Remember Harper’s Ferry! Dr. Louis DeCaro in Torrington, CT (10/2022)

Forget about the Alamo, remember Harper’s Ferry!

Greetings, Torrington. It's taken me 20 years to get here, but I finally made it, and boy am I happy I did.

Um, oh, this moocs, okay. All right, not bad for a guy who teaches at a cemetery. That's actually an old joke, by the way. I love it. Seminary Cemetery, you know? So, I love it, but uh, thank you so much.

It's been a wonderful day. I came this morning. Tinsley picked me up, drove me into this wonderful town. We went and saw the post office murals. Then I got a quick tour, thanks to Mark. I got to go to the Historical Society. I got to get to the library, and then after that, we went to the nativity scene. Well, you know, we went to that, to the place, and it was wonderful. It was just wonderful to be there, and I'm so charged and so excited and so grateful and honored to be asked to come and see Reverend Dan.

How long do I have to preach tonight? I won't take that much time because I know that there are better things to come, but I want to thank all of you. I want to thank you for the invitation.

Three critical quotes about John Brown

Let me start by reading three quotes. Three's a good number, and three are not too long quotes but substantial quotes. Two of them are from John Brown, and one is from John Brown's good friend, Frederick Douglass.

This is the first one, July 1859. John Brown writes a Declaration of Liberty on behalf of the people that he is seeking to liberate.

“We hold this truth to be self-evident, that it is the highest privilege and plain duty of man to strive in every reasonable way to promote the happiness, mental, moral, and physical elevation of his fellow man.”

We would say fellow human today, but bear with him; he's in the 19th century; he doesn't know better. Now, the Harpers Ferry Raid takes place. He's standing before the court; he's been found guilty, and he says,

"I believe that to have interfered as I have done, as I have always freely admitted that I've done, in behalf of his God's despised poor is no wrong but right.

Now, if it is deemed necessary that I should forfeit my life for the furtherance of the ends of justice and mingle my blood further with the blood of my children and with the blood of millions in this slave country whose rights are disregarded by wicked, cruel, and unjust enactments, I say let it be done."

In 1881, Frederick Douglass visited Storer College not far from Harpers Ferry, and he spoke to an audience that even included some of the people that had taken part in the prosecution and execution of John Brown.

This is what Douglass said in 1881,

"Until this blow was struck, the blow at Harpers Ferry, the prospect for Freedom was dim, shadowy, and uncertain. The irrepressible conflict was one of words, votes, and compromises. When John Brown stretched forth his arm, the sky was cleared. The time for compromises was gone. The armed hosts of Freedom stood face to face over the chasm of a broken Union and the clash of arms was at hand. The South staked all upon getting possession of the federal government and, failing to do that, drew the sword of rebellion and thus made her own and not John Brown's the lost cause of the century."

I'm glad to be able to talk tonight about a man who lost a lot of little battles but won a major war. I'm glad that I can devote my scholarly life to studying John Brown when so many writers, some of them excellent, some of them not so good, have done what I like to call drive-by biographies. Nothing wrong with them; some of them are very good. But it has been a privilege of mine to devote the past 20 years to studying John Brown, and I hope to continue to do so because I'm convinced that John Brown, as our dear friend Larry Lawrence, the late Larry Lawrence, used to say of the John Brown Society, "John Brown is the cow in the middle of the road."

No, you can't get from the Antebellum era to the Civil War or to anything afterward without encountering John Brown, and you have to go around him, and you either go around him on the right or you go around him on the left. And I make no apology to say that I go around to Mom to live.

Forget about the Alamo; remember Harper’s Ferry

We live in a society that has told us "Remember the Alamo. Remember the Alamo. Remember the Alamo." And if John Brown could speak to us, he'd say "Remember the Alamo" for what? For slaveholders who died in the effort to extend slave territory. For what he called land pirates who stole land. We're supposed to remember that. We're supposed to feel that that is our defining, our truest sense of who we are. I say tonight, remember Harpers Ferry. Remember Harpers Ferry.

