Patriotic Treason
John Brown and the Soul of America
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
John Brown is a lightning rod of history. Yet he is poorly understood and most commonly described in stereotypes -- as a madman, martyr, or enigma. Not until Patriotic Treason has a biography or history brought him so fully to life, in scintillating prose and moving detail, making his life and legacy -- and the staggering sacrifices he made for his ideals-fascinatingly relevant to today's issues of social justice and to defining the line between activism and terrorism.
Vividly re-creating the world in which Brown and his compatriots lived with a combination of scrupulous original research, new perspectives, and a sensitive historical imagination, Patriotic Treason narrates the dramatic life of the first U.S. citizen committed to absolute racial equality. Here are his friendships (Brown lived, worked, ate, and fought alongside African Americans, in defiance of the culture around him), his family (he turned his twenty children by two wives into a dedicated militia), and his ideals (inspired by the Declaration of Independence and the Golden Rule, he collaborated with black leaders such as Frederick Douglass, Martin Delany, and Harriet Tubman to overthrow slavery).
Evan Carton captures the complex, tragic, and provocative story of Brown the committed abolitionist, Brown the tender yet demanding and often absent father and husband, and Brown the radical American patriot who attacked the American state in the name of American principles. Through new research into archives, attention to overlooked family letters, and reinterpretation of documents and events, Carton essentially reveals a missing link in American history.
A wrenching family saga, Patriotic Treason positions John Brown at the heart of our most profound and enduring national debates. As definitions of patriotism and treason are fiercely contested, as some criticize religious extremism while others mourn religion's decline, and as race relations in America remain unresolved, John Brown's story speaks to us as never before, reminding us that one courageous individual can change the course of history.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Carton has written an absorbing and inspiring, though not wholly innovative, biography of abolitionist firebrand John Brown. A historian of American culture, Carton (The Marble Faun: Hawthorne's Transformations) centers this portrait on Brown's ceaseless efforts to end slavery. From the earliest days, Brown's abolitionism was grounded in Christianity: for him, the biblical call to love thy neighbor trumped any argument a proslavery theologian could make. As for what Brown accomplished in the climactic 1859 raid at Harpers Ferry, Carton quotes, and seems to share, the assessment of Brown's contemporary Wendell Phillips that Brown "loosened the roots of the slave system" and can be credited with ending slavery in Virginia. Carton usefully sets Brown's abolitionism against the backdrop of a larger American story the increased radicalism of black abolitionists beginning in the 1840s; the Compromise of 1850 (which admitted California to the union as a free state while passing the Fugitive Slave Act); and ongoing debates about whether slavery should be legal in western territories. Like Brown's other recent biographer, David Reynolds (John Brown, Abolitionist), Carton writes with great admiration for his subject. His Brown is a hero who set the nation on a road to justice that we are traveling still. B&w photos.
