John Brown: American Revolutionary, Fighter for Black Freedom

0:08 It's time for you and me to stand up for ourselves. Welcome to unwashed and unruly. We're being executed for treason is a badge of honor. Today we're talking about the great militant abolitionist John Brown, who fought for an armed revolution to uproot slavery. I'm your host Lola Michaels, joined by the abolition clinician Ezra Saeed. Hi, Lola. Hi everyone. And terrorist apologist Cam Cruise. What's up everybody? Boom boom boom. Reminder to our listeners that you can find all our episodes on various platforms as well as our website, unwashedandreally.com. And please do us a favor this holiday season and give us the gift of a rating and a review. On December 2nd, 1859, John Brown was executed. On the day of his hanging, he wrote. I, John Brown, am now quite certain that the crimes of this guilty land will never be purged away but with blood. John Brown fought for organized militant struggle against the slave system.

1:11 To some, he was a madman, A fanatic, a terrorist. To others, he was one of the few white men of his time willing to fight not only to end slavery, but to establish a nation where black people could live as equals under the law. In this episode, we'll be commemorating this extraordinary abolitionist who wasn't about begging or praying for the peaceful or legal end to the system of chattel slavery. Brown was not just about words or beliefs. He picked up arms long before others were ready to follow him, and he did not compromise. Though his raid on Harpers Ferry in 1859 was not a military success, it was a Thunderbolt heard around the country, opening the road for the Civil War. The raid LED John Brown to the gallows, but history proved him right.

1:56 As the legendary abolitionist Frederick Douglass wrote, I could live for the slave. John Brown could die for him. Today we look back at the life, faith, strategy and principles of the man who took the warning Live by the sword, die by the sword to overturn America's most heinous institution. So we've been wanting to do this episode for a while now. This is going to be our only December episode. We had wanted to record on the commemoration of his execution, but this is something that we think is really important for our audience, and I'm not really that surprised that people don't know about John Brown or have really skewed ideas about him.

2:41 The mainstream textbooks and Hollywood portray John Brown as this unstable killer driven by zealotry, and it's been a century and 1/2 after his execution and he's still very much a debated figure in American history. And I think one reason why he's considered a fanatic is because he was among the first Americans to draw the correct conclusion about slavery. This was not a system that could be legislated away or morally persuaded out of existence. It was a system held in place by torture and violence and could only be destroyed by force. And he insisted that enslaved humans had the right to fight back, and liberation would require revolution or uprising. You know, not just rhetoric.

3:31 So I want to start there and hear from you both about what do you think we gain by reclaiming the real John Brown the revolutionary? So I am a product of the public education system and I didn't learn about John Brown at all. If I did learn about him, it was probably about Harpers Ferry and learning about him as a spark to the Civil War. But I'm pretty sure if my teacher told me that there was a white man and sliding slaves to rise up and kill their owners, that I probably would have remembered that. So yeah, I didn't learn much about John Brown. And like you said, I'm really excited to talk about him. One of the reasons we wanted to do this podcast is because things are so crazy politically in the US right now.

4:17 It kind of feels like we're at this boiling point. So it's so important to look towards the past, to look towards other resistant movements, to kind of inform what we're doing today and what's going on today and reflect on the structure of things in the structure of resistance. So I think it's just really important that we look back at these movements and these figures who were so brave to fight against the dynamics of their times and the powers of their times. I think John Brown is important historically because he could see further than others could, and he understood in a fundamental way America and the American slave system. And if you want to change the world today, you have to have that kind of understanding and that willingness to fight.

5:04 And John Brown did, from the beginning. And it wasn't just that he was a fighter for for the abolition of slavery and for black rights more broadly, but that his understanding of how slavery work and how the United States worked motivated his tactics. And his tactics, while one can quibble with things here and there, were fundamentally sound. I was listening to an episode on John Brown and they kept talking about how he was problematic. And I was so frustrated with that because it comes really down to what he symbolizes and what role he played in history, that he was about black people taking up arms against oppression.

5:55 And I, I feel like one of the things that we talked about in preparation for this episode was that so many of the people who find fault with John Brown or condemn him really, at bottom, are denouncing the right to break the chains of slavery. Did they say how he was problematic? I mean, it's generally, you know, they'll talk about views of the time, things that, you know, like that he was had a temper. Yeah, I think generally he's kind of shown as this crazed and violent figure. And I think violence is one of the big defining features people think about when they think about him. Like, he was violent, he was a terrorist.

6:36 And it's so strange when you think of the larger context of the momentum, the fact that abolitionists were being regularly beaten and killed by people who were pro slavery. So there was a lot of violence happening at the time, but not a lot of violence was occurring on the abolitionist side for a long time. A lot of abolitionists were pacifist. So I think he stood out in that way. I would add one other thing. John Brown was stubborn. John Brown was had a short temper. These are all things that everyone says about him. I don't think that makes a human being problematic because what John Brown was stubborn and had a temper about was slavery. And one speaks of violence.

7:17 I can think of no greater violence than the genocide of Native Americans and the enslavement of black people in the US. Compared to that, John Brown did nothing in terms of violence. And my argument is actually that John Brown was not a violent man. John Brown was not seeking violence. But John Brown violently hated slavery and he understood that sometimes violence is necessary. And when you look at his acts of violence, they were always deliberate, they were always thought out, They were never chaotic and they were never indiscriminate. He was not a violent man. He was a man who understood that it would take violence to destroy slavery. So when you look at a picture of John Brown, it's also like he kind of looks like somebody they rescued from a mountain who's been, like, lost for two months.

8:10 Like, his skin looks like tanned leather, and his eyes are wild. So yeah, I think also when you look at a picture of him, you can see why he was easily sold as a madman. Well, he also had a very hard life. He was a. Well, he just lived a time where, like, life was miserable for people. Right. And, and he came, he was incredibly impoverished, he and his family. He, it was a abject failure. Every business proposition he went after, he was a Tanner, which is an incredibly difficult job. And because you're making leather will make you look like leather. And in a lot of those pictures, he was also conveying his deadly seriousness, and that was something he was also known for.

8:55 In the line of of deadly seriousness, I heard a quote saying that he'd never danced and that was like something he was proud of because he was such a a serious and devout dude. I didn't know that quote, but that's something that I can imagine him saying because of his religiosity. The man was a deeply, deeply devout man and held himself to a higher standard in terms of his devoutness than even others. And The funny thing is, John Brown was not very much a church going guy because a lot of the churches he went to he didn't like very much. There's a story, I think this was in Ohio, but I may have this location wrong, where he was going to a church and there were a small number of free blacks in the area and they were attend the church, but they would be segregated to the back. They would stand in the back or sit on the ground at the back of the church, and John Brown very ostentatiously got himself and his family up and brought a family of black people to take his place in the Pew.

9:56 This caused an uproar and so he made sure to do it the very next week and the very next week. Yeah, and we'll definitely come back to the religious aspect. I want to talk a little bit about what Cam mentioned about the abolitionist movement at the time and the pacifism and kind of how he stood apart and just give a little background. John Brown was born in 1800. He had a really interesting history. His father was an active abolitionist and a station master and conductor on the Underground Railroad, and so was John Brown. I want to remind people that when you're talking about the Underground Railroad, it's one of the gutsiest and most heroic things you can do during this period. I mean, you're breaking the law. You're doing direct action. This was part of his dedication to waging a war on slavery, and he started to study military tactics and guerrilla warfare, and he really became a revolutionary abolitionist. And that was really different from the other abolitionists who were pacifists and thought you could end slavery without violence.

10:58 There were a lot of deep differences among abolitionists, different wings. A lot of them opposed slavery but did not oppose racism or were openly racist or didn't support the idea of equal citizenship. And John Brown was really unique. He believed that black and white people were equal before God and the law. He drafted a constitution guaranteeing full civil rights in a future free Republic. So, you know, he was really willing to fight and kill and die to make his vision real. So let's talk a little bit about how he differed from some of the other well known abolitionists of his time and why his approach was unique. Well. The giant figure of the abolitionist movement at the time, besides Frederick Douglass, who is in a sort of different category and much closer to John Brown, was William Lloyd Garrison.

