| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 111.2

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 111.2 | The History Cooperative

David S. Reynolds. John Brown, Abolitionist: The Man Who Killed Slavery, Sparked the Civil War, and Seeded Civil Rights. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. 2005. Pp. x, 578. $35.00.
David S. Reynolds is a master of cultural biography, the placement of an individual in the particular cultural and social conditions of the era in which he or she lived. His Walt Whitman's America: A Cultural Biography (1995) skillfully located the poet in the milieu of the Civil War. In his latest biography, Reynolds analyzes the most controversial of all nineteenth-century Americans, John Brown. His goal is to show that in a different time or place his subject might have been viewed simply as a forgettable crank or a despicable criminal or traitor. In arguing for Brown's achievements in abolition and racial equality, Reynolds succeeds admirably. In part because of Brown's humble eloquence before death, and in part because nothing else approached slavery in its wickedness, the leader of the Pottawatomie killings and the Harpers Ferry raid emerges as an admirable figure.	1
Reynolds' subtitle will raise doubts among some. Yet the author successfully shows that Brown did help to kill slavery by loosening its roots; he did not cause the Civil War but rather sparked it by creating conditions in North and South that accelerated its inevitability; he did not bring about the civil rights revolution, but he planted the seeds of racial equality that nurtured its development in the mid-twentieth century.	. . .

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