American History Tellers - Bleeding Kansas | The Man Who Sparked the Civil War | 5

Episode Date: May 12, 2021

John Brown has been called many things: fanatic, hero, terrorist, martyr, zealot. Some of his contemporaries, including Frederick Douglass, believed that were it not for his raid on Harpers Ferry, the Civil War would never have started. But did Brown’s actions really bring about slavery’s eventual downfall? And can his impact still be seen today in a nation that remains deeply divided over issues of race?In this episode, Lindsay discusses Brown’s complex legacy with historian David S. Reynolds, author of John Brown, Abolitionist: The Man Who Killed Slavery, Sparked the Civil War, and Seeded Civil Rights.Listen to new episodes 1 week early and to all episodes ad free with Wondery+. Join Wondery+ for exclusives, binges, early access, and ad free listening. Available in the Wondery App https://wondery.app.link/historytellers.Support us by supporting our sponsors!See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Wondery Plus subscribers can binge new seasons of American History Tellers early and ad-free right now. Join Wondery Plus in the Wondery app or on Apple Podcasts. Imagine it's December 1859. You're walking through the entrance hall of the state capital in Richmond, Virginia. The people of your great commonwealth have just elected you as their new governor, and today you're meeting with one of your most important constituents, Edmund Ruffin, a wealthy planter and slave owner and one of the most zealous leaders of the secession movement. Across the hall, you see a man approaching with long white hair flowing down to his shoulders. Your eyes widen as you notice that he's clutching what appears to be a seven-foot spear.

Mr. Ruffin? Governor, let me offer you my congratulations on your victory. Thank you. It was a tight race. I'm just relieved it's finally over. You get a closer look at the weapon in his hand. It's a long pole with a double-edged bowie knife attached to the end. Uh, what do you have there? This here? This is one of John Brown's pikes. I got my hands on his entire weapons cache.

You know he had 1,000 of these made for his attack on Harper's Ferry? Weapons for his army of rebel slaves. Consider it your victory present. Ruffin offers you the pike. As you examine it, you see a note he's attached to it. To the state of Virginia, a sample of the favors designed for us by our northern brethren. Ruffin nods and smiles. I want everyone to know this is a weapon sent from the North to arm slaves and to be stained with the blood of Southern whites. I see. And you want me to do what with this exactly?

I want you to display it in the Capitol as evidence of the Northern Republicans' fanaticism and hatred of the South, of our people and our way of life. You hand the pike back to Ruffin. Thank you for the gift, but I'm afraid I can't accept it. If I display this, it's just going to stir up people's emotions. Things are volatile enough as it is. Ruffin looks at you in disbelief.

John Brown invaded Virginia to wage war. If we don't stand united, how many more John Browns will there be? The North won't stop until they destroy slavery by force. Come now, you must see that Brown was an anomaly. Plenty of Northerners have decried his actions. But it's clear Ruffin isn't listening. He shakes the pike in front of your face. I will unite the South behind the cause of Southern independence, whether you help me or not. The South will defend slavery against murderers and traitors like John Brown, even if it means we must secede. You shake your head and look past Ruffin, to the other side of the hall where the flag of Virginia hangs beside the stars and stripes. You are filled with fear for the future of the Union

and a growing certainty that the South is hurtling down a path that can only end in civil war. Let's get 90 seconds to pitch to an audience of potential customers. If the audience liked the product, if it gets them in front of our panel of experts, Gwyneth Paltrow, Anthony Anderson, Tabitha Brown, Tony Hawk. Oh my God.

