And Mr. Durney’s point, based on your reasoning, is that the term “Northerners” is also misleading.

As to the notion that the raid was quixotic, this is also an assumption, apparently based on wide spread miseducation about what Brown intended. Brown actually took HF and seized the armory with no real resistance. He knew it the armory was under civilian guard. As he told Gov. Wise of Virginia, who said basically the thing as you, Brown retorted that he had taken HF and held it for nearly two days. In fact, Brown’s plan was to move in and out quickly; he himself said repeatedly that he failed by not following his own plan which was to make a quick strike, occupy HF for only a short time, gather as many enslaved people as available, and move off into the mountains. The conventional notion that slaves did not support Brown has been overturned; there is solid argumentation for a good response with a promise of many more. So the plan was not quixotic; it failed, and failed missions always stand the harsher judgment of historians. But Brown and his men did not go to HF to hole up and fight to the death like their moral counterparts at the Alamo (who fought to the death quixotically for the dream of expanded slave territory). Had Brown not failed in his strategic choices on the ground, the raid would have been a mere first step.

Not everyone who defends Brown is an advocate of PCness, just like everyone who views JB is a white racist. But your view of Brown needs a lot of reconsideration. The Pottawatomie killings were ugly, but the conventional notion of those killings is hardly conclusive. My own reading of those killings is that they were brutal but preemptive–more counter-terroristic than terrorism. Brown was in Kansas territory for months without lifting a hand; he was actually an optimist and his letters show his belief that democracy would prevail in Kansas. But when pro-slavery terrorism overshadowed the territory and the free state side remained passive and naive as to the government’s intervention, not only were free state people generally threatened, but flagrant pro-black people like the Browns WERE targeted. The five men who were killed by Brown’s party were collaborators and there is lots of reason to think they were conspiring against the Browns with lethal intent. The wife of one of the men killed admitted as much when she scolded her doomed husband for his “devilment.” Brown went to Kansas to protect his sons and was drawn into the civil war that was begun by pro-slavery thugs. He didn’t start it but he wasn’t going to let thugs assault his family and if he overreacted (and I don’t think he did), he deserves more sympathy–there was no local or federal constabulary to protect the Browns; the territory was overrun by southern terrorists and democracy was underfoot; the highest leaders in the land had turned a blind eye to slavery’s benefit. He had to act and the men who killed under his command agreed with him, not just his sons, but a neighbor and a son-in-law; the latter argued until his dying day that the killings were necessary for survival. I believe they were and I find it unfortunate that in a society that has suddenly awakened to the realities of terrorism, Brown is seen as one of “them” rather than one of “us.”

If you think that not apologizing for John Brown is PCness, you’re entitled to your opinion. I am a biographer and a student of the man’s life and it is my opinion that across ideological lines, people who have studied Brown the closest tend to agree as to his basic character and integrity. With all due respect, you need to study the man closer. What is going on today in Brown studies is not the triumph of PCness necessarily; it is a breaking away from a lot of traditional, conventional, and hackneyed notions about the man that were themselves born out of snobbery and prejudice in former generations of historians. Regards–LD

And I quote: “I’m not trying to argue that some northerners didn’t become Confederates, only that the term “Southerners” as used by many is misleading.”