A Disease in the Public Mind Read Online Free PDF Page A

curious Ferry townsfolk ogled him.
    In the afternoon Virginia’s governor, Henry A. Wise, and several other politicians, including Senator James M. Mason of Virginia and Congressman Clement Vallandigham of Ohio, arrived to question him. Reporters mingled with these visitors. Colonel Lee asked Brown if he wished the newsmen excluded. Brown said he wanted them to stay. He was eager to “make himself and his motives clearly understood.”
    Brown swiftly demonstrated his goal was obfuscation, not clarity. He did his utmost to conceal the identity of his northern backers. He also tried to muddle the scope of his insurrection. He told Senator Mason, “We came to free the slaves, and only that.”
    Congressman Vallandigham asked him if he had been hoping for a general rising of the slaves. “No sir,” Brown lied. “I expected to gather them up from time to time, and set them free.”
    A reporter closed the interview by asking Brown if he had anything further to say. Brown paused for a moment, then replied: “I have nothing to say, only that I claim to be carrying out a measure I believe perfectly justifiable, and not to act the part of an incendiary or ruffian, but to aid those suffering great wrong. I wish to say, furthermore, that you had better—all of you people of the South—prepare yourselves for a settlement of this question . . . sooner than you are prepared for it. You may dispose of me very easily—I am nearly disposed of now; but this question is still to be settled—this Negro question, I mean, the end of that is not yet.”
    While Brown was talking, Lieutenant Stuart led a marine detachment to the Kennedy Farm, where they seized Brown’s maps of the South and his correspondence with his wealthy northern backers—proof of the huge slave insurrection he hoped to create and lead. But finding this evidence and convincing the American people that John Brown was ready to commit mass murder in pursuit of his blood-drenched dream turned out to be two very different things. 16

CHAPTER 1
    Slavery Comes to America
    Long before the first slaves arrived in the English colony of Virginia in 1619, slavery was a thriving institution in the New World. Hundreds of thousands of black men and women were already toiling on the farms and plantations and in the mines of the Spanish and Portuguese empires in Mexico and South America and on the offshore islands we call the West Indies.
    Few people criticized or objected to slavery; it was one of the world’s oldest social institutions, with roots in ancient Babylon, Greece, and Rome. Greece, the proud forerunner of rule by democracy, found no contradiction in insisting that slavery was essential to a thriving republic. The Roman republic and later the empire had tens of thousands of slaves within its borders.
    The Hebrew Bible described Abraham and other early leaders of the Jews as slave owners. In the book of Leviticus, Jehovah told Moses that Jews were forbidden to enslave their brethren, but they were free to buy slaves “from nations around you.” Another biblical passage had a huge influence on associating slavery with black people: Noah’s curse on his son Ham for the sin of seeing his father naked while he was sleeping. (This seemingly harmless actmay be a metaphor for a sexual assault.) Noah condemned Ham’s descendants to be “the lowest of slaves.” Among the offspring of Ham was Kush, the supposed progenitor of the blacks who populated Africa. 1
    The later religion of Islam forbade Muslims from enslaving fellow Muslims. But there was no barrier to enslaving “infidels.” More than a million Christians, captured in wars and conquests, suffered this fate. The Muslims also transported thousands of Africans from nations and tribes that lived south of the Sahara Desert for heavy labor in their Mediterranean empire. Over the centuries, these luckless people acquired a derogatory reputation.