The Secret Six: John Brown and the Abolitionist Movement

by Otto Scott

The Secret Six: John Brown and the Abolitionist Movement, including Notes, Bibliography, and Index, 375 pages.

(First Edition, New York Times Book Co., 1979. Second Edition, The Foundation for American Education, 1987, as The Secret Six: The Fool as Martyr. Third Edition, Uncommon Books, Seattle, Wash., 1993, as The Secret Six: John Brown and the Abolitionist Movement.)

Unlike previous biographies of John Brown, this is the first to look at the rich men who funded his attack on Harper's Ferry. It looks into their backgrounds and personalities, their associations with Emerson, Thoreau, and other Transcendentalists, and places them not on the fringe, but in the center of the Abolitionist movement.

In the process, antebellum New England takes on a new and more interesting aspect than the whitewashes of the past. This is history as it was, not as it is taught by the winners of the Civil War.

First published by Times Books in 1979, The Secret Six elicited the following comments (among others):

"The author's thesis is that John Brown and the cabal of eminent Massachusetts clergymen, literati and wealthy businessmen, the Secret Six, who encouraged and financed him were pioneers in a use of terror that in our day has come to plague the world: the idea that killing even innocent people is moral if it serves a greater good." The New Yorker

"...Scott's accomplishment is considerable, and worth studying, not only as a signal contribution to the bibliography of terrorism, but as a vivid and penetrating account of an awful phase of our history." Norman Corwin in The Los Angeles Times

"Thanks to Otto Scott's energetic and intricate account of past delusions of righteous grandeur, terrorism may not in the future be so easy to rationalize away." Dr. Gordon M. Pradl in Chronicles of Culture

"If Scott's thorough study of the half﷓secret movement behind John Brown receives the attention it deserves . . . there will be less adulation, even in liberal and radical circles, of a 'reformer' as mad and merciless as any 20th century terrorist. And there should be some reassessment of the famous Northern abolitionists who made mad Brown their tool." Russell Kirk.

"Among other distinctions, John Brown is the only known mass﷓murderer in American history to be remembered as a national hero." M. Stanton Evans.

Now an underground classic for its "incorrect" perspective but eminently correct historical accuracy, this is the definitive book on the exemplar of modern political terror (the practice of murdering helpless and innocent people to make a political point) and the physical origins of the Civil War.

Genres: History, Nonfiction, Politics

256 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1979

About the author

Otto Scott was a journalist and author of corporate histories who also wrote biographies on notable figures such as the abolitionist John Brown, James I of England and Robespierre.

Reviews

[Peter Bringe · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is not a great work in primary research, but rather in the harmonization and interpretation of the history of John Brown and the Abolitionist movement. While there are a few slower parts, the writing is grand and exciting. The narrative follows the development of Northern intellectual thought from about 1830 to 1860. Revivalists, Unitarians, Transcendentalists, and New England elite form an interesting mix of actors in the drama. The drama is one of friends and societies: friendships that impacted a country. It follows the life of John Brown and how he and his terrorizing actions in Kansas intersected with the revolutionary ideas of the Abolitionists.

One of the insightful aspects of this book is Otto Scott's examination of how New England orthodoxy broke down into the new American religion centered on human will and social reform (which still used the terms of the older Christianity). This had both "evangelical" and liberal branches (e.g. Charles G. Finney/Theodore Weld and William E. Channing/Waldo Emerson, respectively), but both branches shared a common belief in the goodness of man and that sin was rooted in society, and thus that salvation came through human exertion and social change. Slavery would be the first of many causes of this social gospel. Both branches also shared a dislike of the established church and the Calvinism of the past.

The abolitionist movement was more than merely an anti-slavery movement. It was a revolutionary, religious movement seeking to eradicate the sin of slavery from society (more precisely, from someone else's society). The rhetoric matched this revolutionary stance and led to the ethics of terror that John Brown used. The American Civil War was surely a complicated event, and by no means were all Northerners abolitionists (though it may have looked that way to Southerners), yet this book is very helpful in understanding the war and its causes.

