John Brown and Oliver Wendell Holmes on Justice through Force

-- JamesCrowley - 31 May 2012

The Path to Civil War

In the run-up to the Civil War, many Northerners who came to favor abolition were motivated more by concerns about the balance of power between the states than by the plight of four million slaves. Among those whose opposition to slavery was grounded firmly in its immoral nature was the young Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. As an editor of Harvard Magazine he had written and published articles promoting abolition. In the fall of Holmes’ junior year John Brown conducted his ill-fated raid on Harper’s Ferry. Ralph Waldo Emerson, whom Holmes had met and admired greatly, said that Brown had made “the gallows glorious like the cross.” By the winter of his senior year Holmes was wielding a billy club as a bodyguard for Wendell Phillips, a prominent Boston abolitionist who had delivered an oration at Brown’s funeral.

Holmes enlisted in the Union army eleven days after the surrender of Fort Sumter. Although set apart from Brown by his youth, affluence and education, he too was now prepared to kill and die to make men free. Holmes would give the next three years of his life to the Union cause, fighting valiantly and pausing only to recover from wounds received in battle. His experience in the war, and the lessons he drew from it, differ sharply from Brown’s approach to violence and Henry David Thoreau’s analysis of it in his Plea. The two provide very different answers to a fundamental question: Can we justify the use of force in remedying perceived injustice?

Different Lessons from the Same Struggle

John Brown went to the gallows maintaining the firm belief that slavery was wrong and that the measures he had taken to oppose it were appropriate. Through years of fighting and the loss of family and friends he remained resolute. “[T]he reason why such greatly superior numbers quailed before him,” says Thoreau, “was, as one of his prisoners confessed, because they lacked a cause, a kind of armor which he and his party never lacked.” Thoreau cites Balaclava as an example of soldiers fighting bravely while being commanded foolishly, but says that John Brown’s struggle, “in obedience to an infinitely higher command, is as much more memorable than that, as an intelligent and conscientious man is superior to a machine…”

While Holmes never stopped believing that slavery was wrong, his actions during the war seem to have been motivated more by a sense of professionalism and duty than by the cause for which he fought. Very few of his surviving letters from the war make any mention of what he was fighting for, mostly because he made a point of destroying those that did when he got home. While serving Holmes befriended Henry Abbott, a fellow officer who made no secret of his Copperhead views. Abbott was politically opposed to Abraham Lincoln, thought that slavery would die out on its own, and wrote in a letter home that he would not act to enforce the Emancipation Proclamation, “having decidedly too much reverence for the Constitution.”

Despite his politics, Abbott won respect and notoriety for his bravery and composure under fire. Holmes’ admiration of Abbott rested not only on his courage in battle, but on the fact that he willingly, even eagerly exposed himself to grave danger for a cause that he regarded with contempt, frequently while carrying out orders that he knew were stupid. Abbott was killed during the Battle of the Wilderness, shot while standing upright during a firefight in order to better direct the fire of his troops. Holmes never adopted Abbott’s political views, but his example taught Holmes that there was honor in performing one’s duty with indifference to ends.

The carnage that Holmes saw convinced him that war was something we should strive to avoid. The run-up to the Civil War convinced him that nothing was more certain to lead to war than certainty. “When you know that you know,” he would say later in life, “persecution comes easy. It is as well that some of us don’t know that we know anything.” He acknowledged that there were things that we couldn’t help but believe in, even things that we were prepared to fight for, but for Holmes it was more accurate to say that we seek to make our preferences reality than to say that we strive for justice. The solution for Holmes was democracy, which provides a forum for holders of different preferences to fight for those preferences without resorting to actual fighting.

Finding the Center

The approaches to perceived injustice advocated by Brown and Holmes represent opposite sides of a spectrum, each in some ways problematic. A great number of atrocities have been committed by people who firmly believed that they were doing God’s work, and a great deal of suffering has been inflicted while those with the power to help stood on the sidelines. John Brown’s actions today appear heroic, in large part because today we are every bit as sure as he was that the institution he sought to eradicate was grossly unjust. When the righteousness of one’s cause comes into question so does the suitability of the use of force.

Holmes developed his approach while fighting for abolition, which oddly seems to be the cause to which its application is most objectionable. How can democracy provide a forum for different interests to compete when millions are barred from the democratic process? There’s also a fairly high level of absurdity in arguing that we shouldn’t tell slave owners how to live their lives. Democracy provides an adequate forum for settling many disputes, but there are situations in which a majority will be in favor of unjust persecution of a minority. In cases of extreme injustice force may be necessary to override that majority, as the minority should not have to suffer and wait for the majority to do what’s right.