In this paper, I argue that Brown’s willingness to employ violence to bring an end to slavery in the United States was justified for a citizen who believed his nation guilty of brutalizing and murdering innocent persons, in violation not simply of his religious convictions but also of that nation’s legitimating political morality. My argument specifically addresses the problem of legal obligation and the standard liberal rejections of violent civil disobedience. These views typically define ‘civil disobedience’ so as to preclude violence, relegating violent means to the aims of revolution and militant resistance. In contemporary popular language, such views must depict Brown as either a ‘terrorist’ or a ‘freedom fighter,’ thus disallowing his inclusion among the ranks of civilly disobedient citizens who wish to reform, rather than overthrow, existing political orders. I argue that Brown can be regarded as a civilly disobedient citizen whose recourse to violence was a reasonable response to the institutionalized oppression and daily torment of millions of innocent persons when persuasion and normal political recourse became futile. Further, I suggest that Brown’s conduct was not merely permissible but was, in fact, in accordance with basic natural duties to promote justice by combating gross injustice. The state’s claim to legitimacy when it comes to coercion does not always preclude a valid claim on the part of citizens.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
References
There are a number of definitional questions surrounding these terms. Some of these matters are taken up later in this paper, but I do not pursue the classificatory issues thoroughly. A useful exploration of these classificatory concerns is provided by Kimberley Brownlee, “Civil Disobedience”, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Spring 2007 Ed.), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), URL - http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/spr2007/entries/civil-disobedience/>. Here, my point is that the use of violence, particularly against persons, is said to be incompatible with ‘civil disobedience’ as defined by the leading liberal conceptions. Given that claim, Brown’s actions at Harper’s Ferry must be classified as something other than civil disobedience: as revolutionary action, militant action, or some other form of violent resistance. One implication of this definitional move is to deprive Brown of the special presumption of moral right to disobey that typically attaches to ‘civil disobedience’, even when particular acts of civil disobedience may appear unjustified in themselves.
I recognize that justification of Brown’s use of violence against institutionalized slavery appears to open the door to justifications of violent resistance by anti-abortion activists, eco-saboteurs, and others. To fully distinguish the slavery case from these others would require significant discussion; however, one relevant distinction is that between the moral status of living human persons and the moral status of fetuses [or, ‘unborn infants’] and non-humans. While we ought not to be too quick to dismiss claims about the moral status of fetuses and non-humans, the fact that these are highly contested claims imposes justificatory limits on the use of violence in defense of fetuses and nonhumans. And, although some pro-slavery advocates spoke of blacks as less than fully human, the practices of slave owners, themselves, give the lie to such beliefs: viz., the frequency with which white males had sexual relations with black women, the commonality of having white infants nursed by black women, the practice of giving white children slave playmates, and the general reliance on slaves to fulfill a variety of domestic and business responsibilities.
The slave-holding Presidents included: Andrew Jackson of Tennessee; William Harrison of Indiana, by birth a Virginian; John Tyler of Virginia, later a member of the Confederate Congress; John Polk of South Carolina, whose war against Mexico was trumpeted as part of the plan to conquer South America ‘for slavery;’ Zachary Taylor of Louisiana. Millard Fillmore of New York succeeded Taylor; although not a slave-holder, Fillmore was a proponent of what became the Compromise of 1850.
On July 4th, 1855, William Lloyd Garrison publicly burned a copy of the U.S. Constitution before an approving Boston crowd, proclaiming it to be a “covenant with Death”. This view of the Constitution—as an ugly compromise which purchased national unity at the cost of human freedom—was common among abolitionists.
John Calhoun was especially disposed to raise the specter of secession whenever pro-slavery interests were threatened, or when he felt pro-slavery advocates were being insulted.
The effect on Northerners, both abolitionists and non-abolitionists, was explosive. Formerly pacifist abolition leaders publicly endorsed abandoning ‘moral suasion’ for violent resistance, especially in defense of black residents threatened with seizure. In Boston, 300 federal deputies and 250 soldiers were called in by President Fillmore to enforce the rendition of Thomas Sims to Georgia. In Christiana, Pennsylvania, the townspeople united against Marylanders seeking escaped slaves and killed one of the southerners. President Fillmore responded to the ‘Battle of Christiana’ by sending in the Marines and arresting some 40 citizens for treason.
