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Henry David ThoreauA Plea for Captain John Brown
Nonfiction | Essay / Speech | Adult | Published in 1859A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Background
Sociohistorical Context: Harpers Ferry Raid
Abolitionist John Brown’s raid on Harpers Ferry in present-day West Virginia was an unsuccessful siege that occurred over the course of two days in October of 1859. Brown and his 12 accomplices (two of whom were his sons) attempted to capture a federal armory and disseminate weapons to enslaved men and to freedom fighters called Free Soilers in the Kansas Territory. The rebellion culminated in the deaths of many raiders as well as the arrest of Brown at the hands of militias called border ruffians and the US Marines, under the command of Robert E. Lee. This defeat made national headlines and signaled the end of the Bleeding Kansas period of history, a microcosm of the national tensions that would escalate into civil war just two years later.
The raid on Harpers Ferry strained the stability of the Union, forcing the federal government into a more complacent position on the question of slavery. Brown’s extrajudicial violence was touted far and wide by Southern Democrats as an example of Northern immorality and coercion, but it was also gravely feared. Many abolitionists felt themselves torn between genteel political inaction on one hand and bloodshed on the other. Sympathetic journals and papers around the country expressed concern that Brown’s violent methods would undermine the humanitarian nature of the abolitionist cause and were unsuited to the presiding goal of avoiding civil war.
The essay was written in the immediate aftermath of the news of the Harpers Ferry raid. In it can be seen all of the tensions surrounding Brown’s actions, as Henry David Thoreau excoriates what he saw as the passivity of abolitionists and their elitist rejection of Brown’s decision to attempt to end slavery by physical force.
Philosophical Context: Transcendentalism
Thoreau was an adherent of transcendentalism, an American philosophical movement that prioritized individual accountability to one’s own moral virtue, and argued that people must follow above all the divine law that supersedes human laws. Thoreau was an outspoken critic of slavery on the grounds that all people are spiritual equals; his convictions led him to denounce the US government, declaring, “I cannot for an instant recognize […] as my government [that] which is the slave’s government also” (Thoreau, Henry David. Walden; and, Civil Disobedience: Complete Texts with Introduction, Historical Contexts, Critical Essays. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2000, p. 20). Thoreau’s beliefs landed him in jail in 1846 for refusing to pay a poll tax on the principle that the money might be used in support of the Mexican-American War. This famous act of resistance laid the groundwork for future nonviolent resistance movements, including those of Mahatma Gandhi and Reverend Martin Luther King Jr.
“A Plea for Captain John Brown,” marks an important complication in Thoreau’s philosophy. The essay calls on the reader to recognize the limits of the nonviolence and civil disobedience that characterize earlier transcendentalist works. For example, Thoreau’s “On the Duty of Civil Disobedience,” an essay published only 10 years earlier, gestured at the need for resistance but skirted outright calls for direct violence in favor of more indirect civic action like withholding taxes:
If a thousand men were not to pay their tax-bills this year, that would not be a violent and bloody measure, as it would be to pay them, and enable the State to commit violence and shed innocent blood. This is, in fact, the definition of a peaceable revolution, if any such is possible (Thoreau, Henry David. “On the Duty of Civil Disobedience.” Aesthetic Papers, 1849).
However, the idea that living one’s moral values can and should lead to positive action as opposed to refusing to take an action foreshadows the arguments that Thoreau would not espouse until later, in “A Plea for Captain John Brown,” which adds direct violence into his formulation, reflecting the disillusionment of American abolitionists by ineffectual civil leadership and the entrenched brutality of slavery. In this speech, Thoreau recognizes the inadequacies of peaceful resistance in the context of undemocratic atrocities. Faithful to the transcendental framework of action and personal truth, he argues that Brown’s efforts in Kansas are a symbolic representation of radical humanity and justice that implicate the American government.
Related Titles
By Henry David Thoreau
