Reviews for From African to Yankee: Narratives of Slavery and Freedom in AnteBellum New England

The average rating for From African to Yankee: Narratives of Slavery and Freedom in AnteBellum New England based on 2 reviews is 3 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2011-09-28 00:00:00 Brandon Messmer There are times when the way we remember history is almost as interesting as the history itself. This phenomenon often occurs with regards to the American Civil War. The Civil War is as much a shared memory as it is a series of historical events. Much of its realties have been obscured by an agreed-upon myth. Every once in awhile, though, the dust gets shaken from that myth, and we are left to confront and argue about the past. Indeed, it seems we have to refight all the old battles every time some ignorant, squeaky-voiced, pimply teenager who couldn't differentiate between General Braxton Bragg and a hole in the ground shows up to his public school with a Confederate flag emblazoned on the back of his pickup truck. After years of careful crafting and massaging by Southern and Southern-sympathizing historians, the general consensus of the Civil War is that it was a contest or moral equals. One side fought nobly to preserve the Union; one side fought nobly to preserve local government. This equivocating makes sense, I suppose, for a country that is decidedly centrist. We're a Goldilocks nation: we like things "just right." And in some very important ways, a morally relativistic view of the Civil War has certain benefits. We are one nation, rather than a north and south divided by a demilitarized zone. There was never a protracted guerilla war following the cessation of hostilities (to be sure, however, there were incidents enough of domestic terrorism, especially directed towards blacks). Unlike other countries, where civil wars have caused still-lingering wounds, if not outright rifts, we tend to celebrate our Civil War. You'll see what I mean if you try to go to Gettysburg in July. (Isn't that American optimism for you? We always think we're the best at everything, even internecine warfare). In that vein, we venerate the heroes of the Confederacy with the same vigor as the heroes of the Union. Strike that. We venerate the heroes of the Confederacy with way more vigor than the heroes of the Union. (Partially this is due to the fact that J.E.B. Stuart, Stonewall Jackson, and Nathan Bedford Forrest were better-looking, more competent, and had better nicknames than Union commanders such as Alfred Pleasonton, Irvin McDowell, and Judson Kilpatrick). If you take a Civil War pilgrimage, you will find museums and statues and birthplaces and grave sites devoted to the Sons of the South. Strangely, you will also find federal military bases named after Confederate generals. (This has always struck me as the oddest of things: for a country to name a fort after someone who tried to destroy that country. Why not Fort Aldrich Ames? Why not Fort Julius & Ethel Rosenberg?) Many of those Southern generals now immortalized in marble and stone shared a similar deficit of character. Specifically, despite some admirable qualities, they all found it morally and economically defensible to own another human being. Of course, no one is tearing down any statues or burning any museums on this point. These men will continue to be remembered as heroes. And John Brown? John Brown, who tried to free the slaves and went to the gallows without flinching? John Brown, who died to set men free? We remember him, variously, as "fanatically prejudiced" (Allan Nevins, American Historian), "a brutal murderer" (Bruce Catton, famed Civil War historian), and "a grim, terrible man" (David Herbert Donald, noted Lincoln biographer). Today, if we think about John Brown at all, we think of a psychopath; a fanatic. We think of John Brown and call him mad. Evan Carton's Patriotic Treason asks you to look at John Brown in an entirely new light. Latter-day historians, the same ones who have tarred him a crazy-eyed wacko, have done a great deal to diminish Brown's role in history. (Historians in general prefer to ascribe the turns of history to movements, rather than individuals). However, Brown's contemporaries saw him quite a bit differently. It was Herman Melville, for instance, who famously called Brown "the meteor of the war." I've come to think of Brown, who was devoutly religious, as a bloodstained John the Baptist, the prophet who came before the leader, a man heralding the coming cataclysm. It's easy for us to see the Civil War as inevitable; but it wasn't, at least not to the people living through those times. Yet John Brown saw clearly what others could not: that the issue of slavery could be decided only one way. Carton's book is a slim, fast-reading, sympathetic biography of Brown. The man in these pages is something of a surprise, a far cry from the photograph on the cover of a grizzled old man with an unwavering gaze. Instead of the raving, Old Testament loon I half-expected, Brown