John Brown (1881)

AUTHOR: Douglass, Frederick
PUBLICATION: “John Brown. An Address by Frederick Douglass, at the Fourteenth Anniversary of Storer College.” Dover, NH: Morning Star Job Printing House, 1881.
https://www.loc.gov/item/07012896/
https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/31839/pg31839-images.html

KEYWORDS: Abolition, animals, environment, food, frugality, land, pacifism, slavery

Douglass’s speech eulogizes John Brown, the wool merchant who organized one of the most notable Abolitionist efforts carried out by an Anglo-American activist: that is, the raid on Harpers Ferry, West Virginia, 16-18 October, 1859. During the raid, Brown was captured and later tried for high treason and executed.

Douglass fleetingly mentions that Brown “was fond of animals” (19); this personality trait is not random but contributes to Douglass’s moral elevation of Brown. Douglass depicts Brown as “kind and humane” (16). Crucially, kindness to animals aligns with what Douglass holds to be Brown’s universal benevolence: “He was a good businessman, and a good neighbor. A good friend, a good citizen, a good husband and father: a man apparently in every way calculated to make a smooth and pleasant path for himself through the world. He loved society, he loved little children, he liked music, and was fond of animals. To no one was the world more beautiful or life more sweet” (19). The assertion of Brown’s love of children recurs later in the speech, when Douglass claims that Brown’s life was not lost in vain, hence his enterprise should not be deemed a failure: “No man, who in his hour of extremest need, when on his way to meet an ignominious death, could so forget himself as to stop and kiss a little child, one of the hated race for whom he was about to die, could by any  possibility fail” (28).

While the text is not veg*n, it shares common ideological traits with notable veg*n trends of the nineteenth-century United States. Love of children and nonhuman animals, as a positive moral trait, was theorized by phrenologists, such as Lydia Folger Fowler, who also contributed to veg*n thought. In her Familiar Lessons on Physiology and Phrenology (1847), Fowler locates the origin of the love of offspring and animals in one of the “social organ[s]” of the brain: "Philoprogenetiveness" (31). In turn, she theorizes "Destructiveness" as responsible for the propensity to gratuitous violence (50), which is antithetical to Douglass’s portrait of Brown. For Fowler, "Philoprogentiveness" and "Destructiveness" respectively translate into kind or hurtful treatment of animals.

Douglass’s emphasis on plainness in his portrait of Brown echoes the priorities of ethical veg*nisms at the time. Brown’s frugality is said to reflect not only his genuineness but also, paradoxically, his pacifism: “It [Brown’s plan] did not, as was supposed by many, contemplate a general rising among the slaves, and a general slaughter of the slave masters (an insurrection he thought would only defeat the object), but it did contemplate the creating of an armed force which should act in the very heart of the South ... . He would shed no blood and would avoid a fight except in self-defense, when he would of course do his best” (23, 24).

Douglass’s moral description of Brown echoes the Transcendentalist Abolitionism of authors such as Henry David Thoreau, according to whom Truth inheres in nature. This idea undermined the authority of the rule of law as an Enlightenment ideal. Douglass says that, “Against truth and right, legislative enactments were to his [Brown’s] mind mere cobwebs—the pompous emptiness of human pride—the pitiful outbreathings of human nothingness” (19). Douglass illustrates his awareness that discourse is only arbitrarily related to what he perceives as true justice, hence legal discourse on slavery jeopardizes the virtue that can be attained through frugality or temperance.