Patriotic Treason: John Brown and the Soul of America

by Evan Carton

Book Overview

With a combination of scrupulous original research, new perspective, and a sensitive historical imagination, Patriotic Treason vividly recreates the world in which John Brown and his compatriots lived... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 074327136X
• ISBN13: 9780743271363
• Release Date: August 2006
• Publisher: Free Press
• Length: 387 Pages
• Weight: 1.41 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.3" x 6.3" x 9.3"

Customer Reviews

Inconsistencies and excesses

In the Civil War's Emancipation Tradition John Brown is one of the major players, the doomed idealist, martyred by the evil slave-holding empire. With his full beard and wild eyes, Brown is an Old Testament prophet passing judgment and calling down the plague of civil war on America. This view makes it almost impossible to find an objective book about the man. He seems either bathed in a white light blinded by his vision or a cloven hove monster with bloody claws. Neither view is accurate, historical or likely to help us understand the man, his actions or the era. John Brown is a complex man full of inconsistencies and excesses. He loves his children but puts them in harm's way, resulting in their death. A deeply religious man, he is capable of cold-blooded murder without remorse. In an age where race dominated society, he is one of the few whites who truly felt blacks are equal. Doing a book on him is full of dangers and can easily incite rage from his supporters or detractors. Evan Carton gives the reader both John Brown, a history of Abolitionist thought, race relations and America from 1830 to 1860. This is a large amount of information for a book that reads like a novel not a history. The author uses endnotes with chapter and page numbers without footnoting. We are told "to convey their living drama, I sometimes visualize the undescribed sensory and emotional particulars and imagine the unpreserved words, thoughts and motives", reading that statement worried me! Was this would be historical fact or Emancipation Tradition fiction? Whatever the author did, they did well producing an excellent read that was enjoyable and informative. I liked this book much more than expected. It is an excellent read, balanced and fair to all parties. These people have serious differences in a society very different from ours. The author never judges them by today's standards. While clearly anti-slavery, the treatment of slave-owners never falls into unwarranted condemnation. John Brown emerges from this book a full figured man with a self-defined mission. The author has problems with some of the presentation but pulls no punches. While Brown's story may always lean toward "half full", all the failures, bankruptcies and the embezzlements are here. Bleeding Kansas, for the most part is accurate and well written. Brown could enflame the problems and that is not fully developed. Neither is the reaction of many "Free-soil" residents toward his actions. However, his military exploits and his use of them to raise funds are. This is Brown at the peak of his fame and ability to captivate an audience. From here to Harpers Ferry is a slippery slope of disappointments. As the Republican Party rises to power, America's views on slavery start to change and Brown's view cannot. The Secret Six, Brown's New England intellectuals that provide most of his funds, do not get full coverage. This is proper in a book on Brown but I would like to see the au

A telling of Brown's life that leaves space for you to decide what to make of this complex man

John Brown's attempt to free slaves by sparking a national uprising through the assault on the Harpers Ferry in October 1859 was a complete and utter failure when measured by how quickly they were thwarted, how many of Brown's men died in the attempt or by execution. Yet, his communications during his trial and from prison galvanized the hardest of abolitionists in the north (including the Transcendentalists such as Emerson and Thoreau) and the secessionists in the south. More than a few people believe it was the reaction to this raid that set events in process that led to the ferocious bloodshed of the Civil War less than eighteen months later. Was Brown a madman acting in a crazed spasm or emotion? That judgment has changed radically in the near century and a half since his execution. Immediately afterward, the largest popular reaction was negative because it was lawless and was an assault on the Federal Government. Some of the most extreme abolitionists did hold him up as a kind of messianic figure. When I was in high school, he was regarded as someone hardly worth mentioning. He was clearly crazed and criminal to boot. In the past decade several books and documentaries have taken another look and come to a much more favorable view of Brown. Some even see him much as the Transcendentalists talked about him right after he was hanged. Evan Carton focuses more on the life of Brown and only gets into the societal issues in a couple of places. He does a fine job in keeping the life Brown lived front and center rather than letting it stand for whatever his supporters or detractors would have it be. Carton trusts the reader enough to let him decide for himself. This is quite important for the modern reader who likely knows little about Brown because of the issues his life raises for our own time. Is a private choice to violence ever justified? Certainly slavery was a great evil. Was Brown justified? Would or could slavery have been eradicated in the United States as it was elsewhere in the European Empires without war? If you answer that slavery was so evil that Brown was justified how do you say that someone who is trying to prevent millions of abortions is wrong? Or someone who wants to retain affirmative action? Or whatever else drives their personal conscience to extreme action? If you say that Brown was not justified, how do you avoid the guilt of slavery? Weren't the millions of souls in bondage worth fighting for? Should they have been left as chattel property for another decade or two or another century until things could work themselves out? I guess my own view is a cheat on the question. I do not condone private violence and believe that those who blow up abortion clinics or violently attack Federal installations actually help their opponents more than their cause. Brown was so fervent and articulate that his passion moved a great many people. If he had stepped forward more as a Frederick Douglass and engaged

Not a madman

This is an excellent, thoroughly researched and referenced book by Evan Carton which is also a very gripping read. Even though the outcome is known, the book is hard to put down. But while the style is nearly novelistic, it is solidly factual. I read this book because I wanted to understand if the usual myths about Brown were correct - if he was indeed a madman. Carton shows him to be a deeply religious and principled man, and one whose reasoning was consistent with his values and with his understanding of the enormous injustice of slavery in nineteenth century America. Brown was an extremely effective fighter against the murderous "border ruffians" from Missouri who attempted to terrrorize free state settlers in Kansas. These Missourian slaveholders and their agents drove free-soil settlers away, burning and looting their settlements such as Lawrence, Kansas, fixing elections, and occasionally killing free-soil setlers, and bragging to "shoot, burn, and hang" abolitionsts, not believing the abolitionists or the free soil settlers(who often weren't abolitionists) would dare to fight back. Initially, they didn't. Brown did, with a very small force, and the reader may find his actions quite shocking. On some occasions his small force routed or captured gangs of the border ruffians who outnumbered them substantially. Brown's desire to accelerate the end of slavery, which he clearly saw as a odious blotch on the ideals which founded his country, led him eventually to more decisive action. Carton provides a clarification for his thought processes through his letters, meetings with sponsors and other associates, and the recollections of survivors after the raid on Harpers Ferry, and convinces that Brown's reasoning was sound, although it certainly was radical. Both before and after the raid, Carton shows us the Brown was confident of the positive effects of the raid even if it were a military failure. Ultimately, it was the notion of the slaveholders that they could indefinitely extend their profitable institution that proved to be madness.

Splendid Book

This is the first book that I've read about John Brown and I'm glad that I waited. Brown's story is a simply amazing one and Carton is the master of every detail. He writes very well, is excellent at telling a story, and, most significantly for me, he is well-versed in the historical period. He has deep knowledge about pre-Civil-War politics, intellectual life and social relations. And he integrates what he knows brilliantly into John Brown's story. Brown emerges as more than the leader of the raid at Harper's Ferry; in this book we come to understand his Christianity, his early life, his family, his values and most particularly his relations with black people, which were perhaps without precedent in America. The book is very moving, though quietly so: Carton doesn't shy away from being critical of John Brown, but eventually his esteem for Brown comes through and it's tough not to be sympathetic. The book was a great pleasure and I felt that I learned a lot from it about race relations past--and present, too.