 Hello, everyone. Welcome. I'm Carol Hincoe, President of Triple E. I want to welcome you to this, our third lecture of the spring series. And I'd like to ask Beth Wood, our program chair, to please introduce today's speaker, Beth. Hello, everyone. And today I'm very pleased to welcome Will Nash as our speaker. Will earned his PhD from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and he joined the faculty at Middlebury College in 1995. He is currently a professor of American Studies and English and American Literatures at Middlebury. His special interests include African American literature, abolitionism, and contemporary representations of enslavement. He's now working on a publication about John Brown, Harriet Tubman, and Frederick Douglas, who actually are the topics of his lecture here today. So please join me in giving a warm welcome to Will Nash. Good afternoon. Before we go any farther, how's my sound level? We okay? It's excellent. All right. Thank you so very much, Gordon. Thank you all for being here. I really appreciate the invitation. And I'm quite excited to talk about one of my favorite subjects for the next little bit, and then answer some questions as well. As Beth mentioned, this is part of a larger work that I'm in the middle of. And I am going to share a few slides with you this morning, or this afternoon, I guess. Let me just get that going here. So I am today talking about the figures that I like to refer to as the Holy Trinity of abolitionist activism. Left or right here in this first slide, we have Harriet Tubman, John Brown, and Frederick Douglas. These are fairly iconic representations of the three. And although each can be studied in his or her own right, there's a particularly interesting thing about thinking of the three of them together. The one instance of the three of them together is, of course, the planning for John Brown's ill-fated but critically important raid on Harper's Ferry in 1859. He implored Douglas to assist him in what he called hiving the bees, by which I mean getting enslaved people who rose after the Harper's Ferry insurrection to join what would become essentially the army that Brown would lead into the South to fight slavery. Douglas declined. Harriet Tubman, whom Brown respected so much that he referred to her as the general, agreed to help Brown, told him that after he had set the date for the raid that he should not change it no matter what. He was forced to change it. She was ill and was not able to be there. So while neither Tubman nor Douglas were with Brown at Harper's Ferry, they were intricately and intimately connected with him around this historical moment. The other way that they exist together in popular culture is in the recent Showtime seven-part series based on James McBride's novel, The Good Lord Bird. And you see here the representations of each figure in stills from the series. I'm really very interested in how they work in this show. And I don't want to do too much of that off the start in case people have not read the novel or seen the show, but certainly if people have particular questions or comments in the Q&A, then I'd be happy to delve into that. I will say that what I want to do for the next half hour or so is talk about these three figures individually and collectively, not so much rehearsing their histories per se as dropping into the history of how we have understood them or put another way how we've recreated or represented them in order to meet the needs of particular cultural moments. So ultimately then, thinking about them in these various cultural moments gets us to what are we doing with them now? All right. And here we have probably the most powerful example of the three of them in the now, although there are certainly others, so we'll get to it. All right. Now, just by way of moving forward, I do want to spend a few more minutes on who they were and how they were understood in 1859. And I would argue that in the 1859 scenario, we see each of the players in the role that we are most comfortable assigning them. Frederick Douglass as statesman. By 1859, he has already published both the 1845 narrative of the life of Frederick Douglass, an American slave written by himself, probably the most taught of any of the narratives of formerly enslaved people in America right now and historically too. He's also published 1855, My Bondage and My Freedom, the second of the three versions of his autobiography. And he is making a name for himself not just as an abolitionist speaker, but also as the editor of a newspaper traveling internationally in support of the cause of abolition. Statesman is really probably the best word to describe him. Here we have John Brown as he looked in 1859. And incidentally, this is just a weird little thing, but I find it striking. This is how we think of Brown, but really it was only in the last year or a little more than a year of his life that he had the big bushy beard. And for most of his life, he was very clean cut, clean shaven, which matters, I think, in terms of our thinking about the way that we need him to be that wild-eyed figure and that sort of Old Testament prophet looking figure, if you will. There's probably not a better word to describe him when he is on the eve of