Provisional Constitution (John Brown)

While a guest in Stephen Douglass's house in 1858, John Brown drafted a Provisional Constitution and Ordinances for the People of the United States. Although this document was dismissed by contemporaries as evidence of Brown's madness, David Reynolds points out that at the time, the U.S. Constitution was "a highly contexted text". It was rejected by the abolitionists Wm. Lloyd Garrison and Wendell Phillips, who called if "a covenant with death and an agreement from hell" because it indirectly sanctioned slavery,[1]:249–250 as the Dred Scott decision had just confirmed.

Hundreds or thousands of John Brown's Provisional Constitution were found among his papers after his raid on Harper's Ferry. It called for a new state in the Appalachian Mountains, a sort of West Virginia, populated by escaped slaves from plantations, which were at lower altitudes. Not one of the copies was ever distributed; even nearby enslaved persons did not receive copies. The reason for this has never been explained. He was not asked about it by any of the many visitors he saw in the weeks between being sentenced to death (in Virginia v. John Brown) and his execution.[2]

Much of the Constitution was reprinted in the Wheeling Daily Intelligencer shortly after his arrest.[3]

References
  1. Reynolds, David S (2006). John Brown, abolitionist : the man who killed slavery, sparked the Civil War, and seeded civil rights. New York: Vintage Books. ISBN 0375726152.
  2. "Archived copy". Archived from the original on 2018-06-30. Retrieved 2018-06-29.CS1 maint: archived copy as title (link)
  3. "Further from Harper's Ferry!". Wheeling Daily Intelligencer. October 20, 1869. p. 3.
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