Best biography of john brown
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David S. Reynolds&#; study of the heroic abolitionist John Brown is more than a biography of one man; it&#;s an account of an entire era. The author helps us understand the forces that shaped Brown and made him such a fierce opponent of slavery. It also conveys a vivid picture of life &#; especially cultural life &#;in the United States before the Civil War, the decades when an intense debate raged over slavery.
With great verve, Reynolds recounts how Brown and his compatriots planned and carried out their bold but ultimately doomed raid on the federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry in October While this portion of the book has a narrative pace worthy of a novel, Reynolds is actually at his best in describing what happened after the raiders&#; noble attempt to strike a blow against slavery failed. (Failed, that is, at least in the strictly military sense of the term.) Reynolds puts his detailed knowledge of 19th century American cultural life to work in the last third of the book, showing how every major writer and political leader and religious figure was forced to take a position on whether what John Brown and his compatriots did was right or wrong. The Harpers Ferry raid shocked and outraged the supporters of slavery. It forced Northern intellectuals like
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John Brown
~John Brown
”For he did not use argument. He was himself an argument.”
W.E.B. Du Bois’s biography of John Brown must be considered a monumental work for a variety of reasons. Top-most, this work, published in , flew in the face of then current scholarly opinion that John Brown was a no account mad man and that his work was insignificant to American history. (This would remain the consensus on Brown throughout most of the 20th century, and was what I was taught in school.) Instead, Du Bois treated Brown, his actions, his motives, his designs, seriously, and put them in context of the turmoil of the s as the country split over the slavery issue. Importantly, this biography was published just 50 years after Brown’s execution, when he and his deeds were still within living memory. And finally, Du Bois seriously considered the perspective of Black Americans, how they reacted to Brown, the effect his actions had on them, and how they responded to them. It would be decades before any other serious scholarship
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