Buddhist Catholic Contemplative Evangelical General Christian Hindu Jewish Latter-day Saint Muslim New Visions Progressive Christian

Beliefs

Topics

Columnists

Resource Library

Research Tools

Video

Podcasts

Thought Readers

Faith In Media Tracker

Newsletters

Ad-Free & Subscriber Log-In Subscription Support

Follow Patheos

Home
Progressive Christian
Baldwin Douglass Stevens Brown (Stevens Brown, Stevens Brown)

Baldwin Douglass Stevens Brown (Stevens Brown, Stevens Brown)

Last updated on: December 6, 2023 at 5:07 pm by Fred Clark

0 Comments

Baldwin Douglass Stevens Brown (Stevens Brown, Stevens Brown) 2023-12-06T17:07:30-05:00 Fred Clark

LOGO Patheos Explore the world's faith through different perspectives on religion and spirituality! Patheos has the views of the prevalent religions and spiritualities of the world.

• A series of recent, thoughtful essays in defense of the humanities prompted Iowa history prof Sarah Bond to share this quote from James Baldwin on Bluesky, calling it “the best reason for studying the humanities that I know of”:

You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read. It was books that taught me that the things that tormented me most were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive, or who had ever been alive.

• One of my favorite stories about Baldwin involves his surveillance by the FBI. James Campbell studied that extensive, intrusive, hostile surveillance:

Baldwin was certainly no stranger to activist causes, and that attracted FBI attention. As Campbell notes, his file with the agency was 1,750 pages long, opened in 1960 after Baldwin signed a petition for the Fair Play for Cuba Committee. In 1963, the FBI added him to the Security Index, a “list of citizens who would be arrested first in the event of a state of emergency,” according to Campbell.

Arrested for what? That didn’t matter much to J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI. They’d come up with something. That was the point of that 1,750-page file. Surely if the FBI tracked this man long enough they’d find some evidence that would serve as the pretext for his arrest “in the event of a state of emergency.” What Hoover thought would constitute such a “state of emergency” I’ll leave to you to imagine. (If you’re guessing something really, really racist, you’re on the right track.)

Putting together such a file meant assigning some agent to do it. And that, in turn, meant that some agent in Hoover’s FBI was assigned the task of reading and studying everything James Baldwin wrote. The plays, novels, and stories, the essays, the articles, his correspondence — everything. In effect, then, some unsuspecting agent was basically assigned to take a graduate-level seminar in the collected works of James Baldwin.

And so part of what we have in that massive FBI file on Baldwin is a record of the gradual education of a G-man. This guy spent years studying the ferocious moral and intellectual clarity of Baldwin’s writing and — as anyone would — he found it persuasive and compelling. Much of that file seems to be the work of an agent who came to believe that James Baldwin was a very smart, insightful person who was usually right.

Some people would mistakenly describe this as the agent losing his objectivity. He got too close to his subject, they would say, and so he lost perspective. That’s backwards. He gained perspective and he found his objectivity. To study James Baldwin’s writing objectively ought to lead to the conclusion that he was a very smart, insightful person who was usually right. To come to any other conclusion would be — objectively — wrong.

If you doubt this, I invite you to try it yourself. Read everything Baldwin ever wrote and decide for yourself.

• Something like that is the reason I’m a big fan of Yale historian David Blight. Blight is a respected historian of the Civil War and a leading scholar of Frederick Douglass. As a good, “objective” scholar, he set out to ingest everything there is to learn about Douglass and thus, willingly or not, he has also come to ingest much of what there is to learn from Douglass.

This is what I’ve come to admire about Blight’s history lectures — many of which are available online as audio or video. He will, like all respectable “objective” historians, include discussion of “all sides” of the debates over slavery, but it’s always clear that Douglass’ side is the one Blight thinks was right.

And that, again, is objectively correct. Douglass was right. Almost always. To come to any other conclusion would be subjective nonsense. It’s not that Dr. Blight has a pro-Douglass bias, but that he has arrived at the correct conclusion that any unbiased observer will reach: Douglass was right.

• I bring up David Blight because John Fea sent me down a YouTube hole over the weekend by linking to this lecture on “John Brown’s Holy War: Terrorist or Heroic Revolutionary?” That video is listed as Lecture No. 9 and if you watch until the end YouTube will recommend other lectures in the series and you can wind up learning a lot of fascinating, important history while raking wet leaves on a Saturday.

Fea’s post linking to that video highlights Blight’s observation that the Dred Scott decision ended the possibility of “moderation” or “compromise” on the question of slavery in America. “That’s when you see danger,” Dr. Blight says, “in American political history. It’s when the side that loses a debate cannot accept the result.”

