Another Lesson from John Brown

Why is this a good introduction? It doesn't show us your central idea. It puts your past self having barely-remembered thoughts in the center of the frame, which is probably not what belongs there. And it states that you now have a new idea, but doesn't tell us what that idea is. Each of these seems to me a drawback, and I don't see the offsetting advantages.

This feels blowsy. It could have been one sentence, about your admiration and indignation, but it would have fit better in a paragraph whose primary topic was something else, namely the new central idea you have about Brown. Substantively, I'm puzzled by the indignation. Approximately 110,000 Union soldiers died from wounds received fighting "on the right side." Is Brown's death the cause of more indignation, and if so, why? Are we not indignant about those who died fighting "on the wrong side"? If so, why?

Second, I could not help but pity him. Initially, I thought that my feeling of pity was merely directed towards his hanging, but I realized that I pitied him for the zealous level of conviction he fought with. Upon reflection, this seemed like an appropriate reaction, at least initially, due to the sort of myopic, zealous impression he left me with. In fact, this was part of his portrayal by the news at the time and how many remember him (though, by itself, this is an obviously oversimplified and an unfair characterization; but, as any bit of propaganda and distortion of reality, it often has to have some semblance of truth in order to be effective). My pity directed at him for appearing ‘crazy’ is not a thought that he is not rational or sane, in the traditional sense, but in that his attitude implied that there was no presence of a reasonable amount of self-doubt in his methods. Lacking some self-doubt in one’s actions is unhealthy and cause for concern.

"Unhealthy"? John Brown is a man in the grip of religious enthusiasm. He wants to do God's will, and he knows what God's will is. Maybe that's unhealthy and maybe it isn't. Because I know there is no God, I know that John Brown cannot be doing God's will, but he can be doing what he believes in, and that doesn't seem to me "unhealthy." People who believe in God will have a harder time with Brown, because it is likely that their God's will is something else, and they only believe in doing that. The Virginian white people who hanged him considered themselves to be Christians. Their God's will was that they should eat the fat of the land gathered for them by their slaves. Does that seem to you unhealthy and cause for concern, or only if they didn't have any doubts about it? Is Massa Tom less unhealthy if he trembles for his country when he reflects that God is just?

Though it’s hard to know how one would feel in counterfactual situations, I doubt I would have felt pity had he displayed more reluctance and less confidence in deciding to take up arms in the manner in which he did.

Odd that. Do you feel pity for the murdered Father Abraham? He had more than a little reluctance and lack of confidence, did he not? And wasn't this a component of what made him renderable, despite all the hatred and contempt felt for him during his lifetime, as the Man of Sorrows and Our Greatest President once he was safely dead?

Taking lives as a means to achieving a greater result is almost always a risky bet,

What has this to do with John Brown? He told you and everyone else, again and again, that he did not come to kill slave holders. His intention was to free slaves, he said at every opportunity, under the protection of arms in the hands of people who would not hesitate to use them, and who were feared on that account, as forceful, competent men ready to kill and die. He had made these forays before, killing no one and carrying slaves to freedom, because people were afraid to engage him, knowing that those who did resist his efforts would die.

That's a very different activity than the one you describe. Either you don't believe Brown or you haven't heard him. If the former, why do you not believe him? If the latter, isn't it time?

since it is almost always epistemically very hard to predict whether or not the end will justify it. In this case, it is entirely unclear that emulation of Martin Luther King Jr.’s or Gandhi’s nonviolent, peaceful style of civil disobedience would not have achieved the same or even better results.

Neither of their methods was calculated to do what Brown was trying to do, according to him, which was to carry away slaves into freedom. Not end slavery, not provoke war, not generate support for the abolition cause in the far-away North, not to create remorse in slave holders, but to free slaves. Discussion of tactics must proceed by accepting the given objectives and the allocated resources; that's what separates tactics from strategy. Brown's objectives were the outcome of his strategy, which was made—as he thought—by God. His Lord's will was that slaves be freed, that the naked be clothed, and the hungry fed. He was a man knowledgeable in the logistics of doing, and he was freeing slaves as it could be done. If he had taken upon himself to feed the hungry, he would not have been lobbying food stamp policy: he would have run a food bank.

But, even if John Brown’s taking up arms was the best method to combat slavery at the time, how could he have been so sure about it at the time?

Because he wasn't combating slavery, he was freeing slaves. Because he had gone around the country watching and learning and doing, and this was what he had decided would work. He had tested it and expanded it and he was "scaling it up," as they say in policyland, and he had the confidence of a visionary sustained by his belief in God, like most of the anti-abortion crusaders in the United States, who have all his zealotry and no part whatever of his effectiveness, for reasons so obvious a six-year-old could elucidate them.

It might be unfair to label his killing of slave-owners as a means to eradicating slavery rather than as a foreseen, unintended consequence of trying to end slavery.

It was neither. It was a foreseeable consequence, to which he was indifferent, of the anticipated resistance to his efforts to free particular slaves.

This is probably true; yet, this is a side issue because whether or not one views his killing either as a means or as an unintended but foreseen consequence of his actions is irrelevant to whether or not he should have manifested some expression of self-doubt in the means he chose.

Do you find the self-confidence necessary to being a leader in combat somehow blameworthy despite its evident necessity? Perhaps you can understand why Richard Nixon kept watching while he was in the White House George C. Scott's brilliant performance as General Patton?

Whether or not the killing was a means or was merely foreseen, John Brown knew that death was likely to result from the insurrection, and thus should have displayed more self-doubt about taking this approach.

No, Brown did not know that death was likely. He wasn't starting an insurrection. He was raiding the Armory for weapons and he intended to get away with it. His own view, which I have no military reason to doubt, was that he could have made good his escape if he had been willing to shoot, or even merely risk the lives of, innocent prisoners. But in any event, why would self-doubt have been an appropriate, let alone necessary, attitude of a military commander in his situation?

This graf confuses me. Why does "properly emulating ... courage" require deciding "how one goes about doing"? I should think that emulating courage requires courage, while emulating wisdom requires wisdom. I don't understand how "learning from Brown's strengths and weaknesses" is reflected in the remaining sentence. It describes how to plan anything, right or wrong, moral or moral. Are we to conclude that Brown's strength is courage and his weakness is bad planning? That does not coincide for me with the Brown I know.

This seems to me an odd turn. The hortatory conclusion feels forced to me. Why tell other people what they "should" do? Surely you can give your ideas voice for yourself and let other people decide for themselves what to think. And for all this to come down to the proposition that one should know one's imperfections, while undoubtedly Christian, seems somehow minimizing. Is that what John Brown's body teaches us, mouldering in its grave? Why did so many others see such another lesson or two there?