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and this is American History Tellers. Our history, your story. In the lead-up to his raid on the Federal Armory in Harpers Ferry, Virginia, John Brown purchased nearly 1,000 pikes to arm the enslaved people he hoped to free. In the wake of his October 1859 capture, Virginia secessionist Edwin Ruffin got a hold of these pikes and sent one to the governor of every slave-holding state, urging them to display the weapons in their statehouses. Ruffin saw the pikes as powerful symbols of Northern plans to end slavery through violence. His propaganda campaign was just one way in which John Brown's crusade against slavery lived on,

fanning the flames of secession and propelling the nation toward civil war. Here today to discuss John Brown's life and legacy is biographer and historian David S. Reynolds. He's a distinguished professor of history, English, and comparative literature at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York and the author of numerous books about 19th century America, including John Brown Abolitionist and his latest, Abe, Abraham Lincoln in His Times. Here's our conversation. Professor Reynolds, welcome to American History Tellers. It's wonderful to be here, Lindsay. So you are a historian, but I'm interested, what made you want to tell John Brown's story in particular? What aspects drew you to him?

Well, what was really funny was that for years and years, I teach American studies and I taught Henry David Thoreau's famous speech, a plea for Captain John Brown. And Thoreau, who genuflected to nobody, even his mentor Emerson, was praising John Brown to the skies and comparing him to Jesus Christ and like the greatest people of history, better than Washington and everything. So I said, what's going on here? I've always heard that John Brown is a complete kook and a fanatic. John Brown was a radical abolitionist who tried to wipe out slavery and he attacked the South almost single-handedly trying to stir up a slave rebellion, but he was captured and hanged instead. But Thoreau led the way in sanctifying him. So I said, well, what's going on here?

And it set me on a huge exploration of John Brown and his background and so forth. So we can look back now, as you have, and see John Brown as an inspiration to Thoreau and Eberson and his abolitionist peers, but who were those who inspired him? John Brown had many sources of inspiration. One was the revolutions in the West Indies, particularly, well, in Haiti in the 1790s, where the enslaved people rose up and they drove out the European colonizers. The same thing happened in Jamaica. So there was a successful slave rebellion there. He was also inspired by Nat Turner, who had risen up in 1831. And in the process, he and his followers killed around 60 people, white people, and he was hanged. But he created such terror in Virginia that

Virginia actually came close to or was considering abolishing slavery because they saw it was so unstable. And John Brown really wanted to do that on a large scale throughout the South. And he was also inspired by the Amistad rebels who were on a ship. And these were enslaved people who rose up, took over the ship. Eventually, they were liberated by the Supreme Court. John Quincy Adams defended them in the Supreme Court. So he's inspired by them. Those were huge sources of inspiration. And then there were a number of abolitionists who inspired him. He was quite close to Frederick Douglass, who had risen up against his overseer while he was enslaved and had escaped to slavery and became a famous abolitionist. And he was quite sympathetic to and close to John Brown. So yeah, there were a lot of sources of inspiration. Most of these sources, however, that you mentioned are rather revolutionary and violent. How did John Brown come to take that view of his abolitionism?

It was an unusual combination of these rather violent slave rebels that I mentioned, and a Puritan Calvinism. His father was a Calvinist who was anti-slavery, and John Brown inherited this Calvinistic view, the belief in predestination, and John Brown came to feel that he was predestined to play a role in abolishing slavery. He came to feel that way, that God had kind of appointed him to follow in the footsteps of previous Puritan rebels, particularly Oliver Cromwell in England, who had led the Puritan revolution in the 1640s, and they had beheaded the king, King Charles, and instituted a new government in overthrowing tyranny and injustice in England. And he was often compared to Oliver Cromwell, the Calvinistic revolutionary there. So it was really a combination of the Cromwell on the one hand, and then the Nat Turner types on the other hand. This curious combination of violent fervor and religious zeal and dedication to the cause is often precipitated by some sort of event. Do you know if there was a time in his life,

a particular instance that lit the fire of anti-slavery in John Brown? When he was 12 years old, he was on a cattle drive for his father. He was alone, and he came upon a farm where there was an enslaved boy his age, and he played with the boy. The boy was very intelligent. They just were pals. And John Brown, being a white boy, was invited by the farmer to eat at the table, whereas the enslaved boy was forced outdoors to eat in the barn. And he was beaten with a shovel by the master and really maltreated. And the young John Brown just said that he swore from that age that he would devote his life to wipe out the injustice of slavery. So he'd really had a seed very deep

