Debts to the Dead

Idris Robinson’s Political Theology Juliana Spahr Hours after John Brown was executed for his failed raid on Harpers Ferry in 1859, Thoreau called him “an angel of light.” Louis Ransom (in 1860) and Thomas Hovenden (around 1884) painted images of him stooping to kiss a Black infant held up to him by its mother, depicting a possibly apocryphal encounter described by a New York newspaper three days…