A Disease in the Public Mind (2 page)

Few presidents have lower ratings than Mr. Buchanan in the polls historians take to rank the nation's chief executives as great, near great, mediocre, or failures. On the other hand, not many presidents had more experience in national politics than “Old Buck.” He spent almost forty years as a congressman and senator, plus terms as secretary of state and ambassador to Great Britain, before winning the White House.

I soon discovered that President Buchanan did not originate the phrase “public mind.” Thomas Jefferson frequently used the term to describe various aspects of the politics of his era. Writing to George Washington in 1792 about the angry disagreements stirred by the new federal government's financial policy, Jefferson warned, “The public mind is no longer confident and serene.” Abraham Lincoln was another man who frequently invoked the phrase. In 1861 he accused the South of “debauching the public mind” about the right to secede. A century later, Democratic presidential candidate Adlai Stevenson declared, “Those who corrupt the public mind are just as evil as those who steal from the public purse.”
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The public mind is intimately linked with public opinion, which one early nineteenth-century commentator called “that inexorable judge of men and manners” in a republic. But the public mind suggests something less
fluctuating than opinion—and more complex than an illusion, which can be swiftly dispelled by events. The phrase implies fixed beliefs that are fundamental to the way people participate in the world of their time.
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A disease in the public mind would seem to be a twisted interpretation of political or economic or spiritual realities that seizes control of thousands and even millions of minds. Americans first experienced one of these episodes in 1692, when the leaders of the Massachusetts Bay Colony became convinced that witches were threatening their society with evil powers. Over two hundred people were arrested and flung into fetid jails. Twenty-one were hanged, one seventy-one-year-old man was “pressed to death” beneath heavy stones, and at least seven died in prison.

No one has described this public frenzy better than the great New England novelist, Nathaniel Hawthorne. “That terrible delusion . . . should teach us, among its other morals, that the influential classes . . . are fully liable to all the passionate error that has ever characterized the maddest mob. Clergymen, judges, statesmen—the wisest, calmest, holiest persons of their day, stood in the inner circle roundabout the gallows, loudest to acclaim the work of blood, latest to confess themselves miserably deceived.”
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A similar frenzy seized the nation in the closing decades of the nineteenth century, reaching a climax on January 16, 1919, when Congress passed the Eighteenth Amendment, banning the sale and consumption of alcoholic drinks. Prohibition destroyed the liquor industry, the seventh largest business in the United States. Tens of thousands of people lost their jobs. For the next thirteen years, the ban corrupted and tormented Americans from coast to coast.

Rather than discouraging liquor consumption, Prohibition increased it. Taking a drink became a sign of defiance against the arrogant minority who had deprived people of their right to enjoy themselves. The 1920s roared with reckless amorality in all directions, including Wall Street. When everything came crashing down in 1929 and the grey years of the Great Depression began, second thoughts were the order of the day. Large numbers of people pointed to the state of mind inspired by Prohibition as one of the chief reasons for the disaster.

In 1933, a new president, Franklin D. Roosevelt, made the repeal of the Eighteenth Amendment one of his priorities. But the evil effects of the plunge into moral redemption linger to this day, most notably in the influence of organized crime, better known as the Mafia, in many areas of American life. The experience proved that a passionate minority seized by the noble desire to achieve some great moral goal may be abysmally wrong.

Later in the twentieth century, a European disease of the public mind consumed a horrific number of lives. Communism, with its spurious goal of achieving economic equality, killed an estimated 50 million people in Soviet Russia alone and uncounted millions more elsewhere.

In America, an offshoot of this disease, McCarthyism, roiled our politics and morality for most of a decade after World War II. Spawned by Joseph McCarthy, a junior senator from Wisconsin, McCarthyism prompted thousands of Americans to become enraged investigators and persecutors of their fellow Americans, based on the often spurious accusation that they were or once had been Communists or Communist sympathizers. Many saw their legal, literary, film, or other careers ruined. Some people, driven to despair, committed suicide.