in his childhood. And then as he grew older, the pro-slavery factor became stronger and stronger and made him all the more determined to wipe out slavery, or at least do his part to wiping out slavery at any cost. Let's talk about abolitionism in the mid-19th century in general. We spoke a little bit about John Brown's contemporaries and his inspirations, but what was the state of the movement in the years that John Brown was active? What was happening was there were several branches of anti-slavery. One was William Lloyd Garrison and Wendell Phillips, and they were radical abolitionists who, Garrison burned the Constitution in public because he thought the Constitution was pro-slavery

and it was a covenant with hell, so he was against the, he wanted a separation between the North and the South. Okay, the South go its own way. Hopefully, eventually slavery will die on the vine down there. Meanwhile, we'll take all the fugitive slaves we can up here. However, the Garrisonians were not, they were pacifists as well. They did not want to go to war. They did not want to choose arms. Then there were the evangelicals who wanted to use religious persuasion, like the Tappan brothers in New York or Charles Grandison Finney in Ohio. And they wanted to, in a way, convert Southerners to the anti-slavery novel, Uncle Tom's Cabin, a very Christian novel by Harry Beecher Stowe, which is very anti-slavery. And then you had the transcendentalists in Concord, like Thoreau and Emerson, and they really didn't know what to do about slavery. They protested against it vehemently. They thought through language. They were great writers that somehow through language and also civil disobedience.

Thoreau preceded Gandhi and Martin Luther King by advocating nonviolent civil disobedience. who only wanted to use the electoral system, the government, the electoral process to try to vote into power anti-slavery people. Unfortunately, the South was so strong at that time that politics only led to the Kansas-Nebraska Act, which was pro-slavery. And then finally, the Dred Scott decision in 1857, which said that black people had no rights that white people had to respect and that black people could never be citizens and had no rights at all. And really, the Dred Scott decision really threw John Brown right over the brink. I mean, he got so disgusted by that law and by the Kansas Nebraska Act, which is why he went to Kansas to try to save Kansas for freedom, for anti-slavery. Unfortunately, the pro-slavery people had taken over the polling booths. There was a lot of corruption and had voted in this fraudulent legislature, pro-slavery, that was supported by the federal

government, which was also pro-slavery. So John Brown went to Kansas and really tried to fight there. He actually fought physically against the pro-slavery forces there and committed acts of violence against pro-slavery people because he was so angry and incensed about what was happening there. That was before Dred Scott, but after Dred Scott, he decided to invade Harper's Ferry, Virginia, an area of Virginia, to liberate the slaves there and try to spark a slave rebellion by populating the mountains that ran all the way down into Georgia, actually from New England all the way down to Georgia, populating them with what we might call them terror cells.

These are cells of black people and whites who would go southward and then steadily emancipate more and more enslaved people and gather a kind of colony in the mountains. The way in Haiti, back in the 1790s, the so-called Maroons, the African people there, had created these cells in the mountains and had successfully driven out the white colonizers. So this is what John Brown tells his context for that.

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idea about from the levi's 501 jeans to legos come for the products you're obsessed with stay for the business insights that are gonna blow up your group chat jack nintendo super mario brothers best-selling video game of all time how'd they do it nintendo never fires anyone ever follow the best idea yet on the wondery app or wherever you get your podcasts. You can listen to The Best Idea Yet early and ad-free right now by joining Wondery Plus. You know, I'm glad that you mentioned Gandhi and MLK, Martin Luther King, because I think this era of American history is so far away from modern day America and yet so consequential that it deserves some sort of compare and contrast to maybe another more American history with another tumultuous one in which the civil rights movement itself was fractured of the 50s and 60s, I mean, was fractured and diverse? We have a more modern appreciation of how difficult the 50s, 60s, and 70s were. How does that compare and contrast to this moment in American history with John Brown? Yeah, well, John Brown was on the kind of radical

