Tuesday, October 16, 2012

October 16th

It's not often that I finish a book on the anniversary of the event that it describes. Today is October 16th, and on that date in 1859 John Brown made his assault on Harpers Ferry, VA. The ACS Library book that I just finished is Midnight Rising by Tony Horwitz; a scrupulously researched and lucidly written account of Brown's rise from a make-ends-meet 19th century tradesman to a single-minded "captain" with a will and plan to incite the abolition of slavery in the United States.
Through the use of carefully scripted quotes from letters, testimonies, and newspapers of the day (the text is supported by 45 pages of footnotes) Horwitz vividly recreates the anarchy of free-staters vs. pro-slavery forces in "Bleeding Kansas" that crystallized Brown's resolve to take up a life's work of ending slavery. Those distant times in these chapters take on the urgency and cruelties of Bosnian infighting or Sudanese marauders in my life-era.

It is, however, his evidence of John Brown as a principled visionary with perhaps an inspired grasp of events that remains with the reader. Again and again, it is Brown's personal dignity, his faith in his own moral compass, and his dispassionate arguments for the purpose of his actions that convinced "the South " (and no less the North) that an abolition-minded citizenry might, in fact, be pervasive in the North, and so, irreconcilable.

I will say also that the book astonishes by way of debunking so many ideas that I have about "olden days." For example, contrary to my cabin-in-the-woods mentality, people traveled widely and often; players in this history are forever up and moving by wagon, train and on foot across states and the nation: alone, with families, penniless and hungry. Abject poverty with no social safety nets did not preclude (perhaps it even precipitated) a steady stream of life-altering change-of-venues throughout their lives.

It seems, sometimes, that the march of history is scripted; that pieces in the chess-match are always on the table ready to act. And then a John Brown surfaces, shaped and motivated by forces to complex to anticipate. His personal volition propels him into the game, and we have only the integrity of his character and the moment itself to reason to whom the advantage shifts.

A compelling character. A compelling book.


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