Speaker 1: Mary Holiday, Miss Wanna Conic of whatever Holidays. It's the
Speaker 1: time of the year where people celebrate things, and maybe
Speaker 1: this year people feel a little bit less like celebrating
Speaker 1: because it has been a dark one. In the year
Speaker 1: before it was also pretty dark, and next year it
Speaker 1: is not going to be less dark. But we have
Speaker 1: another Behind the Bastard's Christmas Special, which uh is, you know,
Speaker 1: a bit of a tradition here. Well is now the
Speaker 1: second time we've done it, so now it's officially a
Speaker 1: tradition where we break with our tradition of telling stories
Speaker 1: about the worst people in all of history and instead
Speaker 1: highlight a hero. Last year I told everybody the story
Speaker 1: of Raoul Wallenberg, a man who risked his life and
Speaker 1: spent the entirety of his considerable privilege saving lives from
Speaker 1: the Nazis. And this year we're going to talk about
Speaker 1: another hero of mine, John eff and Brown. And today
Speaker 1: my guest is my producer, so be Airhorn air an
Speaker 1: air Horn, Sophie. Are you how's your how's your holiday going?
Speaker 1: It's holiday? You know? Yeah? You you? You do you
Speaker 1: enjoy this time of year? Are you big Christmas her? No? No,
Speaker 1: I mean I don't dislike this time here, But I'm
Speaker 1: not like, yeah, what's your what's your favorite holiday? Easter?
Speaker 1: Well that's the wrong answer, but they don't. Just give
Speaker 1: me the funniest look. But it is actually true. The
Speaker 1: Easter is our favorite holiday, such a ship holiday, other
Speaker 1: than the Cadburry cream eggs, which are objectively great, like candies,
Speaker 1: the best for Easter. It is the best for Easter.
Speaker 1: And that's a serious injustice because the pies are best
Speaker 1: for Christmas. Um so, Sophie, so fee so fee so
Speaker 1: fee um. Here we are. What do you know about
Speaker 1: John Brown? For the second podcast? I know nothing. You
Speaker 1: know nothing, You don't know any of the name, doesn't
Speaker 1: ring any bells to you. Let's just let's just know really, okay, Well,
Speaker 1: uh yeah, he's probably somebody people heard about in high school.
Speaker 1: For like a paragraph or two. He's usually like right
Speaker 1: before the Civil War starts, you get a couple of paragraphs,
Speaker 1: are like one of those little insert boxes about John
Speaker 1: Brown and the raid on Harper's Ferry. Um, and he's
Speaker 1: a He's an interesting guy because, like Wallenberg, he gave
Speaker 1: his life fighting against the greatest evil of his age. Um.
Speaker 1: But Waldenberg was kind of like almost a saint like
Speaker 1: in terms of his personal character and conduct. Um. And
Speaker 1: John Brown was a terrorist, It doesn't mean he was
Speaker 1: wrong in a well, he grew up in the like
Speaker 1: early eighteen hundreds when life was terrible, so like he
Speaker 1: probably looked that way by the time he was fucking twenty.
Speaker 1: But yeah, he he looks rough. The only pictures you
Speaker 1: that exist of him, his skin looks like tanned leather.
Speaker 1: Um Like, he looks like he's been getting punched in
Speaker 1: the face by sandpaper for a living for fifty seven years. Um. Yes,
Speaker 1: he's hard life so well. I was researching this episode,
Speaker 1: I came across an article by the Smithsonian magazine. It
Speaker 1: includes a quote from Dennis Fry, the National Park Services
Speaker 1: chief historian for Harper's Ferry, where John Brown conducted his
Speaker 1: famous raid to try to liberate the slaves of the
Speaker 1: American South. Uh And Fry said this about John Americans
Speaker 1: do not deliberate about John Brown. They feel him. He
Speaker 1: is still a life today in the American soul. He
Speaker 1: represents something for each of us, but none of us
Speaker 1: is in agreement about what he means. And that's really
Speaker 1: interesting to me. Because John Brown's legacy has been cited
Speaker 1: by bombers of abortion clinics, and most recently by William
Speaker 1: Van Spronson, who assaulted an ice facility in Tacoma, Washington
Speaker 1: and died attempting to destroy their buses to stop him
Speaker 1: from being able to deport people. Um So, John Brown
Speaker 1: is the kind of guy who speaks to a lot
Speaker 1: of people. Was gonna said, range of audience? Yeah, literally
Speaker 1: the whitest range possible if you're looking at folks who
Speaker 1: were influenced by this guy. Um So, this is a
Speaker 1: more complicated story, I think morally than the story of Wallenberg.
Speaker 1: But I do think John Brown was still a hero.
Speaker 1: Um So, Well, we'll see how you feel at the
Speaker 1: end of this tale. John Brown was born on May
Speaker 1: nine hundred to Owen Brown and Ruth Mills in the
Speaker 1: town of Torrington, Connecticut. Well, there you go. He might
Speaker 1: be the descendant of John Brown. Yeah. Uh. John was
Speaker 1: the fourth of eight children between his father and his
Speaker 1: father's first wife. John's namesake was Captain John Brown, a
Speaker 1: farmer and revolutionary war hero who had briefly fought against
Speaker 1: the British and seventeen seventy six before dying of dysentery
Speaker 1: in New York barn. The I guess that qualifies you's
Speaker 1: a hero. When Captain Brown died, he left behind a
Speaker 1: pregnant widow and ten children, including Owen Brown, who wrote
Speaker 1: that after his father's death, we lost our crops and
Speaker 1: then our cattle, and so became poor. Uh So John
Speaker 1: Brown does not come from money unlike Wallenberg. Um, he's
Speaker 1: he's he's he's from a family that's been poor since
Speaker 1: his dad was little. Um. Now, the Browns were strict Calvinists,
Speaker 1: and in brief Calvinism, Yeah, do you know what Calvinism is? Yeah,
Speaker 1: how would you describe Calvinism, Sophie. It's like it's like
Speaker 1: super strict Christianity our phrasing. It's like it's intense. It's
Speaker 1: like they like really really believed in like the Lord. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 1: And they're like the kind of a lot in a
Speaker 1: lot of ways, the predecessors of a lot of today's evangelicals. Um.
Speaker 1: Because they believe that you can't do good things to
Speaker 1: save your soul from from hell. Um, like it's totally
Speaker 1: God's choice. Um. And so a lot of them believe
Speaker 1: that like where you go end up after death is
Speaker 1: like predicted or is like decided before your birth. Um,
Speaker 1: so they were. They were pretty hardcore fundamentalists. Um. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's not great. It's not my my particular choice of religion,
Speaker 1: but it was a pretty common one at that point
Speaker 1: in time, and in the plate part of America where
Speaker 1: Brown grew up. It's like, hey, it wasn't a great time.
Speaker 1: But also you're going to hell. But also, yeah, it
Speaker 1: doesn't matter what you do. Yeah, that's very depressing. Yeah,
Speaker 1: when you read religious tracts from people back then, the
Speaker 1: kind of God they worship seems more like a terrorist
Speaker 1: to me. But um, and not the good kind of terrorists,
Speaker 1: which we're talking about today, not this kind of a terrorist. Like. Yeah, Now,
Speaker 1: some of what we know about John's early life comes
Speaker 1: from a note he wrote a twelve year old who
Speaker 1: was the son of one of the men who financed
Speaker 1: his crusade against slavery. So he like wrote this summary
Speaker 1: of his life for the kid of one of the
Speaker 1: people who was backing this guerrilla war that he fighting. Yeah,
Speaker 1: that's my starch of choice. Yeah, I write notes to
Speaker 1: a lot of twelve year olds just waging a grill
Speaker 1: a war. It does it sounds creepier than it was? Um, yeah,
Speaker 1: it wasn't really creepy, but it does sound creepy when
Speaker 1: you sum it up that way. Um. And in that note,
Speaker 1: here's how Brown described his childhood. Uh and he wrote
Speaker 1: this in the third person because he's a weirdo. I
Speaker 1: cannot tell you of anything in the first four years
Speaker 1: of John's life worth mentioning, save that at an early age,
Speaker 1: he was tempted by three large brass pins belonging to
Speaker 1: a girl who lived in the family and stole them.
Speaker 1: In this he was detected by his mother and, after
Speaker 1: having a full day to think of the wrong, received
Speaker 1: from her a thorough whipping. So this is what John
Speaker 1: Brown thinks it's important to tell a little kid about
Speaker 1: his childhood. He's like, hey, kid, back in my day pins, Yeah,
Speaker 1: well that guy he punishment is important to him. He's like, listen, listen,
Speaker 1: you think you had it bad? Whipping all, I'm gonna
Speaker 1: say whipping. Oh I bet that kid get whipped too.
Speaker 1: I think they were whipping kids all throughout the eight hundreds.
Speaker 1: But is it wasn't like that normal? Yeah? Yeah, for sure, right, yeah,
Speaker 1: the the abuse like obviously, like we can say that
Speaker 1: what happened to John Brown as a kid was abuse
Speaker 1: um by our standards, but at the time it was
Speaker 1: pretty much just how kids grew up. You know, you
Speaker 1: give them some whippings. They were harder times, Robert. Yeah.
Speaker 1: And it was also a time in which the most
Speaker 1: common reaction to gut wrenching poverty was to pack up
Speaker 1: everything you owned and just move vaguely west. Uh. And
Speaker 1: in Brown's case, this took his family to Ohio, which
Speaker 1: at that point was called very funny. It sounds like
Speaker 1: half my relatives or like, you know what what I did? Yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean, yeah, it sounds like my parents. Yeah, it's
Speaker 1: it's it's kind of the defining emotion of this country.
Speaker 1: Not happy here. What if I had Westmore and you're like,
Speaker 1: all right, I'm I'm now I'm in San Diego. What
Speaker 1: do I do? It's like I guess the sea. Yeah,
Speaker 1: if you're miserable in San Diego, you just gotta walk
Speaker 1: into the ocean. Yeah, don't walk into the ad. Don't
Speaker 1: do that unless you're like walking. But like you're still
Speaker 1: you can still yet, we don't, we don't, we don't
Speaker 1: contron drowning um continue. Yeah. So Brown's family moved to
Speaker 1: Ohio when he was a wee lad which at that
Speaker 1: point was not called Ohio. It was called the Western
Speaker 1: Reserve by Connecticuttians. I don't know what you call people
Speaker 1: from Connecticut, and I refused to learn. Um so Owen, Yeah, no,
Speaker 1: the well they should have lived in a state that
Speaker 1: should have gone with a better name. Yeah, the fucking uh.
Speaker 1: Iowa's right there, Rhode Island. All find names now. Owen
Speaker 1: Brown considered this move west to be an active religious
Speaker 1: devotion as well as practicality, part of a glorious attempt
Speaker 1: to extend the benefits of Christendom further into what he
Speaker 1: saw as an untamed continent. John Brown, however, loved the
Speaker 1: wild nature of the west in Reserve. He wrote with
Speaker 1: excitement that it was a quote wilderness filled with wild
Speaker 1: beasts and indians now. Unlike many of his contemporaries, Brown
Speaker 1: and his family were on friendly terms with the natives.
Speaker 1: One of John's friends was a Native American boy who
Speaker 1: gave him a yellow marble as a gift. John was
Speaker 1: heartbroken when he lost it, according to the book Midnight
Speaker 1: Rising by Tony Horwitz. Quote. He also displayed an unusual
Speaker 1: tolerance towards the native inhabitants of Ohio. Some persons seemed
Speaker 1: disposed to quarrel with the Indians, But I never was,
Speaker 1: he wrote, Nor did he proselytize or damn natives as heathens,
Speaker 1: as Puritans of old would have done. Instead, he traded
Speaker 1: meal for fish and game. He also built a log
Speaker 1: shelter to protect local Indians from an Indian tribe. Young
Speaker 1: John used to hang about Indians as much as he could,
Speaker 1: the beginnings of a lifelong sympathy for natives that stood
Speaker 1: in start contrast at the prevailing hostility of white Americans.
Speaker 1: So we're seeing a guy here who's capable of at
Speaker 1: least transcending from an early age, capable of transcending the
Speaker 1: biases of his time to an extent right, that loves
Speaker 1: to mention sources of young boys. Well, he was a
Speaker 1: young boy. He was like he was like five, six
Speaker 1: years old. Yeah, he was a little kid. He was
Speaker 1: not a young man. At this point. You're like that
Speaker 1: it was a yellow marble. Yeah, it was a yellow marble.