end of abolitionism, just as you had kind of a radical end of the civil rights movement, a very militant end. And then you had the more peaceful, nonviolent end as well. And you also had politicians in the 60s advocating and pushing for some form of civil rights. And you had a lot of violence and unrest in the streets. And you have more or less the same range of factions back in the 1850s from the nonviolent like Thoreau, who went to jail to protest against slavery. And then he wrote the essay, Civil Disobedience, which influenced Gandhi and Martin Luther King. And then you had Lincoln and the Republican Party. That time, that was the Liberal Party that was really advocating for civil rights politically.

And then you had the violent faction of John Brown and his followers who said, politics are going nowhere. Politics has only led to the Dred Scott decision in the Kansas-Nebraska Act. We have to take action. Another one of John Brown's contemporaries was probably the most famous abolitionist to modern ears is Frederick Douglass. Tell us about their relationship. Frederick Douglass went to John Brown's home in 1847, which was a dozen years before Harper's Ferry. And John Brown had written him, and Douglass goes into his home and says, what do you want? And then John Brown told him his plan of conducting a raid into the South, emancipating some enslaved people, taking these people into the mountains.

And John Brown knew these mountains so well, he'd been a surveyor. He said, they're full of caves where you can hide out and you can repel pursuers very, very easily. And I want to destabilize slavery in the South and make it insecure the way the Haitian rebels had done, the way Nat Turner had done. And eventually, as this grows, the South will be like Virginia had been and want to say, hey, this is a very unstable institution, slavery. We're going to have to deal with the North and get rid of it. So he told Douglass this 12 years before Harper's Ferry. And then after that, they became quite close. He stayed in Douglass's home in Rochester, and he wrote the Provisional

Constitution of the United States. The Constitution was considered by many people to be pro-slavery because of certain clauses. So John Brown actually rewrote it for his own followers, outlawing slavery and also helping Native Americans and women as well. So it was very progressive, but he was in Douglass's home when he did that. And he wanted Douglass and Harriet Tubman, he was close to Harriet Tubman, he wanted them both to be at Harper's Ferry. And he met with Douglas just before Harper's Ferry and said, you know, if you came with me, Frederick, it would really raise the visibility here. It would excite so many enslaved people to rally to our side. And Douglass sympathized with him, but he said, you're walking into a steel trap. I'm not going to go with you. But his sidekick, a fugitive slave named Shields Green, who was living at the time with Douglass, because Douglass turned to leave and said, Mr. Green, come on with me. And Shields Green said, no, I'm going to go with John Brown. I'm going to go with the old man. And Shields Green, he died, you know, at Harper's Ferry. So he became sort of a sacrificial martyr to the anti-slavery cause.

But Douglas always admired John Brown. And then in 1871, in his speech at Storer College, he said, I could live for my race. John Brown died for my race. And he said, my dedication to the cause of my people is like a small candle compared to John Brown's shining sun, blazing sun. So, you know, he really honored John Brown. John Brown was dedicated to his cause so much so that he went to live with African Americans. Tell us about North Elba. North Elba is in upstate New York. It's a rocky country, and it's not very favorable to farming, but that's

where a lot of previously enslaved people gathered because they were kind of kicked out of mainstream society and then went to live up there. And John Brown chose to move his family up there around 1850 and he lived up there and he helped them to plot their land, to develop their farms, and he socialized with them. And one time when a famous white author, Richard Henry Dana, came to visit John Brown, he sat at the table with John Brown, and there were a few African Americans sitting at the table, and John Brown was treating them with exactly the same attitude that he treated Mr. Dana. And Dana was totally stunned by this. He just couldn't believe it because that just was not done. So he felt a true human equality. And Walt Whitman once wrote,

this is the table equally set. And Whitman goes on and talks about having the African-American there and other marginalized groups at his table. He's talking poetically. But John Brown did that literally in North Elba. And that's where he's buried. He's buried up there in North Elba. That's where he chose to live. And that's where he chose to be buried. I think that brings up an interesting point about John Brown.

