Putting John Brown in a cultural perspective

John Brown, Abolitionist: The Man Who Killed Slavery, Sparked the Civil War, and Seeded Civil Rights, By David S. Reynolds, Knopf, 578 pp, $35

Consider the abolitionists, New Englanders, with high minds and clean hands. Then there's John Brown, abolitionist by conviction but terrorist by deed.

In what could be called an advocacy biography, David S. Reynolds explores the intersection of conviction and deed in the life of John Brown.

The term ''advocacy" seems apt, for running through Reynolds's vivid narrative is his argument that while John Brown may have been a terrorist, the cause was just -- and he believed in it.

The Pottawatomie massacre in May 1856, Reynolds writes, was ''a war crime committed against proslavery settlers [in Kansas] by a man who saw slavery itself as an unprovoked war of one race against another."

And the Harpers Ferry raid in October 1859 ''was far more than a terrorist act. It was a cultural event."

Of course Brown did not ''end" slavery or ''cause" the Civil War. And the raid in Harpers Ferry, Va. (now part of West Virginia), did not fire up immediate support for the cause of abolition. ''In the North," Reynolds writes, ''both [the raid and Brown] were at first sharply denounced." Only as Brown's writings from prison were circulated, did ''a positive view of Brown the man, if not the deed [slowly] spread."

Reynolds, a professor of English and American studies at the City University of New York, is the author of a ''cultural biography" of Walt Whitman, who ''sought to provide America with healing and reconciliation through poetic language" while Brown ''sought to purge America of its greatest injustice through military action."

Here, pursuing cultural contexts, Reynolds develops three threads: Brown as Puritan ideologue -- a latter-day Cromwell; as the activist face of the intellectual Transcendentalists; and as one who sought the friendship of blacks and their comradeship at Harpers Ferry.

It is in Brown's relationship with those he would liberate that Reynolds most firmly establishes Brown's place in American culture.

In June 1849, Richard Henry Dana, author of ''Two Years Before the Mast," became lost while hiking in the Adirondacks and sought help at Brown's farmhouse. At suppertime, Dana ''was taken aback" when three blacks joined the family at the table and ''was even more shocked" when Brown ''addressed each politely [and] integrated [them] into the conversation" -- although, Reynolds adds, the blacks appeared ''befuddled" at the attention.

Reynolds describes a speech to a group of fugitive slaves in Springfield, Mass., in January 1851 as an American first: ''A white person's detailed strategy for preemptive armed warfare to be waged by blacks against proslavery forces."

Among the antislavery leaders, Reynolds writes, Brown ''was the only one to model both his lifestyle and his plans for abolishing slavery on black culture." Brown, he notes, ''[laid] out his plan [for the raid] mainly to blacks" and there were five black ''soldiers" in his small force.

The immediate reaction to the Harpers Ferry raid was, at best, measured. By the time war came, inevitably, 18 months later, Brown had become the rallying symbol -- and marches into American history with a marching song.

''John Brown's Body" was written at the start of the war using a tune from Methodist revivals. As a veteran of the Massachusetts 12th Regiment recalled, ''It seized upon every blue-coated organization throughout the land with fascinating power" -- only trumped, perhaps, by its offspring, ''The Battle Hymn of the Republic."