Why do northerners compare themselves to slaves

While the responses they depict certainly characterize some Northerners and some Southerners, they overlook a variety of passionate and competing reactions, particularly in the North. In a country that numbered nearly million people in , and was composed of many competing economic, social, and political interests, the response to the attack on Harpers Ferry was more complex than textbooks usually convey.

Northern abolitionists, the most militant and vocal champions of the struggle to free enslaved African Americans immediately, might have been expected to uniformly lionize Brown with the aura of a saint.

Indeed, many committed abolitionists responded in exactly this way. But even this group of passionate antislavery disciples did not display unified support of the raid.

The image of millions of illiterate, unskilled African Americans living amongst them, competing with them for jobs, and driving down wages was not a welcome one for this large constituency in the North. Members of the party found themselves confronted with a particularly difficult conundrum. White Southerners vilified Brown, almost without exception; his attempt to ignite an armed rebellion of enslaved African Americans played upon some of their deepest and most feverish fears.

Even their hatred, however, contained shades of difference. Even as they despised the cause in which Brown employed these traits, a few Southerners thought that those qualities gave Brown more in common with their Southern ideals of manhood than with the milquetoast, mercenary souls they imagined populated the North.

In fact, those attitudes changed over time, often dramatically. This included paying for their room and board in free African Americans' homes, financing any medical aid that was needed, and purchasing railroad fares to Canada. But Still took greatest interest in recording the experiences of the odd fugitives that his committee aided. Still documented details about the daily lives of the fugitives, including their time in slavery and their time in flight.

In , Still published this information in The Underground Rail Road , which circulated widely and went through three editions. In the decade between and , more than three million immigrants came to the United States, with a vast majority of them settling in the free states of the North.

By , foreign-born residents were becoming a majority group; immigrants approached or exceeeded half the total population of several Northern cities. The new Americans arriving in this burst of immigration were nothing like those who had come before.

Before , three-quarters of all immigrants had been Protestants. Most were single men from the British Isles. Of those, a fifth became unskilled laborers or servants, and the remainder worked as farmers, skilled workers, or in professional occupations.

But in the two decades after , the typical immigrant's profile would radically change. More than half of all immigrants in these years were Catholics. Two-thirds were from Ireland, with the remainder from German-speaking countries.

And the percentage of them who worked as unskilled laborers doubled. The growing industrial economy of the North swallowed these new workers into its factories, employing them for long hours at low wages. These manufacturing jobs were repetitious and sometimes hazardous. And from their meager earnings, Northern laborers had to pay for every one of life's necessities. For some Southerners, the situation of Northern workers looked a lot worse than slavery. In fact, they argued, unlike the "wage slavery" of the North, the slavery system in the South provided food, clothing, medical care, and leisure to slaves, caring for them throughout their lives.

Cook, one of his raiders, moved to Harpers Ferry, where he found work and learned what he could about the community, the armory, and the lay of the land. He also fathered a child and married a local woman. In December Brown once again made headlines for his exploits in the West.

He invaded Missouri, where he killed a slave owner, liberated 11 slaves, and brilliantly evaded law enforcement officers as he led the freed blacks to Canada.

Brown also contacted the "Secret Six" who were financing him. In June Brown visited his home in North Elba, New York, for the last time, where he said good-bye to his wife and daughters. Brown probably knew that he was unlikely to see his family again, something he stoically accepted as a cost of his crusade against slavery. He was less accepting of his son Salmon, however, who decided he would not join his father on an apparently suicidal mission into Virginia.

He expected large numbers of men to enlist in his "army," but by September only 18 had arrived, including another of Brown's sons, Watson. By mid-October, a few more arrived. On Sunday, October 16, Brown and his men began their raid.

They made a strange assortment: veterans of the struggles in Kansas, fugitive slaves, free blacks, transcendental idealists, Oberlin College men, and youthful abolitionists on their first foray into the world. The youngest was The oldest, Dangerfield Newby, was a year-old fugitive slave from Virginia who hoped to rescue his wife from bondage.

But most of the raiders were in their 20s, half the age of their leader, the year-old Brown. Brown left three of his recruits to guard their supplies and arms at the farmhouse in Maryland. The remaining 18 raiders, 13 whites and five blacks, marched with John Brown to Harpers Ferry. Brown's small army arrived in Harpers Ferry at night and quickly secured the federal armory and arsenal and later Hall's Rifle Works, which manufactured weapons for the national government.

With the telegraph wires cut, Brown might have easily seized the weapons in the town, liberated slaves in the neighborhood, and then taken to the hills. Or he might have destroyed the armory and literally blown up the town. Inexplicably, though, he remained in the armory, waiting for slaves to flock to his standard.

They never came. Instead, townsmen and farmers surrounded the armory. These civilians were probably not strong enough to dislodge Brown, but they kept him pinned down.

Although Brown tried to negotiate with the civilians, his emissaries, including his son Watson, were shot while under a white flag. By the morning of October 18, eight of Brown's men were dead or captured, and that same day militia from Virginia and Maryland arrived.

President James Buchanan had dispatched U. Directly under Lee was another Virginian, Lt. That morning, marines stormed the engine house of the armory, capturing Brown and a few of his raiders and killing the rest. By the end of the raid, of the 22 who had been involved in the plot, 10 of Brown's men, including his sons Watson and Oliver, were dead or mortally wounded; five, including Brown, had been captured. Seven escaped, but two were later captured in Pennsylvania and returned to Virginia for trial and execution.

The other five, including Brown's son Owen, made their way to safe havens in Canada and remote parts of the North. All but Owen Brown later served in the Union Army. Brown's grave at his family farm in North Elba, New York, became a pilgrimage site.