He is a man who follows his passions and convictions to a point that has passed the line for many others. He was not able to convince many people to join him, although he had enough admirers and financiers to cross the line himself. That tension is also probably best epitomized in his actions at Pottawatomie Creek. We know what happened there, but I want to understand what drove him to such a violent act and what that did for his movement and his public persona. Right. What happened that evening was that he led a raid at midnight on certain settlers who were part of the pro-slavery faction in Kansas, Pottawatomie Creek. And he took, several of them were leaders of the pro-slavery party, the local party, and he conducted them out and he had them killed, five people killed. So now he left the women in there and the children in their cabins, but he was just getting back at this pro-slavery party. He was

just driven to a rage because of what was happening. The fraudulent takeover of the government by these people crossing over from a neighboring state of Missouri, and they terrorized the polling booths, and they elected this fraudulent government in Kansas that was pro-slavery. And then they burned the anti-slavery town of Lawrence, and from a distance, John Brown saw these white supremacists burning the town of Lawrence. And also he had heard of what just happened in Washington where Senator Charles Sumner, an anti-slavery senator, had been beaten, presumably killed, by a pro-slavery Southerner named Preston Brooks. Brooks came up to Sumner with a gold-headed cane and beat him to an

absolute pulp. Should have killed him, but Sumner later recovered. So all these kind of elements combined. Also, there had been huge comments by the pro-slavery people that they were going to wipe out the Brown family and all the other abolitionists. And they had already killed, to that point, 31 anti-slavery people. And so John Brown said, well, I'm going to get my five. And so he got his five as opposed to their 21. There have been so many murders, you see, previously of anti-slavery people. And John Brown was just at a point of boiling revenge. And then after that, it was known, like it was talked on the Senate floor about Pottawatomie, but the justice system was in such chaos in Kansas that he stayed for a while, but then he left and he went across the

country. He was pursued a lot of the way, but he had this aura and he said, it's perfectly well understood that I'm not going to be taken. It's just understood, I'm not going to be taken. And he went up to, on the way across the country, he stopped and some orator was saying, if John Brown were here, I would kill John Brown, just kill him. And so John Brown, he went up and gave the guy a pistol. He said, here I am, go ahead, shoot. And the guy just quavered and kind of cowered, and John Brown took back the pistol and then just disappeared.

He had that kind of fervor and everything like that. But yeah, Pottawatomie, and even Henry David Thoreau and Emerson, who praised him, compared him to Jesus Christ, knew about Pottawatomie. And in his plea for Captain John Brown, Thoreau says, even if someone like John Brown were the vilest murderer and had satisfied himself with that action, then it's okay by me. So it shows you the extreme passion that John Brown kind reason why a lot of people really came to look upon him as just a complete madman and a murderer and all of that. And so he got dropped out of history and he came to be reviled by many, many people. You've mentioned one of the factions, anti-slavery factions, being the politicians and that they were ineffectual for the most part.

One of those politicians was Abraham Lincoln. How did he view Brown and his actions? Yeah, well, he said that Brown had a rare unselflessness and that he felt the same way about slavery that Lincoln did. However, he said John Brown's actions were lawless. They were against the law. He violated the law. And so the speech that got Lincoln elected, the Cooper Union speech in New York in early 1860, he said there

were no Republicans, there were no party people with John Brown at Harper's Ferry. He tried to distance himself from John Brown because John Brown was far too controversial. Lincoln had to put on a somewhat moderate front to get elected. There were a lot of conservative people in the North, obviously in the South, but even in the North. So he had to be much more moderate. He had to really distance himself from John Brown, especially because the South was smearing the Republican Party by saying, oh, the Republican Party, they're nothing but a bunch of John Browns. And when Lincoln was elected, the Southerners started saying, oh, a vulgar partisan of John Brown was elected.

