John Brown, abolitionist : the man who killed slavery, sparked the Civil War, and seeded civil rights /

Hero or villain? The "meteor" who lit the way for the war to liberate slaves, or a violence-prone, deranged fanatic? The debate about John Brown is never ending, and it often reveals more about his partisans or detractors than it does about Brown himself. Professor Reynolds is generally sympathetic to Brown, and although he doesn't break any new factual ground, he does offer an interesting perspective. He views Brown as a virtual throwback to his Puritan forebears. Like Oliver Cromwell and Jonathan Edwards, Brown approached political disputes as struggles between good and evil, and he was quite prepared to play the role of an avenging angel. Reynolds acknowledges Brown's penchant for violence but adamantly rejects the charge of insanity. The focus of this biography, of course, is Brown's commitment to the cause of abolition, and Reynolds credits Brown for framing the issue of slavery in stark, uncompromising terms. He glosses over some of Brown's un-Puritan-like traits, including his financial irresponsibility, but this is a very readable, well-argued analysis of an undeniably important and frustratingly enigmatic man, for all audiences. --Jay Freeman Copyright 2005 Booklist

In the very first paragraphs of this biography, Bancroft Prize-winner Reynolds (Walt Whitman's America) steps back a bit from the grandiose claims of his subtitle. Nevertheless, his book as a whole paints a positive portrait of the Calvinist terrorist Brown (1800-1859)-contrary to virtually all recent scholarship (by Stephen B. Oates and Robert Boyer, among others), which tends to depict Brown as a bloodthirsty zealot and madman who briefly stepped into history but did little to influence it. Reynolds's approach harks back to the hero-worship apparent in earlier books by W.E.B. Du Bois and Brown's surviving associates. John Brown waged a campaign so bloody during the Kansas Civil War-in 1856 he chased men and elder sons from their beds in cabins along the Pottawatomie Creek, and then lopped off their heads with broadswords as sobbing wives and younger children looked on-that fellow Kansas antislavery settlers rebuked him. Even the abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison condemned Brown and his methods. After taking the federal armory and arsenal at Harpers Ferry in October 1859, Brown intended (had he not been swatted like a fly within hours) to raise and arm a large force of blacks capable of wreaking a terrible vengeance across Virginia. Yet Reynolds insists that "it is misleading to identify Brown with modern terrorists." Really? 25 b&w illus. (Apr. 21) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

In this biography of John Brown, Bancroft Prize-winning writer Reynolds (Walt Whitman's America) resurrects the man and the myth from the tangled controversies of his day and afterward that cast him variously as a madman, hero, prophet, and more. Placing his subject in the context of mid-19th-century America, Reynolds presents the Calvinist Brown as purposeful and prophetic in his understanding that only violence might purge America of its great sin of slavery. Much of the narrative covers well-tilled ground, but Reynolds's account of the Harpers Ferry raid brings the events alive as no other account has. More important, Reynolds follows the ways Americans later came to read and misread Brown's meanings through verse, literature, painting, song, and popular culture. If Reynolds misses a chance to add African-American folkloristic traditions to the trail of the Brown legend and sometimes claims too much for his subject's impact on ideas and events, he gets hold of him in ways that show why John Brown will never die in memory. Highly recommended for both public and academic libraries.-Randall M. Miller, Saint Joseph's Univ., Philadelphia (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

Cradle-to-moldering-grave biography of America's homegrown abolitionist terrorist. Was it John Brown's audacity that put the spark to the tinderbox of slavery in mid-19th-century America? The prize-winning Reynolds (Walt Whitman, 2004, etc.; English and American Studies/CUNY) makes the case that the Civil War and emancipation might well have been slower in coming had Brown (1800-59) not inflamed paranoia in the South by his murderous raids in Pottawatomie, Kan., and his seizure of the federal armory at Harpers Ferry, Va. The author argues that Brown was more of a Puritan pioneer than crazed fanatic, a patriarchal figure who "won the battle not with bullets but with words." Although the violence of Brown's anti-slavery raids was at first roundly denounced in the North, his calm and rational behavior after his capture, Reynolds emphasizes, eventually won admiration for his crusade, much thanks to Emerson, Thoreau and other transcendentalists who took up his banner. Though unabashedly hagiographic--the chapter on his execution is titled "The Passion"--the biography justifies its portrayal of Brown as an agent outside and above the norms of society. The author demonstrates that his nonracist behavior, for example, was startlingly original to Southerners and Northerners alike, albeit not anomalous vis-à-vis contemporary European attitudes. Reynolds takes great pains to cast a fair light on an exceptionally controversial figure who used brutally violent tactics to bring about the end of slavery and the beginning of racial equality. He states unequivocally that Brown's tactics were terrorist (and an inspiration to John Wilkes Booth), but in President Lincoln's own words, the Civil War itself was "a John Brown raid on a gigantic scale." Reynolds's conclusions are bold yet justified, and his analysis reflects a thorough understanding of the cultural environment of the time. Engrossing and timely, offering astute, thorough coverage of America's premier iconoclast and the cultural stage upon which he played his role. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.