The Enigma of John Brown

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

What to do with John Brown? Any historian or student of history interested in the Civil War or the lead-up to one of the greatest calamities in U.S. history must grapple with that same question. Or, perhaps, to re-frame the question, how does one explain the enigma of John Brown, this walking contradiction, a man who somehow managed to be both ahead of his time and behind the times, a militant abolitionist politically, a tolerant Calvinist religiously, a man who believed in the true equality of blacks and whites in a time when even the most progressive white abolitionists still embodied the racist sentiments prevalent in that period. In his magisterial biography of John Brown, the abolitionist who became infamous for the murders he oversaw in the fight over "Bleeding Kansas" and for his attack on Harpers Ferry, David Reynolds seeks to unravel this riddle of American history, and for that attempt alone this book is worth the effort needed to plow through over five hundred pages of sometimes densely written text and complex argument.

As much about John Brown the symbol and the historiography of Brown as it is about the man himself, Reynolds deftly places "Osawatomie Brown" in the context of his times and brings a balanced treatment to the topic, something that other historians failed to do (or, in the case of the early 20th Century revisionist historians with their pro-Southern sympathies, didn't try to do in the first case). Brown must surely rank as one of the most remarkable figures in our history, a man who embodied Calvinist attitudes towards religion that had long since fallen out of favor at the same time as he embodied views on race that were downright progressive. His view that blacks and whites were inherently equal, that the two races could live together in harmony and that blacks deserved the same full rights as citizens (he held the same opinion about Native Americans), while mainstream today were revolutionary for the time. Many abolitionists, while noble in their condemnation of slavery, were less noble in their views on race. Some held that the two races could never live in peace and advocated the removal of freed slaves back to Africa; William Lloyd Garrison famously proposed ending the American Anti-Slavery Society in 1863, suggesting that its mission had been accomplished. This action exposed his view that, at least initially, blacks should not have full rights as citizens and did not need post-emancipation protections against their former masters (51). Even Lincoln, while he spent most of his career as a pragmatist who abhorred slavery rather than an Abolitionist, made several statements in which he agreed that blacks were inherently inferior to whites, notably in his debates with Douglas (273). Thus Brown may be considered one of the few non-racists in the United States during the period, going so far as to begin a small town at North Elba where he put his beliefs into practice by living among blacks with his family.

Most interesting of all in the work is Reynolds' treatment of the role of the Trancendentalists in supporting Brown while he was alive and lionizing the man after his capture and subsequent execution for his attack on the federal armory at Harpers Ferry. It is a remarkable and overlooked fact that Emerson and Thoreau spearheaded the movement to rehabilitate Brown and make him a more potent force for abolition in death than he was even when alive. The reasons as to why these men, pacifists at heart, would embrace a radical like Brown who called for anti-slavery violence long before Harpers Ferry is a discussion interesting in and of itself, as is the final portion of the book where Reynolds' traces the legacy of Brown. While some may think that the subtitle of the work is going too far, given the complexity of the slave issue in U.S. history and the lead-up to civil war, I think that the author accurately makes the case that, at the least, the actions of John Brown and the subsequent glorifying of his intentions by many in the North accelerated the already-lit fuse that led to war. Reynolds' asserts that, as pro-slavery feeling in the South had only been strengthening for decades rather than the reverse, the war would have come at some point. The attack on Harpers' Ferry only helped to ensure that the war came in 1861 rather than a decade or two later.

John Brown: Abolitionist is the remarkable end-result of what must have been years of copious, detailed research, a fascinating look at a man who has too-often been sidelined (or completely ignored) in discussions of the Civil War, dismissed as a madman, or worse. Anyone with interest in the man or the period owes it to themselves to take a look at this work, which will help to develop a deeper understanding of the countdown to Fort Sumter. 

Counter-Intuitive Environmentalism

It is a curious feature of the human mind that when confronted with evidence of a reality that contradicts our beliefs, we are often quick to reject this evidence. This confirmation bias--our tendency to uncritically accept evidence which bolsters our own views while rejecting immediately evidence which contradicts it--has been understood as a fact of our thought-processes for some time, and it goes a long way towards explaining why we hold doggedly to fixed beliefs in spite of evidence to the contrary. 

This may well be the case with a book that I've recently finished, David Owen's radical piece of environmental thought, Green Metropolis. So what if I say to you that the environmental movement has had it all wrong on a number of very important points? As someone who has been concerned about the state of the environment for some years, I was quite unsettled by much of what Owen had to say. 

The main point of the book may be summed up as follows: while the environmental movement has historically been hostile to cities, preferring the wide open spaces of the country, and encouraging of living away from cities, this focus is environmentally short-sighted and dead wrong. Residents of dense urban areas per capita consume far fewer resources and have a far smaller carbon footprint than even the most environmentally-conscious urban or country-dweller. Thus cities, when properly planned to encourage high-density living, are better for the environment than living in the country. The reason is quite simple; city-dwellers in dense urban areas live in smaller spaces which encourage having fewer children and discourage the buying of non-essential items. City-dwellers live closer to work, to grocery stores, and to entertainment, thus encouraging walking as a means of regular transportation. This also makes mass-transit feasible and, most importantly of all, discourages the use of cars.

