John Brown’s Body

It probably has not escaped your notice that we are living in strange and parlous times.

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold…

It gives the research on irregular warfare in the Civil War some extra kick, because a key element of that story is the breakdown of civic life — a turning to political violence not just between regions, but between neighbors.

The real launch point for the catastrophic mid-19th Century breakdown in American civic life was “Bleeding Kansas” in the 1850s, so I have been doing a lot of reading in that fascinating territory — which means I have been spending time in the company of John Brown.

Brown was an ardent, indeed fanatical, abolitionist, who believed he had a commission from the Almighty to destroy the institution of slavery. In May 1856, Brown and his sons murdered five pro-slavery settlers on Pottawatomie Creek in frontier Kansas. They used artillery broadswords to hack the men to pieces in a calculated act of terror. Later, Brown would later lead a failed raid on the federal armory at Harper’s Ferry, Virginia, in hopes of sparking a major slave uprising. He was hanged, and became a martyr to the abolitionist cause.

John Brown’s body lies a-mouldering in the grave,
His soul is marching on.

He’s gone to be a soldier in the army of the Lord,

His soul is marching on.

I’ll be covering all of this in considerable detail in The Ranger Project. For now, I want to highlight a most interesting phenomenon: I keep running across comparisons of Luigi Mangione to John Brown. Mangione, you will recall, gunned down UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson on the streets of New York on December 4, 2024.

I was aware that there were people who celebrated the killing, reflecting rage at the state of health care in the United States. I was aware that he had fans who think he’s “hot.” That’s weird, but not uncommon. Hell, Richard Ramirez, the Night Stalker, had his obsessive fans, and I recently talked at length with a podcaster about the “Dallas Cheerleaders,” a group of women who were big fans of Claude Dallas at his original murder trial.

But there is something else going on here with this comparison. It reflects a legitimization of violence as a political tool that is not different from the low-intensity civil war in Kansas/Missouri, which fed directly into the full-bore conflict that broke out just a couple of years later. This is a stark endorsement from a writer named Will Shetterly:

“After Brown’s deeds, [Frederick] Douglas declared that ‘slaveholders sleep more uneasily than they used to.’ After Mangione’s deeds, so do CEOs.”

In an essay pondering the moral threshold of violence, Phil Wilson offered this interesting thought:

As a lifelong believer in nonviolent civil disobedience, I am not comfortable at all advocating for political violence, but, like [Henry David] Thoreau, I feel that I have no right to condemn those like John Brown or Luigi Mangione who invest their entire being toward the goal of liberation.

When the putatively non-violent start saying, “I don’t condone violence, but…” we’re on unstable ground.

This kind of thinking is prevalent enough that it has drawn a response from the likes of history professor Adam Carrington, who cautions:

Lionizing Brown in the 1850s and beyond was a mistake. It justified evil in order to combat evil. Lionizing Mangione would also be wrong. It would justify evil in order to address a serious problem in our society. As with Brown, making Mangione into a hero would say that violence speaks louder than words. It would declare that violence should replace words as our mode of seeking justice and good policy.

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Awaiting the hangman, Brown himself served up words that align with the thinking of zealots of all political stripes who seek to justify purification through bloodshed. You don’t have to delve too far or too deep into our history to find people who might have said these words themselves in justification of acts of extreme violence:

“I, John Brown am now quite certain that the crimes of this guilty, land: will never be purged away; but with Blood. I had as I now think: vainly flattered myself that without verry much bloodshed; it might be done.”