<< 1 >>
Rating: 
Summary: A BRILLIANT WORK
Review: John Stuaffer has one of the finest minds and finest prose styles of any contemporary historian. This book is both brilliant and a wonderful read. It won the prestigious Frederick Douglass Prize "for the year's best non-fiction book on slavery, resistance and/or abolition, the most generous history prize in the field, and the most respected and coveted of the major awards for the study of the black experience" ... That fact alone should answer any comments of the book being deeply flawed by any less respected historian with his own religious ax to grind about John Brown. No one who buys and reads this book will be disappointed.
Rating: 
Summary: A Review from a religious biographer of John Brown
Review: The Black Hearts of Men is a well-written and thoughtful study of four closely-associated anti-slavery figures. John Stauffer is an excellent writer, and he should be credited for taking a fair approach to Brown, free of the usual bias and thinly-veiled racial-political scorn that motivates so many white male writers on the subject.Stauffer must also be credited for overcoming the difficulties of reading Gerrit Smith's (one of the four figures in the study) handwriting. He has also brought four men--two black and two white--together in an engaging study, something apropos of this age of diversity awareness, and something long overdue from the academy. The author introduces and reintroduces Frederick Douglass, James McCune Smith, Gerrit Smith, and John Brown in the context of partnered (or at least overlapping) struggle. He seeks to flesh out various aspects of their worldviews and interests, including their self-presentation (via daugerreotypes, a new photographic technology in the mid-19th century), their sympathy for women's and native rights, and other aspects. Yet Stauffer's study is deeply flawed insofar as he attempts to yoke the four men in a similar style of religious belief---particularly insofar as John Brown is concerned. In fact, Stauffer's analysis of Brown as a religious figure is thin, generalized, and largely self-serving in its speculation. In essence, Stauffer contends that John Brown, like his three friends, moved away from conventional religion. The author would have us believe that Brown repudiated his Puritan theology for some Perfectionist form of millennnialism. The problem with this thesis is that its author has ignored millennialism in its orthodox forms in Puritanism, and the fact that Brown was immersed in millennial belief from his childhood. The issue is not millennialism, as Stauffer would suggest, but the type of millennial viewpoint that Brown had. In fact, Brown's millennialism was Puritan and orthodox. Clever terms like "sacred self-sovereignty" notwithstanding, the author's soup is very watery and highly problematic. Unlike Gerrit Smith, John Brown in fact remained firmly based in his Puritan Calvinist theology, as his associates (like T. W. Higginson) recognized, even until the last. There are other dangerous speculations that Stauffer employs to extend the religious portrait of Brown---sort of like painting with a broad brush, too broad to do justice to Brown's religious life. Certainly, Stauffer needs to look more closely at his sources, which he sometimes fudges on to make a point. He clearly does this in his strong suggestion that Brown was involved in a series of seances in Kansas in late 1857. If he had done his work more carefully, Stauffer would have seen that Brown was not at those occult practices. And if he understood Brown's religious life, he would not even have tried to put him there in the first place. The Black Hearts of Men is welcomed as a study, much as thirsty man may receive a glass of water with gratitude. We need more works like this, and less like the typically biased narratives that have come from academia about John Brown. Yet this glass is only half full--or is that half-empty?
<< 1 >>
| 
