The clarity of his moral politics may be appealing, but the radical autonomy of his approach amounts to anarchy.
The clarity of his moral politics may be appealing, but the radical autonomy of his approach amounts to anarchy.
L uis DeCaro, a professor of Christian history at New York’s Alliance Theological Seminary, recently made the case in Christianity Today for “Why White Evangelicals Should Claim John Brown.” DeCaro, author of several books on Brown, seeks to reconstruct the radical abolitionist’s legacy. Brown murdered five pro-slavery settlers at sword-point in Pottawattamie, Kansas Territory, in 1856. Three years later, he led 20 men in an occupation of the federal arsenal at Harper’s Ferry, Va. Instead of inciting a slave uprising as he hoped, Brown was arrested, tried for treason, and hanged. Noting that Brown’s name is virtually absent from historical surveys of American Christianity, DeCaro urges correction of what he considers an omission. Why?
The gist of DeCaro’s argument is that Brown was a pious evangelical who, even as elites began embracing more liberal theology, adhered to orthodox views such as the inerrancy of Scripture. Brown’s strict Biblicism is central to DeCaro’s argument: “He urged people, ‘Be determined to know by experience as soon as may be, whether Bible instruction is of Divine origin or not,’ convinced that if they tested the Scripture, they would discover the truth.” Certainly, he felt assured of his interpretation of Scripture, telling a minister shortly before his death: “I cannot believe that anything I have done . . . will be lost to the cause of God.”
Brown believed in personal salvation; he prayed fervently for others to be saved. More importantly for DeCaro, Brown’s faith is “distinguished . . . from that of some in America (then and now), [by] a thorough dedication, as he once put it, ‘to better the condition of those who are always on the under-hill side.’ This activism was deeply evangelical . . . shaped by his theological beliefs.” This is the rub of the argument. With a rather weak disavowal that we may admire Brown yet “still question [his] tactics,” DeCaro asserts that present-day “evangelicals [are] in dire need of good examples of people who were transformed by their faith to rise above pedestrian racism.”
So, Brown is a devout, doctrinally orthodox evangelical whose Biblical theology led him to transcend racism — implicitly a graver sin than murder or insurrection. I am not convinced that American church history is so devoid of others whose faith transcended racism. But to argue that point is to cede the premise. John Brown is not a mostly benign egalitarian, neatly separable from the occasional use of regrettable tactics. Even if there is a historical lack of racially enlightened American evangelicals, a domestic terrorist cannot be drafted to supply it.
John Brown’s legacy is inseparable from Pottawattamie and Harper’s Ferry. On the Sunday following his execution, eulogies for the reputed martyr flowed from pulpits throughout the free states. A Congregational minister in Chicago declared that “a man who dies for the truth . . . multiplies his influence a thousand-fold.” Another in Dorchester, Mass., admonished congregants to emulate Brown in loving their southern brethren only as “those who are reaping the . . . inevitable fruit of their transgression.” The most heterodox statement came from the essayist Ralph Waldo Emerson, who famously proclaimed that Brown’s death “made the Gallows as venerable as the Cross!” To that, Nathaniel Hawthorne later wrote the scoffing rejoinder: “Nobody was ever more justly hanged.”
Whether praise or condemnation, all such commentary on Brown presupposed his antislavery violence. It has been so ever since; the man is inseparable from the mythic totem. There is no reason to praise him apart from the symbolic radicalism of his moral politics — a politics grounded in an extreme-populist hermeneutic of autonomous Bible interpretation. Brown may have believed that by “testing Scripture” every man “would discover truth,” but if he expected common agreement on that truth in a democratic society, he was a credulous fool.
Ultimately, both the appeal and horror of Brown’s legacy proceed from the uncompromising and active simplicity of his response a question as old as political philosophy: Are men obligated to obey laws they deem unjust?
The English philosopher Thomas Hobbes claimed that all just commonwealths rest upon the one inalienable right of every person, that of “resisting them that assault him by force.” Despite his theory’s many illiberal failings, there is a majesty in Hobbes’s absolutist view of self-defense. This is what moves readers of Frederick Douglass’s autobiography as he recounts a desperate struggle with a merciless overseer, Mr. Covey. As the self-proclaimed “slave breaker” prepared to give Douglass an unmerited beating, “at this moment — whence came the spirit I do not know — I resolved to fight.” This fight, Douglass reports, “was the turning point in my career as a slave. It rekindled the expiring embers of freedom and revived . . . a sense of my own manhood.” What heroic embodiment of liberty’s manly virtues!
