Transcriber’s Note:

The cover image was created by the transcriber and is placed in the public domain.

AMERICAN CRISIS BIOGRAPHIES

Edited by

Ellis Paxson Oberholtzer, Ph. D.

The American Crisis Biographies

Edited by Ellis Paxson Oberholtzer, Ph.D. With the counsel and advice of Professor John B. McMaster, of the University of Pennsylvania.

Each 12mo, cloth, with frontispiece portrait. Price $1.25 net; by mail, $1.37.

These biographies will constitute a complete and comprehensive history of the great American sectional struggle in the form of readable and authoritative biography. The editor has enlisted the co-operation of many competent writers, as will be noted from the list given below. An interesting feature of the undertaking is that the series is to be impartial, Southern writers having been assigned to Southern subjects and Northern writers to Northern subjects, but all will belong to the younger generation of writers, thus assuring freedom from any suspicion of war-time prejudice. The Civil War will not be treated as a rebellion, but as the great event in the history of our nation, which, after forty years, it is now clearly recognized to have been.

Now ready:

Abraham Lincoln. By Ellis Paxson Oberholtzer.

Thomas H. Benton. By Joseph M. Rogers.

David G. Farragut. By John R. Spears.

William T. Sherman. By Edward Robins.

Frederick Douglass. By Booker T. Washington.

Judah P. Benjamin. By Pierce Butler.

Robert E. Lee. By Philip Alexander Bruce.

Jefferson Davis. By Prof. W. E. Dodd.

Alexander H. Stephens. By Louis Pendleton.

John C. Calhoun. By Gaillard Hunt.

“Stonewall” Jackson. By Henry Alexander White.

John Brown. By W. E. Burghardt Dubois.

In preparation:

Daniel Webster. By Prof. C. H. Van Tyne.

William Lloyd Garrison. By Lindsay Swift.

Charles Sumner. By Prof. George H. Haynes.

William H. Seward. By Edward Everett Hale, Jr.

Stephen A. Douglas. By Prof. Henry Parker Willis.

Thaddeus Stevens. By Prof. J. A. Woodburn.

Andrew Johnson. By Prof. Walter L. Fleming.

Henry Clay. By Thomas H. Clay.

Ulysses S. Grant. By Prof. Franklin S. Edmonds.

Edwin M. Stanton. By Edwin S. Corwin.

Jay Cooke. By Ellis Paxson Oberholtzer.

AMERICAN CRISIS BIOGRAPHIES

John Brown

by

W. E. BURGHARDT DU BOIS, Ph. D.

Professor of Sociology, Atlanta University

Author of “The Suppression of the African Slave Trade,” “The Philadelphia Negro,” “The Souls of Black Folk,” etc.

PHILADELPHIA

GEORGE W. JACOBS & COMPANY

PUBLISHERS

Copyright, 1909, by

George W. Jacobs & Company

Published September, 1909

All rights reserved

Printed in U. S. A.

To

the memory of

ELIZABETH

PREFACE

After the work of Sanborn, Hinton, Connelley, and Redpath, the only excuse for another life of John Brown is an opportunity to lay new emphasis upon the material which they have so carefully collected, and to treat these facts from a different point of view. The view-point adopted in this book is that of the little known but vastly important inner development of the Negro American. John Brown worked not simply for Black Men—he worked with them; and he was a companion of their daily life, knew their faults and virtues, and felt, as few white Americans have felt, the bitter tragedy of their lot. The story of John Brown, then, cannot be complete unless due emphasis is given this phase of his activity. Unfortunately, however, few written records of these friendships and this long continued intimacy exist, so that little new material along these lines can be adduced. For the most part one must be content with quoting the authors mentioned (and I have quoted them freely), and other writers like Anderson, Featherstonhaugh, Barry, Hunter, Boteler, Douglass and Hamilton. But even in the absence of special material the great broad truths are clear, and this book is at once a record of and a tribute to the man who of all Americans has perhaps come nearest to touching the real souls of black folk.

W. E. Burghardt Du Bois.

CONTENTS

CHRONOLOGY

Boyhood and Youth

1800— John Brown is born in Torrington, Conn., May 9th. Attempted insurrection of slaves under Gabriel in Virginia, in September. 1805— The family migrates to Ohio. 1812— John Brown meets a slave boy. 1816— He joins the church. 1819— He attends school at Plainfield, Mass.

