When I was in high school in Houston in the 1950s, we studied the Civil War. John Brown was portrayed in the American history textbook as a zealot and a terrorist.
I just read about a new film in which he is shown as a visionary far ahead of his times, a man who believed unconditionally in human equality.
Of the day following John Brown’s raid on the federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry, Va., in 1859 — now understood by scholars and schoolchildren alike to be one of the precipitating events of the Civil War — pioneering Black historian W.E.B. DuBois described a nation of doubters, uncertain of Brown’s legacy and hesitant to claim it. With the benefit of 50 years’ hindsight, though, DuBois himself had no such compunction.
“When a prophet like John Brown appears, how must we of the world receive him?” he asked in his 1909 biography of the antislavery crusader, combating Brown’s Jim Crow-era reputation as a bloodthirsty outlaw. “Only in time is truth revealed. Today at last we know: John Brown was right.”
Radical abolitionist and domestic terrorist, Confederate scoundrel and Union saint, Brown is among the most contested figures in American history, fated, perhaps, to be received as the world and the moment require. Which lends the earthy, slyly funny, utterly righteous portrait of Brown painted in Showtime’s “The Good Lord Bird,” based on James McBride’s raucous novel, its sense of urgency: We’ve rarely needed Brown the prophet more than we do now.
And in “The Good Lord Bird,” cocreated by Ethan Hawke and Mark Richard, Hawke’s Old Man Brown is neither the monster of Southern nightmares, nor the eccentric on the margins of Geraldine Brooks’ “March,” nor the martyr of Russell Banks’ “Cloudsplitter.” Here, as in DuBois’ analysis, he is our very own Cassandra, logic crystalline behind his cloudy eyes.
This is a film I want to see. I hope I get Showtime.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
It is actually a seven part mini-series and it is excellent. If you have Amazon Prime you can get the 1-month trial for free, and providing you can watch all seven episodes within a month, you can cancel before paying anything. Absolutely worth it, though!
I’ve long considered Brown to be one of the most fascinating of American historical figures.
Diane..
I have not seen this film.
However, I’m interested in the title as well. The ‘God Almighty Bird’, or the ‘Good Lord Bird’ was the ivory billed woodpecker. If you read Audubon, it was everywhere on his trip down the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers. Now, it’s extinct.
This is not because or ‘over hunting’, but because the environment it needed to live (big, old trees) was eliminated. The old-growth Eastern forest was cut over and sent away as ‘building material’ or cut down as ‘trash trees’ and the huge woodpecker had no place to build a nest.
Now, when either you or I have the chance to see this, think about that background. Did John Brown die because of his environmental circumstances? What ever happened to the vision of Thomas Payne?
Thanks for this. After giving speeches to teachers on the perils of economic thinking and testing in education, I used to end with a slide with this quote from Stephen Vincent Benét:
“You can weigh John Brown’s body well enough
But how and in what balance weigh John Brown?
The message in that poem should guide all policy making in education.
When I was in high school in the 1950s, we were taught that John Brown was a terrorist, a murderer, an extremist. He was an example of a fanatic. It is refreshing to learn that his role in history has been rewritten, showing him as a visionary.
What a great way to end a presentation, Laura! I would have dearly loved to have been in the audience at one of these talks of yours!
Sorry, it is hard to see a part of Bleeding Kansas as a visionary. When Stephen Douglas tried to get elected with the idea of popular sovereignty instead of confronting the divide between narratives in the nation, he loosed the tide of bitterness on eastern Kansas. Brown was a part of that prelude to the American Civil War. He ax murdered pro-slavery people during the incident. Ralph Waldo Emerson and Thoreau saw him in a positive light, but it is difficult to see him as anything but a latter day Robespierre, whose machinations were fundamentally corrupting to the ideals he promulgated.
Granted, Brown was a speck when compared to the atrocity of slavery or to the United States of Lyncherdom (thanks Mark Twain), but what he offered to the vision of the United States was terrible strife to cure horrible evil. Give me Mandela or Ghandi any day.
Was there a way to end slavery that was nonviolent? I hate war.
The organic view of history was that the crucible of war was necessary to end the atrocity that was slavery. I am not sure I accept that, but I do think that the atrocity that was the Civil War became the atrocity that was Jim Crow. About the only thing that could be agreed upon thereafter was that the Native American needed civilization and the African-American was fundamentally inferior to the European American. I supposed that was better than slavery, but only just better. While Belgium raped Congo and thousands of Negros were hung from bridges as a part of post-war terror, writers like Mark Twain called for the recognition of both injustices. Their words fell on deaf ears. I wish I could explain it all. I am not sure I can.
Wow Roy, that list is awful. ☹️
And don’t forget, Roy, that Brown personally ran important stops on the Underground Railroad (it’s estimated that he harbored more than two thousand escaped enslaved persons during his time), and he worked to assist, with training in how to farm, freed enslaved persons in taking advantage of a government program that provided them land to form. Brown is definitely one of my heroes.
Whenever I hear people waxing sentimental about the Lost Cause, I think of the end of the day at one of those slave auctions. And let’s remember that the declarations of their independence promulgated by states that seceded from the Union specifically included the preservation of slavery among the supposed grievances against which they were rebelling.
