Surprising look at how John Brown showed that agitation is another name for citizenship

This is something thing you don't see every day, even in 2020 so far: a full-throated defense of John Brown's attack on Harper's Ferry and the slave-liberation project it was meant to kick off. It comes at the end of a piece by Richard Kreitner and Rick Perlstein about the long trope of the "outside agitator", A Brief History of Dangerous Others NYBooks 07/27/2020:

Consider American history’s most notorious outside agitator: John Brown. Although his 1859 raid on the federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry, Virginia, failed to spark a larger revolt of the enslaved, Brown succeeded in accelerating the conflict over slavery and hastening abolition. A Connecticut-born radical and a veteran of “Bleeding Kansas,” that yearslong agitator-palooza, Brown didn’t care about the hackneyed antebellum nostrum — the core of American political culture — that Northerners should leave white Southerners alone, even if that meant allowing the slaver power to survive and expand indefinitely. His Harpers Ferry attack exploded in an instant the nearly century-long, elite-enforced consensus that condemned any criticism of slavery from outside the South as ipso facto illegitimate. Still today sometimes depicted as a treacherous terrorist, Brown was instead arguably America’s quintessential unionist and patriot: he thought Americans in one part of the country were responsible for what went on in every other part, and he acted on that belief without hesitation.

This is how American identity is supposed to work. It rarely does. But in the country we need and deserve—and must today build — the concept of the outside agitator will be nonsensical. The work of agitation, from wherever it comes, is simply another name for citizenship.

Magpie performing Old John Brown by Si Kahn 04/08/2015: