Carton has written an absorbing and inspiring, though not wholly innovative, biography of abolitionist firebrand John Brown. A historian of American culture, Carton (The Marble Faun: Hawthorne's Transformations
) centers this portrait on Brown's ceaseless efforts to end slavery. From the earliest days, Brown's abolitionism was grounded in Christianity: for him, the biblical call to love thy neighbor trumped any argument a proslavery theologian could make. As for what Brown accomplished in the climactic 1859 raid at Harpers Ferry, Carton quotes, and seems to share, the assessment of Brown's contemporary Wendell Phillips that Brown "loosened the roots of the slave system" and can be credited with ending slavery in Virginia. Carton usefully sets Brown's abolitionism against the backdrop of a larger American story—the increased radicalism of black abolitionists beginning in the 1840s; the Compromise of 1850 (which admitted California to the union as a free state while passing the Fugitive Slave Act); and ongoing debates about whether slavery should be legal in western territories. Like Brown's other recent biographer, David Reynolds (John Brown, Abolitionist
), Carton writes with great admiration for his subject. His Brown is a hero who set the nation on a road to justice that we are traveling still. B&w photos. (Sept. 6)