The reality is, the war was going to happen no matter what John Brown did. If he didn’t exist and there was no replacement for him in that era’s culture, the war would still happen. Lincoln was elected, South Carolina left, Lincoln gave them every possible chance to come back peacefully without punishment. There’s a pretty good chance Lincoln wouldn’t have been the one to ban slavery if the south didn’t secede. But the South knew the banning of slavery would come eventually within a democracy, so they left. It wasn’t until South Carolina decided that they were going to stake claim to the Federal Military Fort on their coast, that war became inevitable. Lincoln even THEN gave them a chance to peacefully give up all the soldiers in the fort, all the weapons/ammunitions, and provisions back to the federal government. Jefferson Davis claimed that it was there fort and supplies, Lincoln said lolno the government paid for that shit bud. Lincoln then sent an unarmed boat to give food and supplies to fort and lincoln told davis about the boat beforehand. Davis decided when the boat got there that he would never get that fort back if those supplies made it to the fort. So he attacked the fort and the Civil War began.
Roy, the pro-slavery forces had carried out a sacking of the anti-slavery settlement of Lawrence, Kansas, prior to Brown’s retaliation, and the pro-slavery papers had vowed to make the rivers of Kansas red with the blood of Abolitionists. There can be no doubt who was in the right. Brown was fighting one of the worst evils in the history of the world.
“Granted, Brown was a spec when compared to the atrocity of slavery or to the United States of Lyncherdom.” So why the attack on this man who tried to do something real about slavery? Lincoln said, “When I hear people arguing for slavery, I am seized by a desire to have it tried on him.” (That quotation is not exact, but the gist is.) Given the continuing systemic racism in this country, we need our anti-racism heroes, and I’m happy to include John Brown among these. We talk generally about slavery being a bad thing. Let me make that a little more concrete: at slave auctions, the young women were saved for last and brought the highest prices. You know why. These young women, by the hundreds of thousands, were subjected to sexual slavery by the good Christian men of the South. I’m fine with anyone, back then, who was willing to take up arms to stop that.
I belong to a novelist critique group and one of the members (L. E. Berry, the author of “that one Almighty Thing”) is working on his second novel, historical fiction about John Brown starting with his youth and going into great creative detail about what made him who he was. Berry researched Brown’s letters to get an idea of who the man was behind the myth.
I had a brilliant employee, once, who claimed descent from John Brown.
Brown, of course, was put to death for the attack on the arsenal at Harper’s Ferry. Brown’s aim was to capture arms that he could distribute to slaves to encourage them to rise up against their enslavers.
By 1864, Abraham Lincoln and the former enslaved person and abolitionist leader Frederick Douglass had become good friends. Lincoln asked Douglass to come to the White House for the second meeting of the two men there. At that meeting, Lincoln asked Douglass to participate in a scheme to sneak into the South and arm enslaved persons to rise up against their enslavers. The idea was to force the rebellious states to fight not only the Union troops but also an enemy within.
So, at that point, Brown’s terrible crime had become U.S. government policy.
What a difference a few years make!
For an account of this meeting, see Staufer, John. Giants: The Parrallel Lives of Frederick Douglass and Abraham Lincoln. Twelve, 2009. Stauffer is a Harvard University professor of English and American Literature, American Studies and African American Studies.
“Frederick Douglass . . . an example of somebody who’s done an amazing job and is being recognized more and more.” –Our most ignorant President ever, Donald “J for Jabba” the Trump
I did not know that about Lincoln. Interesting! Thank you.
That’s why I said Brown-was a visionary.
Yes!
I agree, but it’s such a slippery slope for those with little knowledge of the complexities of American history. Pro-lifers who engage in violent actions, like the murder of Dr. Tiller, too often claim that they are part of the lineage of John Brown. It’s not true, but then again, these are the same folks who cite their support of a foreign policy issue and happily condemn the people in the middle of that foreign policy issue to hell when their rapture happens.
A place to visit next time you’re in the neighborhood:
https://www.summithistory.org/john-brown-house
Great to know, Greg! I’ve been to Harper’s Ferry. A stunningly beautiful place, and, of course, fascinating historically.
It is. I was there before the pandemic and used Tony Horwitz’s Midnight Rising: John Brown and the Raid that Sparked the Civil War as my guidebook. Wonderful book to document the places and timing of the raid.
When teaching history, I portray John Brown as complex, especially in his actions at Harper’s Ferry. I raise more questions than I give answers. Who I do not do is portray as complex are the Border Ruffians in Kansas. I do not portray slavery as complex. There were not, neither in Bleeding Kansas, nor in Charlottesville, NOT very fine people on both sides.
Amen to that!
Interestingly, John Brown is part of the enormous genealogy (as is J.P. Morgan, T.S. Eliot, and the contemporary singer-songwriter Mary Chapin Carpenter) of Deacon Samuel Chapin, the founder of Springfield, Massachusetts–where I worked at the High School of Commerce during the 2019-2020 school year. On State Street in Springfield, on the grounds of the library and museum, there is a slightly-larger-than-life St. Gaudens bronze statue of Samuel Chapin which is known as “The Puritan.” A local historian claims that St. Gaudens–who was known to be an admirer of John Brown–modeled the face on “The Puritan” on a portrait of John Brown. I could sort of see it on the numerous occasions I stopped to look at the statue.
Brown’s biographer, David Reynolds, (“John Brown: Abolitionist) argues that Brown saw himself as a solid Puritan with a personal, spiritual, and political commitment to Calvinism. Certainly John Brown’s abolitionist zeal, and willingness to use violence as a form of righteousness, suggests an ideological affinity with this radical form of Protestantism. I’ve read that Brown’s contemporaries among Black abolitionists said that he was the only white abolitionist who considered them equals, and would act on it–e.g. sit at the table with them at meals.
He is a fascinating figure who has in some respects been misrepresented in United States history.
I learned about John Brown’s raids in High School US History. He was presented as a reprehensible fanatic and zealot.
I think that’s how I got him as well, Diane.