That reminds me of another clarifying observation from James Baldwin: “We can disagree and still love each other, unless your disagreement is rooted in my oppression and denial of my humanity and right to exist.”

That gets at what Blight is saying by “cannot accept the result.” He’s not talking about a January 6-style rejection of legitimate election results, but about what happens when the “political debate” is concluded in a way that results in “the denial of one’s humanity and right to exist.”

When the debate concludes, as Dred Scott did, that you have “no rights which the white man’s Constitution was bound to respect” then you “cannot accept the result.” And you should not accept the result.

Blight discusses all of this to set the scene for his consideration of John Brown, which includes not just Brown himself, but also the five formerly enslaved Black men who died in Brown’s bungled raid on Harper’s Ferry. Two of them — Shields Green and Dangerfield Newby — were escaped slaves whose wives remained enslaved in Virginia. They had no legal or political hope of freeing their wives from captivity, rape, and abuse. The only hope they had was the slender, futile hope of John Brown’s reckless, ill-conceived adventure.

This is what Blight means by “the side that loses a debate cannot accept the result.” Not that your preferred candidate got fewer votes and so now you fear that your capital gains tax rate might marginally increase, but that you and your spouse have been officially deemed as non-persons and those you love are trapped in bondage that is perfectly legal, perfectly constitutional, and blessed by every respectable church.

So Shields Green and Dangerfield Newby died at Harper’s Ferry.

Viewed as objectively as possible, John Brown was a man who was extremely right about a few things and horrifically, disastrously wrong about others. He was certainly wrong about the prospects for conquering the state of Virginia with a Provisional Army of 22 men. He was wrong about Oliver Cromwell and his idiosyncratic theology was an unholy mess.

But John Brown was right about slavery. He was utterly right about it in a time when very few other white men were even partly right about it. What he said and believed about slavery was true.

John Brown was also a terrorist and a madman. But, again, the terrorist and madman was very, very right about the biggest moral question of his time, even as most religious leaders and intellectuals were very, very wrong about that same thing.

• Speaking of John Brown, I appreciate John Brown University in Arkansas for including this page on their website:

The school was founded by the radio evangelist John E. Brown in the early 20th century as a college for people who couldn’t afford college. This John Brown was an interesting guy — not nearly as interesting as that John Brown, but then who is?

That page from John Brown [Not That One] University is fun. It might have been even more fun if it said something like “John E. Brown never freed any slaves by hacking their enslavers to pieces with a broadsword …” but it’d probably be imprudent.

These days, JBU may be best known as the home of the Toilet Paper Game, an annual tradition sometimes called “the greatest technical foul in all of basketball.”

• Thaddeus Stevens College of Technology is about an hour west of here. Their web page about the school’s namesake does not say “Not that Thaddeus Stevens” because it is that Thaddeus Stevens. The one and only.

Stevens is another one of those people who, viewed objectively, was usually right. And America has never fully forgiven him for that.

Here’s a nice piece fromTracy Schorn at the Smithsonian on “Why America Is Just Now Learning to Love Thaddeus Stevens, the ‘Best-Hated Man’ in U.S. History.”

Schorn explains why most Americans learned about Stevens the way I did in school. I learned Thaddeus Stevens name, but not much more than just his name. He was briefly mentioned along with Garrison and a few other abolitionists as examples of unrealistic, irrelevant extremists and scolds who failed to persuade anyone.

The gist of that history was that Stevens can and should be forgotten and ignored. Sure, he was, technically, right. But what did that accomplish? I mean, besides the 13th and 14th and 15th Amendments? And besides the way they utterly transformed the Constitution and the country? Stevens made it so that the Bill of Rights actually adheres to you as a citizen, he secured every civil right you can now claim to possess … but other than that what good did he do?

Both Schorn’s article and that bio at Thaddeus Stevens Tech note that Stevens died before the ratification of the 15th Amendment. It is, indeed, sad that he didn’t live to see that.

On the other hand, it’s also a blessing that he didn’t live to see the subsequent 150+ years of white supremacist judicial bullshit that has — successfully! — pretended the words “The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State” mean something other than what they meant to Stevens and to any other literate person who understands English.

There’s a nice new statue of Thaddeus Stevens in Gettysburg and a new monument to him and his longtime partner, Lydia Hamilton Smith, being built in Lancaster. That’s good.

But really the best monument would be just to stop letting erudite liars like John Roberts and Sam Alito get away with pretending that the Reconstruction Amendments don’t exist.

