The South, Secession, Slaves & John Brown

Four days ago, there were fancy celebrations in South Carolina. It was the 150th anniversary of the Palmetto State becoming the first to secede from the US. Much was made by the partiers of the proposition that this had been an exercise in fighting Big Government and upholding states’ rights.

They are unlikely to be celebrating today, at least in public. That’s because 150 years ago the elected legislators of South Carolina issued a document explaining their move, Declaration of the Immediate Causes Which Induce and Justify the Secession of South Carolina from the Federal Union.

I know you’ll be stunned to learn this, dear reader, but it turns out the reason the state tried to bail was: slavery. No, make that: slaves.

Of course it is customary in thinking about the period to refer to “slavery” as the cause of the Civil War, and my point here may be a bit nit-picky, but to me, “slavery” seems too abstract a term. It describes a social institution, but slaves were people! Sometimes folks lament the carnage of the Civil War by saying “Slavery would have died out anyway….” Make the subject of that sentence “Slaves” and the whole premise has to be reconsidered.

And the SC legislature was well aware that the stakes in their desperate political stroke was slaves, not just slavery. The Declaration of the Immediate Causes in its short paragraphs contains a twofold vision of slaves, as valuable pieces of property to be defended and as an omnipresent danger to be kept under tight guard.

The charges justifying separation from the Northern States, whose citizens had just elected the next President, Abraham Lincoln, read, in part:

[T]hey have denounced as sinful the institution of slavery; they have permitted open establishment among them of societies, whose avowed object is to disturb the peace and to eloign the property of the citizens of other States. They have encouraged and assisted thousands of our slaves to leave their homes; and those who remain, have been incited by emissaries, books and pictures to servile insurrection.

Servile insurrection! This had always been the deepest dread of the slaveowners. Look at the ascending nature of the list of offenses the people of the Northern States are charged with--speaking against slavery, organizing to free the slaves, acting to free them and, the ultimate enormity, helping slaves to rebel and free themselves.

And in 1860, this prospect was glaringly real, thanks to the Harpers Ferry raid conducted by abolitionist John Brown and a small band of Black and white freedom fighters only a year before.

The Harpers Ferry raid is usually portrayed as helping trigger secession because it stirred Northern opposition to slavery and Southern fears that Northern tolerance of this great evil was coming to an end. But, as the Declaration of Immediate Causes shows, Southern fears were also directed at menaces more local and immediate.

To underline this, one need only look at events in the vicinity of Harpers Ferry in the weeks between John Brown’s trial and his execution on December 2, 1859. As word of the raid spread through the plantations, they began to burn. “The heavens are illuminated by the lurid glare of burning property,” fretted a Richmond daily.

On October 31, “a Negro boy” torched the barn and stable of George Fole. Eleven days later three straw ricks belonging to John LaRue and the carriage house and granary of a Dr. Stephenson combusted on the same night. Planters rushed to reap and harvest early, lest their crops go up in flames

A planter by the name of Ulare who raised cattle, soon wrote the governor, blaming abolitionists and begging help:

[T]hree stockyards have been burnt in this county alone since their capture and since their trial—last night one of mine was burned destroying not less than $2000 worth of property.

To no avail. On December 2, all the animals on two separate farms belonging to members of the Turner family died suddenly. The next day one of those farms caught fire. And that same week, properties owned by three of the jurors who convicted Brown and his men were destroyed by flames!

Small wonder the South trembled and sought to cut off ties with the contagion from states where many citizens memorialized and honored John Brown.

[The historical material is largely drawn from a splendid article entitled “Regional Black Involvement in John Brown’s Raid on Harper’s Ferry.” It was written by a scholar named Hannah Gellert, with the assistance of Jean Libby. It details extensive Black participation in the planning and preparation of the raid, the death of as many as 17 local free Blacks and slaves who joined Brown's squad during the battle and the response summarized above. The piece can be found in a volume entitled Prophets of Protest, edited by McCarthy and Stauffer.]

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Thoughts On John Brown And Women

"After my father had selected his place, he found out, like men usually do, whenever they attempt to do anything, that he would be obliged to have some woman to help him..."

