In the American Civil War, one of the most effective fighting songs of the Union is often referred to simply as “John Brown’s Body.” Its chorus was so catchy that Julia Ward Howe incorporated it when she wrote the “Battle Hymn of the Republic” that became both the official Union “fight song” and religious hymn—“Glory, glory, Hallelujah!”

The irony of all this is that John Brown was actually a somewhat reviled figure among many Americans in the North before, during and after the Civil War just as he was universally hated in the South. Many in the North blamed his botched Harper’s Ferry attempted slave uprising for unnecessarily fanning the fires of fanaticism in the critical era of 1858.

After the War, most whites, north and south, simply dismissed John Brown as “crazy.” Not so in the African American communities across America. Instead, John Brown was correctly understood by former slaves and their descendants to have been one white man who believed sincerely that blacks and whites were equals, no matter what.

Shortly after the turn of the 20th century, students, faculty and administrators of tiny Western University in Quindaro, rural Wyandotte County, Kansas, undertook to erect what proved to be the first statue of John Brown placed anywhere in the United States. Fully 50 years after his efforts in “Bleeding Kansas” and the aforementioned Harper’s Ferry incident in Virginia, Kansas City area African Americans raised funds for just such a remembbrance.

One hundred years later, their work stands testament to their respect and devotion to this powerful, yet simple New Englander who almost single-handedly aroused northern public opinion about the plight of “free-staters” in Kansas Territory and about slaves throughout the American South. Others had talked about abolition. John Brown did something about it. Quindaro residents and Western supporters wanted to commemorate that spirit.

There remains much confusion about both John Brown in Kansas and the town of Quindaro in the territorial period. Many appear to believe that the later rural African American community of Quindaro that sustained Kansas’ only African American post secondary institution was somehow connected with the ruins of the pre-Civil War town at the bottom of the bluffs.

The old town at the bottom was a largely white community that fostered “Free Soil” beliefs before the War. It was deserted and then legislated out of existence by the supposed “free state” legislature during the War itself. The later community of Wyandotte in which the college was started and in which the African Methodist Episcopal Church came to support by the time of the erection of the John Brown statue was a post-Civil War community almost entirely composed of African Americans. Kansas City, Kansas, did not annex the Quindaro community proper until much later in the 20th century

Much effort has gone into discovering and publicizing the ruins of Territorial Quindaro. It has its own distinctive and mostly white history. The Quindaro that made the much larger contribution of Western University and the John Brown statue grew out of the efforts of African Americans themselves to create institutions that would serve their own needs beginning in the late 1860s. The two communities are distinct in origin and history even though they are close to each other geographically.

As we approach the sesquicentennial of the Civil War and have already passed the 150th anniversaries of John Brown’s Black Jack battlefield exploits as well as even that of his execution, it is good to remember the degree of respect in which he was held by the residents of African American Quindaro just one hundred years ago when they placed this memorial in his honor at 27th & Sewell in Kansas City, Kansas.

Dr. Bill Worley, Instructor, MCC-Blue River