And that's one reason why 11 Southern states left, because we can't deal with John Brown when he's in office. So even though Lincoln distanced himself very carefully from John Brown, from the other side, from the Southern viewpoint, he looked like John Brown. Well, that's how politicians viewed John Brown. But how did John Brown view politicians? Before the Civil War, John Brown distanced himself from politics because he thought that politicians were all talk, talk, talk and not action. And then he saw all these pro-slavery laws being enacted. And he said, politics is going nowhere.

And you had incompetent politicians like James Buchanan, Franklin Pierce, who are pro-slavery in the presidency. And he just said, nothing is happening with politics. So he appealed to certain forward minding anti-slavery philanthropists like George Stearns and several other people who funded him, and also Henry David Thoreau and Thomas Wentworth Higginson and Theodore Parker. But these were people outside of politics. They were reformers, they were preachers, they were philanthropists. So he really tried to stay out of politics. But then when he attacked Harper's Ferry and became so controversial, he fed right back into politics because he fed into the polarization between the North and the South. And the South smeared the North with being just a bunch of bad John Brown types. And the North increasingly, well, the politicians in the North tried to distance

themselves from John Brown, but the public opinion came to be on behalf of John Brown, the popular people, because, and that's why when the Union soldiers marched off to war, the Northern soldiers, their favorite song was John Brown's Body Lies Moldering in the Grave, which then was overheard by Julia Ward Howe, who turned it into the battle hymn of the Republic. So he became kind of a popular myth through this song and just through the image. And he sustained a lot of Union soldiers throughout the war. And eventually, even Abraham Lincoln, toward the end of the war, espoused, he said, finally, we can do what John Brown tried to do. We can liberate the slaves. And he brought Frederick Douglass and said, Frederick, will you go down south with a bunch of scouts and spread the word of emancipation? It'll be like John Brown's underground telegraph,

spreading the word of liberation to the enslaved people. And Frederick Douglass said, yeah, I would love to do it. Turned out he didn't have to because the war went in the North's favor. But Lincoln also met with Martin Delaney, who was like beyond Black Lives Matter. He was a radical, radical, radical African-American. And he asked Delaney, he said, could you go down because the 13th Amendment abolishing slavery has been passed? And I want to spread the word among the enslaved people down there. And Delaney said, I would love to do that. Love, love, love. And they brought up John Brown again. As it turns out, the war ended about a month and a half after that. So Delaney did get the highest ranked officer in the U.S. Army, but he didn't have to go to war because the war ended. But John Wilkes Booth had been at the hanging of John Brown.

He hated what John Brown stood for because John Wilkes Booth was a white supremacist who believed that Black people should be in slavery. They should always remain in slavery. He hated Lincoln. However, he called John Brown the grandest man of the century because he was standing there looking up at Brown, and Brown was the calmest person on the gallows who was being hanged. And there were hundreds of soldiers, people around, they were all nervous. He was just standing there very calmly and very confidently. And John Wilkes Booth wanted to be John Brown in reverse. He wanted to change history, but he wanted to accomplish exactly the opposite of John Brown. Are you in trouble with the law?

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Stream free on Freeview and Prime Video. Of course, John Wilkes Booth did accomplish changing history quite a bit. You know, he's one of many who looks upon John Brown as a polarizing figure, as a reactionary figure. Regardless of their opinion of his politics or ambitions, John Brown is recognized as someone to be reckoned with, admired or reviled. So it does bring up a question. In this turbulent moment in American history, we find this driven man who reverberates throughout popular culture and political history.

