Extremism in the Defense of Liberty: Henry David Thoreau & John Brown

Gary Grieve-Carlson

ABSTRACT

Thoreau’s best-known essay, “Resistance to Civil Government” (1849), is regularly linked to the nonviolent civil disobedience of Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr. However, the argument he develops in that essay leads very smoothly into two subsequent arguments that plainly endorse violence: “Slavery in Massachusetts” (1854) and “A Plea for Captain John Brown” (1859). In “Resistance” Thoreau concedes that following one’s conscience may lead to bloodshed; in “Slavery” he defends Thomas Wentworth Higginson’s attack on the Boston courthouse where a fugitive slave was being held (a U.S. marshal was killed in the attack), and in the “Plea” he endorses Brown’s attack at Harpers Ferry. In this essay I trace Thoreau’s thinking on “resistance to civil government” from the hypothetical bloodshed in the essay of that title to his defense of Higginson in “Slavery” and then to his endorsement of the Calvinist Brown, who believed that bloodshed was the only means of redeeming the nation from the sin of slavery. In defending Brown’s violent extremism, Thoreau creates an intellectual template for the defense of other kinds of vigilante violence, and the wide-ranging and vigorous moral imagination that we find in Thoreau’s earlier work is constricted in the “Plea” to a rigid moral absolutism.

In his acceptance speech at the 1964 Republican national convention, Bar- ry Goldwater proclaimed that “extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice.” American voters rejected Goldwater’s extremism—a militaristic anticommunism so confident in the justice of its cause that a nuclear first strike seemed a real possibility—in one of the most lopsided elections in the nation’s history. In April 1963 Martin Luther King, Jr., in his “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” deflected the charge of extremism leveled against him by claiming that, like Jesus Christ, he was “an extremist for love.” It is easy to forget how many people saw King as a dangerous extremist in 1963, but King’s principled nonviolence eventually won a majority of Americans to his position. Elise Lemire’s claim that Thoreau’s “Resistance to Civil Government” (1849) “inspired freedom movements around the globe to use civil disobedience as a means of protesting injustice” is widely acknowledged (6), and both King and Gandhi cite Thoreau’s essay as seminal to their programs of nonviolent civil disobedience. But nowhere in “Resistance” does Thoreau advocate nonviolence; in fact, he concedes that resistance may lead to bloodshed, and in the following decade he supports violent opposition to the Fugitive Slave Law as well as John Brown’s violence in Kansas and at Harp- ers Ferry. In his essay on Thoreau in Can These Bones Live, Edward Dahlberg writes, “We cannot perceive what we canonize” (13), and in this essay I will argue that Thoreau’s powerful opposition to American slavery and its enabling institu- tions has led to his canonization, thus preventing many of us from perceiving that 322 Gary Grieve-Carlson although his position on slavery aligns clearly with King’s position on civil rights, his sweeping endorsement of violence aligns just as clearly with the “shoot-first” politics of right-wing extremists like Goldwater.

“Resistance to Civil Government” and “Slavery in Massachusetts”

