Friends–
In the NY Times today there is a pair of OpEd pieces occasioned by the 150th anniversary of the execution of John Brown, in Charles Town WV, which is today.
These short essays offer much food for thought by Friends on the subject of war.
One article, by David Reynolds, praises Brown, whose raid on the federal arsenal at Harper’s Ferry was meant to spark a southern slave revolt, as a national hero of freedom.
The other, by Tony Horwitz, laments his action as the “9-11 of 1859, a key catalyst of the Civil War, which ended slavery, but at the cost of killing more than 600000 and devastating large sections of the South, with a legacy of bitterness that is far from played out.
Personally, I’m much more on the side of lament. But what has surprised me repeatedly in historical researches, is how many supposedly nonviolent Friends of his day cheered for Brown, and regarded him as some kind of martyred saint.
Indeed two young Friends, brothers, were part of his guerilla band: one escaped, the other was hung with his prophet-leader.
Among Brown’s Quaker cheerleaders were not a few women, including one of my heroes, Lucretia Mott.
Brown’s “sacrificial”drama played out in my hometown Quaker “neighborhood,” Baltimore Yearly Meeting (or BYM, which covers much of the mid-Atlantic region), as did big chunks of the war that followed. And many young male BYM Friends joined the war on the Union side, despite the pacifist pleas of the elders. (More on that thought-provoking story here.)
Few of the surviving Quaker veterans were disowned, for what previously had been a guaranteed disownable infraction of the Discipline. And their legacy changed BYM’s Quaker culture permanently, undermining the ethos of “separateness” which had endured for close to two hundred years.
So this anniversary is a melancholy one for me, and recalls events that happened close to my spiritual home. I wonder what others make of it, what implications might be drawn from it.
My son and I were wondering if John Brown was a Quaker. I shared the article with him. We have Quakers in our ancestory.
Hi Carolyn Jenkins. No, John Brown was not a Quaker. You can find out much about him online (start with Wikipedia). I believe he mostly disdained Friends because they mainly rejected his violent approach (tho many Quaker men later joined the Union army in the Civil War, which meant an acceptance of his approach after they became “official”.)