John Brown and George Floyd
31 May 2020
Recent events have put me in mind of Harper’s Ferry. If you learned about John Brown and Harper’s Ferry in school, you probably were taught that he was a crazy man who tried to start a slave uprising with the hopes of overthrowing the planter aristocracy of the South and ending slavery. Depending on when you were in school, you may also have learned that he did this because he felt it was his Christian duty to work to end slavery and felt he had exhausted all other options than outright violence. If you don’t remember the story, here’s the short version: On 16 October 1859, John Brown and a group of militant abolitionists (black and white, and three of whom were Brown’s sons) attacked the armory at Harper’s Ferry, Virginia (now West Virginia) with the intent of freeing some slaves in the area and starting a slave uprising. The raid was ended two days later by federal troops under the command of Robert E. Lee. Brown was charged with multiple counts of murder, conspiracy with slaves to produce rebellion, and treason; he was convicted on all charges. On 2 December 1859, he was hanged, becoming a symbol of the antislavery movement for both the northern and southern states.
John Brown’s actions were a breaking point but, as with so many such events, one that could not truly be identified until after the subsequent history had played out. The attack on Harper’s Ferry acted as a catalyst on both sides of the slavery issue. For slave owners, it proved correct their fears that abolitionists wanted them destroyed and were willing to kill whites to free slaves and to encourage the slaves to do so as well; for abolitionists, it showed the limited nature of their work to this point, whether one agreed with Brown’s deeds or not, he pushed the conversation toward much more radical actions. Mere talk of abolition was no longer radical in comparison to Brown’s willingness to not only kill, but to die, for the cause. Brown’s actions pushed the nascent Republican Party to emphasize its antislavery position and to nominate an abolitionist for the 1860 presidential election. The Civil War that followed killed more Americans than any other conflict in which we’ve participated (so far), and can now be seen as a badge of shame: it took the deaths of a little over 600,000 people in a bloody war before four million people living within the United States were recognized as human beings, not chattel.
Merely recognizing a person’s humanity is insufficient. As Reconstruction began, there was a general public consensus that race-based inherited chattel slavery was wrong, as indicated in the Thirteenth Amendment. But even the Amendment allowed for slavery under a different name, specifically those convicted of a crime. And there was nothing that prevented people from being forced into sharecropping contracts from which they could never extricate themselves, or from signing children to apprenticeships in which they were treated like slaves. And the Amendment did not outlaw vagrancy laws created at local and state levels which were aimed at unemployed blacks. The formerly enslaved were made free, but were not made part of the society.
Then came the question of the elements of citizenship: the vote, equal access to schools and public facilities, security in one’s person and property, and everything else that came with it. The Fourteenth Amendment was supposed to account for these, but even as Jim Crow laws prevented blacks from voting all across the United States (and not just in the former Confederacy), the Constitutionally mandated reduction of representation never happened.
Nor does it end once legal discrimination is ended, because the laws require someone to enforce them, who could not always be found. And even the most judiciously enforced law cannot bring about the change of mind for those determined to maintain a prejudiced view.
These elements are still within living memory—there are people alive today who attended segregated schools, who were refused service in public businesses, who were removed from public transportation because of their skin color, who volunteered to fight (and possibly die) in a war to end the racist fascism of Nazi Germany even though they were the subject of racism while doing so, and who soiled themselves because a “colored” toilet could not be found.
This is why Harper’s Ferry comes to mind. Will the death of George Floyd force a change? Right now, it is easy to say it won’t, because nothing changed after the death of Trayvon Martin, or Tamir Rice, or Sandra Bland, or Eric Garner, or Stephon Clark. Even the assassination of the man who led a civil rights movement in so careful a way as to gain approval of whites, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., could not bring the societal change needed.
The impact of Brown’s raid on Harper’s Ferry was acknowledged fairly quickly—he was blamed for starting the Civil War even before it ended, but his actions were simply the most recent and in a series of events that, looking back, we can connect in a way that one could not at the time. Perhaps future historians will be able to say about George Floyd, “this is when things finally changed. It took protesting, property damage, public violence, and the threat of martial law, but this is the moment that people realized society must change.”
-Chrissie
For further information:
Books:
James Loewen’s Lies My Teacher Told Me.
Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States.
Eric Foner’s The Second Founding.
Websites and articles:
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/john-browns-day-of-reckoning-139165084
https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/features/brown-harpers-ferry-raid
https://www.nps.gov/articles/john-browns-raid.htm
https://www.theatlantic.com/past/docs/issues/1872jul/sanborn.htm
https://www.theatlantic.com/past/docs/issues/1872apr/sanborn.htm
and a podcast:
https://dissidentpeasant.com/2018/07/captain-john-brown-part-1 (this links to the first part of three)