“Resistance to Civil Government” presents as the central example of its thesis Thoreau’s refusal to pay his poll tax in opposition to his government’s policies on slavery. Thoreau stopped paying the yearly tax in 1842 but was not arrested until 1846, when he went to jail rather than pay the tax (as he tells us in the essay, he spent only one night in jail because someone paid the tax for him, against his wishes). Like many abolitionists, Thoreau saw the annexation of Texas in 1845 and the Mexican War (1846-48) as major steps toward the expansion of slavery, and much of his essay is a rebuke to the presumed justice of majority rule. Tho- reau tells us that the majority govern “not because they are most likely to be in the right … but because they are physically the strongest.” He goes on to assert that the individual conscience is always a more reliable guide to what’s right than are the laws passed by majority rule, and that a citizen ought never “resign his conscience to the legislator.” In fact, Thoreau argues, “The only obligation which I have a right to assume is to do at any time what I think right,” for “any man more right than his neighbors, constitutes a majority of one already” (416, 417, 421). Although there is more than a whiff of anarchism about these remarks, we ac- knowledge their force with regard to issues such as racism and slavery. Abolition- ism was highly controversial even in the North, where abolitionist speakers were sometimes confronted with mob violence, and Thoreau reminds us forcefully that the majority is not always right, nor are laws always just. The next step in the argument is that, faced with an unjust law, a just citizen ought to break it rather than obey it. Merely to believe that slavery is wrong, or to vote for abolitionist candidates, is not enough: one must engage in “[a]ction from principle—the perception and the performance of right.” This is precisely what Gandhi, King, and their followers do so effectively, but Gandhi and King rely on the majority’s ability to recognize that the laws they are being arrested for break- ing, and the state’s violence against those who break such laws, are unjust. Tho- reau holds no such confidence in the majority. The majority, he writes, will obey the law rather than their conscience because it is more expedient to obey the law, and in distancing himself from the majority, he questions whether they are “[m]en at all,” for in ignoring their conscience they “put themselves on a level with wood and earth and stones” (420, 417). The moral elitism in this claim is amplified when Thoreau considers the question of how we know the truth about what is just or unjust: “They who know of no purer sources of truth,” Thoreau tells us, “who have traced up its stream no higher, stand, and wisely stand, by the Bible and the Constitution, and drink at it there with reverence and humility; but they who behold where it comes trick- ling into this lake or that pool, gird up their loins once more, and continue their pilgrimage toward its fountain-head” (428). Thoreau asks us to imagine truth as Extremism in the Defense of Liberty 323 a stream flowing down a mountainside, forming lakes or pools in its descent, and the truth-seeker as a person who climbs that mountain and follows the stream. In Thoreau’s image, each of us is climbing that mountainside, and each of us could potentially climb higher and, to shift metaphors, come into deeper contact with the divinity within ourselves that gives our conscience its moral discernment. Thoreau shares Emerson’s confidence in the individual’s capacity to know the divinity within oneself, which results in a “self-reliance” with no need for law, religion, or social mores in making moral decisions. Although the majority never climb beyond the Bible and the Constitution, the minority who “continue their pilgrimage” may in good conscience break an unjust law, even if that law is constitutional or Biblically sanctioned, and “even suppos[ing] blood should flow,” for “Is there not a sort of blood shed when a man’s conscience is wounded?” (422). In “Resistance” the bloodshed is hypothetical, and Thoreau behaves entirely civilly when the tax collector arrests him. But things were about to change. The precipitant of that change was the revised Fugitive Slave Law passed as part of the Compromise of 1850, particularly the part of the revised law that re- quired citizens of northern states to assist, if requested, in the capture, custody, and transportation of escaped slaves. Additionally, the South’s defense of slavery where it already existed was turning into an aggressive attempt at expansion into places like Texas and the western territories. Although Britain and Mexico had abolished slavery, for Thoreau and other abolitionists it seemed stronger than ever in the United States. The revised Fugitive Slave Law played out most dramatically in Massachusetts in 1854, when Anthony Burns was captured and tried in Boston. Abolitionists were split over how to respond: William Lloyd Garrison argued for nonviolent protest, but Thomas Wentworth Higginson1 led an armed group to the courthouse where Burns was being held, forced the doors with a battering ram, and attacked police and U.S. marshals inside. Although a deputy marshal was killed, the abolitionists were finally forced back and never reached Burns’s third-floor cell, and Burns was returned to his owner (Wineapple 81-85). The abolitionists’ policy of moral suasion had failed to prevent the Compro- mise of 1850 or the 1854 Kansas-Nebraska Act, which repealed that part of the 1820 Missouri Compromise prohibiting slavery in the western territories north of latitude 36 degrees, 30 minutes. On July 4, 1854, shortly after the passage of the Kansas-Nebraska Act and the trial of Anthony Burns (both of which had occurred in May), Thoreau delivered his lecture “Slavery in Massachusetts,” building on the distinction laid out in “Resistance to Civil Government” between what is legal (or constitutional) and what is morally right or just. In “Slavery” Thoreau seeks to inspire those “who recognize a higher law than the Constitution, or the decision of the majority” (674). Because slavery is morally wrong and unjust, Thoreau asserts that it is simply farcical for the courts to rule on whether a man is or is not a slave, for “this question is already decided from eternity” (664). In words that fore-