Would the Civil War have happened at all without John Brown's precipitating actions? I don't believe it would have happened at that moment because what happens is that when John Brown attacks Harper's Ferry, there's such polarization, not just polarization, but fragmentation, so that when Lincoln runs, the opposing party is so fragmented into different sections. He runs against three candidates. Now, together, those candidates won a million more votes than Lincoln did, popular votes. And it's very possible that if John Brown had not been in the scene, there would have been a much more consolidated opposition to Lincoln, because you wouldn't have had the Southern secessionist party led by John Breckinridge. You probably wouldn't have had the splintered-off Union party led by John Bell. And you might have been left with a Democratic Party led by the other candidate, Stephen

Douglas. And it would have been a much more solidified and a much more unified front. And therefore, if someone like Stephen Douglas had been elected, you were not going to have secession at that moment. You wouldn't have had, and secession is what caused the Civil War, because Lincoln would have not have been elected, probably. This is all imaginary. We can't say exactly what would happen. Would it have happened eventually? I think it probably would have happened eventually, yes. And when John Brown died,

he said, I realize now that the sins of this guilty land can only be purged in very much bloodshed. And it did take nearly 800,000 Americans to die in the Civil War to really get rid of slavery. So it was a deeply entrenched institution. I think eventually, yes, the Civil War was going to happen. Seems Frederick Douglass might have thought so. He had said if John Brown did not end the war that ended slavery, as he intended to do, he did at least begin the war that ended slavery. Yeah, and the point had come where push came to shove.

And we can only be thankful that someone like Abraham Lincoln, who had a native shrewdness and an ability, as I prove in my new book, Abe, which contextualizes Lincoln. He had special capabilities, in part produced by his own background and his own culture, that enabled him to direct America through the Civil War. So we were just fortunate that our greatest president came at that particular moment. You've hinted at this, that there was a revisionism, but I'd like to know more about John Brown's legacy after the Civil War. What was the popular focus and the historical focus, the academic focus on him as the Civil War drifted into history? Well, what happened was that John Brown, his memory was kept alive by African-American thinkers, reformers. For example, Reverdy Ransom was an African-American minister

who spoke at the first Niagara movement, which was the founding of the NAACP. And it was his speech all about John Brown and how great he was. W.E.B. Du Bois in 1909 wrote a laudatory biography of John Brown in which he said John Brown was right. And there's been a fairly consistent praise of John Brown or affection for John Brown or respect on the part of a lot of African Americans. Not so much of the Martin Luther King type who are nonviolent, but more militant types going forward and more radical types going forward. Among white historians, John Brown fell out of favor because during the period of Jim Crow, he was considered nothing more than a rabble rouser, a fanatic, a zealot, really a bad guy.

And a lot of those historians bought the version of history that was pervaded in the film of 1915 called The Birth of a Nation, in which the KKK become the heroes, they become the saviors of America against these uppity Black people who took over temporarily during Reconstruction. And now it's good that we're going to put them down. And then the KKK comes back in the 1920s. And at that moment, John Brown looks like a super duper bad guy. But then during the Civil Rights Movement, there's slowly a recuperation of John Brown in the 60s. And Stephen Oates in his book on John Brown in the 70s is much more positive. I will say that to this day, there's a large faction of academics who still view him with

suspicion. And you can understand why, because a lot of them are political historians. And John Brown really went outside of politics. And one of the dangers, of course, is that he believed in the higher law. The higher law is something beyond the Constitution. And that's why he wrote his own Constitution and why he did his actions. So unfortunately, some people in modern times like John Burt, who was an abortion doctor killer, Timothy McVeigh of Oklahoma City, there are several people that have taken John Brown as their example, whereas John Brown would not agree with their actions. So once you affirm the higher

law, like John Brown did, and then act by it, you can almost follow whatever higher law that you see. Now, it turns out that John Brown's higher law was noble. He loved African Americans. He loved Native Americans. He respected women and women's rights. So he was fighting for a good cause, but his reputation became twisted over time. And so that sometimes people of varying versions of the higher law have applied his tactics. In the subtitle of your book about Brown, you say he ceded civil rights. What do you think Brown would make of our present moment of racial reckoning? He would be appalled by the murders or the killings of African Americans at the hands of the police, the victimization of them in our prison system. He would be appalled also by versions of systemic