Both of those episodes ended in failure for the people involved, true, but one was a failure well deserved. One had to do with men who had asserted themselves to expand and expand slavery, expand power, and to glorify a cause that today would shame any of us who have any common sense. But the man who died at Harpers Ferry died white and Black together, struggling to do something that would redefine and would have redefined the nation had it succeeded.

John Brown's vision and anti-slavery efforts

What John Brown gave us was a vision of what our nation could be at its best. You see, John Brown did not hate his country. From his prison cell, he wrote a letter to a young man, a son of one of his associates, and said, "Strange change has come upon the nation since 1776. Now, I know we could argue politically whether this is fundamentally a slave nation; in some respects, it is; it's written in the Constitution. But John Brown also believed that the better angels, to borrow Abraham Lincoln's phrase, the better angels of our nation really had an opportunity to move away from slavery and that something had happened in his lifetime, something had happened since the late 1700s and throughout the Antebellum era.

The country had moved from the opportunity to eliminate slavery to, rather, digging into profiting and maximizing slavery, and Brown saw that as fundamentally a problem. John Brown believed and knew that slavery was fundamentally unjust. He knew that slavery was racist, that it was exploitative, and that there was nothing that could be good that could come from it, so when he stood on trial and was found guilty, he told his Virginia accusers, "This is a slave country. It's a slave country because by 1859, slavery had essentially taken over the entire country, and John Brown understood the problems of an imperialistic tendency because imperialism in our country was driven by slaveholders. You can't separate them, the acquisition of land, the expansion of slavery, and so we have this problem in our history, and John Brown desired to excise it.

John Brown saw himself and believed himself to be faithful to the founders, one of whom, who fought, was his own grandfather, who died in 1776. John Brown believed in what the possibilities of this nation could be, but he understood that as long as slavery was essential to our nation, this nation would only go from bad to worse, so John Brown tried, and people said, "Oh…” you know, they always rush you to Potawatomi, they always rush you to the place where he kills some people, they never tell you what has happened in the country, they never tell you that in the 1830s even John Brown himself was hoping for a peaceful kind of an end to slavery, but in the 1840s as history went on and by the time you get into the 1850s, what happens in 1850?

The Fugitive Slave Act

The Fugitive Slave Act takes place, and the Fugitive Slave Act effectively turned the entire United States into the South because it gave free rein to slave hunters and Marshals, and it even allowed collaborations between slave hunters and policemen as they did in New York City to steal Black men right off the streets and ship them into the South, and so John Brown in Springfield not far from here formed probably what might be called, if I may not I hope I'm not being offensive, but a kind of first version of the Black Panther Party when he gave a constitution and guided the frightened uh Black citizens of Springfield and taught them, he gave knives out on a Sunday morning after church, and he taught them that they could fight and that they need to fight because they're humans and he knew and had confidence that if you arm Black people, they would fight for themselves and fight for freedom. That was 1850.

The Dred Scott Decision

1857, we passed the Dred Scott decision, which further affirmed that no matter where a Black man went, he was a slave even if he was in a free state, and the official declaration, as infamously known, is that a Black man had no rights that a white man was bound to respect, but John Brown respected those rights, and he wasn't the only one. There were others, but John Brown went to Kansas, and when he went to Kansas, he actually went there to help his sons because his sons contacted him and said, "We're afraid. We've gone out here peacefully to settle in this territory because we were told that Kansas would be defined democratically, that if we went there as free state settlers and we voted, and we had the majority, Kansas would enter the Union as a free state.

But in fact, that wasn't to be the case because the Missourians and the Southerners were intent on forcing Kansas into the Union as a slave state, and it meant terrorism. And when they tell you John Brown is the original American terrorist, you tell them, "Get thee behind me, Satan," because terrorism was already taking place. First of all, terrorism is not something that is defined often by people.

