Du Bois understood that Brown's recourse to violence in killing "border ruffians" in Kansas and his attempt to seize the armory at Harpers Ferry in order to arm slaves had caused "bitter debate as to how far force and violence can bring peace and good will."

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But Du Bois, a co-founder of the NAACP, did not think slavery could have been ended without the Civil War. He concluded that "the violence which John Brown led made Kansas a free state" and his plan to put arms in the hands of slaves hastened the end of slavery. Du Bois' book John Brown was a "tribute to the man who of all Americans has perhaps come nearest to touching the real souls of black folk." African-American historians, artists and activists have long eulogized Brown as an archetype of self-sacrifice. "If you are for me and my problems," Malcolm X declared in 1965, "then you have to be willing to do as old John Brown did."

Blacks' reverence for the memory of Brown has not inspired those mainstream historians uncomfortable with Brown's reliance on violence. The belief that he may have suffered from a degree of "madness" has echoed down through the decades in Brown biographical literature. In his popular 1959 narrative The Road to Harpers Ferry, J.C. Furnas argued that Brown was consumed by a widespread "Spartacus complex."

But Furnas also found that "certain details of Old Brown's career" and writings evidenced psychiatric illness. Brown might have been "intermittently 'in­sane'…for years before Harpers Ferry," Furnas specu- ­­lated, "sometimes able to cope with practicalities but eventually betrayed by his strange inconsistencies leading up to and during the raid—his disease then progressing into the egocentric exaltation that so edified millions between his capture and death."

Careful historians like David M. Potter reaffirmed the centrality of the slavery issue in his posthumously published synthesis The Impending Crisis, 1848-1861, but even Potter conceded that Brown "was not a well-adjusted man"—despite the fact many abolitionists shared his belief that the slaves were restive.
In 1970 historian Stephen B. Oates sought to bridge the rival biographical traditions by depicting Brown as a religious obsessive in an era of intense political conflict. Oates' Brown was not the Cromwellian warrior of early legend builders. Nor was he the greedy, self-deluded soldier of fortune of debunkers.

He was a curious, somewhat schizoid amalgam of the legend builders' martyr and his evil doppelganger. This Brown possessed courage, energy, compassion and indomitable faith in his call to free the slaves. He was also egotistical, inept, cruel, intolerant and self-righteous, "always exhibit[ing] a puritanical obsession with the wrongs of others."

Oates was doubtful that historians might ever persuasively identify psychosis in a subject they studied. He repudiated historian Allan Nevins' belief that Brown suffered from "reasoning insanity" and "ambitious paranoia," but he declared that Brown was not "normal," "well adjusted" or "sane" either (later dismissing these terms as meaningless).

But reference to Brown's "glittering eye"—a telltale mark of insanity in 19th-century popular culture—invited Oates' readers to conclude that Brown was touched with madness after all. Finding in Brown an "angry, messianic mind," Oates straddled the two biographical traditions. For three decades, his portrait of Brown has perpetuated the image of mental instability.

To get to the roots of Brown's mental state, we must turn to those closest to him for help. Analysis of the scores of letters written by members of both Brown's immediate family and the extended family he referred to as the "connection" reveal a John Brown quite different from the self-absorbed, humorless, rigid, imperious, driven fanatic portrayed by some biographers.

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