The Eric Metaxas Show - H.W. Brands

Episode Date: December 17, 2020

Author and historian H.W. Brands takes a unique look at John Brown, Abraham Lincoln, and the struggle for American freedom, with his new book, "The Zealot and the Emancipator."

show. It's the show that answers the questions. Could you milk a cockroach? By the way, cockroach milk is really yummy. Some would even say numby. This announcement has been brought to you by the cockroach dairy council. And now the man who once wrangled cockroaches for a living in Kansas City, Eric Mataxis. Hey there, folks. Welcome to the Eric Mataxis show. For today's episode, I'll be playing the role of Eric Mataxis host. Playing the role of guest, we have an author, goes by the name of H.W. Brands. H. W. Brands is the author of many books. He's a professor at the University of Texas, Austin, Hookham Horns, and his most recent book, I have to say, I am very excited to talk about this. The title is

The Zealot and The Emancipator about John Brown and Abraham Lincoln. H.W. Brands, welcome to this program. Glad to be with you, Eric. This is a crazy combo. I mean, it's one thing to write about Lincoln's, another thing to write about John Brown, to combine them in a narrative, I want to ask you how that happened, first of all. And then for those in my audience who are unaware of John Brown, if you could just give us a thumbnail sketch of who he was, because I don't want to assume that everyone, we have young people here who they were born yesterday, they don't know who Lincoln is. You know, they're not responsible for that material, so if you could help them out. So I think I've asked you three questions. Answer any of anyone you like.

Yeah. So I decided to write about John Brown and Abraham Lincoln because I wanted to get perspectives on how people of the mid-19th centuries, the 1850s in particular, dealt with the question of slavery. What do you do about slavery? John Brown was a militant abolitionist. The abolitionists were those who believed that slavery was so wrong, it needed to be abolished immediately. There were other people who opposed to slavery, but were willing to work things out through the legal and constitutional process. The abolitionist said, no, it's got to be done away with right away. John Brown was a militant, one of those.

And I'll explain a little bit more about what that meant in John Brown's case. He's an abolitionist. Abraham Lincoln, politician, lawyer from Springfield, Illinois, who had been in Congress for one term during the 1840s, dropped out of politics to practice law, basically to recoup his finances. But he still had this political ambition. And in the 1850s, he returned to politics, eventually, because he became, became president of the United States and led the United States through the civil war,

assassinated in 1865. So those are the two characters. The reason I put them together is that I wanted to get an answer to what seems to me a fundamental question, certainly of citizens in a democracy, but also of just people generally in one form another, and that is, what does a good person do in the face of evil? for John Brown and Abraham Lincoln, the evil was slavery. They agreed that slavery was wrong, but they disagreed on what to do about it. And this happens all the time. Citizens of the American Republic, they look at something, they look at a policy, they look at some practices by the government

and by other people, and they say this is wrong. But that's the easy part. The hard part is, what do you do about it? And so I wanted to look at two people who agreed that, in this case, slavery was wrong, but disagreed violently, and I say literally, on what to do about it, because that was the hard part. Well, okay, so H.W. Brands, you said I could call you Bill. Bill, I assume that's William. Is that right? Yes. Henry, Henry William. Yes. Henry William Brands. Let me, let me just say, I certainly don't expect you to be aware of my writings, but the question you have just asked in many ways. It's one of those ultimate questions. I wrote a book about the Nazi, the anti-Nazi Dietrich Bonhofer, who as a pastor struggled with this. I wrote my biography of

him came about about 10 years ago. And it's the ultimate question whenever I do Q&A's. People always say, how can a man of God, you know, be involved in a plot to kill Hitler? And then you have to explain, well, it's got nothing to do with him being a man of God. if it's right, then the question becomes, what does it mean to face evil? What does it mean? And so when you deal with John Brown, because I think his story has not, people are not really familiar with it. What would any of us do if we knew that human beings around us were being killed, were being mistreated, we're being tortured? What would we do? What could we do? The idea that we would accept it, today at least seems beyond the boundaries of civil society. No one would accept it.

