The Afterlife of John Brown This page intentionally left blank The Afterlife of John Brown Edited by Andrew Taylor and Eldrid Herrington THE AFTERLIFE OF JOHN BROWN © Andrew Taylor and Eldrid Herrington, 2005. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. First published in 2005 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN™ 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010 and Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire, England RG21 6XS Companies and representatives throughout the world. PALGRAVE MACMILLAN is the global academic imprint of the Palgrave Macmillan division of St. Martin’s Press, LLC and of Palgrave Macmillan Ltd. Macmillan® is a registered trademark in the United States, United Kingdom and other countries. Palgrave is a registered trademark in the European Union and other countries. ISBN 1–4039–6992–2 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data The afterlife of John Brown / edited by Andrew Taylor and Eldrid Herrington. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 1–4039–6992–2 1. Brown, John 1800–1859—Influence. 2. Brown, John 1800–1859— Public opinion. 3. Public opinion—United States. 4. Brown, John 1800–1859—In literature. 5. American literature—History and criticism. 6. Abolitionists—United States—Biography—Miscellanea. I. Taylor, Andrew, 1968– II. Herrington, Eldrid. E451.A33 2005 973.7Ј114—dc22 2005048677 A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Design by Newgen Imaging Systems (P) Ltd., Chennai, India. First edition: December 2005 10987654321 Printed in the United States of America. Contents Notes on Contributors vii Acknowledgments x List of Illustrations xi Introduction: The Anguish None Can Draw 1 Eldrid Herrington 1. Black People’s Ally, White People’s Bogeyman: A John Brown Story 11 Louis A. DeCaro, Jr. 2. “The Blood of Millions”: John Brown’s Body, Public Violence, and Political Community 27 Franny Nudelman 3. John Brown, Bearded Patriarch 57 Jean Libby 4. “Earth Feels the Time of Prophet-Song”: John Brown and Public Poetry 69 Joe Lockard 5. Consenting to Violence: Henry David Thoreau, John Brown, and the Transcendent Intellectual 89 Andrew Taylor 6. Transforming the “Madman into a Saint”: The Cultural Memory Site of John Brown’s Raid on Harper’s Ferry in Antislavery Literature and History 107 Kristen Proehl 7. Meteor of War: The John Brown Cycle 121 John Stauffer and Zoe Trodd 8. Transatlantic Spartacus 145 Janine C. Hartman vi CONTENTS 9. W.E.B. Du Bois’s John Brown: Placing Racial Justice at the Center of a Socialist Politics 159 Julie Husband 10. “I see your mouth calling / before the words arrive”: Muriel Rukeyser’s “The Soul and Body of John Brown” and 1930s America 173 Bruce A. Ronda 11. John Brown and Children’s Literature 187 Tyler Hoffman 12. More Heat than Light: The Legacy of John Brown in Russell Banks’s Cloudsplitter 203 Kimberly Rae Connor Works Cited 225 Index 239 Notes on Contributors Kimberly Rae Connor teaches various topics in American Studies at the University of San Francisco. She is the author of Conversions and Visions in the Writings of African American Women (University of Tennessee Press, 1995) and Imagining Grace: Liberating Theologies in the Slave Narrative Tradition (University of Illinois Press, 2000), which was selected by Choice as an outstanding academic title for 2000. She is also the editor for the Academy Series, a joint publishing venture of the American Academy of Religion and Oxford University Press. Louis A. DeCaro, Jr. is a religious educator, lecturer, and an independent scholar. He holds graduate degrees from New York University and Westminster Theological Seminary, and a PhD from New York University. He is the author of “Fire from the Midst of You”: A Religious Life of John Brown (New York University Press, 2002), as well as On the Side of My People: A Religious Life of Malcolm X (New York University Press, 1996), and Malcolm and the Cross: The Nation of Islam, Malcolm X, and Christianity (New York University Press, 1998). He is also a contributor to New York Glory: Religions in the City, edited by Tony Carnes and Anna Karpathakis (New York University Press, 2001), and coeditor of Signs of Hope in the City: Ministries of Community Renewal (Judson Press, 1999). Janine C. Hartman is Professor of History at the University of Cincinnati. Her translation of Joseph Déjacque’s utopian novel L’Humanisphère is forthcoming. Her next project is the spiritualist press trance narratives of the American Civil War. Eldrid Herrington is a professor of English literature at University College Dublin and a recipient of an AAS National Endowment of the Humanities Fellowship and a Government of Ireland Fellowship for the forthcoming book Civil War, Revision, and Self-Representation. Tyler Hoffman is Associate Professor and Director of Graduate Studies in the Department of English at Rutgers University-Camden. His book, Robert Frost and the Politics of Poetry, was published in 2001 by the viii NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS University Press of New England. He has published essays on a range of modern American poets and is currently working on a book on John Brown. He is the editor of the electronic American Studies journal The Mickle Street Review and the associate editor of The Robert Frost Review. Julie Husband is Assistant Professor of nineteenth-century American literature at the University of Northern Iowa. She is the coauthor of Daily Life in the Industrial United States: 1870–1900 (Greenwood Press, 2004) and has published essays on Frederick Douglass, Lydia Maria Child, the antebellum writings of factory women, and Philip Roth. Her recent work focuses upon the adaptation of antislavery rhetoric and icons to speak about northern class relations in the antebellum era. Jean Libby is a retired instructor of U.S. History and African American History at community colleges in northern California. She has published widely on John Brown and African Americans in the raid at Harper’s Ferry, and on the restoration of the John Brown farmhouse in Maryland and John Brown’s family in California. Her photo chronology of daguerreo- types of John Brown prepared with analysis by Eileen Barrow of the Forensics Anthropology and Computer Enhancement Services (FACES) Laboratory at Louisiana State University has been published in The Daguerreian Annual 2002–2003. Joe Lockard is Assistant Professor of English at Arizona State University, where he teaches early American and African American literatures. His research interests lie in narratives of U.S. slavery and he directs the Antislavery Literature Project. He is a member of the Bad Subjects Collective. Franny Nudelman is Associate Professor of English and American Studies at the University of Virginia. She is the author of John Brown’s Body: Slavery, Violence, and the Culture of War (University of North Carolina Press, 2004). Kristen Proehl is a PhD student in the American Studies Program at the College of William and Mary. Her primary areas of research include nineteenth-century literature, gender and violence in American culture, and collective memory of the civil war era. Bruce A. Ronda is Professor of English and chair of the English Department at Colorado State University, where he also served as the founding director of the American Studies Program. He is the author of Elizabeth Palmer Peabody, A Reformer on Her Own Terms (Harvard University Press, 1999) and The Letters of Elizabeth Palmer Peabody, American Renaissance Woman (Wesleyan University Press, 1984). He has also published a study of Harvard child psychiatrist and social critic Robert Coles and essays on nineteenth-century American literature and NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS ix culture. He is working on a book-length manuscript called “Reading the Old Man: John Brown in American Culture.” John Stauffer is Professor of English, History of American Civilization, and African and African American Studies at Harvard University. His first book, The Black Hearts of Men: Radical Abolitionists and the Transformation of Race (Harvard University Press, 2002), received four major awards, includ- ing the Frederick Douglass Book Prize, the Avery Craven Book Prize, and the Lincoln Prize runner-up. He recently published the Modern Library edition of Frederick Douglass’s My Bondage and My Freedom; is the coedi- tor (with Zoe Trodd) of Meteor of War: The John Brown Story (Brandywine Press, 2004); and the coeditor (with Tim McCarthy) of Millennial Vistas: New Essays on American Abolitionists. His forthcoming book, which explores the possibility of racial equality, is called Dreaming of Democracy: American Interracial Friendships in History and Myth. Andrew Taylor teaches American Literature at the University of Edinburgh. His book, Henry James and the Father Question, was published by Cambridge University Press in 2002. He has published articles on a variety of subjects in nineteenth-century literature, and is currently working on a book project called “Thinking America: the Nation State and the Nineteenth-Century Public Intellectual.” He is also the coeditor of the Edinburgh Series in Transatlantic Literatures, published by Edinburgh University Press. Zoe Trodd is in the History of American Civilization PhD program at Harvard, and also has a degree in English Literature from Cambridge University. She has published Meteor of War: The John Brown Story (with John Stauffer), and her book American Protest Literature is forthcoming with Harvard University Press. She has won numerous prizes for her writing and teaching, and edits an annual anthology of African folklore for the Zamani Foundation. Acknowledgments The editors are grateful to Oxford University Press and the University of North Carolina Press for permission to reprint Franny Nudelman’s essay “ ‘The Blood of Millions’: John Brown’s Body, Public Violence, and Political Community.” This essay first appeared in American Literary History 14, no.