Scott quotes Reverend H.D. King saying of John Brown,
"I tried to get at his theology…But I could never force him down to dry sober talk on what he thought of the moral features of things in general. He would not express himself on little diversions from the common right for the accomplishment of a greater good. For him there was only one wrong, and that was slavery. He was rather skeptical, I think. Not an infidel, but not bound by creeds…He believed in God and Humanity, but his attitude seemed to be 'We don't know anything about some things. We do not know about the humanity matter. If any great obstacle stands in the way, you may properly break all the Decalogue to get rid of it.'" (p. 251)

[Elijah Williams · Rating 4 out of 5]

Scott writes a good history. "The Secret Six" tells you what few others have. The book covers the abolitionist movement and ideology that began almost half a century prior to the civil war in the United States that it caused. It gives you a close up of the six men who were primary movers on the abolition stage in the years leading up to the war, and who financed and encouraged the terrorist John Brown for their cause. The strange character John Brown, who rose to the status of a saint among his supporters and sympathizers for his role as agitator and murderer, first in the Kansas territory and later at the Harpers Ferry arsenal, is covered in depth. Scott also shows the distinct connection between the abolition movement and the Transcendentalist and Unitarian religions that incubated it. Over all, great book and necessary read.

EW

[Annalise Dorr · Rating 5 out of 5]

I had heard a little about John Brown, but this book was very enlightening and showed how Brown was a murderer funded by Northern men who never faced justice.

[Kent · Rating 4 out of 5]

The tragedy of most great movements in Church history is that they inevitably decline. The tragedy of New England Puritanism is that it did not. Instead, it mutated. Of abnormalities within the healthy Calvinist body there were plenty. Suddenly and strangely, however, they mutated into an aggressive cancer that proliferated in a paroxysm of counterfeit life. By the beginning of the nineteenth century, just a few generations after Jonathan Edwards, morality had become detached from Christ and from life in the Church; as Chesterton put it, all the ordinary virtues went mad.

The virtues, abstracted, became individually absolute, varying according to the pet cause of the reformer. Thus faddish diets, communalism, Transcendentalism, political reform, education, work with the disabled, and increasingly, the abolition of slavery, displaced Christ as the new saviors of New England.

The abolitionist cause, deified, could not admit of the gradual reform befitting a temporal cause. And this new Deity was no benevolent one. Its prophets ran the course from calls for disunion, to outright treason, to the demand for bloody sacrifice.

Just in time, along came John Brown, ripe for the plucking by these prophets. He was the archetypal fanatic: restless, charged with unhealthy brilliance, full of his own brand of religion, chronically in debt, inclined to paranoia: the personification of New England's malignant tumor. His first wife went insane, and dementia temporarily struck his oldest son. Brown himself was not notably stable. In these circumstances he resembled more than one of his "Secret Six" sponsors and other prominent intellectuals: mental disorders of one kind or another hovered on the fringes of radicalism all over the North.

Otto Scott traces, with great skill, the labyrinthine movements of radicalism, from the effete Boston circles of Emerson and Thoreau, to the terrorism and treason of Bleeding Kansas, to the overwrought emotions in Washington, D.C., culminating finally, and embarassingly, in Brown's miserable failure at Harper's Ferry.. It appears the slaves did not see things in quite the same way as their would-be benefactors and failed to join the insurrection. In fact, they completely ignored this new Christ erected on their behalf.

In the North it was different. Preachers all over the region compared Brown, on openly equal terms, to the old Christ they had discarded. John Brown's Body was at least as efficacious as Christ's body, and in even more mystical ways--ironically enough for the rationalists and skeptics of Boston. Bits of wood from his gallows were at least as current there as fragments of the True Cross in Rome, and at least as fraudulent.

Shocked by this attempt to incite a bloody revolt in their midst, by the open approval by the Northern establishment, and fearing the worst from the election of a Republican president, the South began preparing for secession.

[Douglas Wilson · Rating 4 out of 5]

Excellent.