like to see students involved in, but there are a lot of other forms that are emerging, too, and i think we're just starting to understand what that all means. but i work offcampus as well. i spend a large chunk of my time working with people on a regional community, economic development, and environmental issues. i work with a lot of nonprofit organizations and community groups and government agencies and i see an enormous. a of creativity and an enormous amount of change. ...

it felt like the wild west. there was this new system emerging, and nobody really knew what to do or how accountability was going to be -- take place, and people were using public resources, defining the public debt and working on behalf of the public who were not actually public officials. they were volunteers, heads of nonprofit organizations, yet they're using public funds. the public did not necessarily have any oversight. today we have all of these measures and indicators and reporting systems that are a bit owners for a lot of folks, but it does provide a little bit more oversight. >> thank you so much for your time.

>> thank you. >> the c-span campaign 2012 bus visits communities across the country. visit c-span.org / bus. >> up next, tony horwitz recounts abolitionist john brown raid on it -- october 16th, 1858. he reports on the early exploits to abolish slavery pronounced by acts of violence against pro-slavery settlers in kansas. his court trial following his capture, and how his act of defiance contributed to the national discussion of dissension. this is about an hour.vening. >> good evening. thank you all for coming. our thanks go to the historicalg museum for hosting house, toordn book tv for recording this ecial presentation, and especiallyie tough maggie richards for

arranging this return visit -- visit by tony horwitz. bro "midnight rising: john brown and the raid that sparked the civil war"" it folks a familiar images the l larger than life abolitionist that adorns the walls of ourat state capitol ina topeka. brown, in his mid-50s, waged a d bloody renegade war to end slavery that started in the kansas territory, and ended when brown was captured after his famous rate on harper's ferry. n relying on his self-proclaimed archive a defeat tony horwitz blocked the path to harper's ferry, at the same time and on the same date, october 16th,ame as brown and the band of made it -- mandate. he relied on written archives to write about a sharply dividedvid country in the fiery incidents leading into the work. with yuri contemporary parallelf "midnight rising" confirmsst history does repeat itself. please help me welcome back to ppchita tony horwitz.

[applause] >> thank you, beth. [applause] thanks for that kind introduction and historical museum and watermarks books and cafe, it's great to be back in wichita. this is my second consecutive book with the strong kansas connection. i don't know what that means,dow but i seem to be drawn to your u state, or at least the darker chapters of your --i' [laughter] -- history. i am going to try and be brief g reasonably brief tonight andor leave lots of time for questiona because this is a topic thatnds tends to arouse a strong feelin haand i'd like to hear those and have some discussion,, so please don't be shy when i'mb done. the maybe if we could dim the lights a little bit for the pictures. anyone near -- great.

yeah, i brought some pictures for your entertainment. i have to say first, i had a lot of fun writing "midnightng,"nd n is one reason for that is that i got to spend a lot of time in i harpers ferry h is really my kind of town. it's this very picturesque, history-haunted place where strange things still happen. on my first research trip there, by us on my -- i was on my way to the archives, and a park ranger told me there was a beard growing contest going on up the street. not a spectator sport, but still intriguing. [laughter] harper's ferry has been almost a tourist trip since the day of brown's raid as i discover inside my research, and there are still sites such as the john brown wax museum which you can see on your left where you can learn all kinds of history that

never happened. [laughter] um, i also had fun with "midnight rising" because the protagonist of this story, john brown, is such a vivid and compelling figure. and i think quite different from the way most americans imagine him. in art and lore he's often depicted as this wild-eyed, wild-haired fanatic, possibly insane, a sort of self-appointed messiah as he appears here in this famous mural from the kansas statehouse with a rifle in one hand and a bible in the other. i learned this morning that when kansas won the national championship in football a few years ago, that fans unfurled a banner with this image except that in place of the bible brown was clutching a trophy. [laughter] >> basketball. >> oh, it was basketball. excuse me. okay. oh, my gosh.

[laughter] don't run me out of the state. [laughter] anyway, these kinds of images, though, aren't really true to the man, beginning with that beard. for most of his life, brown was a well groomed american striver and family man who favored starched white shirts and leather cravats and dark suits and made business trips to europe. he didn't grow that famous, scary beard of his until the last 18 months of his life when he had a price on his head and went underground and needed to disguise his identity. brown also had a really classically american background, not unlike abe lincoln, a figure who will come into brown's story at the end in a quite significant way. um, he's born in 1800 in connecticut to old yankee farming stock, moves as a boy to the ohio frontier where he's educated in a log schoolhouse

and goes to work young, um, and for the first few decades this future insurrectionist was really something of a conformist. he follows his father's path very closely adopting his calvinist beliefs, his trade of leather tanning, and he marries young at his father's prompting to a woman that brown describes as remarkably plain but industrious and economical, of excellent character, earnest piety and good practical sense. very romantic -- [laughter] description of one's wife. i'm sorry i don't have a picture of her. this was pre-photographic days. and brown is this, also, tremendously self-confident and ambitious man who thinks big and does everything on a big scale throughout his life beginning with family. he will ultimately father 20 children. yeah, i know.

