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BOOK REVIEW         MEYER

in the last analysis in these years before the Civil War the prime mover of men, the transformer of character, the force for change. It was the struggle of the Negro people, with all its multiple effects, that made John Brown's eminent coadjutors ready for his plan before they ever met him. And John Brown, too, was not a cause but a result."

So writes Boyer, to explain what he is in the midst of detailing, the theme of the further story that is to unfold. More than sixty years ago, Dr. Du Bois was writing, in his opening paragraphs of a John Brown biography, that appeared when Dixon's The Clansman was two years old and half a decade before Birth of a Nation was to consolidate in film, the propaganda of history as the rationalization of racist repression:
 
"The mystic spell of Africa is and ever was over all America. It has guided her hardest work, inspired her finest literature, and sung her sweetest songs. . . . Of all inspiration which America owes to Africa, however, the greatest by far is the score of heroic men whom the sorrows of these dark children called to unselfish devotion and heroic self-realization; Benezet, Garrison and Harriet Stowe; Sumner, Douglas and Lincoln - these and others, but above all, John Brown."

Du Bois went on (after that opening that Boyer echoes) to sketch John Brown's life and career, returning again and again to his classic "The cost of repression is greater than the price of liberty," a lesson that the six decades since have not sufficiently taught America or the world. Villard gave us a full, formal, structured biography, filled with the paraphernalia of research and scholarship, but with most of its emphasis on filling out the details of the struggle in Kansas and the attack on Harpers Ferry. 

Boyer, apart from the great tapestry he weaves that depicts the movement against slavery, the grandest episodes in its course, and the nature of the opposition it had to combat, North and South, has a second and striking mission to fulfill in this volume limited to the pre-Kansas years: He wants the reader to see a man of flesh and blood, of hesitation and doubt, of appetite and ardor, but withal a man of growth and development of character. Denying all simplistic portraits of "saint" or "martyr" or "criminal," he strives to start from scratch and describe a "human." But to do this he re-ransacks all the literature on the old man; his object is to encompass rather than select, and with one great ultimate aim; to show us that John

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---------- Reopened for Editing 2024-02-26 16:09:00