And yet the question what one would do, it seems to me that if I were an African slave, I would want a whole bunch of John Browns to do what he did. And yet today we look at it and we think it seems so uncivilized. Why didn't he do what Lincoln did? So I am curious how you process this and what you got out of it? Because to me, it's the ultimate question. Sure. So I'll answer that in two parts. And one is to say, you know, we now, no, the slavery is wrong and we sort of expect that people would act out against it. But I'm a teacher. So I've raised this sort of question with my students. And I asked them, what are we doing today and accepting even though we know that it's wrong? Because we can't figure off what to do about.

about. And one answer that comes up time and again is we engage in war. Nobody thinks war is a good thing, but sometimes people think that war is unavoidable. It's the least bad of the alternatives. And wars kill lots and lots of people. In American history, World War II is still called the good war, even though it was a war in which 40 million people lost their lives. And the United States ended it by dropping atom bombs on two Japanese cities. and making a satanic deal with Stalin, which bothers me as much as Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Exactly. I mean, no question about that.

So the problem is not to identify the evil, but to identify what to do about it. And I forgot the other part of your question. Well, I ramble, so maybe it was two and a half questions. I think, I guess there's so much to take in. I wrote another book about William Wolverforce, and there was a time when people accepted slavery. Now, when we talk about the 1850s, we've really moved beyond that to where many people didn't accept it. It certainly seems that Lincoln didn't accept it. But how someone could allow something that horrific to be going on and not want to pick up a sword and get in a righteous war about it?

I mean, I almost would say that's the real question. How could you do anything less than that? Well, I don't mean to improperly channel Abraham Lincoln, but the way he would have answered the question is that the actions of John Brown, and then for listeners are not familiar with John Brown, John Brown engaged in two major acts of violence against slavery and its supporters. In Kansas territory in 1856, he led a small band of followers who dragged five pro-slavery settlers from their cabins in the middle of the night and hack them to death with

broadswords, a brutal murder that under any definition of the term would be considered terrorism. That was one. The other thing he tried, the other thing he did was to lead a small band of followers, a little bit bigger, about two dozen followers, to raid and occupy a federal arsenal at Harper's Ferry, then in Virginia, now it's West Virginia, with the goal of grabbing the weapons there and distributing them. among slaves in the vicinity of Harper's Ferry. The slaves would use these weapons to rise up against their masters and amass insurrection and claim their freedom. John Brown was essentially trying to start an insurrectionary war of slaves against their masters. It failed, but nonetheless,

it was his effort to move the anti-slavery cause forward. So this is what John Brown is known to history for. But the question you posed is, so how could you not do something like that? Well, Abraham Lincoln definitely did not do anything like that. I'll add. So did Frederick Douglass. Frederick Douglass is one of the most famous abolitionists in American history. Frederick Douglas was a former slave. He'd escaped from slavery in Maryland. We got to Philadelphia. And he became one of the best known spokesman for the abolitionist cause. And John Brown knew Frederick Douglas and vice versa. And John Brown pleaded with Frederick Douglas to join him in the raid on Harper's Ferry. And Douglas declined. He declined for one reason, partly that Douglas said,

you know, I'm a I'm a writer, not a fighter. But in addition, he knew that John Brown's raid would simply make the lot of slaves worse. Okay. Let's just put a pin in it there. This is so fascinating. It's a philosophical and theological discussion as much as literary and historical one. Folks, I'm talking to H.W. Brands. The book is The Zealot and the Emancipator. We'll be right back. Folks, welcome back. I'm talking to H.W. Brands, B, R.A. N.D.S.

The book is the zealot and the emancipator. It is about John Brown and about Abraham Lincoln. And Bill, as you allow me to call you, we're talking about some fascinating things here. First of all, I always have to kind of pause and just go back. When you describe John Brown, I realize I know so little about him. Until I looked through your book, I was not aware of the first of these two acts of violence. The second one strikes me as possible, as perhaps reasonable, perhaps. The first one doesn't.

Tell us about that, because I think the first one tells us a little bit about the character of John Brown. And as he answered that, tell us who he was and how he became the man that. we know. John Brown was born in New England, but his family moved to Ohio when he was very young. So we essentially grew up in Ohio, almost on the border between slavery and freedom. Kentucky, just south of the Ohio River, was a slave state. Ohio was a free state. And so John Brown became familiar with the institution of slavery. Actually, he knew slave kids when he was a kid. And he had, he recalled one moment one time when he was playing with this black kid who happened to be a slave.

