16 SUNDAY, DECEMBER 13, 2020LATE IN 1859,news of John Brown’s failed
raid on the federal armory at Harpers
Ferry alarmed Abraham Lincoln, and his
dismay worsened when prominent North-
erners celebrated Brown as a saint. For
five years, Lincoln had been working to
build an antislavery political coalition
across the North that would finally break
the Southern slaveholders’ domination of
the government. Fending off absolutists
who proclaimed a moral law higher than
the Constitution, battling Northern racists
who hurled slurs unprintable today, Lin-
coln and the fledgling Republican Party
would put slavery on what Lincoln called
“the course of ultimate extinction.” After
decades in the political wilderness, slav-
ery’s opponents were at last seriously con-
tending for national power.
Suddenly, on the eve of a crucial presi-
dential election year, Brown’s attempted
insurrection, doomed from the start (as
Frederick Douglass told Brown when he
refused to join it), endangered everything.
Instantly, a national chorus from Stephen
A. Douglas to Jefferson Davis blamed the
incident on the party they vilified as the
“Black Republicans,” now disgraced as
lawless traitors. Worse for Republicans,
some prominent high-minded Northern-
ers exalted Brown’s crime as a sublime act
by a Christlike hero who transcended petty
party politics. Ralph Waldo Emerson de-
clared that Brown’s blood sacrifice would
“make the gallows as glorious as the
cross.” In some New England towns,
church bells pealed at the hour of Brown’s
execution.
The next day, Lincoln, on the verge of
commencing to run for president, drew a
distinction that was escaping some of his
panicky fellow Republicans. “Old John
Brown has just been executed for treason,”
Lincoln wrote, and though he granted that
Brown was perfectly right about slavery,
he repudiated Brown’s undertaking.
Brown’s antislavery convictions hardly
made him a Republican; neither could they
justify a desperate, even suicidal effort to
instigate a violent rebellion. Nor could
Brown’s strange mystique hide the dam-
age his exploits had done to the growing
antislavery cause. “It could avail him noth-
ing that he might think himself right,” Lin-
coln concluded. At a time of inexorable po-
larization, Lincoln permitted neither racist
smears nor radical pieties to deflect his
own antislavery purpose.H. W. Brands’s study of Brown and Lin-
coln, which features this dramatic mo-
ment, is at heart an appraisal of contrast-
ing political designs and personas in pre-
revolutionary times. A distinguished pro-
fessor of American history at the
University of Texas, Brands is a hyperpro-
lific scholar, the author of more than two
dozen books on subjects ranging from the
life of Benjamin Franklin to Lyndon B.
Johnson’s foreign policy. “The Zealot and
the Emancipator,” describing Brown’s and
Lincoln’s development in alternating chap-
ters, builds on strengths long evident in
Brands’s books, combining expert story-
telling with thoughtful interpretation viv-
idly to render major events through the
lives of the chief participants. Apart from a
biography of U. S. Grant, Brands has until
now had surprisingly little to say about the
Civil War era, but this book presents a grip-
ping account of the politics that led to
Southern secession, war and the abolition
of slavery.
By calling John Brown a “zealot,”
Brands appears to mean a fanatic in a
righteous cause. An ironclad patriarch of
Puritan rectitude — his admirers likened
him to Oliver Cromwell — Brown, when in
his mid-30s, consecrated his life to destroy-
ing the institution of slavery. As it was
founded in wicked violence, he believed, so
holy violence, including terrorist atrocities
when called for, would weaken it, all lead-ing to a final reckoning when oppressed
Black people and their white allies would
vanquish the Pharisee slaveholders.
Brown regarded all conventional politics,
including antislavery politics practiced by
the likes of Abraham Lincoln, as a sham, as
dangerous to the cause of liberty as the
power of the slaveholders. The escalating
supremacy of the slave South and its racist
abettors in the 1850s, culminating in the
Supreme Court’s infamous Dred Scott de-
cision in 1857, hardened Brown’s contempt,
and it propelled his attack on Harpers
Ferry.
