John Brown Today

Send us Fan Mail

In this episode, Lou reviews America's "Good Terrorist": John Brown and the Harper's Ferry Raid, by Charles P. Poland, Jr., Ph.D.   "[W]hile this is a new book," Lou observes, "there is something very old about it, a  refurbished version of the old anti-Brown story that was so pervasive from the early-to-mid-20th century—that old hackneyed tale of John Brown that still haunts the popular narrative." An extended review, Lou examines the author's problematic theme, that Brown was a terrorist, as well as the author's treatment of biographical and historical details.  Listeners will appreciate why, even at his kindest, Lou suggests that this book should not be the first book you read about John Brown, and certainly should not be the last book you read about John Brown either. Besides deconstructing Poland's terrorist argument, Lou considers how the author treats key themes in Brown's life, as well as his actions in Kansas and in Virginia. 

Hey friends, click on this link to get your JOHN BROWN TODAY Podcast Mug!

Support the show

Send us Fan Mail

What can be learned by looking at a person's bookshelf?  In this episode, Lou reflects upon John Brown's early business and financial difficulties and argues that despite the simplistic and often manipulative way that writers have portrayed this theme in Brown's biography, few if any biographers have taken an adequate look at both Brown's business life and the economic circumstances of the United States that impacted him. Lou argues that Brown was not categorical failure in business, and in the later 1840s actually improved his business reputation significantly despite the challenges that he faced.  In this episode, however, Lou is concerned with the nadir of Brown's business life in the late 1830s and early 1840s which culminated with two difficult outcomes--his moral lapse, made out of desperation, in manipulating a client's investment, and his bankruptcy in 1842.  However, using the bankruptcy inventory of 1842, Lou makes a brief survey of a handful of books that were reviewed by the assignee for his case, George De Peyster.  Interestingly, there are some fascinating connections to Brown's life and background to be found in his "bankruptcy bookshelf."  An unabridged transcript of this episode is published on the "John Brown Today" blog at this link.

Hey friends, click on this link to get your JOHN BROWN TODAY Podcast Mug!

Feedback?
https://www.speakpipe.com/JOHNBROWNTODAY

Support the show

Send us Fan Mail

One of the most incredible stories related to John Brown that really is not about him is the story of Alexander Milton Ross, a Canadian public figure of the nineteenth century. Ross was most widely known and celebrated in the later nineteenth century because of his antislavery activities and his reputation as a leading abolitionist figure prior to and during the Civil War. However, Ross was a fraud--at least as far as his claims to have been a close associate of John Brown, and probably as one familiar with Abraham Lincoln, a claim he also made.  Ross not only made an extended, false claim of having been a colleague of Brown, but wrote an autobiographical profile, Recollections and Experiences of An Abolitionist  (here is a link to the very successful second edition, widely celebrated)  in which he invented letters from Brown. To reinforce his deception, Ross went on to initiate a long and successful correspondence with some of Brown's adult children that cemented his reputation.  Ross was never exposed as a fraud until the mid-twentieth century by Boyd B. Stutler, the "godfather" of John Brown scholars.  Stutler sniffed out Ross as a fraud and laid the groundwork in his correspondence, but never published anything beyond what he had written in correspondence with scholars. In this episode, Lou builds on Stutler's findings, adding insight from Ross's correspondence with the Browns, documents not available to Stutler when he was active in the twentieth century.  Ross was one of Brown's most enthusiastic defenders and was widely accepted by Brown's admirers. But his story was that of an amazing fraud--one that slipped away from this life without being caught.

*This episode is based on a longer chapter that Lou did some years back for a little self-published collection, John Brown: The Man Who Lived (2008) which is no longer in print.   A transcript of this version is available on the John Brown Today blog using this link.

Hey friends, click on this link to get your JOHN BROWN TODAY Podcast Mug!

Feedback?
https://www.speakpipe.com/JOHNBROWNTODAY

Support the show

Send us Fan Mail

Spoiler Alert! If you have not seen the popular movie, "Emperor," you may want to watch it before you listen to this podcast.

In this episode, Lou discusses the somewhat mysterious life of Shields Green, a.k.a. Emperor, one of John Brown's Harper's Ferry raiders.  As Lou recounts, it was the making of the "Emperor" movie that prompted him first to want to write a little article, which surprisingly led him down a historical rabbit hole in search of the little known figure of Emperor, ultimately resulting in his own book about Emperor. *  Reflecting on both the history and the ups and downs (mostly downs) of the "Emperor" movie, Lou shares some of the challenges and insights of trying to track down this famous fugitive. He concludes that "Emperor" Shields Green was not only an abolitionist in his own right, but one perhaps with a history of fighting slavery.  As Lou concludes, despite its many flaws and grossly misleading distortions, however, at least the "Emperor" movie led to the writing of a real inquiry into the life of Shields Green, an often forgotten Harper's Ferry raider.

* The Untold Story of Shields Green: The Life and Death of a Harper's Ferry Raider (NYU Press, 2020; an audio version read by Bill Quinn has been published by Tantor, and is available on Audible and Audiobooks.com.

Hey friends, click on this link to get your JOHN BROWN TODAY Podcast Mug!

Feedback?
https://www.speakpipe.com/JOHNBROWNTODAY

Support the show

Send us Fan Mail

In this episode, Lou takes a "deep dive" on understanding John Brown as a person, from describing his physical and personality traits to an extended discussion about Brown's religious views and his inclination to take up for the underdog.  Arguing that Brown certainly is different from popular portrayals, Lou unpacks a biographer's perspective on "the Old Man" that challenges some conventional notions and introduces new insights to a man that is typically misrepresented as unbalanced, angry, and deeply violent.  This is a marathon, but one worth running.  Interested listeners can find many of the themes discussed here in Lou's compact but substantive study, John Brown: The Cost of Freedom (2007).