Northerners responded to the Kansas-Nebraska Act with rage; the repeal of the Missouri Compromise was seen as evidence of the North’s final submission to the ‘Slave Power’.
McPherson, Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), p. 148.
Stephen B Oates. To Purge This Land With Blood; A Biography of John Brown. (Boston, MA: University of Massachusetts Press: 1984); p. 100.
Dred Scott v. San[d]ford. 60 US 393 (1857).
Lincoln, Abraham. Springfield, Illinois, June 16, 1858. http://www.bartleby.com/251/1001.html.
Ibid.
Nelson, Samuel, J., Dred Scott, supra, note 10.
Lincoln, Abraham, 1858; emphasis added.
Ibid; emphasis added.
John Brown in a letter to Congressman Joshua Giddings; cited in. Oates, supra, note 9, p. 115.
Brown probably had up to 50 men with him; some were left to guard their safe house and others, including Owen Brown, were set to keep watch outside Harper’s Ferry. W.E.B. Du Bois notes that the number in the Brown company is often given as 22; this number does not include all the free and escaped blacks with the Brown party. W.E.B Du Bois. John Brown (New York: Modern Library, 2001). p. 167. Originally published in 1909 by G.W. Jacobs (Philadelphia).
Frederick Douglas; cited in Du Bois, ibid., p. 211.
McPherson, supra, note 8, p. 208.
John Brown at his trial; cited in McPherson, ibid., p. 209.
John Brown’s responses to interrogators immediately following his capture: cited in Du Bois, supra, note 17, pp. 208–209.
R.W. Emerson; cited in McPherson, supra, note 8, p. 209; Henry David Thoreau. A Plea for Captain Brown (Kila, MT: Kessinger Publishing, 2004).
Frederick Douglass; cited in Du Bois, supra, note 17, p. 211.
Louis De Caro, Jr. Fire from the Midst of You: A Religious Life of John Brown. (New York: New York University Press, 2002).
Rawls made a similar point in assessing Dr. King’s protest activities as effective appeals to public reason.
I do not deal, in this paper, with Brown’s activities in the Kansas ‘wars’, which included the killing of several men taken from their homes at night. However, I believe that those killings, seen in the context of the territorial civil war in which Brown found himself, can be justified as preemptive acts of self-defense and defense of others. Steven Nathanson has suggested to me that Brown’s situation in Kansas was akin to a State of Nature, wherein individuals do have the right to defend themselves and their families in the absence of effective social order.
John Rawls, A Theory of Justice. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1971); Hugo Adam Bedau, “On Civil Disobedience” The Journal of Philosophy, v. 58, n. 21, 1961, pp. 653–661, and (ed.) Civil Disobedience in Focus. (London: Routledge, 1991); Carl Cohen, Civil Disobedience: Conscience, Tactics, and the Law (New York: Columbia University Press, 1971); Martin Luther King, Jr. “Letter from Birmingham Jail” in Bedau, ed., Civil Disobedience in Focus.
Here, I do not explore Rawls’ insistence that the appeal be further limited to one made to a “shared sense of justice”. Peter Singer and others have adequately addressed the problems entailed by that limitation: Peter Singer, “Civil Disobedience as a Plea for Reconsideration”, in Bedau, ed., Civil Disobedience in Focus, ibid.
Notably: John Morreall, “The Justifiability of Violent Civil Disobedience”, in Canadian Journal of Philosophy, v. 6, 1976, pp. 35–47.
Here, we might distinguish Brown’s views from those of William Lloyd Garrison who was the more genuinely revolutionary of the two.
Walker, David. APPEAL to the COLOURED CITIZENS OF THE WORLD, but in particular and very expressly to those of THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA. First published in 1829; passage quoted from http://www.iath.virginia.edu/utc/abolitn/walkerhp.html.
Frederick Douglass; in a speech cited at http://www.educationanddemocracy.org/FSCfiles/C_CC7e_NonviolenceInAmHist.htm.
