>Say, I've never heard Douglass and John Brown put in contrast like
>this before. I understood that Douglass always admired Brown (if not
>always agreeing with him), that he himself briefly considered going
>on the Harper's Ferry raid, and that he considered this act of
>"self-contented, suicidal righteousness" a feat of heroism that
>helped the great cause. Or am I missing something?
No, you are not missing anything. To understand the contemporary responses to John Brown's Harpers Ferry raid, read _His Soul Goes Marching On: Responses to John Brown and the Harpers Ferry Raid_, ed. Paul Finkelman, Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1995. According to Finkelman:
***** For abolitionists and antislavery activists, black and white, Brown emerged as a hero, a martyr, and, ultimately, _a harbinger of the end of slavery_. Most Northern whites, _especially those not committed to abolition_, were aghast at the violence of his action. Yet there was also _widespread support_ for him in the region. Northerners variously came to see Brown as an antislavery saint, a brave but foolish extremist, a lunatic, and a threat to the Union. Massachusetts Governor John A. Andrew summed up the feeling of many Northerners when he refused to endorse Brown's tactics or the wisdom of the raid, but declared that "John Brown himself is right." _But most Republican politicians worried that they would be tarred by his extremism and lose the next election_. Democrats and Constitutional Unionists, by contrast, feared that Brown's raid would polarize the nation, put the Republicans in power, and chase the South out of the Union. (emphasis mine, endnotes omitted, Paul Finkelman, "Preface: John Brown and His Raid," _His Soul Goes Marching On: Responses to John Brown and the Harpers Ferry Raid_, ed. Paul Finkelman, Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1995, pp. 4-5) *****
As you can see, the Republican Party, then the party (putatively) of racial liberalism, worried more about the next election than the cause of antislavery, _just as_ the Democratic Party now cares only about winning elections, even at the expense of the well-being of people of color, women, GLBT people, & the working class in general for whom it sometimes claims to speak. Nay, to win, the Democrats went out of their ways to distance themselves from their perceived core constituencies.
As for Frederick Douglass's attitude to John Brown, Finkelman writes:
***** In January and February 1858 he [John Brown] spent a month at the home of Frederick Douglass, planning his raid and writing a provisional constitution for the revolutionary state. Douglass was sympathetic to Brown's goals but believed the plan was suicidal: "You're walking into a perfect steel-trap and you will never get out alive," he told Brown. Nevertheless, Douglass introduced Brown to Shields Green, a fugitive slave from South Carolina who joined Brown -- and who was eventually hanged after the raid, by the Virginia authorities. (endnotes omitted, Paul Finkelman, "Preface: John Brown and His Raid," _His Soul Goes Marching On: Responses to John Brown and the Harpers Ferry Raid_, ed. Paul Finkelman, Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1995, p. 6) *****
Had Douglass found Brown to be contemptible & his plan laughable, as Leo Casey insinuates, he would not have allowed Brown to use his home for planning the raid, much less introduced his fugitive slave friend Green to Brown. (BTW, Green was no less a realist than Douglass, and he knew the consequence of joining the raid; nonetheless, he declared, "I b'leve I'll go wid de ole man," according to Douglass.)
After the raid & the execution of John Brown & his fellow raiders, Douglass eulogized Brown, turned him into a noble martyr, & defended him from his detractors who cast doubt upon his sanity; so did the antislavery movement in general, for _they all recognized the profound propaganda value of John Brown's raid_, just as Brown & raiders themselves did:
***** Speeches about the Martyr
In Charlestown meanwhile, there were whispers of rescue. Brown told them, "I am worth now infinitely more to die than to live." And lives his month so, busily. A month of trifles building up a legend And letters in a pinched, firm handwriting Courageous, scriptural, misspelt and terse, Sowing a fable everywhere they fell. [Stephen Vincent Benet, _John Brown's Body_, 1928]
Within days of the raid some abolitionists were contemplating a rescue. However, no one ever acted on these unrealistic plans. Even if Brown could have been rescued, such a result would have destroyed _the propaganda value_ of his martyrdom, as many of his followers well understood. Indeed, there is strong evidence that Brown himself opposed a rescue. Shortly after his arrest Brown apparently decided that he would die a martyr's death for the cause of antislavery....When [Samuel] Pomeroy [visited him in jail and] proposed a rescue, Brown rejected his help, telling him, much as he had told his brother, "I am worth now infinitely more to die than to live."
Many antislavery leaders, moreover, had already realized that _a martyred Brown, lying silent in his grave, would serve well the cause of antislavery_; a fugitive Brown hiding in the North or in a Canadian exile would be _far less useful_. Accordingly, even before the trial was over most abolitionists were concentrating on the process of turning Brown into a martyr. James Redpath, who rode with Brown in Kansas, eagerly awaited the moment when "Old B was in heaven" so that he could write a biography of the martyred abolitionist to further the cause.
