The tie that bound us : the women of John Brown's family and the legacy of radical abolitionism /

This book offers an approach to the John Brown saga that focuses on the women of the family, while not neglecting his importance. Laughlin-Schultz (Eastern Illinois Univ.) maintains that the Brown women, although recognized in their own day, have been marginalized by Brown's biographers. She contends that Brown's wife, Mary, was equally responsible for nurturing the family's culture of antislavery, which was anchored in religious precepts. She emphasizes the fact that the Brown women made it possible for Brown to implement his militant abolition plans in Kansas and at Harpers Ferry. Whether or not they were fully aware of where his militancy would take the family is moot. That the women in the household experienced considerable tension and suffered deprivation because of Brown's frequent absences is well documented. Brown himself recognized that he had cast the family upon a "stormy and tempestuous sea." Abolitionist Lydia Maria Child and others offered them charity, often accompanied by pity and condescension. Nevertheless, the Brown women persisted in their support of John Brown, and in the post-Civil War years were instrumental in shaping a positive image of Brown as reporters and potential biographers sought them out. A poignant account of a neglected side of the John Brown saga. Summing Up: Recommended. Public, general, and undergraduate libraries. L. B. Gimelli emeritus, Eastern Michigan University

To the vast literature on John Brown, Laughlin-Schultz (history, Eastern Illinois Univ.) offers something new and revealing-namely, an intelligent and informative study of the women who stood behind and for John Brown and his family in their radical abolitionism and then in preserving their memory as men of principle. Laughlin-Schultz shows that through their work in maintaining the farm, household, and legacy of John Brown, Brown's second wife, Mary Ann Day Brown, and his daughters encouraged Brown in his antislavery work and even provided direct aid for it. Equally important, by their public displays of courage in claiming Brown's body and then defending his reputation, they encouraged a history of abolitionism as necessary and God ordained when, late in the 19th century, efforts at sectional reconciliation were rewriting the causes and consequences of the Civil War to make it seem that abolitionists, especially Brown, were fanatics driven by irrationality, even insanity. VERDICT Laughlin-Schultz shows how the private became public and the personal political. In doing so she brings us close to the man John Brown, and his sons, who understood and demanded the necessity of women's courage. This is a book every student of antislavery, women's, and Civil War history will read with profit.-Randall M. Miller, St. Joseph's Univ., Philadelphia (c) Copyright 2013. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.