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INTRODUCTION
Two NAMES NOT OFTEN HEARD together in academic circles are those of Frederick Douglass and Henry David Thoreau; scholars of one have tended to ignore the other. This should not be terribly surprising, however, given that they lived such different lives and failed to make reference to one another in their own work. Thoreau mentions Douglass only in his essay "Wendell Phillips Before the Concord Lyceum": "...referring to the case of Frederick-; to our disgrace we know not what to call him... [H] e communicated to a New Bedford audience, the other day, his purpose of writing his life, and telling his name, and the name of his master, and the place he ran from...."1 For his part, although Douglass speaks of Emerson in his third narrative, he says nothing about Thoreau. In fact, it appears that if they met it was only once, at an annual meeting in 1844 of the Concord Women's Anti-Slavery Society, at which Douglass and Emerson both spoke.2
Despite this, Douglass and Thoreau do share many things in common. They were roughly the same age, with Thoreau born in 1817 and Douglass probably in 1818; they knew several of the same people, such as William Lloyd Garrison, Wendell Phillips, Horace Greeley, Theodore Parker, Emerson, and John Brown; they each spoke publicly for the anti-slavery cause, in fact, Thoreau delivered his well-known "Slavery in Massachusetts" while filling in for Douglass at a rally in Framingham, MA; and they were each active with the underground railroad.3 What caught my attention and what I will focus on here, however, is their simultaneous enthusiastic support of John Brown's use of violence against slavery in his failed attempt on the federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry,Virginia, in 1859.4 In short, it is my contention that Douglass's argument supporting Brown's use of violence is superior to Thoreau's. First, however, a brief reminder of the historical case and an explanation of the evaluative criteria are in order.
HISTORICAL BACKGROUND AND EVALUATIVE CRITERIA
John Brown, a Northern white with a passionate hatred for chattel slavery, grabbed the national spotlight when he and a small company of men temporarily took over the federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry. From there he had planned to recruit and arm slaves from nearby...