To the Editors:
Professor Willie Lee Rose’s review, “Killing for Freedom,” in the December 3, 1970, issue of the Review makes a statement about Frederick Douglass in his relations with John Brown which leaves a definitely incorrect impression of the Black Abolitionist’s thinking on a crucial issue in the antislavery struggle. It also raises a question as to how carefully Professor Rose read my biography of Douglass which is one of the books under review.
Rose writes in discussing Douglass’s refusal to join John Brown in his raid at Harper’s Ferry: “…one wonders if in fact Douglass was not deterred by a fundamental aversion to real violence.” Yet a basic reason for Douglass’s earlier break with the Garrisonians, made clear in my biography, was precisely that, partly under the influence of Brown, he had concluded that the passive resistance, anti-violence, “moral suasion” ideology of the Garrisonians was inadequate. Douglass did not reject “moral suasion” if that could bring results, but he did now emphasize that in the antislavery battle it was necessary to use any means necessary—including violence.
As early as 1849, he announced that he would “welcome the intelligence tomorrow, should it come, that the slaves had risen in the South, and that the sable arms which had been engaged in beautifying and adorning the South, were engaged in spreading death and devastation.” In 1850, following the passage of the Fugitive Slave Act, Douglass told his people to supply arms to fugitive slaves who came North so that they could defend themselves from slave catchers.
Two years later, he declared publicly: “The only way to make the Fugitive Slave Law a dead letter is to make a half a dozen or more dead kidnappers.” Douglass proudly protected William Parker after the Black leader of the Chester County, Pennsylvania, fugitive slaves had killed Edward Gorsuch, the Maryland slaveholder, in the famous Christiana Riot. Douglass helped Parker escape to Canada, and informed his people that as he left Rochester, Parker had given him the very gun with which he had killed Gorsuch. “I could not look upon them as murderers,” Douglass wrote years later of the men involved in the Christiana Riot, “to me they were heroic defenders of the just rights of men against men-stealers and murderers.”
Two and a half years before Harper’s Ferry, in his celebrated West India Emancipation Speech, in outlining the philosophy of reform, Douglass emphasized that both words and blows were needed in combatting slavery: “If we ever get free from all the oppressions and wrongs heaped upon us, we must pay for their removal. We must do this by labor, by suffering, by sacrifice, and, if needs be, by our lives, and the lives of others.”
Clearly, Frederick Douglass can hardly be described as a man who had “a fundamental aversion to real violence” in the battle to end slavery.
Rose states that I have not asked whether Douglass knew about the Pottawatomie slayings in Kansas. There was nothing in the contemporary writings of Douglass to answer that question, although in Douglass’s eulogy of John Brown at Storer College in 1881, which Professor Rose mentions, he did state that he met Brown often during the latter’s four years of service in Kansas so that it is quite likely that he must have known of the killings at Pottawatomie. However, in an unpublished speech on Brown which I have recently seen, Douglass discusses the Pottawatomie killings and insists that they must be placed in their historical context: “On both sides deeds were done at which humanity shudders and which no man in a normal condition of society can defend. It was war, terrible war, barbarous and bloody war! All that redeems it is that liberty and civilization triumphed over slavery and barbarism!” Thus did Douglass answer the charge of murder against Brown, and, in my judgment, he was correct.
Philip S. Foner
Professor of History
Lincoln University
Lincoln, Pennsylvania
To the Editors:
I have just read Willie Lee Rose’s review, “Killing for Freedom,” in your December 3, 1970, issue, where she intemperately attacks John Brown’s literary sympathizers and especially my recently published John Brown: The Making of a Revolutionary, subtitled “The Story of John Brown in His Own Words and in the Words of Those Who Knew Him,” a shortened version of my John Brown Reader (1959).
Rose accuses pro-Brown biographers of “intellectual blackmail,” and cites my statement that James Malin, author of John Brown and the Legend of Fifty-Six (1942)
…seems unable to forgive the North for having used force against Southern secession, or the Abolitionists for having taught that the abolition of slavery would be a step forward for American society, or the Negro for having believed that his welfare would be furthered by a forceful elimination of slavery.
Is it “blackmail” to note that Malin and other historians who believe that the Civil War was a “needless” war, brought on by the agitation of “fanatic” abolitionists, bear resentment toward those responsible for it? His resentment is evident in his book on pp. 309, 407, and, especially, 475, where he observes that “the negroes [sic] did not understand that they had been duped by the Abolitionists into believing that political, economic and social miracles could be achieved by force of arms.” The real villains were the abolitionists: the blacks—not capable of independent thought?—were “duped.”
