gem
2nd Lieutenant
- Joined
- Oct 26, 2012
David Reynolds in his book John Brown, Abolitionist: The Man Who Killed Slavery, Sparked the Civil War, and Seeded Civil Rights' talks about the Pottawatomie incident. In a review on the book by Cleves she summarizes Reynolds viewpoint.
https://networks.h-net.org/node/950...n-abolitionist-man-who-killed-slavery-sparked
"More infamously, Brown led his sons and a band of followers on a nighttime raid to murder the men of a neighboring family of proslavery settlers at Pottawatomie. Brown directed his sons to force the men from their houses and hack them to death with double-edged swords--a weapon that Brown chose for its primitive brutality. The swords mutilated his victims "in a way that insurrectionary slaves or embittered Indians would have done it" (p. 167). Yet, Reynolds does not argue that Brown's violence at Pottawatomie indicated some sort of crazed bloodlust. Reynolds carefully situates the Pottawatomie raid in the context of "Bleeding Kansas" (the war between proslavery and free-state settlers for control of the nascent state). His account emphasizes the proslavery settlers' violent repression of the free-staters, and describes Brown's counterattack as long overdue. Brown's victims, the Doyles, are painted as an unsympathetic set of violent racists. Brown carefully selected targets who were agents of proslavery violence and participants in the guerilla war. The killings, Reynolds argues, were political crimes, not crimes of passion. Does that justify the murders? Reynolds poses the question, and seems to answer that the killings were "not admirable" or "legally defensible," but they were "explainable" (p. 139). Reynolds argues that the murders at Pottawatomie reveal Brown not as a lunatic or a villain, but rather as a rational actor who believed so strongly in the cause of antislavery that he was willing to kill for it."
https://networks.h-net.org/node/950...n-abolitionist-man-who-killed-slavery-sparked
"More infamously, Brown led his sons and a band of followers on a nighttime raid to murder the men of a neighboring family of proslavery settlers at Pottawatomie. Brown directed his sons to force the men from their houses and hack them to death with double-edged swords--a weapon that Brown chose for its primitive brutality. The swords mutilated his victims "in a way that insurrectionary slaves or embittered Indians would have done it" (p. 167). Yet, Reynolds does not argue that Brown's violence at Pottawatomie indicated some sort of crazed bloodlust. Reynolds carefully situates the Pottawatomie raid in the context of "Bleeding Kansas" (the war between proslavery and free-state settlers for control of the nascent state). His account emphasizes the proslavery settlers' violent repression of the free-staters, and describes Brown's counterattack as long overdue. Brown's victims, the Doyles, are painted as an unsympathetic set of violent racists. Brown carefully selected targets who were agents of proslavery violence and participants in the guerilla war. The killings, Reynolds argues, were political crimes, not crimes of passion. Does that justify the murders? Reynolds poses the question, and seems to answer that the killings were "not admirable" or "legally defensible," but they were "explainable" (p. 139). Reynolds argues that the murders at Pottawatomie reveal Brown not as a lunatic or a villain, but rather as a rational actor who believed so strongly in the cause of antislavery that he was willing to kill for it."
Bringing the