The author's main example is New York City, with other references to places like Boston and cities in Europe, places which, in general, grew up before the invention of the automobile or are otherwise geographically constrained (Manhattan is an island, after all) to prevent the sprawl that is seen in suburbs everywhere and in poorly-planned urban areas like Los Angeles or Atlanta. While my own confirmation bias wants to reject his argument, I find that I cannot. His line of reasoning is sound, and the weight of his arguments are enough to crush any opposition. Owen is rightly scornful of feel-good environmentalism that has little practical impact--he cites the case of an expensive home renovation with all the standard bells and whistles of "green" technology when the simple expansion of the house itself was enough to undercut any benefits to be gained from solar panels or geothermal energy. He is also critical of overly-burdensome schemes like LEED certifications that reward these types of impractical flourishes while ignoring simpler, far more effective steps that could be taken to reduce a building's carbon footprint. 

Owen calls for steps to encourage higher-density areas, because it is only through achieving high-density urban areas will we be able to take the meaningful steps needed to reduce our carbon emissions. Cities, when properly planned, encourage efficiency by their very nature, while suburbs represent an enshrined inefficiency that no amount of electric cars or solar panels will remedy. The one thing that really bothers me about the book is that Owen himself left Manhattan long ago, choosing to live in the same kind of suburb that he continues to decry throughout the book. This hypocrisy is all the more grating after his feeble attempt to explain why he doesn't follow his own advice and live more efficiently in the city. He explains that, even if he moved out of his house in Connecticut, residence would merely be taken up by someone else with no net decrease in carbon emissions. This answer is deeply unsatisfying and may merely add fuel to the fire of those who assert the stereotype of "hypocritical environmentalists." Regardless, more rational people than those often employed by the fossil fuel companies have a duty to examine the argument without falling for any ad hominem attacks. Whatever Owen's personal choice of lifestyle, the argument must be examined on its own merits. It is, in sum, a solid argument, and the ideas he puts forward need to be taken seriously by both urban planners and governments at all levels. Our future may well depend upon it. 

The Fear of Being Alone

Last evening I enjoyed two pieces of the human imagination that, while different on the surface, still shared a common thread. I sat down and watched the movie "The Awakening," about a woman investigating an alleged haunting; it seems a common horror film theme, but it was quite well done, with the frightening moments used just enough to heighten the tension at key points without being overblown as so many other horror films are. The other bit of human creativity was Nicole Krauss' The History of Love, a beautiful work that is hard to describe save that it is about a Holocaust survivor and the book he wrote in his youth, which he thought destroyed. The thread that ties them together in my mind is that loneliness is at the heart of the stories they tell. Loneliness is, in fact, a theme in much of human storytelling, from the loneliness of the Doctor all the way back to the loneliness of Odysseus as he was trapped on the isle of Calypso.

I recalled last evening from my half-remembered undergraduate course on Greek history that some scholars believe that the first mega cities, the "metropolises" of the Hellenistic period, led to a feeling of social isolation among those city dwellers, an isolation that persists to this day. But of course one doesn't need to be in a metropolitan area to feel socially isolated, to feel lonely. All of us are lonely, I think, whether we admit to that fact or not. This feeling lies at the heart of human emotion; loneliness, and the fear of being alone. Our social rules alone demonstrate just how afraid we are of isolation. Consider for a moment the kind of punishments we mete out, ranging from being given the "cold shoulder" or being shunned to legal punishments like solitary confinement or exile. Sometimes we even consider it worse than death to send someone into social isolation--we fear it that much. Given what we know about the emergence of humanity, this makes perfect sense. For our ancestors, survival was much easier within a social group than outside it. Those who were unsocial and outside of the group were less likely to survive, and the echo of this ancient reality remains with us today.

Humans go to great lengths to suppress that feeling of loneliness, and we are eternally creative in how we address this fundamental crisis of our existence. Our efforts to end our solitude can range from finding friends who share our interests and companions to share our lives, to religiosity and some of the destructive mass movements both past and present. Sometimes how we view our entertainment is directly related to how well it takes us away from ourselves, even for a moment, whether it is a diverting read or a captivating film.

All of us are lonely in some way or other. The same feeling that can lead us to seek love can drive us to hate just as ferociously, to take our own lives in the most extreme cases. We can use it to create things of great beauty out of our own personal pain, like the art of Van Gogh or the works of Lord Byron--or we can use it to join in hateful, destructive acts that merely spread a personal misery around. We can reach out to others in our loneliness, or we can draw back. The choice is ours, and it is how we address our loneliness that helps to define who we are.