Physician and Harvard professor Jeremy Nobel believes art can help foster connections in a time of increasing isolation.

My Brooklyn apartment is designed for sterility. The windows have screens to keep out bugs; I chose my indoor plants specifically because they don’t attract pests. While commuting to other, similarly aseptic indoor spaces—co-working offices, movie theaters, friends’ apartments—I’ll skirt around pigeons, avert my eyes from a gnarly rat, shudder at the odd scuttling cockroach. But once I’m back inside, the only living beings present (I hope, and at least as far as I know) are the ones I’ve chosen to interact with: namely, my partner and the low-maintenance snake plant on the windowsill.

My aversion to pigeons, rats, and cockroaches is somewhat justifiable, given their cultural associations with dirtiness and disease. But such disgust is part of a larger estrangement between humanity and the natural world. As nature grows unfamiliar, separate, and strange to us, we are more easily repelled by it. These feelings can lead people to avoid nature further, in what some experts have called “the vicious cycle of biophobia.”

The feedback loop bears telling resemblance to another vicious cycle of modern life. Psychologists know that lonely individuals tend to think more negatively of others and see them as less trustworthy, which encourages even more isolation. Although our relationship to nature and our relationships with one another may feel like disparate phenomena, they are both parallel and related. A life without nature, it seems, is a lonely life—and vice versa.

The Western world has been trending toward both biophobia and loneliness for decades. David Orr, an environmental-studies researcher and advocate for climate action, wrote in a 1993 essay that “more than ever we dwell in and among our own creations and are increasingly uncomfortable with the nature that lies beyond our direct control.” This discomfort might manifest as a dislike of camping, or annoyance at the scratchy touch of grass at the park. It might also show up as disgust in the presence of insects, which a 2021 paper from Japanese scholars found is partially driven by urbanization. Ousting nature from our proximity—with concrete, walls, window screens, and lifestyles that allow us to remain at home—also increases the likelihood that the experiences we do have with other lifeforms will be negative, Orr writes. You’re much less likely to love birds if the only ones around are the pigeons you perceive as dirty.

[Read: A growing fear of nature could hasten its destruction]

The rise of loneliness is even better documented. Americans are spending more time inside at home and alone than they did a few decades ago. In his book Bowling Alone, the political scientist Robert Putnam cites data showing that, from the 1970s to the late 1990s, Americans went from entertaining friends at home about 15 times a year to just eight. No wonder, then, that nearly a fifth of U.S. adults reported feeling lonely much of the previous day in an April Gallup poll. Loneliness has become a public-health buzzword; Surgeon General Vivek Murthy calls it an “epidemic” that affects both mental and physical health. At least in the United States, COVID-19 has made things worse by expanding our preferred radius of personal space, and when that space is infringed upon, more of the reactions are now violent.

That loneliness and biophobia are rising in tandem may be more than a coincidence. Orr wrote in his 1993 essay that appreciation of nature will flourish mostly in “places in which the bonds between people, and those between people and the natural world create a pattern of connectedness, responsibility, and mutual need.” The literature suggests that he’s right. Our sense of community certainly affects how comfortable or desirable we perceive time in nature to be, Viniece Jennings, a senior fellow in the JPB Environmental Health Fellowship Program at Harvard who studies these relationships, told me. In one 2017 study across four European cities, having a greater sense of community trust was linked to more time spent in communal green spaces. A 2022 study showed that, during COVID-related shutdowns, Asians in Australia were more likely to walk outside if they lived in close-knit neighborhoods with high interpersonal trust.

Relationships between racial and ethnic groups can have an especially strong influence on time spent in nature. In the 2022 study from Australia, Asians were less likely to go walking than white people, which the study authors attributed to anti-Asian racism. Surveys consistently show that minority groups in the U.S., especially Black and Hispanic Americans, are less likely to participate in outdoor recreation, commonly citing racism, fear of racist encounters, or lack of easy access as key factors. Inclusive messaging in places like urban parks, by contrast, may motivate diverse populations to spend time outdoors.

On the flip side, being in nature or even just remembering times you spent there can increase feelings of belonging, says Katherine White, a behavioral scientist at the University of British Columbia who co-wrote a 2021 paper on the subject. The authors of one 2022 paper found that “people who strongly identify with nature, who enjoy being in nature, and who had more frequent garden visits were more likely to have a stronger sense of social cohesion.” In a 2018 study from Hong Kong, preschool children who were more engaged with nature had better relationships with their peers and demonstrated more kindness and helpfulness. A 2014 experiment in France showed that people who had just spent time walking in a park were more likely to pick up and return a glove dropped by a stranger than people who were just about to enter the park. The results are consistent, White told me: “Being in nature makes you more likely to help other people,” even at personal cost.

[Read: How we learned to be lonely]

Time spent in natural spaces might contribute to a greater sense of belonging in part because it usually requires you to be in public space. Unlike homes and offices, natural spaces provide a setting for unpredictable social interactions—such as running into a new neighbor at the dog park or starting a spontaneous conversation with a stranger on your walking path—which “can be a great space for forming connections and building social networks,” Jennings said. In a study in Montreal, Canada, researchers found that time in public parks and natural spaces allowed immigrant families to converse with neighbors, make new friends, and feel better integrated in their new communities, all for free. Similarly, there’s some reason to suspect that strong human relationships can help extinguish any disgust we feel toward the natural world. We learn fear through one another, Daniel Blumstein, an evolutionary biologist at UCLA, told me. The more safe and enjoyable experiences we accumulate in groups, the better our tolerance for new and unfamiliar things.

It would be a stretch to say that just getting people to touch more grass will solve all societal ills, or that better social cohesion will guarantee that humankind unites to save the planet. Our relationships with the Earth and one another fluctuate throughout our lives, and are influenced by a number of variables difficult to capture in any one study. But this two-way phenomenon is a sign that, if you’ve been meaning to go outside more or connect with your neighbors, you might as well work on both. “Natural ecosystems rely on different people” and vice versa, Jennings said. “You don’t have to go on long hikes every day to understand that.”

Editor’s Note: This article is part of “On Reconstruction,” a project about America’s most radical experiment.

Harpers Ferry seemed almost a part of the neighborhood when I was growing up. Granted, it was across the state line, in West Virginia, and slightly more than a half-hour drive away from our Virginia farm. But it took us almost that long to get to the nearest supermarket. And I felt connected by more than roads. The placid, slow-moving Shenandoah River, which flowed past our bottom pasture, becomes raging white water by the time it joins the Potomac River at Harpers Ferry, 35 miles downstream.

Nature itself seems to have designed Harpers Ferry to be a violent place. Cliffs border the confluence of the two rivers, and the raw power generated by their angry convergence made the site ideal for the national armory established there around 1800. It manufactured some 600,000 firearms before Union troops burned it down in 1861 to keep it out of Confederate hands. Five battles took place at Harpers Ferry, and the town changed hands 12 times.