11:51 William Lloyd Garrison founded the Liberator in 1831. That was the newspaper and it is generally portrayed and accepted. That was the birth of the abolitionist movement in the United States as a national movement, or at least in the North, that it was not just a number of disparate people all over the North arguing for abolitionism. By no means was Garrison the first abolitionist or anything like that, but he was the first one to organize it as a movement. His vision was deeply religious. Also, all these men were deeply religious. It formed how they viewed the world, and he believed slavery to be a grave sin against man and God. What he was known for was that line about how the US Constitution is a pact with that or a pact with the devil. You know, there's different variations of it and that sounds very radical in a certain sense, but it actually at that time was kind of not because what it was arguing was that there's no way that the law can be used to argue for the emancipation of the slaves.

12:57 And he also argued against any political participation in the system in any way, shape or form. So there was no point in voting for anti slavery candidates or anything like that. And on top of that, he argued pacifism. And his pacifism, to be clear, was not so much directed at the slaves. He didn't couldn't say much to the slave because the slave isn't going to be reading his newspaper, but it was directed to other white people. So, you know, shortly after he founded the Liberator, you had the Nat Turner rebellion, which was a rebellion led by Nat Turner, a slave that resulted in I think 50 some odd whites being killed, including women and children. And it was a violent slave uprising that was eventually suppressed.

13:39 And he didn't condemn it or anything like that. But what he did is he pointed to it and said if we don't abolish slavery, more of this is going to happen. So that was Garrison. His line was moral suasion. And by definition, moral suasion means you're trying to morally sway the slave owner that slavery is a sin and they he should give up his slave. And like I said, he sort of gave birth to the abolitionist movement. But I also want to emphasize there were abolitionists before William Lloyd Garrison, particular the Quakers, the. Well known abolitionists like Frederick Douglass and Harriet Tubman, they live at a time with John Brown and interacted with him. And I think reading their accounts is really impactful. Reading what Harriet Tubman said about John Brown and her deep respect for him.

14:26 And you know how Frederick Douglass, his impact meeting Brown and was like this man is not for a moral suasion or he knows that peaceful abolition is not an option. And Frederick Douglass really, really admired that. John Brown was for freedom for everyone and for all the oppressed. It's super. Cool that all these people were contemporaries. It's like very Ocean's 11. Yeah, and John Brown was in awe, in awe of Harriet Tubman, didn't he? Refer to her as a man out of respect, he referred. To her as the general. The General. Yeah, I. Also saw that in his writings he would refer to her as he and it was because he respected her so much. And there was all these quotes where he's like she's so smart, she may as well be a man.

15:09 She's so tough, she may as well be a man. So it was almost like an honoring. He was absolutely in of her and he would ask her because she was in Canada at the time. Because what people have to understand about the Underground Railroad, a lot of times the aim was to get people to Canada. Yeah, through the South and to the north. And because of slave hunters, you were never really safe in the north. If you were not very famous or not very well known, you know, you could just be disappeared one night. And so the ultimate aim was to get you to Canada where you didn't have slavery. And he met her there, I believe, in Ontario. And he was just absolutely in awe of her. I mean she.

15:51 Was an ultimate badass kind of kind of hard night and he. And he peppered, he would peppered her with a lot of questions about how she ran the Underground Rd. how she rescued all these slaves, because while he was involved in the Underground Railroad, he never had the connections that she had. He never rescued anywhere near as many slaves as she had. And in terms of Frederick Douglass, very close friend of his, actually, like, families would babysit each other's children at times and deeply respected him. And we'll get back to this. He wanted him desperately, as well as Tubman, to be part of the Harpers Ferry raid. And in the case of Douglas, Douglas explicitly said he was not going to be part of it because he thought it was suicidal.

16:33 Yeah. And we can talk and we'll get back. Yeah, we'll get back to that. I mean, I think the main thing I always think about is that in that discussion that Frederick Douglass had with John Brown where he said taking over a federal arsenal or whatever, you know, doing the raid on Harpers Ferry is going to be a steel trap and it's going to be suicidal. But 25 years later, when he gave his address in 1881, you know, this is after the Civil War. He says explicitly, if John Brown did not end the war that ended slavery, he did at least begin the war that ended slavery. And he and he made the point that what John Brown really represented was that the time for, he says, the time for compromises was gone. The armed hosts of freedom stood face to face over the chasm of a broken Union, and the clash of arms was at hand. So he knew that this was the opening shot basically into the Civil War, and that if it weren't for John Brown, then it wouldn't have been so clear that you needed an American Revolution to overturn slavery.

17:34 There's another. Abolitionist that I think should be mentioned, which is Henry Highland Garnett, OK, he was a black radical abolitionist and he's very interesting because one of the things people should understand is what after Douglas escaped slavery, he was initially under the sway of Garrison and the Garrisonians. And he was a Garrisonian until he broke, I think in 184748. And that actually led to a clash between him and Garnett, who was a black radical abolitionist. And he was initially, in those early years, an opponent of within the abolitionist movement of both Douglas and Garrison, especially their advocacy of non violence. So he advocated for rebellion by the slaves and the equivalent of something like a general strike. So there was an 1843 convention where he gave a speech. He's now speaking as though he's speaking to the slaves in the South.

18:27 From this moment, cease to labor for tyrants who will not remunerate you. Let every slave throughout the land do this, and the days of slavery are numbered. You cannot be more oppressed than you have been. You cannot suffer greater cruelties than you have already. Rather die free men than live to be slaves. Remember you are three millions and garnet. Then move to have this point adopted at the convention in 1843. This call essentially for some, you know, withholding of Labor or a strike by the slaves. And Douglas actually defeated it because he thought it went against the non violence of the Garrisonians because he was still a Garrisonian at the time. Now obviously Douglas will go on to evolve and will break with Garrison.

19:19 I'd like I said, I think 4748 is when that break happens. But he was another man Garnett what that Brown really wanted at the rate and he did not go to the rate for the same reason that Douglas didn't go. It's suicidal. Having said that, he said in the aftermath of the raid, it is the duty of every man who loved the cause of freedom to declare that the Harpers Ferry movement was right, and that anyone who would not say so boldly had much better say nothing at all. Oh. So now, now he wants to say no, no, no. Let me defend Gardner and Douglas for a second here. This is the point actually that you quoted earlier, Lola, from Douglas about I'm willing to live for the slave. Brown was willing to die for the slave. There was sort of an understanding that this suicidal act.

20:11 Now, I mind you, Brown did not see it as a suicidal act when he was organizing it, but it that's what it became. And I think they were right understanding that it was a suicidal act. Having said that, Brown was right in understanding what it would do. In terms of sparking the Civil War, this suicidal act was that sort of the final spark that got the Civil War going, certainly speeded it up in terms of it happening. And that's actually one of the another big difference between someone like Garrison and someone like Brown. Garrison understood that unless you abolish slavery, a civil war was going to happen. The difference is, Garrison, it's kind of like his reaction to the Nat Turner rebellion.

20:52 We need to abolish slavery or else there will be a Civil war. And he would use it as a warning, something to be dreaded. Whereas Brown, Douglas and Garnett were like, we need to have the Civil War, we need to make the Civil War happen. And fundamentally, I think that's what John Brown was aiming to do with Harpers Ferry. And if you look at his stuff after he gets arrested, it becomes absolutely clear that he says explicitly, I'm better off dead as a martyr to spark something broader than alive. Yeah. And I. Think for all this talk about what Harpers Ferry was, that in fact some of the details of the raid itself are not that critical to understand. No, I.