Brands offers a detailed, almost minute-
by-minute account of Brown’s raid, which
he rates a “wretched fiasco,” a “quixotic
venture” that, far from unshackling the en-
slaved, tightened their shackles even fur-
ther. Brands affirms the justice behind
Brown’s actions, no matter how zealous,
when measured against the cruelty of slav-
ery. He describes how Brown’s self-drama-
tizing performance during his trial turned
him into the inspiring popular martyr
whose soul would mythically go marching
on. But Brown’s story ends roughly two-
thirds of the way through Brands’s book.
The denouement — and the achievement
of slavery’s destruction — belonged to
Abraham Lincoln.
In calling Lincoln “the emancipator,”
Brands takes exception to a view of Lin-coln, now in vogue in some quarters, as a
reluctant freedom fighter, a moderate po-
litician who was devoted only to preserv-
ing the Union until the vagaries of the
Civil War forced his hand. In fact, Lin-
coln’s hatred of slavery, established early
in his life, ran deep: Brands quotes oneIllinois abolitionist who got to know him
in the 1840s and found “his view and
mine on the wrong of slavery... in per-
fect accord.” As a working politician, Lin-
coln heeded practical limits, but he did
not conceal his antislavery convictions:
During his single term in Congress, from
1847 to 1849, he gravitated to antislavery
colleagues, withstood abuse for opposing
the American war against Mexico as pro-
slavery and introduced legislation to
eradicate slavery in the District of Colum-
bia, a longtime abolitionist goal. Lincoln’s
emergence as an antislavery leader in
the 1850s had a long foreground.IN LINE WITHrecent writings by, among
others, James Oakes and Sidney Blumen-
thal, Brands refuses to diminish Lincoln’s
antislavery moral commitment because of
his politics, any more than he absolves
Brown’s uncompromising higher judg-
ments of their untethered recklessness.
He quotes Frederick Douglass, who knew
both men and who said in retrospect that
while abolitionist agitators (including
Douglass himself ) might have dismissed
Lincoln before the issuance of the Eman-
cipation Proclamation as cold and indif-
ferent, in fact, given the difficulties he
faced, “he was swift, zealous, radical and
determined.”
At the heart of everything was Lincoln’s
understanding of the Constitution:
Whereas his radical critics cared little or
nothing about man-made laws or be-
lieved, much as the pro-slavery secession-
ists did, that the framers had enshrined
human bondage in national law, Lincoln
saw great antislavery potential in the
Constitution. In that sense, his reverence
for the Union and his hatred of slavery
went hand in hand. When, in 1860-61,
Southern states seceded rather than ac-
cede to his election as president, Lincoln
resolved to crush the rebellion. Doing so,
perforce, would also crush the rebels’
claim that the national government was
powerless to halt slavery’s growth and
commence its extinction. At the outset, it
seemed, nothing could begin on slavery
unless and until the Union was saved. Yet
as the war raged, it became apparent that
preserving the Union required a procla-
mation of emancipation, a goal that, as
Brands’s final chapters show, Lincoln pur-
sued with constitutional correctness and
immense political skill.
John Brown despised politicians and po-
litical parties. His disastrous raid para-
doxically contributed to the nomination of
Lincoln, the fresh national face from Illi-
nois, unlike Senator William Seward of
New York, who carried decades of political
baggage, and was tarred, not least, for
having known Brown. This may have been
Brown’s greatest feat for the antislavery
cause and his most important contribution
to American history. Only the sort of con-
summate politician Brown hated could
have achieved the abolition of slavery. 0Paths to Abolition
John Brown and Abraham Lincoln chose contrasting methods for ending slavery.
By SEAN WILENTZ
THE ZEALOT AND THE EMANCIPATOR
John Brown, Abraham Lincoln, and the
Struggle for American Freedom
By H.W. Brands
464 pp. Doubleday. $30.
John BrownPHOTOGRAPHS FROM THE LIBRARY OF CONGRESSSEAN WILENTZteaches at Princeton and is the
author of “No Property in Man: Slavery and
Antislavery at the Nation’s Founding.” His
edition for the Library of America of the
historian Richard Hofstadter’s writings, the
first of a projected three volumes, appeared
earlier this year.
Abraham Lincoln