And they were getting along the way boys do when all of a sudden a white man came up started yelling at the black kid and beating him around the head. And John Brown realized this is what slavery actually means. He said, this boy gets treated this way and I get treated something entirely different. So from that early time, he had this opposition to slavery. But his opposition to slavery became militant and then violent in the 1850s. At that point, Kansas was a territory, not yet a state, and it was open to settlement on the basis of something called popular sovereignty, which meant that southern immigrants could go to Kansas and take their property, slaves.

Northern immigrants could go to Kansas and take their property, horses and cows. And when enough people lived in Kansas territory to make it a state, then they would vote on a constitution and the constitution to either allow or forbid slavery. So there was this competition, there was this race to Kansas to see who would have more people there. A violence broke out between the two competing sides. And John Brown took part in the violence after a raid by the pro-slavery side on the anti-slavery community of Lawrence, Kansas, where the Lawrence residents didn't stand up for themselves in a way that John Brown thought was appropriate. And so John Brown decided to send a message to the pro-slavery side by committing these murders.

And as I said, it was an act of terrorism in the sense of killing people who didn't pose any direct danger to John Brown to send a political message to others. this will happen to you if you come to Kansas Territory as well. That's a staggering thing, what you've just said. And again, it does tell us about John Brown. It's interesting, though. I know that most of the abolitionists in England, in Wilberforce's Day, and many of the early abolitionists here in the United States, were people of supreme faith.

I mean, people who really believe, because of what the good book says, we cannot countenance this evil toward other human beings. They had a biblical view of their fellow man, who in this case were African slaves. Was that fundamentally where Brown was first coming from on this issue, or was that something that he got to later when he becomes this Testament, Old Testament, prophetic type figure? This is a hard call because there were plenty of people who consider themselves devout Christians,

deeply religious, who accepted slavery. slavery is part of the Old Testament. Jesus never spoke out against slavery. St. Paul told slaves to obey their masters. So you can't cite chapter and verse from the Bible that says slavery is wrong. John Brown, I think he came to his views more as a matter of observing inequality in ordinary life. Now, he was religious. And so like many of the abolition, as you point out, they cited at least religious principles,

the golden rule for heaven's sakes. This could not countenance slavery. So he used his religious views to support his abolitionism. But I'm not sure that I can say that his religious views were the cause of his abolition. His sense of equality was simply offended at what he saw. Right. Practiced in the United States in the age of slavery. Well, I mean, the only reason I say that, I mean, obviously I'm aware of both sides of this complicated issue, but I know that it was the, the Methodists, the enthusiasts, you know, the really serious Christians in England, as opposed to the church-going Church of England, respectable people, so to speak, many of whom had ownership in West Indian slave plantations.

But it was the really religious Christians, let's say. And I know also in this country that that was part of the narrative. You know, I guess maybe today we'd say that they were evangelicals. But I'm just fascinated that this becomes part of his narrative. and he does take on this role of the bearded Old Testament prophet, willing to wield the sword. When you say that he was friends or knew Frederick Douglass, that that's interesting to me.

In other words, who was John Brown, apart from these incidents? Who was he? If we had asked Frederick Douglass, you know, in 1855, who is John Brown? What was he perceived to be at that point? The abolitionist circle in America started small around 1830. There were a few Quakers before that, but the serious abolitionist movement begins with the launch of William Lloyd Garrison's paper, The Liberator, in the early 1830s. And so it started small. As a result of this, the abolitionists all tended to know each other.

In the case of John Brown, he needed to know other people because his various projects depended on their financial support. So there were the philanthropist abolitionists, the ones who would certainly never take up arms and probably never leave their studies or their libraries or their places of work. But they supported the cause with money. And John Brown didn't have any money and he didn't really have any social background. But because he was willing to take up the fight against slavery, they would give him a hearing. And he was well spoken. He was certainly convinced that what he was doing was right. And he was very compelling to the ones that I could call the armchair abolitionists because he had the courage of their conviction.

