Lincoln and Brown differed not only on strategy but on underlying principles. Unlike Lincoln, Brown saw the struggles against slavery and racism as interconnected. He was determined to live an anti-racist life. Richard Henry Dana Jr (the author of Two Years before the Mast) was astonished when visiting Brown’s farm in upstate New York to find Black guests seated at the dinner table. Brown introduced them not by their first names but as ‘Mr’ and ‘Mrs’. It was obvious to Dana that they had not been spoken to that way very often in their lives. Brown was inspired by the example of black abolitionists, many of whom he knew well, and by slave rebels such as Nat Turner. His armed band was interracial, although Brands tells us little about the motives and goals of the five black men who fought at Harper’s Ferry. Brands observes that one of the reasons Lincoln promoted colonisation, despite recognising the near impossibility of transporting millions of men, women and children out of the country, was that history offered no example of ‘a successful biracial republic’. Brown, however, thought the United States could become just that.
Both Brands and Reynolds conclude their books by noting that the paths chosen by Lincoln and Brown eventually seemed to converge. In 1864, convinced he would not win re-election because of Northern war weariness, Lincoln proposed that the Black abolitionist Frederick Douglass raise a force of soldiers who would move into the South, spread word of the Emancipation Proclamation, and encourage slaves to seek freedom behind Union lines. The idea bore a striking resemblance to Brown’s original plan at Harper’s Ferry.
Today, Lincoln is widely revered, while many Americans, including some historians, consider Brown mad. Yet it was Brown’s strategy that brought slavery to an end. In a note written shortly before his death, Brown wrote: ‘The crimes of this guilty land will not be purged away but with blood.’ And Lincoln, the centrist politician, ended up presiding over slaughter on a scale neither he nor Brown could possibly have imagined. At his Second Inaugural, in March 1865, Lincoln embraced Brown’s penetrating insight that slavery was already a system of violence and so could not be eradicated peacefully. Echoing Brown, Lincoln explained the Civil War’s staggering death toll as divine retribution for two and a half centuries of ‘blood drawn by the lash’. He was reminding his listeners that violence in America did not begin when John Brown unsheathed his sword; it was embedded in slave society from the outset. And in the end, as Brands concludes, ‘Union arms, not Union arguments, overthrew slavery.’