Anne Brown, remembering the preparations for the 1859 Harpers Ferry raid.

Yes, the 150th anniversary of Harpers Ferry is behind us, but I am pleased to see that it has stirred up a growing interest in Old Osawatomie. (Anyone who expected Fire on the Mountain to lessen coverage of Brown's contributions to the struggle simply hasn't been paying attention here).

I recently went with John Kaye to a Brown exhibit at the New-York Historical Society featuring a feast of contemporary material, mainly documents, on Brown. Those in the environs or visiting NYC before March 25 are urged to check it out.

Two documents in particular got me thinking about Brown and women. John Brown is, in legend and appearance, so much the Old Testament patriarch that it is easy to think of him as your standard-issue, unenlightened, pre-women's-movement radical.

I was struck therefore by the document Brown prepared in 1858 at Frederick Douglass's Rochester home and later had printed, The Provisional Constitution And Ordinances For The People Of The United States. This document, which was to serve for the territories liberated from slavery by the planned uprising, starts its very first article, "Qualifications For Membership," with the words "All persons of mature age..." NOT, you will note, "All men...." And the same language is used to describe the qualifications for holding elected office.

This was 10 years before the Wyoming Territory granted women the right to vote and a full 61 years before the US managed to ratify the Nineteenth Amendment.

John Brown's advanced stand was clear at a policy level. Another facet appears in the quote cited at the beginning of the article. Brown's daughter Anne, 15 at the time and known as Annie, went with Oliver Brown's wife Martha, 16, in response to a request from John Brown to join the band at the Kennedy Farm in Maryland where the raid was being staged.

The women were not needed to cook and clean, as the cynical might think. The sentence in Anne's moving letter of reminiscence, written in 1887, reads in full:

After my father had selected his place, he found out, like men usually do, whenever they attempt to do anything, that he would be obliged to have some woman to help him, to stand between him and the curiosity of outsiders, a sort of "outside guard" to conceal his movements, and ward off suspicion.

Still, the start of Anne's statement shows that she was aware that her father shared the tendency of his male contemporaries (and our own) to give short shrift to the role and contributions of women. Just as his advanced thinking for the time should be recognized, so too should his shortcomings remind us that the work we have to do in the long struggle to end oppression and exploitation will go better if we keep trying to root out some of that old bullshit in our thinking.

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Visiting Harpers Ferry after 47 years…

My friend Jon, who often provides the photos I employ to illustrate the Black NJ series of postings, wrote about his recent trip with his 83 year-old father to Harpers Ferry. Fire on the Mountain blog-site founder, Jimmy Higgins suggested that we may want to publish this, so (with Jon's permission) his reflections on Si and his recent visit to Harpers Ferry follow:

by Jon Levine

John Brown's "Fort", below the railroad right-of-way at the intersection of Shenandoah and Potomac Streets.

Visiting Harpers Ferry after 47 years? No, not me. My family, my union sisters & brothers, my comrades and other friends all know that I try and make Hajj down to the Ferry as often as possible. Whether I'm driving to Florida on union business, heading to DC for a conference or a demonstration, or on my way to the Black Workers for Justice annual Martin Luther King "Salute to Labor" dinner, if I'm driving, Harpers Ferry is nearly always along the way.

But this year, when I decided to head randomly south I also decided to reprise the old tradition of taking my father along (traveling with my dad, Si, is something we did for a few years right after he retired). And the last time Si was in Harpers Ferry was probably around 1962 or so. Back then the US was commercializing the Civil War, selling little blue or grey "forage caps" for children to dress like Union or CSA troops. Family trips to Gettysburg, Antietam, Harpers Ferry and other relatively closeby Civil War battlefields were part of the new and rising US highway culture (and yes, at the time this industrial town at juncture of the Shenandoah and the Potomac Rivers was mainly *supposed* to be remembered for Stonewall Jackson's 1862 victory).