Speaker 1: That's the best color of marble, I assume. Obviously I
Speaker 1: don't know much about marble. Yell is my favorite call it.
Speaker 1: That's why I'm saying, And I'm a narcissist. So continue weird, Sophie. Now.
Speaker 1: During this period, John Brown started will become a lifelong
Speaker 1: practice of living in difficult conditions and surviving off of
Speaker 1: his wits. He spent basically his whole childhood camping and
Speaker 1: hunting for meat. His father dressed him in the hides
Speaker 1: of animals that his family had killed, and John grew
Speaker 1: up living off of animals but also holding great affection
Speaker 1: for them. As a young boy, he found a baby
Speaker 1: bobtail squirrel which he raised and hand tamed. When his
Speaker 1: beloved pet died, he mourned it for years. Very sensitive boy. Yeah, Yeah,
Speaker 1: he's he's He's got some sweetness to him Nowaday j.
Speaker 1: John's mother died in childbirth. His father remarried almost immediately,
Speaker 1: and John considered his stepmother a very esteemable woman, but
Speaker 1: he never got over the loss of his mom, and
Speaker 1: he would mourn her of the rest of his life.
Speaker 1: In total, John's father, Owen, married three women, the last
Speaker 1: time when he was in his sixties, and he had
Speaker 1: sixteen children totally with him, which is a number that
Speaker 1: John would best. Yeah, the Browns make a lot of people,
Speaker 1: I mean, damn John. Yeah. Now, as a boy, John
Speaker 1: is what you would call spirited. You would have to
Speaker 1: be to be one of sixteen. You gotta stick out, yeah,
Speaker 1: you gotta stick out. Yeah. And he seems to have. Um.
Speaker 1: He lied to his parents a lot, and he was
Speaker 1: punished for it regularly. He played very hard and was
Speaker 1: notable for like playing in a kind of a violent manner.
Speaker 1: He probably hurt a lot of his friends. Um. He
Speaker 1: seems to have been one of those people who was
Speaker 1: just unreasonably full of energy from a very young age. Um,
Speaker 1: And that he was that way his entire life. He
Speaker 1: always had way too much fucking energy. Like reading about
Speaker 1: John Brown's life is fucking exhausting. Um. So John wrote
Speaker 1: that he was quote ambitious to perform the full labor
Speaker 1: of a man when he was already a young child,
Speaker 1: and he started working full time at age twelve when
Speaker 1: he drove his father's heard of cattle one hundred miles
Speaker 1: on his own. So he's just immediately doing like more
Speaker 1: work than most grant women today. How many cattle are
Speaker 1: in a herd? Um, I don't know, but it's probably
Speaker 1: a few, doesn't at least? Is that like a thing
Speaker 1: that people are going to be like? How do you
Speaker 1: know that well, no, there's no set number for a herd.
Speaker 1: It's just a group of cows. Um. So by the
Speaker 1: time this kid is I hate cows. Why they're just
Speaker 1: stupid fat horses. That's what I think. The average hard
Speaker 1: size in the US is just over two hundred I think,
Speaker 1: but that's now the Canadian dairy herds average. That's probably
Speaker 1: closer to so interesting they would have expected, yeah, I
Speaker 1: don't think you would have that. That would have been
Speaker 1: a pretty large herd back then. But I don't know.
Speaker 1: Farms with more than a hundred cows makeup just oh no,
Speaker 1: less than that, less than less than a percent of
Speaker 1: the total jerry farm population. This is so interesting. Sorry,
Speaker 1: I continue far marcro up on head about a hundred
Speaker 1: hundred head of cattle. But you don't like cows, Well
Speaker 1: that's part of why I don't like cows. I lived
Speaker 1: close to him for years what they mean, so you know,
Speaker 1: in all fairness to the cows, I was worse to
Speaker 1: the cows than the cows were to me because I
Speaker 1: was a little boy and it was fun to hurt
Speaker 1: them with a broomstick. And uh, all right, Harry Potter, alright,
Speaker 1: Harry Potter, Well know you just you just hit him
Speaker 1: in the ass and they run around. I would love
Speaker 1: to see Anderson with like a herd of cow. Oh,
Speaker 1: they let dogs love it. I mean she has herding instincts.
Speaker 1: I mean she's a little of the ground, but she
Speaker 1: is technically a cattle dog. Yeah, Anderson, do you hear this? Yeah,
Speaker 1: she would love that now. Uh So, by the time
Speaker 1: John Brown is like a teenager, and by that I
Speaker 1: mean like thirteen or fourteen, he's probably done more hard
Speaker 1: physical labor than like most of the grown men in
Speaker 1: the US today have done in their whole lives. Um
Speaker 1: and most stories you'll read about John will emphasize that
Speaker 1: he was almost supernaturally tough and had an endless tolerance
Speaker 1: for hard work in physical pain. This was matched with
Speaker 1: a fanatic, religious sort of distaste for comfort. He would
Speaker 1: later write with pride that he had never attempted to dance,
Speaker 1: never learned any card games, and nursday profound dislike for Vein.
Speaker 1: In frintless conversations, He's like, I never learned a dance.
Speaker 1: Oh my god, he foot loosed himself real hard, dude.
Speaker 1: Oh man, that's hard to hear. Bacon, he did need
Speaker 1: Kevin Bacon. One Kevin Bacon could have really and that
Speaker 1: makes me think if you had, if you had Kevin
Speaker 1: Bacon and John Brown starring side by side in the
Speaker 1: first Tremors would have been a fun movie. So sad, yeah, yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean yeah, his his religions a bummer um. So
Speaker 1: John later would write that his eternal war with slavery
Speaker 1: also started when he was twelve, when he came upon
Speaker 1: a young black slave boy being beaten with shovels for
Speaker 1: some minor crime. He wrote in his letter to that
Speaker 1: little kid. This brought John to reflect on the wretched,
Speaker 1: hopeless condition of fatherless and motherless slave children. Now, I'm
Speaker 1: sure he saw stuff like that, and it may not
Speaker 1: have happened when he was twelve. He was writing a
Speaker 1: letter to a twelve year old. Maybe he giitted a bit,
Speaker 1: but it does seem accurate to say, basically, why is
Speaker 1: he writing a letter to a twelve year old? Do
Speaker 1: we know? Yeah? Yeah, one of his like as a
Speaker 1: as an older man, will get to this. He's funding
Speaker 1: like a guerrilla insurgency to try to free the slaves
Speaker 1: of the South, and he gets a bunch of rich
Speaker 1: backers and while he's like dining with one of them,
Speaker 1: this kid asks about his life and asks him to
Speaker 1: write a letter. Oh, so it's a Hallmark movie, but
Speaker 1: kind of. I mean it's more like, Uh, this guy
Speaker 1: is illegally funding a terrorist and the guy's kid wants
Speaker 1: to know more about the John Brown's life. So John
Speaker 1: Brown writes in a note, so we can buy more guns.
Speaker 1: Got it. So it's a lifetime movie. Yeah, lifetime movie. Yeah.
Speaker 1: So Brown studied to be a pastor but wound up
Speaker 1: not choosing that life, and it's likely that he would
Speaker 1: have been bored to tears by the work, but he
Speaker 1: remained a devoted Calvinist his entire life, following in his
Speaker 1: father's footsteps. Yeah, and he was like he was still
Speaker 1: like really woke as a Calvinist. Like when his church, uh,
Speaker 1: he learned that black people weren't allowed to sit at
Speaker 1: the front of the church, they had to sit in
Speaker 1: the back. He made a big point in the middle
Speaker 1: of service of getting up with his family, marching to
Speaker 1: the back, uh, walking up to one of the black
Speaker 1: families and offering them his seat at the front of
Speaker 1: the church, and then sitting in the back with his family. Um. So,
Speaker 1: like he's committed from the jump to to racial equality,
Speaker 1: not just to abolition, but to like total racial equality,
Speaker 1: which fucking nobody is at this period. Like most abolitionists
Speaker 1: are still pretty fucking racist, but not John Brown. Um. Yeah.
Speaker 1: At twenty, following his dad's advice, John Brown married Diane
Speaker 1: Lusk Lusk Dianne Lusk. Yeah. Weird name, Yeah, Diane d
Speaker 1: I A N T h E. Dianne Lusk. We name.
Speaker 1: I don't hate it though, No, it's it's a nice name.
Speaker 1: He describes her in his letters as remarkably plain but
Speaker 1: industrious and economical. So it's like she wasn't a bad bitch,
Speaker 1: but she's ugly. But I'm like she this is this
Speaker 1: is trash and does not pass the Bechdel tests. Continue. Yeah,
Speaker 1: well you're asking for too much if you want someone
Speaker 1: to be racially and gender woke. Eighteen thirty Yeah, definitely
Speaker 1: can of both. No where. Yeah. Their first child was
Speaker 1: born a year after they married. Jane Jr. Knows Owen. Um,
Speaker 1: come on, no, no, no, I'm I'm getting that name wrong.
Speaker 1: I write it down somewhere later. Um. Yeah. John and
Speaker 1: his father Owen do not sound like there would have
Speaker 1: been fun people to hang out with, but they were
Speaker 1: on the right side of the debate. He has an Owen,
Speaker 1: He has a John Brown Jr. Oh, he has a Salmon.
Speaker 1: His son's name Sam Holy. He had some weird names.
Speaker 1: Wait he also he's a fun ten of children too. Yeah,
Speaker 1: he has twenty and more than half of them survived
Speaker 1: to adulthood. Some of them die fighting with him. Yeah. Ellen,
Speaker 1: my mom's name is Ellen high Mom. She listens to
Speaker 1: our show and there you go. So John and his
Speaker 1: dad were on the right side of the slavery debate
Speaker 1: from the beginning. Owen had been a fierce abolitionist in
Speaker 1: an era when that really wasn't the thing. He was
Speaker 1: also a pacifist, and for a time John Brown was
Speaker 1: a pacifist too, So they fought slavery without fighting the
Speaker 1: people who kept slaves, largely by helping escaped slaves with
Speaker 1: shelter and food on their way across the underground railroad.
Speaker 1: So well, John is a kid. He and his family
Speaker 1: are like helping to hide escaped slaves as they make
Speaker 1: their way up to Canada. So this is like a
Speaker 1: part of his life from like the teenage years on. Um.
Speaker 1: When John was twenty one, he moved his young Emily
Speaker 1: to Pennsylvania and bought two hundred acres of land. He
Speaker 1: built a house and a tannery on it. Now, the
Speaker 1: tannery had a hidden room which Brown used to hide
Speaker 1: escape slaves from the South. From the mid eighteen twenties
Speaker 1: to eighteen thirty five, the Brown family hosted an estimated
Speaker 1: escaped slaves, playing a critical role in their journey to freedom.
Speaker 1: So he's a committed abolitionist and like putting his money
Speaker 1: where his mouth is his entire life. Now, while he
Speaker 1: was helping to work the underground railroad, John was also
Speaker 1: helping to found a new settlement in rural Pennsylvania. He's
Speaker 1: built a school, and he built a church, and he
Speaker 1: was the area's first postmaster. One of his neighbors described
Speaker 1: him as an inspired paternal ruler, controlling and providing for
Speaker 1: the circle of which he was the head. Have a question, Yeah,
Speaker 1: how is he funding all this? I mean, it doesn't
Speaker 1: take that much money. Like he works, and he like
Speaker 1: you could buy two hundred acres was like a few
Speaker 1: bucks back then. Like, because they're trying to most of
Speaker 1: this area after the whole genocide of the Native Americans thing,
Speaker 1: there's an unspeakable amount of empty territory that the government
Speaker 1: wants people farming. So there's all these deals where you
Speaker 1: can get most of the land for free or basically
Speaker 1: for free, you can get alone or there's no interest
Speaker 1: because they're they're just trying to get people farming and
Speaker 1: using it um to make sure it was realistic and
Speaker 1: it wasn't like an episode of Friends. No no, no Um. Now,
Speaker 1: as you might imagine, there were a lot of people
Speaker 1: who didn't get along with John Brown. His wife's brother
Speaker 1: was only able to visit the family on Sundays, and
Speaker 1: so John hated him because visiting on Sunday was a
Speaker 1: sin against God. Uh. John was so strict about keeping
Speaker 1: the Sabbath that his church banned all worldly conversation on
Speaker 1: that day, so you couldn't talk about anything but religion
Speaker 1: on on Sunday. Making cheese and hanging out with your
Speaker 1: friends was also forbidden on Sunday. Work Yeah, it's it's
Speaker 1: a lay mass religion um. Workers on John's tannery were
Speaker 1: required to attend his church and hold daily worship sessions
Speaker 1: with their families. One of John's apprentices described him as
Speaker 1: friendly as long as the conversation did not turn towards
Speaker 1: anything he considered profane. Or vulgar. Brown's younger brother described
Speaker 1: him as a king against whom there is no rising up.
