Better and Worse Worsts

Sadakat Kadri

The Trial in American Life by Robert Ferguson
Chicago, 400 pp, £18.50, March 2007, ISBN 978 0 226 24325 2

On 16 October 1859, a white anti-slavery agitator called John Brown led 21 followers in a raid on the federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry, Virginia. A previous expedition against a Kansas slave-owning settlement had ended in five deaths, but Brown had far grander hopes for his new enterprise – to start an insurrection across the South. The plan was as optimistic as its execution was incompetent. His would-be guerrillas were carrying 950 sharpened pikes but no provisions, and Harpers Ferry lay in a region where whites outnumbered slaves by nearly seven to one. When Brown surrendered after 36 hours, ten of the 17 dead came from his own party – and not a single person, captive or free, had been won over to his suicidal scheme.

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Vol. 29 No. 10 · 24 May 2007 » Sadakat Kadri » Better and Worse Worsts (print version)
Pages 17-18 | 2557 words

Letters

From Derek Robinson

Sadakat Kadri says that John Brown’s ‘previous expedition against a Kansas slave-owning settlement had ended in five deaths’ (LRB, 24 May). But it wasn’t an expedition (with its military overtones) and the ‘settlement’ wasn’t a town, just a remote scattering of houses. The people who lived there, like many in Kansas, were pro-slavery, but that didn’t make them slave-owners. Brown, accompanied by five of his sons, arrived late at night and attacked three isolated families, hacking the men to death with broadswords. (He got his sons to do this.) As for Harpers Ferry: the first man to die there was Hayward Shepherd, a railroad baggage-master, shot by Brown’s sentries. He was a free negro.

Derek Robinson
Bristol

From Robert Ferguson

Despite Sadakat Kadri’s claims, my book The Trial in American Life gives ample explanation of the American reaction to terrorism (LRB, 24 May). When quoted in context, my observation that popular media coverage of ‘lurid personal crime now trumps offences of far greater legal significance and impact on people’ is hardly a ‘puzzling claim’. It is instead an empirical fact based on an examination of news sources today. One may quibble over trials not treated, as Kadri has done, but my book does not claim to be a conventional history of famous trials or of any one kind of prosecution. My aim was to explain exactly how and why certain courtroom events capture the imagination of a community and go on to control its future thinking.

Robert Ferguson
Columbia University