But none of this is what Harpers Ferry is primarily remembered for. It is known instead for an event referred to at the time as an “insurrection,” a “rebellion,” or a “crusade,” but today most often called just a “raid.” On October 16, 1859, a year and a half before the attack on Fort Sumter, in South Carolina, the white abolitionist John Brown set out to seize the federal arsenal and distribute arms to enable the enslaved to claim their freedom. His effort ended quickly and ignominiously. Badly wounded, he was carted off to jail in nearby Charles Town to be tried and executed, as were a number of his followers. In a sense, though, his insurrection was never put down.

Brown, a brilliant publicist, made himself a martyr. He used the six weeks between his capture and his execution to define and defend his actions. He grounded them in a moral imperative to free the enslaved, invoked the nation’s revolutionary legacies, and warned of the conflagration to come. The “crimes of this guilty land,” he scrawled in a note he pressed on a guard shortly before his hanging, “will never be purged away; but with Blood.”

Within just a few years, Americans would look back at Brown across the gulf of the Civil War and identify him as a sign of what was ahead, imbuing his sacrifice with almost supernatural meaning. Showers of meteors had filled the skies in the weeks between Brown’s capture and his execution, reinforcing perceptions that his life and death had been a singular, numinous occurrence. In the words of a song improvised by a battalion of Union soldiers as they headed south to war not two years after his death, “John Brown’s body lies a-mouldering in the grave, but his soul goes marching on.” Even the attendees at his hanging seemed in retrospect to prefigure the future: Brevet Colonel Robert E. Lee was present as the commander of the U.S. troops who had captured Brown. Thomas J. (not yet “Stonewall”) Jackson led a unit of Virginia Military Institute cadets. John Wilkes Booth, President Abraham Lincoln’s future assassin, hurried from Richmond to Charles Town in a borrowed uniform to join a militia troop sent to police the hanging. He hated Brown’s cause but admired his audacity.

Many upstanding northern citizens—as well as much of the press—condemned Brown’s lawlessness. But others, Black and white, hailed his attack on slavery and mourned his death. On the day of his execution, 3,000 people gathered in Worcester, Massachusetts, to honor Brown; 1,400 attended a service in Cleveland. A gathering of Black Americans in Detroit honored the “martyr” who had “freely delivered up his life for the liberty of our race in this country.” The celebration of John Brown by Black Americans rested in the hope, and later the conviction, that his actions had set an irreversible course toward freedom—a second founding, its birth in violence as legitimate as the first one had been.

When does war start? When does violence become justified? When does it shift from prohibited to permitted and even necessary? Those questions hang in the air at Harpers Ferry, compelling us to ask: When did the Civil War actually begin—and end?

Brown drew the admiring attention of almost every prominent American writer—Emerson, Thoreau, Whitman, Melville, Longfellow, Whittier. But some among the nation’s northern elite did more than praise and defend Brown. Thinking back in his autobiography to events half a century earlier, and relying on a diary he kept in the 1850s, the abolitionist and writer Thomas Wentworth Higginson reflected on what a duty to morality demands when “law and order” stand on “the wrong side” of right and justice.

For him, this was not a theoretical question. He was thinking about the role he’d played long before armies massed on battlefields. He was thinking about the process by which “honest American men” had evolved into “conscientious law-breakers,” until “good citizenship” became a “sin” and bad citizenship a “duty.” Higginson was one among a small group of prominent white men who had known about the Harpers Ferry raid in advance and provided the financial support that enabled Brown to buy weapons and equipment. They came to be known as the Secret Six.

During the 1850s, a succession of legislative and judicial measures had tightened slavery’s grip on the nation. The Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 compelled the North to become complicit in returning those who had escaped slavery to southern bondage. The Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854 overturned the Missouri Compromise of a generation earlier, which had restricted the expansion of slavery into the northern territories. The Supreme Court’s Dred Scott decision, in 1857, established that no Black person could be considered a citizen or hold any “rights which the white man was bound to respect.” The perpetuation of slavery and racial injustice appeared to have become enshrined as an enduring national commitment, with the federal government assuming the role of active enforcer. Faced with such developments, the Black abolitionist Frederick Douglass found himself losing hope of ending slavery through moral suasion or political action; he came to see violence as necessary if emancipation was ever to be accomplished. Slavery itself, he believed, represented an act of war. The justification for violence already existed; whether—and how—to use it became more a pragmatic decision than a moral one.

White abolitionists, too, became radicalized by the developments of the 1850s. The group that became the Secret Six included five Boston Brahmins and a lone New Yorker, all highly respectable citizens, well educated, of good families and heritage; all men of means and in several cases very substantial means. The path that the Six took toward violence began with the passage of the Fugitive Slave Act. The prospect and, soon, the reality of Black people being apprehended on the streets of Boston or New York and summarily shipped to the South brought the cruelty and arbitrariness of slavery directly before northerners’ eyes. Three men who would later be part of the Six were early members of the Boston Vigilance Committee, established to prevent the enforcement of fugitive-slave legislation.

Samuel Gridley Howe was a graduate of Brown University and Harvard Medical School. He claimed descent from a participant in the Boston Tea Party, and had demonstrated his commitment to republican government by serving as a surgeon in the Greek Revolution in the 1820s.

Theodore Parker was a powerful preacher and Transcendentalist whose radicalism so marginalized him within Unitarianism that he established his own independent congregation of some 2,000 members. His oratory attracted legions of followers, who shared his reformist and antislavery views.

Higginson, descended from one of the original settlers of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, was a graduate of Harvard College and Harvard Divinity School and held a pulpit with a fervently antislavery Worcester congregation. He suffered his first battle wound in the unsuccessful effort to free Anthony Burns, who had fled enslavement in Virginia and was seized in Boston in 1854 under the provisions of the new act. With the encouragement of the Boston Vigilance Committee, the city erupted. Parker incited a crowd with a fiery speech at Faneuil Hall, and Higginson distributed axes to those assembled outside the courthouse where Burns was being held. He himself led an assault on the building with a battering ram. In the ensuing melee, a courthouse guard was killed and Higginson suffered a saber wound on his chin, leaving a scar he proudly displayed for the rest of his life. Higginson viewed the effort to free Burns as the beginning of a “revolution”—the shift from words to action he had sought. The killing of the guard, he later reflected, was “proof that war had really begun.” Violence had become both necessary and legitimate. (Burns was captured and returned to Virginia, but his freedom was eventually purchased by northern abolitionists. He attended Oberlin and became a minister.)

Higginson, Parker, and Howe soon turned their attention to Kansas, where a battle was escalating over whether the territory should become a slave state or a free state. In the spring of 1856, proslavery forces attacked a town founded by antislavery settlers from Massachusetts. John Brown, a longtime opponent of slavery who had joined his sons in Kansas with the intention of preventing its permanent establishment there, sought retribution; he and his allies killed five proslavery men in front of their families in a place called Pottawatomie. This murderous act hovered over Brown’s reputation—and later his legacy—instilling doubts in some potential supporters and leading others simply to deny that Brown had played a role in the killings, a stance that was aided by Brown’s own misrepresentations.