Only days after the Harpers Ferry raid, George Baker asked his political ally Gerrit Smith to "publish an _Address to the People_, in the _Tribune_ &c on the subject of Brown's operations and condition." Baker hoped that a stirring essay by Smith would help make "the people of the North be aroused to sympathy for him." As early as October 25, Wendell Phillips was asked to discuss the incident in a lecture previously scheduled for the New York Lyceum. Phillips needed no encouragement. On November 1, he spoke in Brooklyn on the "Lesson of the Hour," attacking the prosecution of Brown and declaring that the Catholic Church's "Inquisition" had been a "heaven-robed innocence compared with the trial...that has been going on in startled, frightened Charlestown."
The antislavery community praised "exceedingly" Phillips's "beautiful and stirring speech." From late November to mid-December Northerners commemorated both the trial and the execution with public prayers, church services, marches, and meetings. Even before Brown was sentenced to death, the executive committee of the American Anti-Slavery Society anticipated this outcome and took steps to capitalize on it, resolving "to observe the tragic event" of Brown's execution "by public meetings and addresses, private conferences, or any other justifiable mode of action." On December 2, the day of his execution, meetings throughout the North proclaimed Brown's martyrdom and condemned the sinfulness of slavery. Bells tolled, sermons were delivered, speeches were read, and resolutions adopted. Fourteen hundred people gathered in Cleveland; abolitionists filled Boston's Tremont Hall to capacity; a one-hundred-gun salute was fired off in Albany; and in countless other cities and towns people turned out to commemorate the day and mourn Brown's death....
Despite the assertions of some historians, few American abolitionists devoted their energies "eagerly bidding for a martyr's crown," in hopes that they could convince their fellow citizens of the evils of slavery. On the contrary, they were generally a hopeful, although sometimes naïve, collection of reformers. They lived in an age of sentimental faith in humankind and progress. Many were pacifists and thus disinclined to advocate violence. They believed that reform could come peacefully, through moral suasion and agitation.
John Brown was in many ways like his fellow abolitionists. He quoted the Bible they knew and loved. Although his personal theology may have been a bit idiosyncratic, and unorthodox, he believed in a living God who would soon intervene on behalf of justice. And, despite his rough demeanor, he understood sentimental approaches to reform. Nor, until the very end of his life, did he seek martyrdom. Indeed, his actions in Kansas and later at Harpers Ferry reveal a man determined to preserve his own life, even when it meant deliberately taking the lives of others....Ultimately, too, it was miscalculation and a failure of Brown's own leadership, and not any prior design, that led to his capture at Harpers Ferry. Once captured, he simply used his position as best he could. He accepted martyrdom -- indeed reveled in it -- only when he saw that it was the only useful option he had. In other words, Brown allowed himself to become a martyr only when his death was inevitable.
The abolitionist movement likewise helped mold Brown into a martyr only when it became clear that there was no other alternative. Initially Brown's friends and backers had hoped for a rescue -- but, this was impossible, a matter of wishful thinking. Death seemed to be the _only_ end for Brown. Martyrdom, then, was the only sensible course of action. Abolitionists accepted this and proceeded to act on it with skill and intelligence....Thus, as Frederick Douglass told his readers, "_The Christian blood of Old John Brown will not cease to cry from the ground_ long after the clamors of alarm and consternation of the dealers in the bodies and souls of men will have ceased to arrest attention."
...In a very real sense, _Brown prepared the antislavery movement for the shift from an age of Christian love and peace to one of Christian visions of an apocalypse and Old Testament notions of a vengeful God_. Within a year after the raid, for example, Wendell Phillips, always uncomfortable with nonresistance, moved in a new direction. Phillips collected "a bodyguard of young admirers like Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. (a distant relative), George W. Smalley, and [Thomas Wentworth] Higginson, who were joined by various militant blacks." A "neighborhood club of German" immigrants provided a full-time guard for his house. During this period, "Phillips let everyone know that he now carried a gun," and one of his most prized possessions became a pike once owned by Owen Brown. _With his pistol and Harpers Ferry pike, Phillips seemed to endorse the violence of John Brown with his deeds, just as he had in his speeches_....
_Brown also forced William Lloyd Garrison, the apostle of nonresistance, to reconsider his position_. At a meeting in Tremont Temple, _Garrison endorsed slave rebellions and echoed Wendell Phillips's allusions to the American Revolution_. In early December Garrison wrote: "Brand that man as a hypocrite and dastard, who, in one death, exalts the deeds of Washington and Warren, and in the next, denounces Nat Turner as a monster for refusing longer to wear the yoke and be driven under the lash." He later declared, "Give me, as a non-resistant, Bunker Hill and Lexington and Concord rather than the cowardice and servility of a Southern slaveholder."
Black abolitionists were more comfortable with Brown's violent legacy; "the Harpers Ferry affair had given a new vitality to the movement to bear arms." Blacks not only accepted but truly venerated Brown's martyrdom. They only wanted to make sure that his death would not ultimately be in vain. Responding to the question, "How shall American slavery be abolished?" _Frederick Douglass declared, "The John Brown way."_... (emphasis mine, endnotes omitted, Paul Finkelman, "Manufacturing Martyrdom: The Antislavery Response to John Brown's Raid," _His Soul Goes Marching On: Responses to John Brown and the Harpers Ferry Raid_, ed. Paul Finkelman, Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1995, p. 44-60) *****
Yoshie