the Harper's Ferry raid than revolutionary. He's seeking to overthrow the troops around the federal arsenal at Harper's Ferry for the purpose of arming enslaved people and moving down into the south with the purpose of destroying slavery. So revolutionary seems to me to be a fair word. And then mystic for Harriet Tubman. It's worth thinking about the ways in which of these three figures, she is the one about whom we know the least biographically. And the things that we do know about her that tend to get amplified are her, of course, her numerous exploits in terms of bringing people out of enslavement. But also in terms of her, a couple of her key attributes, she suffered a traumatic brain injury when she was early in her teens. And for the rest of her life was subject to really what seemed to be sort of narcoleptic incidents where she would just sort of nod off or drop off for a brief period of time. And then when she came awake again, very often part of what she understood herself to have done was commune with God during those narcoleptic incidents, certainly in terms of her effort to free the slaves and the work that she did to run the Underground Railroad trips that she ran, she saw herself as divinely inspired. So we think of her, but she and Brown were deeply religious, but his was much more grounded in the reading of the Old Testament, hers was more grounded in a sort of direct communion with God. And it's interesting for us to think about that mysticism as part of her ethos, if you will. All right. So that's who they, that's who we can see each of them as. Now the fact of the matter is in an hour, I can't do all three of them justice. I'm about to spend 12 weeks with with students working on doing injustice. So I'm going to focus for a few minutes on Brown. And what I want to do now by way of illustrating the broader point is show you a few images of Brown that were created in roughly the same time within 10 years. And think about how they portray him in talk to you a little bit about the artists and what the politics of their representations might be. Now, my first exposure to this image, dating myself in my middle to late fifties was on the cover of an album by the seventies pro-rock band Kansas. It is actually a painting from the walls of the Kansas State House. It is called Tragic Prelude and John Stuart Curry is the artist. This mural was painted in 1938. All right. Now, in the middle is John Brown, Bible in one hand and sharps rifle in the right. Sharps rifle also put some people would call a buffalo gun, a much more accurate weapon than the old muzzle loading musket type rifles that most folks would have had. And indeed, if you see here in the front, I'm pointing, you can't see me pointing, but in the front right in front of Brown that those two gentlemen faced off against each other are holding muskets. He's holding a sharps, which is high tech weaponry for the time. He was very well equipped. And this also the sharps was known as sort of funny Henry Ward Beecher, the abolitionist, whose sister Harriet Beecher Stowe wrote Uncle Tom's Cabin paid for the supplying of sharps rifles to Brown and some other people active on the front in Kansas. And they were known locally as Beecher's Bibles. So he has the actual print Bible in his left hand and Beecher's Bible in his right in this image. All right. Now, why Kansas State House John Brown in the middle of the 1850s, Kansas was contested territory between pro and anti slavery forces in the wake of legislation passed in 1854. We have a full on fight for control of the state. So brutal and bloody in fact that Kansas in this period was known as bleeding Kansas. And in 1855, Brown left his homestead in North Elba, New York right across the lake from where we are in Vermont, where he is incidentally he is buried and went out to Kansas where five of his sons already were. He was at this point deeply committed to the he was deeply I'm sorry distracted there by question deeply committed to bringing the war to anti slavery of anti slavery to Kansas. At Potawatomi Creek in 1856, he and five followers, his sons among them, and also his one of his sons in law went to the to the homes of three different pro slavery settlers, took men and boys out into the night and butchered them with broadswords. This is what was known as the Potawatomi massacre. And in the wake of Potawatomi Brown became nationally famous. All right. We see him here standing between on the left union forces and on the right Confederate forces, but in front of the actual armies you have on the left, an anti slavery settler on the right a pro slavery settler. In the background on the right you have a prairie fire. In the background on the left, you have a tornado. And then in the middle ground you have settlers moving west manifest destiny embodied there. All right. Now, this is an awful lot of Kansas history rolled into to one scene, but that Brown is the most prominent figure here speaks to his importance to the region in terms of their identity at least as it was understood in 1938. All right. The other thing that I I'm not sure if I mentioned or not the title of this mural is tragic prelude and the prelude, of course, here would be Brown as a sort of precursor to the Civil