But to many, Brown’s extremism was a source of attraction, not revulsion. The newly created Massachusetts State Kansas Aid Committee channeled outside support. Higginson sent crates of rifles, revolvers, knives, and ammunition, as well as a cannon, to Kansas. He celebrated Kansas as the equivalent of Bunker Hill—a “rehearsal,” he later called it, for the more extensive violence to come.

It was because of Kansas that the six men who would conspire to support the Harpers Ferry raid found one another and identified Brown as the instrument of what they had come to regard as necessary violence. Like Parker, Higginson, and Howe, Franklin Benjamin Sanborn and George Luther Stearns had become active supporters of the Massachusetts State Kansas Aid Committee. A Harvard graduate who was a schoolteacher in Concord, Sanborn had been deeply influenced by Parker’s preaching while he was in college. Sanborn’s Transcendentalist ideas, with their skepticism about existing social structures and institutions, were further reinforced by his Concord neighbors Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau. Stearns was a wealthy manufacturer whose ancestors included some of the original settlers of the Massachusetts Bay Colony as well as an officer in the American Revolution. Long active in abolition, he had established a station of the Underground Railroad near his Medford home and drew on his considerable fortune to send weapons to Kansas free-state settlers.

The last of the Six was Gerrit Smith, said to be the wealthiest man in New York State. Smith, like Stearns, would supply significant financial support to Brown. He had long been active in politics, seeking the destruction of slavery through political means, but by 1856 he had come to believe that it was time, as he put it, to move beyond ballots and start “looking to bayonets.” Parker, too, was preaching more forceful measures. “I used to think this terrible question of freedom or slavery in America would be settled without bloodshed,” he wrote to Higginson. “I believe it no longer.”

The attempted arrest, in April 1860, of the Secret Six member Franklin Benjamin Sanborn by federal authorities—which the citizens of Concord, Massachusetts, prevented. A contemporaneous etching from Harper’s Weekly. (Wikimedia)

By the end of 1856, under the leadership of a commanding new territorial governor, violence in Kansas had begun to subside, and a free-state electoral victory seemed all but assured. The following year, Brown began traveling throughout New England and New York to raise money for a fresh attack on human bondage—his new plan as yet unspecified. In Boston, he presented Sanborn with a letter of introduction from Smith. Sanborn in turn arranged for Stearns, Howe, and Parker to meet Brown. Uncertain what Brown intended, Higginson at first kept his distance, even though Sanborn pressed him, insisting that Brown could do “more to split the Union than any man alive.” The ideals of the once noble American experiment could be sustained only by separating from slavery or by destroying it.

In February 1858, Brown revealed his plan for the Harpers Ferry attack to Smith and Sanborn. Not long after, all of the Massachusetts conspirators met with Brown in his Boston hotel room and formally constituted themselves as the Secret Committee of Six to support Brown in planning and financing the raid. Stearns was to be the official chair, Sanborn the secretary. They would keep careful records, with an elaborate ledger and a dues schedule. It was as if a clandestine organization of accountants had set to planning an uprising.

The raid’s actual occurrence surprised them—with both its timing and its swift and disastrous outcome. On October 16, 1859, Brown and a party of 21 seized the federal arsenal, eventually taking several dozen hostages. The uprising of the enslaved that Brown expected never materialized, and local militia soon cut off the bridges that were the only escape route. Brown and his men blockaded themselves in the armory’s fire-engine house, where they exchanged intermittent gunfire with the troops surrounding them. On October 18, Colonel Lee and a regiment of U.S. Marines broke down the engine-house door. Wounded by a saber cut, Brown was taken prisoner and transported to the nearby Charles Town jail. Ten of Brown’s men, including two of his sons, were killed; seven, including Brown, were captured and later executed. Four civilians were killed, as was one Marine. To the great dismay of the Secret Six, Brown’s papers and correspondence were found at the farm where Brown had been living in Maryland.

The Six were stunned. In the press and in government offices, accusations flew. Many suspected that Frederick Douglass must have played a role. More than a decade before the raid, Douglass had met Brown and been moved by their conversations to question his own belief in the possibility of a peaceful end to slavery. “My utterances,” he later wrote, “became more and more tinged by the color of this man’s strong impressions.” When Brown took up arms in Kansas, Douglass’s appreciation for his boldness and conviction was only enhanced. Yet Douglass proved unwilling to join Brown when he revealed his Harpers Ferry plans. The scheme struck him as dangerously impractical and risky—“a steel-trap.”

In the aftermath of the raid, Douglass seemed almost embarrassed that he had not offered Brown more support, that he had permitted realism to trump daring. He could not conceal his admiration for the would-be liberator’s courage, but concerns for his own survival won the day. Douglass fled north to Canada and then to England, where he remained for nearly half a year.

Although Douglass was all too aware of his vulnerability, the Six, protected by their social position, had been defying authority with seeming impunity for years. Their recognition of personal peril came as a shock. The Six had embraced violence out of both entitlement and desperation. In public and private communications, they frequently invoked their revolutionary heritage, their biological connections to the country’s Founders—to those who had pitched tea into Boston Harbor and fought at Lexington and Bunker Hill. This was a legacy—and a responsibility—that required them to act with equivalent courage and decisiveness. They believed that in some sense, they owned the nation, and their sense of privilege fueled a confident assumption of immunity from serious consequence. But with Harpers Ferry, it seemed, they might have gone a step too far.

Letters from Smith, Stearns, Howe, and Sanborn were found among Brown’s papers and featured in the press before the end of October. Five of the Six were quickly exposed and excoriated. (Parker, who had left the country before the raid in a futile search for a cure to his tuberculosis, was identified within a few months.) Smith fell into a frenzy of worry about being indicted. After becoming, according to his physician, “quite deranged, intellectually as well as morally,” he was committed in early November to the Utica Lunatic Asylum. After consulting a Boston lawyer, Sanborn, Stearns, and Howe made their way to Canada (and Howe published an article disavowing Brown). All three returned to the U.S., but Canada remained a refuge. Howe and Sanborn went back and forth twice. Higginson, both at the time and later, was contemptuous of his fellow conspirators’ cowardice. John Brown deserved better from them. “We of the Six,” he maintained years later, “were not—are not—great men.” But Brown, he believed, was.

Higginson neither hid nor fled. He busied himself raising money for Brown’s defense and endeavoring to devise a scheme to facilitate Brown’s escape. But even for Higginson, who seems never to have contemplated a battle or a risk he didn’t relish, these plans seemed too far-fetched. Instead, with admiration, Higginson watched Brown’s display of undaunted courage throughout his trial as he refused to plead insanity or back down in his commitment to ending slavery through whatever means necessary. Brown would do far more from the grave than he could have ever imagined accomplishing in life. Higginson spent the day of his sentencing with Brown’s wife and the remaining members of his family on their bleak and remote upstate–New York farm.

