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PARTISAN REVIEW
an act of terrorism for principle of a kind we recognize all too readily
today.
It
achieved, as terrorism often does, an intensified popular awareness
of the irreconcilability of a conflict that had seemed merely ideological to
many. The Pottawatamie Massacre-though it was itself a reprisal for vio–
lence by slavery men-escalated a struggle that could no longer be a matter
ofland claims and disputed elections.
It
made the perpetrator at once a fig–
ure of contrary meaning to a rapidly dividing nation. Were it not for these
two occasions, Brown would have remained a minor figure in the history
of abolitionism, though the organizer of a black league of "Gileadites" in
Springfield, Massachusetts and the captain of an outpost of the
Underground Railroad at North Elba, New York, where he lived for a few
years with his numerous family. A major portion of Banks' leisurely nar–
rative describes the Browns' skirmishes with slave-catchers and the
struggles with the harsh natural conditions of their Adirondack farm. But,
in 1855,John Brown left for Kansas.
Brown would be reviled by the slavery faction as a religious maniac
and at the same time a con-man and adventurer, but, to abolitionists, he
became a sacred figure. As he stood trial for Harpers Ferry, the gentle
Emerson notoriously said he would make "the gallows glorious like the
cross" by his martyrdom. His earliest biography, published immediately
after his execution, was written by a correspondent for the New York
Tribune,
James Redpath, who had attached himself to Brown after
Pottawatamie and declared that he had perceived in 1856 that Brown was
"the predestined leader of the second and holier American Revolution."
There were soon other defenses and eulogies including a "Life and Letters"
published in 1885 by the Concord schoolmaster and friend of Emerson
and Thoreau, Frank Sanborn, who had raised funds to support Brown's
doomed raid, and, finally, the 1910 biography wri tten by the aboli tioni st
William Lloyd Garrison's grandson, Oswald Garrison Villard, which was a
prodigious work of objective research still sustaining the view that
Brown's memory was "at once a sacred, a solemn and an inspiring
American heritage." But Villard's book was attacked, particularly by south–
erners, even so many years after Brown's death. Among other hostile
responses, Robert Penn
Warren'sJohn Brown: The Making
if
a Martyr
offered
an indictment that convicted Brown-as detractors had in his lifetime-as
an embezzler and cattle-thief whose Harpers Ferry adventure was an act of
brigandism. Most persistent has been the belief that the enigmatic
hero/demon could be explained as a sufferer from hereditary insanity-a
theory which had been promoted originally by last-minute attempts by his
own attorney and others to plead legally for his life. Or that he was what–
ever we mean when we speak of a religious fanatic, motivated by a
conviction that he is an instrument of God's will acting on divine