War. But that idea of it as tragic is sort of interesting when we think about where we are in 1938. In 1938, most white people in the United States are more interested in thinking about our history in terms of the rebuilding of the union after the Civil War than they are in terms of the blood that was spilled during the Civil War. Right. And so while Kansas can't really erase Brown from their history, they can position him in such a way that they see we see him in the midst of this conflict which he caused the unnatural disaster, if you will, of the Civil War. In the background of the painting, we have this tempestuous natural disasters of the prairie fire and the tornado in the middle. We have hope. We have progress. We have westward movement. Right. So Brown reads here as a breaker of something, if you will, which we are in the process of repairing nationally in the 1930s. All right. Now, it's worth my saying that for most of the 20th century, representations of John Brown by white artists tend more negative than positive. You have, by contrast, images like these, the left, and it's a little pixelated, I apologize, but the artist's name is Horace Pippin, P-I-P-P-I-N, who was a self-taught or what we call a vernacular painter, the African American tradition. On the right, we have Charles White, another African American artist, but with more formal training. He was, for a time, active in circles in Chicago, which was a very dynamic art scene and a progressive art scene in the 1930s. On the left, Pippin's canvas is called John Brown reading his Bible. Charles White's drawing is simply called John Brown. Now, you can think about why in the late 1930s, African Americans might have seen Brown in a more positive light than Anglo or white Americans saw him in terms of thinking about the idea of a white man willing to make sacrifice even of his own blood for the freedom of black people. But in both of these images, part of what we get is some version of John Brown in repose. I mentioned that the wild-eyed, long-beard look was there with him for only about a year and a half. Neither of these John Browns have that look. There's a way in which Charles White's John Brown is almost more Christ-like in terms of conventional depictions of Jesus from this era. His ethnicity, we know, but it's sort of indeterminate in terms of the way he's presented in the picture, skin tone-wise, and his facial hair and the length of his hair makes him very much like representations of Christ that we can see in popular art from about the same time. Pippin's Brown looks more like Brown looked for most of his life, queen-shaven, short hair. You can't really get much beyond his eyes from this reproduction. I apologize for that. But his expression is pensive and reflective. I just want to suggest that when we think about what we have here in terms of these representations of this figure made about the same time as the Curry picture that I showed you in the last image, the difference in who Brown is for these artists is really significant. It has very much to do with creating an alternative narrative to that narrative of the sort of wild-eyed breaker of American culture, if you will. He is here. As we see on the left, he is devout. He's reading his Bible. The setting is almost monastic, and we see the idea of him in his deep simplicity. On the right, I would say again that he's almost messianic. This is a point when in a live, as opposed to on-screen conversation, I would ask if people had questions. If you do have questions, I hope you will put them into the Q&A so that we can get into them after I'm done with the presentation. I want to move on, though, to another artist from the same era whose work is probably familiar to many of you, the African-American painter Jacob Lawrence. Lawrence is probably best known for his epic, massive-scale work, The Migration of the Negro, which is a series of 60 images, on exhibit most recently at the Met in 2015 in a show called One Way Ticket. Because there's 60 images in the series, half belong to the Met in New York, half belong to the Phillips in DC, because when Lawrence presented the work for sale in 1941, no one could afford to buy all 60 images, so they split them. The evens are one place, the odds are the other. I can never remember who has which, but it's a very rare thing to see them all together. Periodically, it happens. These images are from Briefer series that Lawrence did. He did a Frederick Douglass series. The image on the left is from that. He did a John Brown series. The image in the middle is from that. He did a Harriet Tubman series. The image on the right is from that. Now, part of what's interesting about Lawrence is that he was very interested in the narration of American and particularly African-American history through visual series. There's about a decade and a half when he's primarily a series painter. The Douglass and Tubman series are 38, 39, right around the same time as the Curry mural. And then we have the John Brown series in 40 and then 41 is the migration of the Negro. I want you to think for a few minutes about the labels that I suggested for these three figures. Statesman, revolutionary and mystic. And think about how each of these images might be understood