Book Reviews

A REVIEWER'S NOTEBOOK JOHN CHAMBERLAIN THE SECRET SIX FROM a libertarian point of view, Otto Scott is America's most excit ing contemporary historian and biographer. He has two strings to his bow. With a clear understanding of Albert Jay Nock's distinction be tween social power and political power, Scott alternates his studies. Part of his writing life is devoted to a critical appraisal of creative busi ness enterprises (see, particularly, his story of the Raytheon company, which developed radar). His ttother career," which he pursues with a sense of dutiful but nevertheless exhilarating vengeance, is dedicated to exposing the great ~~fools of his tory." These fools are political types who have led mankind astray by insist ing on a ~~higher law" that has no grounding in human nature. His book on the French revolutionary 252 fanatic Robespierre was a devastat ing dramatization of what can hap pen to a country when a politically powerful person assumes that he and he alone has been ordained to define and impose a ~~general will."

The Scott biography of King James I of England was a study of ab solutism allied to vice and frivolity that might have cost Britain more if it had not been an island. And now Otto Scott, with his The Secret Six: John Brown and the Abolitionist Conspiracy (Times Books, 3 Park Avenue, New York, N.Y., 10016, 375 pp., $15.00), has dared to apply the name of ~~sacred fool" to the man whose attempt to seize the govern ment arsenal at Harpers Ferry, Vir ginia, and incite a slave rebellion was one of the prime harbingers of the American Civil War. John Brown of Osawatomie, KanTHE SECRET SIX 253 John Brown sas, has been the subject of admiring biographers and the inspiration of one great poem, Stephen Vincent Benet's John Brown's Body. Mr. Scott dissents; he calls John Brown a murderer. Killing and Plunder The record clearly sustains Mr. Scott. On May 23, 1856, Old John Brown (he always seemed old to his contemporaries) led four of his sons, his son-in-law and two others on a killing expedition along Pot tawatomie Creek in what was then called Bleeding Kansas. The Kansas territory was being contested be tween southern slaveholding sym pathizers and northern Free Soilers, but Old Brown, in assuming that he was part of a ~~northern army" and hence privileged to kill in the name of the Abolitionist ~~higher law," was in no way concerned in knowing whether his victims were slavehold ers or even interested in anything other than pioneering on the plains.

Mr. Scott surmises that one of Old Brown's confused motives was a de sire to force a nation into a new pattern by creating terror. Brown claimed a religious sanction for in voking a symbolic vengeance on in nocent men and women, but he and his murder party were also in terested in loot. They wanted horses, saddles, guns and bowie knives, and they were particularly happy to walk off with a fine grey horse be longing to Dutch Henry, the big cat tle dealer of the area. Old Brown and his party were never brought to justice for five Pot tawatomie murders that widowed two women and left behind a num ber of fatherless children. One rea son for the oversight was the disor ganized condition of the Kansas ter ritory. But, more importantly, the country as a whole was bemused by the clamor of the sectional issue. The Fifties were the decade of the :Ored Scott decision, the caning of the self-righteous Massachusetts Senator Charles Sumner by an out Jraged South Carolinian, Represen tative Preston Brooks, and the in cendiary controversies of the Boston 254 THE FREEMAN April Abolitionists (Garrison, Wendell Phillips et al.) and the southern fire-eaters who wanted secession.

