"Civil" War wounds: William Wells Brown, violence, and the domestic narrative

African American Review, Spring-Summer, 2005 by Jennifer James

Calling the war the "Slaveholders' Rebellion" in his introduction, Brown begins his chronology with Crispus Attucks, the fugitive slave who was the first to fall in the Boston Massacre. Writing of Attucks's escape from bondage in one sentence and the massacre at Boston in the next, Brown represents Attucks's slave-break and his involvement in the war in one fluid movement, from fugitive to revolutionary, collapsing the distinction between slave and patriot. He devotes the next three chapters to Nat Turner, Denmark Vesey, and Madison Washington, each of whom planned a slave revolt. He follows these installations with "The Growth of Slave Power," a chapter characterizing the expanding proportions of slavery as an overfed "monster" (40). The next chapter describes John Brown's raid on Harper's Ferry, emphasizing the roles played by John Copeland and Shields Green, the only two blacks captured alive. Quoting an article in the Baltimore Sun that marvels at Copeland's "unwavering fortitude" before his execution, Brown adds that Shields "behaved with equal heroism" (49). He concludes: "Shields Green ... died as he had lived, a brave man, and expressing to the last his eternal hatred to human bondage, prophesying that slavery would soon come to a bloody end" (49).

In Brown's book, the Civil War begins thereafter, with black men heeding (albeit unsuccessfully) Lincoln's call for 75,000 Union volunteers. By positioning black soldiers along a continuum of American slave revolutionaries, Brown transforms the Civil War into the greatest in a series of slave revolts, placing the black male in direct, armed confrontation with his master/monster: "an opportunity of settling with the 'ole boss' for a long score of cruelty" (157). Far from being something as removed from African American life as a conflict over "state's rights," the war instead becomes slavery's bloody finale, the inevitable conclusion to an inhumane institution prophesied decades before by a black man with his dying breath. Indeed, in his 1854 meditation on the slave revolution in Santo Domingo and its leader Toussaint L'Ouverture, Brown predicted that if slaves rose up, then "the God of Justice would be on their side" (qtd. in Levine 502). Thus, he defines revolt as a morally righteous materialization of R/republican ideology and divine retribution, and envisions such uprising as the completion of the "revolution that was commenced in 1776" (502). In the 1853 Clotel, Brown had already fused the philosophies of black slave "revolt" and white American "revolution." There, George Green, on trial for insurgency, provocatively asks, "Did not American revolutionists violate the laws when they struck for liberty? They were revolters, but their success made them patriots--we were revolters, and our failure makes us rebels" (226). Thus, while the history of slave revolts left many "failed" bodies--wounded, wrecked, and even obliterated by violence--it was nevertheless a heroic violence of slaves' own making, in which they forcefully asserted selves that centuries of enslavement had attempted to de-create. These bodies, then, represented willing and necessary forfeitures in the making of a manly race and, as Brown sees it, in the making of a black American.