So what's different after nearly half-a-century? I'd noticed a few of these things in the twenty-or-so years I've been making pilgrimage, but seeing the differences from Si's perspective after 47 years was particularly instructive. Obviously John Brown and the Kennedy Farmhouse Raiders has taken on greater significance this year, the Sesquicentennial of Brown's raid. But the relatively new exhibit on Storer College and the Niagara Movement, on W.E.B. DuBois, as well the exhibit about freedmen and slaves in Harpers Ferry impressed my dad. Si was interested to see that the Black population of Harpers Ferry at the time of Brown's raid was approximately 50% freedmen, making the "paradox" that the first townie to die in the raid was a free African-American railroad worker relatively inevitable rather than "ironic", which is how other exhibits choose to describe the incident.

But for me, these newer exhibits had been there for awhile, I've seen them before. No, I found one small new element not only interesting, but instructive. There is an obelisk on the rise near the railroad bridge marking the original location of "John Brown's Fort." (I've always had a problem with this description of the fire-pump storage facility where Brown and the remaining raiders took refuge, maybe going back to my first visit in the early '60s, but that's another matter). My biggest problem was that the location of that firehouse always felt wrong. I knew that it had been moved more than once (to the grounds of Storer College, to the Columbian Exhibition in Chicago, back to Storer, later destroyed, and eventually recreated. Yes, I knew all that, but the location below the railroad right-of-way always felt somehow WRONG, both as a pump-house and (more importantly) as the location Brown would choose for a "last stand."

Militarily, we would expect Brown to choose a less isolated spot as he attempted to cross the river into the highlands (and yes, Brown was a fairly masterful tactician, as earlier events in Kansas had shown). Now the monument on the rise, placing that as the original site of the firehouse may have been there before, but I didn't see it 'til this visit. It made sense, it answered some nagging questions and so I, too, learned something new…

Monument at the original "pump-house" site, on the rise above the present recreated location…

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NJ's People's Organization for Progress Celebrates the 150 Anniversary of John Brown's Heroic Campaign at Harpers Ferry

Dr. William W. Sales, Associated Professor at Seton Hall University, speaks at the October 15th POP meeting

On Thursday, October 15, the day before the Sesquicentennial of the Raid on Harpers Ferry, the People's Organization for Progress acknowledged this important event in African American history with a presentation by Seton Hall Africana Studies professor, Dr. William Sales. Before discussing the Harpers Ferry Raid itself, or John Brown's participation, before explaining the history of the abolitionist movement that Brown came from and became one of the most significant representatives of, Professor Sales began outlining the history of slavery in the United States, and its unique role in creating the wealth that underwrites U.S. capitalism (click here to view a portion of Dr. Sales' speech).

Dr. Sales went on to explain what was unique about John Brown. While many abolitionists of the 1800s opposed slavery, viewing unpaid labor as unfair competition to small farmers because large plantations undercut the influence of homesteading by "free-soilers," John Brown opposed slavery because, in Dr. Sales words, he "loved Black people." He moved his family to settle among free Black families in the community known as Timbuctoo in North Elba, NY. This attitude made Capt. Brown unique among white abolitionists.

And while many 19th century abolitionists viewed battling slavery as a "moral calling," requiring prayer rather than action, Brown had learned in Kansas that the slavers had no qualms about employing violence and terror. Dr. Sales explained that Brown had gone to Kansas after hearing that his son's farm was under murderous attack by the border ruffians. These pro-slavery terrorists came across the border from the slave state of Missouri to try and insure that the Kansas also entered the Union as a slave state. (Later, during the Civil War, many of these same irregular troops joined the special "bushwhacker" units of Confederate Army that burned farms, terrorized civilians and after the war became backbone elements in the Ku Klux Klan.) Units like Quantrill's Raiders, carried out the shelling and burning of Lawrence during the Kansas border wars. Brown played a major role in building the free state resistance in Lawrence.

Dr. Sales explained that Brown became involved out of "a sense of family responsibility, yes, but …because John Brown went to Kansas and fought the bushwhacker terrorists… he slowed down a process by which Kansas was about to be engulfed by pro-slavery sentiment, and by slowing it down, when the Civil War broke out Kansas could come into the war as a free state, a very important intervention on his part."

One cannot understand Brown, Professor Sales added, without grasping why U.S. society needs to portray him as "crazy." Brown was feared because he represented a key thing that both the slaveowners and many whites in the abolitionist movement feared most, a white person who could identify and find true unity with African Americans.