And so he kind of put them to shame. He was putting his life on the line. All they were putting on the line was their money. And most of them had plenty of money they could afford it. I know that John Brown was somewhat advanced in years at the denouement of his career, so to speak. I mean, what was he doing when he was, let's say, 25 or 30 years old? I mean, was he always on this bandwagon or was this something that he came to? Now, John Brown is a good example of those many people who become historically important, but who find their way by process of elimination. He tried any number of other things. He tried farming. He tried herding cattle and sheep. He tried business. He tried his hand at this, that, and the other thing.

And simply couldn't make a success. He moved himself and his eventually very large. family, he had 20 children, from place to place, basically trying to find his niche, trying to find his calling. And a moment of truth occurred in 1837, when he was 37 years old. And an abolitionist editor, newspaper editor in Illinois was murdered by a pro-slavery mob. The editor's name was Elijah Lovejoy. And this was a galvanizing moment for many in the abolitionist movement because they saw that even speaking, or in his case, publishing opinion offensive to the pro-slavery side could get them killed. At that point, John Brown stood up in his church in Hudson, Ohio, where he was living, and said, before God and before this congregation,

I pledged the rest of my life to the battle against slavery. So from that point on, abolitionism was John Brown's full-time job. Amazing. Now, have I heard the name Elijah Lovejoy someplace else, or maybe I'm thinking of another lovejoy. It's one of those names you don't forget. Yeah, there were other love joys. He was most, he was best known as an editor. Well, it is fascinating because, you know, one of the reasons that I wanted to have you on is just to educate us on this period.

I mean, I, you know, confess my ignorance of the milieu, the idea that you would have, for example, as you just described, a pro-slavery mob murder. the editor of an abolitionist newspaper, that's a big deal. I mean, that's, you know, when you have the folks at Charlie Hebdo and Paris gunned down, that's big stuff. You know, that's when you pull out the guns and you say, we've got to do something. We can't allow this.

This is a free country. People are allowed to express themselves. And so if there's a group murdering them, you know, what do we do about it? I guess I had not heard that. And you can see it as a kind of, it makes sense as an inciting incident in his life. Yeah. So somebody like John Brown would have said that the war has already begun.

And I am simply a soldier in the war. And those people who came to Texas, those pro-slavery settlers that he and his band of followers killed, they were soldiers as well. They came to Kansas knowing that there was a war. war on and in a war, soldiers get killed. Now, in John Brown's defense, like if he needs defending, the men that were killed had wives and children. They were left alone. They said, okay, we're not going to touch you. It's just these guys. And because John Brown could have said that, who knows,

tomorrow, these people may be taking up arms against me. That was the justification. In fact, that's the justification that's often given for John Brown's actions in Kansas. and at Harper's Ferry, that the war against slavery, or I guess I should say the war with slavery had already begun. And so John Brown was simply doing what had already been done to him. Right. Forgive me. We're going to pause there.

We'll be right back talking to H.W. Brands. The book is The Zealot and the Emancipator. Hey there, folks. We're talking about a brand new book, The Zealot and the Emancipator. The zealot being John Brown. If you've been listening, the Emancipator being Lincoln, the author H.W. you brands is my guest. I have to ask when you, when you write about Lincoln and Brown, why do you feel the need to do that? In other words, why not just write about Brown? And,

you know, you can still talk about Lincoln, but why did you feel the need to go into such depth with two people in the same book? Because if I write about just one person, then if I want to bring up contradictory points of view, I have to step into. into the frame as the historian, basically, and say, okay, John Brown, this is what you say now. Here's the other side of the issue. By pairing the two, I can explain that Abraham Lincoln thought John Brown was the worst thing ever to happen to the United States and certainly the worst thing to happen to the Republican Party. The raid on Harper's Ferry occurred as Lincoln was preparing to run for president in 1860. The raid on Harper's Ferry was the autumn of 1859.

