Midnight Rising (Horwitz)

Midnight Rising: John Brown and the Raid That Sparked the Civil War
Tony Horwitz, 2011
Henry Holt & Co.
384 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780805091533


Summary
Plotted in secret, launched in the dark, John Brown's raid on Harpers Ferry was a pivotal moment in U.S. history. But few Americans know the true story of the men and women who launched a desperate strike at the slaveholding South.

Now, Midnight Rising portrays Brown's uprising in vivid color, revealing a country on the brink of explosive conflict.Brown, the descendant of New England Puritans, saw slavery as a sin against America's founding principles. Unlike most abolitionists, he was willing to take up arms, and in 1859 he prepared for battle at a hideout in Maryland, joined by his teenage daughter, three of his sons, and a guerrilla band that included former slaves and a dashing spy.

On October 17, the raiders seized Harpers Ferry, stunning the nation and prompting a counterattack led by Robert E. Lee. After Brown's capture, his defiant eloquence galvanized the North and appalled the South, which considered Brown a terrorist. The raid also helped elect Abraham Lincoln, who later began to fulfill Brown's dream with the Emancipation Proclamation, a measure he called "a John Brown raid, on a gigantic scale."

Tony Horwitz's riveting book travels antebellum America to deliver both a taut historical drama and a telling portrait of a nation divided—a time that still resonates in ours. (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
• Birth—June 9, 1958
• Where—Washington, DC, USA
• Education—B.A., Brown University; M.A.
   Columbia University
• Awards—Pulitizer Prize (Reporting); James
   Aronson Award
• Currently—lives in Martha's Vineyard, Massachusetts


Tony Horwitz is an American journalist and writer. His works include Blue Latitudes (also titled Into the Blue), One for the Road, Confederates In The Attic, Baghdad Without A Map, A Voyage Long and Strange: Rediscovering the New World, and Midnight Rising: John Brown and the Raid That Sparked the Civil War.

Horwitz was born Anthony Lander Horwitz in Washington, DC, the son of Norman Harold Horwitz and Elinor Lander Horwitz, a writer of young adult and adult books. Horwitz is an alumnus of Sidwell Friends School, in Washington, DC, and graduated Phi Beta Kappa as a history major from Brown University and the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism.

He won the 1995 Pulitzer Prize for National Reporting, and 1994 James Aronson Award, for his stories about working conditions in low-wage America published in the Wall Street Journal, where he also worked as a foreign correspondent covering conflicts in Africa, Europe, and the Middle East. He also worked as a staff writer for The New Yorker.

Horwitz married the Australian writer and fellow Pulitzer recipient Geraldine Brooks in France in 1984. After formerly dividing their time between homes in Waterford, Virginia and Sydney, Australia, they now live with their sons Nathaniel and Bizu in Martha's Vineyard, Massachusetts. (From Wikipedia.)

Book Reviews
Horwitz has given us a hard-driving narrative of one of America's most troubling historical figures: the fearsome John Brown, whose blood-soaked raid on the federal armory at Harpers Ferry, Va., in October 1859…helped to push the nation into the most devastating war it would ever endure.
Kevin Boyle - New York Times


Horwitz, an exceptionally skilled and accomplished journalist…here turns his hand to pure history with admirable results. Midnight Rising is smoothly written, thoroughly researched, places Brown within the context of his time and place, and treats him sensitively but scarcely adoringly…Without sentimentalizing him, Tony Horwitz has given [Brown] his due.
Jonathan  Yardley - Washington Post


Horwitz’s skills are a good match for this enormously compelling character, and his well-paced narrative incorporates masterful sketches of Brown’s family, foot soldiers, financial backers, admirers and prosecutors.… The result is both page-turning and heartbreaking—a book to engage mind and soul.
Boston Globe


What do you call John Brown? Is he a terrorist or a freedom fighter?... Tony Horwitz settles upon the word insurgent—and the label seems just right, as does Horwitz’s book as a whole… Midnight Rising rolls through a series of indelible scenes… The book becomes a graceful narrative, ever engaging, with the reader allowed to connect Brown and his contemporaries to conflicts that continue to our day.
Seattle Times


Horwitz’s description of the little band of idealists and adventurers who signed on for Brown’s offensive—including five black men and two of Brown’s own sons—is both fascinating and touching. His careful recreation of the bloody events of October 16, 1859, the day of Brown’s disastrous raid on Harpers Ferry, is both suspenseful and heartwrenching.
Christian Science Monitor


