The meet up at Harper's Ferry last Saturday inspired at least one interesting spin-off: My husband, Mark Brown, decided to register at Dkos and has written the following account of his impressions.
I'm offering this today under my user ID in the interest of keeping the connection fresh, since as a new user he won't be able to post under his own name for a week.
The Zealot and the Lurker
By Mark Brown
John Brown was a zealot. His life changed dramatically at Harper's Ferry in 1854.
I was a lurker. I visited Harper's Ferry today in 2005, and my life as changed at least to the extent that I'm not lurking anymore.
I traveled up from North Carolina with my dear wife, mrsdbrown1, and our two kids to meet up with the local Kossacks at Harper's Ferry, West Virginia on Saturday. She's been posting diaries and chatting with folks on the site for almost a year now, and her enthusiasm at the chance to see a lot of the locals in person convinced me to go along for the trip.
Well, as you can surely see from several other diaries, we had lots of fun visiting and putting names to faces. It was great to meet everyone!
Carnacki's HF Diary
Pastor Dan's HF Diary
Brother Feldspar's HF Diary & Picture Album
From left to right: Ides, Mrs. Pastor, Pastor Dan, Mrs. Brown, Me, and The Holy Hand Grenade
It was really the setting that made the day for me. Harper's Ferry is one of those places that is absolutely steeped in American History. It is the confluence of the Shenandoah and Potomac rivers. George Washington slept in several local houses, Thomas Jefferson waxed poetic about the views, Meriwether Lewis stopped by on his way to a certain expedition with a guy named Clark, etc, etc. Before the Civil War, when the railroad and the canal came through town, Harper's Ferry was a central transportation hub that could move supplies, raw materials, manufactured goods, and troops and weapons to several locations.
That was why the U.S. government decided to build an armory there. And that was why, around 150 years ago, John Brown decided that the armory in Harper's Ferry would be the perfect place to start his new independent nation of freed slaves.
My first memories of learning about John Brown date back to 8th grade and an unfortunate historic recreation of his raid on the armory. (I say unfortunate because it was videotaped, which means there's still evidence of it in the world.) I got to play John Brown. After raiding the armory, which, as I recall, was strategically located somewhere behind the teacher's desk, I was tried, convicted, and hanged with a length of burlap twine strung from a hook normally used to hang classroom maps over the blackboard. All of this was dramatically rendered in the space of maybe a minute or two. (If you've ever heard Monty Python's version of "The Death of Mary, Queen of Scots", you've got the general idea of our level of historical accuracy.)
So with these vague memories, a bunch of new friends to get to know, and a pair of kids to keep track of, I wandered in to the John Brown Museum at the end of the street in Harper's Ferry. I was there presented with the oversized image of old John himself, pictured as a colossus striding over the evil slaveholders and the soldiers who defended them. He looked like Moses coming down from the mountain, with his long flowing beard, fierce expression on his face, and Bible held before him.
Further into the museum, I'm simultaneously learning new things and recalling those middle school lessons from years ago. Here's John Brown as the son of an abolitionist, here he is a failed businessman, here he writes of his depression and wish to die rather than continue with life's struggles. There's speculation that his extreme anti-slavery views gave him a purpose in life and a will to live when other tragedies and difficulties beset him.
His zeal and drive to rid the land of slavery earn him financial support from like-minded New Englanders. He joins with a group of anti-slavery militias in Kansas when the state is opened up by the Kansas-Nebraska act. The act essentially left the decision of being a free or slave state up to the state itself, and as a result, both pro-slavery and anti-slavery forces descended on the place to try and force the decision for their own side.
And, oh yes, maybe I can just let the kids skip over this point... In Kansas, John drags five pro-slavery men from their beds at night and kills them by hacking their limbs off with a sword. All perfectly justified because these men were evil slaveholders, of course. I can't help but think of Oklahoma City, abortion clinic bombings, 9/11, and any number of suicide bombers. Interestingly, I don't see the word "terrorist" anywhere in the John Brown Museum.
After Kansas, John Brown winds up in Canada, where he works to draft the constitution of a new independent nation of freed slaves. All he needs is a place to get the work of freeing the slaves started. Harper's Ferry looks like the ideal location, because the news of taking the armory will spread among the slaves of the south, who will rise up against their masters, take up arms supplied by Brown from the armory, and establish a free nation in mountainous areas that can easily be defended.
It's hard to know which is more frightening: that John Brown actually thought this plan would work, or that he convinced a group of men to go along with it.
The actual raid was very dramatic, much more so than our 8th grade production would suggest. There was the initial attack at midnight in the rain, hostages taken (including a descendent of George Washington), innocents killed, and alarms spread via telegraph to the authorities. None other than Robert E. Lee himself actually defeated the raid a day or so later. Lee lead a unit of U.S. Marines, the only time that he would actually command a group of Federal soldiers in battle, and he made short work of John Brown and his raiders.
John Brown was tried and convicted of murder, treason, and inciting slave rebellion, and he was hanged for his crimes.
Now, I'm a software developer. I know about optimistic project plans and wishful thinking. John Brown's raid on Harper's Ferry is by far the most incredible example of wishful thinking I've ever heard. Forge a new nation of freed slaves? Far from it. There was just no doubt at all that his raid was going to get stomped by the local military.
And yet, Henry David Thoreau called him an "Angel of Light." Northern abolitionists sang his praises. His raid and execution only served to heighten the tensions between the North and South, and is considered to be one of the flashpoints that lead to the Civil War.
So here we are today, in a world full of terrorist acts planned and executed by zealots who are just as surely convinced of the rightness of their causes as John Brown was of abolition. They are convinced that the evil in the world is so extreme that all measures are justified in its defeat. They see a win-win situation: both victory and martyrdom serve their cause.
There are always John Browns in the world. There's always somebody willing to blow up the federal office building, to fly the plane into the skyscraper, to blow themselves up in a public place, or for that matter, to throw the tea into the harbor. Every single one of them can justify their actions as necessary and blessed by God as retribution for earlier wrongs committed. They generally get dangerous only when they get funding.
But I take heart from walking through Harper's Ferry in 2005. The site of a violent raid to seize munitions has become a tourist attraction. I can get t-shirts for my kids, or fridge magnets, or Christmas ornaments. I can chat with park rangers who do a wonderful job telling me about the local history before, during, and after the Civil War. I can look at the lines drawn tens of feet high on a sign that show where the Shenandoah flooded in various years to wipe out many of the local buildings and the canal. With any luck, the world's current trouble spots may yet become tourist traps.
Time passes, and we survive. If we pay attention, we can learn from our past. If we're lucky, we can make new friends along the way. And if we're brave, we can quit lurking in the background quite so much, and make our contribution to the world.