The congressional committee appointed in December to investigate the origins and supporters of Brown’s raid proved only a feeble threat to the six conspirators. Higginson, to his disappointment, was never called to testify at all. Howe and Stearns dodged, equivocated, and at times outright lied. Smith was judged too unwell to attend. Parker died in Italy in May 1860 without ever returning to the United States. Sanborn’s fears were at last realized when the U.S. Marshals he had eluded for so long arrived at his house in Concord to compel his testimony. Citizens of the town rose up to prevent his removal while a judge sympathetic to Sanborn was located to issue a writ of habeas corpus. In the end, the congressional hearings were a tepid affair, likely because southern representatives came to recognize that the less attention given to abolitionist voices, the better.

The next battle in the war that Brown had begun would not be long in coming. While he bided his time, Higginson published in February 1860 the first of a series of articles in The Atlantic that he referred to as his “Insurrection Papers.” After writing essays on “The Maroons of Jamaica” and “The Maroons of Surinam”—Black groups who had escaped enslavement to establish their own independent societies on the fringes of white settlement—he proceeded to publish admiring essays on Denmark Vesey, Nat Turner, and Gabriel, men who had embraced violence in their efforts to overturn American slavery. In addition to his writing, Higginson devoted the 16 months between Brown’s execution and the firing on Fort Sumter to reading about military strategy and drills, and to practicing shooting and swordplay. In 1862, this man of words returned to the world of action. He would fulfill “the dream of a lifetime” as the colonel commanding the First South Carolina Volunteers, a regiment of the formerly enslaved. This commission embodied what he had believed in for so long: the mobilization of force in the cause of Black freedom, as well as the arming of Black men in their own liberation.

Both during and after the war, the careers of the Secret Six fell along a spectrum. Stearns never went to war himself but recruited thousands of Black troops into what he referred to as “John Brown regiments”; when the war was over, he helped found the Freedmen’s Bureau, which provided land and other assistance to newly freed African Americans. Howe worked with the Sanitary Commission, a relief agency founded to support sick and wounded soldiers, and, like Stearns, was involved with the Freedmen’s Bureau after the war. Smith emerged from the Utica asylum fragile and aversive to any conversation about Harpers Ferry. He gave a significant amount of money to Stearns’s Black regiments. And yet, in 1867, he was also among those who paid the bond that freed Jefferson Davis from prison. Sanborn appointed himself the custodian of Brown’s legacy, publishing four books and some 75 articles about him. (Many of the articles appeared in this magazine.) Sanborn cultivated the memory of a kinder, gentler Brown, downplaying the violence he had perpetrated. He did not know until the 1870s that Brown had lied to him about his central and murderous role at Pottawatomie.

Higginson was unapologetic. In 1879, when he remarried after the death of his first wife, Higginson chose Harpers Ferry as the site for their honeymoon, introducing his bride to prominent landmarks from the raid, the trial, and the hanging. Higginson never forgave himself for not doing more to support Brown and for failing to persuade him to adopt a plan that was more likely to succeed. To commemorate the 50th anniversary of the raid, in 1909, Higginson joined Sanborn, the only other surviving member of the Secret Six, and Howe’s widow, Julia, in Concord, where they were interviewed by a journalist. (Julia Ward Howe had in 1862 published on the cover of The Atlantic different lyrics for the tune of “John Brown’s Body”: the immortal words of “Battle Hymn of the Republic.”) As a writer and an activist, Higginson had remained deeply engaged in public life, notably on behalf of women’s rights; his views on race and Black suffrage tended to shift with time and circumstance, and he was far from the radical of the prewar years. But in the Concord interview, he expressed no second thoughts about his commitment to violence on behalf of abolition—either at Harpers Ferry or within the legitimating framework of the Civil War.

I learned the story of John Brown at an early age. It might have been that my father told my siblings and me about the history of Harpers Ferry as we drove along Route 340, peering down the cliffsides at the town and the rushing water below. Or Brown might have been one of those historical personages whose names we just knew, inhaled from the Virginia air around us. People like Stonewall Jackson and John Mosby and Turner Ashby, who had all likely ridden across the very fields surrounding our house. When I was growing up, I was always proud to live in a place associated with so many famous forebears. It was many years before I thought to question what their fame and vaunted heroism had been in service of.

[From the August 2019 issue: Drew Gilpin Faust on race, history, and memories of a Virginia girlhood]

But I knew from the outset that Brown’s renown was different. He was, I was told, a madman, undertaking a scheme that was doomed to fail—a suicide mission. When I wrote about Brown for my first term paper in high school, that was the story I told.

From 1859 onward, many observers, reporters, and, later, historians adopted the view that Brown was insane, and by the mid-20th century, when I was in school, it had become a widely held assumption among white Americans. Rather than a “meteor” anticipating or inaugurating the larger war that would end slavery, Brown became no more than an aberration. Violence was reduced to a mental-health problem. The interpretation reassuringly diminished the moral force of Brown’s actions and suggested that only madness could lead to dreams of overthrowing white dominance and Black subordination. This message was intended to emphasize the strength and immutability of the racial hierarchies that remained in place well after slavery’s end, surviving Reconstruction and enshrined in Jim Crow. It minimized the threat Brown posed and by implication all but removed him—and his insistence on the moral evil of slavery—from any place in explanations of the Civil War’s origins. The Lost Cause portrait of a conflict fought by two honorable opponents who differed primarily on constitutional views about states’ rights could remain intact and unchallenged.

Even in the days just after the raid, though, there were those who insisted on acknowledging the historic import of Harpers Ferry as well as the sanity and determination of John Brown. Governor Henry Wise of Virginia came to Harpers Ferry to interview Brown after his capture and rejected the idea that Brown was a lunatic: “They are mistaken who take him to be a madman,” he said. He left with an impression of him as “a man of clear head … cool, collected, and indomitable.” A sane Brown was far more dangerous. If his actions were rational, then the South must regard them as proof that the North was plotting the violent overthrow of slavery. The South, Wise insisted, needed to take active measures to defend itself and its way of life. One South Carolina politician described the raid as “fact coming to the aid of logic”: the South’s worst fears made real. Harpers Ferry was the moment that changed everything. The rabidly proslavery Wise and the radical abolitionist Higginson agreed on little else, but this they regarded as self-evident.