Speaker 1: So that one word, a king against whom there is
Speaker 1: no rising up. So it's basically like my way or
Speaker 1: the highway. Yeah, he is absolutely convinced that he's right. Um.
Speaker 1: And he will not like he's personable unless you disagree
Speaker 1: with him. And he is not not open to being
Speaker 1: disagreed with about the things he believes. Yeah, he's that
Speaker 1: kind of guy. Um So again, a religious fundamentalist, kind
Speaker 1: of a dick about it um, but also like a
Speaker 1: really dedicated family man, dedicated to his community. Uh and
Speaker 1: an anti slavery crusader um So yeah. Uh he's an
Speaker 1: interesting fella. Uh. And when we come back from ADS, uh,
Speaker 1: we will talk about how he raised his kids. I
Speaker 1: love ADS, to Sophie. I love ADS products a good service.
Speaker 1: I don't have a fun. It's it's usually more fun
Speaker 1: when like I say something horrible about like a bunch
Speaker 1: of kids getting murdered, and then I say, you know what,
Speaker 1: won't murder all your kids? Should we try to try?
Speaker 1: We try a transition. I mean I am about to
Speaker 1: talk about how what he did to his children by
Speaker 1: the standards of the modern era was abuse. Um now
Speaker 1: I'm sad that one of them after my mom. Child
Speaker 1: abuse by the standards of our modern era. What isn't
Speaker 1: child abuse is the products that support this show. Wow,
Speaker 1: brave hum. I'm Robert Evans, host behind the Bastards, And
Speaker 1: like a lot of you, I use contacts. My life
Speaker 1: doesn't really work without them. But you know, sometimes it's
Speaker 1: a pain ordering them online because like you get in
Speaker 1: there and you can't find your prescription or maybe it's expired,
Speaker 1: and then like, what are you gonna do? You gotta
Speaker 1: get your contacts? So what you go pay two hundred
Speaker 1: bucks to get like an appointment without insurance. That's not
Speaker 1: great for a lot of us. But Simple Contacts has
Speaker 1: made this a heck of a lot easier. With Simple Contacts,
Speaker 1: can go online, take a five minute vision test, you
Speaker 1: get it reviewed by a license doctor that costs twenty dollars,
Speaker 1: and then you can order your contacts. Their prices are unbeatable,
Speaker 1: standard shipping is free, and we're offering a promotion to
Speaker 1: our listeners. You know, when I tried Simple Contacts, I
Speaker 1: found it a lot easier than I thought it was
Speaker 1: going to be. You know, I expect that it was
Speaker 1: going to be real pain, the vision test would be
Speaker 1: a pain. I thought it was all going to be frustrating.
Speaker 1: It was super fast, super easy. Uh, the most convenient
Speaker 1: contact ordering experience I've ever had. So if you want
Speaker 1: twenty dollars off your contacts, you can go to Simple
Speaker 1: Contact dot com slash behind. That's just Simple Contacts dot
Speaker 1: Com slash behind or intercode behind at checkout and you'll
Speaker 1: get twenty dollars off your contacts. Uh. Now, obviously the
Speaker 1: simple Contact exam isn't a replacement for your periodic full
Speaker 1: eye healthcare exam, but it can make things a lot
Speaker 1: easier for you if you're in the situations I think
Speaker 1: a lot of us are in. So again, go to
Speaker 1: Simple Contacts dot Com, slash behind or enter behind it
Speaker 1: check out for twenty dollars off Simple Contacts. We're back.
Speaker 1: We're back. So we were just talking about John Brown,
Speaker 1: the father. Um. Now, obviously, like everybody was an abuse
Speaker 1: parent by modern standards in this period of time, but
Speaker 1: even by the standards of the mid in early eighteen hundreds,
Speaker 1: John Brown was considered a very strict parent. Uh. And
Speaker 1: I'm gonna quote again from the book midnight rising. His firstborn,
Speaker 1: John Jr. Was required to keep a ledger listing his
Speaker 1: sins and detailing the punishment due each unfaithfulness at work
Speaker 1: earned three lashes. Disobeying mother brought eight. The second born, Jason,
Speaker 1: had a vivid dream about petting a baby raccoon that
Speaker 1: was as kind as a kitten, and described the encounter
Speaker 1: as if it had really happened. He was three or
Speaker 1: four at the time, and his father thrashed him for
Speaker 1: telling a wicked lie. Five year old Ruth muddled her
Speaker 1: shoes while gathering pussy willows and then fibbed about how
Speaker 1: she'd gotten wet. Her father switched me with the willow
Speaker 1: that had caused my sin, she recalled, Yeah, subdiction. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's fucking rough man. Also, like Jason's kid a vivid
Speaker 1: dream about petting a baby raccoon, maybe like, no, don't
Speaker 1: try that. Yeah, well, yeah, Jason. Jason feels like a
Speaker 1: really weird name for that era. Oh yeah, No, there's
Speaker 1: a lot of Jason's that's like a Bible name, right,
Speaker 1: Like like a guy that hangs out at like a
Speaker 1: hip coffee shop and says he's working on his screenplay. Yeah,
Speaker 1: that's Jason, but he goes by Jay. You're right, you're right,
Speaker 1: you're right, you're right. Okay, my apologies. Jason continued having
Speaker 1: vivid dreams about petting baby raccoons, So you agree he
Speaker 1: should have been beaten for that. That's good to know.
Speaker 1: Sophie is pro abusing children who dream about raccoons. I
Speaker 1: mean he's want to talk. I mean, yep, it's settled.
Speaker 1: It's settled to talk. Wasn't his best friend a squirrel?
Speaker 1: Well yeah, but that was a real squirrel, not a
Speaker 1: dream raccoon. I mean that we know of. I mean,
Speaker 1: nobody's friends with a squirrel. Nobody I've been friends with
Speaker 1: a squirrel. Yes, I was. At my last place in
Speaker 1: l A. We hand tamed a squirrel, even pet it briefly.
Speaker 1: We have a sworn enemy named that's a squirrel named
Speaker 1: Edward that we deal with every morning at my apartment complex.
Speaker 1: Named him. I don't I never named our friends squirrel,
Speaker 1: but I loved her, and I hope she's okay. I
Speaker 1: hope Edward gives away. Continue. Brown apprehended two men he
Speaker 1: had countered on the road who were stealing apples, and
Speaker 1: smashed a neighbor's whiskey jug after taking just a few
Speaker 1: SIPs and deciding the liquor had dangerous powers. Despite his severity,
Speaker 1: Brown was beloved by his children, who also recalled his
Speaker 1: many acts of tenderness. He sang hymns to them at bedtime,
Speaker 1: recited maxims from Aesop and Benjamin Franklin, and cared for
Speaker 1: his little folks when they were ill, and was gentle
Speaker 1: with animals. He warmed frozen lambs in the family washed
Speaker 1: up as long as they're real animals. Like, what, this
Speaker 1: is very weird. He's a he's a weird guy. He's
Speaker 1: a complicated person. Um in like clearly is capable of
Speaker 1: being a giant dick as a parent to his kids
Speaker 1: and is also capable of being a really loving father. Um,
Speaker 1: he's he's a strange guy. He's a flawed man. But
Speaker 1: and he's a child of a brutal time. You know. Uh,
Speaker 1: people wound up rougher back then. Um, which is an excuse,
Speaker 1: bad ship, But it was a tough time to come up. Um.
Speaker 1: You try working from age twelve and losing your mom, Like,
Speaker 1: you're not gonna be a softie. Um So. Diane, John's
Speaker 1: wife died in childbirth Yeah, all the Browns have wives
Speaker 1: that die in childbirth, which again not super uncommon the
Speaker 1: number of kids they're having. Yeah. John took this very hard, obviously,
Speaker 1: and he and his five children moved in with another
Speaker 1: family briefly while they dealt with their grief. When they
Speaker 1: returned home, John hired a housekeeper sometimes. Her sixteen year
Speaker 1: old sister Mary came along to help. John Brown proposed
Speaker 1: to marry by letters several months after meeting her, and
Speaker 1: they got married in July. He is thirty one. Nope, sorry,
Speaker 1: he is thirty three. Not common back then, but still
Speaker 1: not that uncommon, but still creepy. Yeah. A year after
Speaker 1: his wife's death, Uh, he marries a woman half his age.
Speaker 1: Uh and four years older than his oldest child. Um,
Speaker 1: sounds like he sounds very Hollywood at this point. Well,
Speaker 1: I think it's more like Honestly, I think with him,
Speaker 1: like it's not even like a lust thing. It's a
Speaker 1: I want to have a lot more kids, and so
Speaker 1: the younger she is, the tougher she'll be, like, the
Speaker 1: better her odds of surviving. Um. And yeah that she
Speaker 1: they would stay married the rest of John's life, and
Speaker 1: she bore him thirteen children. Yeah. Uh. And it was
Speaker 1: not an easy marriage for her. John Brown was all
Speaker 1: the time and had to do with his grumpy, hating
Speaker 1: of imagination ass. I think actually she would have loved
Speaker 1: to have dealt with his grumpy ass more because he
Speaker 1: was fucking gone most of the time, which we're about
Speaker 1: to talk about. Yeah. Um. But for the early years
Speaker 1: of their marriage, the biggest problem, well, he came back
Speaker 1: long enough to get her knock her up again. So um.
Speaker 1: For the first years of their marriage, John was constantly
Speaker 1: on the edge of bankruptcy. He spent money as quickly
Speaker 1: as he made it, and often a lot quicker than
Speaker 1: he could make it. The story of his um like life,
Speaker 1: uh farming having kids like businesses like start. Yeah, he
Speaker 1: would start businesses and they'd fail. Um. So like he
Speaker 1: had a bunch of failed businesses. He was terrible and
Speaker 1: everything to do with money. Um. He was a good
Speaker 1: worker and like had a great work ethic, but was
Speaker 1: just awful at making money or like spending his money wisely.
Speaker 1: And while John struggled to get ahead economically, the United
Speaker 1: States lurched closer and closer to violence over the issue
Speaker 1: of slavery. In the year of Birth eighteen hundred, nearly
Speaker 1: one fifth of the five million people in the US
Speaker 1: were enslaved. Ever since the invention of the cotton gin
Speaker 1: in seventeen ninety three, the South had grown increasingly wealthy
Speaker 1: and influential in American politics. By the eighteen fifties, all
Speaker 1: twelve of the United states is richest counties were in
Speaker 1: the South. On its own, the South was the fourth
Speaker 1: largest economy on Earth. For some perspective, the South and
Speaker 1: the eighteen hundreds was wealthier than California is today. So
Speaker 1: all of the money's in the South, and they have
Speaker 1: most of the political influence. Yeah, this is like, yeah,
Speaker 1: eighteen fifties and stuff, they just get richer and richard. Yeah.
Speaker 1: The whole Industrial Revolution worldwide was driven in large part
Speaker 1: by the production of cotton by slaves in the American South,
Speaker 1: like even down to like the countries that had banned slavery,
Speaker 1: like England, Um, like cotton was critical for like the
Speaker 1: building of boats and ships, and like a lot of
Speaker 1: different like factory equipment, and it was all made possible
Speaker 1: by enslaved black people. So like the whole Industrial Revolution
Speaker 1: is undergirded by black slavery, even in the countries that
Speaker 1: didn't have slave was legal at that point um, which
Speaker 1: is important to note. Yeah. Now, the sheer mass of
Speaker 1: money in the South uh and thus behind slavery, made
Speaker 1: it impossible for most people in the eighteen thirties to
Speaker 1: imagine an end to the institution. In eighteen thirty one,
Speaker 1: as John Brown entered his thirties, the abolition movement was growing,
Speaker 1: but still firmly fringe in the context of national politics.