Since Malin’s image of Brown as a horse thief and murderer has influenced American historians, including Rose, I should like to note the criticism in my book (pp. 22-23) of his work. After mentioning his errors of fact, and his methodology which, “though it claims to be scientific, is notably lacking in the dispassionate objectivity of the true scientist,” I observed that
…in the reconstruction of the events leading to the Pottawatomie killings in Kansas, the reminiscences of members of the Brown family are arbitrarily excluded. Furthermore, the book is based almost exclusively on the materials available in the files of the Kansas State Historical Society. The important collections of John Brown material owned by other state historical societies, the Library of Congress, college libraries, and authorities on John Brown…are either not used at all or only in a very limited way.
These words were written in 1959. I find that Stephen Oates, in his new biography of Brown (1970), praised by Rose as “the most objective…ever written,” says the same thing, even using my words, on p. 390n.
Rose condemns pro-Brown historians for “the indifference they have shown to Brown’s victims [at Pottawatomie]. Who has asked the names and ages of the slain men, or whether they were guilty of anything, or if they were in fact a threat to other settlers in the region? Louis Ruchames, for example, describes them simply with the opprobrious word “proslavery.’ ” I find it almost impossible to believe that any responsible historian with an elementary knowledge of Brown biographies could make these allegations. Franklin Sanborn, in his Life and Letters of John Brown (1885), devotes an entire chapter to the event, mentions the victims by name, provides biographical information, emphasizes their outrages upon Free-State settlers and concludes that “they had long been plotting with the Missourians, and…Buford’s armed colonists from the South, to exterminate the Free-State settlers….” Richard Hinton, John Brown and his Men (1894), pp. 81-87, and Oswald Garrison Villard, John Brown, 1800-1859, A Biography Fifty Years After (1910 and 1943), provide similar information. In my book the reader will find information about the victims on pp. 31-32, and 202-216.
Rose asserts that I have not answered the charges brought by Malin against Brown. Indeed, my entire book, of which more than 250 pages are devoted to documents by Brown and those who knew him, is a refutation of Malin’s image of Brown as a horse thief and undiscriminating murderer.
She also condemns my “justification” of the Pottawatomie killings. Yet, nowhere in my book do I explicitly justify the killings. I write the following:
There is no doubt that if one judges the killings in isolation from other events of the day, the resulting judgment will be one of condemnation. However, if they are placed within their historical context, a different view will tend to emerge.
My judgment, essentially, is that the accusation of murder against Brown was not justified because there were strong mitigating reasons for the action. There was a state of war in Kansas; an undeclared war by proslavery men, aided by marauding bands from the South, and supported by sheriffs, judges, and the official legislature put into office by terror and electoral fraud. On the other side were the Free-State settlers, at least five of whom had been killed, many beaten, their homes burned and goods stolen by proslavery men.
I describe the situation in my Introduction and support it with documents written at the time of the killings and overlooked even by pro-Brown biographers (pp. 31-33). These include a dispatch from Kansas, May 20, 1856, in the New York Daily Tribune and a letter by the wife of Reverend Samuel Adair, Brown’s brother-in-law, then a resident of Osawatomie, Kansas, which depict the fear of death with which the Free-State settlers in the area lived; and a letter by the Reverend Adair himself. As seen in his letter, the killings were the actions of men goaded to desperation, in fear of their lives and those of their families, retaliating against the enemy closest to them in the hope of stemming the tide of violence around them. I would no more condemn Brown and his men than I would those in the undergrounds of occupied Europe in World War II who retaliated against their own Quislings for cooperating with the Germans, threatening their fellow countrymen and informing upon them.
Rose asserts:
Brown’s concentration on their extirpation [that of slavery and slave-holders], though “intense and unusual for his day” was, in Ruchames’s opinion, “not unusual” when compared to that of William Lloyd Garrison, Wendell Phillips, Theodore Parker, and other great abolitionists.
This too is a fabrication. My original statement read: “Brown’s concentration upon slavery and its evils throughout the latter part of his life, which is the usual reason given for alleging his insanity, was indeed intense and unusual for his day. But it was not unusual when compared….” Brown did not seek the extirpation of slaveholders, only the freeing of the slaves; and I have never defended, nor had reason to defend, Brown’s extirpation of slave-holders. His killing at Pottawatomie was limited to five, equaling the number of Free-State settlers presumably killed, though he could have killed more. His final instruction to his men before attacking Harpers Ferry was to avoid killing except when absolutely necessary in self-defense (his words are reported in my book, p. 252), and his concern for the safety of his prisoners at Harpers Ferry, though he and his men were already surrounded and obviously doomed, do not suggest a murderer.