To accept slavery as the cause of the Civil War dictates setting the conflict within a longer trajectory of violence, one that starts at least with John Brown rather than Fort Sumter. Higginson would perhaps have us date the war from his saber cut in 1854. Douglass might well argue that it began in 1619. And when did the Civil War end? Historians studying the era after Appomattox have in recent years emphasized the persistence of violence through and beyond Reconstruction, as intransigent former Confederates turned from organized military force to beatings, burnings, whippings, shootings, and lynchings in the effort to suppress newly gained Black freedom. The war, the historians argue, simply continued in other forms. It is as difficult and complicated to say when the Civil War ended as to determine when it began.

In the years since 1859, John Brown and his raid have become a touchstone in America’s struggle to reconcile—or at least represent—the complex connections between force and freedom. The United States was founded in violent resistance and then guaranteed its survival as a nation eight decades later in a bloody Civil War. Violence is at the heart of our national mythology. The Secret Six drew explicitly on that mythology in their writing. It is central to our national creed. But violence has also, as Frederick Douglass reminds us, rested at the core of the social and legal order that mandated and sustained the oppression of millions of Americans from the early 17th century into our own time. Violence could enslave and violence could free. The purpose mattered. As Douglass declared, looking back on the Civil War in a Decoration Day speech honoring the Union dead in 1883, “Whatever else I may forget, I shall never forget the difference between those who fought for liberty and those who fought for slavery.”

The Black community did not forget that Brown had fought for liberty. After the war, his raid and his death continued to be commemorated across the North. In a stirring address at Storer College, founded in Harpers Ferry in 1867 to educate African Americans, Douglass insisted that Brown had not failed, but had begun the “war that ended slavery.” W. E. B. Du Bois held Brown in similarly high esteem. In 1906, the second gathering of the Niagara Movement, the predecessor of the NAACP, was held at Harpers Ferry in acknowledgment of Brown’s contributions to Black rights. Delegates from the NAACP met there in 1932 intending to dedicate a plaque in Brown’s honor. In a speech at that meeting titled “The Use of Force in Reform,” Du Bois expressed few compunctions about the use of violence: Brown, he said, “took human lives … He took them in Kansas and he took them here. He meant to take them. He meant to use force to wipe out an evil he could no longer endure.”

Langston Hughes used poetry rather than oratory to address African American readers as he invoked the lingering memory of John Brown. Hughes, whose grandmother had been married to one of the Black conspirators killed in the raid, celebrated “John Brown / Who took his gun, / Took twenty-one companions / White and black, / Went to shoot your way to freedom.” Hughes recalled that his grandmother had preserved her husband’s bullet-ridden shawl. As a small boy, he was sometimes wrapped in it. “You will remember / John Brown,” Hughes insisted.

But, fittingly, given his defining commitment to nonviolence, Martin Luther King Jr. remained silent on Brown. Even as the keynote speaker at a centennial observance of Brown’s raid, King did not mention the man once. The place of violence in the centuries of struggle for Black freedom has been long contested, and by the mid-1960s, King faced growing demands from Black activists urging forceful resistance to white threats and assaults instead of the Gandhian passivity that underpinned his philosophy. Malcolm X regarded Brown as “the only good white the country’s ever had.” The Black Power movement that challenged King’s vision of a Beloved Community could claim deep roots.

Barack Obama reflected the long tradition of Black appreciation for Brown in his 2006 book, The Audacity of Hope. Brown’s “willingness to spill blood,” Obama said, demonstrated that “deliberation alone” would not suffice to end slavery. “Pragmatism,” he concluded, “can sometimes be moral cowardice.”

As a nation, we are unable to get over John Brown. And as a nation, we have not figured out what violence we will condemn and what we will celebrate. I found myself unspeakably moved as I stood before Nat Turner’s Bible in the National Museum of African American History and Culture. At the same time, I am horrified by the violence of the January 6 rioters and by what I regard as widespread threats to the rule of law. We pride ourselves on being a country with a written Constitution that sets peaceful parameters for government. Yet the Supreme Court established by that Constitution has issued rulings providing that the citizenry may be armed not just for recreational hunting, but with weapons, including assault rifles, that are frequently purchased with an eye toward resisting that very government. Lawmakers walk the floors of the Capitol with pins shaped like AR-15s in their lapels. The rule of law seems historically and inextricably enmeshed in the tolerance—even the encouragement—of violence.

In the years leading up to the Civil War, antislavery Americans like the Secret Six turned to what Higginson—with a keen awareness of the oxymoron—called conscientious lawbreaking. Douglass came to embrace the legitimacy of violence, but recognized it as justified “only when all other means of progress and enlightenment have failed”—and only when there is a “thing worse than” violence that makes it necessary.

The existence and endurance of our nation has depended on that careful discernment, on that conscientiousness, in deciding when we truly face a “thing worse than.” It is not merely a historical question. A deep-seated ambivalence about violence defines us still.

This article appears in the December 2023 print edition with the headline “The Men Who Started the Civil War.” When you buy a book using a link on this page, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.

Editor’s Note: This article is part of “On Reconstruction,” a project about America’s most radical experiment.

John F. Kennedy took George Plimpton by surprise after a dinner party one evening when he pulled his friend aside for a word in the Oval Office. The president had Reconstruction on his mind—really, though, he wanted to discuss Plimpton’s grandmother.

Plimpton was lanky and lordly, famous for his patrician accent and his forays into professional sports. The Paris Review founder did everything and knew everyone. He might edit literary criticism one day and try his hand at football or boxing the next. Plimpton had known Jackie Kennedy for years, and he had been friends with Robert F. Kennedy since their Harvard days.

He also had another, and very different, Kennedy connection. Plimpton’s great-grandfather Adelbert Ames, a New Englander, had been a Civil War general and Mississippi governor during Reconstruction. He was an ardent supporter of Black suffrage. Kennedy had soiled Ames’s reputation in his best-selling 1956 book, Profiles in Courage, which had won the Pulitzer Prize for Biography the following year. The book ushered the junior senator from Massachusetts onto the national stage, effectively launching his bid for the presidency.

Kennedy’s book presented a pantheon of past U.S. senators as models of courageous compromise and political pragmatism. One such man, Kennedy claimed, was Ames’s racist Democratic rival, Lucius Quintus Cincinnatus Lamar II. A slaveholder, drafter of the Mississippi Ordinance of Secession, and Confederate colonel, Lamar later became the first ex-Confederate appointed to the Supreme Court after the Civil War.

Lamar and Ames were the preeminent politicians of Mississippi Reconstruction. They hated each other. (At one point, Lamar threatened to lynch Ames.) Profiles in Courage had relied heavily on the work of influential Dunning School historians—disciples of the Columbia University professor William A. Dunning, who scorned Black suffrage and promoted the mythology of the Lost Cause. Kennedy may have been genuinely misled by these historians, but he also aspired to higher office and needed to appeal to white southern voters. His book denounced Reconstruction, casting Ames as a corrupt, carpetbagging villain and Lamar as a heroic southern statesman.