And Southerners, Democrats, Lincoln was a Republican, Democrats, pro-slavery supporters, pointed to John Brown as a terrorist and a murderer and exactly what those Republicans are going to bring on the country as a whole. And Lincoln said, no, I'm not an abolitionist. I'm not a John Brown. I'm not a murderer. And the agenda of the Republican Party is nothing like the agenda of John Brown. This was the position he had to take. to maintain political credibility. John Brown's views were supported by a small minority of people, even in the north. They were opposed by everybody in the South, leave aside slaves, and not all slaves. In fact, part of John Brown's goal was to inspire support among slaves in the vicinity

of Harper's Ferry, and none came along because they realized this isn't going to work. This is going to make things worse. Our masters are going to crack down on us and take away the few, freedoms and liberties that we have. And furthermore, any chance that southern slaveholders will be talked into voluntarily ending slavery, I should say by the way, the same way northern slaveholders had been talked into abandoning slavery in their states, in Massachusetts, Connecticut, New York, Pennsylvania, all those had originally had slavery. It's going to make that much more difficult. And so Abraham Lincoln thought that John Brown was bad news. Did the two of them ever meet?

No, they didn't. And for me, as the author of a book about the two, this was potentially a problem. It would been great if they had a moment of truth together, which is one of the reasons that I used Frederick Douglas as a third character who knew the two and who comes between the two, because Frederick Dougler stood on the spectrum of opposition to slavery between John Brown, who was way out on the violent end, and Lincoln, who was on the moderate constitutional legal end. And Douglas was in between. He thought Brown was going too far. He thought Lincoln was going too slowly. It's obvious that Lincoln was a great patriot and loved America.

I mean, he wrote numerous places about his high view of the country, you know, whether it's his almost chosen people, quote, or there are a few places. What was Frederick Douglass's view of America? Was it similar? In other words, did he think like Martin Luther King? Jr. that the founding documents were promissory notes, or was he sour? I'm never really clear on him. Frederick Douglass thought America was moving in the right direction, but too slowly. He did not have the reverence for the Constitution and the law that Abraham Lincoln did, in part because he wasn't a lawyer. He wasn't a politician. He was closer to John Brown in this regard in believing

that pretty much anything, almost anything, should be done to promote the end of slavery. I should say one thing about the abolitionists. They focused everything on that moment when slavery would end. Almost none of them thought, well, what happens after that? For many of them, if that blew up the Constitution and the country, they would say, well, okay, it probably wasn't worth saving. Lincoln thought very seriously, what happens the day after slavery ends? because he thought that if it blew up the Constitution in the Union, then freedom for the slaves wouldn't be worth very much because there wouldn't be freedom for anybody. It's important to keep in mind that American democracy in 1860 wasn't even, was hardly 30 years old. We think of American democracy progressing in sort of inevitably. But Lincoln had been born at a time when most of the people in the world thought democracy was a terrible idea and even many people in the United States were skeptical of it. So for Lincoln, the test of democracy was, could you hold onto the Constitution? Could you keep the union together? And if this abolitionist movement blew up the union, then there would go democracy. And the freedoms of all Americans

would be at risk. Again, Lincoln thought that the only way to end slavery definitively was to change the Constitution. In fact, he turned out to be exactly right. That's why there's a 13th Amendment to the Constitution. There is so much here and so many parallels to things that we're going through today. It's absolutely fascinating. These fundamental questions don't really change. Fundamental issues don't change. I think of the abortion debate in this country. It's a similar kind of thing. Those of us who really do believe it's a human rights issue have always had to struggle with, well, what does that mean? How far do you go? If you know somebody is being murdered right over there, what do you do about it? And it's fascinating because you get all different kinds of

of people opining on different parts of that spectrum. If I know that that is happening and that that is wrong, what is my moral obligation and what do I worry about? And if I'm too worried about other things, maybe really I'm taking the easy path out. Maybe I'm not, maybe I don't really believe that they're being killed over there. I really think the issue of slavery is so similar and to have the figure of John Brown to talk about, to help us think about it is fascinating. We're going to go to a break. Folks, I'm talking to the author of The Zealot and the Emancipator H.W. Brands. We'll be right back.

Folks, we are talking about the big questions. We're talking about a book, The Zealot and the Emancipator. The author H.W. Brands is my guest. Bill, which you said I should call you. Thank you. I am fascinated by Lincoln because it really takes an uncommon kind of character to be able to hold all of these things together, so to speak, to know something is wrong, but to be willing to see it through this process. And then through the grotesque process of the war. I guess I'm wondering whether he thought of John Brown.

