The German Philosophy that Emancipated America
- Kelly M.S. Swope
- Feb 26
- 21 min read
Kelly M.S. Swope on Matthew Stewart's An Emancipation of the Mind: Radical Philosophy, the War over Slavery, and the Refounding of America and Andrew Hartman's Karl Marx in America
John Brown had to fail as a woolman to discover his vocation as a shepherd—to lambs at first, and later to men. W.E.B. Du Bois was the first of Brown’s biographers to discern the deeper meaning of the prices the antislavery crusader charged for wool. Brown tried the wool trade after the Panic of 1837 decimated the modest estate he had built as a tanner. To recover, he thought to capitalize on the recent boom in clothing and carpets: overstuffed with slave cotton, manufacturers up and down the seaboard were now hungry for lambs. At the start of the 1840s, domestic woolgrowers benefited from protective tariffs, but they were poor and isolated from each other, enabling manufacturers to buy up their wool at discounted prices. No sooner did Brown understand this than he devised a plan for a more equitable distribution of returns among sellers and buyers of raw wool. Thus, he rallied small woolgrowers across Pennsylvania to upskill their productions, upgrade their fleeces, and collectivize their warehouses so that they could prosper together. Under this new cooperative system, the raised price point for wool reflected the product’s improved quality, not the millman’s greed, and profits flowed according to equity rather than strategy.
Solvent for a few years, Brown’s venture in petty-bourgeois socialism failed after a decade. Both seller and buyer profited from exchanging fine goods at a fair price, yet the mill capitalists eventually got the better of the woolgrowers’ co-op by pressing Congress to relax tariffs on English and Canadian imports. Feeling rather fleeced himself, John Brown took one hundred tons of his best wool to England to look for new buyers there, but because he would not devalue his exports to grease his sales, he failed in that venture, too. English manufacturers were as baffled as their American counterparts by Brown’s insistence on fixing premium prices for his wares. A competent merchant would have made a killing with the same opportunities; honest John Brown went under. Du Bois surmises from this episode that Brown had trouble doing business with people who could not see that self-preservation and economic fairness converged. And the more the young merchant saw that greed and graft moved global commerce, the less he trusted that moral suasion could separate men from their money.
Brown’s daughter Ruth tells how, during one spring of his woolman period, many of the sheep in her father’s flock contracted a parasite that caused the ewes to reject their newborns. For weeks, her father stayed up all night corralling the sleepy mothers so that the babies could nurse, and whenever he could not get them to give up their milk, he put the starving lambs on his own lap and spoon-fed them until their strength revived. Years later, when Captain Brown rammed his antislavery battalion through Kansas, the soldiers recorded similar stories about his saintliness in small things. Alongside the austere culture he enforced in camp—no booze, no vulgar language, or incivility of any kind were permitted, while every crumb of tack was blessed with prayer—he encouraged an egalitarian ethic that uplifted every soldier. The Kansas soldiers adored their fearsome shepherd because he nursed them with the milk of freedom. Captain Brown believed that a battalion raised on equal mutual regard would fight harder and longer against a ruthless enemy than one built on slavish obedience to a commander. He taught them that genuine liberty depended on the Golden Rule; that self-interest demanded self-sacrifice; and that the sale of human beings, and even land, as personal chattel offended the laws of nature.
The pious tenor of Brown’s antislavery gospel had little to do with conventional religion. His was essentially a moral Christianity modeled on the lives of the Hebrew prophets. With his plain but sharp intellect he whittled the New Testament down to the maxim that all human beings were of equal value to God and so deserved equal treatment. The Old Testament he understood as pragmatic physics: violence committed to advance evil necessarily generates righteous counter-violence. The question for Brown was never if, but when, American slaves would revolt for their freedom as the Haitians had done at the end of the previous century. Haiti, indeed, was Brown’s lodestar throughout his mature years, for he understood that nothing unsettled the Southern planter class more than the thought of that nearby black republic. His mission during Bleeding Kansas, and later at Harpers Ferry, was to goad black emancipation in the direction of a humane, multiracial, egalitarian order, a Second Founding of America that finally consummated the Revolution.