1 Higginson was one of the Secret Six who bankrolled John Brown, and later was com- mander of a black regiment that saw action in the Civil War at Port Royal, South Carolina. Still later, he became Emily Dickinson’s literary advisor and editor. 324 Gary Grieve-Carlson shadow his defense of John Brown, Thoreau writes, “They are the lovers of law and order who observe the law when the government breaks it,” and continues: The question is, not whether you or your grandfather, seventy years ago, did not enter into an agreement to serve the Devil [i. e., the Constitution and its implicit acceptance of slavery] … but whether you will not now, for once and at last, serve God,—in spite of your own past recreancy, or that of your ancestor,—by obeying that eternal and only just CONSTITUTION, which He, and not any Jefferson or Adams, has written in your being. (673-74) This passage echoes the image of the mountainside stream in “Resistance to Civil Government” and its truths that are higher than those of the Constitution or Bible, but there is a knot in Thoreau’s reasoning: one might think that if the same “eternal constitution” is inscribed by God into each individual’s being, then conscience ought to be identical in each of us and we all ought to agree on what is good or evil. In fact, Deak Nabers asks how we can possibly “fail to obey what is written in our beings” (838). Although we disagree regularly and deeply on moral questions, Thoreau seems to assume that each of us will recognize the “higher law” when we see it, and that we’ll all agree on what action it requires of us. The fact that an individual conscience like Thoreau’s is so often at odds with the opinion of the majority simply means, for Thoreau, that the majority follows the path of “expediency” and resists or ignores what their conscience tells them. Matthew Stewart suggests that Thoreau’s privileging of the individual conscience would not have persuaded America’s founders, who were functionally unanimous in their conviction that good government … produces virtue by relying not on acts of conscience but on acts of law. As Paine so eloquently puts it in Common Sense, ‘… Were the impulses of conscience clear, uniform, and irresistibly obeyed, man would need no other lawgiver.’ (375) For Thoreau, on the other hand, the individual conscience constitutes “a majority of one.” In “Slavery in Massachusetts” Thoreau calls for the individual to dissolve his union with Massachusetts until the state dissolves its union with the slaveholder, i. e., refuses to comply with the Fugitive Slave Act. He goes beyond passive resistance, however, when he decries “the cowardice and want of principle of Northern men” and defends Higginson and his followers, who are in jail “for attempting to rescue a slave from her [Massachusetts’] own clutches” (678, 663). Thoreau insists that “Whoever can discern truth has received his commission from a higher source than the chiefest justice in the world who can discern only law” (669), and implies that Higginson discerns that higher truth. And if one acts in accordance with that higher truth, how far may one go? “I need not say,” writes Thoreau, “what match I would touch, what system endeavor to blow up; but as I love my life, I would side with the light, and let the dark earth roll from under me” (673). At one level, the moral logic of Thoreau’s position is clear and attractive: race-based slavery is so widespread and so plainly evil as to admit of no compromise—and, as he says in “Resistance,” the “perception” of right must be followed by the “performance” of right, or “action from principle.” But if Higginson was right to attack the Boston courthouse where Anthony Burns was jailed, even though a U.S. marshal was killed Extremism in the Defense of Liberty 325 in the attack, and if holding morally right opinions and voting accordingly are morally insufficient, as Thoreau claims in “Resistance,” then is the speech of nonviolent abolitionists like Garrison or the Quaker John Greenleaf Whittier sufficient action from principle? Thoreau did not go to Boston to try to force the release of Burns, but his family sheltered escaped slaves in their home, and Henry assisted some of these runaways in various ways. What kinds of action did the principle of antislavery require? The case of John Brown would make this abstract question concrete.

“A Plea for Captain John Brown”

Because the Kansas-Nebraska Act stipulated that “popular sovereignty” would decide the issue of slavery in those territories as they attained statehood, each side in the slavery debate tried to move settlers into Kansas, and the conflict soon erupt- ed into violence. Much of that violence was the work of pro-slavery “border ruffians” from Missouri, aimed at intimidating antislavery settlers. In addition to the events of “Bleeding Kansas,” fights over slavery continued on the national stage. In 1856 Congressman Preston Brooks of South Carolina entered the U.S. Senate and, with a metal-tipped cane, delivered a violent, bloody beating to abolitionist Sena- tor Charles Sumner of Massachusetts. In 1857 the Supreme Court ruled in its Dred Scott decision that even free African Americans could never become U.S. citizens, and that the federal government had no right to regulate slavery in the western territories. In October 1859 John Brown, who led the most effective of the antislavery militias in Kansas, seized the federal armory and arsenal at Harpers Ferry, Vir- ginia, and was captured by U.S. Marines under the command of Robert E. Lee. Unlike Garrison and Whittier, John Brown was an abolitionist who was willing to fight against, and not just talk about, the terrible evil of slavery. He has always provoked extreme responses: several weeks after the attack at Harpers Ferry, Ralph Waldo Emerson called Brown a “new saint awaiting his martyrdom, and who, if he shall suffer, will make the gallows glorious like the cross” (D. Reyn- olds, Brown 366). But Nathaniel Hawthorne responded that he never “expect[ed …] to shrink so unutterably from any apothegm of a sage [i. e., Emerson], whose happy lips have uttered a hundred golden sentences, as from that saying (perhaps falsely attributed to so honored a source), that the death of this blood-stained fanatic has ‘made the Gallows as venerable as the Cross!’ Nobody was ever more justly hanged” (397-98). Deification and demonization continue to characterize our discourse on Brown. On December 2, 2009, the 150th anniversary of Brown’s execution, the disagreement between Emerson and Hawthorne was replayed on the op-ed page of The New York Times, with Tony Horwitz calling Brown “a bearded fundamentalist who believed himself chosen by God to destroy the institution of slavery” in a piece provocatively titled “The 9/11 of 1859,” and David Reynolds calling for a presidential pardon for Brown, who as “Freedom’s Martyr” had engaged in a “heroic effort to free four million enslaved blacks.”2

2 Bruce Catton calls Brown “a brutal murderer if ever there was one” (Peterson 148) and “a rover, a ne’er-do-well, wholly ineffectual in everything he did save that he had the knack of 326 Gary Grieve-Carlson

