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John Brown — Story, Setting & Ideas

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Authors: Du Bois, W. E. B. (William Edward Burghardt), 1868-1963, Oberholtzer, Ellis Paxson, 1868-1936 [Editor] Digital Source: Project Gutenberg Gutenberg Release Year: 2020 First Publication Year: Not confirmed

Key Word: Brown, John, 1800-1859; Abolitionists -- United States -- Biography; African Americans -- Civil rights -- Philosophy Target Reader: Readers of public-domain and historical texts

Book Edition: Project Gutenberg digital edition Book Language: en

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Words 103,222

Reading time 449 min

Text sections 24

For John Brown — Story, Setting & Ideas, the stored edition analysis reports 103,222 words, 7 hr 29 min estimated reading time, and 24 detected text sections.

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Project Gutenberg metadata also associates the work with “Brown, John, 1800-1859,” connecting these edition facts with the source record’s subject description.

Source: Project Gutenberg record #62799

Du Bois's 1909 biography of John Brown examines the abolitionist's life through a sociological lens, emphasizing Brown's strategic choices, his relationships with Black allies, and the rhetorical construction of his legacy. The text blends narrative with documentary evidence, including letters and testimony.

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ck, for fear he would oversleep if he went to bed, and then the fire would go out and she take cold.”[12]

The death of one little girl shows how deeply he could be moved: “He spared no pains in doing all that medical skill could do for her together with the tenderest care and nursing. The time that he could be at home was mostly spent in caring for her. He sat up nights to keep an even temperature in the room, and to relieve mother from the constant care which she had through the day. He used to walk with the child and sing to her so much that she soon learned his step. When she heard him coming up the steps to the door, she would reach out her hands and cry for him to take her. When his business at the wool store crowded him so much that he did not have time to take her, he would steal around through the wood-shed into the kitchen to eat his dinner, and not go into the dining-room where she could see or hear him. I used to be charmed myself with his singing to her. He noticed a change in her one morning and told us he thought she would not live through the day, and came home several times to see her. A little before noon he came home and looked at her and said, ‘She is almost gone.’ She heard him speak, opened her eyes and put up her little wasted hands with such a pleading look for him to take her that he lifted her up from the cradle with the pillows she was lying on, and carried her until she died. He was very calm, closed her eyes, folded her hands and laid her in her cradle. When she was buried father broke down completely and sobbed like a child.”[13]

Dianthe Lusk, John Brown’s first wife, died in childbirth, August 10, 1832, having borne him seven children, two of whom died very young. On July 11, 1833, now thirty-three years of age, he married Mary Ann Day, a girl of seventeen, only five years older than his oldest child. She bore him thirteen children, seven of whom died young. Thus seven sons and four daughters grew to maturity and his wife, Mary, survived him twenty-five years. It was, all told, a marvelous family—large and well-disciplined, yet simple almost to poverty, and hard-working. No sooner were the children grown than the wise father ceased to command and simply asked or advised. He wrote to his eldest son when first he started in life in characteristic style:

“I think the situation in which you have been placed by Providence at this early period of your life will afford to yourself and others some little test of the sway you may be expected to exert over minds in after life and I am glad on the whole to have you brought in some measure to the test in your youth. If you cannot now go into a disorderly country school and gain its confidence and esteem, and reduce it to good order and waken up the energies and the very soul of every rational being in it—yes, of every mean, ill-behaved, ill-governed boy and girl that compose it, and secure the good-will of the parents,—then how are you to stimulate asses to attempt a passage of the Alps? If you run with footmen and they should weary you, how should you contend with horses? If in the land of peace they have wearied you, then how will you do in the swelling of Jordan? Shall I answer the question myself? ‘If any man lack wisdom, let him ask of God, who giveth liberally and upbraideth not.’”[14]

Not that Brown was altogether satisfied with his method of dealing with his children; he said to his wife: “If the large boys do wrong, call them alone into your room and expostulate with them kindly, and see if you cannot reach them by a kind but powerful appeal to their honor. I do not claim that such a theory accords very well with my practice; I frankly confess it does not; but I want your face to shine even if my own should be dark and cloudy.”[15]

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W. E. B. Du Bois opens his biography of John Brown not with a birth date but with a question of method: how to render a figure already encased in polemic. The book, part of the American Crisis Biographies series edited by Ellis Paxson Oberholtzer, was published in 1909, the same year as the founding of the NAACP. Du Bois, then a professor of sociology at Atlanta University, brings to the task a scholar's attention to documentary evidence and a writer's ear for the rhythms of speech. The excerpts show him weaving together official correspondence, newspaper accounts, and the recollections of Brown's associates, often letting the subjects speak in their own words. The result is a portrait that emphasizes Brown's tactical decisions, his relationships with Black collaborators, and the contested meanings of his actions.