Unlike Brown, most of American Christendom believed that owning black persons was morally permissible if not biblically sanctioned. Moses and Paul said nothing definitive for or against racialized slavery; they asked simply that masters show reasonable benevolence—or reasonable wrath—toward their property. But if not Christian soldiers, who marched in the Captain’s antislavery army?
In An Emancipation of the Mind: Radical Philosophy, the War against Slavery, and the Refounding of America (W.W. Norton, 2024), the intellectual historian Matthew Stewart serves up some revisionary surprises to the received history of antebellum abolitionism. A sequel to Stewart’s Nature’s God: The Heretical Origins of the American Republic (W.W. Norton, 2014), the book claims that John Brown’s closest conspirators in the antislavery cause were not in fact upright Christians but a pack of Northern infidels whose radical philosophy complemented his radical faith.
Frederick Douglass and Abraham Lincoln are the most familiar, and the most inscrutable, infidels in this story. Others, like the American transcendentalist and lasped clergyman Theodore Parker, who was source of inspiration to Louisa May Alcott in her most brutal years of poverty and labor, broadcast their apostasies to all who would hear. Stewart links these grandiloquent secular ministers to a philosophical tradition imported from Germany and explains how they fueled the civil war of ideas that preceded the shooting war. The narration passes through Douglass’s intimate conversations with a German exile who translated his second autobiography; to Lincoln’s friendship with a drunken lawyer who gave him copies of Parker’s heretical sermons; to the top-secret rendezvous between Douglass and Brown in the leadup to Harpers Ferry. Everything culminates in Lincoln’s Second Presidential Inaugural of 1865, during which, instead of projecting bullishness about the Confederacy’s imminent surrender, the president wondered cryptically whether God’s justice would require that every drop of blood drawn by the slaver’s lash be repaid by the soldier’s sword.
According to Stewart, the relevance of German philosophy to Lincoln’s lamentation started with a revolt in biblical hermeneutics almost thirty years earlier. In 1836, the German scholar David Friedrich Strauss published Life of Jesus, Critically Examined, “rock[ing] the theological universe” on both sides of the Atlantic. Strauss argued that Jesus was a miracle of a man—just not literally. Moreover, the Gospels were not the actual Word of God, but myths and parables authored by men of imagination who wanted to share Jesus’s message with the common people. True Christianity was nothing more, but nothing less, than a sound moral teaching that had withstood reason’s strict scrutiny.
In 1837, a Harvard divinity student named Theodore Parker received a copy of Strauss’s book from a professor who was handing them out like forbidden fruit. Parker’s plunge into heresy was instant. The young minister converted Strauss’s arguments into a “career-destroying sermon” titled On the Transient and the Permanent in Christianity (1841), in which he proposed that Christian institutions were dust in history’s winds, and that only Jesus’s moral teaching, not the mortal named Jesus, would endure. Stewart surmises that Parker was trying to found “a modern religion [that] might preserve some sense of a spiritual inspiration without ever falling back on revealed authorities or contradicting natural science.” Although his heresies scandalized the people of Massachusetts, Parker found many adherents in the interior states who suffered the social consequences of biblical literalism. One of them, an activist lawyer from Illinois named William Herndon, understood the connection between apostasy and antislavery after residing in an area where Bible beaters had murdered abolitionists. In 1844, when Herndon partnered with an ambitious young lawyer named Abraham Lincoln, he gifted his new friend copies of Parker’s sermons in hopes of winning him over to the antislavery cause. Stewart attends with care to every link in the long chain of influence from D.F. Strauss to the White House. How much of the German critique of religion Lincoln metabolized Stewart never verifies (and probably cannot); but he finds plenty of circumstantial evidence from Lincoln’s own writings of religious infidelity. The subdued irony of the president’s reelection inaugural is the strongest hint on record: “Both [parties in the war] read the same Bible and pray to the same God, and each invokes His aid against the other.”