When the news of Harpers Ferry broke, Thoreau was among Brown’s first and most extreme defenders. Thoreau admired Brown for acting against the enormous moral evil of slavery in the face of the state’s repeated failure to address that evil. In the mid-1800s there was no easy solution to the problem of slavery and the insidious racism with which it was entangled. Immediate abolition without compensation to slaveowners, gradual abolition with compensation, colonization—every proposed solution entailed various negative consequences. But for Thoreau, none of those consequences mattered: all that mattered was ending slavery. This became an extremism that led him to endorse, as the most truly moral response to slavery, what John Brown saw as the only means of atonement for the sin of slavery: the redemptive shedding of blood. Brown imagined his audacious raid on Harpers Ferry as the spark that would ignite the war he believed was necessary to end slavery. The Southern response to Brown’s raid was of course negative, but so was much of the immediate North- ern response. Massachusetts Senator Henry Wilson wrote, “If we [Republicans] are defeated next year we shall owe it to that foolish and insane movement of Brown’s” (Woodward 45). Abraham Lincoln called for Republicans not to object to Brown’s execution. Even Garrison’s Liberator at first referred to the raid as “misguided, wild, and apparently insane,” although “well-intended” (Finkelman 41). But eventually, as northern abolitionists came out in support of Brown while southern secessionists grew more convinced of the North’s, and especially the Republican Party’s, hostility, the real impact of the raid was its further polar- ization of an already polarized nation. If the North was defending Brown, went the argument, then wouldn’t it continue to foment slave revolt? Today almost all historians agree that Brown’s raid further radicalized the South and made seces- sion far more likely. Brown believed that war was necessary for the abolition of slavery, but he could not have known whether Harpers Ferry would spark a war, or if it did, whether that war would end slavery. Nobody who argued in 1859 that violence was a morally legitimate means of ending slavery could have known that the Civil War would leave as many as 750,000 dead (Hacker 347-48), at least that many maimed, widowed, or orphaned, the South’s economy and infrastructure shattered, its white population embittered, resentful, and still deeply racist, and its African American population denied important civil rights and consigned to subaltern status for many years to come. This is not to say that Thoreau should have foreseen the future, but rather that nowhere in his writing does he consider the social, political, or economic consequences of an immediate, uncompensated abolition accomplished by war. We drawing an entire nation after him on the road to unreasoning violence” (Richardson 369). In a 1973 letter to Walker Percy, Shelby Foote writes that Brown and John Wilkes Booth were “two madmen, one to start it, another to wind it up” (The Correspondence of Shelby Foote and Walker Percy, ed. Jay Tolson, New York: Norton, 1997: 174). More recently, scholarly opinion seems on the whole far more sympathetic to Brown; see, for example, Louis A. DeCaro Jr.’s “Fire from the Midst of You”: A Religious Life of John Brown (New York UP, 2005), Robert E. McGlone’s John Brown’s War Against Slavery (Cambridge UP, 2009), Evan Carton’s Patriotic Treason: John Brown and the Soul of America (Free Press, 2006), and David S. Reynolds’s John Brown, Abolitionist (Random House, 2005). Extremism in the Defense of Liberty 327 do not typically think of Thomas Jefferson as an abolitionist, for he was a slave- owner and a racist. Nevertheless, in Notes on the State of Virginia (1787) Jefferson writes that slavery encourages “the most unremitting despotism on the one part, and degrading submission on the other… . The man must be a prodigy who can retain his manners and morals undepraved by such circumstances” (205). The moral depravity of slavery violates God’s gift of liberty, argues Jefferson, and its continued existence invites God’s wrath: “Indeed I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just: that his justice cannot sleep forever… . The Almighty has no attribute which can take side with us in such a contest” (205). Jefferson calls for slavery’s gradual abolition, along with the education in “tillage, arts or sciences, according to their geniuses” of young African Americans, and then their eventual colonization, “with arms, implements of household and of the handicraft arts, seeds, pairs of the useful domestic animals, &c.” (197). He acknowledges the expense of this plan, but he defends it by pointing to the “Deep rooted prejudices entertained by the whites” and the “ten thousand recollections, by the blacks, of the injuries they have sustained,” and he predicts that unless the freed slaves are colonized, “new provocations … will divide us into parties, and produce con- vulsions which will probably never end but in the extermination of the one or the other race” (197-98). Jefferson can be criticized on many grounds: he owned several hundred slaves, took one as his mistress for many years, and freed only a handful. His belief that abolition must be followed by either expatriation or a race war is extreme. Yet unlike Thoreau, he recognized the likely consequences of the depth and pervasiveness of white racism for emancipated slaves, as did African American writers like Martin Delany in The Condition, Elevation, Emigration, and Destiny of the Colored People of the United States (1852). For Thoreau, all that mattered was immediate abolition, and if violence was necessary to effect that goal, then he was in support of such violence. As his lecture on Brown’s raid shows, the only consequence he thought about was the end of slavery. On October 19, the day after Brown’s capture, Thoreau began writing about Brown in his journal, and those notes form the basis of “A Plea for Captain John Brown,” the lecture that he delivered in Concord on October 30, 1859.3 David Reynolds calls this lecture a “classic antislavery speech” (“Policy” 52), but rather than an argument, the lecture is a polemic in which Thoreau praises Brown as a