is revealed as a devoted family man, a tireless worker, and an eminently relatable human being: his life was a veritable rollercoaster of minor business triumphs and familial and economic tragedies. He failed at achieving his dream of becoming a minister; he buried one wife and many of his children; he saw his business enterprises blow up in his face; and he lived much of his life burdened by a crushing debt. To his children, he was tantalizingly elusive: partly stoic, distant, a stern disciplinarian; at other times effusive, loving, and doting, the kind of father who'd stay up all night to nurse a sick child. (Carton shows a Brown who is strikingly vulnerable in the wake of the deaths of certain of his children, to the extent that Brown even questioned his normally-unshakeable faith). If there are any lulls in Carton's biography, it is during these years of Brown's life, in which he was a skilled shepherd who couldn't catch a break. Even the lulls, however, serve a purpose. They go to show that this wasn't a guy who was batsh*t crazy or harboring certifiable mental illnesses. He was a normal man with some strongly-held beliefs who finally, eventually, felt compelled to take action. Those beliefs centered around Brown's ardent abolitionism. But Brown was more than an abolitionist. He was an outlier among outliers because he believed in equal rights. Unlike many conditional abolitionists, men as good-intentioned as William Lloyd Garrison, Brown believed in equality among the races. He wasn't in favor of freeing the slaves only to send them back to Africa. Instead, he believed in their immediate integration into American society. He lived this credo in a way that shocked his friends and neighbors. He was respectful of blacks, he dined with blacks, and he lived among blacks, all during a time when even the most liberal-hearted white harbored doubts about a black person's innate abilities. Brown's colorblindness is striking even today, in our allegedly more enlightened age. His solicitude and devotion allowed him to befriend such luminaries as Frederick Douglass and Harriet Tubman. Brown's fame, or infamy, if you prefer, came later in life. He followed several members of his family to Kansas, a territory that was enflamed in turmoil over the issue of slavery. Long story short, following the repeal of the Missouri Compromise and the passage of the Kansas-Nebraska Act, the people of Kansas Territory were granted popular sovereignty to decide whether their state would be admitted as slave or free. This led to an extra-territorial stampede to the ballot boxes, in which the side that prevailed would be the side that voted early, voted often, and stopped as many of his opponents from voting as possible. When Brown arrived, Kansas was controlled by pro-slavers, many of them Border Ruffians from Missouri. The pro-slavery faction voted illegally, ran-off many free-state citizens, and passed ridiculous laws restricting people from even harboring a kind thought about a black person. Following the pro-slavers' sack of Lawrence (which would be sacked again, during the Civil War, by Quantrill, and once more, in the 80s, in the nuclear war miniseries The Day After), and Preston Brook's brutal caning of Senator Charles Sumner in the Capitol (hard to believe, but the Senate is more civil today), John Brown had enough. He took a handful of men to a pro-slavery settlement on Pottawatomie Creek and murdered (there isn't any other word for it) five men. Brown himself did not do any actual killing, save to fire a bullet into a dead man's skull, but he clearly was the instigator. Carton does a good job of placing this act, utterly unredeemable in isolation, into a broader context, without getting bogged down in the complicated history of Bleeding Kansas. Brown was not simply lashing out irrationally; instead, he targeted men who'd bullied and threatened his family and neighbors in the past. His slaughter along the Pottawatomie was a retaliation of sorts for months of pro-slavery provocations that included illegal arrests, threats and intimidation, beatings, robbery, arson and, yes, murder. As Carton describes it, the reason Brown's killings were so shocking (aside from the obvious brutality of death by broadsword) was the fact that free-state men had fought back at all. (To make a crude comparison, free-staters were the modern Democratic Party of the 19th century; it was expected that their opponents would dish it out, and that they would take it on the chin). Following Pottawatomie Creek, Brown went on the run and became a guerilla leader. His son Frederick was murdered in retaliation, and his sons John Jr. and Jason were imprisoned. Undeterred, Brown won a well-publicized skirmish against a company of pro-slavers at the Battle of Black Jack. Later, Brown used the notoriety he gained in Kansas to become the self-appointed leader of the militarized abolitionist movement. He tried to form, train, and equip an army; however, his "army" never numbered more than a