Despite bad weather and limited advanced promotion in the media, this People's Organization for Progress celebration, The Sesquicentennial of the Harpers Ferry Raid and the Legacy of John Brown, drew a sizable crowd. Perhaps, some POP members speculated, word of mouth is more powerful than an "Upcoming Events" listing in the Star Ledger. Perhaps area academics assigning students to attend Dr. Sales' lecture or the use of so-called "new media" like blogs and Facebook by POP members made the difference. No matter the reason, the gathering left POP members and supporters demanding more. POP Chairman Lawrence Hamm has proposed that Dr. Sales return to another meeting simply to have the question-and-answer segment that, due to a lack of time, never occurred. (click here, to see additional photos from this event)

Professor Bill Sales with POP's chairman, Larry Hamm salute John Brown

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From Kirke Mechem's Opera About John Brown

More anent John Brown, as the 150th anniversary of the raid on Harpers Ferry is upon us.

Last year, as part of a continuing focus on music inspired by John Brown, I posted a piece here at FotM on the opera by Kirke Mechem, John Brown, which had just premiered in a performance by the Lyric Opera of Kansas City.

Here is a more recent concert performance of one of the highlights of the opera, "Dan-u-el." Mechem describes it thus:

The scene is based on a real incident. In December 1858, Brown helped a slave family escape to Kansas from Missouri, and then led them to safety into Canada. During that time, the mother gave birth to a boy whom she and her husband named after John Brown.

Some of the words come from the spiritual, "Didn't My Lord Deliver Daniel?"; the others from my libretto. The music is original.

The fact that "Dan-u-el" seems to be entering the repertoire of adventurous modern "classical" pieces performed by college and university chorales is one more small but happy development in the reclaiming of John Brown as one of this country's greatest heroes.

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A Great Song About Harpers Ferry

The sesquicentennial of the heroic raid on the U.S. arsenal at Harpers Ferry led by Captain John Brown is fast approaching.

Following up on Rahim on the Dock's recent posting here about the planned observation of this anniversary by the People's Organization for Progress in Newark, NJ, this video is one slice of what may well be the single most moving and nuanced work of art about John Brown yet created.

Magpie, the longstanding duo of folkies Terry Leonino and Greg Artzner, released John Brown: Sword of the Spirit in 2000. It is a song cycle, call it a folk opera, entirely about the raid on Harpers Ferry. I have praised it here at FotM before, in the first of several posts over the last couple years on music about John Brown.

This one tune, and lorry nose I'm glad they finally got a video cut in time for the observance of the anniversary, only gives a hint of the extraordinary musical and lyrical power of the whole CD. "Goodbye To Old Ohio" salutes, verse by verse, members of Brown's band: the Coppoc brothers, Edwin and Barkley, white Quaker abolitionists who had tired of ineffectual moral witness; John Kagi, Brown's fight-hand man since Kansas; John Copeland and his uncle Lewis Leary, free Black men from Oberlin; and Aaron Stevens, an Ohioan with roots, like Brown himself and others of the band, in Connecticut.

Other songs pay tribute to others of the raiding party, to Brown's wife and to his daughter, and to other abolitionist fighters. All are fine, several are splendid.

You can order this CD from the usual big on-line merchants, but I expect that Greg and Terry will do a little better if you purchase it from them with a postage stamp and a check.

Do this thing!! You won't be sorry!

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Take Five: Music About John Brown

[From time to time Fire on the Mountain features, on Fridays, Take Five--a list of five cool things in some particular category. It's not supposed to be the only five, best five, top five or anything, just five items worthy of attention. The idea is you can chip in your own suggestions for the list in the comments sections below.]

I just learned, entirely by accident, about a great new piece of music about John Brown. I will be blogging about it in the next day or so, but in the meantime, I have taken the opportunity to revive the flagging Take Five franchise, by posting five cool musical tributes to the Old Man, to whom this country owes so much.

TAKE FIVE

David Soldier—The Apotheosis Of John Brown

This is a cantata—that’s a classical music form, y’all, not a version of the macarena. That means that the trained human voice is privileged, and the chorale here is backed by a small baroque orchestra. (I personally did not catch much hint of Soldier’s background playing bass in Bo Diddley’s touring combo here.)

