The 150th anniversary of John Brown’s raid on Harper’s Ferry is this weekend. In today’s WSJ, I have an article on “John Brown’s Body,” the long poem by Stephen Vincent Benét.
In the foyer of the John Brown Museum hangs a large-lettered quote from Stephen Vincent Benét: “You can weigh John Brown’s body well enough/But how and in what balance weigh John Brown?” … [These words] capture the complicated legacy of the man who tried to start the Civil War about a year and a half before it actually erupted. Was Brown a hero of black freedom or a bloodthirsty terrorist? Americans have weighed the question since 1859.