“I…am now quite certain that the crimes of this guilty land can never be purged away but with blood. I had, as I now think, vainly flattered myself that without very much bloodshed, it might be done.”
- John Brown.
Yet our record bloodshed in the Civil War soon to come still wouldn’t be enough to completely remove it all. Sure slavery was abolished, but things were still horrible for so many reasons for the following 100 years, and somewhat still are today.
That’s what happens when you kill it’s driving force and replace him with a sympathizer.
Even then, it was only legally abolished, some plantations never had any Union soldiers come, so they never freed their slaves, just kept them in “sharecropping” agreements but they weren’t allowed to leave. Actual share cropping was also horrific and also sometimes had slavelike conditions.
Some of these fake “sharecropping” agreements stayed in place till the mid 1900s.
Here’s a very excellent video by Knowing Better on Neoslavery.
He stood there frozen for a few minutes, that’s how long the exposure time was before they discovered/invented materials that are more sensitive to light… and then of course, found ways to mass-produce them. Maybe he stood there five minutes?
Gotta wonder how his day was going before tidying up and being asked to stand there like a statue while staring straight at the box in front of him, and how it went after that. In that environment so familiar yet still utterly alien to our eyes. What did he have for dinner that evening. How were the restaurants and bars of the era?
It was a world of steam power but that predated electricity, except maybe for the telegraph, transmitting its’ mysteriously instantaneous messages in Morse code wherever the country-spanning wires were laid out, and no further. A world where horses were as abundant as cars are today. A world whose nighttime was lit by candlelight and oil-lamp.
I love daguerrotypes, they’re such a vivid look into the past. Exposures outdoors in bright sunlight only took a few seconds, but as this one appears to be taken indoors he would have indeed needed to stand there for quite a while. That’s probably why his left hand is blurry (he’s holding the flag in his right hand - daguerrotypes were laterally mirrored).
Also, see the faint parallel lines all over the picture? Those are faint marks made by the photographer as he was polishing the plate just prior to sensitizing it and loading it into the camera.
Damn he only lived 1 year. Must have had super Jack disease.
#JohnBrownDidNothingWrong
He does not look like he fucks around.