i complain about two. [laughter] and in the entrepreneurial spirit of the age of jackson, the 1830s, he moves from farming and tanning into land speculation. he wants to get rich. he starts buying land and borrowing money and subdividing land and borrowing more and buying more until this property boom goes bust in the panic of 1837s and brown is left buried in lawsuits and debt. and, ultimately, is driven into bankruptcy like thousands of other americans in this era. um, this family that endures economic hardship also has repeated tragedies. brown's first wife dies young in childbirth as his own mother had done when he was only 8, and of those 20 children, he buries nine of them before the age of 10. and he battles back in his 40s from bankruptcy and loss to

become a leading wool merchant only to once again overreach, um, and go bust once more. so this tremendously ambitious man enters his 50s really as a failure, a struggling -- struggling to support this large family that's been through so much hardship and loss. just as an aside, when he arrives here in kansas in 1865, he had 60 cents in his pocket. and this is a picture of his second wife, mary, and two of their young daughters. i think you could say they don't look terribly happy. but this is what i find so remarkable about brown. um, he has this burning passion, this unbending conviction that sustains him through all his job-like trials. he's descended from puritans and revolutionary war soldiers, and he believes the nation's founding destiny of liberty and equality can only be fulfilled

through the destruction of slavery. and he believes it's his god given destiny to do the job. and he clings to this mission for decades, quietly laying the groundwork until in his mid 50s, a penniless, unknown man explodes onto the national scene that i find difficult about brown, he's this very excessive figure, and i hope part of the suspense of reading reading this book is figuring out how you feel about this complicated sometimes confounding man who pulls you one way or the other. but i have to say now that i'm also in my 50s, i'm very struck by his resilience and capacity to remake himself.

map. issue of his day despite all his worldly -- [inaudible] he forces you to think about your own life and what's possible. it's really a very american story. but brown's militant abolitionism doesn't just come out of nowhere. i think this is another aspect of his story that's often misunderstood largely because of "gone with the wind" from which i've taken this image. i think many americans still have this image of the pre-civil war south and this doomed society, feudal and agrarian in which plantations and slavery are destined to be swept away in a modernizing, industrializing world. and because we look back at the so-called old south through the prism of it loss in the civil

war, it has this aura of underdog and lost cause. but to americans before the civil war who, obviously, couldn't see the future things appeared altogether different. the south didn't seem an underdog region. in some ways, it was the top dog. politically, the south held sway over the white house, the supreme court and much of congress for almost the entire era between the nation's founding and the civil war. the cotton economy was booming, really an engine of the national and global economy, by far the country's largest export. and slavery is also on the march, exploding in states like texas and southern leaders and pro-slavery fire eaters as they were called were urging the nation to invade cuba and central america so they would have more lands to plant and enslave.

so you get this sense, also, that even though the north had the majority of the population and industry and railroads, it's the south that's the brasher, illustrated most graphically in 1856 when massachusetts senator charles sumner take toss the floor of the senate and really gives a stinging speech about kansas and slavery and its defenders. and in reply a south carolina congressman, preston brooks, approaches sumner, raises his gold-topped cane and beats sumner almost to death on the floor of the senate in plain sight. and for this act brooks is instantly lionized in the for, quote, lashing into submission the senate's most vocal abolitionist. so in diaries and letters and news reports from this era you

get the sense that northerners feel beaten up and pushed around and bullied by what they called the slave power. there's a wonderful phrase in this era for weak northern democrats. they're called dough faces because they were half baked, malleable in the hands of slave holders. and all three of the presidents in the 1850s fit this description, and you see one of them in this political cartoon, pierce, with stephen douglas forcing slavery down the throat of a free soiler while these two southern leaders tug at his hair. and this really enages brown -- enrages brown, and it's part of why he's so potent. he's the rare northerner in this era who punches back hard. most abolitionists are staunch pacifists, they believe in combating slavery through education and moral uplift, and

they think slaves are too docile brown derides this as what he calls milk and water abolitionism. weak and ineffectual. to him, slavery is a state of war and must be met in kind. and he does so, of course, first here in kansas. um, and when he arrives in 1855 to join his sons, um, who have already settled here, pro-slavery forces have the upper hand in the fight over whether kansas is going to enter the union as a slave or free state. this is really the front line in the 1850s in this conflict over slavery's extension. border ruffians as they're called from missouri, they're also called pukes, interestingly. coming across the border, swim candidating and -- intimidating and sometimes killing northern settlers who want kansas to be a free state.

