Mr. Villard's John Brown is a capital example of the thorough, the conscientious and the candidly critical in historical writing. It may well be described as the first really adequate biography of a man who, whatever one may think of the chief acts of his life, has won a conspicuous place among American immortals. In its preparation no available source of information seems to have been neglected. Original documents, contemporary letters and living witnesses have been examined in all parts of the country. Materials never before utilized have been drawn upon, and use has been made of others whose existence has hitherto been unknown. There is a constant citation of authorities, the note references running far into the hundreds, together with an excellent bibliography. The result is a work that not only meets the demands of the modern scientific school but is of a high literary quality. Perhaps the criticism should be made that there is an obvious tendency to go too minutely into detail, but in view of the importance of the subject this fault may readily be condoned.

Like all other students who have given the matter thoughtful consideration, Mr. Villard is hard put to it to account for John Brown's militant and uncompromising hatred for slavery. He sees clearly enough that Brown's autobiographical statement describing incidents of slavery which he observed in boyhood, is quite futile as an explanatory hypothesis. Why should one who so hated the profession of arms, Mr. Villard pertinently inquires, be the first to take up arms in order to free the slave from his chains? What was there in the humdrum life of an Ohio farmer to cause him to espouse the rôle of a border chieftain in the middle of the nineteenth century? The answer apparently is to be sought in Brown's innate love of freedom, his strenuousness and his proneness to violence. The theory, however, that he was insane, and that his bloody doings in Kansas and Virginia were the frenzied work of a monomaniac, finds no favor with Mr. Villard. Says he, emphatically:

If it could be reasonably declared that he was partially or wholly deranged, it would be easy to explain away those of his acts which at times baffle an interpreter of this remarkable personality—the Pottawatomie murders, for instance. But this cannot be done. Gov. Wise was correct in his estimate of John Brown's mentality; the final proof is the extraordinary series of letters written by him in jail after his doom was pronounced. No lunatic ever penned such elevated and highminded, and such consistent epistles. If to be devoted to one idea, or to a single cause, is to be a monomaniac, then the world owes much of its progress toward individual and racial freedom to lunacy of this variety. If John Brown was insane on the subject of slavery, so were Lucretia Mott and Lydia Maria Child, while Garrison and Phillips and Horace Greeley should never have been allowed to go at large. That their methods of advancing their joint cause differed from John Brown's violent ones, in no wise argues that he went beyond the bounds of sound reason in his efforts for freedom for the blacks. If John Brown was the victim of an “idée fixe,” so was Martin Luther, and so were all the martyrs to freedom of faith. But, examining his record day by day, weighing all the actions of a life of great activity, and reading the hundreds of letters from his pen which have survived to this hour, the conclusion is inevitable that, however bad his judgment at times, however wild the planless assault on Harper's Ferry, John Brown himself had escaped the family taint. * * * The paranoiac invariably betrays himself at last. But the man who sacrifices business prospects, a quiet orderly life, his family's happiness, and the lives of himself and his children, in a crusade which the world has since declared to have been righteous as to its object, cannot, because of his devotion to that purpose, be adjudged a maniac—else asylums for the insane have played too small a part in the world's history.

John Brown, then, as Mr. Villard sees him, must be held strictly accountable for his acts; and on this view it is certain that in dying as he did on the gallows he met a fate which he deserved, if not for the Harper's Ferry raid, assuredly for the affair on the Pottawatomie. In this, it will be recalled, Brown led an armed party against pro-slavery settlers in Kansas to avenge the Border Ruffian attack on Lawrence. But, as the evidence now for the first time fully assembled proves beyond any question, the men whom he and his followers killed were given not the slightest opportunity to defend themselves, but were led from their homes and mercilessly cut down. The result, as is well known, was to plunge Kansas into the horrors of civil war; and this, Mr. Villard insists, quite needlessly.

For he boldly challenges the view that the crusading efforts of Brown and Robinson and Lane were the means of “saving Kansas.” Even if Kansas had not weltered in blood in 1856, it would still, he declares, have been free, since “climate and soil fought in Kansas on the side of the Free State men,” and “the familiar slave crops never could have been raised in Kansas with its bleak Winters.” In fact, Mr. Villard hazards the suggestion that had it not been for Brown and his rifle, Kansas would have been definitely numbered with the Free States earlier than it actually was; while, on the other hand, he frankly concedes that to Brown more than to any other one man must be given the credit for arousing the North to a realizing sense of what Mr. Seward so happily termed an “irrepressible conflict.”

This, of course, was brought about even more through the raid on Harper's Ferry than through his campaigning in Kansas; and most of all through the manner in which he faced the doom confronting him because of his failure at Harper's Ferry. Clearly, Mr. Villard believes that it was in the way he met death rather than in the manner of his life that John Brown served as an inspiration to the people of the Northern States, and aided in creating the wave of anti-slavery sentiment that so soon afterward swept Southward to overwhelm all opposition. Here is the way he states the case, as he sees it:

The True Deliverance came with John Brown behind the bars at Charlestown, when there was suddenly revealed to him how inferior a weapon was the sword he had leaned upon from the time he had abandoned the pursuits of peace for his warfare on slavery. Not often in history is there recorded such a rise to spiritual greatness of one whose hands were so stained with blood, whose judgment was ever so faulty, whose public career was so brief. John Brown is and must remain a great and lasting figure in American history. Not, however, because he strove to undo one wrong by committing another; not because he took human lives in a vain effort to end the sacrifice of other lives and souls entailed by slavery. Judged by the ordinary moral and legal standards, John Brown's life was forfeit after Harper's Ferry. The methods by which he essayed to achieve reforms are never to be justified until two wrongs make a right. It was the weapon of the spirit by which he conquered. In its power lies not only the secret of his influence, and his immortality, but the finest ethical teachings of a life which, for all its faults, inculcates many an enduring lesson, and will forever make its appeal to the imagination.

Mr. Villard's book is bound to provoke much discussion, and even controversy. But, in the main, there would seem to be no doubt that it presents a portrait of John Brown and an appraisal of his career that will in the end be pretty generally accepted.