Frederick Douglass heard Lincoln’s jeremiad on the Capitol steps in 1865. By that time in his intellectual journey, America’s preeminent abolitionist was no stranger to German philosophy and could hear the speech’s heretical subtext. On the mantle in Douglass’s private library in Washington sat two marble busts side-by-side: one of the very same Strauss who authored Life of Jesus, Critically Examined; and another of Ludwig Andreas Feuerbach, author of The Essence of Christianity, a materialist treatise that reduces God to human consciousness. Throughout the 1840s, Feuerbach was the leading philosopher of the younger German revolutionaries who tried to overthrow the old theological-political order in Europe. His argument that God was nothing more than alienated man not only challenged metaphysical pieties but also deflated Christianity’s claim on political power. Douglass encountered Feuerbach’s anthropology of religion through his special German friend, Ottilie Assing, who found George Eliot’s English translation in a New York City bookshop in the early 1850s.
Assing was an exile of the 1848 moment, emigrating to America when reactionary forces began their vicious crackdowns on dissidents. She became prominent among the German-speaking 1848ers who bolstered the antislavery, pro-labor, and public-education movements. Like many of her generation, Assing was cut from Feuerbachian cloth. She believed that a guided journey through the “brook of fire” would cleanse her special friend Douglass of any pieties he had absorbed from the Garrisonian abolitionists. Stewart contends that Douglass adopted Feuerbach’s atheistic humanism without ever confessing it outright, preferring to bury it in essays on other topics. This is an interesting provocation (especially because it challenges authoritative biographers like David Blight who believe Douglass remained religious after his liaison with Assing), but Stewart should have situated it within a richer account of Douglass’s relationship to free black Christianity – the most consequential spiritual counterweight to proslavery biblical literalism.
When Douglass did speak about God, he emphasized His proportional justice. The line from Lincoln’s Second Inaugural that stirred him concerned the size of the payment God would exact for slavery. Douglass praised Lincoln for implying that slavery could not have ended except in catastrophic bloodshed and that God’s retributive justice in America was necessary. The horrors of war were real and regrettable, but equally so were those of slavery, and the world could now measure on the battlefield how much blood had been spattered on the cotton field. Douglass’s “sanguinary abolitionism” resembled John Brown’s, except that, for Brown, belief in God’s justice came from revealed religion, whereas for Douglass, it was an inference of reason. The God of the abolitionist infidels was “Nature’s God” (or as the Dutch-Jewish philosopher Baruch Spinoza once called Him, “God or Nature”). To them, Nature’s God was not some anthropomorphic legislator of positive laws that mortals could bend if they pleased. On the contrary, He was the very laws of nature from which no living thing, even free human beings, could veer. In the shooting war over slavery, Douglas reasoned, the laws of nature would at last supersede the corrupt civil laws of the United States. The less responsive that religious abolitionists were to this message, the louder Douglass proclaimed it. As early as 1852, at an antislavery conference in Ohio, he received a question about it from Sojourner Truth, a black activist of the moral-suasion school. Truth asked, “Frederick, is God dead?” Douglass replied: “No, and because God is not dead, slavery can only end in blood.”
An Emancipation of the Mind often alludes to the proto-Marxian spirit of the radical abolitionists who put German philosophy into action in antebellum America. Besides Feuerbachians like Ottilie Assing, there were men like August Willich, the radical Prussian communist and one-time rival of Karl Marx, who commanded Union troops in Ohio and mingled with a group of intellectuals that later became known as the Ohio Hegelians. In Cincinnati, Willich published a newspaper called the German Republican and organized a festival in celebration of the English radical Thomas Paine, author of the heretical screed The Age of Reason, which links the philosophy of deism to the French Revolution. Like other German emigres of his generation, Willich managed to wed revolutionary politics with public service, attaining high ranks in the army and holding civilian offices like County Auditor. Lives like his were proof that the German philosophy of freedom planted real roots in American institutions before and after the War over Slavery. But Stewart’s book does not tell the postbellum history of German philosophy in America.