When he thought of all of the young men, hundreds of thousands being killed during the war, what he thought of John Brown at that point, or whether you have any thoughts on that? At the time of the raid on Harper's Ferry, Abraham Lincoln thought John Brown was a pain in the neck, was a threat to the peace of the country, was a threat to the union,

and was a barrier to Lincoln's own election as president. After the war began, after Lincoln was elected and seven, then 11 southern states seceded. And after Union soldiers start marching into battle singing John Brown's body lies molding in the grave, his soul goes marching on. Brown still troubled Lincoln because Lincoln still took the position that this war against the South is not a war against. It's a war against the idea that any state can leave the union. There's the old chestnut. Was the civil war about states rights or was it about slavery? The answer is that it was about both. But for Lincoln, it was first and foremost about states' rights. More precisely, his view that the states did not have the right to leave the union. If you don't mind, let me just go deeper on that,

because this is not something that I have thought about. It seems to me, as somebody who believes in the state's rights that a state ought to have the right to secede. How can we force them not to secede? Seems a little strange if we're talking about freedom and state's rights. How did Lincoln answer that? I'm not quite clear on this. Well, Lincoln was a lawyer, and lawyers have a habit of sort of deciding what the conclusion should be and then making plausible arguments in that direction. The essence of Lincoln's argument that the union was perpetual, were two, one is that the predecessor to the Constitution, the Articles Confederation, explicitly defines this as a perpetual union. And then, in the preamble to the Constitution,

the one that succeeded the Articles Confederation, it says to make a more, a more perfect union, as though the union already existed, now we're simply improving on it. So there's that. The other thing that Lincoln said again and again is that no government ever signed its own death sentence. No government ever wrote into its own charter that you can leave, except Lincoln was being way too facile there because this question did come up at the constitutional convention. And the framers the Constitution deliberately fudged it. They could have said, once in forever in, or they could have said, you know, here's how you get out if you want to get out. But they didn't do either because they thought it would sort of spoil the atmosphere and would scare off states that might be on the borderline between

coming in and not. So they kicked the can down the road. But yeah, there were plenty of people in the United States at that time, most of them in the South, who took the position, well, the essence of self-government, this is what democracy is all about, is having the government you want. Now, on technical grounds, Lincoln, I should say, that the Confederates said, we're simply doing what the founding fathers, the Patriots did in 1776. They didn't like their situation in the British Empire, so they seceded from the British Empire. And Lincoln said yes and no, because what the Southern states in 1860 and 61 were claiming was a constitutional right to leave the union. He said, you don't have that constitutional right. Now, he did say, you have the right of revolution. That's what the

Patriots did back in 1776. But to exercise that right, you have to fight the war and you have to win. If you don't win the war, then that right's so good. That's very interesting. I guess in a funny way, I'm guessing this has to be part of Lincoln's thinking is that in a way, in a way, the Constitution, well, this is what we have today, right, when the Supreme Court it makes a decision that says this overrides states' rights. In other words, if a state says in our state, we all voted X. Today, let's say some state says, we're going to have slavery in our state. Today, the Constitution would say, no, you can't do that. That's not allowed. There's freedom up to a point. In other words, you know, if religious freedom means we're going to sacrifice our children

on the altar of bail, no, you cannot do that. Religious freedom doesn't go that far. So it seems to me that somehow part of the logic of Lincoln was that they had freedom up to that point and that somehow there was something about the union. It can't just be the union. I mean, it has to be more of a moral point to it, right? Because otherwise it's just, you know, what is the union for the sake of the union? But so that's interesting to me. It seems hard to really unravel that. Well, for Lincoln, it was essentially a matter of the rule of law. law. And if you lose an election, the South basically lost the election of 1860, you don't there or have the option to say, okay, we don't like the result. We're out of here. No, said Lincoln. Your job is to put up a better candidate in 1864 and win that election. So you can't say not my president. Right. Exactly. Which is my position, right, that we, you know, you don't have to like the president, but he's your president. And then all you have to do is, you know, a few years later, elect someone that you like.