Library of Congress. Brown's capture on October 18 set the stage for his trial and execution. Severely wounded, Brown had to be carried into court on October 25 for a preliminary hearing and on October 27 for his trial. The judge would not even delay the proceedings a day to allow Brown's lawyer to arrive. The trial was speedy. On November 2 Brown was convicted and sentenced to death. Many Northerners interpreted the hasty actions of the Virginia authorities in trying and executing Brown as another example of Southern injustice.

The apparent lack of due process in his trial thus contributed to the Northern perception that Brown was a martyr. The most absurd aspect of the trial was the charge against Brown. He was indicted and convicted of "treason" against the state of Virginia. But as Brown pointed out, he had never lived in Virginia, never owed loyalty to the state, and therefore could not have committed treason against the state.

Most Southerners, however, saw Virginia's actions as a properly swift response to the unspeakable acts of a dangerous man whose goal was to destroy their entire society. By the time of his execution, the entire nation was fixated on this bearded man who spoke and looked like a biblical prophet and whose deeds thrilled—whether with fear or admiration or both—an entire generation.

Indicative of this fixation is a shared aspect in the otherwise divergent responses of Wendell Phillips and Edmund Ruffin—the great abolitionist orator and the fire-eating Virginia secessionist. In the year following the raid, each of them prominently carried and displayed a "John Brown pike" that Brown had ordered from the Connecticut foundry.

For Phillips the pike symbolized the glory, and for Ruffin the horror, of a servile insurrection led by a resurrected Puritan willing to die to overthrow slavery. Brown's actions in Kansas and at Harpers Ferry were clearly violent.

He killed people or at least supervised their death. But was he a terrorist? At neither place do his actions comport with what we know about modern terrorists. The Harpers Ferry raid was his most famous act. Brown held Harpers Ferry from late Sunday night, October 16, until he was captured on the 18th. He was in possession of almost unlimited amounts of gunpowder and weapons. He had captured prominent citizens, most famously Colonel Washington. He stopped a train full of passengers and freight.

What would modern terrorists have done in such circumstances? They might have let the train go, only after they had robbed all the passengers to fund further acts of terror, and then blown up the bridge as the train crossed from Virginia to Maryland. They might have planted explosives on the train and let it proceed, as terrorists did in Spain a few years ago. What did Brown do? He boarded the train, let people know who he was, and was seen by people who might later have identified him.

Then he let the train continue on to Washington. These were not the actions of a terrorist. While in Harpers Ferry, Brown might have blown up the federal armory or indeed most of the town after taking as much powder and weapons as his men could carry. He might have broken into homes of prominent people and slaughtered them. Brown did none of these things. He waited, foolishly for sure, for the slaves in the area to flock to him.

He was caught in a firefight with local citizens, and he was captured by the U. He proved to be a disastrous military leader and a failed "captain" of his brave and idealistic troops. But he never acted like a terrorist. He ordered no killings; he did not wantonly destroy property; and he cared for his hostages. This is simply not how terrorists act.

The events at Kansas are similar. Brown targeted a number of individuals who had been leading—violently leading—proslavery forces in the area. At the home of James Doyle, the raiders did not kill his year-old son or his wife, Mahala, even though both could have identified Brown and his men. Brown's men killed Allen Wilkinson, but not his wife, Louisa, who recognized one of Brown's sons from his voice.

Wilkinson was ill at the time, and after killing her husband, Brown asked her if there would be neighbors who could help care for her. Surely, as Robert McGlone notes, it might seem "bizarre" that Brown was concerned about her health after he had just killed her husband. But her husband was guilty of attacking free state men and threatening the Browns, and so he was in John Brown's mind justly executed.

But his wife was innocent and not punished. This was not the behavior of a terrorist. Kansas—Bleeding Kansas as it is known—was in the midst of a civil war. Between and about men would be killed in Kansas. Not all were politically motivated, and historians disagree on what constitutes a "political" killing. But even the most conservative scholar of this violence finds 56 killings that were tied to slavery and politics. I think this number is low, and that most of the deaths were actually politically motivated and tied to slavery and Bleeding Kansas.

But the actual number of political killings is less important than the understanding that in Kansas there was a violent civil war being fought over slavery; men on both sides were killed. Brown's actions are most famous because there were five killings, and he strategically used swords, rather than guns, which would have alerted neighbors. This is the nature of guerrilla warfare. It is brutal and bloody, but it is not terrorism.

There is also a political context. In Kansas there was no democratic government. Elections were notoriously fraudulent and violent. The majority of the settlers were from the free states, but the national government recognized a minority government that was proslavery.

That legislature made it a crime to publicly oppose slavery. There was, at least under the formal law, no free speech in Kansas for abolitionists. He could not have gone to Virginia to denounce slavery or even urge Virginians to give up slavery. Thus, in this sense Brown was not fighting against democratic institutions in a free society; rather he was fighting against an unfree society that denied him basic civil liberties and, in Kansas, even the right to have a fair election.

So, what in the end can we make of John Brown? If he was not a terrorist—what was he? He might be seen as revolutionary, trying to start a revolution to end slavery and fulfill the goals of the Declaration of Independence. As proslavery border ruffians tried to prevent democracy in Kansas, and were willing to murder and assault supporters of freedom, John Brown surely had a right to defend his settlement and his side.

He reacted to specific threats and the sacking of Lawrence by a proslavery mob. This was not terrorism, but a fact of warfare in Bleeding Kansas. Nevertheless, modern Americans are uncomfortable endorsing his vengeful violence in Kansas, however necessary it may have been. Similarly, no one, not even the slaveholders, could deny that slaves might legitimately fight for their own liberty.