EDITOR’S NOTE: First  published in 1909 and then long out of print, DuBois’s biography of John Brown defends Brown against all detractors who saw him as a fanatic, fiend, or traitor. According to the publisher, in this biography “John Brown emerges as a rich personality, fully understandable as a unusual leader with a deeply religious outlook and  a fierce devotion to the cause of freedom for the slave. His plans were in the making for many years before he seized the armory at Harper’s Ferry (1859), which Dr. DuBois considers the first battle of the Civil War.”

 

John Brown by W.E.B. DuBois (NY: International Publishers, 310 pages)

 

The Preface for the New Edition of John Brown (1987 Printing)

“A full century has passed since John Brown started in America the Civil War which abolished legal slavery in the United States and began the emancipation of the Negro race from the domination of white Europe and North America. John Brown in Kansas met murder with murder and tried in Virginia to arm slaves so that they might resist and escape slavery. Ever since his violent murder of the border ruffians who were trying to force slavery on Kansas and his attempt to seize the armory at Harper’s Ferry so as to arm the slaves, there had been bitter debate as to how far force and violence can bring peace and good will. This is a question that can never be completely answered for all circumstances and for all time. It is quite possible that time and searching conscience could have brought the emancipation of the slaves of the South without the catastrophe of war, murder and destruction, but that is by no means certain. It is quite possible that in time public opinion of an Abolitionist North could have forced the whole nation to embrace freedom for all men. But that certainly was not true before the American Civil War.

“On the other hand it was true that the violence which John Brown led made Kansas a free state; that the flight of the fugitive slaves was the beginning of abolition, and the plan of John Brown to put arms in their hands could have hastened it. Although John Brown’s plan failed at the time, it was actually arms and tools in the hands of a half-million Negroes that won the Civil War.”