pillage the state capital of lawrence. the very same week that sumner is caned on the floor of the two days -- and within two days of these two shocking events, brown leads a party including four of his sons in a night raid on a pro-slavery settlement in potowatomie creek in kansas, drags five men from their beds and slaughters them with broad swords. as his son later explained, the enemy needed shock treatment, death for death. um, this shocking act also helps ignite much more savage and wider conflict in kansas. it's at this point that it becomes known as bleeding kansas, and brown is right in the middle of it, fighting pro-slave forces sometimes in pitched battle. i think most americans at least outside of this area don't recognize that in 1856, five

years before the first battle of manassas, you have northerners and southerners in kansas killing each other over slavery in open field combat with musket and cannon. this is really a preview, in some ways, the beginning of the civil war. um, but brown, as always, is thinking big. he wants to take his crusade into the heart of the slave holding south. he's going to lead a guerrilla army through the mountains to harper's ferry, seize the massive federal armory and arsenal there and its 100,000 guns, free and arm slaves and continue south through the mountains in this rolling campaign of liberation. and he's going to use his kansas fame to raise money and guns for this crusade. so he goes east from kansas in full freedom fighter persona and

really wows the rather astute armchair abolitionists of new england who are intoxicated by this rough-houston warrior. wealthy new yorkers hosting black panthers and other radicals. brown is vetted in the lecture halls and salons of the northeast, he dines with emerson, another transcendentalist, writes of consciousness of what exactly he's up to. is, of course, thor row on the left who writes very eloquently about brown who he

government. are known as the secret six. apropos of nothing, i'll long diary that at one point he is the devil,

the famous poet who across a couplet about her marriage in which she said hope died as i was led unto my marriage bed. [laughter] sorry, that is not really much to do, but, um, these are very colorful figures which is one reason i had a good time with this book. so that's some of what's going on behind the scenes. but brown also has many men who are eager to fight alongside him. he was not a lone gunman. um, and the men who fought with him in kansas and later virginia are not suicidal zealots or cult followers, they're farmers, factory workers, blacksmiths, bad poets, teachers, free blacks and fugitive slaves who share brown's belief this slavery --

that slavery must be taken on by force. but there are also young men, mostly in their early 20s, who misbehave, seek adventure, lose faith and spend a lot of time courting women. they're risking their lives to free four million slaves and save the soul of the nation, and they're working that line hard with the girls. [laughter] i didn't expect to find much romance in this story, but i was pleasantly surprised. there are also women in brown's band. in the summer of 859, brown -- 1859, brown posing as a farmer and entrepreneur named isaac smith rents a secluded log farmhouse five miles from harper's ferry where he begins gathering his weapons and men including three of his own sons. he's also joined by his teenage daughter annie and by his daughter-in-law, martha brown, who are there to act, really, as camouflage and lookouts for the

band. if a passerby or neighbor approaches this farmhouse where there's a lot of mysterious comings and goings in the summer, annie greets them in the yard or on the porch and plays the part of innocent, ordinary farm women while the guerrilla fighters huddle out of sight in the farmhouse attic. annie writes really wonderful letters about this southern summer, the fire flies, sleeping on a straw mat in this mountain hideout and the thrill and terror of being what she calls an outlaw girl, concealing these dashing young fighter, one of whom becomes her first lover. i don't mean to suggest that all was fun and games at this summer camp in maryland. it's not. it's hot, it's crowded, it's tense. brown, as usual, has run through all his money, and there's the constant risk of exposure, particularly when the five black members of brown's band arrive

in maryland, a slave state, where slave catchers are constantly on the lookout for fugitives. and one of these men shown here is dangerfield newby. he's a virginia-born slave who has recently been freed when his owner moved to ohio, but his wife, um, and children are still in bondage in virginia, and he raises the price letters from virginia slaves in this era. and i'll just read you a little from one of her letters. oh, dear dangerfield, come this fall without fail, money or no

