![]() The speech is about the Dred Scott decision. Don’t just read that first lyrical, biblical paragraph, read what Lincoln goes on the argue. Now in your reader, your Lincoln Reader, edited by Mike Johnson, you have the House Divided speech, but read past the first page. But inside, Lincoln gave his now famous House Divided speech. It was on the outside steps of that State House where Barack Obama began his campaign almost exactly a year ago. ![]() In the opening of his campaign he decided to open it in the Legislative Hall of the old State House in Illinois. House of Representatives and then a failed attempt at re-election, a guy with very little experience when he ran for President. And this guy, Abe Lincoln, with one term in the U.S. Senate against Stephen Douglas - Stephen Douglas, the same Stephen Douglas, author of the Kansas-Nebraska Act parliamentarian genius of the Compromise of 1850 the man most associated with the Democratic Party’s theory of popular sovereignty for Kansas and Nebraska and the whole of the West. The year before John Brown’s raid the most important, the most exhilarating, and by far the most substantively interesting political debates in American history would occur in Illinois, when Abraham Lincoln runs for the U.S. ![]() “A House Divided”: The Lincoln-Douglas Debates You can weigh John Brown’s body well enough, but how and in what balance do you weigh John Brown? He had no gift for life, no gift to bring life, but his body and a cutting edge, and he knew how to die.” More on old John Brown coming up. Measure a wave with it, measure fire, cut sorrow up in inches, weigh content. “The law is our yardstick and it measures well, oh well enough when there are yards to measure. John Brown - it’s not easy to decide - was he a heroic revolutionary or a midnight terrorist? This is Benét’s verse, embedded in a 250-page epic poem. And embedded in that poem is this verse where Benét, I think, captured the dilemma of John Brown. So did Stephen Vincent Benét in a famous and classic lyric, epic poem called John Brown’s Body, published in the 1920s. Almost all major African-American poets in the twentieth century attempted their John Brown poem. That’s in part because next year is the 150 th anniversary of the Harpers Ferry raid. And we’re in the midst right now of a John Brown biography revival. Poets, songwriters, lyricists, biographers, those who would come to love him, those who would come to hate him, and those who cannot quite figure out what to do with him, would never stop writing about him. Unfortunately, they often have a lot to do with violence, and we’ll come back to this point at the end today.īut John Brown was far, far, far, far more important dead than he’d ever been alive. There are catalytic events in history, that is, events around which ideas, forces, movements, problems coalesce. In some ways he wasn’t very lovable, until he died on the gallows, and the gallows made him heroic - at least to some people - and it made him all but the devil to others. John Brown never made it easy for people to love him. And we’re going to discuss mostly today the story of one abolitionist you could say the most famous abolitionist, certainly the most notorious American abolitionist, John Brown. Now 1857 is, of course, the final year of the playing out of Bleeding Kansas and we’ll return to that in just a second. And if you were African-American, that really meant something. Professor David Blight: On a morning in the second week of March, 1857, Americans grew up living - they didn’t all quite understand it yet - but they grew up living in the land of the Dred Scott decision. The Civil War and Reconstruction Era, 1845-1877 HIST 119 - Lecture 9 - John Brown's Holy War: Terrorist or Heroic Revolutionary?
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