[From the June 2021 issue: Why Confederate lies live on]

Ames’s daughter Blanche—Plimpton’s grandmother—was incensed. She sent meticulously researched letters to Kennedy, demanding that he correct his book. Some of the letters had footnotes. Some had appendixes. Blanche would not let up, chasing Kennedy from the Senate to the presidency.

In Plimpton’s telling, as Kennedy took his guests on an informal tour of the White House that evening, he motioned to Plimpton for a word. “George,” he said, as Plimpton would recall, “I’d like to talk to you about your grandmother.” Kennedy begged him to persuade Blanche Ames to stop writing, complaining that her correspondence “was cutting into the work of government.”

Plimpton promised to try, but he knew it would be no use. “My grandmother was a Massachusetts woman,” he later explained, and when Kennedy refused to amend Profiles, Blanche “did what any sensible Massachusetts woman would do: she sat down and wrote her own book.”

Blanche Ames was born in Massachusetts in 1878, the year after Reconstruction ended in a political deal that awarded Rutherford B. Hayes, a Republican, the disputed presidential election in exchange for withdrawing federal troops from the South. Blanche had the Civil War in her blood. Benjamin F. Butler, a Union general, was her maternal grandfather; he had commanded Fort Monroe, in Virginia, and had designated fugitive slaves as “contraband of war,” using a legal loophole that allowed refugees to seek protection behind Union lines. He later became governor of Massachusetts. Adelbert Ames, her father, won the Medal of Honor at First Bull Run and fought at Antietam and Gettysburg. After serving as the military governor of Mississippi, Ames became the state’s senator and then its civilian governor. He was a champion of racial rights, embracing a personal “Mission with a large M ” to support Black citizens.

Blanche, too, was a principled fighter, willing to risk her social privilege for the causes that she championed. Adelbert encouraged his daughters to attend college. Blanche went to Smith, where she became class president. At commencement, she delivered a forceful address promoting women’s suffrage, with President William McKinley in the audience. Blanche helped spearhead the Massachusetts women’s-suffrage movement, working as a political cartoonist for Woman’s Journal. She founded the Massachusetts Birth Control League. Once, Blanche sauntered onto Boston’s Commonwealth Avenue carrying a hand-carved wooden penis to demonstrate proper condom use; she was arrested, but police released her after realizing she was the daughter of one governor and the granddaughter of another. “If she was a man,” one historian has observed, “there would be five books” about her already.

Blanche Ames Ames acquired her distinctive, double-barreled name upon marrying the prominent Harvard botanist Oakes Ames, who came from an unrelated dynastic strand of Ameses. A talented painter, Blanche illustrated some of Oakes’s books about orchids. The Ames mansion at Borderland, their 1,200-acre estate outside Boston, was built entirely of stone to ensure that the library—the filming location for the 2019 movie Knives Out—would be fireproof. Adelbert Ames’s and Benjamin Butler’s Civil War–era swords can still be seen in the foyer. George Plimpton once used one to cut a cake at an anniversary party.

Profiles in Courage roused Blanche from her Borderland retirement. Eight decades had elapsed since the end of Reconstruction. The modern civil-rights movement was gaining momentum, with its promise of a second Reconstruction. Kennedy was not only taking the wrong side, but he was doing so by maligning Blanche’s father:

No state suffered more from carpetbag rule than Mississippi. Adelbert Ames, first Senator and then Governor … [admitted] that only his election to the Senate prompted him to take up his residence in Mississippi. He was chosen Governor by a majority composed of freed slaves and radical Republicans, sustained and nourished by Federal bayonets … Taxes increased to a level fourteen times as high as normal in order to support the extravagances of the reconstruction government.

Lamar, meanwhile, was cast as a “statesman” for whom “no partisan, personal or sectional considerations could outweigh his devotion to the national interest and to the truth”—a selfless patriot who had helped reconcile the nation.

The truth of the matter was very different. Reconstruction-era Mississippi under Ames’s leadership arguably held more political promise for newly enfranchised Black people than any other southern state. Before the Civil War, Mississippi had contained some of the richest counties in the nation, but most Mississippians—some 55 percent—were enslaved. After the war, Mississippi was the poorest state in the Union. But the new state constitution worked to overturn the Black Codes—laws designed to limit the rights of newly freed African Americans—and Mississippi’s Hiram Revels and Blanche K. Bruce became the country’s first Black senators. Ames himself shared his gubernatorial ticket with three Black candidates.

Democrats swept the 1874 national midterm elections in what the historian Eric Foner has called a “repudiation of Reconstruction.” Mississippi Democrats saw an opportunity: By seizing control of the legislature in upcoming state elections, they could pass measures that would essentially end Black suffrage. The year 1875 became a struggle between Ames, the elected governor, and Lamar, who was then in Congress. Ames’s administration had the support of Black voters. Lamar, meanwhile, embraced the so-called Mississippi Plan, which aimed to disrupt a legitimate election, by force if necessary. Lamar insisted that the Democrats had to win control of the state legislature to ensure the “supremacy of the unconquered and unconquerable Saxon race.” On Election Day, paramilitary terrorists called White Liners obstructed polling places, destroyed ballot boxes, and threatened to kill Black citizens who voted, as the journalist Nicholas Lemann has written in Redemption: The Last Battle of the Civil War. Counties that were once overwhelmingly Republican saw the Republican vote drop to single digits. “A revolution has taken place,” Ames wrote to his wife, prophesying a bleak future for Mississippi. “A race are disenfranchised—they are to be returned to … an era of second slavery.”

[From the December 2023 issue: Eric Foner on Confederate general James Longstreet]

Democrats, elected by terrorism and led by Lamar, now threatened Ames with impeachment. They accused him of financial impropriety—including the high taxes that Profiles decried—despite his administration’s relative frugality. To avoid impeachment, Ames resigned and fled the state. A U.S. Senate committee investigated the Mississippi elections and produced a 2,000-page document known as the “Boutwell Report.” It concluded that Ames was blameless and that his resignation had been forced “by measures unauthorized by law.” No matter: Ames’s reputation lay in tatters.

The following year, during the presidential deadlock, Lamar helped broker the Compromise of 1877, which gave Hayes the presidency over Samuel Tilden in exchange for the return of “home rule”—rule by white-supremacist Democrats—to the South, effectively destroying national Reconstruction.

Profiles in Courage evades easy categorization. It is a historical work, written by a political team, heavily assisted by historians, and published for political gain. The book features eight senators, strategically distributed across time, space, and party. Five of the profiles focus on questions of slavery, the Civil War, or Reconstruction, and none of the featured senators took a progressive approach to Black rights. Three, including Lamar, were slaveholders. Questions about authorship arose early: Kennedy’s speechwriter Theodore Sorensen was rumored to be the true author. (He did, in fact, write most of the book.) Archival drafts reveal that the Georgetown University history professor Jules Davids helped overhaul the Mississippi chapter. The book’s historical vision, though, came from Kennedy.

