About book Midnight Rising: John Brown And The Raid That Sparked The Civil War (2011)
An excellent, well-written piece of history by one of my favorite nonfiction writers, who I was able to meet and listen to while he was actually finishing up this volume. Concise and straightforward, he avoids over dramatization in the telling, while ably detailing the times and passions involved in this momentous event. I look forward to Horwitz's next project, and encourage teachers to assign this volume to students interesting in the Civil War. It also raises important questions about homegrown fanaticism and terrorism, how fervent advocates of causes (even opposing ones) view and use similar events. I moved often growing up, and as a result, my memory for places is odd. I vividly remember an old Victorian house in Maryland and most churches my father served in, but have little recall of almost every other house we lived in. I remember that house--and Harpers Ferry.The Civil War was so omnipresent in my early life it was a relative, that guy you never invite but who shows up anyway, gets drunk, and yells obscenities until he's escorted out the door. Our coffee table was covered with books diagramming battles and collections of Mathew Brady photographs. This backfired later: at various famous battle locales, my siblings and I would stage ourselves like the corpses in the photos, to entertain ourselves while my father was doing whatever he was doing--communing with the battlefield, I suppose. By the way, my father's family were Yankees. My mother's were Southern. It made for interesting detours on battlefields when we went to go find the monument of X company of Massachusetts or Connecticut then the X company of Georgia or Florida. (When my mother married my Seattle-native father, her mother told her she was betraying the South. I suspect that was partially the point--my mother's parents were in North Florida and she chose to live in, well, Seattle.) On the wall in whatever house we lived in, you could find at various times among others, a framed piece of confederate currancy, a (Northern) watch list with an ancestor's name on it, and a picture of the ancestor who was charged with caring for Jefferson Davis after the war. There were cannon balls, shrapnel, swords, guns--the Civil War was always there.During the years in Maryland, my usually west-coast family made the most of it: if we missed a nearby battlefield or other momument, it wasn't for lack of trying. (Between my parents, school groups, and camps, I went to Gettysburg 25 times--at least, that was when I stopped counting. Show of hands: who else has been told to "suck it up" and hike up Big Round Top and/or walk Pickett's Charge? At ten? Surely there's someone else.) For all that moving, and all those battlefields, though, I remember Harpers Ferry better than most. (And although it changed hands a number of times in the war, I still struggle to think of it as a battlefield.) I probably didn't go there more than three or four times. I went to what was left of the engine house, walked along the streets, up the hill, saw St. Peter's, watched movies put on by--I'm guessing--the parks service, and marveled at how pretty it was----but nowhere in all that did I understand John Brown's raid. Battlefield museums with light shows, key bridges, fences, bloody farm lanes, churches--fine. I got the point of those. Fighting over land is stupid, but it's the basis of almost every war. A handful of Americans storming a federal armory? To do...what, exactly? What were they going to do with a dozen men and all those guns? Even my 10-year-old brain thought it was foolhardy. MIDNIGHT RISING is different than most Horowitz books. What is charming about CONFEDERATES IN THE ATTIC or BLUE LATITUDES is the mix of history with travel narrative, with moments of laugh-out-loud humor. (You will find no hard-core chickens in this book.) This is a straight-up account of Brown's life, death, and legacy, and if I still don't completely understand what the heck Brown was thinking in 1859, it's not Horowitz's fault. (Mild spoilers, if you've been under a rock for 150 years: he most likely intended to ignite Northern and Southern passions--the North against the South and the South againt the North-- and hasten the Civil War.) Brown succeded, and so does the book. Mostly. Horowitz's voice isn't as strong as it is in other works, but Horowitz isn't part of this one--and with Brown as his subject, no wonder. He's not the sort of guy you'd invite over and if he showed up anyway, he'd give you all a lecture on morality. There's a lot of nuance here: Brown was rigid and vicious and insensitive (sometimes)--but was probably the most progressive man of his day vis-a-vis the equality of man. Sponsored by a handful of northern abolitionists (who struggled to distance themselves after the raid), Brown believed absolutely whites and blacks should be treated the same. You weren't going to find that even in the Alcotts' parlor. What I took away from MIDNIGHT RISING (other than a deep desire that someone would have edited out the redundant biographical information of Brown's followers) was that Brown either 1) actually believed he'd spark a massive uprising (in which case, Harper's Ferry was a stupid place to start, for geographical and demographic reasons) or 2) planned that massive uprising, realized it was going to fail, and still decided to do things in a grand way. Either way, he made some very big mistakes and mislead his followers. Because of my childhood and my quirky cousin the Civil War, I'd been Civil War-ed out for the last twenty years (or so). There's a good chance that if this had been written by anyone else, I'd have passed, but I do like Tony Horowitz. Very glad I read it: I've come away with a childhood mystery mostly solved, a renewed horror of the antebellum world (both of Southern slavery and Nothern hypocricy), and a deep sense of sadness for the many, many lives that were lost between Brown's raid and Appomattox.
Do You like book Midnight Rising: John Brown And The Raid That Sparked The Civil War (2011)?
Excellent book...lots of stuff I didn't know about John Brown told in a fascinating way.
—ted
a good read about a seminal event in the struggle to end the evil of slavery in the US.
—Aria
i learned some stuff, i still can't see why anyone followed him, he was nuts
—HuskyMoon