money, she writes in the summer of 1859. if you do not get me, somebody else will, and then all my bright hopes for the future are blasted. if i thought i should never see you again, this earth would have no charms for me. do all you can for me, which i have no doubt you will. your affectionate wife, harriet. newby heeds this plea, goes from ohio to brown's mountain hideout in maryland carrying harriet's letters with him, and finally that october of 1859 brown leads 8 of his men -- 18 of his men across the potomac and into harper's ferry sparking this savage street battle, and the first of his men gunned down is dangerfield newby, shot dead in the street, 50 miles short of his goal of rescuing harriet who is sold a few months later to a slave owner in louisiana. so there's great deal at stake personally and collectively for the men and others caught up in

this conflict. now, i'm not going to walk you through all the details of the raid tonight or the court and prison drama that follow and the tremendous impact this has on the nation, you'll have to read the book for that. but as a former journalist, i'll just say a word about this, these headlines i have up here on the left, one of many interesting things about this story is it occurs at a time when the telegraph is relatively new, and unlike our own era newspapers and news wires are expanding and being started all the time. and this becomes one of the first breaking news stories in the nation. correspondents begin rushing to harper's ferry almost, you know, from the moment this conflict starts and sending dispatches by telegraph. and they're front page news for weeks. this story, you know, goes viral

in modern parlance. and as you can tell from these headlines, it's really a tremendous shock to the nation, this ab biggist band seizing -- abolitionist band seizing this enormous armory and declaring that they're going to free every slave in the south. it really jolts the nation in some ways not unlike the effect on us of 9/11, and in my view, this is precisely what brown intended. but militarily things don't go quite so well. brown initially succeeds in crossing this bridge you see across the potomac into harper's ferry, this compact, industrial town seizing the armory, freeing slaves from surrounding plantations and taking about 45 prominent whites hostage. but his men are inexperienced, there are no silencers in 1859, and when nervous raiders fire shots in the night, virginians

begin to awake to this invasion of their town and start to mobilize. and by the afternoon of the first day they and militiamen from surrounding towns have succeeded in surrounding brown in his position in the armory. um, and at this point the raid is really a little bit like a bank heist gone bad with the robbers and their hostages stuck inside the bank, um, except in this case it's not a bank, it's a brick armory engine house which, as you can see, the first building there on the left. and really either brown and his men have to shoot or negotiate their way out. and meanwhile, 90 u.s. marines are on their way to this scene. interestingly, under the command of robert e. lee and stonewall -- and jeb stewart, two future confederate generals. this story is weirdly almost a

dress rehearsal for the confederacy. stonewall jackson later appears on the scene, jefferson davis is very involved, even john wilkes booth is present in the end. um, so i'm going to end by just reading a short passage about this point in the raid, and just as background one of the characters i'm going to read about who's caught in this tense situation with brown holed up in the engine house is a man named aaron stevens who's this larger-than-life figure. he's this very tall, dark, handsome, broad-shouldered man, and the only member of brown's band who has military training. he was a mexican war veteran who was then court-martialed for what's called in the records a drunken riot and mutiny. he's sentenced to hard labor here in kansas at leaven worth and quickly escapes and becomes a fierce abolitionist fighter

and joins brown's band. but this rather ferocious warrior has a very gentle side, a tender soul, and in the months leading up to the raid, he falls desperately in love with a music teacher named jenny dunbar who i'll just mentioned is described as having great eyes full of pathos with exquisite contours and a glory of dark hair. that's about as racy as it gets in these victorian documents. [laughter] exquisite contours, i like that. [laughter] anyway, all through this summer leading up to the raid and the mountain hideout, stevens is writing soulful letters to jenny, you know, declaring his love and begging her to return it. so the bit i'm going to read i hope gives some sense of the intimacy of this event and the weird mix of courtliness and brutality. begins just after brown has sent out one of his men, william thompson, as a peace envoy to negotiate, and instead he's been

seized by the gunmen outside. thompson's seizure under a flag of truce angered brown and enraged his lieutenant, aaron stevens, who was dangerously hot-headed when crossed. his court-martial five years before had been triggered by demeaning words from a superior officer which caused stephens to draw his gun, declare i'm as goo good a man as you, and threaten to blow out the officer's damn brains. now in harper's ferry he wanted to take violent retaliation against thompson's captors. stevens was dissuaded by a prominent hostage, the superintendent of the armory. he had been the first man awakened in the night and alerted that the armory was in the possession of an armed band. going to investigate, he had been seized and held ever since. i can possibly accommodate matters, he said, as brown and stevens mulled how to respond to thompson's capture. he offered to go out as a peace

broker himself with stevens as escort. brown agreed to this sending his own son, watson, as a second bodyguard. stevens and watson brown walked out of the armory gate behind the hostage who waved his white handkerchief. the men proceeded down a street that dead ended beside which loomed the galthouse saloon. as the men neared it, the proprietor smashed an upper story window so he could shoot unobstructed, then he and a fellow gunman opened fire. their first volley hit watson brown. a moment later stevens was also struck. he swore and fired back. hit again and again, he finally collapsed. lying bloodied on the street, stevens called out to the hostage who had urged him to attempt negotiation, i have been cruelly deceived. the hostage who had been dragged from his bed replied, i wish i

