The Cost of Liberty: John Brown Was Right
By Mark Linehan at the Annual John Brown Memorial Walk, Dec 2, 2020
I want to start In 1907 when W.E.B. DuBois was asked to write a biography of John Brown that would be part of a series known as The American Crisis Series. It would be one of 50 biographies written by various authors, and the one on Brown was to be written by DuBois. It was published in 1909. In writing that biography, DuBois did what we are doing here tonight: honoring the Great John Brown! 1909 was the 50th anniversary of Brown’s execution.
Freedom for Black people after the Civil War often meant death or prison
But I think some quick background is necessary. The end of the Civil War and emancipation had led to violence, Black codes, Plessy v Ferguson and the entrenchment of Jim Crow, an average of one US lynching every three days between 1890 and 1920, the eugenics movement, and the disenfranchisement of Black voters. In Louisiana, for example, 130,000 registered Black voters had registered in 1896. By 1904, there were 1,300. The math is easy. Ninety-nine percent had been disenfranchised in just eight years.
So DuBois was troubled in 1909. And rightly so.
In his biography of John Brown, DuBois asked,
“Has John Brown no message - no legacy, then?! He has, and it is this great word: the cost of liberty is less than the price of repression...even though that cost is blood.”
“To rectify the sins of the present - to sidestep justice in favor of comfort - is to make the final price of liberty all the more expensive.”
“John Brown knew,” said DuBois,
“…that in 1700 it would cost something to overthrow slavery and establish liberty and that by reason and cowardice and blindness, the cost in 1800 was vastly larger but still not unpayable!”
However, said DuBois, John Brown
“…felt that by 1900 no human hand could pluck the vampire from the body of the land without doing the nation to death!”
“What Brown decided,” DuBois continues, “was that he had to strike a blow for justice in his time. It will cost something - even blood and suffering - but it will not cost as much as waiting.”
That man, John Brown, was born right here, twenty feet behind me, in a room on the southwest corner of the house that once stood here, on May 9, of the above-mentioned 1800, when the cost of liberty was “still not unpayable.”
At the end of his life, in his final note, he famously warned that:
“I am now quite certain that the crimes of this guilty land will never be purged but with blood.”
For in his lifetime, so much change had taken place. The issue that wouldn’t go away was whether or not we would honor the words of the Declaration of Independence. When John Brown was born, the country went only to the Mississippi, and control of that was still uncertain. There was no canal system, no steamboats (Fulton would sail his Clermont when Brown was 7), no railroads, no trains, no telegraph. There were 800,000 plus enslaved people in the U.S.
By 1859, Old John Brown was 59 years old. Canals, steamboats, trains, and the telegraph had all transformed the country economically and politically. And there were by then 3,800,000 enslaved people as the country stretched all the way to the Pacific. Plus, slavery had crossed the Mississippi into Missouri in 1820, symbolically into territory that was not part of the U.S. when the Constitution was written. “A Firebell in the Night,” said Jefferson! John Brown was 20.
Is the cost of liberty ever unpayable?
From then on, with each year matching John Brown’s age, events would bring us closer and closer to the point where, potentially, the cost of liberty would be unpayable.
John Brown believed in the Declaration of Independence because he believed in the Golden Rule. They were one and the same, he said. If all men are created equal, then all should be treated as we want to be treated ourselves - because we are all equal. That may be one of the most important things to say to understand John Brown. It sounds a bit simple, but it’s powerful. And it connects 18th-century republican ideology in the Declaration to biblical idealism - to our Christian duty to our neighbor.
And John Brown hated slavery because of it. But abolition was not enough. Abolition had to be immediate, and equal rights for the formerly enslaved people had to follow. I have used the following quotes before for Brown. I will use them again here: One biographer has called John Brown
“the least racist white person among the pre-Civil War public figures” he has studied and, “That in the cultural sea of racism” of pre-Civil War America, “John Brown stands out for his utter lack of prejudice.”
For Brown, it was liberty and equality. He believed that firmly, and he never equivocated. There were no “yeah, buts” that you find with so many others.
And then there’s Lincoln
And then there’s Lincoln, “The Great Emancipator.” What must be said of Lincoln is that he was a politician working under the pressures of the presidency, caught in a crisis. There were plenty of “yeah, buts.”