The Tanner

1819–1825— John Brown works as a tanner at Hudson, O. 1821— He marries Dianthe Lusk, June 21st. 1822— Attempted slave insurrection in South Carolina in June. 1825–1835— He works as a tanner at Randolph, Pa., and is postmaster. 1831— Nat Turner’s insurrection, in Virginia, August 21st. 1832— His first wife dies, August 10th. 1833— He marries Mary Ann Day, July 11th. 1834— He outlines his plan for Negro education, November 21st. 1835–1840— He lives in and near Hudson, O., and speculates in land. 1837— He loses heavily in the panic. 1839— He and his family swear blood-feud with slavery. 1840— He surveys Virginia lands for Oberlin College, and proposes buying 1,000 acres.

The Shepherd

1841— John Brown begins sheep-farming.

In Kansas

1854— Kansas and Nebraska Bill becomes a law, May 30th. Five sons start for Kansas in October. 1855— John Brown at the Syracuse convention of Abolitionists in June. He starts for Kansas with a sixth son and his son-in-law in September. Two sons take part in Big Springs convention in September. John Brown arrives in Kansas, October 6th. He helps to defend Lawrence in December. 1856— He attends a mass meeting at Osawatomie in April. He visits Buford’s camp in May. The sacking of Lawrence, May 21st. The Pottawatomie murders, May 23–26th. Arrest of two sons, May 28th. Battle of Black Jack, June 2d. Goes to Iowa with his wounded son-in-law and joins Lane’s army, July and August. Joins in attacks to rid Lawrence of surrounding forts, August. Battle of Osawatomie, August 30th. Missouri’s last invasion of Kansas, September 15th. Geary arrives and induces Brown to leave Kansas, September. Brown starts for the East with his sons, September 20th.

The Abolitionist

1857— John Brown is in Boston in January. He attends the New York meeting of the National Kansas Committee, in January. Before the Massachusetts legislature in February. Tours New England to raise money, March and April. Contracts for 1,000 pikes in Connecticut. 1857— He starts West, May. He is at Tabor, I., August and September. He founds a military school in Iowa, December. 1858— John Brown returns to the East, January. He is at Frederick Douglass’s house, February. He reveals his plan to Sanborn in February. He is in Canada, April. Forbes’ disclosures, May. Chatham convention, May 8–10th. Hamilton’s massacre in Kansas, May 19th. Plans postponed, May 20th. John Brown starts West, June 3d. He arrives in Kansas, June 25th. He is in South Kansas, coöperating with Montgomery, July-December. The raid into Missouri for slaves, December 20th.

The Harper’s Ferry Raid

1859— John Brown starts with fugitives for Canada, January 20th. He arrives in Canada, March 12th. He speaks in Cleveland, March 23d. Last visit of John Brown to the East, April and May. He starts for Harper’s Ferry, June. He and three companions arrive at Harper’s Ferry, July 3d. He gathers twenty-two men and munitions, June-October. He starts on the foray, Sunday, October 16th at 8 P. M. The town and arsenal are captured, Monday, October 17th at 4 A. M. Gathering of the militia, Monday, October 17th at 7 A. M. to 12 M. Brown’s party is hemmed in, Monday, October 17th at 12 M. He withdraws to the engine-house, Monday, October 17th at 12 M. Kagi’s party is killed and captured, Monday, October 17th at 3 P. M. Lee and 100 marines arrive, Monday, October 17th at 12 P. M. Brown is captured, Tuesday, October 18th at 8 A. M. 1859— Preliminary examination, October 25th. Trial at Charleston (then Virginia, now West Virginia), October 27th-November 4th. Forty days in prison, October 16th-December 2d. Execution of John Brown at Charleston, December 2d. Burial of John Brown at North Elba, N. Y., December 8th.

JOHN BROWN

CHAPTER I
AFRICA AND AMERICA

“That it might be fulfilled which was spoken of the Lord by the prophet saying, ‘Out of Egypt have I called My son.’”

The mystic spell of Africa is and ever was over all America. It has guided her hardest work, inspired her finest literature, and sung her sweetest songs. Her greatest destiny—unsensed and despised though it be,—is to give back to the first of continents the gifts which Africa of old gave to America’s fathers’ fathers.

Of all inspiration which America owes to Africa, however, the greatest by far is the score of heroic, men whom the sorrows of these dark children called to unselfish devotion and heroic self-realization: Benezet, Garrison and Harriet Stowe; Sumner, Douglass and Lincoln—these and others, but above all, John Brown.