Speaker 1: This started to change that August, when an enslaved preacher
Speaker 1: named Nat Turner gathered up a small band of his
Speaker 1: fellow slaves and launched an insurrection. Armed with hatchets, knives,
Speaker 1: and muskets, they executed roughly sixty white Virginians and gathered
Speaker 1: a small number of slaves to their banner. Like John Brown,
Speaker 1: Nat Turner had also been born in eighteen hundred. Also,
Speaker 1: like John, he came to view himself as something of
Speaker 1: a prophet and believed that he had been chosen by
Speaker 1: God to bring about the end of slavery. Turner's band
Speaker 1: did not just kill slaveholders. They executed women, school children,
Speaker 1: and even a baby in a cradle. Um. So Nat
Speaker 1: Turner's raid is a complicated thing to talk about morally, Okay, okay,
Speaker 1: what no, no, yeah, these they are they are just
Speaker 1: killing They're killing all of the white people they come across. Um.
Speaker 1: And in terms of like sort of parsing that out
Speaker 1: in a moral context, I found an interesting CBS article
Speaker 1: UM that interviewed Bruce Turner, who was a great great
Speaker 1: great grandchild of Nat Turner, and Rick Francis, who's a
Speaker 1: descendant of one of the slaveholding families that Turner massacred.
Speaker 1: I'm gonna quote from that now. Both Turner and Francis
Speaker 1: are avid students of history who have researched their own
Speaker 1: families as well as the historical record of the rebellion.
Speaker 1: Anderson Cooper put the question to them both. Is Nat
Speaker 1: Turner a hero? Yes, he is, says Bruce Turner, because
Speaker 1: he saw an opportunity to try to correct something that
Speaker 1: was an extremely bad evil. He believes Nat Turner was
Speaker 1: a freedom fighter who started a movement that helped in
Speaker 1: the institution of slavery. Prior to the insurrection, slave owners
Speaker 1: actually believe that the slaves were happy in their condition.
Speaker 1: He says, Nat Turner's changed that Rick Francis is no
Speaker 1: defender of the horrible institution practiced by his forbears, but
Speaker 1: he does not see Nat Turner as a heroic figure.
Speaker 1: France's questions whether a desire to end slavery is what
Speaker 1: motivated Turner to kill. He also points out that Nat
Speaker 1: Turner and his followers killed many women and children. There
Speaker 1: were a means to an end, says Bruce Turner. Women
Speaker 1: were slave owners, children were slave owners. And the baby
Speaker 1: and the brad Old question mark. Yeah, I mean I
Speaker 1: think what Nat Turner would say, if you could bring
Speaker 1: him back and pose that question him, is that baby
Speaker 1: would have grown up to be a slave owner. Almost
Speaker 1: none of the children of slave owning families grew up
Speaker 1: to repudiate those beliefs. It was very uncommon um. And
Speaker 1: Turner's argument, I think would have been something along the
Speaker 1: lines of, they were all part of this institution, um,
Speaker 1: and they didn't spare our children, so why should we
Speaker 1: spare theirs? You know? And uh, it's just like on
Speaker 1: a sixty minutes thing or something with Anderson Cooper. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I think so. I just found it in an article,
Speaker 1: but I think it was part of Anderson Cooper's show. Yeah,
Speaker 1: shout out Anderson Cooper, the father of my dog. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's a complicated story the tale and Nat turn how
Speaker 1: you how you feel about how justified it was a
Speaker 1: matter of your own personal morality. I feel like you
Speaker 1: can't really judge it. Likely I would argue that you
Speaker 1: can't judge. I don't think you can judge the actions
Speaker 1: of an enslaved person taking action against the people who
Speaker 1: kept him in bondage. Um, no matter how terrible, uh
Speaker 1: they seem based on the morality you get to have
Speaker 1: in a much less fucked up era. Um. But I'm
Speaker 1: not gonna I'm gonna slam my opinions on Nat Turner
Speaker 1: on the audience. We have a lot of John Brown
Speaker 1: to get through. So NAT's uprising did not work out. Um.
Speaker 1: While he eventually gathered about forty slaves, they failed to
Speaker 1: make it to the town of Jerusalem and its armory,
Speaker 1: which is where they were headed to try to get guns.
Speaker 1: White militiamen succeeded in scattering turners men and executing or
Speaker 1: killing most of them. Turner's insurrection inspired a vicious white
Speaker 1: reprisal um, and gangs of armed whites murdered hundreds upon
Speaker 1: hundreds of black people and impaled their severed heads on
Speaker 1: road signs as a warning. To others. Turner's body was decapitated,
Speaker 1: quartered and skinned. His skull and brain were sent off
Speaker 1: to be studied because people were like, why would a
Speaker 1: slave not want to be a slave. The fat from
Speaker 1: Turner's body was rendered into wagon wheel grease, and his
Speaker 1: skin was tanned and sent off to the families of
Speaker 1: the people killed in his raid as a souvenir. U.
Speaker 1: This is a fucking brutal time. Like you really got
Speaker 1: to remember that whenever you try to think through these
Speaker 1: people's actions and decisions and morality. Is like it was
Speaker 1: fucking rough, and like how do we like did somebody
Speaker 1: write all this down? Like this is they weren't They
Speaker 1: weren't ashamed of it, And like if you're the fucking
Speaker 1: if you're the white oppressors, who want who are who
Speaker 1: are doing? Who are massacring these people and chopping up
Speaker 1: Nate's body, Like you want all of the black people
Speaker 1: who might come across the story to know what happens
Speaker 1: when they stand up, Like that's part of how you
Speaker 1: oppress people. Yea, this would have been a great time
Speaker 1: for an ad transition. I would have been like, you
Speaker 1: know what doesn't oppress people? The products? But you're early bro,
Speaker 1: We're early. I know, I just it would have been good.
Speaker 1: So um. Prior to Nat Turner's uprising, most abolitionists supported
Speaker 1: a slow, piecemeal emancipation of enslaved blacks and sought to
Speaker 1: basically ship them to Africa or the Caribbean. The nation
Speaker 1: of Liberia was born from this basic idea. And this
Speaker 1: is like what Abraham Lincoln and others like him kind
Speaker 1: of would have advocated in the period um prior to
Speaker 1: NAT Turner. This is about the best you could hope
Speaker 1: for from woke white people, that they'd be like, slavery
Speaker 1: is wrong, but we don't want them here. Um Now.
Speaker 1: After Nat Turner, abolitionists were increasingly likely to urge an
Speaker 1: immediate into the institution of slavery, and the figurehead of
Speaker 1: this new wing of the abolitionist movement was a guy
Speaker 1: named William Lloyd Garrison, who was the editor for a
Speaker 1: newspaper called The Liberator in Boston. Um Now. The Liberator
Speaker 1: started publication eight months before Turner's revolt, and Garrison's prose
Speaker 1: could have knew an utterly uncompromising tone that fitted well
Speaker 1: with the era ignited by Nat Turner. Garrison had nothing
Speaker 1: but contempt for the interests of his day and their
Speaker 1: advocacy of gradual reform. He wrote, tell a man who
Speaker 1: his houses on fire to give a moderate alarm. I
Speaker 1: will not equivocate, I will not excuse, I will not
Speaker 1: retreat a single inch, and I will be heard. So
Speaker 1: after Turner, some stronger voices start to speak up in
Speaker 1: favor of abolitionism. Yeah, and not like, oh, we'll do
Speaker 1: it piece by piece and like will slowly. They're like, no,
Speaker 1: this ship has to end. It's fucked. Not like, Okay,
Speaker 1: we'll transfer you to another department, none of that bullshit. Yeah,
Speaker 1: fuck this ship. Garrison is a fuck this ship kind
Speaker 1: of guy, but he is a pacifist. He's also a pacifist.
Speaker 1: Should I not say that? No, no, no, no no.
Speaker 1: I don't agree with everything Garrison thought about how to
Speaker 1: end slavery, But you can't fault him on a moral level.
Speaker 1: He just didn't believe in violence. Um, and it turns
Speaker 1: out violence was the only way to end slavery. But um,
Speaker 1: you can't fault him for not wanting the nation to
Speaker 1: be convulsed by a bloody war. Um. Yeah. So for
Speaker 1: a time, John Brown approached his abolitionism through the lens
Speaker 1: of passive bism too. But in the years after Nat
Speaker 1: Turner's rebellion, the debate over slavery turned more violent. Pro
Speaker 1: slavery Southerner saw what had happened in Virginia with Nat
Speaker 1: Turner as the culmination of their worst nightmares. The sheer
Speaker 1: number of slaves, who in some areas outnumbered whites, terrified them.
Speaker 1: They believed that any talk of abolitionism deserved an immediate
Speaker 1: and violent response. In eighteen thirty seven, a pro slavery
Speaker 1: mob murdered Elijah Lovejoy, the abolitionist editor of what was
Speaker 1: effectively an anti slavery zine. They tossed his printing press
Speaker 1: into the Mississippi. Love Joy had feudally armed himself in
Speaker 1: self defense, which William Lloyd Garrison disapproved of, but which
Speaker 1: John Brown seems to have taken as something of an inspiration.
Speaker 1: At a meeting of Brown's church convened to protest love
Speaker 1: Joy's murder, John Brown swore a declaration here before God,
Speaker 1: in the presence of these witnesses, from this time, I
Speaker 1: consecrate my life to the destruction of slavery. So he
Speaker 1: takes love Joy's murder as a rallying call, and he
Speaker 1: buys a gun shortly after this point, so he's so
Speaker 1: far no weapon up to this point. He was like
Speaker 1: he was he was on like his dad had been
Speaker 1: a pacifist. His dad was a pacifist. Um he was
Speaker 1: a pacifist. He didn't like he had been a child
Speaker 1: during the War of eighteen twelve, and he had a
Speaker 1: really negative idea of soldiers because he'd seen what they
Speaker 1: did in the areas where they like bivoact and stuff.
Speaker 1: So he was very anti violence. This starts to change
Speaker 1: after love Joy's murder. He starts to think, maybe violence
Speaker 1: is the only way we're going to get rid of slavery. Now.
Speaker 1: Brown did not follow this declaration by joining any of
Speaker 1: the abolitionist groups in his area. Instead, he decided to
Speaker 1: turn his large family into what amounted to an abolitionist
Speaker 1: insurgent cell um. John surviving children later that recall the
Speaker 1: night he sat down with his wife and his three
Speaker 1: oldest sons. Quote, he asked us, who of us were
Speaker 1: willing to make common cause with him and doing all
Speaker 1: in our power to break the laws of the wicked
Speaker 1: and pluck the spoil out of his teeth? Are you married? John, Jason,
Speaker 1: and Owen John's wife and children all prayed with him
Speaker 1: and swore an oath to fight for slavery's defeat. Of
Speaker 1: of the years, John would bring the rest of his
Speaker 1: enormous brood into this anti slavery pact, boys and girls included.
Speaker 1: His relationship with his sons is fascinating to me, and
Speaker 1: I think this paragraph from Midnight Rising makes it clear why. Quote.
Speaker 1: None of Brown's sons adopted their father's orthodox faith, and
Speaker 1: several openly challenged it, an apostasy that vexed him tremendously.
Speaker 1: But all seven of his unregenerate boys who survived childhood
Speaker 1: would take up arms against slavery. They held firmly to
Speaker 1: the idea that father was right. Samon recalled where he
Speaker 1: had led. We were glad to follow, and every one
Speaker 1: of us had the courage of his convictions. Brown's brothers,
Speaker 1: in laws and other kind would also lend support to
Speaker 1: his anti slavery crusade. There was a Brown family conspiracy.
Speaker 1: His eldest son said to break the power of slavery's kids. Yeah,
Speaker 1: none of his kids follow him and his religion. They're like,
Speaker 1: you're kind of nuts on this. But like the old
Speaker 1: dudes write about slavery. That ship. They're like, they're like, listen,
Speaker 1: you know, I can't funk with you on that, but
Speaker 1: I'll get behind you on that. So they're like the
Speaker 1: slavery ship. I mean, I mean like they're kind of right. Yeah.
Speaker 1: And it's kind of like you get a feeling from
Speaker 1: John in doing this with his family that he kind
Speaker 1: of recognizes once he commits himself to this cause that like,
Speaker 1: I'm gonna wind up breaking the law, I'm gonna wind
Speaker 1: up being a terrorist, I'm gonna commit a shipload of crimes.
Speaker 1: And so I can't trust joining a group full of
Speaker 1: people that I don't know, Like, it's got to just
Speaker 1: be me and my family, um, Like otherwise somebody's going
Speaker 1: to wrap me out. He's got nepotism. Yeah yeah, I mean,
Speaker 1: I don't know if it's nepotism for terrorism. Maybe it's
Speaker 1: just the smart way to do it. Um. But he
Speaker 1: does commit to using his family in this way. It's
Speaker 1: somebody you know and not you know. Yeah, yeah, exactly. Yeah.