21:35 Agree. I agree there's no point in going into like a blow by blow account of it, right? It's really about how he got to this point and then what it represented afterwards. So let's talk a little bit about the religious conviction that he had because he believed that owning slaves was contrary to Christianity. And of course when you're talking about Christianity and slavery, you have both wings, the pro slavery wing and the anti slavery wing. Looking to the Bible to answer the question of whether or not slavery was morally right. And there are plenty of passages in the Bible that justify owning a slave as property. Openly supported that talk about how slaves need to respect their masters and obey him.

22:21 On the other hand, as you mentioned, Ezra, abolitionists were deeply religious and they had their own interpretation of scripture and they looked at passages from the Bible that, you know, denied hierarchy. And so you could basically pro slavery people could take a passage and argue that God was a fan of slavery and the abolitionists could take a different passage and argue the opposite. So can you talk a little bit about how Calvinist Puritanism played a role in John Brown's outlook on slavery? Sure. One of the things to remember is that people often treat the Bible as a book. The Bible is not a book. The Bible is a series of disparate little books that were written over centuries, written by completely different people and written under completely different circumstances, spanning several 100 years, and then stitched together and redacted and edited.

23:11 And in the process you're going to get a book full of contradictions. And so whatever you want to get out of that book, you will get out of that book. Nowhere does the Bible say explicitly, I challenge anyone to show me a quote where it says slavery is a sin. It does not say that. It does say treat your slave well. It does say in the Jubilee year you should release your slaves. It does say, you know the Israelites should not take slaves from the Israelites. You should take slaves from foreign nations or foreign peoples. But it does not say slavery is a sin. Having said that to people like John Brown and Garrison and others, there are certain stories and there are certain things that the Bible imbued them with. That line, do unto others as you would have them do unto you was something that John Brown repeatedly came back to as as did the Quakers and others.

24:02 You don't want to be a slave. Don't enslave others. Judge not, lest you be judged. So that's from the New Testament. The story of Moses leading the Israelites out of bondage in Egypt played a huge part for and still does actually in black churches to someone like Nat Turner, sort of was a massive inspiration. Not only because Moses led the slaves out of bondage, but because through the 10 plagues that are in the Exodus story, there was punishment, There was an exaction of blood for the sin of slavery. Now, that's another thing that's a theme in all of this, which is blood. This is a theme all over the Bible. Sin demands blood as a sacrifice to purge the sin.

24:46 This is goes back to the Old Testament and it's basically the basis of Christianity, which is the blood being the blood of Christ. You know, So to Garrison, to Brown, to Nat Turner, to Douglas, to all these people, there had to be blood spilled. So you started out by reading that line from John Brown just before he was getting executed. I, John Brown, am now quite certain that the crimes of this guilty land will never be purged away. But with blood. That was not a new revelation for him. What was new in some ways is the second sentence of that note, which says I had, as I now think, vainly flattered myself that without very much bloodshed it might be done. That was the realization.

25:34 Now, John Brown, even during his lifetime, would often get compared to somebody like Oliver Cromwell, the Puritan leader of the English Civil War and Revolution, a century and a half before or two centuries before. Sorry. And he. Studied Oliver Cromwell, he thought was like, oh, he. Studied a lot. Yes, he studied Oliver Cromwell. He was compared to Oliver Cromwell, including the religious zeal for Brown. One of the aspect of the religious zeal is his Calvinism, which was very stern. And in Calvinism, you have this concept called predestination, that God elects a certain number of people or group of people that he's going to save, and everyone else is everyone else. And this is predestined.

26:19 So it's an incredibly bourgeois religion in that sense. And because part of how you demonstrate that you are part of the elect is God rewards industry, frugality, hard work, that kind of thing. Someone like John Brock would have nothing but contempt and disdain for a whole class of people who grew fat, rich, and lazy off the unrequited labor of a slave. That is a grave, despicable sin. And to these people in Christianity in general, but to John Brown specifically in his Calvinism, like within the. Values of Calvinism, yes. He also this concept of predestination, he sort of applied not simply to the afterlife, but to this life. God gives you a fate now that you are supposed to fulfill. And I mentioned earlier that he was an utter failure in all his business dealings that only solidified for him that his fate was to be the undoer of the slave. He had a.

27:20 Path. Yeah, that's. And that's was that those failures were God's way of saying no, no, no, don't pay attention to this stuff. Pay attention to to the question of slavery. He was a very much a God of the Old Testament. There is once a story. God's mean, huh? Yeah. God, whose justice was both severe but righteous in his view. There's a story that I like. I wish I could have been a family in the wall where Garrison and Brown meet each other and they end up debating for hours where Garrison is throwing out quotes from the New Testament and Brown is throwing out quotes from the Old Testament at each other. One is, you know, defending pacifism, and the other one is defending the idea that you have to take up arms against the oppressor, everyone. Knows now if Ezra were to pick one moment in history to return to, this would be it.

28:12 I would love to have to see it. I don't know if it's my only one, but so he very much saw that Providence or a sort of God as fate as having provided a role for him in the destruction of slavery. And I mentioned this thing earlier about John Brown seeing sin demanding blood, but I want to actually approach in a different way. That was his way of dressing up his actual keen understanding of American social dynamics. I would argue he understood that slavery would have to be smashed with blood because a slave owner cannot be persuaded to give up an incredibly valuable piece of property because that's not how class relations work.

28:54 He understood that. But the way he dressed it was it is the purging of sin. And so his keen understanding of American Society was overlaid with his religious outlook. So yeah, religion was a massive thing for Jon Brown. I actually didn't know this until I was reading about this, but the Southern Baptists were created in 1845, breaking from the Northern Baptists to create a wing that was Christian and for slavery and not for abolition. So that was the origins of Southern baptism, Yeah. And I don't know that the Northern Baptists were abolitionists, but I don't know. If they were abolitionists, they were Northern. They were.

29:36 Northern And so their view on slavery was probably indifference and that wasn't good enough to the Southern Baptists. Yeah, you had to not not just being different. And this is reflecting a period in American history. We had a lot of revival movements that were deeply religious popping up all over the country. But you also something changed with slavery. By the time you get to the 30s and 40s in America, if you go back to the late 18th century or the late 1700s, you have someone like Thomas Jefferson talking about slavery as though, as he put it, unnecessary evil. I think the line from his we have the wolf by the by the ears. If we let it go, it will devour us quite self. Serving, of course.

30:17 It's very. Self-serving, but there was a sense of shame about slavery. That's why, for example, the US Constitution doesn't use the word slave or slavery at all. It has the three fifth compromise. It talks about unfree persons, but an unfree person could be a prisoner. Doesn't have to be a slave, you know. And as an institution, slavery was actually kind of weakening by the time you get to the late 1800s. And then you have the invention of the cotton gin, and that transformed everything. That's where you get King Cotton. And then by the time you get to the 1830s and 40s and beyond, someone like John C Calhoun, who was a Southern leader, was no longer arguing that slavery was a necessary evil. He was arguing that it was a positive good.

30:59 It was a positive good for America. It was a positive good for the slave owner and it was a positive good for the slave. That was the argument. And so the Southern Baptist, their argument was it's no longer good enough to be indifferent to slavery. You have to actually be pro slavery. What you were talking about in terms of the 1830s, eighteen 40s is kind of critical. So just to go back, let's talk a little bit about some of the major events in history at this time that did play a role in John Brown. So besides religion, what is going on on the US terrain? So starting with when he's 20 years old, you have the Missouri Compromise, that's 1820. You have a series of things basically that show that like what you were saying about the cotton gin, that the country was doubling down on bondage basically, and was willing to compromise in favor of the slave states in 1850. That was the Fugitive Slave Act.

31:50 And that was a really, really big deal for John Brown. He organized the League of the Gileadites to write that was to. Basically, beat back the bloodhounds, the biped bloodhounds, as Frederick Douglass put it. In some ways you can actually start a little bit earlier because the American Revolution. And the only reason I mention is because John Brown also held very dearly the Declaration of Independence, the concept all men are created equal, endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. And so he'd be quotes from here where he'd say, you know, I I'm against any institution that violates the Bible and the Declaration of Independence and which slavery does I read? Somewhere that his grandparents were actually Revolutionary War veterans, yes. Yeah.