3 Opinion on Brown in Concord was decidedly mixed: Richardson reports that the select- men refused to ring the town bell before Thoreau delivered the “Plea,” so Thoreau rang it himself (370). By the time of Brown’s hanging in December, however, opinion seems to have shifted, and the Concord church bell, along with church bells throughout the North, was tolled in com- memoration. Thoreau delivered the “Plea” again on November 1 before Theodore Parker’s con- gregation at the Tremont Temple in Boston, where he replaced Frederick Douglass, who had fled the country because of suspicion that he was involved with Brown’s Harpers Ferry attack. Thoreau delivered his “Plea” a third time on November 3 at Washburn Hall in Worcester, and in 1860 it was published in James Redpath’s Echoes of Harper’s Ferry, which eventually sold 33,000 copies (Gougeon 195). In addition to the “Plea,” Thoreau delivered a short address titled “After the Death of John Brown” on December 2, 1859, the day of Brown’s execution, at services held at Concord’s Town Hall. Thoreau was invited to speak at a memorial for Brown on July 4, 1860, in North Elba, New York; he was unable to attend but sent an essay titled “The Last Days of John Brown,” based on his journal entries. 328 Gary Grieve-Carlson man who acted on moral principle and attacks all those who criticize him. Much of the “Plea” is simply an attempt to correct what Thoreau sees as one-sided newspa- per coverage: he insists that Brown’s raid was “far from being a wild and desperate attempt” and that Brown’s critics focus too heavily on his tactics rather than his cause (688, 689). Connecting Brown to the “action from principle” argument he lays out in “Resistance” and “Slavery,” Thoreau calls Brown “a transcendentalist above all, a man of ideas and principles” (686) who, in following “the everlasting laws which rightfully bind man… . gave his life to the cause of the oppressed” (706, 695). These are stirring words, but where do they lead? One weakness of Thoreau’s argument is that “action from principle” on its face may cover an extremely wide range of “principles”: states’ rights, white suprem- acist, jihadist, Marxist, and anti-abortion, to name only a few. If an individual conscience endorses any moral principle, then “action” ought to follow. But when Thoreau expands his claim to violent action from principle, its implications grow considerably darker. Thoreau cannot bring himself to believe that those who fight in defense of slavery are truly acting from principle: he claims that in Kansas, “the reason why such greatly superior numbers quailed before [Brown] was, as one of his prisoners confessed, because they lacked a cause—a kind of armor which he and his party never lacked” (688). But Confederate soldiers would fight extremely well against the “greatly superior numbers” of the Union—Thoreau may not have liked their cause, but they certainly believed they had one. Another weakness is Thoreau’s hero-worship of Brown, who, Thoreau tells us, “was like the best of those who stood at Concord Bridge once, on Lexington Com- mon, and on Bunker Hill, only he was firmer and higher-principled than any that I have chanced to hear of as there” (684). Nor was Brown simply more admirable than anyone of the Revolutionary generation: He was a superior man… [who] did not recognize unjust human laws, but resisted them… . No man in America has ever stood up so persistently and effectively for the dignity of human nature… . In that sense he was the most American of us all… . He was more than a match for all the judges that American voters, or officeholders of whatever grade, can create. He could not have been tried by a jury of his peers, because his peers did not exist. (695)

Here Thoreau approaches the terrain of hagiography, and then he crosses the border into that terrain: “Some eighteen hundred years ago, Christ was crucified; this morning, perchance, Captain Brown was hung. These are the two ends of a chain which is not without its links. He is not Old Brown any longer; he is an angel of light” (706). Brown had “as many at least as twelve disciples” with him at Harpers Ferry, and was “sent to be the redeemer of those in captivity… . You who pretend to care for Christ crucified, consider what you are about to do to him who offered himself to be the saviour of four millions of men” (696, 705). Thoreau’s rhetoric is as one-sided as that of Brown’s detractors, establishing the “demonization/deification” pattern that we find persisting in political rhetoric even today. The Brown-as-Christ analogy depicts the hanging of Brown and six of his “disciples” as crucifixion, but it ignores the violence Brown initiated at Harpers Ferry, during which ten of Brown’s men were killed, along with two U.S. marines Extremism in the Defense of Liberty 329 and six civilians (one of whom was a free black man, shot in the back by Brown’s son Watson). We can understand Thoreau’s wish to defend Brown against those who characterize him as foolish, criminal, or insane, but like the polarizing tactics in the broader debate over slavery, Thoreau’s argument sets all of the virtue on the side of Brown and his supporters, and attributes only stupidity, ignorance, or vice to those who criticize Brown’s attack. The journal entries on which the “Plea” is based show us how Thoreau imagined Brown’s opponents: he writes, “The brutish, thick-skinned herd, who do not know a man by sympathy, make haste home from their ballot-boxes and churches to their Castles of Indolence,” and “I speak to the stupid and timid chattels of the north, pretending to read history and their Bibles, desecrating every house and every day they breathe in!” (405, 412). Some of Brown’s detractors were undoubtedly brutish and stupid, but others included Lin- coln, Garrison, and Whittier, whose arguments Thoreau never seriously engages. Thoreau’s principled refusal to pay his poll tax and his willingness to go to jail inspired the nonviolent resistance of King and Gandhi, but the arguments he lays out in “Resistance” (1849) and “Slavery” (1854) complement his argument in the “Plea” (1859). All Americans in 1859 were complicit in the legality of slavery: to obey the law was tacitly to endorse the violence that the state exercised against rebellious or escaped slaves, as well as the violence inherent in the institution of slavery itself. One of Thoreau’s strongest contemporary defenders, Jack Turner, argues that moral suasion had proven “so inadequate to the evil of slavery as to be frivolously self-indulgent,” that stronger action had become “morally impera- tive,” and that Thoreau and Brown had correctly concluded that “there was no hope of destroying American slavery except by bloodshed” (161, 171). In dismiss- ing the antislavery positions of people like Whittier and Lincoln as “frivolously self-indulgent,” Turner captures the appeal of John Brown, who refused to wait for the law to end slavery. The slavery problem was the Gordian knot of American politics, and Brown proposed to cut it with a sword.