John Brown was a stalwart, rough-hewn man, mightily yet tenderly carven. To his making went the stern justice of a Cromwellian “Ironside,” the freedom-loving fire of a Welsh Celt, and the thrift of a Dutch housewife. And these very things it was—thrift, freedom, and justice—that early crossed the unknown seas to find asylum in America. Yet they came late, for before they came greed, and greed brought black slaves from Africa.

The Negroes came on the heels, if not on the very ships of Columbus. They followed De Soto to the Mississippi; saw Virginia with D’Ayllon, Mexico with Cortez, Peru with Pizarro; and led the western wanderings of Coronado in his search for the Seven Cities of Cibola. Something more than a a decade after the Cavaliers, and a year before the Pilgrims, they set lasting foot on the North American continent.

These black men came not of their willing, but because of the hasty greed of new America selfishly and half thoughtlessly sought to revive in the New World the dying but unforgotten custom of enslaving the world’s workers. So with the birth of wealth and liberty west of the seas, came slavery, and slavery all the more cruel and hideous because it gradually built itself on a caste of race and color, thus breaking the common bonds of human fellowship and weaving artificial barriers of birth and appearance.

The result was evil, as all injustice must be. At first, the black men writhed and struggled and died in their bonds, and their blood reddened the paths across the Atlantic and around the beautiful isles of the Western Indies. Then as the bonds gripped them closer and closer, they succumbed to sullen indifference or happy ignorance, with only here and there flashes of wild red vengeance.

For, after all, these black men were but men, neither more nor less wonderful than other men. In build and stature, they were for the most part among the taller nations and sturdily made. In their mental equipment and moral poise, they showed themselves full brothers to all men—“intensely human”; and this too in their very modifications and peculiarities—their warm brown and bronzed color and crisp curled hair under the heat and wet of Africa; their sensuous enjoyment of the music and color of life; their instinct for barter and trade; their strong family life and government. Yet these characteristics were bruised and spoiled and misinterpreted in the rude uprooting of the slave trade and the sudden transplantation of this race to other climes, among other peoples. Their color became a badge of servitude, their tropical habit was deemed laziness, their worship was thought heathenish, their family customs and the government were ruthlessly overturned and debauched; many of their virtues became vices, and much of their vice, virtue.

The price of repression is greater than the cost of liberty. The degradation of men costs something both to the degraded and those who degrade. While the Negro slaves sank to listless docility and vacant ignorance, their masters found themselves whirled in the eddies of mighty movements: their system of slavery was twisting them backward toward darker ages of force and caste and cruelty, while forward swirled swift currents of liberty and uplift.

They still felt the impulse of the wonderful awakening of culture from its barbaric sleep of centuries which men call the Renaissance; they were own children of the mighty stirring of Europe’s conscience which we call the Reformation; and they and their children were to be prime actors in laying the foundations of human liberty in a new a century and new land. Already the birth pains of the new freedom were felt in that land. Old Europe was begetting in the new continent a vast longing for spiritual space. So it was builded into America the thrift of the searchers of wealth, the freedom of the Renaissance and the stern morality of the Reformation.

Three lands typified these three things which time planted in the New World: England sent Puritanism, the last white flower of the Lutheran revolt; Holland sent the new vigor and thrift of the Renaissance; while Celtic lands and bits of lands like France and Ireland and Wales, sent the passionate desire for personal freedom. These three elements came, and came more often than not in the guise of humble men—an English carpenter on the Mayflower, an Amsterdam tailor seeking a new ancestral city, and a Welsh wanderer. From three such men sprang in the marriage of years, John Brown.

