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FREEDOMWAYS                THIRD QUARTER 1973

Brown was (as Higginson wrote of the freed slaves under his command) "intensely human," and, as such, sane. 

Sane. 

Although this is never the expressed second purpose of the Boyer book (the first being to depict John Brown in the context of the history that most Americans have never learned: what were slavery and anti-slavery really like?) it is its real triumph. It is a book written by a non-black, about a non-black, for an audience of ignorant non-blacks. (Shall we call it a phase of "White Studies," since the people of black America have never needed to be instructed on the subject of John Brown's sanity; see, most recently, the Benjamin Quarles anthology, Blacks on John Brown, Urbana, Ill., 1972.)

Whites are ignorant because their own "educators," their intellectuals and academicians, have failed them. They think, even the New Leftish ones, of the New York Review of Books as their bible of criticism and fountain of knowledge; their centrist culture structure venerates as its exalted hero, even demigod, the recently deceased writer Edmund Wilson. (See the present writer's as yet unanthologized essay, "Israelites With Egyptian Principles," The Midwest Quarterly 1964.)

Here is what Edmund Wilson had to say about John Brown, writing in 1962, after (as we were told) fifteen years of reading and writing about the Civil War era, in his Patriotic Gore (subtitled "Studies in the Literature of the American Civil War"). Wilson reflecting his intellectual heredity and dominating his (white) intellectual environment, calls John Brown "this madman," "mad Brown," "pernicious," "crack-brained," "the evidence that Brown was a lunatic never reached his admirers at all." This was the white writer wept over by the New York Times Book Review's wunderkind, Wilfrid Sheed, as having a "lordly democracy of spirit," and mourned even in the Nation as "great democrat of letters."

Perhaps not quite as bad, but very much in the same vein is C. Vann Woodward, prized expert on slavery and the South for the white radical New York Review. In this aspect, Woodward, critical historian of Jim Crow, and sound enough when he writes of Reconstruction or Populism, is caught in the same trap. He has a compulsion to insist that we will "miss the meaning of Harpers Ferry" if we overlook "the evidence of John Brown's close association with insanity in both his heredity and his environment." Lunacy by association?

Woodward is worse than Wilson in one aspect: while Wilson

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---------- Reopened for Editing 2024-02-26 16:12:11