under the lens of those labels, right? We see Douglass on the left, hard at work in his study, well-dressed, clearly at a phase of his life when he is accomplished, already free, and a man of some means, a man of substance. We see Brown here in the middle, arming some of the men who fought with him at Harper's Ferry. And one of the things that has been emphasized in the past few years is that of the 19 or 20 who were in Brown's army with him, five were African-American. And in this picture, if you take realism as something of what Lawrence is after, then we have three-fifths of the African-American component of his army. But clearly, again, we have here that bearded figure not so wild-eyed as Curry's, because where Curry might be interested in showing Brown as something of a madman, Lawrence views his revolutionary tendencies more positively. All right. And then on the right, from the Tubman series, we have Harriet Tubman out in nature at night. In her white garb, she looks something like a priestly figure or a nun. She's communing with the stars, if you will. And again, that idea of divine inspiration is very much important for her. All right. So in these three images, I would argue, again, we can see an artist who is presenting these figures in ways that might be useful to the creation of a narrative of African-American history. Now, if we think about the 1940s as the moment when the second wave of the Great Migration is happening, and also as a moment when there's a real push towards new levels of Black empowerment in the United States, you can see why a statesman might be an important figure. And in terms of the willingness to fight, if you will, to take up arms as we move into World War I, the place of Black soldiers is a complicated topic. But there's an interesting thing to think about in terms of the messaging about Black men being willing to take up arms. And then, of course, the other piece that I would say in terms of thinking about why it might be important in that moment to show the sort of a spiritual side of African-Americans as they are in the process largely of moving from rural to urban environments, there are ways that all three of these versions of Black history, if you will, meet particular needs in this moment. And I would argue that that's part of Lawrence's purpose in creating these images. All right. Now, in the interest of time, even though it would be possible to track this a little bit more deliberately, I'm going to make a jump forward because I do want to get to some of the pieces from the present that I think are striking. This slide here, which is meant, fold disclosure, to be a little bit visually overwhelming, gives you some taste of the publications that we have seen about these three figures in roughly the past 25 years. And they're clustered sort of in terms of the figures that they're about. You have a lot of John Brown titles there, sort of in the upper left. You have a few Harriet Tubman titles. I could have actually given you a few more there, but I focused on fiction for her because there has been sort of an interesting uptick in fiction about her. And then over on the right, you have a couple of biographical treatments of Douglass, David Blight's landmark Frederick Douglass. This is the new standard biographies. Absolutely fantastic. And a book there on the top right, picturing Frederick Douglass. It turns out that Douglass was the most photographed American of the 19th century. And if we think about this whole notion of representation of him by other artists, it's also useful to think about the way that he presented himself for the camera. And there's a whole series of portraits that track the creation of that idea of the statesman on his part as well. All right. Now, in the bottom right there, you have Douglass's women, which is a novel that is about the two women who were in Douglass's household around the time of his encounter with John Brown, his wife, Anna. And the white German woman, whose name escapes me at the moment, I apologize, who also lived with him. And there's some indication that there's a bit of a love triangle. It certainly makes for a bit of fun fiction. It's to me in some ways the least riveting of these titles. But nevertheless, it's sort of interesting to think about that picture of Douglass. And then we have there almost in the middle and sort of bigger than other books, James McBride's The Good Lord Bird, which I mentioned earlier, The Good Lord Bird is the novel on which the Showtime series, The Good Lord Bird, Good Lord Bird is based. And I want to simply say that the pictures of the three figures that we see in the novel is very interesting to me. And it's interesting in terms of McBride's willingness to construct versions of these characters that are less laudatory in some ways than other versions that have been constructed. The Douglass of McBride's novel is a child molester, simply put. And it is written in such a way that it plays as broad comedy because the central conceit of The Good Lord Bird is that there is a young African American male traveling with Douglass, excuse me, traveling with Brown. And Brown misunderstands his identity when they first meet and thinks he's a girl. So he is in drag for most of the