32:35 So, yeah. So that's something. Then the Missouri Compromise, there was always this tension between the North and the South about the expansion of slavery, slavery needed to expand. Slavery as a system of production is incredibly brutal and vicious and murderous, but it's also inefficient, very inefficient and very thoughtless and how the slave owners organize it. So slave agricultural production destroyed the soil, like tired out the soil, dried up the soil. And so you need it constantly to get the expand to basically maintain the plantation agricultural system under slavery. And So what the Missouri Compromise did is it set the 36 parallel and said north of that, no slavery.

33:17 South of that, we can talk about it. The Fugitive State Slave Act 1850, it's repercussions in the North were monumental because it made a lot of people who couldn't, who actually didn't care about slavery, care about slavery. What they were really offended by is the idea that the Southern aristocrats are now going to treat Northerners. This is the Northerners now talking. They're treating us like they treat the slaves. Basically, it turned the whole of the United States, including the North, into slave territory. So if a slave escapes, it's not only your duty not to interfere with the bloodhounds. By law you're now supposed to actively try to capture that slave and return him or her to their so-called quote UN quote owners.

33:59 Of course, as you can imagine, in the course of that, lots of free black people were also, it wasn't just slave because it was, it was basically slave hunting going to the North. So it really galvanized the abolitionist movement, made the abolitionist movement much more popular than it used to be. Just as an aside, I just, I think it's just worth mentioning that John Brown was never a member of any abolitionist movement. This just should just be clear. He was not a member of any organization. He was allied with certain people, but he was sort of his own man. Just again, it's John Brown. If we keep going chronologically, the next big thing is the Kansas, Nebraska Act in 1854. And it's really after that that John Brown's name becomes known nationally. Yeah, that.

34:43 Was like the breaking point, right? He becomes a national figure after the events that unfolded in the wake of the Kansas, Nebraska Act. So these were two territories that the US acquired acquired. In quotes. Yeah, in quotes from Native Americans stole. So yes, thank you for the correction that territories that the US stole from Native Americans and in essence, Congress voted to let them. Decide to overturn. The Missouri Compromise, because what it said is, well, let each territory decide if it wants to join the Union as a Free State or as a slave state. And the reason it overturned the Missouri Compromise is both states were well to the north of the 36th parallel.

35:29 By the Missouri Compromise, neither state should be a slave state. The problem was you would then have what's called an imbalance, more free states than slave state. I mean, it was one of the reasons why the Civil War was inevitable. It was a constant, exactly tug of war between the two sides. Everybody understood Nebraska was not going to go to the slave. It was too far north. But Kansas was a different story. It bordered Missouri, Kansas. Was a swing state exactly. It bordered Missouri, and the Deep South can get to it through Missouri. So what happened was basically a race of settlement. And by the way, this is a popular vote of just white men. So what you had was a race of settlement from pro a Free State people, not necessarily pro black people. I want to make that really clear. And pro slavery people were rushing to basically acquire land and settle in Kansas so they could outweigh the other in terms of the vote.

36:29 And that eventually becomes basically in microcosm the Civil War, but played out on. Kansas Terrain. With a little bit into Missouri. You might call it rigging elections. These days it was. Rigging, Yes, there was actually plenty of rigging of elections by both sides, but it wasn't, it was mainly that it was actually physical fighting. Yeah, it was. I mean, it was actual. Yeah, it was violent. It was genuinely violent. What? State Do you guys think the new civil war is going to kick off in? Texas. Sorry, you can ignore that. Illinois, I don't know. I think Texas. Texas, OK.

37:10 I think Texas is probably true I feel like. Maybe Colorado, we got some good like purple, purple energy there, I don't know. I think a lot of guns. I feel like it. I feel like it would be one of those states where either there's a sharp division racially, like Illinois with Chicago or Texas, where it's like, yeah. Or maybe Austin will just secede from Austin is. Going to uprise. OK, so we have a whole bunch of these reactions. There's one other thing three years. After the Kansas Nebraska Act in 1854, you have the Dred Scott decision. And I just want to mention that that is a infamous US Supreme Court decision. Its bottom line is, as declared by the Chief Justice Rodger B Taney, no black man, slave or free, could be a citizen of the United States and that black people had quote, no rights which the white man was bound to respect.

38:03 That was a Thunderbolt because basically it rendered the three blacks living in the North and the three blacks living in the South because there were three blacks in the South non citizens by official federal degree that is. The most famous part of the Dred Scott decision, but combined with that, you're talking about giving constitutional protection to slaveholders rights to human property. You're talking about banning basically the prohibition of slavery in any of the US territories. So I mean, it was just like everything about it was the government is fully aligned with the slave system. Like completely yes, it was a. Total unadulterated victory by the Southern slave owners. And it's not an accident that comes a few years after the Fugitive Slave Act.

38:48 It was sort of the South asserting its power over the North. It will bite back because the North will go to war with the South. But there was a period where it felt like the slave owners basically not only had control of the southern, southern United States, but had control of the whole of the United States, right? So. Yeah, that paints a good picture. So you're looking at 1850, the Fugitive Slave Act. This is when Brown had a very prominent role in the Underground Railroad and was organizing his group to resist slave catchers and assist runaways to escape to Canada. You have Bleeding Kansas. That's 1854. That was when all the border ruffians and the white settlers were flooding into Kansas. This is when John Brown, as Ezra said, basically became a national figure.

39:32 He first entered the scene and organized armed resistance. Two years after that you have these attacks by Brown's group that we didn't talk about yet. But this is one year before Dred Scott decision. So you want to talk about the Potawatomi killings So. John Brown actually initially was not planning on settling in Kansas himself. It was his sons. People should know. John Brown had some like 20 children or 21 I. Think he had 20 and then 11 survived or something. Was it something like? That a bunch of his sons went to settle in Kansas. He didn't actually, but as his business dealings kept failing, he thought he would join them. And he wasn't going there actually to pick a fight initially. He was going there to just settle. The problem was as he was moving about getting there and remember it takes weeks and weeks to get there because what transportation was like, there's no SU. VS There's no.

40:26 SU VS No high speed rail? Still no. High speed rail and there's still. No high speed rail. Yeah, we no problem isn't fixed here. He started getting letters from his son, John Brown Junior, saying bring guns. It is really bad here. The state of the Free Kansas guys is desperate. We're under constant attack. Bring guns. And that's when he gets there with guns. Now, there were constant clashes, but a number of things happened simultaneously that sort of put him over the edge. A small Free State town was burnt down. This had come on in the wake of the murder of five or six Free Staters in Kansas by pro slavery guys. And the same night or the next night, after the town was burnt down, news had reached John Brown that abolitionist or radical Republican Senator Charles Sumner was beaten nearly to death and the floor of the Senate by a pro slavery senator with a.

41:22 With a cane, Was it with a cane? Yes. With a. Cane and he was so celebrated for beating him with a cane that southerners would be sending extra canes to him because he broke his cane on Charles Summers head. Wild, and this is what I was saying about normalized violence versus non normalized violence. Like it was just normal for people who were pro slavery to be behaving like that. So that just like falls out of history. We don't talk about that. But John Brown being violent, that's, that's extraordinary. So, John. Brown responded by organizing an act of what I would call revolutionary terror and I would defend this act. He went to Potawatomi with his posse and he basically rounded up five men from their homes and these were pro slavery men who had been involved in the fighting and hacked them to death.

42:06 Or he didn't do the hacking himself, but his men hacked them to death as an act of terror. He didn't harm the children, he didn't harm the wives, didn't do any of that. It was a deliberate, like I said, this was not just a violence for violence sake. It was a deliberate thought out act in response to the brutal violence of the pro slavery guys. And it was to send a message. We're not putting up with this and it was effective. To this day, when people talk about John Brown being a violent fanatic, they talk about. The pot of. The Potawatomi killings and now I just want to say again, five men, pro slavery men killed in a war situation as opposed to the inhumane violence of the very institution of slavery.

