Smithsonian’s Civil War collection, CWPT’s Animated Maps

Every so often I totally fail to come up with something substantial to write, but I do run across a website that is inexpressably nifty. Today is one of those days.

You can go view some of the Smithsonian Museum of American History’s collection of Civil War Artifacts. It’s flash hell but it’s reasonably well-executed flash hell, so that’s all right.

Speaking of flash animation, if you’ve never lost part of an afternoon watching the Civil War Preservation Trust’s animated maps, then you should go do that while you’re at it.

His soul is marching on.

So here it is, the end of December, 1859. John Brown has been dead for weeks but the fuze he lit at Harpers Ferry continues to burn. Across the south, slaveowners who were always alert for the whiff of rebellion are beginning to reach new heights of paranoia. Sectional tensions after the bloodshed in Kansas (in which Brown had his part) were already running high, and here! Here was proof that abolitionists intended to see Southern whites murdered in their beds.

The still-young Republican Party, founded partly on abolitionist principles, moved to distance itself from Brown, while the Democratic party began to split down the middle like a rock split by ice. To top it all off, the country was about to enter an election year.

The Republicans would hold only their second nominating convention in May of 1860, but as 1859 drew to a close they were still casting about for candidates. They would eventually put 13 on the ballot at their convention. Among them were Charles Sumner, who had been beaten bloody by Preston Brooks four years earlier; and a Kentucky lawyer who had made his home in Illinois, named Abraham Lincoln.

John Brown’s Body Lies A-Mouldering In The Grave

On 2 December, 1859, at high noon, John Brown was hanged by the neck until dead.

The night before his wife had finally made it to Charles Town to visit him. They had dinner together but his jailers wouldn’t allow her to stay the night. Witnesses report that was the only time in prison that John Brown lost his composure.

On his way to the scaffold, John Brown handed one of his supporters a note, which read

Charlestown, Va
2nd December 1859
I, John Brown, am now quite certain that the crimes of this guilty, land: will never be purged away; but with Blood. I had as I now think: vainly flattered myself that withought very much bloodshed it might be done.

He mounted the scaffold, the rope was placed around his neck, the trapdoor sprung, and John Brown passed into history, to become a hope for the slaves, a song for the soldiers, and a terrifying specter for the south.

Reading Material: John Brown’s Letters

I have just found the niftiest historical widget. Familytales.org has 202 of John Brown’s letters online and you can filter them by recipient, the place he wrote from, or the date he wrote. The filters aren’t perfect, but they are fascinating, and it’s a neat way to shuffle through Brown’s voluminous correspondance.

These 202 letters were written between 1833 and 1859, with the vast majority of them (56) being written in 1859. This is not particularly surprising given what John Brown was up to that year. Among other things, they have John Brown’s will, written on the 1st of December, the day before he was hanged. Most of his children got only a Bible from him, “as good a copy of the Bible as can be purchased at some bookstore in New York or Boston, at a cost of $5 each in cash. . .” His grandchildren were to receive Bibles worth $3.

The one-sided view we get of Brown’s correspondance is by turns tantalizing and poignant. What are we to make of letters like this:

Charlestown, VA., Nov. 30, 1859.

DR. THOS. H. WEBB, Boston.

MY DEAR SIR, I would most gladly comply with your request most kindly made in your letter of the 26th inst., but it came too late. It is out of my power. Farewell: God bless you!

Your friend, JOHN BROWN.

And then there is this one:

Charlestown PRISON, JEFFERSON COUNTY, VA.,

Dec. 1, 1859.

To MR. JAMES FOREMAN

MY DEAR FRIEND, I have only time to say I got your kind letter of the 26th of November this evening. Am very grateful for all the good feelings expressed by yourself and wife. May God abundantly bless and save you all! I am very cheerful, in hopes of entering on a better state of existence in a few hours, through infinite grace in Christ Jesus my Lord. Remember the poor that cry,” and them that are in bonds as bound with them.” Your friend as ever,

JOHN BROWN.

Anyhow, it’s worth a little time to click over there and rifle through John Brown’s correspondance and watch him develop, as it were, pointing himself with greater and greater surety toward the tragedy at Harpers Ferry. Interestingly he never expresses anything but peace at the thought of his execution. One might almost think that John Brown wanted to be a martyr to the abolitionist cause.