It should be noted that the political order confronting Brown was corrupted by persons who suppressed democratic processes, including those that otherwise survived the constitutional compromise which disproportionately enfranchised the pro-slavery states. In other words, I am not addressing, here, the legitimacy of the legal and political system in place in the ante-bellum U.S. As I argue further on, Brown accepted the system as legitimate, but regarded slavery as an aberration of justice in that system.
John Stauffer. The Black Hearts of Men: Radical Abolitionists and the Transformation of Race (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002).
John Locke. A Second Treatise of Civil Government (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1960), p. 465.
In 1849, the South accounted for 30% of the voting population; it controlled 42% of the electoral vote.
See, e.g., Jeremy Waldron. “Special Ties and Natural Duties”, Philosophy & Public Affairs, v. 22, no. 1, 1993, p. 9, note 5.
We should note that there were a number of unjust features of our early political order, including significant limitations on the franchise by sex and economic criteria.
David Lyons argues that until the repeal of Jim Crow laws in the 1960s the United States was not a regime sufficiently just to create any presumption of obligation among its citizens. David Lyons, “Moral Judgment, Historical Reality, and Civil Disobedience”, Philosophy and Public Affairs, v. 27, n. 1, 1998, pp. 31–49.
A factor in the definitional disputes must be the relative importance of disparate features of the paradigm cases: intent of the disobedient, scope of her aims, motivation, and means employed. A subtle analysis of these features can be expected to reveal intersections, e.g., between aims and appropriateness of means.
Michael Walzer similarly observes that a restrictive no-violence definition of civil disobedience “…virtually invites militants of various sorts to move beyond the bounds of civility altogether”. M. Walzer. Obligations: Essays on Disobedience, War and Citizenship (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1970), p. 25.
As a last nod to definitional concerns, I would note that the most effective means of ending slavery, by the mid-1800s, was the kind of ‘direct action’ undertaken by Brown at Harper’s Ferry and by operatives in the Underground Railroad. Whether Brown believed that slaves would join him at Harper’s Ferry, thus effecting their own liberation, remains a matter of speculation. However, it is clear that political means and moral appeals were utterly ineffective. Direct action, by its very nature, invites coercive response from authorities and, in this way, frequently necessitates violent resistance to that coercive response. The alternative to violent resistance is acquiescence to the authorities, which negates the original effort and, in some cases, may cost the resister her life.
W. H. Seward, “Freedom in the New Territories”, speech presented in the US Senate, March 11, 1851. Available online at http://www.senate.gov/artandhistory/history/resources/pdf/SewardNewTerritories.pdf.
Rawls, John. A Theory of Justice, supra, p. 334, also p. 115.
One feature of Rawls’ analysis I find intriguing is that those who benefit most under a system have the strongest [specific] duty to obey the laws of the system but have no greater duty to reform the system than those who benefit least from it. This strikes me as an open invitation to dominant racial and ethnic groups to ignore the suffering of oppressed minorities in their midst and to do so under the cover of their own legal obligations.
An interesting account of the move to narrowly define civil disobedience while emphasizing the strength of political obligation can be found in: J. Welchman, “Is Ecosabotage Civil Disobedience?”, Philosophy and Geography v. 4, n.1, 2001, pp. 97–107. See, also, Lyons, “Moral Judgment, Historical Reality, and Civil Disobedience”, supra, note 39, p. 48.
Nor, I think, do disparate assessments of likely success alter our intuition that it is right to defend others.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2008 Springer Science + Business Media B.V
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Sistare, C.T. (2008). John Brown's Duties: Obligation, Violence, and ‘Natural Duty’. In: Reidy, D.A., Riker, W.J. (eds) Coercion and the State. The Philosophical Foundations of Law and Justice, vol 2. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4020-6879-9_7
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4020-6879-9_7
Publisher Name: Springer, Dordrecht
Print ISBN: 978-1-4020-6878-2
Online ISBN: 978-1-4020-6879-9
eBook Packages: Humanities, Social Sciences and LawLaw and Criminology (R0)