Speaker 1: It's like, well, we won't make more comparisons to drug dealing,
Speaker 1: but it's like what you do when you deal drugs. Now,
Speaker 1: for the first years of this crusade to end slavery.
Speaker 1: The Brown family efforts were mostly limited to helping hide slaves,
Speaker 1: and for most people this would have been more than enough,
Speaker 1: and in my opinion, anyone who helped to operate the
Speaker 1: underground rail out in that time, even in a minor capacity,
Speaker 1: did something heroic. But just that was not enough for
Speaker 1: John Brown. He was clearly frustrated for years by his
Speaker 1: inability to strike any sort of direct blow against slavery.
Speaker 1: This was exacerbated by his constant and repeated failures at business.
Speaker 1: He wound up at the edge of bankruptcy several times
Speaker 1: and moved his family all around the New West in
Speaker 1: search of better prospects. Brown tried fur trading, cattle driving, surveying,
Speaker 1: and even breeding race horses. By eighteen forty, he was
Speaker 1: so broke that he could not even afford postage for
Speaker 1: his letters, and he declared bankruptcy. Yeah now, his attempts
Speaker 1: to find new work led him away from his family
Speaker 1: for months at a time, and the letters he was
Speaker 1: able to send home to his wife showed a distinct
Speaker 1: depression had gripped him. He signed unworthily yours above his
Speaker 1: name and referred to his wife as the sharer of
Speaker 1: my poverty, Trials, discredit and sore afflictions. In ninety one,
Speaker 1: the year after he declared bankruptcy, John's family was torn
Speaker 1: apart by a horrific bout of dysentery, which killed four
Speaker 1: of his children, including his nine year old daughter Sarah
Speaker 1: and his six year old son Charles. So this is
Speaker 1: a rough fucking life this guy is like now. From
Speaker 1: most of the early eighteen forties, John spent his time
Speaker 1: trying desperately to pull his family out of the financial
Speaker 1: hole he dug them into. It wasn't until eighteen forty
Speaker 1: seven that he had meaningful contact with members of the
Speaker 1: abolition movement. That year, he moved to the town of Springfield, Massachusetts,
Speaker 1: where he convinced a moneyed investor to fund a wool
Speaker 1: trading business. Brown was bad at the job, as he
Speaker 1: was bad at everything to do with money, and it
Speaker 1: failed miserably, But his time at Springfield brought him into
Speaker 1: contact with a huge number of freed blacks. While he
Speaker 1: was there, he met Frederick Douglas, an escaped slave and
Speaker 1: renowned speaker and writer. The two had dinner and Brown's
Speaker 1: exceedingly humble home, and during that dinner John walked Frederick
Speaker 1: through the plans that he had spent years cooking up.
Speaker 1: He unrolled a map of the Allegheny Mountains, which run
Speaker 1: from Pennsylvania and into the southeast. He pointed out that
Speaker 1: these mountains were filled with caves and natural fortresses. They
Speaker 1: were John thought the perfect place for an insurgent army
Speaker 1: to hide. He hold Douglass he believed the mountains had
Speaker 1: been put there by God for the emancipation of the
Speaker 1: Negro race. Over his dinner table, John Brown outlined an
Speaker 1: ambitious plan to use the Alleghanies as a base for
Speaker 1: a guerrilla army that would raid plantations, free their slaves,
Speaker 1: and send them north to swell the ranks of his army. Now,
Speaker 1: Douglas thought this plan was stirring, but probably outside the
Speaker 1: realm of possibility. So he thought it was a good idea,
Speaker 1: but he didn't think it was gonna work. Um, But
Speaker 1: he still found himself deeply taken an inadmiration of John Brown.
Speaker 1: He described him as built for times of trouble and
Speaker 1: fitted to grapple with the flintiest hardships. While in Springfield,
Speaker 1: Brown gained a reputation for being the exceedingly rare sort
Speaker 1: of white man who not only agitated for abolition, but
Speaker 1: actually treated black people as his equals in his personal life.
Speaker 1: John Stouffer, a Harvard historian who studies the history of
Speaker 1: race in America, says he stood apart from every other
Speaker 1: white in the historical record for his ability to burst
Speaker 1: free from the power of racism. Blacks were among his
Speaker 1: closest friends, and in some respects he felt more comfortable
Speaker 1: around blacks than he did around whites. So he's he's
Speaker 1: he's you'd call him awoke, dude. Um, he was famous. Yeah,
Speaker 1: he was kind of infamous among his fellow white people
Speaker 1: for dining with black families regularly and addressing the adults
Speaker 1: as mr. And mrs. And it's a sign of how
Speaker 1: racist America was at that time. Like he calls the Mr.
Speaker 1: My god. Like that's what we're dealing with in the
Speaker 1: broader culture at this point. Um. Frederick Douglas. Yeah, Yeah,
Speaker 1: you don't wind up super proud of American history when
Speaker 1: you really get into the weeds of race. Um, kind
Speaker 1: of hard to oh, my god, but not John Brown,
Speaker 1: So that's good. Uh. Frederick Douglas himself said that Brown,
Speaker 1: though a white gentleman, is in sympathy a black man,
Speaker 1: and as deeply interested in our cause as though his
Speaker 1: own soul had been pierced with the iron of slavery.
Speaker 1: So you'd call him a good ally as the point
Speaker 1: I'm trying to make. Yeah. In eighteen forty eight, Garrett
Speaker 1: Smith a wealthy abolitionist and another good ally, but he
Speaker 1: huge chunk of land in northern New York and gave
Speaker 1: it away to a large group of freed slaves. He
Speaker 1: asked Brown to move there in order to help the
Speaker 1: new community get on its feet. John agreed, in part
Speaker 1: because he thought that the colony in the Adirondacks might
Speaker 1: be able to act as a subterranean passway that would
Speaker 1: effectively expand the underground railroad's capacity by several orders of magnitude.
Speaker 1: He also thought it might act as the start of
Speaker 1: a chain of fortresses for the army of abolitionists and
Speaker 1: free blacks he planned to build to raid the plantations
Speaker 1: of the South. Now, John Brown's plans here are not
Speaker 1: as impossible as they sound. He knew that even with
Speaker 1: a large guerilla army, he could not hope to free
Speaker 1: all four million enslaved Blacks, but he could cause a
Speaker 1: panic and collapse the economies and slaveholding states as a
Speaker 1: result of that panic. But unfortunately, John Brown's economic realities
Speaker 1: forced him to push this plan on hold. While he
Speaker 1: traveled to Europe to sell a huge pile of wool
Speaker 1: for his failing business, He left his long suffering wife
Speaker 1: and children alone and the relatively primitive conditions of their
Speaker 1: New York farm. Now, we have no evidence that John
Speaker 1: Brown was physically abusive to his wife, and in fact,
Speaker 1: from the evidence we have, it seems very unlikely that
Speaker 1: he was. But it would be fair to say that
Speaker 1: there's was not a healthy relationship. And I'm gonna quote
Speaker 1: again from Midnight Rising. Her frequently absent husband acknowledged the
Speaker 1: hardship she endured in an unusually tender letter in eighteen
Speaker 1: forty seven. Note in his follies the very considerable difference
Speaker 1: in our age and the fact that I sometimes tied
Speaker 1: you severely. The toll was evident to Richard Dana when
Speaker 1: he visited the Browns at Irandack home. He described Mary,
Speaker 1: then just thirty five, as rather an invalid. So he's
Speaker 1: it's a he's he's a horrible husband. Um. Now, in
Speaker 1: his defense, it's a hard time to raise a family,
Speaker 1: but he's not he's not good at being around. Um.
Speaker 1: Sometimes I chied you severely. Was that the quote? Yeah, Yeah,
Speaker 1: he probably probably yells at her or something. Yeah, he
Speaker 1: scolds everybody. He's a scold. Ye. I don't know. I
Speaker 1: think he was probably kind of the quiet sort of scolder,
Speaker 1: but I I don't know about that. Um. That just
Speaker 1: the only I get from him, that he was the
Speaker 1: kind of like quietly furious at you, and that was
Speaker 1: the worst thing. But I don't know. Now. Brown's tour
Speaker 1: of Europe ended, as per usual, in economic disaster. He
Speaker 1: and his family were left even poorer than before. Brown
Speaker 1: returned to the farm in New York and for a
Speaker 1: time worked at helping free Black's so bad at making money.
Speaker 1: He's just terrible at it. Why, I don't know. I mean,
Speaker 1: it was probably was hard. It was hard. It's hard
Speaker 1: to make money, so you can't do anything. He can't.
Speaker 1: Like he's the dude that tries like every career and
Speaker 1: it's like it's just not for me. Yeah, he's he's
Speaker 1: just bad at it. He's bad at the business aspect.
Speaker 1: He's a good worker, but he keeps trying to run businesses.
Speaker 1: He's a great worker. Everyone says that, but he's just
Speaker 1: shipped at, like the capitalism part of it. Um, like
Speaker 1: selling things. He's bad at and he keeps trying to
Speaker 1: do it. Do you want to know what you're not
Speaker 1: bad at? Oh? Ship selling things? Oh, Sophie nice, that
Speaker 1: was a good one. Nailed it, nailed the ad transition. Yes,
Speaker 1: so do something John Brown couldn't do and buy products
Speaker 1: over the internet. We're back so um. Outside of New York,
Speaker 1: where John Brown labored to help build a colony for
Speaker 1: freed blacks, the ideological war over slavery had reached a
Speaker 1: fever pitch in eighteen fifty with the implementation of the
Speaker 1: Fugitive Slave Law. Now, this law was a craven act
Speaker 1: of political compromise by American moderates to the demands of
Speaker 1: the slaveholding states. It brutally punished anyone caught aiding a
Speaker 1: slave and mandated that all citizens helped capture escaped slaves.
Speaker 1: In eighteen fifty four, another act of Congress pushed northern
Speaker 1: abolitionists even further from the Smithsonian Magazine quote. Under pressure
Speaker 1: from the South and its democratic allies in the North,
Speaker 1: Congress opened the territories of Kansas and Nebraska to slavery
Speaker 1: under a concept called popular sovereignty. The more northerly Nebraska
Speaker 1: was in little danger of becoming a slave state. Kansas, however,
Speaker 1: was up for grabs. Pro slavery advocates the meanest and
Speaker 1: most desperate of men, armed to the teeth with revolvers,
Speaker 1: bowie knives, rifle and cannon, while they are not only
Speaker 1: thoroughly organized but under pay from slaveholders. John Brown Jr.
Speaker 1: Wrote to his father, poured into Kansas from Missouri, anti
Speaker 1: slavery settlers begged for guns and reinforcements among the thousands
Speaker 1: of abolitionists who left their farms, workshops, or schools to
Speaker 1: respond to the call, where John Brown and five of
Speaker 1: his sons. Brown himself arrived in Kansas in October eighteen
Speaker 1: fifty five, driving a wagon loaded with rifles he had
Speaker 1: picked up in Ohio and Illinois. Determined, he said, to
Speaker 1: help defeat Satan and his legions. So this is the
Speaker 1: first time John's gonna have a chance to confront slavery
Speaker 1: violently and defeat Satan and his legions. Yeah, he sure
Speaker 1: does now. Bleeding Kansas, as the conflict came to be known,
Speaker 1: proved to be one of the bloodiest pre Civil War
Speaker 1: chapters in America's battle over slavery. It's something like two
Speaker 1: hundred people were killed, but possibly hundreds more. It was
Speaker 1: also the event that launched John Brown on the path
Speaker 1: that would guarantee him several paragraphs in American history textbooks
Speaker 1: for years to come. Shortly after Brown arrived in Kansas,
Speaker 1: the pro slavery population of the state elected a legislature
Speaker 1: via a shameless electoral fraud. This body voted into law
Speaker 1: extreme pro slavery regulations, which, among other things, punish the
Speaker 1: expression of anti slavery views with two years of hard labor.
Speaker 1: One pro slavery editor at the time made the goals
Speaker 1: of the slave holding Kansan's clear quote, we will continue
Speaker 1: to tar and feather, drown, lynch, and hang every white
Speaker 1: livered abolitionist who dares to pollute our soil. So these
Speaker 1: people are like, we want to extend slavery here, We're
Speaker 1: willing to fight for what we believe in, and we'll
Speaker 1: kill all you weak like shitty abolitionist free state or
Speaker 1: like assholes like we don't give a funk, will murder you.