Mahala Doyle and John Brown

I’ve previously discussed one woman who wrote to John Brown after his capture at Harpers Ferry. L. Maria Child was an outspoken abolitionist who admired John Brown’s “work” in Kansas and in Harpers Ferry. Later, though, John Brown got a different kind of letter.

Metadata: Rain, internet connections, and Andersonville

Apologies for the radio silence, the remains of Tropical Storm Ida have parked themselves over the Manor of Mixed Blessings and refuse to move. This presents a problem for my internet life, because the Manor of Mixed Blessings is so far out in the boonies that I rely on satellite broadband for my internet connection. Satellite is great under any number of conditions, but when heavy clouds and rain are overhead, my connectivity sucks.

That being said, I have managed to do some random surfing, and found this place which is selling, I shit you not, a 1/32 scale Andersonville prison playset. Scroll down to the middle of the page. One set contains the stockade and guard towers, and then the “Andersonville accessories” contains 24 little plastic Union POWs, tents and shebangs for them, and 8 teeny plastic Confederate guards.

I just keep looking at it. I think I’m balanced nearly perfectly between “Oh. My. God. Who the hell even thinks that a toy version of the most deadly prison camp on American soil is a good idea?” and “Holy shit, I need the accessories set at the very least for my desk at work.”

In this world you have no abiding place

In my last entry I briefly touched on John Brown’s letters from prison before haring off and ignoring them entirely to deal with the interrogation of John Brown that took place after his capture. Sorry about that. Sometimes, I am a sloppy writer when I blog and my digressions get the better of me.

The end of that is not yet

We’re kind of killing time here. John Brown has been convicted and sentenced to hang and sits in prison in Charles Town, Virginia. His hanging marks the next Sesquicentennial on December 2nd. Meanwhile, he was writing letters. The letters and the interview with him in the Charles Town jail on the 31st of October can tell us a lot about what kind of man he was.

Reading Material: Slavery, Race, and Ideology in the United States of America

Just a quick hit because I’m sort of busyish. This essay by Barbara Jeanne Fields is freakin fascinating as all get out. 24 pages and definitely worth your time:

Probably a majority of American historians think of slavery in the
United States as primarily a system of race relations—as though the
chief business of slavery were the production of white supremacy
rather than the production of cotton, sugar, rice and tobacco. One
historian has gone so far as to call slavery ‘the ultimate segregator’.
He does not ask why Europeans seeking the ‘ultimate’ method of segregating Africans would go to the trouble and expense of transporting them across the ocean for that purpose, when they could have achieved the same end so much more simply by leaving the Africans in Africa. No one dreams of analysing the struggle of the English against the Irish as a problem in race relations, even though the rationale that the English developed for suppressing the ‘barbarous’ Irish later served nearly word for word as a rationale for suppressing Africans and indigenous American Indians. Nor does anyone dream of analysing serfdom in Russia as primarily a problem of race relations, even though the Russian nobility invented fictions of their innate, natural superiority over the serfs as preposterous as any devised by American racists.

The sentencing of John Brown

On November 2nd, 1859, a verdict was rendered in Virgina vs. John Brown. The trial had begun just over a week earlier. Technically speaking the crime John Brown had committed was if anything treason against the United States of America, but President Buchanan caved to pressure from Virginia Governor Henry Wise and allowed John Brown to be tried for treason against the state of Virginia.

Governor Wise and other pro-slavery forces were doubtless concerned that a federal trial might result in an acquittal. Trial in a state court in Virginia, on the other hand, virtually guaranteed a conviction and death sentence. And that’s what they got. John Brown was sentenced to hang. After the verdict was announced, he spoke to the court.

. . .Had I interfered in the manner which I admit, and which I admit has been fairly proved (for I admire the truthfulness and candor of the greater portion of the witnesses who have testified in this case), had I so interfered in behalf of the rich, the powerful, the intelligent, the so-called great, or in behalf of any of their friends, either father, mother, brother, sister, wife, or children, or any of that class, and suffered and sacrificed what I have in this interference, it would have been all right; and every man in this court would have deemed it an act worthy of reward rather than punishment. This court acknowledges, as I suppose, the validity of the law of God. I see a book kissed here which I suppose to be the Bible, or at least the New Testament. That teaches me that all things whatsoever I would that men should do to me, I should do even so to them. It teaches me, further, to “remember them that are in bonds, as bound with them.” I endeavored to act up to that instruction. I say, I am yet too young to understand that God is any respecter of persons. . . .

In the month that followed, John Brown wrote many letters, but this was the last speech he gave.