* * *
The latest book from historian Andrew Hartman, Karl Marx in America (University of Chicago Press, 2025), picks up where the former leaves off, showing how Karl Marx’s ideas influenced the U.S.’s transition from a slave society to a free-labor society after the war. Hartman covers some of the same intellectual terrain as Stewart, finding Marx’s signature on the German 1848ers who injected new ideas to the workers’ struggles in New York and Cincinnati; in the hundreds of articles he penned for The New York Daily Tribune in the leadup to the war; and in the generations of American social movements that his writings have inspired. Each of the book’s nine divisions explores a distinct era of Marx’s U.S. reception from the 1850s to the present, covering the Civil War and Reconstruction, the Gilded Age, the Great Depression, the Cold War, and much more. At least two motifs recur throughout. The first is that the history of “Karl Marx in America” is also the history of “America in Karl Marx.” Hartman questions the consensus that Marx’s mature thought was a tripartite synthesis of German philosophy, French socialism, and British political economy, arguing that Marx’s lifelong study of the American contest over slavery provided an essential fourth pillar of his intellectual biography.
The book’s second major claim is that Karl Marx has appealed to Americans across three centuries because his philosophy of freedom speaks to fundamental human needs about which the U.S. Constitution is silent—namely, the needs for autonomy and welfare in work. Whereas traditional constitutionalism views the abstract rights to contract one’s employment and to acquire private property as the material preconditions of freedom, Marx teaches that such rights count for little in the real-life struggle for bread and roses under American capitalism. With no corresponding rights to economic democracy or minimum wellbeing, the liberal Constitution offers an incomplete version of human emancipation to working-class Americans.
Like thousands of German 1848ers, Marx had to find a new home off the European continent once the Belgian authorities pursued him for his writings and activism. Instead of crossing the Atlantic with the likes of Ottilie Assing and August Willich (he briefly considered Texas before deciding against it), Marx settled in London, and from his perch at the British Museum began to compile research toward his multivolume magnum opus on the inner logic of modern capitalism – Das Kapital. For income, he landed a gig as a foreign correspondent for The New York Daily Tribune at a moment when the paper was seeking real-time analysis of the fallout from 1848. Founded by the Republican leader Horace Greeley, the Tribune was a mouthpiece of antislavery politics in the leadup to the shooting war. The so-called “silent decade” during which Marx corresponded for the Tribune but did not publish any major books turned out to be one of the most productive periods in his career. As the United States drifted inexorably toward war, Marx provided over two hundred thousand readers of New York City’s most important newspaper with a steady stream of socialistic analysis of how the slavery question fit into the international workers’ struggle. Greeley’s Tribune published many of Marx’s articles without a byline, suggesting that the German radical’s ideas hewed very closely to the Republican paper’s editorial perspective.
According to Hartman, however, Marx’s pivot toward America started well before his newspaper gig. As early as 1843, Marx was studying the complex interaction between the U.S.’s secular political state and its popular religious culture. Unlike in Prussia, the U.S. Constitution did not affirm Christianity or any other official religion and even specified in its First Amendment that the state must never establish one. Yet, as Alexis de Tocqueville discussed in Democracy in America, religion was endemic in American civil society. Marx concurred with Tocqueville that the secularization of the public sphere was not antithetical to, but in fact encouraged, the proliferation of private creeds. On the one hand, Marx believed the state’s decoupling from religion was progressive insofar as it rendered conflicts between private religion and public law as political (legal, constitutional) rather than theological (scriptural, cultural) questions. On the other hand, the coexistence of a thoroughly secular state with a deeply religious society showed that the political emancipation from religion did not complete the human emancipation from religion. Marx followed Feuerbach in thinking that religion was a mode of self-alienation in which human beings projected the essence of their own being onto an illusory deity, and he saw an analogy in the secular state’s respective orientations to religion and private property. A state could abolish religious belonging or asset ownership as preconditions for political enfranchisement without abolishing them from civil society. The American order was the near-perfection of modern Christianity—i.e., a totally secular state bulwarked by a totally religious society—and of bourgeois capitalism—i.e., a political-economic system that safeguarded capital’s right to dominate labor.
