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The Pottawatomie Massacre, as it came to be called, and Brown’s later raid on the Harper’s Ferry arsenal in Virginia began a headlong series of events that led to the bloodiest war fought on U.S. soil.
“Whether he actually wielded the sword himself, he led the party and he gave the order,” said University of Kansas historian Jonathan Earle about the Kansas raid.
More than 150 years after Brown’s hanging for the Harper’s Ferry raid in 1859, Americans are still trying to figure out how they feel about the man whose pugilistic opposition to slavery makes him one of the most venerated historical figures among African-Americans.
“John Brown’s brain remains tough to crack,” Earle wrote in his recent book, John Brown’s Raid on Harper’s Ferry: A Brief History With Documents. “Was he good or evil?”
Who was John Brown? And how can we come to an understanding of him that is as complex as the man himself?
One way is through opera, says composer Kirke Mechem, who has devoted nearly 20 years of his life to creating a musical portrait of Brown that is fair and accurate yet emphatic in its portrayal. Brown was a heroic figure, Mechem said — a flawed one, perhaps, but one whose belief that dire actions are sometimes necessary to avoid worse evil still rings true for many.
Mechem’s goal in his opera is “not so much to make John Brown a hero,” he said, “but to show that any time you have a terrible injustice, you’ll have a John Brown rise up and fight against it in any way that he can.”
On Saturday the Lyric Opera of Kansas City presents the world premiere of the Wichita native’s “John Brown,” a labor of love by a composer who has unabashedly admired Brown since childhood.
The opera comes at a time when the notion of violence committed in response to perceived injustice is one of today’s most pressing issues.
“You don’t just do operas about the nice couple who live next door,” said Lyric general director Evan Luskin, adding a caveat:
“We are not taking sides in the debate about John Brown. We’re presenting his life and what he stood for, and the audience can listen and decide what they think.”
The hard part about “knowing” John Brown, Earle said, is that his reputation in the public and even scholarly consciousness has ebbed and flowed according to the tenor of the times.
“Even while he was alive, it was hard to find two people to agree on John Brown and what he represented. Among African-Americans he has always been viewed as a hero. For white Americans he careens from being a sort of political hero to being a murderer and a horse thief.”
After the Civil War, Brown was universally blamed for “getting us into this mess,” Earle said.
But in the turbulent 1960s he was admired by those who sought violence to change an American system they deemed corrupt — only to be discredited as a “terrorist” after 9/11. (It didn’t help that Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh admired Brown.)
Today he’s seen by many historians as a passionate, single-minded and perhaps tortured man who believed America could simply not exist with such an evil as slavery at its core.
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