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ABSTRACT
Abolitionist John Brown remains a cultural touchstone over 160 years after his execution for leading the Harpers Ferry Raid in October 1859, largely because that event and Brown’s behavior after it played a part in leading the nation into civil war. To understand that legacy and his role in sparking the Civil War, this article examines the discursive field that animated around Brown within the context of the racial sensorium of his time. We argue Brown still attracts interest because he was a distinctive antebellum racial figure who catalyzed major shifts in the country’s racial sensory landscape by offering a mode of radical whiteness grounded in white mobility, the use of violence, electrifying words and deeds, and shockingly bold intimacies with Black people. Ultimately, by examining the discursive field that surrounded Brown from his time in Kansas to after his execution, we demonstrate how his radical sensibilities shifted the somatic politics of racial confrontation in the antebellum period and show that John Brown became an amplifying cultural force through which both Northerners and Southerners felt the question of slavery in new ways.
Correction Statement
This article has been corrected with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.
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No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1 W. E. B. Du Bois, John Brown (New York: Random House, 1909/2001), 224.
2 Blakeslee Gilpin, John Brown Still Lives! (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2011), 50–1.
3 Gordon L. Thomas, “John Brown’s Courtroom Speech,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 48, no. 2 (1962): 295.
4 B. L. Ware and Wil A. Linkugel. “They Spoke in Defense of Themselves: On the Generic Criticism of Apologia,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 59, no. 2 (1973): 273–83; Thomas R. Burkholder, “Symbolic Martyrdom: The Ultimate Apology,” Southern Communication Journal 46, no. 4 (1991): 289–97; and Sharon D. Downey, “The Evolution of the Rhetorical Genre of Apologia,” Western Journal of Communication 57, no. 1 (1993): 42–64.
5 Marouf Hasian, Jr., “Jurisprudence as Performance: John Brown’s Enactment of Natural Law at Harper’s Ferry,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 86, no. 2 (2000): 190.
6 Charles J. G. Griffin “John Brown’s ‘Madness’,” Rhetoric & Public Affairs 12, no. 3 (2009): 369–88.
7 Jeffrey B. Kurtz, “Saving John Brown: Religious Fanaticism and the Dilemma for Rhetorical Scholarship,” Southern Communication Journal 76, no. 4 (2011): 369–88.
8 Anne C. Kretsinger-Harries, “Commemoration Controversy: The Harpers Ferry Raid Centennial as a Challenge to Dominant Public Memories of the U.S. Civil War,” Rhetoric & Public Affairs 17, no. 1 (2014): 70.
9 See Jay P. Childers, “Transforming Violence Into a Focusing Event: A Reception Study of the 1946 Georgia Lynching,” Rhetoric & Public Affairs 19, no. 4 (2016): 571–600.
10 George L. Stearns Testimony, in John Murray Mason and Jacob Collamer, Report of the Select Committee of the Senate Appointed to Inquire Into the Late Invasion and Seizure of the Public Property at Harper’s Ferry, United States Congress, (Washington, D.C., 1860), 242.
11 Megan Poole, “Seeing and Sensing Rhetorically,” Western Journal of Communication 84, no. 5 (2020): 606.
12 Lisa M. Corrigan, Black Feelings: Race, Affect, and the Long Sixties (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2020), xxvii.
13 Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (London: Verso, 2002), 110; Eduardo Bonilla-Silva, “Feeling Race: Theorizing the Racial Economy of Emotions,” American Sociological Review 84, no. 1 (2019): 1.
14 Sara Ahmed, The Cultural Politics of Emotion (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004), 11.
15 Debra Hawhee, “Rhetoric’s Sensorium,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 101, no. 1 (2015), 5.
16 Hawhee, “Rhetoric’s Sensorium,” 5; see also, Lauren Berlant, Cruel Optimism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011).
17 Ahmed, Cultural Politics, 10.
18 Mark M. Smith, How Race is Made: Slavery, Segregation, and the Senses (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2006), 5.
19 Smith, How Race is Made, 4.
20 Erin Rand, “Bad Feelings in Public: Rhetoric, Affect, and Emotion,” Rhetoric & Public Affairs 18, no. 1 (2015): 161.
21 Kirt Wilson, “Interpreting the Discursive Field of the Montgomery Bus Boycott: Martin Luther King Jr.'s Holt Street Address,” Rhetoric & Public Affairs 8, no. 2 (2005): 306.
22 Sachi Sekimoto and Christopher Brown, Race and the Senses: The Felt Politics of Racial Embodiment (London: Bloomsbury, 2020), 42.