At some point between writing “On the Jewish Question,” the essay in which he develops these thoughts, and joining the Tribune, Marx realized that the most explosive material nexus of religion and property in America was Southern slavery. The Cotton Kingdom was at one and the same time a Christian patriarchy ensconced in the feudal past and an industrial-scale enterprise designed for the global economy. Hartman writes that Marx perceived the connection between “the mounting brutality of American slavery [and] the rising savagery of English factory work”; the biblical cruelty of the Piedmont plantation reappeared as the Protestant work ethic in the Manchester mill. Marx took this lesson to heart in his mature critique of global capitalism: “The years Marx dedicated to understanding the United States in general, and the Civil War [over slavery] in particular, helped him grasp the tight connection between labor and freedom.” Because he saw this connection, Marx cheered John Brown’s direct action at Harpers Ferry, calling it “one of the biggest things happening in the world today” and relating it to the serf uprisings then taking place in Russia. If men like Captain Brown (and after him, Abraham Lincoln, whom Marx regarded as “the single-minded son of the working class”) could bring an end to chattel slavery, then the conditions for uniting the working class around the world would be far more favorable.
The first division of Hartman’s book discusses Marx’s hopes for the Radical Reconstruction period that followed the Union victory in the Civil War. Even without President Lincoln to lead it, Marx believed that emancipation might bring about a socialistic renovation of economic relations that would fortify the legal promises of the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments. He was not entirely wrong about this. With the backing of the federal occupation, the Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned Lands implemented some redistributive reforms that were radical relative to what the Old South had been. One limitation of these reforms was that they did not account for the inherent antagonism of capital and labor within the American system and so did not treat the Southern oligarchy as the vanquished foe in a classwar.
Like Lincoln, most Radical Republicans thought that universalizing free labor and education would solve most working-class problems (and so did not push the envelope as far as the radical 1848ers in their ranks might have wanted). In the first few years of Reconstruction, black men started to vote and sent their first representatives to statehouses and to Congress, but they could not secure a sufficient stake of Southern land and labor to make their votes transformative. Racial animus and elite corruption were major factors in Reconstruction’s regression into Jim Crow, but so was the restraint of the Northern victors who, impatient to resume normal business relations with the Southern states, forfeited in peace much of what they had won in the war. By the late 1860s, just as he was publishing the first volume of Das Kapital, Marx could see that the prospect of converting the Union’s triumph into a multiracial working-class revolution had all but vanished. By the early 1880s, around the time Marx was dying, the U.S. Supreme Court decided a series of cases that all but neutered the Reconstruction Amendments. Add to that the unabated settler conquest of the Western frontier, and the odds that any American working-class movement would be able to supplant bourgeois individualism with enlightened solidarity must have looked very grim at the end of Marx’s life.
The pinnacle of Marx’s positive reception in America came a half-century later with the Great Depression. The reasons for this were not mysterious: the shockwave events of the 1917 Russian Revolution and the 1929 market crash laid bare the fragile foundations of American stability for the first time since the panics of the 1870s. In this time of catastrophe, as millions lost their jobs and drought parched the prairies, working-class Americans agreed in the largest numbers ever that the economic system itself, not their individual choices, was the cause of their pain. Through mass left-wing organizations like the Congress of Industrial Organizations and the Communist Party USA, workers combined electoral pressure with strategic strikes to force the federal government to invest countercyclically in the welfare of its population. The rural-urban coalition that uplifted Franklin Roosevelt as their champion secured the first federal protections for the right to unionize, the social-security system, numerous national employment programs, and a serious vision for an “Economic Bill of Rights.” Marx’s memory inspired this progressive redistribution of capitalism’s costs, but the most conspicuous specter haunting the times was not the old German curmudgeon but the old Virginia slaver. The same counterrevolutionary forces that stifled Reconstruction – the battered-but-not-beaten coalition of white-supremacist Southern Democrats and conservative Northern Republicans – came together again to put the kibosh on the New Deal’s most transformative policies.