had remained at home. watson brown retreated to the armory vomiting blood from a stomach wound. his father could do little. brown regarded himself as a soldier subject to traditional rules of battlefield conduct. his hostages abided by this can on. virginian's prided themself themselves on their code of honor. pledged to return and did so. the exception was archie bald kitzmiller caught in the fire fight, he did not consider his pledge to return binding under the circumstances, he later said, and took refuge in the nearby wager house hotel. the bullet-riddled stephens remained crumpled on the pavement, exposed to a hard rain and the horrified gaze of onlookers. i've seen big beasts killed, and they did not lose more blood. but stevens wasn't yet dead. after lying still for a few

minutes, he began to move and groan. brown couldn't risk sending out another man, but a hostage volunteered to do so. joseph brewer went into the bullet-riddled street, helped stephens into the wager house and returned to captivity n. a strange day that mixed cruelty and kindness, brewer's act was among the most extraordinary. also astonishing was the fortitude of the man he'd rescued. stephens had already attracted notice from the townspeople for his unflinching defense of the armory, now a doctor dressed the wounds to his face, torso and limbs, stephens became a figure to all for his majestic physique. another described him as the finest specimen of physical manhood i've ever seen. his manner was just as imposing. though shot six times and surrounded by armed inquisitors, stephens remained composed and definal.

he expressed no regret for his actions and declared himself fully prepared to die for the cause of freedom. one life for many, he said. believing himself close to death, stevens gazed at a picture he wore around his neck of his beloved jenny dunbar to whom he'd written in his last letter, i hope i shall live to see thy lovely face once more. i'm not going to tell you the rest of that story except that, miraculously, stephens survives his six wounds and does, indeed, live to see jenny dunbar once more on the night before his execution. on that note, i'd like to -- maybe we can bring up the lights so i can see the audience, and let you fire away with questions, comments, whatever. so, um, i can pretty well see you, and i'll repeat questions if anyone can't hear them. >> i have to turn on the microphone.

>> thank you. >> i'll start with a question. >> please. >> what are you working on currently? >> nothing. [laughter] don't tell that to my wife. [laughter] i, usually you have a long lag time between when your book is finished and it comes out, like nine months or a year, so by the time your book comes out, you've forgotten about it and moved on to something else, but i only finished the maps and end notes and all the exfrom stuff in this book -- extra stuff in this book in august, so i really haven't even had time to even think about the next thing. so given my kansas proclivities, i may be here. i pay a finder's fee if anyone has ideas afterwards, let me know. [laughter] come on. john brown. angry. someone must have a question. please, don't be shy. here we go. >> you wouldn't know it, but

wichita has a sizable african-american population, and i wonder what the response of african-americans was to brown at the time and then what sort of response you're getting to his story as you go around the country now. >> uh-huh. yeah, um, it's again, one of the extraordinary things about brown. he's a man who really lives his beliefs. he has black people at times living in his home, he stays with black people as well, he stays with frederick douglass, the famous abolitionist, for three weeks. they become real friends. he lives for a time in a free black settlement in upstate new york. so, um, he's really quite extraordinary in that sense. this is very uncommon in this day, um, even, you know, among abolitionists. in prison he's even asked by a reporter what do you think about amalgamation which is interracial marriage, and he says, well, i'm not really for

it, but i'd prefer my daughters marry industrious black men rather than idle whites. i mean, this is 1859. i'll add that he also has great political ambitions. he writes or rewrites the american constitution at one point to give full rights not only to blacks, but to women, and he goes to canada to hold a constitutional convention among blacks in canada, many of them fugitive slaves. and during this convention they nominate positions for legislature and president, and they nominate a black man for president. so any of you who voted for obama and felt very progressive in doing so, john brown would say you were 150 years late to the party. [laughter] so he really is extraordinary in that way, and black men fight alongside him and write about how there was no hint of

prejudice or condescension in brown's band. i think he was really true to his beliefs. i think your second question was response going around talking? um, the only negative concern you know, what's interesting, brown's a very polarizing figure, obviously, and raises all these very raw issues that are still with us, race, religious fundamentalism, violence, terrorism, the right of individuals to, you know, oppose their government, do ends ever justify the means. and what's interesting is almost everywhere i go i find splits almost down the middle. and i was in harper's ferry the other day which is always swarming with school kids, and i talked to a ranger who interprets for the kids. and at the end of the program they always vote on, you know, was brown right to do what he did here, and even the school kids split right could be the middle -- down the middle, he

