Text commentary Letter on John Brown

Qui Parle, 2006

Journal of American History, 2016

Given the volume of recent works produced on the anti-slavery movement of the 19th-century Atlantic world, it was time for someone to create a new synthesis. Manisha Sinha's The Slave's Cause is a synthetic work that traces the long trajectory of the anti-slavery movement in the United States and places it into an international context. It provides a catalogue of antislavery figures, organizations, and publications and will likely serve as a valuable go-to reference work for years to come. Besides bringing the different waves of anti-slavery together in one place, Sinha offers her own conclusions about the anti-slavery movement, primarily that divisions of race, gender, class, and ideology were not as pronounced in the movement as some historians have made them out to be and that the overall history of the movement was one of continuity more than change. Just as importantly, in illustrating the radical nature of the movement she highlights the connection between anti-slavery sentiment and an early critique of capitalism and imperialism. Rather than seeing the movement as being broken into a series of periods that replaced each other with new ideas and tactics (though she does describe different 'waves' of abolition), Sinha focuses on continuity more than change. She describes the movement was an organic and dynamic one in which activists from one generation to the next considered the same questions and held similar tactical debates. This continuity has become increasingly obvious in the studies produced over the past decade, and Sinha builds upon a host of primary and secondary sources to show readers that, while scholars may continue to divide the movement in broad periods, the issues of each of those periods blended from one into another as the movement advanced. One of the main continuities of the anti-slavery movement was its interracial nature. Sinha begins her story in Africa, maintaining that, while there is plenty of literature on African participation in the slave trade, scholars often overlook African opposition to the slave trade and to slavery. She points out that the first antislavery writing was produced in West Africa and that the story of the rise of abolition was an interracial one from the beginning. Indeed, she concludes that 'writers of African descent were among the first to wrestle with the problems of race and slavery in the modern West' (p. 9) and that their early works discredited 'the racist logic that dehumanized Africans as slave property' (p. 26). Not only did Africans provide the first written protests, they also led rebellions that went hand in hand with protests by Quakers and other whites in North America. Just as importantly, slaves protested their condition by running away, and their actions influenced white abolitionists like Granville Sharp and led to the famous anti-slavery ruling in the Somerset

The New England Quarterly, 2014

McGill University's Historical Discourses, 2019

John Brown, the 59-year-old white radical abolitionist, is often considered to have played a significant role in helping spark the American Civil War. His 1859 attempt to incite a slave rebellion at Harpers Ferry, Virginia, and vicious 1856 murder of five slavery-supporting men in Kansas, made him a legend both during his lifetime and after. However, though his memory has endured through biographies, poems, novels, and art, the nature of that memory—whether Brown was an extreme but noble idealist, or simply a madman—has continually fluctuated in the century and a half since his death. As one biographer writes: “In Brown, generations have found the perfect foil to debate the nation’s evolving identity.” This paper explores the fate of Brown’s memory in the 21st century, sifting through biographies, textbooks, newspaper articles, and other sources to gain insight into how he is seen in contemporary times. As a figure that embodies some of the most divisive and challenging problems of the modern age—when is violence justified, how to fight racism, and what to do if the government is perceived as failing to do so—John Brown remains potently relevant to 21st century America, and his contemporary interpretation gives insight into our treatment of these issues—even if on an unconscious level.

Annelien de Dijn and Hannah Dawson (eds.) Rethinking Liberty before Liberalism (Cambridge University Press)), 2022

This paper explores a hypothetical scenario during which the state discards traditional punitive protocols. I discuss the infeasibility of the abolitionist position and propose an alternative method of victim compensation.

The American Journal of Jurisprudence, 1983