John Brown October 16, 2012
Posted by WorldbyStorm in Uncategorized.trackback
A guest post from CL on the occasion of the anniversary of John Brown’s raid on Harper’s Ferry.
Early one morning in 1859 Lewis Sheridan Leary, a 25-year old free black man in Oberlin Ohio, saddled up his horse and told his wife he would be gone for a while. A few weeks later he was killed taking part in John Brown’s raid on the U.S armory in Harpers Ferry.
Sheridan Leary’s wife re-married and in time it became her responsibility to raise her grandson, Langston Hughes, who grew up to be a writer. In 1931 he wrote this poem.
October 16
Perhaps
You will remember
John Brown.John Brown
Who took his gun,
Took twenty-one companions
White and black,
Went to shoot your way to freedom
Where two rivers meet
And the hills of the
North
And the hills of the
South
Look slow at one another-
And died
For your sake.Now that you are
Many years free,
And the echo of the Civil War
Has passed away,
And Brown himself
Has long been tried at law,
Hanged by the neck,
And buried in the ground-
Since Harpers Ferry
Is alive with ghosts today,
Immortal raiders
Come again to town-Perhaps
You will recall…
John Brown.——-Langston Hughes.
John Brown was influenced by the Haitian revolution, by the Maroon communities formed by escaped slaves in Jamaica, and by slave uprisings in the U.S. He believed that only a violent struggle could overthrow slavery. His raid on Harpers Ferry was an attempt to instigate such an uprising.
John Brown was hanged in December 1859. A little over 3 years later, in January 1863, President Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation.
Thanks for this post. And the chance to reread Hughes’ wonderful poem. Being American born, I only wish that the rest of the world could gain more insight into the profound progressive currents that run through the history of the American people. That these progressive currents were religiously inspired, and fundamentalist religion at that, puts a different perspective on general coverage of religion in the US today – extremist groups attacking evolution, science, and the 20th century in general while waiting for the end of the world. John Brown, himself, may have had personal flaws but that shouldn’t blind us to the thousands, hundreds of thousands, of Sheridan Learys who throughout American and world history fought for the simple right not to be owned, something that has, or should have, great resonance today. Truly as the Civil War song has it, John Brown’s ‘soul’s marching on’. It marches still.
In a way it’s strange – and perhaps an indication of how capital has predominated – that an entire history and a legacy of progressive activism and success in part has been broadly wiped from the consciousness of the world in that respect.
http://www.yale.edu/glc/john-brown/mcdaniel-abstract.pdf
For the Irish connection. Webb from Waterford and an MP deserves to be remembered.O’Connell was good on slavery as well.
Though before we get carried away with the national self congratulation it might be worth noting that John Mitchel was virulently pro slavery and that the 1863 draft riots saw large numbers of Irish Americans in New York attack black people, killing over a hundred of them.
http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/new_hibernia_review/v005/5.1ferreira.html
ntereIsting article on Douglas with lots of references to Ireland
[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jso1YRQnpCI&w=420&h=315%5D
Bloody WordPress. Anyway, the above is Pete Seeger singing ‘John Brown’s Body’.
I prefer this version.
Great post.
Relatedly to this, there were far more pro-Union and pro-Abolitionist
white Southerners than most people know about – such
as Sarah and Angelina Grimkén the “abolitionist sisters” , and
John Aughey, the Mississippi preacher and
author of “The Iron Furnace or Slavery and Secession”.
It’s all in David Williams’ excellent book
“A People’s History of the Civil War: Struggles for the Meaning of Freedom”.
Thanks for that reference:
Book News
Directly inspired by the approach to history demonstrated by Howard Zinn in the popular A People’s History of the United States, Williams (history, Valdosta State U.) explores the role of “common folk” in shaping the Civil War and the many civil wars of social and economic cleavage and conflict that existed during the wider conflict. He describes class conflict along the battlefront, efforts of African-American slaves and freedmen to make the Civil War serve their need for emancipation and equality, Native American reactions to the war, and women’s experiences and social struggles. Annotation ©2006 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)
Every state in the South except one sent troops North to fight for th union. There were counties like West irginia all the way down.here is a mention of it in “To kill a mocking bird”. guy called Harrison wrote a bio of Webb. He eserves remembrance.
I read an excellent book some years ago: “Lincoln’s Loyalists – Union soldiers from the confederacy” by Richard Nelson Current, which dealt with this issue. In his chapter on the ‘galvanized yankees’ – confederate prisoners – who joined the union army, he quotes the commandant of Camp Butler in Illinois as follows:
“The prisoners of war now confined at Camp Butler are principally from regiments raised in and about Texas. A large number are of Irish, German and Polish nationality. They state that they were conscripted and forced into the rebel army against their will ……… They are willing to take the oath of allegiance and fight for the Union…”