5.
Why didn't John Brown use nonviolence?
John Brown has just recounted how moral suasion-nonviolence-was tried for decades and found unable
to stop the spread of slavery. Other abolitionists such as Frederick Douglass came to this same conclusion.
Does it justify Brown's violence that he and other abolitionists exhausted the avenue of nonviolence? Why
or why not?
Historical Background of John Brown
As a boy of five, John Brown witnessed a slave his own age being beaten with a fire shovel. He vowed to become a foe of slavery.
By the mid-1800s, Brown was fulfilling his vow. The Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854 allowed the two territories to decide the issue
of slavery by popular ballot. The fight in Kansas was so intense that the state earned the nickname, "Bleeding Kansas." Ast
Missouri pro-slavery "Ruffians" flocked to Kansas, New England abolitionists bankrolled "Free-Soilers" to move to the settlement
of Lawrence, Kansas. In 1856, after abolitionists were attacked in Lawrence, John Brown led a raid on scattered cabins along the
Pottawatomie Creek, killing five people.
John Brown had another plan to bring about an end to slavery. On October 16, 1859, Brown and a small group of militants seized
the federal armory at Harpers Ferry, Virginia, hoping to ignite a slave rebellion. They waited in vain or the uprising they hoped
would follow. The next day, U.S. Army officers Robert E. Lee and J. E. B. Stuart brought in a company of marines and stormed the
armory's fire-engine house where Brown had taken cover. They captured Brown and his band, and killed two of his sons. Brown
was hanged, along with six other conspirators. In death he became a martyr for abolitionists. "I am worth inconceivably more to
hang," he said, "than for any other purpose."
Brown's execution further polarized a nation already divided over the question of slavery. In the North, it galvanized.
abolitionists-a small but vocal minority, comprised of Christian reformers, women, free blacks, and fugitive slaves. Appalled that
the "land of the free" was the world's largest slave-holding nation, they advocated federal intervention to rid the nation of a
moral evil. Brown's execution also energized "Free-Soilers," Northerners who were willing to leave slavery alone in the South but
opposed its spread to new territories in the West.
In the South, Brown's martyrdom further alienated whites. Southerners felt a strong allegiance to their states and region and a
shared fear that they were in danger of being dominated by Northern interests. Of the total Southern white population of eight
million in 1860, only 384,000 owned slaves, and over 80 percent of these had fewer than twenty. Still, the slave system made the
South's agricultural economy viable and shaped the region's cultural identity. Southern planters and small farmers alike were
committed to keeping the region's 3.5 million African Americans enslaved.
6. Is John Brown's legacy a positive one or a negative one (hero, madman or something else)? Explain your reasoning.