During this episode in the “America in Karl Marx” epic, Hartman foregrounds the upsurge among black intellectuals of revisionary Marxian histories of slavery. First there was W.E.B. Du Bois’s 1935 Black Reconstruction in America, a magnificent 700-page tome that reinterpreted the Civil War and Radical Reconstruction through the framework of global class struggle. Throughout the book, Du Bois considers the lasting contributions of the quasi-socialist experiment of trusting “Ignorance and Poverty” (i.e., the uneducated and poor Southern Republican base) to rule a reconstituted America. Left to their own democratic devices, Ignorance and Poverty constitutionally emancipated the four million human beings held as fictional capital on Southern plantations; temporarily implemented programs that redistributed the wealth filched from slave labor; and founded an interstate public-education system that made tax-funded schooling a requirement for inclusion within the Union. From his critical Marxian vantage point, Du Bois could see that there were some fatal flaws in the Radical Reconstruction project as well: it did not overcome the inevitable political corruption that follows victory in war, nor did it effectively contain white-supremacist violence against the Freedmen.
In the concluding chapters, Du Bois defended Reconstruction’s positive legacies against the “propaganda of history” that cast the defeated Southern states as victims while overlooking the “counterrevolution of property” that had restored oligarchic control in Dixie. At a time when that same rearguard coalition was reassembling itself to crush the New Deal—and as the New Deal repeated some of Reconstruction’s fatal racial mistakes—Du Bois’s revisionary history showed that the specter of slavery still haunted the twentieth-century class struggle. After Du Bois’s Black Reconstruction came C.L.R James’s The Black Jacobins, a masterful account of the slave revolt of Saint Domingue (1791-1804) that created the black republic of Haiti. Besides appropriating the libertarian declarations of French radicals in Paris, the “black Jacobins” of Saint Domingue developed their revolutionary consciousness out of a creolized island culture that syncretized influences as various as Catholic Christianity, transatlantic freemasonry, and voodoo spiritualism. Like Du Bois, James treated their fight to overthrow slavery as an episode of global class struggle that brought the modern ideal of autonomous work into plain relief. And like John Brown, James intuited Haiti’s relevance to the United States, launching his first speaking tour after Black Jacobins among transplanted Trotskyists in North America. James judged that the wage worker’s lack of autonomy under industrial capitalism was a surviving remnant from slavery’s degradation of human labor into beastly burden. He repeated this claim in his posthumous postwar tract American Civilization, judging that American capitalism’s signature was delivering bread without roses.
America’s most powerful criticism of Marx emerged in the time of Stalin and concerned the seeming “necessitarianism” that historical materialism injected into human history. Believing that the emancipation of labor from capital’s yoke was inevitable was akin to saying that the riptide of history washed away all human freedom. No wonder the states that had partly or fully embraced Marxism, Stalin’s Soviet Union, Mao’s China, the African postcolonial countries, had developed totalitarian regimes that reviled American-style individualism. The most antipathetic version of this criticism insisted that the only viable response to Marxism’s threat to liberty was to eradicate anyone who espoused it. (Both James and Du Bois lost their status in America, the latter when he was well into his nineties – due to their association with Marx’s ideas and movements for black social uplift.) Those more sympathetic to Marx’s critique of capitalism wondered if his historical materialism might be tempered by Anglo-American humanisms (“class struggle” countervailed by Ralph Waldo Emerson’s nonconformism or Isaiah Berlin’s liberal pluralism). A small minority who still sympathized with state socialism before Khrushchev’s revelations thought that the existence of totalitarian Marxist states simply mirrored in public what America did in the private sector.
The open secret of American capitalism was that dictatorship thrived at the worksite where the boss ruled the worker like a feudal lord, or rather, like a surveilling bureaucrat. Postwar American liberalism and conservatism were not so anti-totalitarian as pro-capital, vigilantly asserting the hard distinction between state and society that Marx pointed out a century before in “On the Jewish Question.”
Hartman thinks that most Cold Warriors, whether they bear-hugged America or Russia, failed to grasp the truth of Marx’s dialectical historiography. “The most important thing to know about [Hegelian-Marxist] dialectic,” he writes,
is that…history was a process of unfolding…in which every paradigm contains the seed of its undoing. The unfolding of contradictions conserves the past and reembodies it in the future. Just as we detect some semblance of the present in the past, we seek to detect some semblance of the future in the present. Yet this does not mean that the future is more of the same. Nor does it mean there is a definitive path to the future, or that humans have no role in carving such a path…[H]umans do not sit idly by awaiting the unfolding of history. Humans are the unfolding of history.
