Freedom's Dawn by Louis DeCaro Jr

Author:Louis DeCaro Jr.
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers
Published: 2015-04-29T03:34:30+00:00

Chapter 13

The Celebrity of the Day

Have you read all of his letters published in the Tribune? Are they not sublime?

Early in November, an editor in Staunton, Virginia, made the interesting observation that it would be beneficial to prolong John Brown’s life as much as possible. Extending his days would not only make Virginia’s justice seem “cool and calm,” he wrote, but it would undercut the reactionary tendency to make him a martyr. Indeed, were the soldiers at Charlestown disbanded and the old man “kept caged for a few weeks by the jailor,” it would make it clear that Virginians were not “frightened out of their wits.”

Facetiously, the editor added that extending Brown’s time would also continue “the supply of paragraphs which he will afford daily as long as he is permitted to live.” After all, he was “emphatically the celebrity of the day” and would continue to be a popular subject of discussion “even after he drops from the gallows into the grave.” As long as Brown lived, he concluded, “every editor feels it to be a solemn duty to prick him with his pen and slice him with his scissors, for his own amusement and the gratification of the community.”

The editor’s remarks were not without value. In the first place, John Brown was not only the undoubted “celebrity of the day” but also the first to become the controversial center of attention for the telegraphic press in a way that anticipated modern media coverage. Of course, his social and political impact on society, and the prominence of his controversial and charismatic profile, was shortly and inevitably eclipsed by the Civil War and its dramatic personae. However, the Harper’s Ferry raid and its leader not only sparked the popular “fashion for interviewing,” but John Brown himself was arguably the first “modern” public figure who came to life in the press.

Even apart from his unusually progressive view of racial equality, John Brown was essentially a modern figure—a forward-looking man who took advantage of whatever new developments emerged in the antebellum era. Quite in contrast to the ludicrous notion of Brown’s “rage at the modern,” his biography is footnoted by a variety of episodes where the usefulness of new technology is applied to medicine, agriculture, and his antislavery activities. Indeed, if the advent of the railroad, as Peter Drucker has written, “was the truly revolutionary element of the Industrial Revolution” that brought about a new “mental geography,” then Brown was a willing beneficiary of that revolution, being one of the first transcontinental activists in the history of the United States.1

The editor also had a point regarding the “pricking” and “slicing” of John Brown by newspapermen, because he had certainly provided “abundant pabulum” for the “voracious gentlemen of the press.” Following the major New York papers, editors throughout the country had made coverage of John Brown a regular feature that sold papers and extended debates for weeks. Besides feeding the dailies and fueling the interest for a number of publications, he

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