Extralegal Violence and Pottawattomie

Most of us recognize the attraction of principled extralegal violence: virtually all readers of Frederick Douglass’s autobiography sympathize with Douglass in his fight against the brutal slave-breaker Edward Covey, just as we celebrate the violent rebellion that led to American independence. Similarly, many contemporary Americans believe that “Brown’s was a just war against an abominable institution” (Heath 223). When we contemplate how, in the fall of 1858, John Brown and his men freed 11 slaves from three Missouri farms and Aaron Stevens killed a farmer who pulled a gun, many of us may sympathize with Stevens, who was acting in order to free the slaves. Frederick Douglass and Theodore Parker defended the use of violence in the antislavery struggle (although Douglass refused to join the Harpers Ferry raid, telling Brown “You’ll never get out alive”), and during the 1850s Garrison, Angelina Grimke Weld, and Wendell Phillips abandoned their insistence on nonviolence. Aaron Stevens never wanted to kill that farmer, just as Higginson never intended the death of that federal marshall in the attempt to free 330 Gary Grieve-Carlson

Anthony Burns. Yet both men were willing to accept those deaths in pursuit of their larger cause, and they would have accepted more. Another problem with principled extralegal violence is that it often spirals into unanticipated directions: Watson Brown never intended to shoot Hayward Shep- herd, the African American baggagemaster at Harpers Ferry, in the back—but he did. In the “Plea” Thoreau states that Brown “commenced the public practice of humanity in Kansas” (685), but not everyone would use the word “humanity” for what occurred at Pottawatomie in May 1856 when, in retaliation for pro-slavery forces’ assault on the free-state capital of Lawrence and the killing of six Free-Soil settlers, Brown and his men killed five unarmed pro-slavery settlers (none of whom actually owned slaves) at Pottawatomie Creek. The five were hacked to death with broadswords. The New York Herald reported that one victim was decapitated and another’s windpipe “entirely cut out” (Trodd & Stauffer 92). The report continued: “some [were found] with a gash in their heads and sides, and their throats cut; others with their skulls split open in two places, with holes in their breasts, and hands cut off; and others had holes through their breasts with their fingers cut off” (Meyer 304). There is some dispute over the extent of the mutilation and whether Brown himself killed any of the five, but he was the organizer and leader of the attack. He never admitted his role in the massacre, but shortly afterwards wrote to his wife and children: “We feel assured that He who sees not as men see, does not lay the guilt of innocent blood to our charge” (Trodd & Stauffer 85). Brown’s defenders have argued that the Pottawatomie raid was provoked by the attack on Lawrence and other Border Ruffian violence. In an exchange of let- ters with Christopher Benfey, David Reynolds justifies the Pottawatomie attack: … of the thirty-six politically related murders known to have been committed in Kansas between 1855 and 1858, twenty-eight were committed by the proslavery side as compared with eight by the antislavery one. In addition, gun-wielding Border Ruffians were taking over polling booths in Kansas and electing fraudulent proslavery legislatures there. But Benfey is not persuaded: Reynolds says the other side committed atrocities, too, committed more of them, and committed them first. That is always the defense for atrocities, in Srebrenica or Syria or, indeed, in the attacks on September 11… . In his book on Brown, Reynolds concedes, twice, that “the Pottawatomie affair was indeed a crime, but it was a war crime… .” Pre- cisely what work, one wonders, is the word “but” doing in this sentence? (Reynolds and Benfey, “Exchange” 22) The question of whether Brown was or was not a terrorist has generated consid- erable heat in recent years, but not much light. What happened at Pottawatomie seems to me an act of terror designed to show all pro-slavery settlers that they could never know when Brown and his men might invade their homes in the mid- dle of the night, pull them from their beds, and hack them to death with swords.4

4 Gary Fine writes, “whether John Brown was a ‘terrorist’ is tricky … his actions have all of the characteristics by which we currently define the term … Brown’s raid has become an image in the arsenal of those who wish radical revolutionary change, including anarchists, Marxists, Eugene Debs, Malcolm X, the Weather Underground (which named their magazine Osawato- mie), and pro-life radicals” (226). Nicole Etcheson writes that “Brown told Franklin Sanborn Extremism in the Defense of Liberty 331

