Do You Support John Brown's Revolutionary Violence

[Slargos]

it would certainly have been unjust to their population

[Sheilbh]

Yes.

[Norgy]

Fun book but need to keep a pile of grained salt handy as you read.

Oh, indeed. It's a bit like shock comedy.
What's he going to say next?

[CountDeMoney]

You assholes know where I stand on this issue.  So fuck all of you Confederatards and pussies.

[CountDeMoney]

But then, slavery is used to beg the question: what do you do when law and order support an unjust regime, even if a democracy? You wait?

You reason, you persuade.

Lulz  You would've been Kevin Bacon's character at the end of Animal House during the Sacking of Lawrence.

That's a dumbass statement, and luckily it was addressed throughout the thread during my absence.

[CountDeMoney]

Now, where I get off the train is John Brown's raid was insanely stupid. No rational actor would have believed it had any chance for success, further, it had virtually no chance of even starting a proper slave rebellion. Further still, John Brown basically killed a few innocent people in a small town in Virginia that was not a major plantation area, the people killed by John Brown were townsfolk, not plantation owners. One of the people killed in the raid was just a train baggage handler passing through. They also killed one of the marines that stormed "the fort", but that's sort of the name of the game in that regard. Nat Turner lead a slave revolt, Spartacus lead a slave revolt, John Brown just murdered a few random people and then got his followers killed or executed in short order.

John Brown's failure in his plan was actually expecting slaves to see "the big picture" in his attempts to foment them into an insurrection army, a la the Haitian Maroons.  Half of the slaves he picked up on the way to Harper's Ferry were scared shitless, and had absolutely no clue what the fuck was going on that morning.

If anything, he gave slaves too much credit for political awareness.  But that's the poignant, bittersweet beauty of John Brown, a man who looked upon the slave as his equal.

[Ideologue]

Now, where I get off the train is John Brown's raid was insanely stupid. No rational actor would have believed it had any chance for success, further, it had virtually no chance of even starting a proper slave rebellion. Further still, John Brown basically killed a few innocent people in a small town in Virginia that was not a major plantation area, the people killed by John Brown were townsfolk, not plantation owners. One of the people killed in the raid was just a train baggage handler passing through. They also killed one of the marines that stormed "the fort", but that's sort of the name of the game in that regard. Nat Turner lead a slave revolt, Spartacus lead a slave revolt, John Brown just murdered a few random people and then got his followers killed or executed in short order.

John Brown's failure in his plan was actually expecting slaves to see "the big picture" in his attempts to foment them into an insurrection army, a la the Haitian Maroons.  Half of the slaves he picked up on the way to Harper's Ferry were scared shitless, and had absolutely no clue what the fuck was going on that morning.

If anything, he gave slaves too much credit for political awareness.  But that's the poignant, bittersweet beauty of John Brown, a man who looked upon the slave as his equal.

You know, I wonder if it's really that appropriate to call it a failure in retrospect.  Certainly it would've been a failure on its own terms, but how many racist-ass abolitionists-lite were there?  How many who teared up over Brown's martyrdom, and how many more who didn't care one way or the other, might have been outraged and actively turned against abolition if armed blacks had actually gone on and killed a few thousand white people before the U.S. Army inevitably brought them down?

I mean, I can't say with any real scholarly backing, but just based on my low opinion of people in the 19th century, I'd bet at least a few.  Did a lot of white folk cry over Crazy Horse?

[CountDeMoney]

The problem with John Brown is not that, in the abstract, violence isn't ever an appropriate response to the evils of slavery.

The problem with John Brown is that the particular forms his violence took (the Potawottamie massacre, the raid on Harper's Ferry) were totally non-productive of a solution to the problem of slavery - except insofar as they raised communal tensions leading to the Civil War.

John Brown simply fought slavery the way the pro-slavery forces fought it--as a war.  The Transcendentalists and the rest of the Christian-inspired Abolitionist movement was full of peacenik anti-violence types ("you reason, you persuade", LOL).  The Missouri Ruffians and their government-sanctioned buddies in Kansas committed the vast majority of violent acts and murders, while the Abolitionists wrung their hands and bleated like sheep, trying to reason and persuade in Northern papers while members of Congress got physically assaulted by pro-slavers. 