Historians in recent years have acknowledged that the real problem with Profiles is not authorship but substance. As a critic, Blanche Ames got there first. Her personal copy of the book, a first edition, overflows with annotations. She drew arrows and corkscrew question marks around the paragraph about her father, her anger visible on the page. When Kennedy insisted that Lamar had written Mississippi’s Ordinance of Secession only after losing hope that “the South could obtain justice in the Federal Union,” Blanche thundered in the margins: “Lamar had sown the seed in 1861. He was sowing it again in 1874.”

In June 1956, Blanche sent a nine-page letter to Senator Kennedy, introducing herself as his friend Plimpton’s grandmother and urging “corrections of errata for your own sake as well as mine.” She recognized diplomatically that, “in a work as ambitious as ‘Profiles in Courage’ … there are bound to be some viewpoints to arouse controversy.” Nevertheless, she argued, ambition did not excuse historical inaccuracy.

Kennedy replied the next month. He was cordial, admitting that Reconstruction was “one of the most difficult sections” to write, not because of lack of material, but because of an abundance of “emotion-packed and strongly partisan” readings. It was a politician’s apology, suffused with qualifiers. He insisted that he had relied on “reputable authorities,” but granted that “it is possible, of course, that in so doing a particular individual or incident is slighted or inadequately or inaccurately described.” He added, “If such is the case in connection with my mention of your father … I am indeed sorry.” He assured Blanche that her message “succeeded in stimulating me to further research,” but warned that he did not expect Profiles to be reprinted, so there would be no correction.

Kennedy did, in fact, do further research. According to Plimpton, during that Oval Office conversation after the dinner party, Kennedy asked Plimpton what he knew about his great-grandfather, apparently eager to demonstrate his own knowledge. He reenacted how Ames would inspect his Civil War soldiers and shout “For God’s sake, draw up your bowels!,” causing White House personnel to burst in, worried by the uproar. The president had found this obscure detail in an equally obscure book, The Twentieth Maine, which was published a year after Profiles.

But between 1956 and 1963, Profiles was reprinted more than 30 times. Kennedy did not change his account of Adelbert Ames and L. Q. C. Lamar.

Kennedy’s intransigence only fueled Blanche’s campaign. She forwarded her letters to Harper & Brothers, giving the publisher “the first opportunity” to rectify where Profiles in Courage “falls short of the Code of Historians.” The publisher declined, claiming that too much time had elapsed for readers to be able to understand any corrections. Blanche combed through Kennedy’s acknowledgments and wrote to the professors who assisted with drafting or editing Profiles, hoping that the historians might put pressure on him.

They did not. There is no evidence that Davids, architect of the Lamar chapter, ever bothered to reply. Allan Nevins, at Columbia, backpedaled, claiming that the introduction he had written for Profiles “carried no endorsement of all details … I am sure the Senator will make correction where correction is proper.” Arthur Holcombe, at Harvard, patronizingly suggested that Blanche had “misunderstood Senator Kennedy’s meaning.” Some of these academic historians may simply not have taken Blanche seriously: She was old, she was a woman, and she lacked scholarly credentials.

Blanche contacted a second circle of scholars, seeking a historian “free from bias” who might serve as an impartial biographer of Adelbert Ames. She steeped herself in the historiography of Reconstruction, coming to understand how closely Profiles followed the neo-Confederate historians Wirt Armistead Cate and Edward Mayes. “Cate copies Mayes and Kennedy copies Cate,” she wrote to the eminent Harvard historian Samuel Eliot Morison. “Now, unless corrected, modern and future historians may copy Kennedy! This method of writing history leads around in circles of quotations of half-truths. It is a false method.”

Morison suggested a few military scholars as potential Ames biographers, but mainly recommended “Negro historians” such as John Hope Franklin, Rayford Logan, and Alrutheus Ambush Taylor. “Adelbert Ames’ career as Governor was, I believe, more important than his military career,” Morison reasoned, “and he was the champion of the Negroes.” Blanche contacted a host of prominent academics, including C. Vann Woodward, whose books had criticized the Dunning School and challenged the myth that Reconstruction governments with Black elected officials were simply incompetent or ignorant. The Profiles team had paid no attention to this scholarship. Despite her efforts, no historian would commit to the project. So Blanche resolved to write a biography of Adelbert Ames herself.

Borderland became Blanche’s archive and fortress while she spent six years—1957 to 1963—researching and writing. When her granddaughter Olivia Hoblitzelle visited Borderland, she marveled at the piles of Civil War maps and books in the library. On one trip, Hoblitzelle recalled, her father asked, “How long is it now?” “Five hundred pages,” Blanche replied. When Hoblitzelle’s father asked, “Isn’t that enough?,” Blanche “looked him straight in the eye, and said, ‘Well, if Tolstoy could do it, so can I.’ ” When she finished, she was 86 years old.

Blanche’s research drew significantly on the work of Black historians, who had been publishing trenchant studies of Reconstruction for decades. White historians had largely ignored this work, dismissing it as second-class scholarship. Blanche thought otherwise. Her bibliography cited W. E. B. Du Bois’s Black Reconstruction in America, Franklin’s The Militant South, John Lynch’s The Facts of Reconstruction, Merl Eppse’s The Negro, Too, in American History, and George Washington Williams’s History of the Negro Race in America. Kennedy, meanwhile, had not cited a single Black author on Mississippi Reconstruction.

[From the March 1901 issue: W. E. B. Du Bois on the Freedmen’s Bureau]

The stakes, Blanche believed, included not only her father’s reputation but the very meaning of Reconstruction. Her final chapter, “Integrity and History,” is a scathing condemnation of the traditional Reconstruction historiography Kennedy had parroted. Throughout the book, she linked Adelbert Ames’s promotion of racial rights in the 1870s with the modern civil-rights movement—the second Reconstruction:

In this fateful year of 1963, our Congress has a unique opportunity with its overwhelming Democratic majorities … Congress seems to hold the practical power to do away with the disgraceful suppression of Negro suffrage rights … A hundred years has been too long to wait for application of these long-standing laws of equity.

Blanche Ames’s book was published at the worst possible moment. In September 1963, she finished correcting page proofs for Adelbert Ames, 1835–1933: General, Senator, Governor. The book was lovingly bound in Sundour cloth and stamped in gold. It sold for $12.50, about $120 today—an old-fashioned, costly volume. Kennedy’s mass-produced paperback, meanwhile, sold for less than a dollar. On November 22, 1963, as Blanche’s book was going to press, Lee Harvey Oswald shot and killed Kennedy in Dallas.