Speaker 1: And the government kind of just lets this happen because
Speaker 1: it doesn't want to piss off the South, which is
Speaker 1: the most powerful voting block in the United States at
Speaker 1: the moment, because America, Yeah, kind of modern American. This
Speaker 1: is America. Yeah. Now. Brown's first armed action in Kansas
Speaker 1: occurred in defensive a group of abolitionist Kansons who held
Speaker 1: their own congress in opposition to the pro slavery cans
Speaker 1: in Congress. Brown's militia showed up with guns, revolvers, swords, powder,
Speaker 1: and caps to defend the vote against pro slavery raiders
Speaker 1: from Missouri who had shut down other similar events. No
Speaker 1: enemy appeared, but in May eighteen fifty six, pro slavery
Speaker 1: militiaman sacked the city of Lawrence, Kansas, a known abolitionist hotbed.
Speaker 1: They burned and looted and murdered their political opponents. At
Speaker 1: the same time, news reached Kansas that Charles Sumner, the
Speaker 1: most prominent abolitionist in the Senate, had been beaten newly
Speaker 1: to death on the floor of Congress by a South
Speaker 1: Carolina congressman armed with a cane. John Brown found himself
Speaker 1: in yeah yeah, it's a fucked up chapter of his
Speaker 1: like like beating him with a cane in front of people,
Speaker 1: and nobody's doing anything. Yeah, I mean eventually they pulled
Speaker 1: him apart, but it was like three years before Sumner
Speaker 1: could retake his seat. He was so badly injured, horrible. Yeah.
Speaker 1: So John Brown was piste off at this. He was
Speaker 1: furious about the massacre and Lawrence. He was furious abut
Speaker 1: what had happened to Sumner, And he was pissed more
Speaker 1: than anything that no abolitionists, none of the moderates, were
Speaker 1: doing a goddamn thing about these fucking pro slavery assholes
Speaker 1: and all the violence that they were just allowed to
Speaker 1: do for some reason. Um. He was pissed. Um. So,
Speaker 1: over the course of several weeks, Brown formed his sons
Speaker 1: and a group of local volunteers into an anti slavery militia.
Speaker 1: His goal was not merely to defend abolitionists from the
Speaker 1: violence of pro slavery mobs. He wanted to take the
Speaker 1: fight to them. When one of his neighbors urged caution,
Speaker 1: Brown replied, caution, caution, Sir, I am eternally tired of
Speaker 1: hearing the word caution. It is nothing but the word
Speaker 1: of cowardice. On John Brown and a select group of
Speaker 1: his men, including several of his sons went on a
Speaker 1: raid across a series of farms and Pottawatomie Creek, Kansas.
Speaker 1: They dragged five pro slavery advocates out of their homes
Speaker 1: and the dead of night and hacked them to death
Speaker 1: with swords. Now, these are generally described as broad swords,
Speaker 1: but I've seen pictures of them and they seem to
Speaker 1: have been closer to Roman Gladius's um. And what does
Speaker 1: that mean. It's like a short sword. It's a broad
Speaker 1: bladed short sword. Welcome listeners, because nobody knew what that man.
Speaker 1: And now, uh, you get different attitudes on this based
Speaker 1: on like who you hear it from, because this is
Speaker 1: a very brutal. He drags these people out of their house,
Speaker 1: they're unarmed, and he murders them, um with fucking swords. Swords. Yeah,
Speaker 1: so depending on who you read, you'll come to different
Speaker 1: attitudes about what exactly this sort of this counts as um.
Speaker 1: Smithsonian Magazine says this, by almost any definition, the Potawatomi
Speaker 1: killings were a terrorist act intended to sow fear in
Speaker 1: slavery's defenders. Brown viewed slavery is a state of war
Speaker 1: against blacks, a system of torture, rape, oppression, and murder,
Speaker 1: and saw himself as a soldier in the army of
Speaker 1: the Lord against slavery. Says one scholar, Kansas was Brown's
Speaker 1: trial by fire, his initiation into violence, his preparation for
Speaker 1: real war. So now every historian agrees with calling the
Speaker 1: Potawatomy massacre an act of terrorism and a piece to
Speaker 1: the National Archives. A guy named Paul finkeled Men makes
Speaker 1: this argument. Kansas, Bleeding Kansas, as it is known, was
Speaker 1: in the midst of a civil war. Between eighteen fifty
Speaker 1: five and eighteen sixty, about two men would be killed
Speaker 1: in Kansas. Not all were politically motivated, and historians disagree
Speaker 1: on what constitutes a political killing, But even the most
Speaker 1: conservative scholar of this violence finds fifty six killings that
Speaker 1: were tied to slavery in politics. I think this number
Speaker 1: is low, and that most of the two hundred deaths
Speaker 1: were actually politically motivated and tied to slavery and Bleeding Kansas.
Speaker 1: But the actual number of political killings is less important
Speaker 1: than the understanding that in Kansas there was a violent
Speaker 1: civil war being fought over slavery. Men on both sides
Speaker 1: were killed. Brown's actions are most famous because they were
Speaker 1: five killings, and he strategically used swords rather than guns,
Speaker 1: which would have alerted neighbors. This is the nature of
Speaker 1: guerrilla warfare. It is brutal and bloody, but it is
Speaker 1: not terrorism. Oh so he used the sword because they're quiet, Yeah, exactly.
Speaker 1: And guns were a lot of ship back then. They're
Speaker 1: not quiet today. Um no, but I'm just loud. Yeah,
Speaker 1: So you know, I I tend to be on the
Speaker 1: side of like it was terrorism, I think it probably
Speaker 1: qualifies a that, but terrorism isn't necessarily invalid. Um, It's
Speaker 1: an act, like in a guerrilla war. It's a tactic.
Speaker 1: And at that point John and his men were outnumbered, um,
Speaker 1: and they wanted to strike a blow, and they wanted
Speaker 1: to scare the ship out of these people who had
Speaker 1: been acting with impunity. And I think they did it.
Speaker 1: But again, different people, different opinions. So the Potawatomy masker
Speaker 1: escalated the conflict in Kansas to a new level. Pro
Speaker 1: Slavery forces staged what affected to a full scale invasion
Speaker 1: of the territory. There were battles, towns were sacked, and yeah,
Speaker 1: a lot of people were killed. John Brown Gainey reputation
Speaker 1: during the fighting as a leader of cunning and skill
Speaker 1: and earned the appellation Captain Brown. For months, he fought
Speaker 1: a grinding, insurgent campaign that made him a household name
Speaker 1: in much of the North. There were stories of like
Speaker 1: he led this like spirited defense of this town that
Speaker 1: you know, they eventually lost, but they inflicted a lot
Speaker 1: of casualties on the enemy and made it really bloody
Speaker 1: for them. He successfully like out maneuvered this big force
Speaker 1: of pro slavery guys and took like they surrendered to him,
Speaker 1: and he took a bowie knife from the guy in charge.
Speaker 1: So he's like and there's stories about this, Like journalists
Speaker 1: meet him when he's out in the field and like
Speaker 1: right about him and his band of guerilla warriors and stuff,
Speaker 1: and he becomes very famous in the North. Um, and
Speaker 1: it's you know, it's again it's a brutal guerilla war.
Speaker 1: One of his sons during this point is captured and
Speaker 1: executed by pro slavery forces. Um. Two of his sons
Speaker 1: are wounded. So it's like it's rough, but he walks
Speaker 1: out of bleeding Kansas a national hero. Really. Now, when
Speaker 1: the violence in Kansas subsided, John Brown decided to use
Speaker 1: his newfound fame to draw up support and funding to
Speaker 1: open up a new front in the war against slavery.
Speaker 1: He wrote his son Jason a letter saying I have
Speaker 1: only a short time to live, only one death to die,
Speaker 1: and I will die fighting for this cause. Brown, now
Speaker 1: a wanted man, traveled the Northern States dressed in the
Speaker 1: gear of a guerilla fighter, drumming up funds and support
Speaker 1: for his war on slavery. He showed off the bowie
Speaker 1: knife he'd taken from a pro slavery militia leader and
Speaker 1: played up the daring dew involved in his flight from
Speaker 1: the law from the book Midnight Rising quote brandishing the
Speaker 1: captured bowie knife strapped just above his boot or loading
Speaker 1: a revolver as he warned a federal marshals on his trail.
Speaker 1: Brown also introduced a frision to the genteel parlors of
Speaker 1: New England. I should hate to spoil these carpets, he
Speaker 1: told one Boston hostess. But you know I cannot be
Speaker 1: taken alive. So he plays up this reputation great like
Speaker 1: action hero quotes. Yeah, he really does. He's absolutely an
Speaker 1: action cool guy quotes, He's absolutely an action hero and Yeah,
Speaker 1: he's he's a pretty he's pretty hardcore. He's a badass, problematic,
Speaker 1: but badass. Now. John spent much of the next two
Speaker 1: years yeah, buying arms and raising funds to buy more arms,
Speaker 1: as well as working mostly unsuccessfully, to convince other white
Speaker 1: abolitionists and freed blacks to sign up to fight in
Speaker 1: the army he was raising. Gradually, he built up a
Speaker 1: network of six wealthy backer all of whom were to
Speaker 1: differing degrees committed to the cause of ending slavery. These men,
Speaker 1: known to history is the Secret Six, made it possible
Speaker 1: for Brown to secure several hundred sharps, rifles, a significant
Speaker 1: number of revolvers, and eventually five hundred pikes. Now, a
Speaker 1: pike is basically a dagger at the end of a
Speaker 1: long spear, and Brown plan to use these pikes to
Speaker 1: arm freed slaves. Um He couldn't give them rifles right
Speaker 1: off the bat, because rifles at the time were really complicated.
Speaker 1: If you have if you don't know how to use one.
Speaker 1: It took a lot of training to be functional with him,
Speaker 1: and he wanted to be able to arm people immediately.
Speaker 1: So they had like long like long like sticks with
Speaker 1: like a like a dagger at the end. Yeah, it's
Speaker 1: less like a point like a spearhead, and more like
Speaker 1: a literal knife. It's yeah. They called them Kansas toothpicks.
Speaker 1: It was pretty cool. Uh. You know, the booie knives
Speaker 1: are basically machetes. They had a lot of bowie knives. Um,
Speaker 1: but yeah, uh. And so Brown thought number one, like
Speaker 1: the pikes were important so we could have something to
Speaker 1: arm freed slaves with immediately, you know, when he wouldn't
Speaker 1: have time to train them right away. But he also
Speaker 1: felt that immediately arming freed slaves was a critical step
Speaker 1: in their emancipation, stating, give a slave a pike and
Speaker 1: you make him a man. Deprive him of the means
Speaker 1: of resistance, and you keep him down. So we thought
Speaker 1: this was very important on like a level of like
Speaker 1: building morale in this army he was seeking to make now. Obviously,
Speaker 1: fleeing from the law and raising funds to form a
Speaker 1: guerilla army did not leave much time for Brown to
Speaker 1: see his wife and family. He begged his wealthy supporters
Speaker 1: to donate money to help them make ends meet. He wrote,
Speaker 1: one donor, I have no other income for their support,
Speaker 1: and my wife, being a good economist and a real
Speaker 1: old fashioned businesswoman. She has gone through the two past
Speaker 1: winters in our open, cold house, unfinished outside and not plastered.
Speaker 1: So it's miserable for Mary. Sucks. Yeah, Mary's life is
Speaker 1: fucking trash. She's She did not complain often, but she
Speaker 1: was clearly miserable as a result of her husband's chosen vocation.
Speaker 1: In letters to her, Brown admitted that his work had
Speaker 1: left her in a kind of widowed state, like I'm
Speaker 1: already basically dead. Yeah, yeah, she is a bandit. Yeah.
Speaker 1: And for the remaining years of his life, yeah, it
Speaker 1: was rare for him to spend more than a couple
Speaker 1: of days at a time with his family. Uh. In
Speaker 1: March of eighteen fifty seven, Mary sent John a letter
Speaker 1: in informing him that their sons had committed themselves to
Speaker 1: learn and practice war no more so. She's like, yeah,
Speaker 1: they're done with this ship. Um, they're like she she's
Speaker 1: stepping in. And then I'm sure John was like, yeah,
Speaker 1: you're right, that's fine. No, he didn't do that, did he, well,
Speaker 1: kind of, I mean he replied that it was not
Speaker 1: at my solicitation that they engaged in it at the first. So, uh,
Speaker 1: he says like it wasn't my decision that they did it, um,
Speaker 1: And they don't all come to fight with him after this,
Speaker 1: And he also seems to have like felt bad after
Speaker 1: that letter. Several days later, he sent his two year
Speaker 1: old daughter Ellen a Bible uh and inscribed in it
Speaker 1: in remembrance of her father, who's care and attention she
Speaker 1: was deprived in her infancy. Really really really really sad.
