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         Making martyrs

By Ishmael Law
Pacific News Service

Paul Hill has been sentenced to die for murdering an abortion doctor and a bodyguard in Pensacola last summer. Among some in the abortion rights movement, this is bad news. As a letter in a newspaper recently argued, "If (Hill) is executed, anti-abortion extremists will invoke his name, as abolitionists invoked John Brown's after his hanging."

One hundred thirty-five years separate John Brown from Paul Hill. Curiously, John Brown's opponents, like Hill's, worried that "To hang a fanatic is to make a martyr of him."

John Brown was a Yankee, raised in the broil of conflict over slavery. He fathered 17 children and ended up in the Kansas Territory in the years when bands of proslavery thugs from Missouri were using arson, false ballots and murder to force Kansas into the Union as a slave state. After one massacre in 1856 Brown rallied a group of free-soil supporters and by dark of night retaliated by hacking five men to death.

In 1859, with the backing of a network of abolitionist supporters, Brown led a band of white and black recruits and seized a Federal arsenal in Harpers Ferry, Va. He expected to arm an insurrection of slaves. In the shoot-out that followed, ten of his band (including two sons) and two slaves were killed. Seven were captured and hanged. Five locals perished.

John Brown and Paul Hill each de-scribed his deed as a mandate from God. And both were raised within the same religious tradition. Brown came from a Congregationalist-Presbyterian family and had studied for the ministry. Hill is an ordained Presbyterian minister. For both men, Calvinism, with its divine moral commands, was strong.

John Brown called himself "an instrument in the hands of God to free the slaves." Quoting from the Supreme Court's Dred Scott decision upholding slavery, he declared, "I go joyfully in behalf of millions that 'have no rights' that this great and glorious, this Christian republic 'is bound to respect.' "

At his sentencing, Brown stilled the courtroom: "I see a book kissed, which I suppose to be the Bible, or at least the New Testament, which teaches me that all things whatsoever I would that men would do to me, I should do them . . . I believe that to have interfered as I have done in behalf of His despised poor is no wrong, but right. Now, if it is deemed necessary that I should forfeit my life for the furtherance of the ends of justice, and mingle my blood with the blood of millions in this slave country whose rights are disregarded by wicked, cruel and unjust enactments, I say let it be done."

Paul Hill recently said, "I have great peace and joy in the Lord, in that I have done something I think the Lord is pleased with . . . I'm unquestionably encouraging others who are called by God to do the same thing. There's no question in my mind that it was what the Lord wanted me to do, to shoot John Britton to prevent him from killing unborn children."

The context for each man's deed was an irrepressible conflict. The U.S. Supreme Court had declared in 1857 that blacks were not part of the body politic and that they had no rights that other people were bound to respect. In 1973 the Supreme Court said exactly the same thing about the unborn.

On the issues of both slavery and abortion the Democrats took the prochoice position. The Republicans were in opposition. But the nation's heart was torn in three. Some Americans simply insisted that "niggers" and fetuses were not human at all. Others said Negroes and unborn children were endowed by their Creator with the rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

In between, and much more numerous, were those who wanted slavery or abortion to be safe, legal and rare -- and out of sight. These Americans had uneasy consciences. Like Jefferson, who preached liberty and had slaves, they said a person must have rights over what belongs to him or her. They regretted, they deplored -- but they did not feel the lash or the knife.

Brown and Hill took the radically prolife position, and they found few to stand beside them. Brown reviled slavery and Hill reviled abortion as villainy and violence so vicious that they had to be stopped by force. The last words Brown ever wrote were: "I, John Brown, am quite certain that the crimes of this guilty land will never be purged away but by blood." At the time of his sentencing, Hill said that he had tried persuasion for months, but the children had perished. "I thought that this time, hopefully, I will prevail in keeping them from killing their unborn child."

Many Americans considered John Brown to be insane, deluded, a madman. Many Americans today consider Paul Hill to be a nut, a fanatic, a terrorist. Yet it is the awe of their dying, not the horror of their killing, which may abide. W.E.B. DuBois, the black Harvard scholar, said of Brown what may end up to be true of Hill as well: "He did not use argument, he was himself an argument."

Most Americans who opposed slavery dove for cover, and joined in calling for John Brown's death. Even Lincoln, on his way to candidacy for the party created to end slavery, hastened to say that Brown was "no Republican." A century later, antiabortion activists have been elbowing one another aside to disavow Hill.

Throughout his life, John Brown spoke incoherently. Once arrested, he was clothed in eloquence. Emerson compared his prose to Lincoln's. He was wrong. It was Brown's prose that provoked Lincoln to see and to say that the nation's conscience was at stake.

John Brown was hustled through his trial. The judge would not wait for his lawyers to arrive, and when they did, the court refused them time to read the indictment or the Virginia code. Still, Brown did have his say. and his words rang. They found their echo at Gettysburg, and the second inaugural, and in the Battle Hymn, and through Stephen Vincent Benet. His truth went marching on.

Paul Hill's judge forbade him to plead justifiable homicide, even to make the argument. None of the lawyers who are currently famous for defending the rights of the accused -- not Alan Dershowitz, not Bill Kunstler -- stood by Paul Hill. Nothing has been heard from the ACLU, which sacrificed one-fifth of its membership by defending a group of Nazis in Skokie, Ill. Surely a man on trial for his life should be given the most spacious freedom at least to argue on his own behalf.

In death however, abortion-rights supporters now fear Paul Hill, like John Brown, may be impossible to silence.

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