42:54 There's no question who is on the right side of history, as he put it himself. I did not kill them, but I approved of it. I believe that I did God's service and having them killed, and I have no problem with that. I think that's why when people talk about John Brown and the Potawatomi killings and they tie it back to Nat Turner too, because a lot of that debate is around the Nat Turner rebellion, right? Like that Nat Turner spared no white people, no white families, children. Children were going to grow up to be slave owners and it was the worst nightmare for the slaveholding class, right? And just a point about John Brown not being a violent man.

43:37 In the course of Kansas, one of his sons, Frederick, was murdered by pro slavery people. There was an episode where a couple of years later, Brown and his group were riding through and they saw the person who killed Frederick. Yeah. And one of the men says to Brown, suppose you and I go down and see the old man and have a talk with him. And Brown objected and said, people mistake my object. I would not hurt one hair on White's head. White being the guy who killed Frederick, I would not go one inch to take his life. I do not harbor the feelings of revenge. I act from a principle. My aim and object is to restore human rights. And Mr. White lived to see another day. If that was a violent man and he saw a man who killed his son, that man would be dead.

44:26 I would. Have killed him so after bleeding Kansas and after what is it Potawatomi Potawatomi John Brown has gained some national notoriety how does he move forward at this point like what's the next step for the movement well there's. Arrest warrants, things like that, but nothing ever happens to him because he's just too, he has too much of an he's too wily. He's out there hiding in the mountains with his pet squirrel sometimes. He's out in the open, it's just no one dares to arrest him because he's got too much of A popular following. He's now raising money because Bleeding Kansas is still happening. Kansas doesn't even become a state until after the Civil War, so this is just all still going on. He needs to raise money to get guns. He then approaches the Secret 6 The Secret Six were these six wealthy benefactors, industrialist, philanthropist, preachers, reformers, doctors, etcetera, that kind of liked what John Brown was doing in Kansas and started basically funneling money to him so that he could get arms.

45:24 Just to name them very quickly. Franklin, Benjamin Sanborn, George Luther Stearns, Garrett Smith, Theodore Parker, Samuel Gridley Howe and the most Radical I think of the Secret 6 Thomas Wentworth Higginson Shout. Out Secret 6 now. For most of them, they think they're funding Kansas. To some of them, he was saying things like I have an operation in mind, but he also didn't want to tell them what the operation was exactly. Partly for plausible deniability, also to protect himself, because what if one of them gets cold feet and then turns them in? So he's he's just saying I need money for Kansas and I need money for an operation.

46:04 Good military tactics. You don't want to give away your stuff. And they were sending him money. One of the things he organized was besides getting guns and revolvers and ammo, was actually he thought about it. If you're a slave and your whole life have been a slave, you don't know how to use a gun. Remember, this is the time where you had to load each gun, each shot separately. And it takes a lot of training to do that. So he got, I think 1000 Pikes because he figured, well, you don't really need any deep training to use a Pike. It's like a. Stick with a dagger with a. Bayonet at the end, basically. And what he's planning is a raid in Harpers Ferry, which was a national US Armory in the state of Virginia that he hoped would spark a slave rebellion in Virginia and more broadly. And that at least enough of a slave rebellion that he and his men, including the escaped slaves, would be able to go into the woods and maintain a situation of a sort of what he saw at a provisional free Republic and guerrilla warfare, with the understanding that this will soon plunge the whole of the country into a civil war.

47:14 So yeah. The idea is to go get all the guns to arm the slaves because I know that was also something that was really fundamental to John Brown belief is to arm slaves because some abolitionists obviously thought that was terrible. The. Area was also mountainous. So you can get trained in guerrilla warfare, right? Right. And it's interesting because he drafted A provisional constitution and it was adopted in May 1858 in Chatham, ON and Canada. This is when he was talking with Harriet Tubman, trying to get her to be part of the Harpers Ferry raid, and Harriet Tubman actually agreed to do it and oh, she. Was sick.

47:54 Got very ill and could not join him. But so it got adapted at this Chatham Convention in Ontario, Canada in May 1858. And it's kind of worth reading the preamble because it gives you a sense of how John Brown thought about these things, the preamble to this Constitution for what he saw as a provisional free Republic, that he wanted to get dissolved as soon as the US gets rid of slavery, so he says. Whereas slavery throughout its existence in the United States is none other than a most barbarous, unprovoked and unjustifiable war of 1 portion of its citizens upon another portion. The only conditions of which are perpetual imprisonment and hopeless servitude or absolute extermination in utter disregard and violation of those eternal and self-evident truths set forth in our Declaration of Independence. Therefore, we citizens of the United States and the oppressed, who by a recent decision of the Supreme Court, are declared to have no right which the white man is bound to respect, together with all other people degraded by the laws thereof, do for the time being ordained and established for ourselves the following provisional Constitution and Ordinances, the better to protect our persons, property, lives and liberties, and to govern our actions.

49:22 That was the preamble camera. Snapping better than. Our Constitution. You saw him there. He's referring he, he talks about 1 portion of its citizens upon another portion. So he's he's clearly he's talking about black people as citizens of the United States. He's referring obviously to the Dred Scott decision. He's referring to the Declaration of Independence. That's why I wanted to mention that as a thing that weighed down his mind. I. Just want to give a little color to this because Ezra and I went to Harpers Ferry and it's a small town and now West Virginia and you can see where kind of how strategic it is in terms of location and the rivers, the Potomac and the Shenandoah rivers and kind of the mountain range.

50:07 It's very pretty. You can see kind of the residual elements of the federal arsenal or you know, like the not very much left kind of like a brick building, very hilly town. What I found so interesting because people go there for John Brown mostly, but if you go to the gift shops in Harpers Ferry, there are Confederate flags, which I they don't really. Understand their tourism audience, huh. Do you? Remember this Ezra? Do you remember how shocked I do? I do, I do, I yeah. I mean, in some way I, I know at the time I was shocked. But in in America, that kind of makes unfortunately makes some sense because.

50:51 Because people. Also do hate tourism of John Brown because there are people who still celebrate his execution. Yeah, and there are people who go there and they're like, oh, wasn't that cute? That was cute. So the raid itself, let's talk a little bit about the raid because it was poorly planned, wasn't. Part of it that, like we mentioned Harriet Tubman before, getting sick and pulling out wasn't a huge part of the plan. Harriet Tubman kind of inciting local slaves to join the rebellion as it was happening he. Wanted well known black figures there because he thought that would help to spread rebellion. But like I said, Douglas and others wouldn't go and Tubman ended up not being able to go. There were others, white guys who had promised to join him who did not.

51:39 So by the end of the day, he had a choice to make. He had a, you know, a total of 22 men, including himself. Such a. Tiny amount of people for such a grand idea, right? And so it becomes a question now, do you just call it off? That's a possibility. Some of the guns didn't make their way to him. You know, it was, you could say it was poorly planned or it was a, a confluence of just messy circumstances happening and in a sense that he felt, he felt kind of let down. There's no question about that. So do you proceed with it in what is now clearly a suicide mission or do you pack up shop and go home? And he decided that he wants to proceed with it because he believed even in failure, that it would do much to eliminate slavery.

52:35 One of the interesting things they found once he was captured, they raided the cabin where he and his men were staying, was a thing that he titled Vindication of the Invasion. And it's written in the past tense as though you. I think he realized by that point that it was going to fail, and it was. So it's written in a way that as though he's justifying what he's with the Harpers Ferry raid, but as though it's already failed and so he's justifying it. So he gives 4 reasons to justify, as he calls it, the invasion. First, it was in accordance with my settled policy. Second, it was intended as a blow at slavery. Third, it was calculated to lessen the value of slaves. And finally, it was over and above all others, right. I think that the whole thing is when people talk about Harper's Ferry raid as failed and you know, the result being that ten of his supporters died, six of them were captured and and hung John Brown himself obviously, and four. Escaped SO.