To the unraveling of human tangles, we would gladly believe that God sends especial men—chosen vessels that come to the world’s deliverance. And what could be more fitting than that the human embodiments of freedom, Puritanism and trade—the great new currents sweeping across the back eddies of slavery, should give birth to the man who in years to come pointed the way to liberty and realized that the cost of liberty was less than the price of repression? So it was. In bleak December 1620, a carpenter and a weaver landed at Plymouth—Peter and John Brown. This carpenter Peter came from goodly stock, possibly, though not sure, from that very John Brown of the early sixteenth century whom bluff King Henry VIII of England burned for his Puritanism, and whose son was all too near the same fate. Thirty years after Peter Brown had landed, came the Welshman, John Owen, to Windsor, Conn., to help in the building of that commonwealth, and near him settled Peter Mills, the tailor of Holland. The great-grandson of Peter Brown, born in Connecticut in 1700, had for a son a Revolutionary soldier, who married one of the Welshman’s grandchildren and had in turn a son, Owen Brown, the father of John Brown, in February of 1771. This Owen Brown a neighbor remembers “very distinctly, and that he was very much respected and esteemed by my father. He was an earnestly devout and religious man, of the old Connecticut fashion; and one peculiarity of his impressed his name and person indelibly upon my memory: he was inveterate and most painful stammerer—the first specimen of that infirmity that I had ever seen, and, according to my recollection, the worst that I had ever known to this day. Consequently, though we removed from Hudson to another settlement early in the summer of 1807, and returned to Connecticut in 1812, so that I rarely saw any of that family afterward, I have never to this day seen a man struggling and half strangled with a word stuck to his throat, without remembering good Mr. Owen Brown, who could not speak without stammering, except in prayer.”[^[1]]

In 1800, May 9th, wrote this Owen Brown: “John was born, one hundred years after his great-grandfather. Nothing else very uncommon.”[^[2]]

CHAPTER II
THE MAKING OF THE MAN

“There was a man called of God and his name was John.”

A tall big boy of twelve or fifteen, “barefoot and bareheaded, with buckskin breeches, suspended often with one leather strap over his shoulder”[^[3]] roamed in the forests of northern Ohio. He remembered the days of his coming to the strange wild land—the lowing oxen, the great white wagon that wandered from Connecticut to Pennsylvania and over the swelling hills and mountains, where the wide-eyed urchin of five sat staring at the new world of a wild beast and the wilder brown men. Then came life itself in its realness—the driving of cows and the killing of rattlesnakes, and swift free rides on great mornings alone with earth and tree and the sky. He became “a rambler in the wild new country, finding birds and squirrels and sometimes a wild turkey’s nest.” At first, the Indians filled him with a strange fear. But his kindly old father thought of Indians as neither vermin nor property and this fear “soon wore off and he used to hang about them quite as much as was consistent with good manners.”

The tragedy and comedy of this broad silent life turned on things strangely simple and primitive—the stealing of “three large brass pins”; the disappearance of the wonderful yellow marble which an Indian boy had given him; the love and losing of a little bob-tailed squirrel for which he wept and hunted the world in vain; finally the shadow of death which is ever here—the death of a ewe-lamb and the death of the boy’s mother.

All these things happened before he was eight and they were his main education. He could dress leather and make whip-lashes; he could herd cattle and talk Indian; but of books and formal schooling he had little.

“John was never quarrelsome, but was excessively fond of the hardest and roughest kind of plays, and could never get enough of them. Indeed when for a short time, he was sometimes sent to school, the opportunity it afforded to wrestle and snowball and run and jump and knock off old seedy wool hats, offered to him almost the only compensation for the confinements and restraints of school.

“With such a feeling and but little chance of going to school at all, he did not become much of a scholar. He would always choose to stay at home and work hard rather than be sent to school.” Consequently, “he learned nothing of grammar, nor did he get at school so much knowledge of common arithmetic as the four ground rules.”

Almost his only reading at the age of ten was a little history to which the open bookcase of an old friend tempted him. He knew nothing of games or sports; he had few or no companions, but, “to be sent off through the wilderness alone to very considerable distances was particularly his delight.... By the time he was twelve years old he was sent off more than a hundred miles with companies of cattle.” So his soul grew apart and alone and yet untrammeled and unconfined, knowing all the depths of secret self-abasement, and the heights of confident self-will. With others he was painfully diffident and bashful, and little sins that smaller souls would laugh at and forget loomed large and awful to his heart-searching vision. John had “a very bad foolish habit.... I mean telling lies, generally to screen himself from blame or from punishment,” because “he could not well endure to be reproached and I now think had he been oftener encouraged to be entirely frank ... he would not have been so often guilty of this fault, nor have been (in after life) obliged to struggle so long with so mean a habit.”