But I should also state that he was willing to change his views and grow. Lincoln did oppose slavery. But he also made it clear in the beginning that his opposition was to the expansion of slavery into the new territories. Emancipation, to Lincoln, did not mean equality. And he made that clear too often with quotes such as
“I do not believe that the two races can live together on terms of social and political equality.”
(Just read the Lincoln-Douglas debates of 1858 or his response to newspaper editor Horace Greeley in the summer of 1862.)
Compare the above “I do not believe the two races can live together” to John Brown, who was living amongst and with Blacks in North Elba, N.Y. In December of 1861, in his first year in office, Lincoln said he would not push the issue of emancipation. It would be, said Lincoln, “equivalent to a John Brown raid on a gigantic scale.” Note that even during the first two years of his presidency, Lincoln insisted that emancipation would be undertaken by
The State governments
That Federal funding would be used
That it would be gradual
That the enslavers would be compensated (reparations)
And that colonization in the West Indies or Africa would be encouraged.
But Lincoln grew. By the summer of 1862, the Northern war effort was in trouble, and for various reasons, Lincoln had already decided to move toward some type of emancipation program. What he needed was a victory. Otherwise, emancipation would look like an act of desperation. And so Lincoln had to wait.
Antietam was part of the cost of liberty
Back in 1859, when John Brown and his rag-tag army left the Kennedy farm in Maryland, headed for Harpers Ferry, he was only 8 miles from a small creek known as Antietam. It seems appropriate. Three years later, on September 17, 1862, the Battle at Antietam Creek not only gave Lincoln the victory he needed but was the bloodiest day in North American history. Lincoln gained his opportunity for freedom from a day of horrific bloodshed. It was part of the cost of liberty! He could now announce a preliminary proclamation to go into effect on Jan 1, 1863.
But Lincoln still mentioned gradual and compensated abolition and emancipation a month before that above date!
A month later, his hand trembling from exhaustion, Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation that was immediate, not gradual, did not mention compensation for enslavers, and made no reference to colonization. Lincoln never again mentioned colonization in public.
As one historian has argued, the Emancipation Proclamation embodied a “double emancipation.” One: for the enslaved people, and two:
“for Lincoln himself, for whom it marked the abandonment of his previous assumptions about how to abolish slavery and the role Blacks would play in post-emancipation American life.”
Lincoln emancipated himself, too
Lincoln was emancipated. On March 4, 1865, in one of America’s great speeches, Lincoln complimented and completed his Gettysburg address with his second inaugural address. He identified slavery as the fundamental cause of the war - something he had not always done before.
“The war might well be,” he said, “divine punishment for the evil of slavery. And indeed, that God might allow it to continue until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid for by another drawn by the sword.”
This war did not start at Fort Sumter, Lincoln reminded us. “This terrible war, he said, had been preceded by 250 years of the terrible violence of slavery. The violence of war, Lincoln had come to realize, had been necessary to pay for the violence of slavery. It was the cost of liberty. It was blood atonement. It was regeneration through violence.
John Brown was right
Brown had been right. He had been prophetic. Lincoln recognized that, as DuBois would say in 1909,
“The cost of liberty is less than the price of repression even though that cost be blood.”
He would have, I believe, recognized DuBois’ words almost a half-century later. Something Brown had recognized much sooner. And I believe John Brown would have admired Lincoln’s words. His “I am now quite certain that the crimes of this guilty land will never be purged but with blood” easily precedes Lincoln’s “Until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid for by another drawn by the sword.”
And in that sense, it was Abraham Lincoln who became John Brown.
I think that makes John Brown deserving of his own statue! Our John Brown was born right here. He was not a terrorist, not a madman, but a believer in freedom and equality and the Declaration of Independence.
—This essay was recited on Dec. 2, 2020, at the annual John Brown Memorial Walk around the Brown family property. It was written and recited by Mark Linehan, a citizen of Torrington, and inspired by two NY Times articles, one by Eric Foner, a Columbia historian (Dec. 31, 2012), and another by Jamelle Bouie, Columnist (Oct. 22, 2022). We at the John Brown Project are here to say that it checks out in a lot of other sources, too.