The journalists of the time were par tisan, and those who wrote for northern papers from Kansas took Old Brown at his own estimate that he was engaged in a highly moral crusade. Supporting Intellectuals To Mr. Scott, the real scandal of the whole Brown story was the be havior of the Massachusetts intel lectuals. The Concord group was particularly blameworthy for mak ing Brown a hero. Ralph Waldo Emerson excused the Kansas vio lence by saying ttbetter that a whole generation of men, women and chil dren should pass away by a violent death, than that one word" of the Golden Rule and the Declaration of Independence ushould be violated. in this country." Henry David Thoreau agreed with Emerson that Brown was a Utranscendentalist saint." The more ttliberal" of the Boston clergy echoed the Concord non sequiturs. But the real culprits, as Scott's careful research shows, were the members of the committee he calls the Secret Six. This group was composed of Dr. Samuel Gridley Howe, the Reverend Thomas Wentworth Higginson, the Reverend Theodore Parker, the millionaire Gerit Smith, Franklin B. Sanford, the town antiquarian of Concord, and George Luther Stearns, an idealistic Massachusetts lead pipe manufacturer. The Secret Six sup ported Old Brown with introduc tions, immoderate praise, and good hard cash. Unwilling to go to Kan sas in person to fight the so-called Border Ruffians from the South, they satisfied their guilt feelings by supplying money and arms for Brown's activism. Announcing that tta revolution was what the country needed," Stearns at one point drew up a subscription list to provide reg ular shipments of Sharp's rifles to Kansas.

Pacifist Beginnings The ironic thing about the Abolitionist movement, insofar as the clergy was involved in it, was that it had begun in pacifism. Theo dore Weld, the theology professor who trained scores of agents in a uschool of abolition," was the gen tlest of souls. The Reverend William Ellery Channing, the acknowledged leader of the Unitarian movement, complained that William Lloyd Gar rison, the ttliberator ," and his vocif erous circle were tttoo precipitate" and ttlacked tact." But as the uirre pressible conflict" of the Civil War approached, Theodore Parker pro claimed that ttall the great charters of Humanity have been writ in blood." The free man, he said, tthas a natural right to help the slaves re cover their liberty ... and as a 1979 THE SECRET SIX 255 means to that end, to aid them in killing all such as oppose." Parker, who boasted of helping to fund John Brown, lay dying in Italy when the poorly planned and stupid raid in the Harpers Ferry arsenal misfired. He might not have survived the ordeal of returning to the United States to stand trial in Virginia as an accessory to Brown's treasonable act. To do the Reverend Thomas Wentworth Higginson justice, he was willing to appear in court and was rather miffed that nobody asked him. But the rest of the ~~secret six"

scurried for cover when Lieutenant Jeb Stuart captured Brown after a thirty-six-hour engagement at the Harpers Ferry arsenal. Howe, Stearns and Sanborn, fearful that they might be exposed as accessories to Brown's act of treason, ran away HANDSOME BLUE lEATHERLEX to Canada. Gerit Smith, the mil lionaire, pretended lunacy. Frederick Douglass, the leader of northern black freedmen, had tried to dissuade Brown from his mad escapade. But when the raid on the arsenal actually took place, Doug lass fled to Canada and England. He was under no illusions about his safety if he had been called upon in a Virginia court to explain his conver sations with Brown before the san guinary event took place. Otto Scott does not draw modern parallels in The Secret Six. But his contempt for intellectuals who sup port violence in the name of the ~~higher law" obviously extends to western liberals who favor bloody solutions in Rhodesia, South Africa or wherever. The ~Csecretsixes" are always with us. , FREEMAN BINDERS $3.00 Order from: THE FOUNDATION FOR ECONOMIC EDUCATION, INC.

IRVINGTON-ON-HUDSON, NEW YORK 10533 256 THE FREEMAN SPECIAL OFFER Back issues of THE FREEMAN, in bulk lots. Printing overruns and other miscalculations leave extras of many of the 1978 monthly is sues of THE FREEMAN. Instead of our storing these, we'd prefer to see them offered as handouts in classrooms, lec tures, study groups, doctors' and dentists' waiting rooms, li braries, employee reading racks, or wherever a student of liberty might find them. If you could so use 100 or more of any of these 1978 is sues, at $2.00 a hund red deliv ered in the U.S., (postage extra for foreign delivery) let us know your total need and preference of months. We'll promptly ship up to the limits of the surplus stock. Send requests and checks to: The Foundation for Economic Education, Inc. Irvington-on-Hudson, New York 10533 the Freeman VOL. 29, NO. 5 • MAY 1979 Gold versus Fractional Reserves Henry Hazlitt 259 Worsening inflation may oblige governments to allow individuals to restore gold as a medium of exchange.