Surely, then, if slavery is wicked and the resisting slave is righteous, Brown’s fatal raid is contemptible only for its failure. Is it not especially so when the American republic rests on a revolutionary foundation? “Governments are instituted among men,” as the Declaration of Independence puts it, “to secure [inalienable] rights . . . whenever any form of government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or to abolish it.” Yet this right, though foundational, is conditional. George Washington — no stranger to the alteration and abolition of governments — admonished Americans in his Farewell Address that “the constitution which at any time exists, till changed by an explicit and authentic act of the whole people, is sacredly obligatory upon all.”
The later career of Abraham Lincoln is a case study in the tension between opposition to unjust laws and the obligation to uphold a duly established government. The 1854 Kansas-Nebraska Act, which opened new federal territories to the possible spread of slavery, brought Lincoln back from legal practice into public life. It also led John Brown to Pottawatomie Creek.
The law’s author, Stephen Douglas, had hoped to remove the divisive slavery question from the sphere of Congress. In 1857, Chief Justice Roger Taney made a similarly ill-fated attempt to do so in Dred Scott v. Sandford, ruling that slavery questions belonged exclusively to state legislatures. Douglas defended Taney’s ruling, labeling opposition to it “a deadly blow at our whole republican system of government.” A year later, in the first of seven public debates with Lincoln, Douglas accused his rival of “warfare on the Supreme Court” by his “utter opposition to the Dred Scott decision.” In a later debate, Douglas asked: “Is every man in this land allowed to resist the decisions he does not like, and support only those that meet his approval?”
In fact, Republicans charted a middle course between acquiescence toward injustice and war upon the state. Lincoln pointedly warned that Douglas’s adherence to Dred Scott, “simply because of the source from whence it comes . . . commits him to the next decision, [whether] right or wrong.” Reflexive obedience may be preferable to anarchy, but it is not free self-government. In the Senate, future Secretary of State William Seward swore to “reform [the Court’s] political sentiments and practices, bringing them into harmony with the Constitution and the laws of nature.” In doing so, Republicans would “reassume [the people’s] own just authority.”
In a free society, the people are the wellspring and ultimate guardian of law. Republicans did not, like Brown, set matches to political powder kegs. They dissented from a Supreme Court ruling without delegitimizing the institution; they opposed unjust statutes without attacking the Constitution. They set about the long, slow work of winning elections by convincing voters. As Lincoln’s First Inaugural address asserted in defiance of both secessionists and radicals: “A majority, held in restraint by constitutional checks and limitations and always changing easily with deliberate changes of popular opinions and sentiments, is the only true sovereign of a free people. Whoever rejects it does of necessity fly to anarchy or to despotism.”
This is the American creed. It is why Frederick Douglass was a hero for fighting the tyrant Covey, yet Brown was justly hanged for Harper’s Ferry. No legal avenue existed for Douglass to secure his rights. But the Constitution offered Brown, as a citizen, peaceful and lawful means to fight slavery. The clarity of his moral politics may be appealing, but the radical autonomy of his hermeneutic is anarchy. He is no model for any Americans, evangelical or otherwise.
American history is poised to repeat itself. The pro-life and originalist movements have fought for half a century to overturn Roe v. Wade. In a few instances, most recently the murder of late-term abortionist George Tiller in 2009, extremists resorted to violence. Pro-life groups have universally condemned such acts. Christianity Today even published a piece on “the troubling Christian forerunners of Tiller’s killer,” comparing such violence to Brown’s Harper’s Ferry raid.
The eight murders of abortionists in the United States since 1977 are outliers. The organized pro-life movement has followed the path of Lincoln. Now, as the Supreme Court has rewarded this patient constitutionalism with a long-awaited victory in its Dobbs ruling, angry extremists gather in violent reaction. The radical pro-abortion group “Jane’s Revenge,” appealing to their own consciences over any other law, firebomb crisis pregnancy centers and declare menacingly: “If abortion isn’t safe, you aren’t either.”
There speaks the spirit of John Brown in the hermeneutics of autonomy and the politics of moral absolutism. Christ, have mercy upon us.