23 Sekimoto and Brown, Race and the Senses, 42.
24 Stephen Kantrowitz, More than Freedom: Fighting for Black Citizenship in a White Republic, 1829–1889 (New York: Penguin Books, 2012), 2.
25 See, for instance, Eugene Genovese, Fatal Deception: Slaveholding Paternalism in the Old South (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 2012).
26 Nicole Etcheson, Bleeding Kansas: Contested Liberty in the Civil War Era (Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas, 2004), 75.
27 Du Bois, John Brown, 37.
28 James McPherson, Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), 8.
29 See Stephen Maizlish, A Strife of Tongues: The Compromise of 1850 and the Ideological Foundations of the Civil War (Charlottesville: University of Virginia. 2018).
30 See R. J. M. Blackett, The Captive’s Quest for Freedom: Fugitive Slaves, the 1850 Fugitive Slave Law, and the Politics of Slavery (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2018).
31 Kellie Carter Jackson, Force and Freedom: Black Abolitionists and the Politics of Violence (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2019), 2.
32 James McCune Smith, “Republic of Letters.” Frederick Douglass Paper, Aug. 8, 1856, 7.
33 David S. Reynolds, John Brown, Abolitionist: The Man Who Killed Slavery, Sparked the Civil War, and Seeded Civil Rights (New York: Vintage, 2006), 333.
34 McPherson, Battle Cry, 145.
35 Dale E. Watts, “How Bloody was Bleeding Kansas? Political Killings in Kansas Territory, 1854–1861.” Kansas History: A Journal of the Central Plains 18, no. 2 (1995): 126.
36 Benjamin Quarles, Allies for Freedom & Blacks on John Brown (New York: De Capo, 2001): 13–14.
37 Martha Schoolman, Abolitionist Geographies (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2014).
38 Frederick Douglass, John Brown: An Address (Dover: Morning Star, 1881).
39 John Stauffer, The Black Hearts of Men: Radical Abolitionists and the Transformation of Race (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2001), 170.
40 See Catherine Clinton, Harriet Tubman: The Road to Freedom (New York: Little, Brown and Company, 2004), 125; and Kate Clifford Larson, Bound for the Promised Land: Harriet Tubman, Portrait of an American Hero (New York: Ballantine Books, 2004) 158–60.
41 Quarles, Allies for Freedom, 37–62.
42 Manisha Sinha, The Slave’s Cause: A History of Abolition (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2016), 552.
43 Quarles, Allies of Freedom, 39–40.
44 Louis A. DeCaro, Jr., “Black People’s Ally, White People’s Boogeyman: A John Brown Story” in The Afterlife of John Brown, ed. Andrew Taylor and Eldrid Herrington (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), 11.
45 Du Bois, John Brown, 7.
46 Sara Ahmed, The Promise of Happiness (Durham: Duke University Press, 2010), 230 n1.
47 Corrigan, Black Feelings, xxix.
48 Rand, “Bad Feelings,” 175.
49 John Brown, “Provisional Constitution and Ordinances for the People of the United States,” in John Brown’s Raid on Harpers Ferry: A Brief History with Documents, Jonathan Earle (Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2008), 66.
50 George M. Frederickson, The Black Image in the White Mind: The Debate on Afro-American Character and Destiny, 1817–1914 (New York: Harper & Row, 1971), 101.
51 Frederickson, Black Image, 101.
52 Naomi Greyser, On Sympathetic Grounds: Race, Gender, and Affective Geographies in Nineteenth-Century North America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2018), 4.
53 Herman Melville, Battle-Pieces and Aspects of the War (Amherst: Prometheus Books, 2001), 41.
54 R. Blakeslee Gilpin, John Brown Still Lives! America’s Long Reckoning with Violence, Equality, & Change (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2011), 29.
55 Halstead, Murat. “Tragedy of John Brown.” The Independent. Dec. 1, 1898, pp. 1543.
56 “Cap. John Brown.” National Defender. November 1, 1859. P. 2.
57 “Letter from Hon. C. L. Vallandingham—Harper’s Ferry Insurrection,” Dayton Daily Empire, Oct. 25, 1859, 1.
58 William Lloyd Garrison, “The Tragedy at Harper’s Ferry,” The Liberator, October 28, 1859, 170.
59 This actually comes from the Toronto Globe, although we cite it in Landon, Fred. “Canadian Negroes and the John Brown Raid.” Journal of Negro History 6, no. 2 (1921):174–82.
60 Fred Landon, Ontario’s African-Canadian Heritage: Collected Writings by Fred Landon, 1918–1967 (Toronto: Dundurn, 2009), 177.