novel. And when he is at Douglass's house presenting as this young sort of not exactly new bile, but young African American woman, Douglass gets aggressive with her. Now it's interesting to me to think about this because this is not the Frederick Douglass that people are used to or the Frederick Douglass that people expect. And interestingly enough, on showtime it's not the Frederick Douglass that they show. They leave that part out. And I think there's something to be said here about how far we are willing to go or not go in terms of representations of these figures. Okay, that's also something else we can talk about in the Q&A. All right. Now, one other thing that I did want to talk about briefly here in terms of representation, I am not sure why this is so, but graphic novels have in the past several years been a really fruitful genre for imaginations of enslavement. And these are not the comic books of my youth or the youth of folks on the call who are my age or a little older. I'm 57. These are full blown novelizations, illustrated novelizations, often very intricate and complicated. And we have here, I will say that Harriet Tubman Demon Slayer is more of a comic book than a graphic novel in terms of its brevity. But my understanding is that the author and illustrator of this comic book are in the process of expanding it into a graphic novel. But I wanted to spend a few minutes here and think about the covers of these three graphic treatments of our figures, how they track with the statesman revolutionary mystic idea and just say a few things about them. The life of Frederick Douglass on the left is very much, as the cover might suggest to you, a dignified presentation of the narrative of Douglass' life as it is sort of first sanctified in the 1845 narrative. We have a lot of text as opposed to images in this book. And a lot of the text seems to come straight out of the 1845 narrative. With respect for the authors and no ability to create a graphic novel myself, but just with a critical eye, I would say that this book is quite boring to look at. It is almost a geographic in terms of its presentation of Douglass. And when you think about that idea of not willing to show him engaged in certain kinds of negative behavior on TV, we may not be ready for a Frederick Douglass who is much more out of the box, if you will, than we get with those representations. We don't have that problem with Brown and Tubman. This is part of the point that I wanted to make is that we're willing to show John Brown and Harriet Tubman in these more extreme ways. Then we show Douglass. And I think that's partly about our sort of cultural readiness to fly in the face of idols, if you will. Thunderbolt, an American tale, the middle one, is the first volume of what's going to be a multi-volume graphic novel series going from the Potawatomi massacre, which I talked about earlier, through Harper's Ferry. You can tell from just the cover of this how very different you can expect it to be from Frederick Douglass in terms of the way the lettering works, in terms of the way that Brown is represented there on the cover. He certainly is face cast in shadow. He's much more menacing. There's nothing that suggests sort of a reverential representation here. The other thing that I want to talk about briefly in terms of Thunderbolt, though, that's really interesting, is you may be able to see on Brown's lapel there, there's a button. The button says anti, ANTI. It's given to him by one of his sons, and it's made from a broken compass. It is a compass that will only tell north. It won't tell any other directions. Anti on one level is obviously shorthand for anti-slavery, which fits in the context of the narrative. But anti also works in terms of thinking about Antifa. This book in many ways is suggesting a revolutionary vision for Brown that might be seen in line with Antifa. There's a whole other conversation to be had about Brown's name being used by left-oriented Second Amendment activists. People like the John Brown clubs and the Red Neck Revolt who arm themselves and show up at places like the Charlottesville Unite the Right March to protect peaceful counter protesters from armed right-wingers. Again, a big topic I'm happy to delve into. Then we have here over to the right Harriet Tubman Demonslayer, which is here, is kind of a goof, but it's also really interesting in some ways to think about. Tubman in these two books that exist so far is a katana-wielding zombie fighter, and the zombies are the fugitive slave catchers. There's this whole brutal sequence where slave hunters come out of the woods after fugitives and Harriet Tubman drops down and pretty bloodily dismembers them. There's a way to think about that. It's not mystic in the positive sense, but certainly it is otherworldly and fits again with that idea of her. It's sort of interesting. My students have the least patience with the Harriet Tubman books in a way because they are so of the genre, but I think in some ways they're also really interesting because, again, the figure about whom we know the least we are having to sort of make the most of, if you will, and the idea of her as this kind of super heroic figure is one that is really compelling, and there's a lot