Responses to John Brown and the Harpers Ferry Raid

edited by John Stauffer and Zoe Trodd

 

It is said that “to the victor goes the spoils,” and among such spoils is the pen with which to write history. After all, it is difficult to refute an account when one is dead. In his letters John Brown understood this intimately and foresaw a day when his campaign to be Moses in North America might fail. While the 1859 raid on Harper’s Ferry did indeed fail soon after its start, Brown’s campaign lives on. Granted, history has done as much as it can to erase the significance of the events leading up to the raid; have a gander in any pre-2000 history book published in the United States and read what little is offered.

Thus it is that The Tribunal has been published to fill that peculiar void.

 

A compilation of letters from Brown, editorials about the raid, letters to newspapers, interviews (including one recorded by Brown as he lay injured very soon after his capture), speeches about the raid and essays made in the aftermath as well as some years later, this 500-page document is one that is not just for the library that re- serves space for the topic of slavery in the U.S.A. but the basic history of this nation. It is divided into several sections: Brown’s own words; Northern, Southern and international responses; and civil war/postwar responses. One would be mistaken to think that all the Northern responses were pro-Brown, or that Southern responses were in unison against the man. There are also surprises found in the post-war words by Walt Whitman, Frederick Douglass, Henry Thoreau, Mark Twain and John Wilkes Booth.

 

In this day and age, such a title is sure to inspire and inflame the topic of slavery and being black in America nearly to the degree that it did when the raid occurred. Brown is said by many to be the spark that started the American Civil War; upon taking the time to read this collection one will understand why there has been such a campaign for so long to suppress them.

 

Hardcover, 640 pp.

The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press •