In 1909, on the fiftieth anniversary of the death of John Brown, W. E. B. Du Bois published his biography of the abolitionist martyr. Du Bois was a college professor and an intellectual, but at the time he wrote this book Du Bois was moving out of the academy and into a more public world as a civil rights professional. A year after the book came out Du Bois left the academic world to begin a lifetime career as a full-time activist.
When he wrote John Brown, Du Bois’s scholarly credentials were impeccable. After receiving his bachelor’s and master’s degrees at Harvard he spent two years at the Friedrich-Wilhelm III Universität (commonly called the University of Berlin). Returning a worldly, sophisticated young man, he finished his study of the African slave trade and in 1895 received a PhD in history from Harvard. Du Bois was an accomplished scholar, capable of solid, well-researched, carefully argued history. His doctoral dissertation, published by Harvard University Press as The Suppression of the African Slave-Trade to the United States of America, 1638–1870 (1896), was the standard work on the subject for decades. Although it is no longer cutting edge, the book nevertheless holds up surprisingly well more than a century after it was published. Du Bois’s sociological study of urban blacks, The Philadelphia Negro (1899), was an extraordinary study of African America urban life. To this day his data, insights, and analysis make the book a useful source for the study of northern blacks before the great migration. Du Bois was also able to write brilliant social criticism with lyrical prose, as he showed in his most important work, The Souls of Black Folk (1903).
The biography of Brown is unlike Du Bois’s other early work. It is a generally competent history of Brown’s life, but as a work of scholarship it is, frankly, unimpressive. It has many annoying factual errors—such as the wrong date for the founding of Oberlin College, the persistent description of the average-size and sinewy Brown as a “tall man,” and the historically inaccurate claim that “the escape of fugitive slaves” was “systematized in the Underground Railroad.” Du Bois could have avoided such errors had he concentrated on the scholarly aspects of this book; but one reads this volume with a sense that scholarly accuracy was not his first concern. John Brown was not intended to be a great work of scholarship. Rather, it is a work about activism, social consciousness, and the politics of race.
Du Bois is self-conscious about his purpose for the book. In his preface he noted that the existing biographies provided a good history of Brown and that a new general biography was not needed. This was in fact not true. Only a year after the publication of Du Bois’s John Brown, Oswald Garrison Villard published John Brown, 1800–1859 (1910). This was the first scholarly biography of Brown, and it set the standard for the next half century. Du Bois surely could have written such a book, but he chose not to. Du Bois was interested in writing a book that was essentially about activism and consciousness raising, not about history.
The Brown biography may in fact signal the transition of Du Bois from his role as professor and scholar to his role as full-time activist. Du Bois’s interest in Brown was undoubtedly stimulated by the meeting of the Niagara Movement at Harpers Ferry in 1906. Gathering at the site of Brown’s raid, blacks and whites sympathetic to improving race relations took the first steps to creating the nation’s first and most importation civil rights organization, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). Du Bois wrote the Brown book in the years immediately after the Niagara meeting in Harpers Ferry. A year after the book came out, Du Bois left teaching for full-time work at the NAACP. For the next quarter century Du Bois worked at the NAACP, until he resigned in 1934, unable to work with the new leadership. In 1934, Du Bois returned to teaching, and a year later he published his most important work of historical scholarship, Black Reconstruction (1935).
The Brown biography was Du Bois’s transition from scholar to activist. The book is self-consciously activist. He notes that the viewpoint of the books “is that of the little known but vastly important inner development of the Negro American.” Du Bois is more than sympathetic to Brown; he makes Brown into a heroic figure of almost mythic proportions. Indeed, in describing Brown as tall or large, Du Bois seems to be unconsciously enhancing Brown’s physical size to match his moral and political size. Similarly, for Du Bois, Brown is a heroic figure who had “sworn a blood feud with slavery” in the 1830s and from that moment onward planned the Harpers Ferry raid. There is little evidence to support this claim, but such a description of Brown helps shape a narrative that is deeply political. Du Bois offers a good overview, with a critical subtext, of Brown’s life: here was a white man willing to give his life to change American race relations. He was a martyr and a saint, a hero larger than life. At the end of the book Du Bois asks, “Was John Brown simply an episode, or was he an eternal truth?” The answer, for Du Bois, was obvious.
The first line of John Brown—“The mystic spell of Africa is and ever was over all America”—sets the tone. While telling Brown’s story, Du Bois is really telling a story about race and American race relations. Brown’s life becomes a vehicle for a short history of slavery and an expansion of Du Bois’s understanding of the importance of blacks—and race—to American history and society. The prose is lyrical and enticing. Du Bois writes with passion, turning history into an art form. But it is an art form that always has a purpose. The goal of the book is to explain to Americans that race discrimination is wrong, always wrong, and that it is always costly. Du Bois argues that the life of Brown proves that “the price of liberty is less than the price of repression, even though that cost be in blood.” He argues that the historical cost of repressing American slaves could have been avoided if Brown had been successful, or if the South had responded to Brown by ending slavery. The cost of liberty for the South could have been a “decreasing cost,” and thus the Civil War might have been avoided. This, he argues, is the real lesson of Brown.
Du Bois takes his argument beyond the United States, illustrating his early understanding of the significance of race and colonialism. He argues that the colonization of African and Asia by Europeans will ultimately lead to heavy costs that could be avoided by taking steps to end colonial occupations. This, too, is a lesson of Brown.
In his great book The Souls of Black Folk, Du Bois argues that the problem of the twentieth century would be the problem of the “color line.” This was a statement about both the United States and the world. And of course he was right. As he wrote his biography of Brown, Du Bois was looking at the increasingly segregated South, the blatant racism in much of the North, the horrors of lynching, the rising tide of social Darwinism, and the expansion of colonial empires among what Du Bois would have called the “colored” races of the world. Thus he reiterates his theme about the problem of the color line. At the very end of John Brown, Du Bois quotes the martyred abolitionist as saying, “You may dispose of me very easily—I am nearly disposed of now; but this question is still to be settled—this Negro question, I mean. The end of that is not yet.” Du Bois comments that “those words” are “as prophetic now as then.” In rereading this biography of Brown we realize once again the sharpness of Du Bois’s critique of race and racism. We are reminded that his own analysis of race relations—and his own compelling prose—are as prophetic now as a century ago.