Such a nature was in its very essence religious, even mystical, but never superstitious nor blindly trustful in half-known creeds and formulas. His family was not rigidly Puritan in its thought and discipline but had rather fallen into the mild heathenism of the hard-working frontier until just before John’s birth. Then, his father relates in quaint Calvinistic patois: “I lived at home in 1782; this was a memorable year, as there was a great revival of religion in the town of Canton. My mother and my older sisters and brother John dated their hopes of salvation from that summer’s revival under the ministry of the Rev. Edward Mills. I cannot say as I was a subject of the work; but this I can say that I then began to hear preaching. I can now recollect most if not all of those I heard preach, and what their texts were. The change in our family was great; family worship set up by brother John was ever afterward continued. There was a revival of singing in Canton and our family became singers. Conference meetings were kept up constantly and singing meetings—all of which brought our family into a very good association—a very great aid of restraining grace.”

Thus this young freeman of the woods was born into a religious atmosphere; not that of stern, intellectual Puritanism, but of a milder and a more sensitive type. Even this, however, the naturally skeptical bent of his mind did not receive unquestioningly. The doctrines of his day and church did not wholly satisfy him and he became only “to some extent a convert to Christianity.” One answer to his questionings did come, however, bearing its own wonderful credentials—and credentials all the more wonderful to the man of few books and narrow knowledge of the world of thought—the English Bible. He grew to be “a firm believer in the divine authenticity of the Bible. With this book he became very familiar.” He read and reread it; he committed long passages to memory; he copied the simple vigor of its English, and wove into the very essence of his being, its history, poetry, philosophy and truth. To him the cruel grandeur of the Old Testament was as true as the love and sacrifice of the New, and both mingled to mold his soul. “This will give you some general idea of the first fifteen years of his life, during which time he became very strong and large of his age, and ambitious to perform the full labor of a man at almost any kind of hard work.”

Young John Brown’s first broad contact with life and affairs came with the War of 1812, during which Hull’s disastrous campaign brought the scene of fighting near his western home. His father, a simple wandering old soul, thrifty without foresight, became a beef contractor, and the boy drove his herds of cattle and hung about the camp. He met men of position, was praised for his prowess and let listen to talk that seemed far beyond his years. Yet he was not deceived. The war he felt was real war and not the war of fame and fairy tale. He saw shameful defeat, heard treason broached, and knew of cheating and chicanery. Disease and death left its slimy trail as it crept homeward through the town of Hudson from Detroit: “The effect of what he saw during the war went so far to disgust him with military affairs that he would neither train nor drill.”

But in all these early years of the making of this man, one incident stands out as foretaste and prophecy—an incident of which we know only the indefinite outline, and yet one which unconsciously foretold to the boy the life deed of the man. It was during the war that a certain landlord welcomed John to his home whither the boy had ridden with cattle, a hundred miles through the wilderness. He praised the big, grave and bashful lad to his guests and made much of him. John, however, discovered something far more interesting than praise and good food in the landlord’s parlor, and that was another boy in the landlord’s yard. Fellow souls were scarce with this backwoodsman and his diffidence warmed to the kindly welcome of the stranger, especially because he was black, half-naked, and wretched. In John’s very ears the kind voices of the master and his folk turned to harsh abuse with this black boy. At night the slave lay in the bitter cold and once they beat the wretched thing before John’s very eyes with an iron shovel, and again and again struck him with any weapon that chanced. In wide-eyed silence John looked on and questioned, Was the boy bad or stupid? No, he was active, intelligent and with the great warm sympathy of his race did the stranger “numerous little acts of kindness,” so that John readily, in his straightforward candor, acknowledged him “fully if not more than his equal.” That the black worked and worked hard and steadily was in John’s eyes no hardship—rather a pleasure. Was not the world work? But that this boy was fatherless and motherless, and that all slaves must of necessity be fatherless and motherless with none to protect them or provide for them, save at the will or caprice of the master—this was to the half-grown man a thing of fearful portent and he asked, “Is God their Father?” And what he asked, a million and a half black bondmen were asking through the land.

CHAPTER III
THE WANDERJAHRE

“Where is the promise of His coming? For since the fathers fell asleep, all things continue as they were from the beginning of the creation.”

