Book Review: Midnight Rising

Book Title: Midnight Rising

Author: Tony Horwitz

Author's web page: http://tonyhorwitz.com/

Publisher: Henry Holt & Company

Date: 2011

Length: 290 pages of text, 55 pages of endnotes, 3 pages of image credits, 15-page index

Illustrations: maps, old photos and drawings

ISBN: 080509153X

Quote: "Viewed through the lens of 9/11, Harpers Ferry seems an al-Qaeda prequel: a long-bearded fundamentalist, consumed by hatred of the U.S. government, launches nineteen men in a suicidal strike on a symbol of American power. A shocked nation plunges into war."

As all Washingtonians know, Harpers Ferry is a picturesque, slightly touristy but mostly unspoiled, mountain town whose distinguishing features include a quaint old railroad that still runs passenger trains to and from D.C. While waiting for the train back to the city, you may read, talk, or knit, but you can't not notice the dramatic mountain and river view. To some people, including Horwitz, it seems "spooky." If a place has the right to be haunted, Harpers Ferry has...

Fair disclosure: my primary reason for reading this book was to find out how many of the nineteenth-century images of Harpers Ferry were drawn from the railroad station (several) and how much the view has changed (not terribly much). For me, the scenery is enough of an attraction, apart from the history of this town.

However, Harpers Ferry's big tourist attraction has been the history of the act of "Northern Aggression" that, as all Southerners know, really started the Civil War. Our ancestors wouldn't have fired on Fort Sumter if a megalomaniac, but not legally insane, Yankee hadn't attacked Harpers Ferry.

After 150 years, although the issues over which people were fighting even before 1860 seem surprisingly current, it's hard to take the old war rhetoric seriously. Horwitz has a good time at the expense of both sides. Many things people said and wrote even in the early nineteenth century can be clearly identified as either Green or Greedhead, and Horwitz shares some choice expressions of Greedhead thinking in the Old South. Not only did Southerners suffer from their own form of collective megalomania, or empire-building, as they envisioned a future in which their descendants would continue to exhaust the land and move on; while the best thinkers in the South understood that slavery was self-doomed, there were idiots who blithered in public about the need to evangelize and spread the benefits of slavery...

Meanwhile, in the North, several people who were indeed the best writers in their communities, if not the best thinkers, fell under the spell of John Brown's charismatic megalomania. Frederick Douglass kept some sensible reservations about Brown and his scheme. Amos Bronson Alcott, Henry David Thoreau, and Thomas Wentworth Higginson did not. (For those who've been wondering what possessed Emily Dickinson to call a writer so inferior as Higginson her "master," it seems likely that his freedom to act as well as write may have been his attraction.) Alcott called Brown "the manliest man" he ever saw, a "Christian brave and true"; Thoreau raged against his sentencing that Brown "could not have been tried by a jury of his peers, because his peers did not exist," and Louisa May Alcott effused, "Living, he made life beautiful,--Dying, made death divine."

Midnight Rising offers other glimpses of historical figures. Those acquainted with Wise County, Virginia, may particularly appreciate the mini-biography of then-Governor Henry Wise incorporated into this book. The story also has walk-on parts for James Buchanan, Herman Melville, Robert E. Lee, T.J. "Stonewall" Jackson, William Lloyd Garrison, and many more people whose names readers should know.

John Brown seems to have considered himself a Christian; it was just that Christ's warning that "those who take the sword will perish by the sword" seems not to have meant much to him...Horwitz tries to avoid passing moral judgment on Brown's act, to remain objective and simply trace its connections to other events in history. He hands over the job of concluding the story to Langston Hughes, whose poem ends, "Perhaps / You will recall / John Brown." You will, indeed.

Dozens of books had already been written about the Harpers Ferry raid, including a memoir by Osborne Anderson (a survivor) and a biography of Brown by W.E.B. Dubois. Did the world, or even the Harpers Ferry tourist business, really need another one? Well...adding Horwitz's talent to the body of existing books on the topic couldn't hurt anything. If you're going to read only one book about Harpers Ferry, I can't claim to have read enough of the others to say that Midnight Rising is "better" than they are, but it's a good read--written clearly and cleanly enough to make a challenging book for a bright middle school student, while still holding the interest of adults.