Alexandria Library's Blog: John Brown's Body Lies A-Mouldering In The Grave

Press release from Alexandria Library's Blog:

2021-07-28

At the geological high point of Harpers Ferry, just above St Peter’s Catholic Church and beyond the ruins of St John Episcopal Church, lie several masses of Harpers shale that lie one on top of another. From this vantage one can look East as Thomas Jefferson once did in the 18th Century and see what he described as a scene worth a voyage across the Atlantic. From this vista one can see the Potomac and Shenandoah Rivers as they meet and create the peninsula where the town Harpers Ferry is situated.

I recently found myself in Harpers Ferry inspired by the completion of James McBride novel, The Good Lord Bird. The fictionalized journey of John Brown to Harpers Ferry as told through the eyes of Henry Shackleford, or Onion, a young boy and slave of Dutch Henry, who John Brown liberates and takes under his wing as his good luck charm. John Brown hears Henry’s name as Henrietta and is convinced he is a girl and once John Brown has a notion, he holds on to that notion for the duration. The Good Lord Bird was the National Book Award winner in 2013.

Before reading The Good Lord Bird, I never thought much about John Brown. Being raised in Virginia at the tail end of Jim Crowe and the Harry F. Byrd machine, we were educated that John Brown was a murderer who instigated the slaves to turn against their masters and was eventually captured by Robert E. Lee and the Federal Army which included such figures as Jeb Stuart, and Thomas Jackson who would be known a few short years hence as the Confederate hero Stonewall Jackson. The Abolitionist Brown would be tried and hung along with his ragtagged army and his rebellion put down. And that was the most of it or so my young mind was led to believe.

John Brown’s actions and subsequent hanging became a point of focus for the abolitionist movement. He had been associated with or sought out by such 18th Century leaders in the anti-slavery movement as Harriet Tubman and Frederic Douglas. His writings before he was hung circulated among such thinkers as Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau. It is pretty well established, that John Brown planted the seeds that drove this nation to finally stand firm and further establish the self-evident truths, that “all men are created equal”. 

In 1906, W. E. B. Du Boise led the Niagara Movement in Harpers Ferry, which became the cornerstone of the Civil Rights Era.  At the movement’s conference he wrote:

HERE

JOHN BROWN

AIMED AT HUMAN SLAVERY

A BLOW

THAT WOKE A GUILTY NATION.

WITH HIM FOUGHT

SEVEN SLAVES AND SONS OF SLAVES.

OVER HIS CRUCIFIED CORPSE

MARCHED 200,000 BLACK SOLDIERS

AND 4,000,000 FREEDMEN

SINGING 

“JOHN BROWN’S BODY LIES 

A-MOULDERING IN THE GRAVE

BUT HIS SOUL GOES MARCHING ON!”

But like the Shenandoah and Potomac Rivers meeting at the Harpers Ferry Point, Du Bois movement was met by Daughters of the Confederacy with a plaque chiseled in granite and placed with great ceremony in 1931 near to the armory where John Brown took his stand against slavery. The Daughters view, steeped in the landscape of Jim Crow, challenged Brown’s idea of slavery as a cruel and evil institution and articulated by Du Boise. Du Bois plaque was placed in Harpers Ferry a year later in May 1932.

I found myself in the middle of this history; seriously the heart of the controversies we find ourselves in today. Nikole Hannah-Jones 1619 Project and the ideas underlying Critical Race Theory are met by voices offended by the reach of the truth from a past that has been buried below a convenient history. 

In Harpers Ferry, I saw more signage telling about the forces of Confederate Stonewall Jackson taking the Armory and capturing 12,000 Federal Troops on the march to Antietam in 1862. Beneath the veneer of Confederate victories with the goal of further crushing the evil John Brown crusaded against, there is the sense of unresolved histories that linger to this day.

Sources:

https://www.salon.com/2018/10/19/the-heyward-shepherd-monument-an-overt-ode-to-slavery_partner/

http://www.wvculture.org/history/journal_wvh/wvh56-1.html

https://credo.library.umass.edu/view/full/mums312-b197-i048

https://www.nps.gov/hafe/learn/historyculture/the-niagara-movement.htm

This press release was produced by Alexandria Library's Blog. The views expressed here are the author’s own.