This is the same species of humanistic necessitarianism that the radical abolitionists invoked in their cause to abolish slavery. Frederick Douglass, Abraham Lincoln, and Theodore Parker believed that the laws of nature necessitated slavery’s abolition because the system was antithetical to human self-preservation. They might have underestimated just how long it would take to abolish slavery’s “badges and incidents” (a political project that is ongoing two centuries later), but they were right that corrupted Christian theology, not any natural law, bulwarked slavery. Similarly, Marx’s materialist philosophy held that industrial capitalism could not survive its own contradictions and would have to evolve into a more rational social order that better met humanity’s needs. And while he and his American adherents underestimated their foe’s resilience, they were not wrong about its totalitarian underbelly or its compulsive greed – grotesqueries that remain on full display into the second quarter of the twenty-first century.
When is the time for free human beings to make the necessary happen? Neither Stewart nor Hartman fully answers that most important question, but then, neither could their very capable muses.
Toward the end of his 1909 biography of John Brown, W.E.B. Du Bois reflects on how time had proved the Captain right: those who opposed slavery had to take bold action to ignite the war that would destroy it. The failed raid on the Harpers Ferry weapons arsenal provoked the Slave Power like nothing since Haiti’s successful slave rebellion. On the one hand, Southern elites acted in the way that Frederick Douglass feared, commencing their final crackdown on the slaves trapped inside the Cotton Kingdom. On the other hand, they panicked into a reactionary secession, hurling themselves into a war of attrition that, due to the scarcity of real human solidarity in Dixie, they were very unlikely to win. All of this is clear in retrospect, writes Du Bois, but in the real time in which this history was made, there was only the question of whether to march with John Brown’s army. It turns out that history-making action required a measure of prophecy and of materialism. Harpers Ferry was a vision grounded in Brown’s clear-eyed critique of the peculiar institution. Had Brown not understood that the planter class’s interest in slavery had become so bloated and depraved that it would never give up without a fight, he never could have shaped his zealous energies into concrete plans. Nor could Douglass, who never quite endorsed Brown’s vigilantism, have positioned himself to aid the Union effort as much as he did without the conviction that a solidary national bloc was necessary to root out organized evil. In that precious vanishing moment when justice won out in American history, prophecy and materialist critique were close collaborators.
W.E.B. Du Bois’s biography of Brown concludes that the woolman-turned-shepherd touched many hearts but not many minds. The men who went with him to his death were men of little to no education, brought up by the violent parents of slavery and the frontier, “lovers of God and personal liberty” who were content to study Holy Scripture, or Thomas Paine’s Age of Reason, or the Baltimore Sun newspaper, whatever exigency required. Their half-competent, half-reckless, mixed-race battalion modeled the Abolition Republic to come. From their example Du Bois concludes that democracy is the form of social organization most in conformity with the laws of nature.
But real freedom and equality among humans fosters human self-development such that the best of our potential rises to actuality. Moreover, such values are consonant with the maxims of wholesome religion, which never asks more of the faithful than to enact the Golden Rule. Most of all, they are constitutional securities against having to solve political problems with human sacrifice. Brown the woolman saw these truths in vague outline when he searched for a fair deal in a greed-addled market. Brown the shepherd tested them when he sent himself and three of his sons to the slaughter for the sake of the nation’s lowliest. The cost of freedom is always less than the price of repression, Du Bois reminds us. Are we willing to pay?
Kelly M.S. Swope is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Thomas More University in Covington, Kentucky. He has written on a variety of topics in a variety of forums. His review essays have appeared in Full Stop; his peer-reviewed research in Studies in Philosophy and Education; and his opinions in Times Higher Education. He is the creator of the documentary podcast series, Life on the Ark: The Zanesville Animal Catastrophe a Decade Later (available on Spotify and Apple). Kelly lives in Cincinnati, Ohio.