said. so i guess that's what i've noticed the most. you'll get strong minnesotas really -- strong opinions really on both sides. come on. this is a shy audience. >> did brown have any doubts or qualms or ever agonize over ends versus means? >> yeah. did brown agonize over ends versus means? i don't ever see a sign of it in his letters. um, he believes or is the thing that really galvanizes him most is passivity and what he sees in the face of what he sees as evil. this really, it's partly his religious belief, it's partly his racial beliefs, but i think it's also temperamental. he just can't stand, you know, the sight of bullying that goes unanswered. but he believes really at every stage that what he's doing is absolutely right, um, and that, you know, this is the mission

he's been given by god. i don't, um, really sense doubt about that question. to him, slavery itself is a form of terrorism and, you know, to oppose evil as he has done is the right thing to do, and he gets up in court and says, you know, not only is slavery a sin, but to fail to oppose it would be a sin which, you know, it's kind of confronting to northerners, many of whom oppose slavery but don't really want to do anything about it. he's saying, you know, you're guilty too if you're not doing something about it. and what i did was not wrong, but right. and if that means i have to hang for that, um, you know, so let it be done. he embraces his death sentence. and this is really in the end what gives brown such power. to me, this is one of many ironies to this story. john brown who, um, you know, thinks of himself as this man of action and, you know, in strong contrast to all those who are

just talk, talk, talk. at harper's ferry he fails as a man of action, dismally really. but he ultimately triumphs through the power of his words in court and prison. so, you know, he again has this resilience and adaptability right to the end. everything is turned on him, and he's, okay, this is my situation, i'm going to play this hand that's been dealt to me, and he goes to the gallows really almost a christ figure to many in the north. yeah. >> [inaudible] >> the question is what led me to write the book. um, really wasn't any one thing. i wrote a book about a dozen years ago, "confederates in the attic," that was mostly about civil war memory in the south today because i've always been interested in the civil war. while i was researching that book, i went to harper's ferry and, you know, again, it's this very spooky place that still feels haunted by john brown, so

i've always been chewing on him. to be honest, it was partly the nagging of my wife. she, geraldine brooks, my wife s a historical novelist and wrote a book called "march" that was a book about imagining the father of louisa may alcott based on her real father, bronson alcott, and as part of this she began researching the secret six who i referred to because they come into her story a little bit, and she said to me, you know, you're a civil war bore, you need to write about these people. it's a little known story, etc. , and really to get her off my back i started researching them. [laughter] and i find them fascinating, but they're not probe files in courage. -- profiles in courage. when brown's raid goes bad and they're implicated, one of them's already abroad, three of them flee to canada, and my favorite, garrett smith, checks himself into the lunatic asylum in utica, new york, to avoid prosecution.

[laughter] so i thought these are the kind of characters, tortured islists, that my wife loves to write about, but i'm a little more drawn to action figures, i don't know why, and it kind of drew me back to brown. and i guess, also, while a lot has been written about brown, the raid itself, i think, hadn't gotten it full -- this is a really thrilling, sweaty, tense event, and i wanted to see if i could tell that in all its, all it drama and also these characters i've been talking about. yeah. >> did you talk about frederick douglass and how he changed his support of brown's raid? >> yeah. the question's about frederick douglass and how he changes his support of brown's raid. and he's threaded through the book. he's a major figure in the book. some of the problem with frederick douglass, he's such a great orator and writer that when you go to quote him, you just want to quote the whole speech. it's hard to pull out a quote

because he's really one of our greatest orators. but he, um, is one of the first that brown discloses his plan to back in the 1840s, and he really want douglas s' support, and douglass is really struck by this man and his conviction but doesn't think his plan is viable. but they keep up this relationship, and brown stays with him, and brown keeps courting him right up to the end. that summer at the mountain hideout, he meets with douglass in a secret meeting in a quarry in pennsylvania. and wraps his arms around douglass and says come with you, you know, after i strike. the bees will swarm, and i want you to help hive them. and douglass just can't do it. as he puts it, harper's ferry, to him s a trap of steel, and brown and his men are going to be caught inside it. and i think he, like other blacks, also recognizes as a fugitive slave in his case or a former slave that, you know, his

prospects would be particularly dim if he went along. [laughter] but what's interesting is he then really becomes one of brown's great defenders after the event. he, too, runs to canada. but he's at least honest about it. he says, you know, judged by the harper's ferry standard, i'm a coward essentially. and later really becomes brown's most eloquent defender and says, in essence, and i kind of end the book with one of his great speeches that, you know, the moral soul of the nation was so numbed that it needed this kind of shock and that the prospects for freedom in 1859 were really dim until brown, you know, spread his arms and, you know, started this fight. and, you know, these are really striking kind of evolution in douglass' opinions because he saw brown's flaws, and he's very honest about his own doubts.