53:42 Militarily, it was a failure. But in terms of it, the reason why I think we still talk about it here as a success is because it made it clear that talk of a uprising was not just rhetoric and, and also the way the South interpreted it. The South interpreted it as they had to secede because otherwise it wasn't safe for them. And one thing I wanted to point out which I find really interesting is, of course, in terms of the sequence of this, what's really important is this is 1859. The Civil War starts 1861.

54:27 You're talking a year and a half really after the Harpers Ferry raid. So it really was the opening shot and the Civil War erupted right after that. And regardless of what views people had right after Harpers Ferry, regardless of what views people had about it being a military failure, within a month between like him being captured and him being executed, John Brown, he was transformed into this prophetic hero. You know, there was there, yes, there were still people called him a brutal terrorist and stuff like that. The abolitionist paper The Liberator was not favorable to John Brown or the the raid on Harpers Ferry. But for many of the other abolitionists, it really did embolden them.

55:17 They saw him as a hero, and then he got a lot of national attention and sympathy. And I think that's really, really kind of important also in terms of the the political turning point. Yeah, you have to also get the other side. He was also vilified massively. I mean, that was that's part of why it sparked a civil war, because it did exactly what he wanted it to do. Which is it? It called the question and divided the country. So in that sense, it was a stunning political success. The South went hysterical, ballistic. So John Brown was not actually tried by the US government. He was tried by the state of Virginia. The state of Virginia would not allow him to go be tried in a federal government because they were worried about Northern influence, that it might actually result in him somehow not being executed, even though he would have been. So he was tried for treason against the state and for inciting survival insurrection, but for treason against the state of Virginia.

56:15 And as he pointed out, well, I'm not a citizen of the state of Virginia, so how is this treason against it? But it didn't matter what the legalities were. He was, he was a dead man and he knew that and everybody knew that. And the hysterics were such that suddenly every Southerner and every Southern newspaper and every Southern politician saw the specter of Nat Turner again. And what they did is they basically saw that every Republican. Now you have to remember at the time, the Republican Party. The Republican. Party was a newly founded party at the time. It was what's called a Free Labor, Free Soil Party. They were not abolitionists, but they were opposed to the expansion of slavery. They included Radical Republicans who were abolitionists, but they also included conservative Republicans who just didn't want slavery expanded and thought black people were inferior.

57:09 And all all the ugly racism that you can imagine the. Democrats were the Southern and. The Democrats were, so that was the Republicans. The Democrats were an interesting party because they were really two parties fused together in the South. They were the party of the Southern slivocracy in the North. They were apologists for slavery in the South, defenders of slavery in the South. And I want to emphasize that because it's going to come back later, but a lot of what they tended to sort of draw in terms of their popular base were more sort of disgruntled Catholic voters, the Irish immigrants and so on, and played the race card very heavily by pitting Irish, newly arrived Irish immigrants against black people, so.

57:56 Both. Sections North and South were thoroughly, thoroughly unadulterated open races in a in a way that like I guess mega. So that was that was the political lay of the land. And so the southern slobaccracy were screaming that every every Republican they would call the Republicans the black Republicans. That was that was what the name that they that they referred to the Republicans that. Was like an insult, huh? Yeah, of course, yeah. And that and that and that, John, and that the Republicans were breeding John Brown's everywhere and that John Brown was going to breed Nat Turner's everywhere. Yeah. So he. Became the boogeyman of the of the Democratic Party. Yeah, I mean, and, and and it was like weeks and weeks afterwards they were still in hysterics. They were like patrols all over the South in fear of a slave rebellion.

58:46 More than that, if you go to the 1860 presidential election where Nick Lincoln wins and then the Civil War basically is declared in April shortly after his inauguration, the only reason Lincoln was able to win was because the Democratic Party split. It split into two parties and ran 2 separate candidates. And the reason it's split, if you look at the convention where the Democratic Party split, the Southern Democrats were basically demanding that the Northern Democrats not just defend slavery in the South, but defense the expansion of slavery into the West and even according to some of them, into the back into the North. And this Northern Democrats were like, we can't do that.

59:28 It's political suicide for us to do that. And so they said, well, if you're not going to fall in line, we're going to run our own candidate and you guys can run your own candidate. And so the Democratic Party split into two. And that that's what allowed Lincoln to win. If you look at the convention debate, the, the name John Brown repeatedly comes up that this was all a hysterical reaction by the South to John Brown's raid. This was the the you know, the North basically you have to do this because the North is gearing up to slaughter us to rape our women to you know, incites are violent surrection all this, you know, all the most vile racist things you can imagine, and it was all triggered by this raid.

1:00:15 So without. Splitting that vote, then Lincoln wouldn't even have become president. I don't. Think so. No, I don't think he would have. And I mean, I still think the civil war would have eventually happened, but it it would have been delayed. But this it did exactly what John Brown wanted, which was sparked that civil war that would end slavery. One of the things that we were looking at last night was a absolutely incredible speech given by Henry David Thoreau on October 30th, 1859. So this was after Harper's Ferry raid. Sorry to interrupt. But Harper's raid is between October 16th and 18th, 1859. So this is about, what, 10 days later or 12 days later? Please go on.

1:00:58 Because it was one of the earliest public defense of John Brown. Yeah. And. It was, I can't even pretend to do it justice. I would recommend just Googling A Plea for Captain John Brown by Henry David Thoreau and and reading it yourself, because it's a it's a masterful polemic, and particularly a masterful polemic against the newspapers at the time that were vilifying John Brown and against everyone in the American social system and fellow abolitionists as well. And one of the lines is just absolutely beautiful. And it shows the intersection in the transcendentalist movement and among others, the influence that John Brown had after this raid.

1:01:38 He says such do not know, and he's talking about the kind of the main the mainstream newspapers or whatever. Such do not know. That like the seed is the fruit, and that in the moral world, when good seed is planted, good fruit is inevitable and does not depend on our watering and cultivating. That when you plant or bury a hero in his field, a crop of heroes is sure to spring up. This is a seed of such force and vitality that it does not ask our leave to germinate. It's just absolutely incredible. Now I have to mention this because every book you read about John Brown will mention and everybody who opposes John Brown will mention it. The fact that the idea, sorry, the idea that he was insane, unfortunately the birth of that idea comes from some of his supporters, initially came from his court appointed lawyer, which John Brown shot down immediately to plead. Insanity.

1:02:39 So that his life would be spared. Then it came from some of his supporters in Ohio who started spreading around this idea and this rumor that he was mentally insane and refer to supposed family members in the past that were insane or were not insane, but anyway that they claimed were insane. There was nothing. I don't even want to give it much time except to mention that he rejected this. He was not insane. He was actually very rational and very thoughtful in what he did. And I want to read his. So he's, he's tried before the court and he gives essentially a sort of last will or his statement to the court.

1:03:21 And I think it's worth reading because it shows who John Brown is and his way of thinking. So he says, had I interfered in the manner which I admit and which I admit has been fairly proved, for I admire the truthfulness and candor of the greater portion of the witnesses who have testified in this case. Had I so interfered in behalf of the rich, the powerful, the intelligent, the so-called great, or in behalf of their friends, either father, mother, brother, sister, wife, or children, or any of that class, and suffered and sacrificed what I have in this interference, it would have been all right.

1:04:06 Every man in this court would have deemed it an act of reward rather than punishment. I believe that to have interfered as I have done, as I have always freely admitted I have done in behalf of his despised poor, was not wrong. But right now it is deemed necessary that I should forfeit my life for the furtherance of the ends of justice, and mingle my blood further with the blood of my children, and with the blood of millions in this slave country, whose rights are disregarded by wicked, cruel, and unjust enactments. I submit, so let it be done. Does not.

