His Brothers' Keeper: John Brown, Moral Stewardship and Interracial Abolitionism

Abstract

Recent biographies of abolitionist John Brown emphasise his uniqueness and cast him as an anomalous figure in the anti-slavery movement. This article, however, makes the case for Brown's representativeness by connecting his career to his formative years in northeastern Ohio, a geographical and cultural context that shaped Brown's lifelong image of himself as an adviser and manager of wilderness communities. That self-image made Brown similar to white 'moral stewards' in many reform movements. Even Brown's interracial relationships, though difficult to interpret because of sparse documentary evidence, were shaped partly by the culture of moral stewardship in which Brown's career began.The militant abolitionist John Brown is now increasingly remembered as a visionary egalitarian who 'seeded' the modern Civil Rights movement and, 'virtually alone among nineteenth century white Americans', forged 'personal relationships with black people that were sustained, intimate, trusting, and egalitarian'. Indeed, the emerging consensus is that Brown was an egalitarian without equals -an utterly unique figure whose views were closer to those of contemporary scholars than they were to Brown's own peers. According to one recent biographer, the unique intimacy of Brown's interracial relationships even suggests that he adopted a black identity or 'black heart' and, unlike most abolitionists, understood race and gender as 'social constructs'. 1 Such claims imply that Brown marked the boundaries of 'what was possible' for abolitionists before the Civil War, for if, as John Stauffer writes, Brown was 'in no way "representative"' of broader currents in antebellum America, how we see Brown affects how we see abolitionists generally. Some recent biographers claim that other white abolitionists pale next to Brown, compared to whom even abolitionists like William Lloyd Garrison appear condescending and compromised by racial prejudice. Garrison's 'racial openness' was not as thoroughgoing as Brown's, writes