but he ultimately comes to embrace him m -- him. yeah. >> talk about the relationship with harriet tubman. >> yeah, harriet tubman, the question is about his relationship with harriet tubman who he also courts. i mean, it's amazing with this story, the cast of characters that come into it. as i mentioned, on the southern side you have this whole roster of future confederates, on the northern side you have all these transcend dentallists. he meets with her, he really wants her because she, of course, is very experienced at slipping across this border area that he's planning to attack. um, and he meets with her, and he thinks she's given him her full support. and in my view brown is kind of a wishful thinker. he often sees things that maybe aren't cleat -- completely there, and i think this is the case with harriet tubman.

the problem is we don't have her really much of her own writing on this, it's a little murky. she apparently was sick that summer and couldn't be found, but brown really right up to the end is hoping she's going to come help him because he really wants to found this whole kind of revolutionary state in the mountains of virginia of freed slaves, and he wants tubman and douglass and others to really help him pull off this revolution. yeah. >> the most remarkable thing discovered about -- [inaudible] >> brown, the man? >> yeah. >> single most extraordinary thing, gee, let's see. i've talked about his resilience, um, gosh, that's, you know, i should have, you know, i should have an answer all teed up. i guess, um, you know, partly

that this is a little different subject. you know, we think in our own era that we've been through so much change, you know? the internet and all these things. brown's life is really incredible in this regard. he's born in 1800 at a time when plows, everything's moving at horse and foot speed. this is really a pre-industrial world. and by his 50s he's traveling the nation on trains, he's sending telegraphs, he's having his photograph taken. i mean, this is a real future-shock era, and he's attacking a highly industrialized town. so partly i was intrigued or surprised by, you know, the kind of adaptations he had to make. and even though in some ways he's a very old-fashioned man in his religion and some of his beliefs, he's very savvy with the new technology. media in particular. he really knows how to play the media. he lets a train go from harper's ferry during the raid to really

spread the word. he knows, you know, what's going to happen. that rain's going to get to baltimore, and there'll be correspondence there, and he gives this very alarming message that, you know, gets out. so i don't know if that was the most surprising thing, but it was something that kept striking me. my gosh, the train, the telegraph, all these things happening in this era. it's a really extraordinary era in american history. yeah. >> not having read your book -- [inaudible] >> yeah. >> what is it that takes a white guy out of his milieu like this and spins him around to be an advocate and a revolutionary? i mean, it seems to me pretty astounding. >> it is astounding. and i don't think there is any one factor. i think as i mentioned earlier he's very strongly influenced by his father who is also a very formidable figure. and one of the things that's interesting about his father is he's a really early abolitionist. and also strikingly tolerant of

native americans in ohio at a time when, you know, most whites are not. he's an interesting, you know, by our rights very progressive figure or very forward-looking figure. i think that's one source of his anti-slavery beliefs. he writes in a letter late in his life that he saw a slave boy beaten with a shovel when he was 12 and that this sort of began his eternal war on slavery. i think it's also his calvinist beliefs. this was a belief system that have -- that was very fixated on sin and rooting out sin, personal and collective. so i think there are many factors. and then as i mentioned, you know, the times. he comes of age, one, when organized abolitionism is emerging, but also when the slave power as they called it was emerging. this is the era when, you know, cotton becomes king, so he's watching this era in which, you know, slavery is on the march,

and no one seems to be able to, you know, push it back. and so i think it's no one thing really with brown. yeah. >> i have two questions. >> sure. >> i know you like -- [inaudible] harper's ferry. >> yeah. >> have you been to any of the john brown-related sites in kansas? have you actually seen -- >> yep, uh-huh. um, yeah. the question is about, yeah, using the archive of the feet. i mean, most of the research for this book was, you know, in archives, um, which is really fun if any of you haven't done it. i spent a lot of time in topeka at the kansas state historical society which has one of the best repositories of brown paper. it's where i found a lot of these love letters between aaron stevens and jenny dunbar. it's sort of like digging for hidden treasure, you know? you're going through these boxes. wonderful. but i also, yeah, i like to go

