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John Brown Retried
I am doing an internship as a high school teacher in a Florida public school. After observing for several weeks, I took over teaching responsibility last week. My first unit was a retrial for John Brown. The students in all four periods of "American History" read a selection of primary sources from John Brown: Great Lives Observed, and then wrote a paragraph or two on whether or not they thought the Harper's Ferry Raid was moral or immoral. Over eighty percent of the students said that his actions were morally righteous.
The prosecution teams argued that the juries should disregard their personal feelings about slavery and find John Brown guilty on the basis that he committed the crimes. There were some funny moments - mostly pointing to the fact that for students today slavery is literally unimaginably evil. At one point the prosecution called Wise, the Governor of Virginia, as a witness, and he announced that he was an abolitionist as well, but thought John Brown used the wrong methods. Another prosecution team called ultra-pacifist William Lloyd Garrison to the stand to show that there were alternatives to violence. The notion that William Lloyd Garrison would testify for the state to help sentence a man to death for murder didn't strike any incongruity bells for them. In another class the defense used Garrison's brilliant speech in defense of Brown as strong testimony. The defense teams really did a good job - they pulled from speeches and essays by Garrison, Wendell Phillips, Thoreau, Brown, and Emerson. They penned speeches "by" Harriet Tubman and Frederick Douglass. They argued that not only was the violent raid justified by the horror of slavery, but also that given the historical conditions (particularly the Dred Scott decision and the fact that the South censored anti-slavery speech and books) violence was the only hope for freeing the slaves. Another highlight was one student's argument that the people killed at Harper's Ferry were not "innocent bystanders" because "if you are not trying to stop slavery you are guilty." Unfortunately, this testimony failed to convince most of the jurors. One of the classes acquitted Brown of all charges. But the other three hung him, although in one of those three the jurors found him guilty only of inciting rebellion and were unhappy that he would be hung. Why did most jurors - most of whom had found John Brown moral on first blush - after hearing arguments by the defense (which struck my ears as overwhelming to the point that I was predicting acquittal on all charges in all classes), decide to find John Brown's actions worthy of capital punishment? |
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Over the next several
days we prepared for and conducted a trial of John Brown on the
charges of murder, treason, and incitement of servile rebellion.
Each jury member was given a three page pamphlet on "Jury
Veto Power" to let them know that they could vote their
conscience and need not enforce unjust laws.|
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