I have been visiting Harpers Ferry National Park since the 1990s, and I decided to visit the park anew on a sunny Saturday in September, not knowing that this might be my last opportunity for a while. What, I wondered, have Trump’s edicts wrought?
Well, I am happy to report (but also a bit fearful, given the possible repercussions): not all that much. The park was packed with hundreds if not thousands of visitors: white, brown, and Black. The park service brochure, available at the information desk, unabashedly informs visitors: “Here, abolitionist John Brown struck a blow against slavery.” Brown may have been a militant, but the brochure asserts that his “raid made Harpers Ferry a symbol of freedom.”
The perspective in this brochure is actually not all that different from the National Park’s anonymously-authored first booklet on Harpers Ferry, published in 1957 when work on the site got underway. The authors term Brown “ardent to the point of fanaticism,” but they can’t help celebrating him for his convictions. “In an eloquent statement,” they write, Brown shortly before being hanged “denied everything ‘but… a design on my part to free slaves.’” The booklet includes Brown’s notable final reflection that to “interfere” on behalf of God’s “despised poor” was “no wrong, but right.” Brown, in this account, was a freedom-fighter who modeled himself on Christ.
Just about all that I saw during my recent visit suggests that Harpers Ferry National Park remains committed to telling the story of freedom that has long informed the National Park Service’s writings about the site. The bookstore continues to have a section called African American History, featuring such books as Henry Louis Gates’s collection of nineteenth-century slave narratives. The African American History building was closed for unclear reasons (that seemed to me ominous), but the John Brown Museum right across the street had compelling displays about Brown’s attack and its aftermath. Slavery was everywhere in sight, including in a mural called “Slavery’s Storm” and in a blown-up image of the famous Josiah Wedgwood 1787 antislavery medallion of an enslaved person asking, “Am I not a man and a brother?” A provocative display drew connections between Brown’s attack and the Civil Rights Movement. Another display, called “Reactions,” charted mostly positive responses to Brown and included a picture of Harriet Beecher Stowe, along with an excerpt from her 1860 letter to a British clergyman declaring that Brown “has done more than any man yet for the honor of the American name.”
John Brown and Harriet Beecher Stowe: an apparently strange pairing of a militant with the author of the sentimental antislavery novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin, published seven years before Brown’s raid. Stowe’s ability to make white northerners care about the sufferings of the enslaved people led Abraham Lincoln and others to regard her as a key instigator of the Civil War. But Stowe was a more complicated figure than the sentimentalist label would belie, and her embrace of Brown’s actions has much to teach us about Christian nationalism and Stowe herself.
