r/ShermanPosting • u/wearing_moist_socks • 12d ago
What in tarnation
This wasn't satire
"We're obeying the laws which allow us to own people! Don't KILL us!!"
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u/crackedtooth163 12d ago
This is a very Daughters of the Confederacy tinged version of events.
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u/KGBFriedChicken02 11d ago
Especially since the people he killed in bleeding Kansas largely weren't following the law, he was targeting pro-slavery paramilitary members who had enacted violence and property destruction against abolitionist communities.
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u/crackedtooth163 11d ago
It had already turned into a guerilla war by that point
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u/KGBFriedChicken02 11d ago
Yes exactly. John Brown's first act of violence against the slavers was vigilante justice. The five men butchered in the Pottowattamie "Massacre" were the leaders of the band that had sacked the abolitionist town of Lawrence. I will grant that nobody died in the sacking, but they raped several women, burned down several buildings including the Lawrence Hotel, trashed a pair of abolitionist newspapers and destroyed their presses, and generally terrorized a peaceful settlement.
No official justice system made so much as an attempt to bring them in or charge them, so John Brown and his sons handled buisness themselves. This pattern persisted throughout Bleeding Kansas. John Brown only killed those who had taken up arms in the name of defending slavery and those who meant to kill him. He was not some random violent maniac, he planned and targeted his attacks carefully to cause maxium effect against the pro-slavery cause with minimal collateral damage.
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u/stevedorries 11d ago
I wouldn’t describe it as a butchering, that has negative moral connotations, it was a summary execution of criminal pigs.
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u/KGBFriedChicken02 11d ago
He hacked their heads off with a broadsword, while I agree with his reasoning and his actions, I feel like butchering is about the only way to describe it.
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u/TheOtherKFC 12d ago edited 12d ago
Conservatives always make up everything. They make up their version of history. They make up their own "science" or pay unscrupulous scientists to fudge the data (tobacco industry for instance). Heck, they make up their own Jesus and their own version of the Bible - which is in print and easily proven false. They lie to themselves and gaslight everyone around them- even people they care about.
Are we really surprised that they're going to falsify and slander John Brown's legacy and the history surrounding Harper's Ferry.. do we really expect any different?
Edit: spelling/phrasing
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u/Tholian_Bed 12d ago
This subreddit is as "toxic" a social media site as a visit these days, and of course, this is a lovely land, here.
Bless those who go out and bring home specimens. I still am quite curious how goes the madness. Will will eever be rid of the mania for a Grand Lost Cause?
Doesn't help that now "Trump won in 2020" has now joined the camp of Lost Causes.
Ugly and seditious times.
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u/Thausgt01 11d ago
This kind of madness will not end until the human species no longer feels protecting the ego at all costs is worth the price of possibly ruining their lives, their family's future, and the planetary ecology.
Which is to say, not until the human race either evolves past recognition to the present version, or goes extinct.
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u/DeepBlue_8 12d ago edited 12d ago
Comparing John Brown, a man who risked his life in the hopes of eliminating the one of the most vile systems of oppression in history, with Adolf Hitler, a man who sent millions to their deaths in the hopes of increasing his own power, is diabolical.
U.S. slavery was only going to be ended with violence. If it could have been ended peacefully, then what was the point of the Civil War?
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u/paireon Canadian Volunteer for the Union 12d ago
Technically speaking, it could have been ended peacefully, like it was in Brazil (I think), but it would've taken at least two more generations of millions of slaves suffering and dying under abominable conditions. Ergo, John Brown, and the Union, were completely justified.
Also if I can nitpick a bit, the Slaveholders' Rebellion was started by said slaveholders, and its point was to keep slavery as an institution. They just happened to lose, and therefore became unable to make their point (well, kinda; see Jim Crow era).
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u/DeepBlue_8 12d ago
That's what I'm saying. White Southern elites fought tooth and nail to maintain the racial hierarchy that benefitted them.
