Honor John Brown and Harpers Ferry Uprising

(Quote of the Week)

On 2 December 1859, the revolutionary abolitionist John Brown was executed for having led the multiracial anti-slavery uprising in Harpers Ferry, Virginia, two months earlier. Brown’s raid prepared the road for the liberation of slaves through the Civil War, the Second American Revolution. But with the undoing of Radical Reconstruction, the promise of black equality was betrayed by the Northern bourgeoisie. Racial oppression remains in the very marrow of American capitalism. Ending the oppression of black people that is inherent in American capitalism will require a workers socialist revolution. The following is an excerpt from an 1881 oration by leading black abolitionist and radical democrat Frederick Douglass honoring his friend and comrade given at the historically black Storer College in Harpers Ferry. The speech was published as a pamphlet to fund an endowment for a John Brown Professorship.

But the question is, Did John Brown fail? He certainly did fail to get out of Harper’s Ferry before being beaten down by United States soldiers; he did fail to save his own life, and to lead a liberating army into the mountains of Virginia. But he did not go to Harper’s Ferry to save his life. The true question is, Did John Brown draw his sword against slavery and thereby lose his life in vain? and to this I answer ten thousand times, No! No man fails, or can fail who so grandly gives himself and all he has to a righteous cause.... If John Brown did not end the war that ended slavery, he did at least begin the war that ended slavery. If we look over the dates, places and men, for which this honor is claimed, we shall find that not Carolina, but Virginia—not Fort Sumpter, but Harper’s Ferry and the arsenal—not Col. Anderson, but John Brown, began the war that ended American slavery and made this a free Republic. Until this blow was struck, the prospect for freedom was dim, shadowy and uncertain. The irrepressible conflict was one of words, votes and compromises. When John Brown stretched forth his arm the sky was cleared. The time for compromises was gone—the armed host of freedom stood face to face over the chasm of a broken Union—and the clash of arms was at hand. The South staked all upon getting possession of the Federal Government, and failing to do that, drew the sword of rebellion and thus made her own, and not Brown’s, the lost cause of the century.

—Frederick Douglass, “John Brown: An Address at the Fourteenth Anniversary of Storer College” (May 1881)