Brown — along with certain radical characters of the black abolitionist movement — shared with the slaveowners a romantic ideology of personal honor through violence. “Our white brethren cannot understand us unless we speak to them in their own language; they recognize only force,” Brown’s friend the black radical James McCune Smith wrote, using words that no Garrisonian abolitionist would have trusted but which Brown grasped and admired. “They will never recognize our manhood until we knock them down a time or two; they will then hug us as men and brethren.”

One need only compare Brown’s attitudes with those of the other key voices of the decade to see how important this difference was. Abraham Lincoln, in the eighteen-thirties, was grappling with the same realities — the explosions of violence centered on the anti-slavery disputes — but, in his first important speech, to the Springfield Young Men’s Lyceum in 1838, he took a radical position against the Southern cult of honor and redemption through violence. Lincoln insisted that salvation for America lay only in extreme proceduralism: “Passion has helped us, but can do so no more. It will in future be our enemy. Reason, cold calculating, unimpassioned reason, must furnish all the materials for our future support and defense.”

It is hard now to grasp the cultural authority that the code of passionate honor — with its elaborate rituals of feuds and duels — seemed to give the South in that period. Not merely the political edge but the poetic priority seemed to lie with the feudal and honorable South against the commercial and mouthy North. (It was a cultural advantage that persisted right up through, and perhaps beyond, the Atlanta première of “Gone with the Wind.”) Brown, though, understood it because he felt it. He set out, in effect, not to convert the South to Northern values but to convert the Northern abolitionists to the Southern codes of honorable violence. He was a virus that was to prove deadly to the Old South, because at some deep level he shared its DNA: its assumptions, its literature, and even some of its values—particularly the value of dying heroically for a cause over living honorably for one, and the companion value of forcing other people to die heroically for their cause, whether they quite wanted to or not.

Brown’s acceptance of this feudal ethic forms the general background to his murderous night in Kansas on May 24, 1856. Brown was brought to Kansas by his sons, who had learned their father’s creed by heart. “We must show by actual work that there are two sides to this thing and that they can not go on with this impunity,” Brown declared, after watching his fellow-abolitionists quake and tremble in the face of violent pro-slave mobs. He assembled a party of activists, including four of his sons and a son-in-law, armed them with swords, and marched them toward the little settlement of Pottawatomie Creek. Brown had his men bang on the doors of pro-slavery households, pretending to be lost travellers in order to get the men outside. There he ordered them cut to pieces, watching impassively as his sons and other followers did the work. (He seems to have executed one man, James Doyle, himself.) Five men were murdered in this manner.

Reynolds, without wanting to excuse it, goes to great lengths to set the Pottawatomie massacre in its context — pro-slavery thugs had been routinely beating and intimidating and killing anti-slavery activists, and, until then, the anti-slavery side had seemed too timid or frightened to defend itself. Yet Brown’s motives for this act remain murky. The psychiatrist James Gilligan has argued that acts of violence are always rooted in feelings of shame and humiliation that can be expiated only by the destruction of someone who was a witness, in some sense, to one’s shame. Brown in Kansas at first might seem to be without this cue to action—he was neither implicated nor particularly humiliated by the vigilantes — until one realizes that the real trigger was something that had happened two days before in Washington. There, as Reynolds reminds us, a South Carolina congressman had beaten Senator Charles Sumner, of Massachusetts, nearly to death with the gold head of his cane for daring to speak out against the pro-slavery forces in Kansas and, in a feudal manner, for criticizing a kinsman of his. Sumner, though no pacifist, had been unable to defend himself. (His feet seem to have got caught under his little desk.)

This assault was put forward, instantly, as crowning proof of the difference between the Southern honor culture and the Northern procedural one; a Northerner could talk trash, but he couldn’t stand up for himself. Brown, one of his sons said, “went crazy — crazy. It seemed to be the finishing, decisive touch.” It was not a cool evaluation of the potential uses of violence in Kansas but the transferred sense of humiliation that he felt on behalf of Sumner that drove Brown crazy and into the massacre.

Brown emerged from the massacre not bloodstained but magnified in the eyes of his enemies. Before, the anti-slavery forces had had only contempt for the abolitionists. Now they were scared to death of John Brown. He was able to win a minor skirmish with government forces who were out to get him simply through the fear his name invoked.

Brown did not claim particular glory for the Pottawatomie massacre but he did not cover it up, either. What makes him a typically American idealist is not his lust for killing — he was eager to avoid murder if he could — but his indifference to human life lost on the way toward his ideal. Like our current idealists in power, he didn’t want to kill, but he didn’t want to count the dead he did kill, either. He shrugged off the dead men in the dirt, even as one of his sons went mad at the memory.

Update (5/21): See also reviews in the New York Times (by Barbara Ehrenreich) and the New York Review of Books (by James M. McPherson).