There were no innocent victims at Potawottamie.  Calling the deaths of individuals who either participated in the Sacking of Lawrence or provided logistical support for Ruffian forays into Kansas to murder Free-Staters a "Massacre" is bullshit.

John Brown simply gave them a taste of their own medicine, and the Abolitionist movement was the better for it.

[CountDeMoney]

You know, I wonder if it's really that appropriate to call it a failure in retrospect.  Certainly it would've been a failure on its own terms, but how many racist-ass abolitionists-lite were there?  How many who teared up over Brown's martyrdom, and how many more who didn't care one way or the other, might have been outraged and actively turned against abolition if armed blacks had actually gone on and killed a few thousand white people before the U.S. Army inevitably brought them down?

I mean, I can't say with any real scholarly backing, but just based on my low opinion of people in the 19th century, I'd bet at least a few.  Did a lot of white folk cry over Crazy Horse?

I don't consider it a failure at all in the strategic sense.  Harper's Ferry ramped up so much paranoia in the South--as its greatest collective nightmare were slave uprisings--that the South began emptying arsenals en masse', their allies in the Federal government ensuring Federal armories and stock started moving south, and propelled the South into a military-response mindset.

The "abolitionist-lite" types of the North, whose support for Brown prior to Harper's Ferry was behind-the-back funding and promises of support and who wouldn't say a damned thing in public to support Brown--particularly the pussy Transcendentalists--prior to his martyrdom had weapons free after it.  The Raid was the single unifying force between the radicals and the parlor Abolitionists.

[Ideologue]

Indeed; I'm just considering the possibility it would have been less strategically successful if it had been significantly more tactically successful.

[garbon]

Oh get a room with his corpse already, Seedy.

[Malthus]

The problem with John Brown is not that, in the abstract, violence isn't ever an appropriate response to the evils of slavery.

The problem with John Brown is that the particular forms his violence took (the Potawottamie massacre, the raid on Harper's Ferry) were totally non-productive of a solution to the problem of slavery - except insofar as they raised communal tensions leading to the Civil War.

John Brown simply fought slavery the way the pro-slavery forces fought it--as a war.  The Transcendentalists and the rest of the Christian-inspired Abolitionist movement was full of peacenik anti-violence types ("you reason, you persuade", LOL).  The Missouri Ruffians and their government-sanctioned buddies in Kansas committed the vast majority of violent acts and murders, while the Abolitionists wrung their hands and bleated like sheep, trying to reason and persuade in Northern papers while members of Congress got physically assaulted by pro-slavers. 

There were no innocent victims at Potawottamie.  Calling the deaths of individuals who either participated in the Sacking of Lawrence or provided logistical support for Ruffian forays into Kansas to murder Free-Staters a "Massacre" is bullshit.

John Brown simply gave them a taste of their own medicine, and the Abolitionist movement was the better for it.

The problem with Brown wasn't his violence, it was the absurdity of his plans. Attempting to gather up slaves, arm 'em with pikes and stolen guns, and make of them a revolutionary army to send against US regulars was just plain crazy - as was noted at the time. It had not a snowball's chance; it could not have worked and, predictably enough, it did not work.

[CountDeMoney]

Oh get a room with his corpse already, Seedy.

Don't make me return you to your massa's plantation.

[CountDeMoney]

The problem with Brown wasn't his violence, it was the absurdity of his plans. Attempting to gather up slaves, arm 'em with pikes and stolen guns, and make of them a revolutionary army to send against US regulars was just plain crazy - as was noted at the time. It had not a snowball's chance; it could not have worked and, predictably enough, it did not work.

I'd go with "grandiose" rather than "absurdity".  He wasn't fashioning an army to send against US regulars, he was fashioning an insurgent army that would run up and down the Appalachians, raiding plantations and scaring the piss out of white people from the mountains.

And while it wasn't the ideal strategy for the 1859 United States, and Brown certainly wasn't a strategist, he wasn't totally stone-cold crazy; the strategy worked for the Haitian Maroons and the Jamaicans, so there was an historical precedent to base it on.

[Slargos]

Yeap. Murder is ok as long as you're on the right side.