If you have the right kind of American eyes, it may seem equally preordained that the prophet who came before the Christly figure of that American Abraham just as inevitably bore the name “John,” a fugitive voice crying in the wilderness, wild-eyed and full of holy terror and uncompromising, and marked for a divine appointment with Herod’s executioners. John Brown was, among other things, a former shepherd, for Pete’s sake. But there were complications and limits to the biblical parallels: John Brown’s great long patriarchal beard, familiar from the famous portraits, was a disguise—most of his life, he was clean-shaven, or at least as often as he could be in his vagrant circumstances. And when that American prophet traveled to Harpers Ferry, he did not sign his name “John” while securing accommodations for his holy insurgents—then, he was “Isaac,” presumably after the son of the free woman who ultimately would cast out his half-brother, Ismael, the son of the slave. One suspects that the choice of a nom de guerre was far from accidental. “This is an allegory,” St. Paul wrote to the Galatians. “These women represent two covenants. One covenant is given on Mount Sinai and bears children who are born into slavery … Now you, brethren, are, like Isaac, the children of the promise. … We are the children not of the slave woman but of the free woman.”
Lincoln—who belonged to no church but planned to spend at least part of his retirement in the Holy Land—was too fond of quoting Scripture, at least in Stephen Douglas’ judgment. But Lincoln understood the American context, which begins with understanding that the Declaration of Independence, even authored as it was by the unorthodox Thomas Jefferson, is a fundamentally Christian document and arguably a Puritan one at that, the implications of which for the matter of slavery could be seen as early as the drafting of the Constitution, with its provision for the abolition of the African slave trade. That constitutional settlement, as Lincoln noted in an 1859 speech in Illinois, was the work of:
representatives of American liberty from thirteen States of the confederacy — twelve of which were slaveholding communities. … These communities, by their representatives in old Independence Hall, said to the whole world of men: ‘We hold these truths to be self evident: that all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.’ This was their majestic interpretation of the economy of the Universe. This was their lofty, and wise, and noble understanding of the justice of the Creator to His creatures. Yes, gentlemen, to all His creatures, to the whole great family of man. In their enlightened belief, nothing stamped with the Divine image and likeness was sent into the world to be trodden on, and degraded, and imbruted by its fellows. They grasped not only the whole race of man then living, but they reached forward and seized upon the farthest posterity. The erected a beacon to guide their children and their children’s children, and the countless myriads who should inhabit the earth in other ages.
Wise statesmen as they were, they knew the tendency of prosperity to breed tyrants, and so they established these great self-evident truths, that when in the distant future some man, some faction, some interest, should set up the doctrine that none but rich men, or none but white men, were entitled to life, liberty and pursuit of happiness, their posterity might look up again to the Declaration of Independence and take courage to renew the battle which their fathers began — so that truth, and justice, and mercy, and all the humane and Christian virtues might not be extinguished from the land; so that no man would hereafter dare to limit and circumscribe the great principles on which the temple of liberty was being built.
Fine words. Great words. Important words. Spoken just over a year before the raid on Harpers Ferry, when John Brown had decided that fine words would not do.
Brown had plans for his own kind of constitution, a “Provisional Constitution and Ordinances for the People of the United States,” to govern his insurgent followers until the realization of that “more perfect Union” Lincoln would talk about. He raged against the “heaven-daring laws” of the slaveholding states, echoing abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison’s denunciation of the Constitution as a “most bloody and heaven-daring arrangement” between the decent godly free Christians and the idolatrous slavers.
John Brown’s moral and political reasoning was reasonably straightforward: He wasn’t launching an attack on anybody—slavery was a de facto state of war, a war of conquest launched by one group of people with the aim of oppressing another, and all he proposed to do was to fight back. This was comprehended by Frederick Douglass, who tried to talk Brown out of his program of violent insurgency: “In his eye a slave-holding community could not be peaceable but was, in the nature of the case, in one incessant state of war,” Douglass said. “To him such a community was not more sacred than a band of robbers; it was the right of any one to assault it by day or night.”