It is also true that what are arguably terror tactics sometimes end in what are arguably positive outcomes: the establishment of the Republic of Ireland, the State of Israel, a majority-governed South Africa. Nelson Mandela is today hailed as a hero, but in 1961 he abandoned his policy of nonviolent resistance to apartheid and formed the paramilitary group Umkhonto we Sizwe (Spear of the Nation) in response to the killings of nonviolent protesters. Spear of the Nation was classi- fied as a terrorist organization by the United States, a decision that illuminates the unstable moral status of extralegal violence. We honor Mandela today, but opinion is far more mixed on groups like the Irish Republican Army or Menachem Begin’s Irgun (cf. the bombing of the King David Hotel in Jerusalem in 1946). Ob- viously the historical context surrounding the beliefs and actions of these groups varies widely, but the salient point is that groups and individuals who are reviled by many for their violence may be understood to act from principle, i. e., in accordance with what their consciences recognize as “higher law.” When Thoreau writes, “The only obligation which I have a right to assume, is to do at any time what I think right… . Law never made men a whit more just; and, by means of their respect for it, even the well-disposed are daily made the agents of injustice” (“Resistance” 417), his “I” applies to each of us, including those Southerners who chose to fight in defense of slavery, or those who find it right to oppose abortion by violent means. Thoreau never seriously considers the possibility that individual consciences may arrive at different moral conclusions, or that moral principles may sometimes conflict with one another. Thoreau’s endorsement of the violence practiced by Higginson and Brown is a function of his confidence that his conscience can always discern moral truth, despite what others believe or what the law states, and his rhetoric can be quite strong: “I quietly declare war with the State,” he writes in “Resistance to Civil Govern- ment” (426). In that same essay he accepts the possibility of bloodshed during acts of resistance to unjust law because a sort of blood is shed when one’s conscience is wounded by such laws, about which Sherman Paul remarks, “Blood was a price he was willing to pay: he was not speaking entirely metaphorically” (243). In “Slav- ery in Massachusetts” Thoreau asserts that Higginson and his men “recognize[d] a higher law than the Constitution, or the decision of the majority,” so their “heroic attack on the Boston Court-House” (674, 675) was entirely justified, despite the killing of a U.S. marshall. In his journals Thoreau writes that the police and marines that it [Harpers Ferry] would strike terror into the slave-owners to discover that an armed force had seized an armory so near the capital” (35) and that Frederick Douglass spoke of “the fear it instilled in slaveholders” (37). She argues that “guerrilla” is a more accurate term than “terrorist” for Brown because terrorists practice “indiscriminate violence” and “do not care if in- nocents die,” but she concedes that Brown “sometimes used terrorist methods” (32). J. C. Oleson argues that “in many ways the criminal acts of Ted Kaczynski are consistent with the ideals of Henry Thoreau” (213), and concludes, “If John Brown’s armed siege on Harper’s Ferry could be justified by his abolitionist ideology, surely Ted Kaczynski’s mail bombings can be justified by his own utopian goal: liberating modern society from the shackles of technology and material- ism… . In all likelihood … Thoreau would have condoned—or quite possibly applauded—Kac- zynski’s acts” (225-26). Lewis Hyde writes that “With both the September 11 attacks and John Brown in Kansas we have violence perpetrated against unarmed combatants … and we have the grandiosity of those who believe the extremity of their actions is sanctioned by God” (136). 332 Gary Grieve-Carlson who enforced the court’s decision, including presumably the U.S. marshall killed in Higginson’s attack, “were not men of sense nor of principle—in a high moral sense they were not men at all” (L. Reynolds 63). In “Slavery in Massachusetts” he writes, “My thoughts are murder to the State, and involuntarily go plotting against her” (678)—in his journal those same lines are followed by these: “I am calculating how many miscreants each honest man can dispose of. I trust that all just men will conspire” (L. Reynolds 63). Several weeks earlier he writes that “[r]ather than thus consent to establish hell upon earth,—to be a party to this establishment,—I would touch a match to blow up earth and hell together” (Journals 315). Such violent rhetoric is remote from the peaceful civil disobedience that many readers associate with Thoreau’s politics, yet Sherman Paul is right: Thoreau is not speaking entirely metaphorically, as his vigorous defense of Higginson and Brown indicates. Thoreau never mentions Pottawatomie, though after examining the newspa- pers Thoreau is known to have read after the Harpers Ferry insurrection, David Fuller concludes “that he knew about the allegations of Brown’s involvement in the murders at Pottawatomie” (2), and suggests that Thoreau simply refused to believe that Brown was responsible for what happened there. A more fundamental question is whether Thoreau’s defense of violence in the struggle against slavery applies to Pottawatomie as well as to Harpers Ferry or the Anthony Burns incident. Nowhere in his writings on slavery and violence does Thoreau ever distinguish between acceptable and unacceptable levels, targets, or types of violence—he focuses strictly on the right to act with violence in accordance with one’s moral principles.

