How have textbooks’ portraits of John Brown changed through time?

From the text:

The treatment of Brown, like the treatment of slavery and Reconstruction, has changed in American history textbooks. From 1890 to about 1970, John Brown was insane. Before 1890 he was perfectly sane, and after 1970 he has slowly been regaining his sanity. Before reviewing six more textbooks in 2006-07, I had imagined that they would maintain this trend, portraying Brown’s actions so as to render them at least intelligible if not intelligent. In their treatment of Brown, however, the new textbooks don’t differ much from those of the 1980s, so I shall discuss them all together. Since Brown himself did not change after his death— except to molder more—his mental health in our textbooks provides an inadvertent index of the level of white racism in our society. Perhaps our new textbooks suggest that race relations circa 2007 are not much better than circa 1987.

Indeed, the first edition of this textbook came out in 1956, long before the changes wrought by the civil rights movement had any chance to percolate through our culture and influence the writing of our history textbooks. The choice of language—from “fanatical figure” and “dubious dealings” to “fiendish butchery”—is hardly objective. One man’s “stalk” is another’s “walk.” Bias is also evident in the choice of details included and omitted. The account throughout makes Northerners the initial aggressors, omitting mention of the earlier murders by pro-slavery Southemers. Actually, free-staters, being in the majority, had tried to win Kansas democratically and legally; it was pro-slavery forces who had used terror and threats to try to control the state. No reader of Pageant would guess that pro-slavery men had recently killed five free-state settlers, including the two slain in the Lawrence raid. Nor had Brown moved to Kansas “with his large family”; rather, he had moved to the Adirondacks, hoping his sons would join him there, but five sons and their families instead went to Kansas, hoping to farm in peace. They then asked their father for aid when threatened by their pro-slavery neighbors. Other errors include “presumed to be proslaveryites” (they were), and “literally hacked to pieces” (they weren’t).

Eight other books, new and older, are negative, although they don’t imply that he was crazy. The other nine are openly hostile. Several textbooks, including four of the six recent ones, emphasize the claim that no slaves actually joined Brown. Boorstin and Kelley makes the point at length: “The party forcibly ‘freed’ about 30 slaves. Taking these reluctant people with them, Brown and his men retreated to the arsenal. Ironically, the first person to die in the affair—killed by John Brown and his men—was an already-free black gunned down by these ‘liberators.’ ”

Four textbooks still linger in the former era when Brown’s actions proved him mad. “John Brown was almost certainly insane,” opines American History. The American Way tells a whopper: “[L]ater Brown was proved to be mentally ill.” The 2006 American Pageant, like its predecessor, characterizes Brown as “deranged,” “gaunt,” “grim,” and “terrible,” says that “thirteen of his near relatives were regarded as insane, including his mother and grandmother,” and terms the Harpers Ferry raid a “mad exploit.” Other books finesse the sanity issue by calling Brown merely “fanatical.” Not one author, old or new, has any sympathy for the man or takes any pleasure in his ideals and actions.

After 1890, textbook authors inferred Brown’s madness from his plan, which admittedly was far-fetched. Never mind that John Brown himself presciently told Frederick Douglass that the venture would make a stunning impact even if it failed. Nor that his twenty-odd followers can hardly all be considered crazed, too. Rather, we must recognize that the insanity with which historians have charged John Brown was never psychological. It was ideological. Brown’s actions made no sense to textbook writers between 1890 and about 1970. To make no sense is to be crazy.