(I recognize that I’ve discussed these four people in a different order than that suggested by the title of this post, but I’ve left the title in that order so that we can all sing it to the tune of “London Bridge Is Falling Down.” You’re welcome.)

class warfare

history

Previous Post

December 4, 2023

They're not mobile, but they are homes

Next Post

December 8, 2023 LBCF, No. 4: Weird science

Recent Comments

0 | Leave a Comment

"I remember A: but not B:. It was just A: for floppies and C: for ..."

MG Remoaner

A Psalm for Election Day

""Why would God need a watch?""He doesn't, that's why we know a watchmaker made the ..."

damanoid

The possibility of possibility

"30 minutes just to get to the coffee/tea part."

P J Evans

The possibility of possibility

"Are they Juan Ortiz posters? (I have a book of Next Generation ones and the ..."

Scurra

The possibility of possibility

Browse Our Archives

Select a Category class warfare evangelicals Iraq Left Behind Mammon music Uncategorized

Select a Month November 2026 October 2026 September 2026 August 2026 July 2026 June 2026 May 2026 April 2026 March 2026 January 2026 December 2025 November 2025 October 2025 September 2025 August 2025 July 2025 June 2025 May 2025 April 2025 March 2025 February 2025 January 2025 December 2024 November 2024 October 2024 September 2024 August 2024 July 2024 June 2024 May 2024 April 2024 March 2024 February 2024 January 2024 December 2023 November 2023 October 2023 September 2023 August 2023 July 2023 June 2023 May 2023 April 2023 March 2023 February 2023 January 2023 December 2022 November 2022 October 2022 September 2022 August 2022 July 2022 June 2022 May 2022 April 2022 March 2022 February 2022 January 2022 December 2021 November 2021 October 2021 September 2021 August 2021 July 2021 June 2021 May 2021 April 2021 March 2021 February 2021 January 2021 December 2020 November 2020 October 2020 September 2020 August 2020 July 2020 June 2020 May 2020 April 2020 March 2020 February 2020 January 2020 December 2019 November 2019 October 2019 September 2019 August 2019 July 2019 June 2019 May 2019 April 2019 March 2019 February 2019 January 2019 December 2018 November 2018 October 2018 September 2018 August 2018 July 2018 June 2018 May 2018 April 2018 March 2018 February 2018 January 2018 December 2017 November 2017 October 2017 September 2017 August 2017 July 2017 June 2017 May 2017 April 2017 March 2017 February 2017 January 2017 December 2016 November 2016 October 2016 September 2016 August 2016 July 2016 June 2016 May 2016 April 2016 March 2016 February 2016 January 2016 December 2015 November 2015 October 2015 September 2015 August 2015 July 2015 June 2015 May 2015 April 2015 March 2015 February 2015 January 2015 December 2014 November 2014 October 2014 September 2014 August 2014 July 2014 June 2014 May 2014 April 2014 March 2014 February 2014 January 2014 December 2013 November 2013 October 2013 September 2013 August 2013 July 2013 June 2013 May 2013 April 2013 March 2013 February 2013 January 2013 December 2012 November 2012 October 2012 September 2012 August 2012 July 2012 June 2012 May 2012 April 2012 March 2012 February 2012 January 2012 December 2011 November 2011 October 2011 September 2011 August 2011 July 2011 June 2011 May 2011 April 2011 March 2011 February 2011 January 2011 December 2010 November 2010 October 2010 September 2010 August 2010 July 2010 June 2010 May 2010 April 2010 March 2010 February 2010 January 2010 December 2009 November 2009 October 2009 September 2009 August 2009 July 2009 June 2009 May 2009 April 2009 March 2009 February 2009 January 2009 December 2008 November 2008 October 2008 September 2008 August 2008 July 2008 June 2008 May 2008 April 2008 March 2008 February 2008 January 2008 December 2007 November 2007 October 2007 September 2007 August 2007 July 2007 June 2007 May 2007 April 2007 March 2007 February 2007 January 2007 December 2006 November 2006 October 2006 September 2006 August 2006 July 2006 June 2006 May 2006 April 2006 March 2006 February 2006 January 2006 December 2005 November 2005 October 2005 September 2005 August 2005 July 2005 June 2005 May 2005 April 2005 March 2005 February 2005 January 2005 December 2004 November 2004 October 2004 September 2004 August 2004 July 2004 June 2004 May 2004 April 2004 March 2004 February 2004 January 2004 December 2003 November 2003 October 2003 September 2003

TAKE THE

Religious Wisdom Quiz

Do to others as you would have them do to ____.

Select your answer to see how you score.

You Others Themselves Everyone