John Brown, both in life and in legend, holds a particular and persistent sway over American memory and conscience. Nowhere is this more the case than in Kansas. To this day Brown stands as a defiant sentinel in statues of marble and bronze in Kansas City, Kan., and Osawatomie, and he towers apocalyptically above viewers in the dramatic John Steuart Curry mural in the Kansas Statehouse in Topeka.

Born in 1800, the same year as that other fiery insurgent, Nat Turner, Brown — perhaps more than any other American — brought a steely eyed clarity and biblically violent resolve to end the national shame of an ugly, violent system: chattel slavery.

In the wake of the Kansas Wars, the epochal Harpers Ferry Raid and Brown’s own sensational hanging in Virginia in 1859, a slew of biographies ensued. The most recent is David Reynolds’ 500-plus page tome, “John Brown, Abolitionist: The Man Who Killed Slavery, Sparked the Civil War and Seeded Civil Rights.”

Reynolds, who previously has written about that other white-bearded American icon, Walt Whitman, presents here what he terms a “cultural biography” of John Brown, one that acknowledges “the ideas of the time are in the air and infect all who breathe it.”

In particular Reynolds focuses on Brown as an American Cromwell — a comparison made often during Brown’s lifetime and one that, in many ways, still fits.

William A. Phillips, the New York Tribune special correspondent for Kansas, described Brown as “a regular martinet” in his camp. Brown, in Kansas, was the first among abolitionist Free Staters to strike back at the pro-slavery “sons of the gallant South” who had repeatedly attacked the Free Staters with impunity. Brown’s Cromwellian reprisal was swift and bloody at Pottawatomie Creek following the Sack of Lawrence on May 21, 1856, and he continued his unapologetic campaign at Black Jack and Osawatomie.

“He is not a man to be trifled with,” Phillips wrote in 1856, “and there is no one for whom the border ruffians entertain a more wholesome dread than Captain Brown. They hate him as they would a snake, but their hatred is composed nine-tenths of fear.”

Reynolds writes a fine book, full of rich detail, fascinating connections, and with a thorough understanding of the milieu in which Brown existed. Far from being a lone, insane fanatic, Brown was deeply engaged personally and intellectually not only with the abolitionists of New England, Ohio and Kansas, but most importantly with African Americans themselves, whom he befriended, admired, helped and spent his life trying to free.

A few flaws

The book is not without problems. An iconic, searing 1846 daguerreotype of John Brown (p. 87), taken by the renowned African-American daguerreotypist Augustus Washington of Hartford, Conn., is listed in Reynolds’ book as “probably taken in Springfield by a black photographer whose name is unknown.” The daguerreotype is a masterpiece of photographic art and is a prized possession of the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery in Washington, D.C.

Similarly the last photograph ever taken of John Brown (with full beard, p. 356) — one which also graces the cover of the book — is badly misattributed. It was taken by the prominent Boston photographer J.B. Heywood in 1859, not by his successor, J.W. Black. The photograph is not of the Boston Athenaeum’s painting by Nahum B. Onthank, or “Nathan B. Outbank” as Reynolds has it.

Reynolds pays short shrift to his predecessors in biography of Brown. In particular the works of Oswald Garrison Villard (1910), Stephen B. Oates (1970) and Richard 0. Boyer (1973), which stand as extraordinary, penetrating and masterful works of research and scholarship in their own right, receive only passing notice by Reynolds.

Good portrayal

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But these are quibbles. Reynolds has done a remarkable job of rescuing Brown from both fawning acolytes and debunking detractors to show him as he was in his time, and how his actions and words brought on the Civil War and emancipation, and laid the groundwork for the long civil rights struggles that would ensue.

The book also is timely in an era when the words “terror” and “terrorist” are meant to conjure up only foreign devils. Brown himself never shied from the words, and he knew their true nature was all too domestic. Terror had been inflicted mercilessly for centuries on people of African descent in America, and for Brown the war was already on.

His “terrible swift sword” merely proved to be the blade America had forged for itself to fall on by excluding millions of human beings from the lofty principles of freedom and equality outlined in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution.

Karl Gridley is a Lawrence resident and historian.