more to be said about super heroism in this tradition if people are interested. Coming back, as we run out of time, I need to wrap up so we've got time for Q&A. I just wanted to bring you again to these pictures of, on the left, the revolutionary, the top right, the mystic, the bottom right, the statesman, and think again about how each of these figures has a role to play in creating a narrative about the fight to end American child slavery. Before I go, at the risk of opening a can of worms, these are pictures from January 6th of this year. For my money, the conversations about John Brown and revolutionary violence are somewhat more complicated in this moment than they might have been a couple of months ago. That's not to say that the issues were not complicated a couple of months ago, but the notion of talking about taking up arms in service of an idea against the government reads a little differently right now, I would say. I would point out I am not equating Brown with the seditionists who attacked the Capitol on January 6th. I do not see his action in the same light as the actions of individuals involved in trying to stop the certification of a legitimate election. I don't think that we can understand him entirely as motivated by a desire to do violence. One of the things that's worth knowing about Brown is that the time between his capture on October 16th and his execution on December 2nd of 1859, he spent in jail in Charleston, in what is now West Virginia, writing letters about the need to abolish enslavement, talking with journalists who came to see him, and essentially in those two months, he effectively shifted the conversation about abolitionism with his writing. What he did with his sword and literally he carried a sword is important, but his pen was in fact mightier, and I don't think that there's an analogy that I can see between what we've recently been through and that that holds up. I do think that it's worth noting that there's a whole thread of conversation about Brown in terms of whether or not we should understand him as a terrorist. One of the books that is out recently that is on my slide a few clicks back is called America's Good Terrorist, and that notion of him as an insurrectionist is really important in those terms, but I do think there are nuances and I think they're complexities. I bring up January 6th simply because I cannot in good conscience talk about Brown now without acknowledging that. That's probably as good a stopping place as any, and I am happy to answer questions. I see that there are a few in the Q&A, so let me just sort of run through what we have here. Someone asked to that I reiterate the name of the Showtime series. It's called The Good Lord Bird, and it details Brown's life from his time in Kansas through his execution, told through the eyes of Henry Shackleford, the young African American in drag, if you will, that I mentioned. Someone makes a point that history through images is always fascinating, as well as memorable. Do you teach your middle-bodied classes using this technique? Yes, I very often do this. I'm in American Studies, and visual art for me is a great tool for thinking about cultural history and sort of trends. This is actually one of my favorite ways to go at thinking about history. Between Frederick Douglass, John Brown, and Harry Tubman, who do you find the most interesting in why? Who is the figure child in the lower left corner of the Harry Tubman painting whose hand she seems to be holding? I'm not sure who that is in the corner of the Tubman painting. In terms of who I find most interesting, it's a good question, and I think they're each interesting in their own rights. For me right now, John Brown is certainly the person with whom I am obsessed, and this project that I'm working on now started for me when I looked around and realized that there was sort of this rush of books about Brown coming out, and it got me thinking about why it might be the case that we were interested in him again. A couple of other questions here. Has the content or emphasis of my teaching of African American studies changed over time? Yes. I was originally trained to teach literature, and my first years at Middlebury I taught mostly African American literature, which I still do, but my interest in sort of more American studies, cultural studies approach has evolved. Students are very much interested in not just reading books, and certainly I think that in this time that broader approach to artifacts is more appealing to them. There's another question here about Vermonter's reactions to Frederick Douglass's speaking tour in Vermont. That's a really interesting thing. In the 1840s, the American anti-slavery society decided to do an event or a series of events, 100 meetings across the nation in pushing against enslavement. Douglass came and originally actually came to Middlebury to speak. He was not well received in Middlebury, and in fact, among the people who pushed against him speaking were students at Middlebury College who referred to him in derogatory terms as a criminal. He was invited to leave Middlebury, I'll put it in those terms, and went up the road to Ferrisburg where the Robeson family lived at Rokeby, an interesting and important site