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John Patrick Daly, Robert E. McGlone. John Brown's War against Slavery. New York: Cambridge University Press. 2009. Pp. x, 451. $35.00, The American Historical Review, Volume 115, Issue 3, June 2010, Page 844, https://doi.org/10.1086/ahr.115.3.844
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John Brown has taken on many guises in American history: madman, religious fanatic, revolutionary hero, Christian martyr, terrorist, and chronic failure. Robert E. McGlone dissects and dismisses all these shopworn theories and constructs a “normative” account of Brown's story. Analysis, however, dominates narrative in the book—clearly McGlone's intent. He engages other historians' sources and theories, particularly Stephen Oates's rightly praised biography. Although his eagerness to enter into argument and minutiae mar the narrative flow in several sections, McGlone's judgments are always sound and supported by first-class research. He is a master at illustrating how cherished arguments have their roots in flawed sources distorted by both the passage of time and authors' agendas.
The book is particularly strong on Brown's actions in Kansas, especially the cold-blooded slaughter led by Brown of five proslavery men at Pottawatomie in 1856. While Kansas transformed Brown and confirmed his identity as a warrior against slavery, McGlone shows Brown's path to Pottawatomie to be rooted in relatively prosaic forces. McGlone normalizes Brown, observing that “secular concerns largely shaped his day-to-day life” (p. 8). His ideology was based in social experience and events, not in the religious fantasies depicted by Oates.