A Biographer's Dual Role

Du Bois positions himself as both historian and advocate. The preface acknowledges earlier biographers—Sanborn, Hinton, Connelley, Redpath—and implies that his own account will correct or supplement theirs. He does not feign neutrality. His prose carries a moral urgency, as when he describes Brown's final raid not as a failure but as a turning point. Yet the excerpts also reveal a meticulous compiler: letters are quoted at length, dates are specified, and the movements of Brown's small band are tracked from Iowa to Kansas to Ohio. Du Bois the sociologist appears in his attention to the networks that sustained Brown—the Massachusetts Kansas State Committee, the minister's barn in Tabor, the fugitive Richard Richardson. The biography thus operates on two tracks: a narrative of events and an argument about their meaning.

The Texture of Collaboration

One of the most striking features of the excerpts is the density of named individuals. Brown does not act alone. Du Bois introduces John E. Cook, Luke F. Parsons, Richard Realf, Aaron D. Stevens, Charles W. Moffett, John Henry Kagi, William H. Seeman, Charles Plummer Tidd, and Richard Richardson—all within a few paragraphs. The effect is cumulative: the reader sees a movement built from personal loyalties and shared risk. Du Bois also includes the voice of Hugh Forbes, the English mercenary who trained Brown's men and then broke with him over pay and strategy. The dispute is rendered in concrete terms—$100 per month versus $600 previously paid—and in Forbes's contempt for Brown's lack of resources. This attention to the mundane details of organizing a rebellion gives the biography a documentary texture.

The Language of Command

Du Bois reproduces Brown's own words, and they are notably terse and practical. A note to Cook reads: "You will please get everything ready to join me at Topeka by Monday night next. Come to Mrs. Sheridan’s, two miles south of Topeka, and bring your arms, ammunition, clothing and other articles you may require." The tone is that of a quartermaster, not a prophet. Brown's farewell to his party—"Good-bye, you will hear f..."—is cut off in the excerpt, but the fragment suggests a man who does not waste words. Du Bois does not embellish these utterances. He lets the plainness stand, trusting the reader to see in it a kind of authority. The contrast with Forbes's grander ambitions—"projecting slave raids into Missouri and other states"—is implicit but clear.

Silences and Inferences

The excerpts cover only a portion of the biography, and the reader must be cautious. We see Brown in the late 1850s, organizing a military school in Ohio, but we do not see his earlier life or the raid on Harpers Ferry. Du Bois's treatment of Brown's relationship with Black allies is suggested by the presence of Richard Richardson, "an intelligent Negro fugitive," but the full scope of that theme is not visible. The book's catalog subjects—abolitionists, African Americans' civil rights—indicate a broader argument about race and resistance, but the excerpts do not reveal its shape. What is clear is that Du Bois is writing against a tradition that would dismiss Brown as a fanatic. He insists on the rationality of Brown's methods, even when they fail.

Readers approaching this biography should attend to the interplay between Du Bois's narrative voice and the documentary evidence he presents. The book rewards those who track the names, dates, and places that accumulate across its pages. It is not a simple hagiography but a work of argument built from fragments—letters, testimony, newspaper reports—that Du Bois has assembled into a coherent portrait. The gaps in the excerpts remind us that any biography is a selection, and that Du Bois's choices are themselves part of the story he tells.

I finished John Brown feeling how strangely devotion shapes a life, and then found myself wandering into The Memoirs of Jacques Casanova de Seingalt, 1725-1798. Volume 08: Convent Affairs — Background and Themes. It’s not the same world at all—but both left me thinking about the quiet spaces between a person’s choices and their own story, and how we never quite see ourselves as others do.