On May 30, 1881, Frederick Douglass gave a speech in Harpers Ferry, West Virginia about his longtime friend and fellow-abolitionist John Brown. “Did John Brown draw his sword against slavery,” he asked, “and thereby lose his life in vain?” Twenty-two years after Brown was executed for trying to spark an abolitionist rebellion of enslaved people in northern Virginia, Douglass replied “to this I answer ten thousand times, No! No man fails, or can fail, who so grandly gives himself and all he has to a righteous cause.”
I think a lot about the Harpers Ferry raid and militant abolitionism more broadly because no single event had a greater impact in bringing about the destruction of slavery in the U.S. “John Brown,” Douglass reminded listeners, “began the war that ended American slavery and made this a free Republic.” Prior to Brown’s raid into slave country, “the prospect for freedom was dim, shadowy and uncertain.” Without citizenship, voting rights, and in the words of the Dredd Scott ruling, having “no rights which the white man was bound to respect,” Black Americans had no meaningful ability to achieve emancipation legally, a fact enslavers had woven into the Constitution itself. “The irrepressible conflict,” Douglass observed, “was one of words, votes and compromises” between elite white men with no formal opportunity for input from or collaboration with Black Americans. John Brown’s raid changed all that.
While many of us rightly celebrate Brown’s desire to strike a deathblow to slavery as righteous, it is crucial that we recognize that he was also a religious fanatic and terrorist. He helped fund, train, and equip abolitionist militants in their unofficial war against enslavers in Kansas and attempted to spark a much larger conflict on the scale of the Haitian Revolution. The Haitian Revolution had become a topic of fascination and celebration of American abolitionists, who modeled their militant abolition after one of its leaders, Toussaint Louverture. Brown’s plan at Harpers Ferry had been inspired in part by the success of the revolutionary slave revolt in Haiti, which destroyed slavery on the island and created the first state to abolish slavery in the Western Hemisphere. Taken with the example of Haiti, abolitionists across the northern and western U.S. viewed an eventual slave revolt as likely due to the dehumanizing conditions under which enslaved people lived. Such a violent and oppressive regime, they reasoned, could only inspire its own ultimate destruction in revolutionary violence.
As I consider the horror unfolding in Israel right now—a horror that now promotes further mass suffering and dispossession—I cannot look away from the legacy of Brown. What might he have said about the terrible actions of desperate and stateless people crammed into decades-old refugee camps without freedom of movement, self determination, and access to basic opportunities? A people literally fenced in and now deprived of electricity, food, and water.