1:04:48 Sound like the words of a madman to me. Higginson from the Secret 6/1 of the things you have to know is a number of people in the Secret 6 once it was found out who they were because honestly John Brown didn't hide his papers very well. So when they raided the cabin they saw these letters from the Secret 6. So some of them like went crazy, disavowed John Brown. Higginson didn't. And actually, Higginson would go on to become an officer in the Civil War and organize one of the first black regiments, the first South Carolina volunteers made-up of former slaves from the Sea Islands. And he published a book that is very much worth reading called Army Life in a Black Regiment. So that's just a recommendation.

1:05:32 Anyway, he, Higginson tried to organize an escape posse for John Brown, and John Brown told them to go away. Really. That yes. That he is perfectly fine to be executed because it is God's will, and that he is worth I am, I am worth inconceivably more to hang than for any other purpose. Gosh, she had. Such good self-awareness and like big thinking so. There's symbolism in the Harpers Ferry raid that ties John Brown directly to the main actors of the Civil War. And I don't think that's an accident that officers to whom John Brown surrendered himself once the raid failed and he was captured were Robert E Lee and JB Stewart or Jeff Stewart, who would go on to become celebrated officers of the Confederate Army. There's a figure named Edwin Ruffin. Edwin Ruffin was a fanatical slave owner, pro slavery and slave owner.

1:06:30 He went to watch John Brown's execution to enjoy watching it. Edwin Ruffin is reputed to have fired the first shot at Fort Sumner Sumter and that launched the Civil War. There's a great line from WEB Du Bois in Black Reconstruction in America that's kind of imprinted in my brain. When Edwin Ruffin, white haired and mad, fired the first shot at Fort Sumter, he freed the slaves. Yeah, this. Will be on my tombstone. Of course Karl Marx was right, but Karl Marx also at the time knew that John Brown's death was a signal that the conflict that was to come in the United States had entered A revolutionary phase, and that was what the Civil War was, was the second American Revolution. The legacy of John Brown, I think became more popularized in the 1960s and 70s.

1:07:31 Since 1970, you have kind of this outpouring of biographies and scholarly studies and works of fiction even that are about John Brown, which we can talk about some of them that exist. I think it's interesting that he started to become more popular in the 1960s. And I know one of the people who popularized him was Malcolm X and so on that point about whether or not John Brown was a madman or a fanatic. Malcolm X has this really, really great quote about him. And he says, you know what John Brown did? He went to war. He was a white man who went to war against white people to help free slaves. He wasn't nonviolent. White people called John Brown a nut. Go read the history.

1:08:16 Go read all of them say about John Brown. They're trying to make it look like he was a nut, a fanatic. But they depict him in this image because he was willing to shed blood to free the slaves. And any white man who is ready and willing to shed blood for your freedom in the sight of other whites, he's nuts. As long as he wants to come up with some nonviolent action, they go for that. If he's liberal and nonviolent liberal, a love everybody liberal. But when it comes time for making the same kind of contribution for your and my freedom that was necessary for them to make for their own freedom, they back out of the situation. So when you want to know good white folks in history where black people are concerned, go read the history of John Brown.

1:08:56 Yeah, that's a great quote for Malcolm, and I want to just make a point about John Brown, the violent fanatic nut. He's a surrogate. Let's be clear about this. When they say this idea of violence is bad, they're not talking about John Brown violence. They're talking about the idea of the slave taking up arms to defend himself is bad. They're talking about the idea of the modern oppressed taking up arms to defend themselves and fighting for their freedom is wrong and deranged and insane or madman fanatical, whatever word you want to use for it. John Brown is a surrogate for attacking the black, the oppressed, the downtrodden in this country. Well, we. We talked a little bit about at the beginning about listening to people say he was quote, UN quote, problematic and some of the military shortcomings that he had and some of his the errors, some of his inflexibility, his anger, his religiosity and his zeal.

1:09:58 What should we understand in terms of some of his shortcomings in the context of this time and the revolutionary struggle that he believed was necessary? If I were to have one real criticism of John Brown, it would be this. He underestimated the brutal impact of slavery on the slave. So Brown studied things like the Spartacus slave uprising in ancient Rome, the Haitian Revolution, Nat Turner's rebellion, the Maroon wars in Jamaica, and other guerrilla at tactics. He studied the English Civil War, like we talked about earlier. He said Napoleon, but specifically these slave uprisings, all with the aim of trying to figure out how to spark a slave revolution akin to those in the United States. And I think what he missed is that in all of these situations, the spark came from within the slaves themselves. Spartacus was a slave.

1:10:57 The Haitian Revolution was sparked by slaves. The Maruan Wars, all of these were sparked by the slaves themselves. It would be incredibly difficult to conceive of slaves because of a raid by, let's say, not 22 was not his obviously his intended #22 men, Let's say double, triple, quadruple that. That you're going to take your life into your hands and actually rise up in rebellion on the belief that this small band of radical revolutionaries, we're going to somehow eliminate slavery.

1:11:38 It's very hard to conceive of the slave doing that because these enslaved people were deeply intelligent and deeply understood what the repercussions of this would be. Everything to lose, yeah. And and, and not just themselves. It's not just that you would get killed. Your wife, your children, your whole family. So I think that would be my one criticism if you actually look at how it happened, when what Dubois would later describe as the general strike during the Civil War really occurred when you had the Union Army winning some victories and going into the South. And that's when the former slaves abandoned the plantations, joined the rear of the army and in some cases became volunteers in the military.

1:12:23 Eventually, once they let them in. But that was because there was a whole army marching through the South. It doesn't, you know, it doesn't just happen. Slavery is a brutal and brutalizing institution. If you look at history, it's not very often that you have slave rebellions because they usually end in a lot of bloodshed for the slave. Having said all that, his act did spark the war that ended slavery. If John Brown was a guerrilla fighter, then Benjamin Lay was guerrilla theatre. So while we were preparing for this episode about John Brown the abolitionist, one of our devoted listeners mentioned a Quaker, Benjamin Lay. And I didn't really know much about him. And I had the pleasure of researching him for this show, and I learned so much good stuff. Yeah.

1:13:18 So before, like you say, the formal abolitionist movement, there were outliers. And one of the most notable outliers is a man named Benjamin Lay. And he was a Quaker. The Quakers are famously involved in the abolitionist movement, involved in the Underground Railroad. But Benjamin Lay is born about 100 years before John Brown. So super progressive. He's born in England. He's a dwarf. He's about four feet tall. But let me tell you, even that 4 feet, this guy stands on business, he puts his tiny little feet right on that business. So he becomes a sailor. And this is where he starts like kind of getting an idea about what's happening with slavery. So he sees the horrors of the slave trade as a sailor, not personally, just like hearing the stories about how horribly people are treated. And he moves to Barbados for a little while with his wife. And in Barbados at the time, there is like a huge slave economy there.

1:14:12 It's like 10 slaves for every 1 white person. So while he's there, he's running a little store and he's seeing the damages of slavery. He's seeing that people are maimed and starved for punishment. He's seeing women and children being overworked to exhaustion. He sees overseers openly carrying instruments of torture. And he's super horrified by it. So this is where Benjamin Lay starts speaking out against slave owners. So at Quaker meetings in the Barbados, he started to denounce slave owners And like, not just in general. He would call people out at meetings by name. So he'd be like, Jim is a slave owner. Jim sucks. He's disgusting. So he's like super, super outspoken.

1:14:53 This is revolutionary ideas at the time. Like, even these people who are devout religious people and are pacifists see no problem with slavery. And so there's Benjamin Lay fighting against them. So eventually, Benjamin Lay and his wife decide they do not want to be in Barbados. They're disgusted by the slave culture there. So they move back to England for a while, and then they end up in Philadelphia. And like I said, this is before the Underground Railroad started, which is around the 1780s, I think is when it starts to emerge. And Benjamin Lay is going to these meetings and he's speaking out against Quaker slave masters because there are Quaker slave masters at this point still. So like if John Brown is the Batman of abolition, Benjamin Lay is like a performance artist of abolition.