A good example was my friend, novelist Howard Fast, who was forced to write under a pseudonym to make a living. I was among several fellow writers who gave him quotes that his publisher used to help sell these secretly written books.

Analyzing these false beliefs gave me additional insights into how a disease in the public mind works its dark will on the world. It is backed by politicians and other prominent leaders, and often by a media apparatus—newspapers, pamphlets, books, magazine articles, and in the twentieth century, television, radio, and film—that reinforces the disease with massive repetition. At least as important are hate-filled verbal denunciations of real or supposed opponents.

On September 11, 2001, the United States awoke from the illusion that an era of peace and reason was dawning after the collapse of Soviet Communism in 1989. Muslim fanatics flew two passenger planes into the twin towers of New York's World Trade Center, and another plane into the Pentagon
in Washington, DC, killing themselves and 2,700 Americans. The disease in the public mind that motivated these true believers was a warped version of the Mohammedan faith.

Perhaps President Buchanan's assertion that a disease in the public mind produced John Brown in 1859 and the ensuing Civil War deserves consideration, at the very least. Let us remember it while we visit a bloodstained Harpers Ferry and begin our journey into the history that inflamed John Brown's already unbalanced brain—the United States of America's entanglement with African slavery.

PROLOGUE

John Brown's Raid

Sunday, October 16, 1859, was a day of clouds and light rain in the rolling farm country of western Maryland. In a dilapidated two-story house rented from a man named Kennedy, twenty-one young men, five of them black, attended a religious service led by fifty-nine-year-old John Brown. Fiercely erect, with glaring blue eyes in a gaunt face largely concealed by a long grey beard, Brown urged them to ask God's blessing on the insurrection they were about to launch with their attack on the federal arsenal in Harpers Ferry, Virginia.

Brown confidently predicted that the arsenal's twenty thousand rifles and millions of rounds of ammunition would equip a conquering army of slaves from Maryland and Virginia and antislavery whites from nearby Pennsylvania. They would all flock to the cause when they heard the electrifying news that weapons of liberation were waiting for them. With Jehovah's help they were certain to achieve their awesome goal: nothing less than freeing the South's four million slaves.

Brown and his followers had spent the summer at the farmhouse, slowly accumulating weapons and ammunition. In their barn they now had 198
Sharps rifles, 200 Maynard revolvers, and 980 menacing pikes. The Sharps rifles were expensive, highly accurate guns, capable of firing 8 to 10 shots a minute. The six-shot Maynard revolvers were reserved for officers in their prospective army. The pikes, two-edged bowie knives attached to six-foot poles, were intended for the freed slaves, whom Brown assumed would have trouble mastering the intricacies of loading and firing a gun.

Some people, then and now, might wince at the idea of encouraging slaves to plunge these grisly weapons into the bodies of white Southerners. But John Brown was a man who did not flinch from shocking acts on behalf of his cause. The Connecticut-born visionary believed that slavery was an abominable crime, punishable by death—a conviction he had already demonstrated more than once. Among his favorite aphorisms was, “Without the shedding of blood there is no remission of sin.”
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In the hot days of July and August, the volunteers had pondered maps of the southern states that John Brown had drawn on cambric. Each was filled with numbers he had gleaned from the census of 1850, identifying counties where slaves outnumbered whites, sometimes by ratios of six or seven to one. With the blacks he expected to muster and arm in Virginia and Maryland, Brown planned to focus on these counties, triggering a series of slave revolts that would demoralize and slaughter slave owners and their supporters from the Mason-Dixon Line to the Gulf of Mexico.

