The Film: Interview Transcripts: James Oliver Horton

James Oliver Horton, Ph.D., historian on
John Brown
John Brown was brought up in an abolitionist family.  As a personality, John Brown was pretty strict.  He seemed to be unforgiving.  He was really a person who concentrated seriously on issues that he cared deeply about, and one of those issues was anti-slavery.  He was unforgiving in terms of pushing towards his mission of bringing freedom to substantial numbers of African-Americans.  He was a religious man, who used the language of the day.  And you know in the 19^th Century, religious language was kind of a common language of the day, and he spoke in religious terms and he was willing to break the law.  He was willing to risk his life.  He was willing to do all kinds of things that today, in retrospect, we might consider very radical kinds of things in the name of freedom.

It is difficult, I think to assess John Brown in light of today’s society, because some of the things that John Brown did are things that I, quite frankly, don’t want to defend.  John Brown killed people.  John Brown assassinated people.  I don’t want to defend that.  But, by the same token, I also have to be aware that John Brown was willing to fight for freedom of human beings, even to the point of killing people.  Revolutionary violence is a terribly difficult thing to think about in light of our contemporary situation.  How does one feel about that?  I’m not sure I can assess John Brown in terms of right or wrong in his method, but in the things that he believed in his unswerving dedication to human freedom, that, I have to admire.  I wish there had been some other way that he could have achieved his goal, but the fact of life is that, at the time, slavery was protected by the full force of Southern society.  Slavery was protected by the full force of the United States of America.  So, John Brown, then, is making a decision to break not only local and state law, but federal law in order to raid Harper’s Ferry, in order to acquire the weapons that he thought he needed to arm slaves in the vicinity of Harper’s Ferry in the Virginia mountains and, from his point of view, to form a kind of slave rebellion.  I mean, those are radical things.  We need to talk a lot about the implication of those things.  We need to understand the complexity of that motivation of those goals.  John Brown is a difficult person to assess, but his belief in human freedom, his dedication to human freedom, his willingness to sacrifice everything for the freedom of human beings, that I think you can assess very well and very quickly.

We should never make the mistake of assuming that to be a white abolitionist was to be a believer in racial equality.  Because there were lots of white abolitionists who did not believe in racial egalitarianism.  They believed in abolishing slavery.  They believed that slavery was a moral evil.  They believed that slavery was wrong and needed to be destroyed, but that did not mean that they necessarily believed that whites and blacks could live together as equals.  John Brown is an example of a white person who not only believed that slavery needed to be abolished, but that people could live together as equals.  That was very unusual in the mid-19^th Century, the time in which John Brown was living.  It made him a very unusual person.  It’s interesting because if you read the descriptions of John Brown written by blacks at the time, boy, did they appreciate that.  Did they see him as a person who was not only committed, as they were, to human freedom, but was also committed as they were to equality, to equal rights.  Now, it seems to me that that’s saying a lot for the period just before the Civil War.  Because, there weren’t very many white, even white reformers, who would stand for human rights, racial equality. 

John Brown had a strong personal friendship with Frederick Douglass.  In fact, I have seen a letter, a joint letter, actually signed by John Brown and Frederick Douglass to John Brown’s wife. The Douglass part of the letter says that he is honored to have John Brown as his houseguest, and that John Brown is planning big things and he was going to make an important contribution.  And so Frederick Douglas says to John Brown’s wife that she ought to be proud of her husband.  Now, there were lots of examples of John Brown, who was not only fighting with blacks, fighting for blacks, but fighting with and for black friends.  This is, I think, a very important part of understanding John Brown and that is that he socialized with blacks, not only as a part of the anti-slavery movement, which, of course, he did, but also as friends. 

economic impact of slavery

the role of free blacks

inter-racial alliances

the decision to escape

importance of
Western Pennsylvania

black patriotism

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