to the places where history happened, and i think you can learn a lot from the landscape, particularly in a place like harper's ferry where the landscape is very significant to the story. and hasn't changed that much. so you can, you know, really grasp what happened. his mountain hideout is still there, the armory engine house, the courthouse where he was tried. but, yes, i also went to potowatomie creek, site of his massacre, site of his most famous battle in kansas and also blackjack. um, and, you know, again, i think it's very worth while to kind of get a sense of -- i guess i was surprised not being from this part of the country that eastern kansas, particularly around potowatomie creek, is kind of swamp pi. i mean, it doesn't look the way most people imagine kansas somehow. it was very malarial. [laughter] that's one theory of why people were called pukes, because one theory -- no one really knows

where this phrase came from, that they would call these people from the border region pukes is that in these sort of river bottomlands malaria was very rife and that they puked a lot, i guess. i'm not sure i believe this theory, but it's one of them. so, yeah, i found -- and potowatomie in particular is still a quite spooky place and has an excellent little museum of john brown in a cabin that his half sister lived in and where he spent a lot of time. so if you haven't been there, i'd really recommend -- you're lucky to be quite close to these brown-related sites. >> my second question is more personal. >> sure. >> i know you're married to geraldine -- >> yeah. >> do you read her books and make suggestions, and does she read yours and make suggestions? [laughter] >> right. the question is, you know, whether my wife and i read each other's stuff and make suggestions. yeah, we do. we work about ten feet apart, and we used to be journalists

together and write stories together. and but then she went to the dark side and started making stuff up and writing novels. [laughter] so i think i'm of less use to her than she is to me. i, i love reading fiction, but i have no idea how to do it, at least, you know, not intentionally. so, but yes, nothing goes out of the room without, you know, having edited each other. and, you know, it's not always easy. um, but we have very different styles, and i think it's good in that sense because she's a real writer's writer. i mean, she writes beautiful prose. i aspire to a kind of sparer style, leaner, you know, tense. i like dialogue and action and, you know, keep the pace going. and so i try and kind of jazz hers up a bit, and she tries to encourage me to, well, you know,

describe the scenery a little more. tell us what this person looked like. so, you know, i think we have a very productive relationship in that regard. sometimes it makes for not much to say at the dinner table at night when you've been sitting ten feet apart from each other all day and listening in on each other's phone conversations, a little hard to say, oh, what did you do today? [laughter] but we have two sons, so that always keeps it interesting. yeah? >> my mom's too shy to ask this question, so i'm asking for her. >> yeah, sure. >> she wants you to talk a little bit about his relationship with lincoln and what brown thought of politics. >> yeah. the question is about lincoln and another kind of fascinating part of the story. yeah. brown had real contempt for politicians. he calls them leeches. with the slave power, you know? so he, he didn't really even, i don't think, know who lincoln was at that stage.

lincoln wasn't yet a well known national figure. so he never writes about lincoln specifically. um, but his raid occurs, um, really in the early periods of the 1860 presidential campaign. and lincoln at this point is really a second tier candidate in the republican field. i mean, he's really not well known outside of illinois and the midwest, um, newspapers often get his name wrong, they call him abram. you know, he's kind of i don't know what would be comparable today, rick santorum in the republican race. [laughter] i mean, no offense to rick santorum, but he's, you know, second tier. but as soon as this happens, it forces everyone to take a position on brown. this is the big news of the day. and brown -- lincoln uses brown really as a foil. he condemns the raid, he says, you know, we admire his anti-slavery conviction, but

this is the wrong way to do it. this is not what the republican party about. we're not about violence, we're not about meddling with slavery in the south. we're about stopping its expansion. and he, essentially, positions himself as the safely moderate choice in the republican field. while his main competitors are regarded as more militant on slavery and, therefore, sort of tarred by this episode in what's perceived to be their connections with brown. so i think it really contributes strongly to lincoln's nomination. it's by no means the only factor, there are many others, and it also divides the democratic party, his opposition, which after harper's ferry and, again, there are other events. i don't want to oversimplify. really splits this strong, very extreme southern wing says, you know, we can't trust any northerner. they're all abolitionists.

look at john brown, they regard him as christ, this traitor, and we need explicit guarantees to protect slavery. and this splits the democratic party, and there's also another party that forms. so in the end lincoln is run anything a very broken field -- running in a very broken field and is elected with less than 40% of the vote. so i would argue that lincoln might well not have been elected had it not been for john brown's raid. what's also fascinating is this man who has initially condemned john brown and even once the war starts he's being urged to emancipate slaves, he says, no, this would be like a john brown raid on a massive schedule. it would alarm the border states that he needed, it was the wrong way to go. but then, you know, unlike brown he's a man who rethinks his positions, um, depending on circumstance and, ultimately, fulfills brown's mission with e