Speaker 1: Yeah it's sad. It's sad. My mom's name is Ellen,
Speaker 1: So I feel that harder. Yeah, well, you know, it's
Speaker 1: it's one of those things. Uh, like what do you
Speaker 1: what do you like if this was like if he
Speaker 1: if he was abandoning his family like this to make
Speaker 1: it in Hollywood, I'd be like, dick, move bro. But
Speaker 1: like it is slavery, Like it's the worst thing this
Speaker 1: country did, well, tied for worst with the genocide. Like
Speaker 1: kind of worth abandoning your family over I hate to
Speaker 1: say it, like it is slavery. Yeah, yeah, like shit,
Speaker 1: you know, um it it sucks for Ellen, it sucks
Speaker 1: for Mary. Um. Six of John Brown's sons had fought
Speaker 1: in Kansas, as I said, one was killed, two wounded,
Speaker 1: and the others were pretty traumatized. By the experience, but
Speaker 1: not all of them had in fact committed to study
Speaker 1: war no more. Owen Brown traveled with his father in
Speaker 1: eighteen fifty eight as he sought final support for his
Speaker 1: impending invasion of the South. Now, by this point, Brown's
Speaker 1: plan for an insurgent war on the South had evolved.
Speaker 1: Rather than taking time to establish a guerilla army and
Speaker 1: a string of forts, he decided to assault the town
Speaker 1: of Harper's Ferry, which contained the largest armory in the
Speaker 1: country probably had more guns than any other place in America.
Speaker 1: Now Brown believed that Harper's Ferry was at a fencible position,
Speaker 1: and that he'd be able to use its hundred thousand
Speaker 1: firearms to train and equip the army of slaves he
Speaker 1: was sure would flock there once word of his efforts
Speaker 1: got out. In April eighteen fifty eight, John Brown met
Speaker 1: Harriet Tubman, who at that point had made eight secret
Speaker 1: trips to Maryland and led dozens of slaves to freedom.
Speaker 1: Brown was deeply impressed by Tubman. And this is like
Speaker 1: a problematic wokeness. I don't know what you call this.
Speaker 1: He referred to her as a man in all of
Speaker 1: his writings and talking of her, and he did it
Speaker 1: because he respected her so much. He said that she
Speaker 1: was naturally the most man that he had ever met. Um,
Speaker 1: So he's he's saying the set of respect, but it's
Speaker 1: kind of problematic. It's like dreds woke compliment, but a
Speaker 1: two nineteen like dude. Yeah. He also referred to her
Speaker 1: as General Tubman, which is a less problematic appellation of respect.
Speaker 1: And you know, for her part, Harriet Tubman was equally
Speaker 1: taken with John Brown. Kate Larson, one of Tubman's biographers,
Speaker 1: says Tubman thought Brown was the greatest white man who
Speaker 1: ever lived. So he is very popular, um for his
Speaker 1: dedication with the like sort of leading figures of like
Speaker 1: black liberation in this period of Yeah, I would say
Speaker 1: he got co He got co signed by Frederick Douglas
Speaker 1: and Harriet Tubman. Yeah, yeah, pretty solid. Those those are
Speaker 1: some pretty solid co signs. Yeah. Yeah, good, like if
Speaker 1: he'd written a book, good names to have on the jacket. Yeah. Now,
Speaker 1: John Brown solicited both Frederick Douglas and Harriet Tubman for
Speaker 1: help with his planned attack on the South. Tubman was
Speaker 1: unable to help due to illness and may have also
Speaker 1: been unwilling to help because she was worried if it failed,
Speaker 1: it would expose the underground railroad, and Frederick refused because
Speaker 1: he rightly viewed the attempt at suicidal lunacy. He warned
Speaker 1: Brown that he was going into a perfect steel trap
Speaker 1: and that he would not get out alive. So Douglas
Speaker 1: clearly respects what Brown is doing, but as like, I'm
Speaker 1: just not willing to kill myself for this, I think,
Speaker 1: you know I And he was doing a lot of
Speaker 1: stuff outside of that made the right call. Um. In
Speaker 1: May of eighteen fifty eight, John Brown and thirty five
Speaker 1: of his followers convened in Chatham, Canada. It's not hard
Speaker 1: to get to Canada. You're up in the in New England.
Speaker 1: It's right there. He's all over the place. He's like, yeah,
Speaker 1: he travels around. I mean it just seems like, yeah,
Speaker 1: he's moving around a lot. I mean it just it's
Speaker 1: hard enough to travel. Well, yeah, but like you're in
Speaker 1: if you're in Illinois, like getting up to Canada, it's
Speaker 1: like going to fucking uh Sacramento from Los Angeles. Like
Speaker 1: it's not really a big deal. Um, it's like right there. Well,
Speaker 1: I don't like Sacramento. Either, I'd rather be in Canada,
Speaker 1: but for sure, I'm just making a point. So in
Speaker 1: May of eighteen fifty eight, John Brown and thirty five
Speaker 1: of his followers convened in Chatham, Canada to host a
Speaker 1: constitutional convention in order to create a new American government.
Speaker 1: Um see. By this point, the failures of the existing
Speaker 1: government to do anything about slavery in a recent Supreme
Speaker 1: Court ruling that black people had no claim to the
Speaker 1: rights guaranteed by the Constitution had convinced John that a
Speaker 1: whole new government needed to be established just basically decides
Speaker 1: our constitution is too like stained by the evil of
Speaker 1: slavery to continue, and what we part of what we
Speaker 1: need to do is like build a new country basically,
Speaker 1: and the foundation of new country needs to be black liberation. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean so, I mean, yeah, there's some weird stuff
Speaker 1: to his plans to He's not a perfect man. I'm
Speaker 1: sure I'm going to read a quote he even though
Speaker 1: he's co signed, but he's flawed. Yeah, he's he's flawed.
Speaker 1: He's flawed, and I think quote from Midnight Rising by
Speaker 1: Tony Horwitz makes it clear kind of both what was
Speaker 1: neat about what he was doing there and what was
Speaker 1: a little problematic. John Brown cited this infamous ruling in
Speaker 1: his Constitution's preamble, which explained why a new government was
Speaker 1: needed to protect our persons, property, lives, and liberties. But
Speaker 1: the forty eight articles that followed were less concerned with
Speaker 1: rights than with the command structure of Brown's highly militarized state.
Speaker 1: The role of its weak president in Congress was mainly
Speaker 1: to advise a powerful commander in chief who could tap
Speaker 1: the treasury as needed for money and valuables captured by
Speaker 1: honorable warfare. Article I think was directed towards another preoccupation
Speaker 1: of Brown's it for evade filthy conversation, in decent behavior, intoxication,
Speaker 1: and unlawful intercourse. The Constitution was read aloud at Chatham, debated,
Speaker 1: and signed the same day. Every man was anxious to
Speaker 1: have his name at the head, wrote one of Brown's
Speaker 1: Iowa Party, but the delegate showed distinctly less enthusiasm. Two
Speaker 1: days later, when they reconvened to elect officials, the black
Speaker 1: men nominated for the presidency declined to stand, and the
Speaker 1: post was left vacant, along with many others. Only two
Speaker 1: congressmen were appointed, and the cabinet was filled by Iowa recruits.
Speaker 1: Brown unsurprisingly was elected by acclamation as commander in chief.
Speaker 1: So you're right, there's like it's like okay, and some
Speaker 1: problematic stuff in there, like filthy conversation. Uh what did
Speaker 1: you say, unlawful intercourse? Yeah, intoxication. I wouldn't have done well.
Speaker 1: He's the police a little bit, would There are people
Speaker 1: who will compare John Yeah, there's people who will compare
Speaker 1: John Brown to Osama bin Laden. And it's not a
Speaker 1: hundred percent Obviously what he was fighting for was better,
Speaker 1: but you're not a hundred percent off. He was a
Speaker 1: long bearded, uncompromising religious fundamentalist who was willing to kill
Speaker 1: for his belief. Now, Brown grew up poor, and again
Speaker 1: what he was fighting about was fundamentally more moral than
Speaker 1: what would you know. And also Brown didn't attack civilians
Speaker 1: like he he understood they were going to die, but
Speaker 1: that he didn't make him his target. But like, there
Speaker 1: are some parallels. He is a religious fundamentalist and not
Speaker 1: in a fun way. Police. He's the fun police. You
Speaker 1: can't say Fox, you can't fuck and you there's no
Speaker 1: there's no drinking. Yeah, there's no John Brown, you know,
Speaker 1: and it's it's a marker of how fucked the times
Speaker 1: are that John Brown is still the best guy, still
Speaker 1: the locust white man in the country, the police in
Speaker 1: more ways than one, and not a great time. I
Speaker 1: just want to side note to listeners, if you look
Speaker 1: up young John Brown looks a lot like Igor from
Speaker 1: young Frankenstein. He absolutely looks like Igor from young Frankenstein.
Speaker 1: Um to an extent. That's bizarre, bizarre. Yeah. Continue. In
Speaker 1: December of eighteen fifty eight, as Brown's plans for an
Speaker 1: invasion of the South matured, he was suddenly presented with
Speaker 1: another opportunity to strike a blow against slavery. A Missouri
Speaker 1: slave named Jim Daniels found him in Kansas and told
Speaker 1: him that he and several other slaves were about to
Speaker 1: be sold and needed Brown's help. John gathered a force
Speaker 1: of eighteen insurgents and set out for Mazoura, where they
Speaker 1: carried out a highly illegal raid on a farmhouse and
Speaker 1: freed five slaves at gunpoint. They proceeded next to another
Speaker 1: farm and freed five more slaves. A small group of
Speaker 1: Brown's raiders also broke into another home, freeing a single
Speaker 1: slave and shooting her owner dead. The raiders stole oxen horses, food, clothing,
Speaker 1: and also captured two white hostages before they crossed back
Speaker 1: into Kansas. This sparked rage across the South, and the
Speaker 1: governor of Massoura, as well as President Buchanan, offered rewards
Speaker 1: for Brown's capture. Many moderate abolitionists were also unhappy with Brown.
Speaker 1: They felt that invading a southern state, stealing property, and
Speaker 1: killing a slave owner was a step too far. In
Speaker 1: a letter to the New York Tribune, Brown mocked these people,
Speaker 1: pointing out that the previous May, a force of pro
Speaker 1: slavery militiamen had killed five anti slavery settlers in Kansas.
Speaker 1: There'd been no outcry, he noted, but when he freed
Speaker 1: eleven human beings, the government and many people where he wrote,
Speaker 1: filled with holy horror, which is a solid point. Yeah.
Speaker 1: So Brown was confronted on road by eighty pro slavery militiaman.
Speaker 1: He had only twenty two men in his band, but
Speaker 1: they charged the pro slavery forces and caused them to
Speaker 1: flee in panic. Brown captured several horses and took more prisoners.
Speaker 1: By February of eighteen fifty nine, Brown had escaped Kansas
Speaker 1: fleeing the law. All the while, he succeeded in leading
Speaker 1: his group across Iowa and onto a box car headed
Speaker 1: for Chicago. The freed slaves made it from there to Detroit,
Speaker 1: where they were taken by ferry to Canada. One of
Speaker 1: the freed women gave birth along the way. She named
Speaker 1: her child John Brown. That's a fucking dope story, right,
Speaker 1: very very cool. Shoutout Detroit, um. Yeah. Now. The notoriety
Speaker 1: of Brown's raid energized his backers, the Secret Six, several
Speaker 1: of whom had started to wane in their enthusiasm for
Speaker 1: his cause. More money started to pour in, and Brown
Speaker 1: spent the rest of eighteen fifty eight gradually moving a
Speaker 1: small force of men in a large stockpile of arms
Speaker 1: and ammo onto a small farm that he had rented
Speaker 1: in the outskirts of Harper's Ferry. The whole story of
Speaker 1: how they did this is rather fascinating. In Midnight Rising
Speaker 1: breaks it down in granular detail. I really recommend that
Speaker 1: it is cool, um, But the focus of our story
Speaker 1: today is the man John Brown, and not the details
Speaker 1: of the attack on Harper's Ferry. The plan failed, Brown
Speaker 1: and his men succeeded in taking possession of the armory,
Speaker 1: but they held it for less than two days. Ironically,
Speaker 1: the first fatality of the raid was a freed black
Speaker 1: man who was shot in the dark on accident. It
Speaker 1: just was a big tragedy. John's sons, Oliver and Watson
Speaker 1: were killed during the fighting. Uh And in fact, of
Speaker 1: the nineteen men who went with Brown to Harper's ferry,
Speaker 1: ten were killed or fatally wounded. Four townspeople were also killed,
Speaker 1: and more than a dozen militiamen in US Marines were wounded.