handful, most of them his kin. The result of this Quixotic mission, of course, was Brown's failed raid on the Federal Arsenal at Harpers Ferry, Virginia. On October 16, 1859, Brown and 18 men took control of the arsenal and the railroad bridge leading into town. Brown hoped that his audaciousness would encourage slaves to flee their masters; he then intended to arm these slaves with the captured weapons from the arsenal. The raid was put down by enraged townspeople, with the help of U.S. Marines led by Robert E. Lee. Most of Brown's men, including two sons, were killed; Brown was wounded and captured. The hoped-for slave revolt never materialized. Brown was tried and convicted of murder and treason (against Virginia, despite not being a citizen of that commonwealth!) and hanged on December 2, 1859. At the time, Brown's actions were widely repudiated. Voices in support were muted. During the Civil War, Brown finally received some acclaim, including being the subject of a song, John Brown's Body, that was given new lyrics by Julia Ward Howe to become The Battle Hymn of the Republic. Following the War, Brown's friend, Frederick Douglass, gave Brown the most famous eulogy, saying: "I could live for the slave - but he could die for him." Later still, however, history came to know John Brown as a wicked man, delusional at best, pathological at worst. I suspect that a lot of people, even after reading Patriotic Treason, will remain uncomfortable with John Brown. He was an absolutist. He believed in good and evil and the justification of righteousness. He was a self-appointed judge, jury, and executioner. His acts, in some sense, were the acts of a homegrown terrorist. I thought about this, and my admitted support for the man, as I finished Patriotic Treason. As I pondered the quandary of John Brown, I took a moment to reflect on the book's subtitle: John Brown and the Soul of America. As I did, I recalled a statement made by an aging Douglass, in which he said: "Whatever else I may forget, I shall never forget the difference between those who fought for liberty and those who fought for slavery." It occurred to me that whatever else John Brown did, he fought for freedom and liberty. And not figurative "freedom" and figurative "liberty," the words politicians use whenever they send an army to war. No, we are talking about literal freedom and literal liberty and breaking loose the chains of those who'd been enslaved two hundred years and more. We know slavery caused the Civil War; we also know that the Union soldiers who flocked to the banner did so for a variety of reasons, and abolition was not always at the top of this list. In John Brown, though, there is no ambiguity. Aside from everything else, he is striking for the clarity of his moral vision. There is no doubting John Brown: after all these years, we know exactly where he stood; we know exactly why he took up arms; and we know exactly the cause for which he died. Imagine there had been no John Brown. Imagine that we never knew, with any certainty, that there was even one person in America willing to die to end slavery. Imagine that we never knew, with any certainty, that there was even one person in America willing to give life to Jefferson's lofty phrase that "all men are created equal." What would that uncertainty have meant to the soul of America?

Review # 2 was written on 2016-09-30 00:00:00 CJ Johnson I remember John Brown from high school history class as some weird crazy, quasi-terrorist man who killed people to free the slaves. Yet it wasn't until I read the conclusion to this book that I put it all into perspective: "Had Brown been an escaped slave or a free northern black man who acted and spoke exactly as the historical John Brown did, professional historians of the last fifty years would not have labeled him mad. Radical, militant, enraged, desperate, impatient, self-aggrandizing, perhaps--but not crazy... A man who lived, went to war, and died to help win black people's rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness must have been black. A white man who did these things must have been deranged or fanatical." And the author is right. John Brown is not exactly a white knight, but history must label him a crazy weirdo because why would anyone be willing to die for the rights of a different group of people? I think humanity is becoming more empathetic as the generations progress. John Brown, a white man, fought and died for the rights of black people to become free. After men supporting the second and third waves of feminism, whites marching on Selma in the 1960s, and heterosexuals supporting gay marriage initiatives in record numbers these days, it's becoming abundantly clear that one doesn't need to belong to a specific class to fight for the rights of that class. Because as Solomon Burke said, if one of us is chained, none of us are free. This book does a great job putting John Brown into full perspective and should be required reading for high school history/sociology classes.