Testing the limits

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Sons of Providence

The Brown Brothers, the Slave Trade, and the American Revolution

Charles Rappleye

Simon & Schuster: 402 pp., $27

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The Whiskey Rebellion

George Washington, Alexander Hamilton, and the Frontier Rebels Who Challenged America’s Newfound Sovereignty

William Hogeland

Scribner: 302 pp., $26.95

HIS wife was dead, his conscience stricken. In 1773 -- three years before the Declaration of Independence and nearly 90 years before the Emancipation Proclamation -- Moses Brown, one of two brothers prominent in Rhode Island and beyond, believed the Almighty was punishing him for his ties to slavery and the slave.

“God might be mysterious,” Charles Rappleye writes in “Sons of Providence,” “but Moses believed that there was a reason for every occurrence, and that calamity was rooted in retribution.” (Such a view was not uncommon: In the fall of 1775, Abigail Adams thought a dysentery epidemic in Boston was divine punishment for slavery.) Moses, who with his brother John traded in human chattel from Africa, converted from his forebears’ Baptist faith to Quakerism during his wife’s final illness and had a vision while returning from her grave. “I saw my slaves with my spiritual eyes plainly as I see you now,” he is said to have recalled, “and it was given to me as clearly to understand that the sacrifice that was called for of my hand was to give them their liberty.”

And so began a momentous clash between Moses and John Brown -- the “Sons of Providence” of Rappleye’s fresh and interesting new work. Moses was an early abolitionist; John, a business-minded trader who fought to protect commerce in human beings in the Revolutionary era. It was an early brother-versus-brother skirmish over American slavery -- the kind of conflict that would play out on an epic stage in the 1860s.

The sheer number of recent popular books about the Revolution and its aftermath -- a flowering that roughly dates from David McCullough’s “John Adams” in 2001 -- brings a Winston Churchill remark to mind. Informed of a new effort to write about his life and work in 1950, he said: “There’s nothing much in that field left unploughed.” But Rappleye’s story of the Browns and William Hogeland’s “The Whiskey Rebellion” recount stories well worth telling -- stories that touch on perennial issues of race, power, equality and money.

Rappleye’s is perhaps the more surprising of the two. Using the Browns to illustrate competing forces, Rappleye brings the siblings to vivid life. “They emerged as American archetypes, the robber baron and the social reformer, thunder and light, a dichotomy in the national character that echoes to this day,” he writes. His portraits of the domineering, business-obsessed John and the understated, pious Moses bear out the thesis.

The roots of Moses’ discomfort with slavery were personal. As young men, the brothers invested in the slave trade, and while John spent the rest of his life trying to turn a profit by whatever means were at hand, Moses’ guilt -- expressed most dramatically in his religious vision -- drove him to agitate for abolition. That the American antislavery movement began so early is a point often lost in the popular mind, and Rappleye revives these earlier struggles well. In 1783 and 1784, Moses -- who in his Quaker clothes and broad-brimmed hat was increasingly seen as an eccentric -- petitioned the Rhode Island General Assembly. “The plan was ambitious,” writes Rappleye, “calling for more comprehensive antislavery legislation than anything that had come before, including gradual emancipation and a strict ban on any residents of the state taking part in the slave trade.” When the proposal went to the legislators in Providence, John Brown quickly set about defeating his brother’s cause.

Theirs was, to say the least, a complex relationship. Longtime partners in business, in the founding of what became Brown University and in the Revolutionary cause, the Browns were like many brothers: alternately ready to kill the other or die for him. Moses had won John’s freedom from British custody during the Revolution; Rappleye writes that by the time of the fight over slavery, John “may have tired of sharing laurels with his more pious brother.... Within the family, as in the town at large, John wielded great influence, but Moses seemed to enjoy greater respect.” There may have been an element of jealousy, then, in John’s role in scuttling the abolitionist legislation, and scuttled it was.

For decades to follow, the two men would engage in a similar dance, with Moses pressing for emancipation and John, who eventually won election to Congress, working to keep slavery -- and the slave trade, which was more directly relevant to the business interests of the North and of John himself -- alive and well. John died in 1803; afterward, Moses seemed to lose his abolitionist zeal, a development that Rappleye speculates may have had something to do with the fact that the cause was no longer driven by fraternal rivalry. This is an interesting theory -- men have done stranger things from purely emotional motives -- but I suspect the more likely answer lies in another point of Rappleye’s: that “while Moses was enthusiastic about the idea of legislation, he had no taste for the ugly business of holding his peers -- and ultimately his brother -- to account.” This ambivalence in a man who gave so much to the cause of emancipation is an intriguing comment on a larger reality: the nation’s own ambivalence about slavery -- one that prevailed, more or less, until the Civil War finally settled the matter, tilting the balance of power in the country toward justice.

The new nation’s power was first tested, Hogeland argues in “The Whiskey Rebellion,” by a 1794 uprising in western Pennsylvania against the federal effort to collect taxes on hard liquor. The crisis raised the same fundamental question that led to the Civil War: Who was in charge, the federal government or the states?

“The rebellion thus became a primal national drama that pitted President Washington and other eastern founders, along with their well-heeled frontier proteges and allies -- all recent revolutionaries themselves -- against western laborers with a radical vision of the American future,” Hogeland writes.

Moving from the Pennsylvania frontier to Alexander Hamilton’s maneuverings at the highest levels of government, Hogeland tells a good tale. Here he describes the rebels: “The attackers’ faces were blackened; the victims were tortured and humiliated.... Stripped to deerskin breeches, they streaked their chests and faces with herb-dyed clay and stuck feathers in their hair, imitating a native raiding party. Or they borrowed their wives’ dresses. Black faces framed by white caps, they kicked the awkward skirts while confronting human prey.” Washington himself led the troops to put down the several-years-long unrest, and Hogeland’s renderings of Washington and Hamilton, as well as local figures, make the great men seem all too human.

It is not too much to say, I think, that the Whiskey Rebellion and the 1832-33 crisis over federal tariffs, a battle pitting President Andrew Jackson against hot-headed South Carolinians, are among the most significant yet little-known tests that America faced in its first few decades. In these books by Rappleye and Hogeland, readers will find much to remind them that history is never seamless, and that America, as Wellington said of Waterloo, was -- and is -- the “the nearest run thing you ever saw.” *