in this as in many things, for recalling Brown to our national attention in her Gilead novels.
• 
  Noah

  This biography, while good, treats John Brown more like a mythic prophet than an actual person. He certainly is larger than life, so it's kind of understandable. Still, I would have preferred a more neutral and objective look into the life of the man, even if I do overall consider him a hero. I would probably give this book one more star, but the last bit of the book makes a bizarre argument for non-racist eugenics (which is apparently a thing), which is just strange and really doesn't need to be in there. But since it's only one small section of the book, the rest of the book is still worth reading for the history of John Brown and how his personal actions helped start the Civil War and ultimately end slavery.
• 
  Paige McLoughlin

  Dubois has his finger on deep and hard truths about America and it totally makes sense that he would write a biography of John Brown. He is a live wire into American race and power politics. Brown challenged the shadow of The American experiment and the first lightning bolt in the oncoming storm of civil war. He challenged Slavery and racism with violence and with his body. He put fear in every plantation owner in the south and pushed the slavery issue to a point where it could not be ignored. Dubois wrote this 100 years ago but it crackles and sparks as much as the nightly news report. Must read.
• 
  Michael Wilson Jr

  John Brown was such an extraordinary figure that I cannot overstate his colossal role in being a sort of boogie man to non-abolitionist. Du Bois' storytelling of Brown is riveting. There are a few accounts of Brown's life written by others, but known as potent as the one written by Harvard's first black student to receive a doctorate degree. Du Bois' early educational achievement was hugely possible by brave, saint-like individuals, like John Brown. Reading the story of his life from one of the founders of the NAACP is the only way, I think, anyone can read it.
• 
  Matt Wright

  This was a wonderful read -- certainly not as in depth as other biographies, and there are a few small errors as noted in the wonderful introduction, but the joy of this book comes from the combination of the subject, the story of John Brown and his rejection of and war against slavery, and Du Bois's terse, powerful writing. I've read this as a library book, but will be purchasing soon so as to have a copy to refer back to in the future. I think this would be a wonderful entry-point as far as John Brown biographies go.
• 
  Caleb Sommerville

  An interesting biography (with some added pontificating from Du Bois). The time period (1909) this was written in is extra-fascinating, especially with Du Bois' kinda wordy outro. Some of the psuedo-scientific crap is easily left by the wayside, but the musings on the future of the "race problem" in America (and some asides about Europe) hit differently since they were all written pre-Great War.
  
  Now, the biography proper of John Brown is fantastic. Tons of first- and second-hand accounts and letters. The structure is a bit jumbled, but hey, it's 1909.
  
  Brown was a fascinating man.
• 
  Al Duran

  This book, in its original publication by George W. Jacobs & Company, was one of a series of biographies of at least twenty-three famous Americans of the nineteenth century brought out by this publisher under its imprint American Crisis Biographies. Other biographies from this same set currently listed on GR are Frederick Douglas by Booker T. Washington and William Lloyd Garrison by Lindsay Swift.
• 
  Pete

  Du Bois works the hell out of primary source documents to tell John Brown’s story—with great humanity, but also the flourishing that should accompany as grandiose a personality as Brown. And I loved how, in the end, Du Bois positioned Brown’s legacy within the context of his own time, and the concerns of Marxism.
• 
  Bryan

  A great book regarding the history of John Brown and the fight for the freedom of the slaves. WEB Du Bois brings an insightful look not to just John Brown but does comparisons to the time the book was published(1909).
  
  James Buchanan puts a $250 bounty on John Brown so John Brown puts a $2.50 bounty on James Buchanan.
• 
  Dawn

  Written in 1910- An inspiring biography of John Brown who stood against slavery and for the civil rights of every American. A person who stood for rights and who made possible the confidence of others to take a stand for rights. I got this book from the Gutenberg Project on my Kindle. I read this as a part of Black History Month.