in Vermont history around abolitionism. Douglass gave his speech there. There's a church on Route 7 as you're coming from Middlebury towards Burlington. It's on the right and there's a marker there indicating where Douglass stood when he gave his speech. He was very well received in Ferrisburg, and we commemorate that spot and there's no marker in Middlebury to his having spoken down here. I think that has everything to do with how well he went over in Ferrisburg. Someone in the chat notes that Douglass made a point of being photographed numerous times as if to preserve his place in American history. Do I want to speculate as as to why? Well, certainly I think he had a strong sense of what he was doing, and certainly the the technology of photography was fairly new, so it makes sense for him to have been interested in it, but I think the idea of him preserving his place in American history has something to do with him understanding what he was in the process of accomplishing. There's not much more about it, I can say. Othelia Ossing is the name of the German woman in the Douglass's house, and thank you very much to the person who put that in the chat for me. Someone here asks about accuracy in these books. I would say that while my favorite biography of John Brown is David Reynolds, John Brown abolitionist, I think it's just tremendous, very thoughtful, gives you both the historical record and some reflection on how Brown was presented, so that would be my choice there. David Blight's Frederick Douglass is the standard now for us in terms of scholarship on Douglass, and there are a couple of Tubman books that are equally good. Kate Clifton, I believe it is, wrote Harriet Tubman, and I think that those are very strong for doing what they're doing, which is working with creating biography of a figure for whom the historical record is kind of thin. I think they both do an admirable job, but I just think there's less to work with archivally. All right, I have, I'm going to skip down. I'm saying that we're just about out of time. There are just a couple of questions left. Could I say more about Douglass not wanting to help Brown? Douglass, how should I say this? Douglass did not think that what Brown had in mind to do at Harper's Ferry could be done. He thought it was suicide, essentially. His admiration and respect for Brown did not diminish, but in terms of putting himself in the line of fire, as it were, and we have, I'm sorry, I'm questioning here, telling me how much time we have in the Q&A. In terms of putting himself in the line of fire, that was not Douglass's way, right? And again, if we think about him in terms of statesmen, then that might make sense. We should also know that Douglass was in many ways, first and foremost, a pragmatist. I mean that positively, not negatively. His goal to achieve freedom was very important to him, but the idea of doing it in pragmatic ways, ways that were viable and reasonable and sustainable, that's very much a piece of his formulation. In terms of Brown, Brown was capable of military planning to a great degree, but he was not pragmatic. He believed himself to be doing God's work, and he was so thoroughly committed to doing it that he took what we might call, in some ways, a leap of faith. Now, one of the things that I will say is that it's worth considering within that whether or not Brown ever really believed that the raid on Harper's Ferry would succeed. This is not my original idea. David Reynolds gets credit for this. That said, I think it's a really compelling idea. What Reynolds sketches out is the idea that Brown knew that martyrdom would be the outcome of the raid, that he knew that it would not be possible to, with a small army, take and hold the armory, and that he understood that in his martyrdom he would be far more effective, if you will, in terms of striking the blow against enslavement than he could be just by taking the armory. If you take that notion, then it sort of complicates the idea of him as not being pragmatic, because we could say that in fact he is pragmatic. It's just pragmatism that doesn't involve self-preservation. Douglas is interested in both. He is interested in pragmatic approaches that allow him to live another day. I don't think, for me at least, it's productive to understand one or the other of these as more or less effective, but it is helpful, I think, to understand that we have in this two people whose way of being in the world and in acting the fight that they were both invested and engaged in, played out differently. All right, there's one last question here about Douglas's relationship to Lincoln, which is really more complicated than there is time to get into at this moment. I would say that the two books that I would recommend for a person wanting to pursue this question would be, again, David Blights, Frederick Douglas, and David Herbert Donald's one-volume biography of Abraham Lincoln, which is, again, just spectacular. Thank you very much for your attention. I'm really pleased to have had the chance to talk with you today and hope that you found this interesting. Oh, Will, thank you so much. It was very interesting, fascinating. You did a wonderful job at opening our eyes to these three people. Thank you.