With the president’s tragic death, Profiles in Courage got a second life, landing back on the New York Times best-seller list. As Americans evaluated Kennedy’s legacy, his prizewinning book seemed a natural place to start. A televised adaptation of Profiles had been in production at NBC before Kennedy’s death. At that time, Blanche had urged Kennedy to use television as an opportunity to “bring your views into accord with the trend of modern historical interpretation of the Reconstruction Period.” After the assassination, the network pressed ahead, framing the series as “one of the finest living memorials to President Kennedy.” But Blanche may have gotten through to Kennedy’s team in the end, at least as far as the television series: When it premiered, a year after Kennedy’s death, the planned segment on Lamar had been quietly dropped. It was the only original profile not to be featured on television.

But there was still the book. Blanche wrote to Sorensen in early 1964, trying to strike a tone of mutual interest: “Must we not find a way of correcting these obvious misstatements inadvertently restated by President Kennedy? Otherwise they will be perpetuated with greater force than ever, and I do not believe that he would have wished this. Do you?” There is no record that Sorensen replied.

Blanche lived to see the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Born a year after the end of the first Reconstruction, she was able to witness the start of the second. But when she died at Borderland, in 1969, a belittling New York Times headline read: “MRS. OAKES AMES, BOTANIST’S WIDOW; Illustrator of Her Husband’s Works on Orchids Dies.” Despite Blanche’s best efforts, her book sold only a few thousand copies.

In 2010, a few years before efforts to remove Confederate monuments gained traction across the country, a life-size statue of Lamar was erected outside his former home in Oxford, Mississippi. The L. Q. C. Lamar House Museum’s public-outreach efforts generally commemorate Lamar not as a white supremacist or an architect of the Mississippi Plan, but as the embodiment of Kennedy’s redemptive arc: “Southern secessionist to American statesman,” as the museum describes it. Ames is not mentioned at all; Profiles is highlighted throughout the museum.

In 1980, George Plimpton donated a copy of Blanche’s book to the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum, in Boston. “President Kennedy would know,” he said, “that a Massachusetts woman will eventually have her way.” But Blanche Ames Ames has not had her way quite yet. At the library’s gift shop, visitors can buy a 50th-anniversary edition of Profiles in Courage, published in 2006, with an introduction by Caroline Kennedy. The book has never been corrected.

This article appears in the December 2023 print edition with the headline “Kennedy and the Lost Cause.” When you buy a book using a link on this page, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.

Editor’s Note: This article is part of “On Reconstruction,” a project about America’s most radical experiment.

“Reconstruction,” by Frederick Douglass, appeared in the December 1866 issue of this magazine. It was the most important article that The Atlantic published in the immediate postwar era. It was also, for its time, unusually concise, coming in at a mere 2,703 words. By contrast, The Atlantic’s 1860 endorsement of Abraham Lincoln, written by James Russell Lowell, had run to 7,331 words, and Lincoln himself was not mentioned until the 1,747th word. (The editorial did succeed, of course. And yes, I’m taking credit on behalf of The Atlantic for Lincoln’s presidency.)

Douglass published his call for a radical reimagining of the American idea at an ambiguous but promising moment. Already, the infant project of Reconstruction—­of the South, of the lives of newly liberated Black Americans, of the Constitution itself—was stimulating opposition that would, by 1877, prove shattering to the cause of equality. And yet Doug­lass was correct, as his biographer David W. Blight writes in this issue, in understanding that “the United States had been reinvented by war and by new egalitarian impulses rooted in emancipation.” Douglass’s essay, which Blight brilliantly annotates for us, is “full of radical brimstone, cautious hope, and a thoroughly new vision of constitutional authority.”

The Reconstruction period has been a topic for The Atlantic across the centuries. This special issue, edited by our senior editor Vann R. Newkirk II, working alongside our editor-at-large, Cullen Murphy, and our managing editor John Swansburg, is meant to examine the enduring consequences of Reconstruction’s tragic fall at a moment—­yet another moment—when the cause of racial progress faces sustained pressure. The idea for this issue emerged from a conversation I had not long ago with Lonnie G. Bunch III, the secretary of the Smithsonian Institution and the founding director of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture. Bunch is, among other things, a stupendous builder, a conscientious American patriot, and an impresario of memory. He is also a scholar of the Freedmen’s Bureau archives, and the author of a moving article about the bureau’s work.

Our conversation at first focused on the need to complete the exploration and digitization of the imperishably important archives, but then it ranged more widely. Both of us felt that, in this period of political and social reaction, revisiting the centrality of Reconstruction, and of promises made and broken, would be an apt subject for this magazine. Bunch writes in his article:

Librarians around the nation feel the chilling effects of book bans. Some individuals who seek to occupy the highest office in the land fear the effects of an Advanced Placement class that explores African American history—a history that, as education officials in Florida have maintained, “lacks educational value”; a history that does not deserve to be remembered.

As Newkirk, who has written a fascinating article about the Fisk University choir, noted to me, “If the last seven years in this country have proven anything, it is to show just how un­finished, and fragile, the project of Reconstruction actually is.”

In the interest of memory, we asked our deputy editor Yoni Appelbaum, a historian by trade, to examine The Atlantic’s mixed record on questions of Reconstruction. I would prefer to tell you that Frederick Douglass spoke singularly for this magazine on the subject, but there is also the matter of Woodrow Wilson, a frequent contributor to The Atlantic in the years before he became president. Wilson was a prime contributor to a 1901 series in this magazine focused on Reconstruction. The series, which also featured W. E. B. Du Bois (thank goodness), has too much of a “good people on both sides” air about it. As Appelbaum notes, Wilson’s critique of Reconstruction was appalling. “The negroes were exalted; the states were misgoverned and looted in their name,” Wilson wrote. This went on, he continued, until “the whites who were real citizens got control again.”

Illumination is the point of this issue. We have great scholars, including Peniel E. Joseph, whose article, “The Revolution Never Ended,” focuses on the Black Americans who continued the work of Reconstruction even after federal troops withdrew from the South, and Drew Gilpin Faust, a former president of Harvard and a noted Civil War scholar, who writes about the Secret Six, the men exposed after the war for having funded John Brown’s raid on Harpers Ferry. Eric Foner, in many ways the dean of Reconstruction scholarship, writes on James Longstreet, the Confederate general who accepted the Union’s victory and took up the cause of rebuilding the nation.

At the center of this issue, spread across 32 pages, you will find something surprising and glorious: an original play by Anna Deavere Smith, a contributing writer at The Atlantic as well as a playwright, a performer, and an actual genius. I don’t doubt that you will one day see the play, This Ghost of Slavery, on Broadway. When I first started talking with Smith about writing for this issue, she had predictably brilliant ideas for a long exploration of juvenile justice and its roots in the slave system, but we soon realized that an essay couldn’t contain all that she was trying to achieve. So I suggested that she write a play. We recruited our national editor, Scott Stossel, to serve as her dramaturge. Spend time with this play. It will move you. Spend time with this whole issue, in fact: It asks, and answers, the questions that most need to be asked.

This editor’s note appears in the December 2023 print edition with the headline “The Questions That Most Need Asking.”