In this engrossing history of John Brown’s 1859 slave-liberation raid on the Harper’s Ferry, Va., arsenal, bestselling author Horwitz (Confederates in the Attic) concentrates on action set against deftly sketched historical background and compelling characters rendered without overdone psychologizing. His vivid biographical portrait of Brown gives us an American original: a failed businessman and harsh Calvinist with a soft spot for the oppressed and a murderous animus against oppressors (even if sometimes, as at Pottawatomie Creek in Kansas, his victims were unarmed). Brown’s raiders—a motley crew of his sons and various idealists, adventurers, freedmen, and fugitive slaves—come alive as a romantic, appealing bunch; their agonizing deaths give Horwitz’s excellent narrative of the raid and shootout a deep pathos. The author’s shrewd interpretation of Brown (similar to that of other scholars) makes him America’s great propagandist of his deed; after the raid ended in fiasco, he used his eloquent trial statements to transform himself in the public eye from madman and desperado to martyr and prophet—and a symbol who hardened both Northern and Southern militancy. But Horwitz smartly gives priority to the deeds themselves in this dramatic saga of an American white man who acted, rather than just talked, as if ending slavery mattered. 35 illus.; 2 maps.
Publishers Weekly


Horwitz (Confederates in the Attic), Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and best-selling author, presents a gripping narrative of Brown and the raid on Harpers Ferry that in many ways set the stage for Southern secession and civil war. Horwitz brings all his gifts of character building and storytelling to Brown's rise and self-promotion as an instrument of a supposed God-ordained command to purge with blood the land of the sin of slavery.... Verdict: Horwitz's Brown did not die in vain. By recalling the drama that fired the imagination and fears of Brown's time, Midnight Rising calls readers to account for complacency about social injustices today. This is a book for our time. —Randall M. Miller, Saint Joseph's Univ., Philadelphia
Library Journal


Horwitz’s potent prose delivers the facts of this bellwether incident in riveting fashion… It is an absorbing portrait of the often frustrated but passionately driven firebrand who successfully convinced a country of the shame of slavery and, to the South’s great regret, earned martyr status in the aftermath of his execution. Brown qualifies as America’s first important post-revolution terrorist… Horwitz brings events to life with almost cinematic clarity, and for American history and Civil War aficionados, Midnight Rising is required reading.
Bookpage


A crisply written but not entirely original retelling of John Brown's raid on Harpers Ferry. Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist and historian Horwitz returns to the Civil War era...and John Brown's infamous raid on the federal armory at Harpers Ferry in what is now West Virginia. The author depicts a morally upright abolitionist deeply committed to his cause but also well known for his "fixedness," a rigid stubbornness that could be a source of strength but was equally a source of weakness....Though the author's archival sleuthing pays off with a rich narrative,...[it] lacks deep historical analysis. Lucid and compelling but hardly groundbreaking.
Kirkus Reviews

Discussion Questions
Use our LitLovers Book Club Resources; they can help with discussions for any book:

• How to Discuss a Book (helpful discussion tips)
• Generic Discussion Questions—Fiction and Nonfiction
• Read-Think-Talk (a guided reading chart)

Also consider these LitLovers talking points to help get a discussion started for Midnight Rising:

1. Abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison called John Brown's raid a "misguided, wild and apparently insane" act. How was the raid viewed, initially, by Northerners and Southerners? How and why did the views of the Northerners' change? How does author Tony Horwitz view the raid?

2. How should we look at John Brown, today—as hero, provocateur, or terrorist? How does Tony Horwitz present him? How do you see him? Was he insane as many historians have claimed? Or was he sane, as many other historians have claimed?

3. Talk about the way in which Brown's parents and Calvinist upbringing shaped his views as an adult.

4. How would you describe Brown's temperament as portrayed in Midnight Rising? How did it affect his role as provider and father? What role did his temperament play during the three phases of the Harpers Ferry raid—planning, conduct, and outcome?

5. William Lloyd Garrison (see Question 1), a pacifist, believed that moral suasion could turn the South away from slavery. What was Brown's belief? What do you think? Was war inevitable, a necessary evil? Or could it (should it) have been avoided?

6. Prior to Harpers Ferry, Brown envisioned conducting raids to free slaves, retreating to the mountains, then conducting more raids to free more slaves. What was his intended goal? Why didn't he carry out those earlier raids?

7. In 1856, after a particularly murderous raid at Pottawatomie Creek in Kansas, Brown rationalized his brutality by exclaiming, "God is my judge." He also said he and his sons "were justified under the circumstance." What do you think?

8. What mistakes were made before and during the Harpers Ferry raid that doomed its outcome? What do you think might have happened had Brown made it to the mountains instead of being captured?

9. After Brown was captured and hanged, Ralph Waldo Emerson called his death "as glorious as the Cross." Louisa May Alcott said that his "dying made death divine." Horwitz wonders whether Brown's intention all along was to die as a martyr. What do you think? If it had been his intention, were the 29 other deaths, during the raid or by hanging afterward, worth the price?

10. Horwitz is concerned that, "through the lens of 9/11," we might be tempted to view John Brown as a "long-bearded fundamentalist" and Harpers Ferry as an "al-Qaeda prequel." Is he right to worry? Can a link be made between the 19th-century actions of John Brown and 21st-century events?

(Questions by LitLovers. Please feel free to use them, online or off, with attribution. Thanks.)

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