Richard Dortch, an avid reader of Tony Horwitz, contributes this review of his latest book, Midnight Rising: John Brown and the Raid That Sparked the Civil War.
The Civil War didn’t start with the firing on Fort Sumter, said the great African-American abolitionist Frederick Douglass. It started with John Brown’s 1859 raid on Harpers Ferry.
In a feat that was at once brave and reckless, brilliant and stupid, a scheme of inspired lunacy – John Brown and a band of 21 dedicated abolitionist fighters managed to capture and occupy a U.S. government arsenal containing a stockpile of over 100,000 rifles. It wasn’t Brown’s capture of these weapons that triggered the Civil War, but what he intended to do with them: distribute them to slaves in northern Virginia so they could rise up, kill their masters and assert their God-given rights of freedom and liberty.
The moral confusion of a nation dedicated to the principles of freedom, yet acquiescent to the institution of slavery, would be reduced in John Brown’s hand from shades of gray to the clarity of day and night.
The raid on Harpers Ferry exposed the precarious position of the few who enslave the many, triggering panic and unfounded rumors of slave revolts across the South. Southern politicians responded with harsh and abusive new slave laws, bellicose anti-U.S. rhetoric, and ultimately, a fateful decision to secede from the Union. Within two years of Harpers Ferry the United States would be convulsed in its bloodiest and deadliest war ever.*
In Midnight Rising, author Tony Horwitz has chosen this epic break-point in American history to explore a poorly-understood phase of our nation’s adolescence and paint a clear picture of one of history’s most obscure and controversial anti-heroes: John Brown, a sober and deeply religious old-line Calvinist whose hatred of slavery grew to consume his life and ultimately destroy it.
Horwitz preps his reader with the saga of Bleeding Kansas: the violence that erupted over whether Kansas would become a slave or free state, and where John Brown cut his teeth as a militant abolitionist. Pauses in the action are filled with rich biographies of Brown, his band of raiders, the women who supported them and the Secret Six: a cadre of wealthy Northern abolitionists who helped finance Brown’s covert operations.
Armory Guard House and Fire Engine circa 1862
The book hits its crescendo with the raid at Harpers Ferry, Virginia, which Horowitz renders with an unflinching and emotionally devastating blow-by-blow of the 32 hours John Brown and his men controlled the U.S. arsenal. The imagery is stark, the violence vivid; the raiders picked off one-by-one until only a handful remain to make a futile last stand against U.S. troops led by Col. Robert E. Lee (yes, that Robert E. Lee). Horwitz delivers a history lesson that reads like an action film – marking him as a true modern genius in the art of turning ‘boring-old’ history into page-turning literature.
There is one element common to Horwitz’s other books that readers will not find in this one: a great deal of lighthearted humor. In Midnight Rising Horwitz relinquishes his congenial first-person perspective to deliver a straightforward and sobering historical narrative. Those looking for a laugh-out-loud road trip spiked with hilarious characters, vis-à-vis Confederates in the Attic, will not find it in Midnight Rising. John Brown was called many things by the people of his time. Funny wasn’t one of them.
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* It merits mention for Lemuria readers that among John Brown’s personal items were found maps derived from 1850 U.S. Census data showing counties in the South where the slave population outnumbered whites. Among these were Hinds, Rankin and Madison counties in central Mississippi – all of which contained more enslaved people than free people at the dawn of the Civil War.
-Written by Richard Dortch
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