racism. He would be very pleased by the fact that there at least is a consciousness of this in America. And in certain areas, African Americans and Native Americans and other previously marginalized groups have made progress, have entered certain professions and, you know, made names for themselves. But he would be very, very disturbed by the persisting evidence of racism in America. And I think that he would not take up arms. Henry David Thoreau said that John Brown did not win through his arms, through his violence. He won through his words. His speech in front of the Virginia court was second only to the Gettysburg Address in its eloquence on behalf of enslaved people. And his letters from prison, which were printed everywhere, were just so eloquent. He was offered to go to the gallows

with a famous clergyman. He said, no, I would much rather go to the gallows with an enslaved woman, a ragged enslaved woman with her children. I'd be much prouder to go to the gallows with somebody like that than with a white clergyman. So he would definitely side with the African Americans and with the marginalized today. I don't think that he would probably resort to violence. Hopefully he would use his forceful language and his charisma to work against racial discrimination. violent acts and intents were not the thing that he was most successful. It was his example and his commitment and his words. So if you could give a final analysis on John Brown, was he successful? And what lesson could we learn from him as we move forward? I think the lesson we can move toward is that to devote yourself to less privileged people, people of color who might be marginalized, and to kind of feel the kind of empathy toward them that you might feel toward your own family. I mean, John Brown had 20 children.

You know, he had a large family, but he really dedicated his life for the cause of the enslaved people and also to some degree for Native Americans. And it seems to me this sense of social commitment in whatever avenue of life we can push that. I happen to be an author and I write about people like Lincoln and John Brown. Other people perhaps make films or whatever. Any way that we can bring this to

public consciousness, even in our jobs or work or whatever, our personal relations, seems to me that that's the example we should follow. Professor Reynolds, thank you so much for talking to me on American History Tales. Thank you very much for having me, Lindsay. That was my conversation with award-winning biographer, critic, and historian David S. Reynolds. He is the author of John Brown, Abolitionist, and Abe, Abraham Lincoln, in his times. Next on American History Tellers. In 1971, a man hijacked a Boeing 727 en route to Seattle, parachuted out of the plane with $200,000 in ransom money, and then disappeared. Fifty years later, the search for the hijacker known as D.B. Cooper continues.

From Wondery, this is Episode 5 of Bleeding Kansas from American History tellers. In our next series, in 1971, a man hijacked a Boeing 727 en route to Seattle, parachuted out of the plane with $200,000 in ransom money, and then disappeared. 50 years later, the search for the hijacker known as D.B. Cooper continues.

If you like American history tellers, you can binge all episodes early and ad-free right now by joining Wondery Plus in the Wondery app or on Apple Podcasts. Prime members can listen ad-free on Amazon Music. And before you go, tell us about yourself by filling out a short survey at wondery.com slash survey. American History Tellers is hosted, edited, and produced by me, Lindsey Graham for Airship. This episode was produced by Morgan Jaffe. Our senior producer is Andy Herman.

Our executive producers are Jenny Lauer-Beckman and Marsha Louis, created by Hernán López for Wondery. for wandering. In the Pacific Ocean, halfway between Peru and New Zealand, lies a tiny volcanic island. It's a little-known British territory called Pitcairn, and it harboured a deep, dark scandal. There wouldn't be a girl on Pitcairn once they reach the age of 10 that would still have heard it. It just happens to all of us.

I'm journalist Luke Jones, and for almost two years, I've been investigating a shocking story that has left deep scars on generations of women and girls from Pitcairn. When there's nobody watching, nobody going to report it, people will get away with what they can get away with. In the Pitcairn Trials, I'll be uncovering a story of abuse and the fight for justice that has brought a unique, lonely Pacific island to the brink of extinction. Listen to the Pitcairn Trials exclusively on Wondery Plus.

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