Nevertheless, and I write as one somewhat phobic about classical music, this is readily accessible. For starters, they’re singing in English, and Soldier provides the excellent Robbie McCauley to narrate and hold the piece together. The whole cantata runs 38 minutes, but is broken up into sections comfortably approximating the length of album cuts.

Mainly, though, Soldier benefits from having chosen to base his composition on incomparable source material—the writings of abolitionist Frederick Douglass, a friend and admirer of John Brown, and a great writer. In fact, the closing song on the Magpie CD plugged below, draws from exactly the same well.


Magpie—John Brown: Sword Of The Spirit

This is a remarkable work, a composition in the folk music tradition that is in some ways similar one of those “rock operas” that started blighting the musical landscape in the late ‘60s. Only JB: SotS is a coherent work, musically and as a narrative, and it’s entirely about the 1859 raid on the US Arsenal in Harpers Ferry. Starting with their version of Si Kahn’s driving “Old John Brown,” they echo the new opera in using spirituals to set the stage.

Magpie, who are Terry Leonino and Greg Artzner (and have been so for something like 35 years), also include a Woody Guthrie number I’d never even heard of before, “The Ballad of Harriet Tubman.” Most of the other songs were written by the duo, who give musical shout-outs to each of the 19 men who joined the Old Man for the raid, with the songs about Shields Green, Dangerfield Newby and John Copeland particularly moving.

The thing I like most about it is that it is unapologetic. A deceptively simple song, taken from a story actually told by Brown’s daughter, “Pretty Little Bird” compares striking at the slaveocracy to killing a snake. Their friend Peggy Eyres’ “Mary Brown, Abolitionist” reclaims John Brown’s wife from both scholarly neglect and the picture too frequently painted of her as a passive victim beaten down by his unbending male fanaticism.

Over the years I’ve picked up several cases of this recording to sell on FRSO/OSCL literature tables, and given many to friends. I recommend it unequivocally, even if your musical tastes generally run louder and funkier than “singer/songwriter.” I don’t care. If you don’t have it, this should be the next CD you buy.


Paul Robeson--“John Brown’s Body”

I mean, I know there are other versions a-plenty, but how ya gonna leave Paul Robeson’s magnificent baritone out of this, even if the cut I’ve got only has a couple of verses, omitting both the earliest “folk” ones about hanging Jeff Davis from a sour apple tree’ and such favorites as

They hung him for a traitor,
Themselves the traitor crew.

The impact of the Harper’s Ferry raid is testified to by the fact that within two years, this song was sung universally in the Union Army and throughout the North. Itself derived from a camp meeting hymn called “Say, Brothers, Will You Meet Us,” it was gussied up into “Battle Hymn Of The Republic” by abolitionist Julia Ward Howe, Subsequently Wobbly bard Ralph Chaplin kyped the tune for "Solidarity Forever." Truly a revolutionary song.


Mat Callahan & Yvonne Moore—“Old John Brown”

This has more than a title in common with the Si Kahn’s tune that Magpie covers. It, too, look at how the Harper’s Ferry raid broke the stasis of the slave system in the mid-1800s, using the music to convey a sense of power restrained and ready to erupt to underline its point. It closes with a reminder that Brown’s work is not complete.

A confession: I actually have Mat’s permission to post this song right here on FotM. I’d been sleeping on this post until I could figure out how to post music here, but the news of the John Brown opera premiere pushed me into premature action. Get me your email address and I’ll see that you get an MP3 of the sucker.


Rancid—"Meteor Of War"

I finish with this in part to atone for the length of some of the earlier choices. Tim Armstrong and crew bring this punk celebration of John Brown in at a brisk 1 minute 20 seconds. And they make the essential point, loud and fast. Twice (I told you it’s fast):

John Brown set the tone, he was a meteor in a guilty land.
Abolitionists understand freedom to the despondent man.


Your turn, dear reader. What John Brown cuts ring your chimes? (NB: Please limit it to cuts about this John Brown—no Dylan, no Masters Of Reality, no Huey “Piano” Smith, etc, eh?)

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