In 1819 a tall, sedate, dignified young man named John Brown was entered among the students of the Rev. Moses Hallock at Plainfield, Mass., where men were prepared for Amherst College. He was beginning his years of wandering—spiritual searching for the way of life, physical wandering in the wilderness where he must earn his living. In after years he wrote to a boy:

“I wish you to have some definite plan. Many seem to have none; others never stick to any that they do form. This was not the case with John. He followed up with great tenacity whatever he set about as long as it answered his general purpose; hence he rarely failed in some degree to effect the things he undertook. This was so much the case that he habitually expected to succeed in his undertakings.”[^[4]] In this case he expected to get an education and he came to his task equipped with that rare mixture of homely thrift and idealism which characterized his whole life. His father could do little to help him, for the war was followed by the “hard times” which are the necessary fruit of fighting. As the father wrote: “Money became scarce, property fell and that which I thought well bought would not bring its cost. I had made three or four large purchases, in which I was a heavy loser.”

It was therefore as a poor boy ready to work his way that John started out at Plainfield. The son of the principal tells how “he brought with him a piece of sole leather about a foot square, which he had himself tanned for seven years, to resole his boots. He had also a piece of sheepskin which he had tanned, and of which he cut some strips about an eighth of an inch wide, for other students to pull upon. Father took one string, and winding it around his finger said with a triumphant turn of the eye and mouth, ‘I shall snap it.’ The very marked, yet kind immovableness of the young man’s face on seeing father’s defeat, father’s own look, and the position of the people and the things in the old kitchen somehow gave me a fixed recollection of this little incident.”[^[5]]

But all his thrift and planning here were doomed to disappointment. He was, one may well believe, no brilliant student, and his only chance of success lay in long and steady application. This he was prepared to make when inflammation of the eyes set in, of so grave a type that all hopes of long study must be given up. Several times before he had attempted regular study, but for the most part these excursions to New England schools had been but tentative flashes on a background of hard work in his father’s Hudson tannery: “From fifteen to twenty years of age he spent most of his time working at the tanner’s and currier’s trade;” and yet, naturally, ever looking here and there in the world to find his place. And that place, he came gradually to decide in his quiet firm way, was to be an important one. He felt he could do things; he grew used to guiding and commanding men. He kept his own lonely home and was both foreman and cook in the tannery. His “close attention to business and success in its management, together with the way he got along with a company of men and boys, made him quite a favorite with the serious and more intelligent portion of older persons. This was so much the case and secured for him so many little notices from those he esteemed, that his vanity was very much fed by it, and he came forward to manhood quite full of self-conceit and self-confidence, notwithstanding his extreme bashfulness. The habit so early formed of being obeyed rendered him in after life too much disposed to speak in an imperious or dictating way.”[^[6]] Thus he spoke of himself, but others saw only that peculiar consciousness of strength and quiet self-confidence, which characterized him later on.

Just how far his failure to get a college training was a disappointment to John Brown one is not able to say with certainty. It looks, however, as if his attempts at higher training were rather the obedient following of the conventional path, by a spirit which would never have found in those fields congenial pasture. One suspects that the final decision that college was impossible came to this strong free spirit with a certain sense of relief—a relief marred only by the perplexity of knowing what ought to be the path for his feet, if the traditional way to accomplishment and distinction was closed.

That he meant to be not simply a tanner was disclosed in all his doing and thinking. He undertook to study by himself, mastering common arithmetic and becoming in time an expert surveyor. He “early in life began to discover a great liking to fine cattle, horses, sheep, and swine.” Meantime, however, the practical economic sense of his day and occupation pointed first of all to marriage, as his father, who had had three wives and sixteen or more children, was at pains to impress upon him. Nor was John Brown himself disinclined. He was as he quaintly says, “naturally fond of females, and withal extremely diffident.” One can easily imagine the deep disappointment of this grave young man in his first unfortunate love affair, when he felt With many another unloved heart, this old world through, “a steady, strong desire to die.”

But youth is stronger even than first love, and the widow who came to keep house for him had a grown daughter, a homely, good-hearted and simple-minded country lass; the natural result was that John Brown was married at the age of twenty to Dianthe Lusk, whom he describes as “a remarkably plain, but neat, industrious and economical girl, of excellent character, earnest piety and practical common sense.”[^[7]]

Then ensued a period of life which puzzles the casual onlooker with its seemingly aimless changing character, its wandering restlessness, its planless wavering. He was now a land surveyor, now a tanner and now a lumber dealer; a postmaster, a wool-grower, a stock-raiser, a shepherd, and a farmer. He lived at Hudson, at Franklin and at Richfield in Ohio; in Pennsylvania, New York, and Massachusetts. And yet in all this wavering and wandering, there were certain great currents of growth, purpose and action. First of all he became the father of a family: in the eleven years from 1821 to 1832, seven children were born—six sons and one girl. The patriarchal ideal of family life handed down by his fathers, strengthened by his own saturation in Hebrew poetry, and by his own bent, grew up in his home.