Of course, you can't even take a nation and dispossess people and kill them off and not commit terrorism, but that is part of our history, too, and slavery is, in fact, an institution of terror. It takes violence, murder, and exploitation. It takes fear to keep people in bondage, so don't call John Brown a terrorist because you look silly in light of history.

John Brown in Kansas

When John Brown went out to Kansas to help his sons because they didn't bring real weapons, they brought a squirrel gun and whatever else, and he told the sons, told them, "Look, we're in danger here. We don't have real guns, and these southerners are coming in, and in 1854, they, they forced the ballot, you know, you talk about a stolen election, they wanted Kansas because they were determined that Kansas was going to be a slave state and people like the Browns were doubly endangered because the Browns were not just free state people, they were abolitionists, and so I know I don't want to go too long, but I do want to say this that one of the other things that we've been told that's not so true in history is that to be against slavery meant that you were egalitarian, that you were for human rights. It's not true.

Many of the people in this country who were against slavery were racist. I don't mean that they were necessarily ogres. I mean that they did not want to live in peace and equality with their neighbors who were Black, indigenous, or Latino. The free state simply means free white, no slaves. And the Browns and the abolitionists were more than that. They were about human equality, and it was so offensive to the people, some of the southerners and Missourians in Kansas, that they identified the Browns and put a finger on them, and if you look at the history, you'll see that in 1856, Kansas territory, the government in Washington DC didn't care because it was in the hands of pro-slavery people. The territorial government was not interested in protecting the Free State people, and they were getting their butts kicked, and they were themselves, uh, besotted by a fear of act of using force to meet force, and then John Brown arrived and John Brown addressed the first case, the most necessary case he had to, at Pottawatomi Creek at the end of May in 1856 when five men—it should have been seven, but he only got five of them—who were involved in a conspiracy to bring the force of pro-slavery terrorists down on his family and his associates when he cut them off. And I make no apologies for that. I know people will always tell you, "But let that be the context."

John Brown's Commitment

The context is that he couldn't call the police. He couldn't call the FBI. There was no one to call. And so John Brown, being a father and being a man, took up the sword, and he suffered for it consequently. But I believe that what John Brown was doing in Kansas is significant when we see how easily our democracy is attacked, and there are shades of January 6th, or you might call them reverse shades, when you look at what happened in the beating of Charles Sumner, in the way that the Ruffians—which were really terrorists—invaded territory and completely destroyed and devastated the Democratic process, and then you see the kind of actions that we have seen in recent years, and understand that it is true that democracy is a delicate thing, but human rights are essential to the best expression of democracy, and John Brown is a witness.

So I'll close by saying this. I don't hold up John Brown to Black people. I think it's great if Black people appreciate John Brown; he loved John; he loved Black people, and in most cases, they loved him. But I really think, as I've often said and I will continue to say, John Brown is best for little white boys and little white girls. We need him. We need to understand that John Brown's memory is important to the country and important to all people, but for those of us so-called white people because we know race is a social construct or actually more pink if you're going to get into colors, and I'm, you know, Italian-American, so I guess, you know, I'm more Mediterranean if you get into flavors, but the reality is that as long as there's a racial construct, we need to have people who represent the best of our history, and I'm here tonight to stand and represent John Brown, to encourage you to celebrate him, to remember him.

Don't be afraid; don’t be ashamed to show your children that there were people like John Brown, like Mary Brown, his wife, and a community of abolitionists who, even if they didn't agree on every point, were determined to put a light in a dark place. That dark place was called the United States in the antebellum United States, and their light is what we're feeding off of today as we see the reality of presidents and statesmen who were racists as we see their hypocrisy of leaders.

When you look for John Brown, you won't find a hypocrite; you'll see a man who said, as he said here, "Let them hang me." I celebrate John Brown, and I thank you for celebrating him too.

God bless you.