Journal for the Study of Radicalism

John Brown has cast a long shadow in American memory. He has often been treated as a sort of symbol, a man not quite of this world, by historians as well as by many of his contemporaries. Several excellent biographies have been published in the last decade, but much of the historiography on Brown still deals with representations of him rather than with his own words and actions.¹ But to see Brown only symbolically, as a reincarnation of a dour 17th century Puritan or as an isolated oddity, obscures our understanding of the abolitionist movement. Brown may have been the best-networked abolitionist on the continent, and one of the most respected.² Although he was unique in many ways, he was not alone, and part of what inspired others about him was his militant commitment to redefining the American Revolutionary tradition as a radical one opposed to white supremacy and racial oppression. In this article I'll suggest that Brown became a potent symbol not simply because of his willing martyrdom on a Virginia gallows. It is also because he provided a model for direct, revolutionary action through his determination to march against slavery with an integrated army. This decision eventually became the cause of the United States government itself in part because of the inspiration Brown gave to some of his closest allies to continue the argument that blacks and [End Page 111] whites were, as Benjamin Quarles put it, "allies for freedom" and could fight together to end slavery.

In this essay I'll discuss the written work of Brown and two other radical white abolitionists whose views on slavery and the need to confront the South directly and violently were similar—British activist-journalist James Redpath³ and Unitarian minister turned writer and activist Thomas Wentworth Higginson. Brown, Redpath, and Higginson were all involved in the war in Kansas during 1856 and 1857, and each was determined to continue the battle against slavery after fighting there ended. Redpath and Higginson both knew and worked with Brown; Higginson actively conspired with the Old Man to raise money, personnel, and resources for the raid as part of the "Secret Six," and Redpath spent time in Brown's camp in Kansas. Redpath and Higginson were as interested as Brown in finding a way to articulate a vision of the United States in which blacks and whites were cocombatants against the Southern planters. All three men found it necessary to write their way into this battle, and I will describe the various results of those attempts here. The texts I describe here articulate, in various ways, the need and potential for an armed alliance between blacks and whites.

This essay will be, to some extent, a suggestive one in which I look at ways in which three men tried to imagine and help others imagine a different world: Brown by remembering and redefining the stated mission of the country, and Redpath and Higginson by remembering and redefining Brown and his work as part of the history of the black struggle against oppression. I will try to help shed some light on the tactics they used and the solutions they found, and describe the related documents in some detail. Higginson's Army Life in a Black Regiment is probably the most widely read of those I discuss here, and a couple of them are hardly known and long out of print.

In preparation for his raid on Harpers Ferry, Brown rewrote the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution of the United States to make them unambiguously antislavery documents outlining a black–white alliance in combating slavery. Inspired by Brown's efforts to create a rationalization and a plan for widespread slave resistance, Redpath and Higginson also created documents in which the barrier between black and white Americans was, if not erased, tested and blurred. In each case, the lines are challenged: the line between "legitimate" revolt like the American Revolution and "illegitimate" slave "insurrection," and the line between black and white. [End Page 112] Redpath memorialized Brown himself as...