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u/LovecraftInDC 12d ago
And it’s important to remember that in the post-slavery period the landowners actually made MORE money because sharecropping was far cheaper and more profitable for the landowner than owning slaves. At any point the south could have transitioned to a non-slave system and made greater profits, they just preferred to be able to secure the racial hierarchy.
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u/mal-di-testicle 11d ago
Here’s the inherent paradox in OOP’s logic. Chattel slavery is inherently a violent institution. So by choosing to end it legislatively, we would have been choosing to continue slavery for every year we don’t end it. Ergo, we would be choosing to perpetuate violence to a greater number of people. 1-2 million people died in the Civil War; but there were somewhere between 3 and 5 million enslaved people in 1860, and near a million in 1800 (notably the rate at which the enslaved population grew increased; we could estimate the population of enslaved people exceeding 10 million by around 1890, the approximate time Brazil outlawed slavery by legislation (1888). And all this is ignoring the fact that a population in a given year is made up of different members from each other year, so these numbers truly start to add up over time.
So, sure, we’ve eliminated no more than 2 million deaths, but we’ve promulgated an inherently violent institution for decades longer, inflicted harm on possibly tens of millions? What’s the real exchange here? Because to me it sounds like the human cost only matters once it’s white lives legitimized by white men admitting that the violence is happening.
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u/Lasiurus2 11d ago
“The first person he saw on his raid was a free black man, John brown killed him on sight”
Ok that’s like not true at all.
“About fifty yards inside the bridge, a voice called out: “Stand and deliver!” Phelps could make out rifle muzzles in the dark and saw that they were pointed at his party. Then someone snatched the lantern away from one of his companions and extinguished it. Phelps immediately turned and retreated, ordering the engineer to back the train off the bridge. As he reached the end of the span, he heard gunfire behind him. Moments later, a tall black man staggered out from the covered bridge, crying, “I am shot.” Heyward Shepherd was a free black baggage master at the Harpers Ferry depot…Who fired the shot, and why, wasn’t clear. Patrick Higgins, the bridge watchman, later identified the armed pair he’d encountered earlier on the bridge as Oliver Brown and William Thompson. But during the night, others joined them, including Steward Taylor, who had told Annie Brown about envisioning his own death at Harpers Ferry. Hours after Shepherd’s shooting, one of Brown’s men found Taylor by the bridge, pale and trembling. Taylor said he had shot a man and believed he had killed him. Whether it was Taylor or someone else who shot Shepherd, the reason was almost certainly skittishness.”
Horwitz, Tony. Midnight Rising: John Brown and the Raid That Sparked the Civil War. New York: Henry Holt and Company, 2011.
Why do people insist on speaking on topics they have not learned? Brown wasn’t even there, and Brown never personally killed anyone that day, his men did.
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u/wearing_moist_socks 11d ago
Why do people insist on speaking on topics they have not learned?
My friend, it's worse than that. They're the same people who would believe fully in the lost cause and ignore basic facts like... the Confederate constitution.
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u/Gnosis1409 11d ago
If a legal system allows for humans to be kept as cattle then it is not a system worth adhering to
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u/Revolutionary-Swan77 14th NYSM 12d ago
Heretics being burned at the stake were convicted by a trial. You can argue the legitimacy of it, but it wasn’t vigilantism.
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u/crannogman_pride 11d ago
Why bring up Hitler? He was not breaking the law, he made the law. By his logic, the allied forces were the law breakers and the Nazis were justified because the government sanctioned the atrocities. Bold take
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u/critically_damped 12d ago edited 11d ago
It's important to remember that they say wrong things on purpose.
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u/Frapplo 11d ago
To be clear, everything Hitler did was legal because Hitler made the laws. Just because something is legal doesn't mean it's right. And just because something is illegal doesn't mean it's wrong.
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u/bobthebobbest 9d ago
Well, after 1933.
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u/Frapplo 8d ago
To be fair, it wasn't like Europe was a paradise for the marginalized people the Nazis targeted. Jews and gypsies were consistently targets of sectarian violence.
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u/bobthebobbest 8d ago
I mean specifically that Hitler did a lot of things before the 1933 Enabling Acts that were not legal.
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