Secret Six: The True Tale of the Men Who Conspired with John Brown

Secret Six: The True Tale of the Men Who Conspired with John Brown by Edward Renehan offers the reader some keen insight into the fuel that fed the fire that was John Brown. The author does a good job of showing what drove John Brown and how he convinced others, with more intellect then sense, to fund his ill conceived plans for abolition. The oft used saying about the road to hell being paved with good intentions comes to mind. But were John Brown's intentions all that good? In this biographical tome John Brown is seen as an individual who, in the name of freeing slaves in the United States, developed more of a Moses complex than a Messiah complex. He was driven strictly by hate. He simply, based on his own suspicions, murdered people in Kansas, who were not even slave holders. Not to mention the people he got killed hatching his crazy plans to free slaves, which included free and runaway slaves. To his backers, mostly from Boston and vicinity, he embellished his non-accomplishments. In 21st century parlance, he was one sick pup. His plans to free the slaves had no bases in reality, and really no planning. He was a failed business man, with a cursory understanding of Calvinism who convinced the educated abolitionists in New England, and some in New York, that he was ordained to to put an end to slavery. This book is a good read if one wants to get some background on what went came before and went into the notorious raid on Harpers Ferry.

John Brown remains an elusive figure even today, nearly 150 years and who knows how many books after his execution. But our continuing fascination for the Brown--was he a saint? a madman? a traitor? a hero?--tends to overlook the fact that his activities, both in bleeding Kansas and Harpers Ferry, were financed and supported by many aristocratic and wealthy New England abolitionists. Edward Renehan's genuinely fascinating book offers us the first in-depth look at the leading six of them: Thomas Wentworth Higginson, a pastor who became a colonel of black troops in the Civil War; Theodore Parker, minister and philosopher; Franklin Sanborn, educator; Samuel Howe, physician; and Gerrit Smith of New York and George Luther Stearns of Boston, wealthy businessmen. For me, the overriding impression from Renehan's narrative is that the involvement of the "secret six" with Brown was not unlike a Gilbert & Sullivan comedy. The six raised money for weapons that were frequently low quality; they self-importantly sprinkled letters to one another with codewords: "shepherds" for soldiers; "furniture" for guns, "Hawkins" for Brown; they insisted on not knowing details about Brown's plans to protect themselves, yet got petulant when they felt they were kept out of the loop; when Brown was captured, all but one of them (Higginson) panicked mightily (Higginson, to his never-ending mortification, seems never to have been recognized as a conspirator by the authorities); and by the time Brown was hanged on 2 December 1859, Howe and Stearns had fled the country, Parker was dying of consumption in Italy, Sanborn couldn't make up his mind whether or not he ought to flee, Smith was in an insane asylum, and Higginson was planning a half-cocked (and never pulled off) plan to rescue Brown's still imprisoned companions in the crazy raid on Harpers Ferry. All this is absurd and even silly. But things take on a much more ominous tone when Renehan paints a portrait of Brown as a religious fanatic who seems indifferent to life in Kansas (the Pottawatomie massacre is just he most famous example); who believed that his raid on Harpers Ferry was approved by God and hence infallible; whose military planning included the bizarre insistence that low ground was more defensible than high; and who apparently felt no compunction about adding deception and common theft to murder in the pursuit of his goal to spark a slave insurrection. The fascinating subtext of Renehan's book, then, is a question: how is it that well-educated, wealthy, upper-class men could've so fallen under the sway of a man like Brown that they were willing to risk treason to finance his insurrection (notwithstanding that after the revolt failed they lost their nerves)? Part of the answer lies in the secret six's hatred of slavery and their despair over a legal end to it. But part of the reason must also have been Brown's charisma. Mad as he probably was--as even Higginson years later said he was--his magne

No one has done more than Renehan to explore and explain the Byzantine tale of abolitionist John Brown and his idealistic but confused (and sometimes absurd) northeastern bankers. This is a splendid story that, by polishing with his customary narrative excellence, Renehan has turned into a real gem.

THE SECRET SIX does a wonderful job of revealing the tangled web of intrigue that lay behind John Brown's 1859 incursion at Harpers Ferry. This is stunning stuff: six affluent northeasterners, one of them the husband of poetess Julia Ward Howe and another the leading Unitarian minister of his day, financing terrorism in slave states -- and going about it methodically, calmly, and deliberately. What a story. And so well told.

I notice that three Pulitzer Prize-winning historians disagree with Mr. Shear's scathing criticism of THE SECRET SIX. Garry Wills, author of LINCOLN AT GETTYSBURG, says "Renehan admirably works himself into the inner circle of these would-be conspirators for good." James McPherson, author of BATTLE CRY OF FREEDOM, says: "In vivid prose, THE SECRET SIX unravels the mysteries of the six prominent abolitionists who supported John Brown but abandoned him to his fate after the ill-starred raid at Harpers Ferry. Edward Renehan has made an important contribution to our understanding of the Civil War and its causes." And C. Vann Woodward, editor of MARY CHESTNUT'S CIVIL WAR, writes: "With their own words and private correspondence, this remarkable book reveals more secrets of the Secret Six than John Brown himself ever knew." The book has also been praised by the New York Times, the Boston Globe, the Baltimore Sun, and Esquire Magazine. Mr. Shear, it seems, stands alone. -- Arnold Roosevelt ([email protected])