If white Southerners counterattacked, Brown planned to retreat into the Allegheny Mountains, where he and his followers would establish “maroon” communities, similar to the ones that escaped slaves had created in the mountains of Jamaica and Haiti. The word is derived from the French word
marron
, meaning a domestic animal run wild.
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Brown's band of followers was sure that thousands would rally to a banner held aloft by “Captain” John Brown. To them, he was a famous figure. During the guerilla war that had raged in Kansas earlier in the 1850s, some journalists had hailed Brown as a fighter on a par with the heroes of 1776. Five prominent men from Massachusetts had joined a New York millionaire
in giving him the money and encouragement for this immensely more ambitious attack on what they and Brown called “The Slave Power.”
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During the afternoon of October 16, Brown had assigned tasks to his troops. Eighteen would march with him to Harpers Ferry. In their pockets they carried captains' commissions authorizing them to organize the freed slaves into companies. Brown's son Owen and two other men would stay behind at the Kennedy Farm, awaiting word to move the guns and pikes to a site where they could be used by the new recruits.

At eight o'clock, Brown climbed onto a one-horse wagon loaded with pikes, some hickory-and-pine torches, and a crowbar, and led his men toward Harpers Ferry, nine miles away. In the moonless darkness the raiders passed undetected through the thinly populated rural countryside.
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Along with weapons, Brown brought two documents he considered of surpassing importance. The first was a “Declaration of Independence by the Representatives of the Slave Population of the United States of America.” The declaration denounced slaveholders as pirates, thieves, robbers, libertines, woman killers, and barbarians. Politicians who tolerated this inhumanity were termed “leeches” unworthy of being called “half civilized men.”

At least as important was a lengthier document—a “Provisional Constitution and Ordinances for the People of the United States.” The constitution's forty-eight articles began by emphasizing that citizenship and participation in the government were guaranteed to all persons “of a mature age” without respect to race or sex. Another article specified that “all persons of good character . . . shall be encouraged to carry arms openly.” Other clauses guaranteed protection to slaveholders who freed their slaves voluntarily and declared that the “commander in chief” (Brown) owned all goods and wealth confiscated from the enemy. Toward the close, consistency and order vanished. Brown had written the Constitution in a near frenzy, working day and night.

These documents reveal John Brown's vision of an America in which blacks and whites would live as equals. It was an extraordinary ideal for a
white American in 1859, when the vast majority of the nation, North and South, regarded blacks as inferior and potentially dangerous. The presence of five black men in his volunteer army, living in intimate proximity with his white soldiers, proved Brown meant what he had written.

The scrawled, almost illegible pages of the declaration and constitution also offer significant clues to John Brown's personality. A psychologist who made a careful study of Brown's life concluded that their extravagant phrases—and frequent confusion—were part of a pattern that coruscated through his career. Again and again, Brown had nurtured grandiose schemes and dreams that invariably ended in disappointment. The psychologist concluded that Brown was a manic-depressive. In his manic phases he was capable of going for days without sleep and producing magnificent plans that were ruinously short on practical details.
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Earlier in the summer, some of Brown's followers had not been as confident as their leader that God had sent them to their rendezvous with history. Prominent among the doubters was twenty-one-year-old Oliver Brown, the youngest of the leader's sons. He had abruptly asked how their handful of men could subdue a town the size of Harpers Ferry—some 2,500 people. Oliver was probably wondering why Frederick Douglass, a former Maryland slave who had become an electrifying antislavery orator and writer, had declined to join his friend John Brown in this venture.

Brown had talked with swaggering confidence about how Douglass's presence would inspire thousands of slaves to rally to their cause. After listening to his plan, Douglass not only declined Brown's invitation, he had predicted that the captain and his followers would be captured or killed within hours of their appearance in the streets of Harpers Ferry with guns in their hands.

John Brown had let Douglass depart without reproaches. The discovery that Oliver Brown had equally grave doubts was a far greater shock. How could his own flesh and blood question the fact, as clear to him as morning sunlight, that God had chosen him to strike this blow that would annihilate slavery? After much debate, Oliver—and others who may have shared his
doubts—succumbed to Brown's incandescent faith in his destiny and remained in the game.