Hey friends, click on this link to get your JOHN BROWN TODAY Podcast Mug!

Feedback?
https://www.speakpipe.com/JOHNBROWNTODAY

Support the show

Send us Fan Mail

In this episode, Lou discusses the hostile book about John Brown by the late scholar, Otto Scott, The Secret Six: John Brown and the Abolitionist Movement.  Scott was a skillful researcher and writer who devoted his life to working for the corporate world, but contributed heavily to racist, right-wing, and white nationalist Christians. His work on Brown is a screed, a work of propaganda that is based on discredited sources and fashioned to suit the agenda of racists and neo-Confederates, but still circulates among conservatives today, especially Christian Reconstructionists and romancers of the so-called Confederate past.  Scott considered Brown a "fool" among several other historical figures he considered despicable, and blamed him as one of a number of historical figures who essentially ruined the present.  Scott's Secret Six is perhaps the worst contemporary work on John Brown and continues to contaminate the public conversation on the abolitionist movement in context.
-------
Lou would like to acknowledge the scholar Edward H. Sebesta, who provided him with copies of some of Otto Scott’s contributions to neo-Confederate publications, especially the Southern Partisan.  Sebesta’s blog is Anti-Neo-Confederate.  He is the co-editor of Neo-Confederacy: A Critical Introduction (University of Texas Press, 2008)  and  Pernicious: The Neo-Confederate Campaign against Social Justice in America (Dallas: Third American Revolution Press, 2016).

Hey friends, click on this link to get your JOHN BROWN TODAY Podcast Mug!

Support the show

Send us Fan Mail

In this episode, Lou shares the climaxing chapter in John Brown's story--his death, and tells how his body was carried to Philadelphia, Pa., in route to burial in the Adirondacks.  Centering the story on Philadelphia, Lou reflects on Brown's previous visits to the City of Brother Love, including the decisive role that Frederick Douglass played in Brown's disappointed effort to enlist free black men from the city.  Reflecting on matters of race, too, this episode provides a glimpse of the controversy in the North that immediately followed Brown's execution, and the influence that the South had upon the North in the antebellum era.  This episode is based on a presentation that Lou made at the Historical Society of Pennsylvania on Dec. 2, 2009 in commemoration of the 150th anniversary of the Harper's Raid and John Brown's execution. An annotated transcript of this essay is available on John Brown Today: A Biographer's Blog, at https://bit.ly/decoycoffin.

Hey friends, click on this link to get your JOHN BROWN TODAY Podcast Mug!

Feedback?
https://www.speakpipe.com/JOHNBROWNTODAY

Support the show

Send us Fan Mail

In this episode, Lou considers one of the most controversial themes in the John Brown story: the Pottawatomie killings of May 1856. Lou argues that there is a standard bias in the way many narrators deal with the controversial Kansas episode, when Brown and his men killed five proslavery neighbors along the Pottawatomie Creek.  All too often, popular narratives on Brown have barely begun before the "Pottawatomie massacre" is invoked, reinforcing notions of Brown as a "terrorist." As a biographer, Lou argues to the contrary: John Brown was a counter-terrorist and the Pottawatomie episode cannot be correctly understood without a consideration of the political conditions of territorial Kansas in the spring of 1856, and the particular challenges and hazards faced by the Browns, who were notorious, even among free state settlers, for being radical abolitionists and advocates of black equality. The argument is not to beautify the Pottawatomie killings, but to see them for what they were, and to understand why principled and religious men like John Brown and his party chose to make such an extreme response.

Hey friends, click on this link to get your JOHN BROWN TODAY Podcast Mug!

Feedback?
https://www.speakpipe.com/JOHNBROWNTODAY

Support the show

Send us Fan Mail

In this episode, we explore the origins of "The Battle Hymn of the Republic," reflecting upon the myths and realities of the "white liberal" abolitionist orientation of writer Julia Ward Howe and the pacifist abolitionist elites, and their motivations for rewriting "The John Brown Song." Viewing the "The Battle Hymn" as an intentional replacement on the part of the abolitionists, we consider the raw liberationist ethos of "The John Brown Song" and why it was replaced, and the significance of its mythology in our own thinking about the antebellum and  Civil War eras.  Drawing upon the searing analysis of Malcolm X and the 1963 March on Washington, DeCaro draws his own conclusions about what happened to "The John Brown Song" and why.  This narrative is based upon an essay from  DeCaro's book, John Brown, Emancipator.

Hey friends, click on this link to get your JOHN BROWN TODAY Podcast Mug!

Feedback?
https://www.speakpipe.com/JOHNBROWNTODAY

Support the show

Send us Fan Mail

In this episode, we meet the forgotten journalist, Edward "Ned" House, who was the clandestine reporter for Horace Greeley's New York Daily Tribune at the time the paper was banned in Virginia following John Brown's raid on Harper's Ferry.  Tribune, an antislavery Bohemian, worked as the Tribune's theater critic, but because he held Democratic party credentials, he was able to go to Charlestown and cover John Brown's last days, from late October until the day of the abolitionist's hanging.  House filed reports secretly, smuggling most of them and risking discovery by an angry proslavery community that wanted Brown and his men dead, trial or not.  Reflecting his detailed account, Freedom's Dawn: The Last Days of John Brown in Virginia (Rowman & Littlefield, 2015), DeCaro provides a glimpse of Ned House's brave and unsung role in documenting John Brown's final weeks as a prisoner with clarity, detail, and wit--all at the expense of slaveholding society--and in defense of the freedom of the press.

Hey friends, click on this link to get your JOHN BROWN TODAY Podcast Mug!

Feedback?
https://www.speakpipe.com/JOHNBROWNTODAY

Support the show