His eldest son and daughter tell many little incidents illustrating his family government: “Our house, on a lane which connects two main roads, was built under father’s direction in 1824, and still stands much as he built it with the garden and orchard around it which he laid out. In the rear of the house was then a wood, now gone, on a knoll leading down to the brook which supplied the tan-pits.”[^[8]]

“Father used to hold all his children while they were little at night and sing his favorite songs,” says the eldest daughter. “The first recollection I have of father was being carried through a piece of woods on Sunday to attend a meeting held at a neighbor’s house. After we had been at the house a little while, father and mother stood up and held us, while the minister put water on our faces. After we sat down father wiped my face with a brown silk handkerchief with yellow spots on it in diamond shape. It seemed beautiful to me and I thought how good he was to wipe my face with that pretty handkerchief. He showed a great deal of tenderness in that and other ways. He sometimes seemed very stern and strict with me, yet his tenderness made me forget he was stern....

“When he would come home at night tired out with labor, he would before going to bed, ask some of the family to read chapters (as was his usual course night and morning); and would almost always say: ‘Read one of David’s Psalms.’...

“Whenever he and I were alone, he never failed to give me the best of advice, just such as a true and anxious mother would give a daughter. He always seemed interested in my work, and would come around and look at it when I was sewing or knitting; and when I was learning to spin he always praised me if he saw that I was improving. He used to say: ‘Try to do whatever you do in the very best possible manner.’”[^[9]]

“Father had a rule not to threaten one of his children. He commanded and there was obedience,” writes his eldest son. “My first apprenticeship to the tanning business consisted of a three years’ course at grinding bark with a blind horse. This, after months and years, became slightly monotonous. While the other children were out at play in the sunshine, where the birds were singing, I used to be tempted to let the old horse have a rather long rest, especially when father was absent from home; and I would then join the others at their play. This subjected me to frequent admonitions and to some corrections for eye-service as father termed it.... He finally grew tired of these frequent slight admonitions for my laziness and other shortcomings, and concluded to adopt with me a sort of book-account something like this:

“John, Jr.,

“For disobeying mother—8 lashes.

“For unfaithfulness at work—3 lashes.

“For telling a lie—8 lashes.

“This account he showed to me from time to time. On a certain Sunday morning he invited me to accompany him from the house to the tannery, saying that he had concluded it was time for a settlement. We went into the upper or finishing room, and after a long and tearful talk over my faults, he again showed me my account, which exhibited a fearful footing up of debits. I had no credits or offsets and was of course bankrupt. I then paid about one-third of the debt, reckoned in strokes from a nicely prepared blue-beach switch, laid on ‘masterly.’ Then to my utter astonishment, father stripped off his shirt and seating himself on a block gave me the whip and bade me lay it on to his bare back. I dared not refuse to obey, but at first I did not strike hard. ‘Harder,’ he said, ‘harder, harder!’ until he received the balance of the account. Small drops of blood showed on his back where the tip end of the tingling beach cut through. Thus ended the account and settlement, which was also my first practical illustration of the doctrine of the atonement.”[^[10]]

Even the girls did not escape whipping. “He used to whip me often for telling lies,” says a daughter, “but I can’t remember his ever punishing me but once when I thought I didn’t deserve, and then he looked at me so stern that I didn’t dare to tell the truth. He had such a way of saying, ‘Tut, tut!’ if he saw the first sign of a lie in us, that he often frightened us children.

“When I first began to go to school,” she continues, “I found a piece of calico one day behind one of the benches—it was not large, but seemed quite a treasure to me, and I did not show it to any one until I got home. Father heard me then telling about it and said, ‘Don’t you know what girl lost it?’ I told him I did not. ‘Well, when you go to school to-morrow take it with you and find out if you can who lost it. It is a trifling thing but always remember that if you should lose anything you valued, no matter how small, you would want the person who found it to give it back to you.’” He “showed a great deal of tenderness to me,” continues the daughter, “and one thing I always noticed was my father’s peculiar tenderness and devotion to his father. In cold weather he always tucked the bedclothes around grandfather when he went to bed, and would get up in the night to ask him if he slept warm—always seeming so kind and loving to him that his example was beautiful to see.”