So it's very interesting how these questions come round and round. He was simply saying that this is how we govern. This is how the government works. And if you don't like it, you can't pick up your marbles and go home. But it is an extraordinary thing to go to war over that. I just have to say that it's, this is so, no wonder so many people like you write books about this because it is kind of endlessly fascinating. When we talk about John Brown and his legacy

and people singing that song, how did that play years later through reconstruction or the lack of reconstruction? How was his memory handled in the latter part of the 19th century? John Brown looked a lot better after the Civil War, and even today, than he did before the Civil War. because his final words as he was heading toward the gallows to be executed were it came in a note that he smuggled to his jailer

and he said that the sins of this country will never be purged except by blood if you knew that the civil war was coming if you accept that that had to come then john brown was the profit of that yeah but if you didn't think the civil because it's a radio program we're going to go to another hard break folks we'll be right back to allow my guests to complete these sentences thank you Thank you. I'm talking to H.W. Brand's book is The Zealot and The Emancipator. And Bill, I had to cut you off there.

Forgive me. Please continue that line of thinking. Absolutely fascinating. So John Brown is relatively easy for people of a lot of different political persuasions today to like, because John Brown clearly was on the right side of history. The opponents of slavery, they sort of knew where history was going. they got there first. So, you know, you give them credit for that. But he's a troublesome one because if you simply take that view, if you're on the right side of history, that basically permits

anything, then there's no way of telling where that's going to lead precisely because we don't know where history is going. And so there's an alternative universe. There's an alternative history. John Brown does not raid Harper's Ferry and the union doesn't fall to pieces. He wasn't the only cause, but he was a trigger. Suppose the union doesn't fall to pieces, and suppose the South does eventually decide, as Lincoln thought it would, to free slaves on its own, instead of at the point of a civil war musket. Then one can imagine that reconstruction, well, there wouldn't be reconstruction, and that Southerners would have had every opportunity to integrate literally the former slave workforce into a more flexible, modern industrial workforce.

So you can't tell how it would play out. But it's really dangerous to say, because this person was on the right side of history, what he did was right. I think a fundamental principle is even somebody who's in the right can go wrong. Oh, there's no question about that, which is why John Brown's such a fascinating figure and why somebody says, I'm going to murder the abortionist because I want to keep him from murdering whoever he's going to murder today, who are human beings. it is a tricky thing. And I think in dealing with my, in my Bonhofer book, you come to that.

People sort of think, oh, somebody just decided, let's kill Hitler. And it was far more complicated than that to get to that point. It is very complicated, theologically, philosophically, and in other ways. So how does Lincoln come out in your book? We've just got about two minutes left. How does he end up looking? Well, Lincoln is the president that everybody comes to like. And I think some of that has to do with the tragic timing of history. He was killed. He was assassinated when the hard part began. The straightforward part was fighting the South on the battlefield. The harder part would be fighting the South on the field of politics. In war you can coerce. In politics, you have to persuade. In Southerners, they ended the war, not having been convinced that slavery was wrong or their interpretation of state's rights was long, we just, we can't do it. So I think that the career of Abraham Lincoln would have gotten a lot harder. And his political reputation probably would have fallen had he lived, had he had to govern through reconstruction. Yeah, it is fascinating. It's hard to imagine how things would have played out had he lived very hard. But, well, we know

reconstruction didn't go so well, or it didn't go the way Lincoln wanted it to. We're just about out of time. Anything that we haven't covered that you wanted to talk about? The one thing that I would say is that if you go into history looking for simple answers to questions, contemporary questions or any other questions, you're going to be disappointed because history is always more complicated than you think. Now, some of us, me, for example, I think the complications are what make it interesting. But, you know, it's tempting to say, you know, who's on the right side here, who's on the wrong. alongside. There's a mixture, there's always a mixture on almost every important question in the past, just as there's almost always a mixture on every important issue in the present. Well, this has been a fascinating conversation. Just so glad for you writing the book, folks.

It's called The Zealot and the Emancipator. H.W. Brands is the author and has been my guest. So grateful to you for your time and your effort in writing this book. Thanks. My pleasure. Good to talk to Eric. Thank you.