Bloodshed and the Remission of Sin

John Brown never claimed access to those “higher” sources of truth that Thoreau describes in “Resistance to Civil Government”; he would have found the notion blasphemous. Brown’s total confidence in his ability to know what is right and just lay in his old-school Calvinism, a Calvinism certain that God requires violence as a means of both punishment and redemption.5 For Brown, violence was not only acceptable as a means of atonement for sin, it was necessary to the redemption of the sin. His favorite scriptural passage was Hebrews 9:22: “without the shedding of blood, there is no remission of sin.” Brown saw himself as an instrument, a weapon, in the hands of a wrathful God,6 and was convinced that violence was the only way to end slavery and redeem the nation’s sin. On the day of his execution, he passed a note to one of his guards, which read: “I John Brown am now quite certain that the crimes of this guilty land: will never be purged away; but with Blood [Brown’s italics]” (Peterson 20).

5 Brown’s son John Jr. recounts an example of such violence, stating “that his father once began to punish him with lashes for the moral debts accumulated in his ‘account book’ of trans- gressions, but ended up taking two-thirds of the lashes on his own back, to pay his son’s debt and enact the doctrine of Atonement before John Jr.’s eyes” (Trodd and Stauffer 10). This incident is powerfully imagined in Bruce Olds’s novel Raising Holy Hell. 6 “As the Lord had armed Peter, ‘so also … he put a sword into my hand,’ Brown recalled, when he ‘first went to Kansas’” (Etcheson 39). Extremism in the Defense of Liberty 333

Although he points in “Resistance” to “higher” sources of truth than the Bible, Thoreau seems untroubled by the fact that Brown’s moral principles derive wholly from his Calvinism, or by Brown’s claim that redemption from the sin of slavery can be attained only with the shedding of blood. “It was his peculiar doctrine,” writes Thoreau, “that a man has a perfect right to interfere with the slaveholder, in order to rescue the slave. I agree with him” (“Plea” 702). This sounds appealing at first but Brown’s violence, sanctioned in his mind by the Bible, is entirely con- sonant with that of Scott Roeder, who in 2009 shot and killed Dr. George Tiller in a Wichita church because Dr. Tiller performed abortions. In his single-eyed focus on the immorality of American slavery, Thoreau failed to see the moral dilemma that slavery, and the insidious racism that undergirded it, posed for the nation, i. e., he failed to see that all of the available responses to slavery entailed serious negative consequences. Like Garrison and Brown, Tho- reau demanded immediate abolition without compensation to slaveholders. Not only would this create enormous resistance and resentment in the South, as well as economic disaster, but four million slaves would be turned out, most of them il- literate and uneducated, without property or wealth, into a free-market economy deeply pervaded by racism. Abolition could not eliminate racism, but it could exacerbate it, as Jefferson and others thought that it would, and as evidenced after the Civil War by the rise of the Klan, the emergence of Jim Crow, and the persis- tence of racism throughout the nation to the present day. But if immediate abolition carried a set of undesirable consequences, so did the various plans of gradual abolition or, even worse, the maintenance of the status quo or the expansion of slavery to the West. Americans faced a moral dilemma that their government was handling to nobody’s satisfaction, and in such a situation, extremist positions on both sides gathered support. David Bromwich uses the term “American psychosis” to describe not an in- stance of abnormal psychology but rather a peculiarly American style of moral thinking: a state of mind characterized by a kind of “moral cocoon” that is “im- pervious and self-contained” as well as “incorrigible” (183). Bromwich traces its origin to the separatists of the Massachusetts Bay colony, those antinomian “purifiers of conscience” such as Anne Hutchinson and Roger Williams, whom Bromwich describes in words that apply equally well to Thoreau: “discoverer of a conscience to which all society is an encroachment” (187, 192). This hyper-indi- vidualism on the plane of morality, this “psychosis,” has persisted throughout our history, writes Bromwich, and its “leading exhibit” in our literature is Emerson’s “Self-Reliance.” Emerson was attracted to John Brown, Bromwich suggests, because he saw in Brown a man acting in accordance with his “aboriginal Self” (218, 202). There can be little doubt that Brown’s “moral cocoon” was “incorrigible,” and that like Thoreau, Brown saw society as an encroachment on his conscience. A similarly incorrigible moral cocoon is evident in those radical anti-abortionists who firebomb clinics or, in extreme cases, kill the doctors who perform abortions, for in their eyes abortion is the kind of enormous moral evil that admits of only one moral response, just as slavery was for Brown and Thoreau. Today many people admire the force of Thoreau’s and Brown’s convictions, for the evil of slavery and the necessity of its abolition are not open to argument. But 334 Gary Grieve-Carlson when that force operates from within a “moral cocoon” that posits vigilante violence as the highest moral response to slavery, then its extremism in the defense of liberty becomes a vice. Goldwater was wrong. Henry Thoreau stands among America’s greatest writers and most provocative and engaging thinkers, but in his polemical defense of John Brown we find his usually supple and lively thought growing rigid and sclerotic.

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