1:15:38 Like he's just really trying to get everybody's attention in really big ways. And the way Quaker meetings are set up is there's not a formal priest or somebody who's formally in charge. You kind of just speak as the spirit moves you. So he becomes this rabble rouser that, like, everybody hates. And he is what they say. They quote the most disowned Quaker in history. So he just is like, constantly getting kicked out of meetings because he's like, calling people out and telling them they're shitty. And everybody's just like, Oh my God, Benjamin, please shut up. And in one meeting, he famously gets kicked out on a rainy day. And he just lies in front of the stairs in the mud so that everybody has to step over him on their way out of church and like, confront him directly as he yells at them. So then he starts like kind of making these demonstrations a regular thing.

1:16:24 And he does this thing where he stands outside of the church with no shoes or no socks in the middle of the winter in the snow. And as people come in, they're like, Benjamin, like, why aren't you wearing any shoes? You're going to get sick. And he's like, this is how you treat your slaves. And you don't give a shit when the slaves don't have any shoes on. And he's just like constantly getting into arguments with people. This just. Reminds me of like, you know, when you're a leftist in this world and it's like everyone hates you, but it's like that means you're just doing the right thing if everyone hates you, that's probably the early philosophy. And. Full disclosure, I I didn't know anything about Benjamin Lay until one of our devoted listeners and a friend of mine told us about him and said that he was one of his heroes. So thank you for sharing that information and for allowing us to share some of Benjamin Lay's stories in the abolitionist movement.

1:17:14 So. Yeah, he's full of juicy, fiery stories. He's a really colorful guy. He also wrote a book denouncing slavery, and I tried to read some of it, but it's honestly kind of a mess. And you can tell me. Listen to the title of this book. All slave keepers that keep the innocent in bondage apostates pretending to lay claim to the pure and holy Christian religion of what congression so ever, but especially in their ministers. This is the title of the book. And that's like kind of how the book reads. It sounds catchy. It's just it's just the best. And then these are my two favorite Benjamin Lay demonstrations. One of them is he kidnapped his neighbor's daughter and he just like let her go crazy for a while trying to figure out where her daughter was.

1:17:57 And then when he bought her back, he was like, oh, you know that slave girl you have in your kitchen? That's how her mom feels when she doesn't know what's happening with her daughter. Damn, so so. Some light kidnapping and then like this is the the most elaborate 1 is this 1738 Bible protest that he did He got all dressed up in like this military outfit. This is already spicy because you know Quakers are pacifist at this time. So he gets this military outfit. He hollowed out a Bible like, you know when you're like trying to break out of prison and you hide things in a book so he hollowed out a Bible and he put a little bladder of poke Berry juice in it and then poke Berry juice is like super, super red right. And then he has that hidden in there. He put a sword on, he wore like this big overcoat and he goes into the meeting and then like, you know, everybody's speaking and he stands up also.

1:18:46 He placed himself like right next to the top dogs, the most slavey of the slavers. And then he like stands up, and he says, O all you Negro masters who are contentedly holding your fellow creatures in a state of slavery during life, well, knowing the cruel suffering those innocent captives undergrow, especially you who professed to do unto all men as ye would they should do unto you, you might as well throw off your plain coats as I do. And then he dramatically throws off his coat and reveals that he's wearing a military outfit. Everybody's like, what the hell? And he has a sword. And then he pulls out the sword and he stabs through the Bible and like, blood starts splattering and that's not even enough. He like, takes the blood and like, even like sprays it. He like on to the slaveholders to kind of distinguish them. And he tells them, thus shall God shed the blood of those persons who enslave their fellow creatures. So I'm I'm sure he was also disowned from this meeting. But yeah, he was just like, really, really convinced that this was true.

1:19:50 And he was willing to put his skin on the line in the same way John Brown was. You know, he was being pushed out of the community. He was being kind of estranged from his religious peers. But he knew what he had to do. And he, like, really lived on his word. So one of the cool things about him is that he really lived aligned with his values. So he didn't use any goods that were, like, the product of slave labor. So no tobacco, no sugar, no tea, no rum. He used to make all of his own fabric because he didn't want fabric that was connected to cotton picking. In the US, he was also a vegetarian. He was like really sympathetic to animals, nearly a vegan. I think the only thing that he consumed from animals was honey.

1:20:31 And he didn't ride a horse, so he would just walk everywhere. The Bible demonstration I just told you about, there's all these accounts that he walked like 20 miles or 30 miles to get there. And considering the fact that he's a dwarf, he is sacrificing and making his life inconvenient to stand on his principles. And he just keeps being shunned and pushed out of his society. And he eventually moves into a cave with his wife, just kind of like, lives off the grid with his vegan life. Like, yeah, the most progressive man in the night, the 1700s for sure. Yeah, that's what everyone says when they learn about John Brown. They're like, oh, he was so woke from the time. Yeah, so so.

1:21:11 Definitely. He was different than John Brown because he was also never violent. He didn't believe in violence, but religion was the source of his conviction. He stood. He wasn't afraid to be estranged from his religious peers and just kind of have his own interpretation of the Bible. And he was willing to fundamentally change his life to make sure that he was living in a way that aligned with his beliefs. Yeah. That was good background on Benjamin Lay in terms of the legacy of John Brown. We can't finish this episode without listening to John Brown's Body. When I first heard the song John Brown's Body, I thought that it was taking off of the song The Battle Hymn of the Republic.

1:21:55 I thought, oh, someone later in life, I actually thought it was like in the 1900s had created the song from the Battle Hymn of the Republic as a kind of homage to John Brown or whatever. What I didn't realize is that the Battle Hymn of the Republic of 1861 is a variation came from John Brown's body, which was originated in 1861 as a Union Army marching song. Ezra told me this last night that originally it was because there was a Massachusetts soldier named John Brown. He was a Sergeant John Brown. And his troop was it.

1:22:36 His troop used to joke about it. Yeah, it. Was other members in his battalion would jokingly go around singing John Brown's body Liza Muldering in the grave as though he's dead even though he's pretty much alive. He's a guy, Scottish background has no relationship to that John Brown. But they but they were just making fun of him and they were using a tune that most people now recognize as the Bethlehem of the Republic that had been popularized as a hymn in the 1830s, I believe, or 40s as part of the great revival movement, religious revival movement. Yeah. So it was, it was a Methodist hymn from say, Brothers Will You Meet Us? And then they started to use it, turned it into a song for John Brown's body. And then eventually as.

1:23:21 A way to make fun of the guy. And then it just became. Kind of the rallying cry, like it became abolition. It suddenly took a. Serious turn. And it just became a hymn in honor of John Brown. And so when the Battle Hymn of the Republic is written by Julia Ward Howe, she's she's actually taking off from John Brown's body. And if you look at the lyrics, it's clearly talking about the Civil War and the fight for freedom. And just as a little aside, she's the wife of one of the Secret 6 and and was actually a very good friend of John Brown and visited him while he was in prison. Am I the only one that when you hear Secret 6 it makes you think of Fast and Furious for some reason? That's the conclusion of our episode commemorating John Brown.

1:24:12 As always, you can reach us at unwashedunruly@gmail.com. Please follow us, rate and review. And to close off, here's John Brown's Body by Paul Robeson. Should I start singing now? Brown's body lies a mold ring in. The Gray get ready. For a motherfucking banger. Y'all this call John Brown's body? Glory, glory, Hallelujah, glory, glory, Hallelujah, glory, Hallelujah.

1:25:10 In his soul goes lighting on, on, on. Brown body lies are moving. In the grave, John Brown body lies are moving. John Brown's body lies alone in the grave. His soul goes marching on.

1:25:51 The stars above in heaven now are looking kindly down. The stars above in heaven now are looking kindly down. The stars above in heaven now are looking kindly down on the grave of old John from. This soul goes Marty on the Lord of glory, Hallelujah, the Lord glory, Hallelujah, the Lord glory, Hallelujah. The soul goes Marty gone.

1:26:39 Glory, glory, Hallelujah, glory, glory.