The tribunal : responses to John Brown and the Harpers Ferry Raid /

With The Tribunal, Stauffer (Harvard) and Trodd (Nottingham) have assembled a fantastic collection of speeches, letters, newspaper articles, and journal entries that respond to one of the most significant antebellum moments. Following an erudite overview that proffers an excellent introduction to John Brown and the Harpers Ferry Raid of October 1859, the core of this anthology is divided into five sections. The first section, culled from the writings of Brown, gives voice to his motivations and to his reflections on the raid's failure and his impending death. The next two sections document the disparate responses from the North and the South. Here, readers will find the thoughts of Abraham Lincoln, Henry Thoreau, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Andrew Johnson, and John Wilkes Booth, among dozens of others. The anthology's penultimate section, "International Responses," includes the ruminations of John Stuart Mill, Karl Marx, and Victor Hugo. The Tribunal concludes with a view of Brown's legacy from the context of the Civil War and the Reconstruction era, and includes responses from Herman Melville, Mark Twain, and Charles Sumner. This impressive collection is a welcome addition to the study of this period. Summing Up: Highly recommended. Lower-level undergraduates through researchers/faculty. R. Walsh Trinity College

No one is likely to have the last word on John Brown, the abolitionist and leader of the 1859 Harpers Ferry raid that cut to the marrow of the slavery question and convinced many Southerners that the North had gone mad and wanted to incite slave rebellion. However, this superb collection of documents comes very close to doing so. In the wide sweep of texts collected here-150 speeches, editorials, letters to editors, pamphlets, poems, songs, and more, each neatly set in historical context by the editors-Northerners, Southerners, and foreign commentators are shown to be, in Frederick Douglass's phrase, both "curious and contradictory" in weighing the meaning of John Brown and his act. The documents display a mixture of awe and anger, hope and horror, at the man, especially after he went bravely to the gallows proclaiming the justice of his cause. And, as the documents further attest, Brown and his raid remained contentious in history and myth thereafter. VERDICT To understand the power of conviction and the crisis of fear that brought on civil war, reading this brilliant collection is essential. From it, one will see that John Brown is not a-moldering in his grave. He haunts us yet today.-Randall M. Miller, St. Joseph's Univ., Philadelphia (c) Copyright 2012. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.