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Review
| Terrible Swift Sword: The Legacy of John Brown, edited by Peggy A. Russo and Paul Finkelman. Athens: Ohio University Press, 2005. 228 pages. $59.95 cloth; $24.95 paper.
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| The dozen multidisciplinary essays with a preface and introduction in this collection enhance the body of literature on John Brown. Several of the essays originated from a 1996 conference on the complex Brown. The editors note that in the ensuing decade, which included the bicentennial anniversary of Brown's birth there was a growing interest in Brown and his legacy. In the introduction, Finkelman places Brown in context by noting that "for all his failures, he is remembered—and remembered correctly—as an icon of the antebellum crisis and a harbinger of the violence and death that was soon to sweep over the nation" (xxiv). An author of one of essays, historian Dean Grodzins, investigates the reasons why a Transcendentalist minister, Theodore Parker, supported Brown in his plans to raid Harpers Ferry, delving into issues of class and northern opposition to abolition. Political Scientist Hannah Geffert next reveals that the local slave and free black communities at Harpers Ferry took an active, indeed a central, part in Brown's actions, contrary to "conventional wisdom." In what this reviewer deems the least valuable essay in the volume, Jean Libby discusses the Rev. Thomas W. Henry, a black A.M.E. minister, whose only connection to Brown was that his name is mentioned in passing in the papers of Brown discovered after the raid. Henry fled to the North rather than face investigation. |
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The next three essays seek to define Brown. Scott John Hammond describes Brown as a "founder," drawing from ideas presented by Machiavelli and Rousseau. Eyal Naveh explores Brown's legacy as a martyr, an image that peaked during the Civil War but then diminished in the years that followed. Charles J. Holden looks at how postwar Southern writers used John Brown to advance their proslavery defense and desire for white supremacy as well as their critiques of race relations, the centralization of governmental power, fear of majority rule, and labor relations. Naveh's and Holden's essays mesh well together. James N. Gilbert and Kenneth R. Carroll each analyze Brown in more modern terms. Gilbert asks if Brown would qualify as someone we would today deem a terrorist, and concludes "yes," though a "unique, paradoxical example of a terrorist whom history has often viewed through rose-colored glasses" (114). In another provocative essay, Carroll places the historic John Brown under examination to determine what a modern psychiatrist or clinical psychologist would find. He concludes that Brown evinced signs of being bipolar, suffering from manic episodes which compelled him to act as he did. This essay probably will not be the last word on the sanity of Brown, but it definitely adds to the debate. |
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English teacher William Keeney ties several themes from the above together in his study of the poetry concerning Brown that appeared between his capture and the outbreak of the Civil War, poems which "represent Brown as hero, as martyr, and as madman" (142), sometimes simultaneously. Novelist Bruce Olds looks at the ways in which the writers of fiction (and historians) shape and reshape history in their works, using his novel on Brown as a starting point. Paul A. Shackel investigates the changing meaning (and location) of John Brown's Fort, the old engine house of the arsenal at Harpers Ferry. Finally, Peggy Russo looks at the only two movies made about John Brown, Santa Fe Trail (1940) and Seven Angry Men (1955), two very different films. Russo sees both as products of their times. The former with its pro-Southern tone, its portrayal of Brown as a "fanatical terrorist raider," is rife with inaccuracies; the latter truer to the historical record with Brown portrayed as a more sympathetic hero, has a clear antislavery tone to reflect the growing Civil Rights movement of the 1950s. |
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The essays in this volume certainly do not represent the final word on John Brown, but teachers will find value in the volume or individual essays by using them to stimulate discussion on Brown and issues such as historical memory and history's cross-disciplinary application. |
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| Cor Jesu Academy, Saint Louis, Missouri |
Thomas F. Curran |
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