61 Christina Zwarg, The Archive of Fear: White Crisis and Black Freedom in Douglass, Stowe, and Du Bois (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020).
62 Griffin, “John Brown’s Madness,” 372.
63 “Where the Responsibility Belongs”, Chicago Press and Tribune, October 20, 1859, 2.
64 Oswald Garrison Villard, John Brown, 1800–1859: A Biography Fifty Years After (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1910), 46.
65 Franklin Benjamin Sanborn, The Life and Letters of John Brown, Liberator of Kansas and Martyr of Virginia (Boston, Roberts Bros., 1891), 131.
66 Thomas Wentworth Higginson, “A Visit to John Brown’s Household,” 62.
67 Gerrit Smith, Letter to Brown, Dec. 30, 1856.
68 Untitled Editorial, Pittsburgh Gazette, December 3, 1859, 2.
69 “Harper’s Ferry Outbreak,” New York Herald, October 21, 1859, 1.
70 “Speech of Governor Wise at Richmond,” New York Herald, October 26, 1859, 1.
71 Richard Realf, “John Brown’s Raid,” New York Times, February 10, 1860, 5.
72 Wendell Phillips, “Lesson of the Hour,” in Echoes of Harper’s Ferry, ed. James Redpath (Boston: Thayer and Eldridge, 1860), 55.
73 Andrew Johnson, “Remarks to the Senate,” The Congressional Globe. 36th Congress, 1st Session, December 12, 1859, 107.
74 Johnson, “Remarks to the Senate,” 106.
75 Kansas Weekly Herald, June, 21, 1856, 1.
76 William Phillips, The Conquest of Kansas, by Missouri and Her Allies, (Boston: Phillips, Sampson and Company, 1856), 332.
77 D. H. Strother, “The Trial of the Conspirators,” Harper’s Weekly, November 12, 1859, 730.
78 Henry David Thoreau, “A Plea for Captain John Brown,” in Echoes of Harper’s Ferry, ed. James Redpath (Boston: Thayer and Eldridge, 1860), 30.
79 Thoreau, “A Plea,” 30.
80 Garrison, “The Tragedy at Harper’s Ferry,” 170.
81 Victor Hugo, “Letters of Victor Hugo,” in Echoes of Harper’s Ferry, ed. James Redpath (Boston: Thayer and Eldridge, 1860), 101.
82 Douglass, John Brown, 9.
83 Douglass, John Brown, 10.
84 A Tribute of Respect, Commemorative of the Worth and Sacrifice of John Brown, of Ossawatomie (Cleveland, OH: Wentworth Press, 1859), 17.
85 Tribute of Respect, 18.
86 “Speech of Rev. J. S. Martin,” The Liberator, December 9, 1859, p. 2.
87 “Speech of Rev. J. S. Martin.”
88 Phillips, “Lesson of the Hour,” 56.
89 Moncure D. Conway, “Sermon of Rev. M. D. Conway,” in Echoes of Harper’s Ferry, ed. James Redpath (Boston: Thayer and Eldridge, 1860), 353.
90 Mason and Collamer, Report of the Select Committee, 12.
91 Tribute of Respect, 18.
92 Asia Booth Clarke, John Wilkes Booth: A Sister’s Memoir (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1996), 124.
93 As quoted in, Du Bois, John Brown, 174.
94 William A. Phillips, “Lecture by William A. Phillips,” in Echoes of Harper’s Ferry, ed. James Redpath (Boston: Thayer and Eldridge, 1860), 377–8.
95 Phillips, “Lecture,” 383.
96 Noel Ignatiev and John Garvey, ed., Race Traitor (New York: Routledge, 1996); see also, Lisa A. Flores & Dreama G. Moon, “Rethinking Race, Revealing Dilemmas: Imagining a New Racial Subject in Race Traitor,” Western Journal of Communication 66, no. 2 (2002): 181–207.
97 James Redpath, “Notes on the Insurrection,” The Liberator, November 4, 1859, 173.
98 Quarles, Allies, 171.
99 Shawn Leigh Alexander, An Army of Lions: The Civil Rights Struggle Before the NAACP (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012), 273.
100 Alexander, An Army, 273.
101 “The Niagara Movement,” Alexander’s Magazine, September 15, 1906, p. 19.
102 See, Robert Penn Warren, John Brown: The Making of a Martyr (New York: Payson & Clarke, 1929).
103 Malcolm X, By Any Means Necessary (New York: Pathfinder, 1970), 126.
104 Reynolds, John Brown, 503.