Whether Brown was mad, whether he was a delusional religious fanatic, whether he was a terrorist of Bloody Kansas, whether he was guilty of murder and incitement to murder many times over, are questions of fact.
Whether he was a moral hero fighting a just campaign against an intolerable moral crime is an entirely imaginary question with only imaginary answers.
The radical sees the conditions of the ragged and brutalized serf, slave, and free laborer and says all are alike victims of injustice.
His revolution does not end until all that is overthrown.
He will ruin the universe trying to get there.
The libertarian sees the same horrors and protests serfdom and slavery are unjust but not the frightful state of free labor.
His revolution ends with the destruction of the ancien regime and the liberation of the slaves.
For both he would spill oceans of blood.
It seems that Hawthorne, though a solid republican who disapproved slavery, was a Copperhead Democrat who would have let the South go and sympathized more with hard-driven free white labor than slaves he thought generally no worse off, and perhaps not as badly off in some cases.
He sought no revolution, in any case, and deplored the Civil War.
Not your typical Yankee intellectual of those days, though in fact for many decades that was the view of most abolitionists.
They wanted to end slavery in the US, and if the way to do that was to sunder the Union they would sunder it.
But that was not the view of the Republicans, who agreed with Lincoln in insisting before secession that if the South attempted it "We will not let you go!"
Some, distressed by Hawthorne's position, attribute it to racism.
That is just stupid.
Lincoln was a racist, as were nearly all abolitionists, including the most fanatic.
The bones of contention were slavery and Union.
The Copperheads did not accept the intolerance of Lincoln's "house divided" speech and did not want to plunge into war either to convert the Union from a voluntary association to a creature of conquest or to end slavery.
The Republicans wanted all those things and more.
And did them.
They ended slavery in the South by conquest and they kept the South in the Union by conquest.
And then they spent decades trying to force political and civic equality for blacks upon the country without real majority support.
These things would have shocked and horrified the men of Philadelphia.
As they shocked and horrified people like Hawthorne.
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