Speaker 1: It's the Marines who finally bring him down. Not the
Speaker 1: proudest moment in the Marine Corps history. Um yeah, Now.
Speaker 1: John Brown was badly injured, but taken alive, and he
Speaker 1: survived long enough to stand trial. He was obviously guilty
Speaker 1: by the laws of the time, and the trial was
Speaker 1: mostly significant because it provided John with a chance to
Speaker 1: speak to the nation and justify his actions. The speech
Speaker 1: he gave before being sentenced was considered by Ralph Waldo
Speaker 1: Emerson to have been one of the greatest speeches in
Speaker 1: American history. You would like to read it? Oh yeah,
Speaker 1: oh yeah? Selection from it now had I inferred in
Speaker 1: the manner which I admit and which I admit has
Speaker 1: been fairly proved for I admire the truthfulness and candor
Speaker 1: of the greater portion of the witnesses who have testified
Speaker 1: in this case. Had I so interfered in behalf of
Speaker 1: the rich, the powerful, the intelligent, the so called great,
Speaker 1: or in behalf of any of their friends, either father, mother, brother, sister, wife,
Speaker 1: or children, or any of that class, and suffered and
Speaker 1: sacrificed what I have in this interference, it would have
Speaker 1: been all right, and every man in this court would
Speaker 1: have deemed it an act worthy of reward rather than punishment.
Speaker 1: The court acknowledges, as I suppose, the validity of the
Speaker 1: law of God. I see a book kissed here, which
Speaker 1: I supposed to be the Bible, or at least the
Speaker 1: New Testament, that teaches me that all things whatsoever that
Speaker 1: I would that men should do to me, I should
Speaker 1: do even so to them. It teaches me further to
Speaker 1: remember them that are in bonds as bound with them.
Speaker 1: I endeavored to act upon that instruction. I say, I
Speaker 1: am yet too young to understand that God is any
Speaker 1: respecter of persons. I believe that to have interfered as
Speaker 1: I have done, and as I have always freely admitted
Speaker 1: I have done in behalf of his despised poor was
Speaker 1: not wrong. But right now, if it is deemed necessary
Speaker 1: that I should forfeit my life for the furtherance of
Speaker 1: the ends of justice and mingle my blood further with
Speaker 1: the blood of my children and the blood of millions
Speaker 1: in this slave country whose rights are disregarded by wicked,
Speaker 1: cruel and unjust enactments, I submit. So let it be done.
Speaker 1: I mean, fuck yeah, Lifetime, there's your movie right there, baby,
Speaker 1: Come on, what the fun is good speech? That is
Speaker 1: a good fucking speech. Yeah, And I like what he
Speaker 1: points out that, like, hey, if I had done what
Speaker 1: I'd done for these poor black slaves like two of
Speaker 1: like the children of any rich person in this country,
Speaker 1: I'd be held up as a hero like you just
Speaker 1: don't give a funk about these people, are consider them human?
Speaker 1: Like fuck you. It's a good speech. Yeah, I mean
Speaker 1: talk about hashtag no filter man. Yeah. John Brown was
Speaker 1: executed by hanging on December second, eighteen fifty nine. His
Speaker 1: last words up. His last words, written on a scrap
Speaker 1: of paper and handed to a jailer, were, I John
Speaker 1: Brown am now quite certain that the crimes of this
Speaker 1: guilty land can never be purged away. But with blood
Speaker 1: he would prove to be very right. The US Civil
Speaker 1: War would start a little more than a year later.
Speaker 1: John Brown's raid was seen by many at the time
Speaker 1: and by many historians today as one of the primary
Speaker 1: sparks of that war. From the Smithsonian magazine quote. Had
Speaker 1: John Brown's Raid not occurred, it is very possible that
Speaker 1: the eighteen sixty election would have been a regular two
Speaker 1: party contest between anti slavery Republicans and pro slavery Democrats,
Speaker 1: says City University of New York historian David Reynolds, author
Speaker 1: of John Brown Abolitionist. The Democrats would have probably won,
Speaker 1: since Lincoln received just fort of the popular vote, around
Speaker 1: one million votes less than his three opponents. Well, the
Speaker 1: Democrats split over slavery Republican candidates such as William Sewar,
Speaker 1: we're tarnished by their association with abolitionists. Lincoln at the
Speaker 1: time was regarded as one of his party's more conservative options.
Speaker 1: John Brown was in effect a hammer that shattered Lincoln's
Speaker 1: opponents into fragments, says Reynolds. Because Brown helped to disrupt
Speaker 1: the party system, Lincoln was carried to victory, which in
Speaker 1: turn let eleven States to secede from the Union. This
Speaker 1: in turn led to the Civil War. Yeah, so that's
Speaker 1: John Brown. So do we think that his religion kind
Speaker 1: of influence his no Fox given attitude? Because he essentially like,
Speaker 1: no matter what he did on earth as a as
Speaker 1: a living being, his fate was decided at birth. So
Speaker 1: do you think that maybe his like no fox given
Speaker 1: attitude towards like I'm gonna do risk at all? But
Speaker 1: also like, like, do you think that had it some
Speaker 1: sort of influence on his ethos and ideology as a human?
Speaker 1: I don't think he actually believed that aspect of Calvinism
Speaker 1: very strongly. I I get the feeling for him, Um,
Speaker 1: he doesn't act like a guy who thinks everyone around
Speaker 1: him is going to hell um, But I don't know,
Speaker 1: you know, I may be wrong on that. What I'll say,
Speaker 1: I think, more than anything, the reason he acts the
Speaker 1: way he does is that he is absolutely convinced about
Speaker 1: everything that he believes that he is a right um
Speaker 1: and that made him probably pretty insufferable to be around.
Speaker 1: It made him a horrible, un bastard, horrible husband, yes,
Speaker 1: not great father, probably a very strange friend. But great abolitionist,
Speaker 1: but but a great abolitionist, and the man the only
Speaker 1: white man who was willing to do the thing that
Speaker 1: was so clearly necessary at that point in time, like
Speaker 1: somebody needed to go into the South and just start
Speaker 1: fucking shooting people over this stuff. Like that's what needed
Speaker 1: to happen. I mean, it's fucked up, like we don't
Speaker 1: want things to have to go that way, but that's
Speaker 1: what had to happen. Like he was the locust white
Speaker 1: man of the eighteen hundreds, which is mhm, a compliment
Speaker 1: in an insult. Yeah, it's an insult to everyone else. Yeah, Um,
Speaker 1: but yeah, he's a remarkable person. Um. And uh, you
Speaker 1: can see why people is varied as like abortion clinic
Speaker 1: bombers and William Spronson, who was you know, outraged about
Speaker 1: the deportations by Ice in the child concentration camps. Why
Speaker 1: people like both of those people can see something in
Speaker 1: him inspirational. Um. Yeah, And I I go back and
Speaker 1: forth myself as to like what would John Brown be today? Um,
Speaker 1: Because like obviously, if he'd been like a hardcore fundamentalist,
Speaker 1: you know, religious person, you might assume he would be
Speaker 1: one way. But I also kind of get the feeling
Speaker 1: of John that if he'd grown up in a different era,
Speaker 1: he might have been a fundamentalist of something else, like
Speaker 1: this is the kind of guy. It kind of depended
Speaker 1: on how he was raised. But whatever he was, like,
Speaker 1: I don't know. Um, I think he I think more
Speaker 1: than anything, because there were a lot of Calvinists who
Speaker 1: were ave owning assholes, Like there were a lot of
Speaker 1: like like religious people, like like Bible believing Christians in
Speaker 1: this period who used it as a justification for their slavery.
Speaker 1: So I think that while he was a fundamentalist religious man,
Speaker 1: the core of what John Brown was was a respecter
Speaker 1: of human dignity and freedom. Um, and his outrage at
Speaker 1: what was being done to blacks in America. Um, I
Speaker 1: think he would be. I think the core of his personality,
Speaker 1: were he alive in a modern age, would be outrage
Speaker 1: at injustice rather than any particular religious ideology. I do
Speaker 1: feel that about him. Yeah, I mean that's I'm not
Speaker 1: sure what he would have picked. Sorry, I mean I
Speaker 1: feel like, after hearing this entire thing, I feel like
Speaker 1: that is kind of a very accurate yeah interpretation of him. Yeah, yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean very definitely heroic definitely flawed, definitely did what
Speaker 1: was necessary and definitely was the only one to really
Speaker 1: do it in the way he did. Yep. And as
Speaker 1: even you know, you can be flawed, but if you're
Speaker 1: the only one doing the thing that needs to be done,
Speaker 1: that's all that really matters in the end. Yeah, yep,
Speaker 1: So that's John Brown, John and Brown if he would
Speaker 1: be really pissed at me using funk so much in
Speaker 1: this episode celebrating him, but oh yeah, he's the fun Police.
Speaker 1: I forgot he's the fun Police. But he's also dead now,
Speaker 1: so fuck it, Like he's not going to get angry
Speaker 1: at me. Yeah, we didn't. And you know, we don't
Speaker 1: know where he ended up because we don't know where
Speaker 1: he ended up. Yeah, fuck fucking John Brown. Fu Fu
Speaker 1: fu fucking John Brown. I like it, Sophie. You got
Speaker 1: any plug doubles to plug? I really like this one
Speaker 1: show called Behind the Bastards, And I really like this
Speaker 1: other show called Worst Yere Ever. And if you haven't
Speaker 1: listened to it could happen here yet what are you doing? Yeah,
Speaker 1: I don't. I don't know that listeners of this show
Speaker 1: would like Behind the Bastards are Worst Year Ever? But
Speaker 1: I guess they might. Yeah, I mean I guess I
Speaker 1: have Instagram, Sophie Underscore, underscore, sunshine, lots of underscores. So
Speaker 1: if you have sunshine with underscores in between the words
Speaker 1: I post pictures of Anderson, that's where you can find
Speaker 1: pictures of Anderson and and you getting that listeners is
Speaker 1: my Christmas present to all of you. Yeah. I don't
Speaker 1: have Twitter because Robert has Twitter, and Robert does on
Speaker 1: Instagram because I have Instagram. That's just how that works. Cool. Well,
Speaker 1: I love Twitter. I don't, but you can find me there.
Speaker 1: Uh okay, yeah, um you can find me not on Instagram. Um,
Speaker 1: but you can find this podcast on Instagram or Twitter
Speaker 1: at Bastard's pod. Um, you can find you can find
Speaker 1: the answer to the question of what you need to
Speaker 1: do in our trying times if you look into the
Speaker 1: stories of men like Raoul Wallenberg and John Brown. And
Speaker 1: that's all I'm gonna say on the matter. Um, So
Speaker 1: go hug a cat, celebrate whatever holidays you do or
Speaker 1: don't celebrate, or just celebrate the fact that most things
Speaker 1: are going to close down for a couple of days
Speaker 1: and we all have a chance to chill. Um. And
Speaker 1: then come back in the next year, ready to kick ass,
Speaker 1: take names, and seize Harper's ferry. And um don't have
Speaker 1: dreams about petting a raccoon. Yes, I have many dreams
Speaker 1: about don't. Actually do not, do not. John Brown will
Speaker 1: come back from the dead and kick your ass if
Speaker 1: you have be a friend of squirrel, the friend of squirrel.
Speaker 1: Don't dream about raccoons except this squirrel that torture is
Speaker 1: my dog an asshole. Yeah. I think John Brown would
Speaker 1: have hated that squirrel too. Yeah, that's that guy. Anyways,
Speaker 1: happy whatever, end of year. Uh yeah, yeah, go go
Speaker 1: have fun, drink lots of eggnog. I will yeah h
Speaker 1: h