Questions About John Brown

[KLarson]

Just a quick comment - John Brown's war on slavery and his goal was to arm slaves and create a territory where slaves could live in freedom, govern and defend themselves. He/they needed arms, of course, to accomplish that, and he knew that they would have to battle slaveholders and shed blood in order to achieve freedom. Samuel Howe went to Canada in 1863 to interview freedmen and report on their "condition" - meaning, interview fugitive slaves who had fled the United States to claim freedom in Canada, not native born blacks who had been living there for generations. He recorded their testimony regarding life in slavery, their reasons and methods of escape from slavery, and what their lives were like in Canada. Howe and others wanted to know how formerly enslaved people were faring in a society that allowed them to vote, sit on juries, attend schools, etc., and most importantly, show white people in the US that recently free people were "industrious, intelligent, moral, and accomplished," not the stereotypes propagated by racism in the US.

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Tubman met John Brown in 1858 in her home in St. Catharines, Ontario, Canada. Abolitionists had long been telling both of them that they had to meet. Both were deeply impressed with each other - Brown admired Tubman's incredible skills to travel back and forth into the slave states undetected; Tubman admired this white man who was willing to die to end slavery. She had never met a white man like that. His war was her war. They communicated for over a year - she helped recruit black men, all former slaves who had fled to Canada, to join Brown's provisional army he planned to take to Virginia. He hoped that she would be at his side when he finally executed his attack at Harper's Ferry. She did not join him, just like Douglass did not, and I suspect that she, like Douglass, realized the assault would be a death sentence. She still had UGRR work to do to rescue more family members, and I sense that her survival instinct protected her and kept her from traveling from New Bedford, MA to Harper's Ferry on that fateful day in October 1859. She recognized immediately that the attack on the Arsenal and Brown's hanging would change the world, and that Brown would become the martyr that would rally abolitionists and others in a way that no dead slave would.

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And as for Tubman participating in treason, I argue that she, as a slave, had been fighting a war on slavery her whole life, but for the first time she had an opportunity to make a significant contribution to its demise. She had lived with - like millions of slaves before her and contemporary to her - daily assaults and murders of black people that went unpunished for hundreds of years. She chose to fight for freedom and equality, to force the United States to fulfill its promises for all as spelled out in the Declaration of Independence. To argue that putting Tubman on the $10 would be divisive ignores the fact that white southerners who defended and expanded slavery had been advocating disunion, and who did indeed fire the first shots of the Civil War to defend slavery. Tubman embodies what we as Americans value so deeply - Freedom, Equality, Justice, Self Determination. I don't see how that can be divisive. Slaveholders on our currency never have and still do not embody those values. Here's to #HarrietontheMoney #TubmanontheTen #TheNewTen