Especially were his sympathy and devotion evident in sickness: “When his children were ill with scarlet fever, he took care of us himself and if he saw persons coming to the house, would go to the gate and meet them, not wishing them to come in, for fear of spreading the disease.[^[11]]... When any of the family were sick he did not often trust watchers to care for the sick one, but sat up himself and was like a tender mother. At one time he sat up every night for two weeks while mother was sick, for fear he would oversleep if he went to bed, and then the fire would go out and she take cold.”[^[12]]

The death of one little girl shows how deeply he could be moved: “He spared no pains in doing all that medical skill could do for her together with the tenderest care and nursing. The time that he could be at home was mostly spent in caring for her. He sat up nights to keep an even temperature in the room, and to relieve mother from the constant care which she had through the day. He used to walk with the child and sing to her so much that she soon learned his step. When she heard him coming up the steps to the door, she would reach out her hands and cry for him to take her. When his business at the wool store crowded him so much that he did not have time to take her, he would steal around through the wood-shed into the kitchen to eat his dinner, and not go into the dining-room where she could see or hear him. I used to be charmed myself with his singing to her. He noticed a change in her one morning and told us he thought she would not live through the day, and came home several times to see her. A little before noon he came home and looked at her and said, ‘She is almost gone.’ She heard him speak, opened her eyes and put up her little wasted hands with such a pleading look for him to take her that he lifted her up from the cradle with the pillows she was lying on, and carried her until she died. He was very calm, closed her eyes, folded her hands and laid her in her cradle. When she was buried father broke down completely and sobbed like a child.”[^[13]]

Dianthe Lusk, John Brown’s first wife, died in childbirth, August 10, 1832, having borne him seven children, two of whom died very young. On July 11, 1833, now thirty-three years of age, he married Mary Ann Day, a girl of seventeen, only five years older than his oldest child. She bore him thirteen children, seven of whom died young. Thus seven sons and four daughters grew to maturity and his wife, Mary, survived him twenty-five years. It was, all told, a marvelous family—large and well-disciplined, yet simple almost to poverty, and hard-working. No sooner were the children grown than the wise father ceased to command and simply asked or advised. He wrote to his eldest son when first he started in life in characteristic style:

“I think the situation in which you have been placed by Providence at this early period of your life will afford to yourself and others some little test of the sway you may be expected to exert over minds in after life and I am glad on the whole to have you brought in some measure to the test in your youth. If you cannot now go into a disorderly country school and gain its confidence and esteem, and reduce it to good order and waken up the energies and the very soul of every rational being in it—yes, of every mean, ill-behaved, ill-governed boy and girl that compose it, and secure the good-will of the parents,—then how are you to stimulate asses to attempt a passage of the Alps? If you run with footmen and they should weary you, how should you contend with horses? If in the land of peace they have wearied you, then how will you do in the swelling of Jordan? Shall I answer the question myself? ‘If any man lack wisdom, let him ask of God, who giveth liberally and upbraideth not.’”[^[14]]

Not that Brown was altogether satisfied with his method of dealing with his children; he said to his wife: “If the large boys do wrong, call them alone into your room and expostulate with them kindly, and see if you cannot reach them by a kind but powerful appeal to their honor. I do not claim that such a theory accords very well with my practice; I frankly confess it does not; but I want your face to shine even if my own should be dark and cloudy.”[^[15]]

The impression which he made on his own family was marvelous. A granddaughter writes me of him, saying: “The attitude of John Brown’s family and descendants has always been one of exceeding reverence toward him. This speaks for something. Stern, unyielding, Puritanic, requiring his wife and daughters to dress in sober brown, disliking show and requesting that mourning colors be not worn for him—a custom which still obtains with us—laying the rod heavily upon his boys for their boyish pranks, he still was wonderfully tender—would invariably walk up hill rather than burden his horse, loved his family devotedly, and when sickness occurred, always installed himself as nurse.”

In his personal habits he was austere: severely clean, sparing in his food so far as to count butter an unnecessary luxury; once a moderate user of cider and wine—then a strong teetotaler; a lover of horses with harassing scruples as to breeding race-horses. All this gave an air of sedateness and maturity to John Brown’s earlier manhood which belied his years. Having married at twenty, he was but twenty-one years older than his eldest son; and while his many children and his varied occupations made him seem prematurely aged, he was, in fact, during this period, during the years from twenty to forty, experiencing the great formative development of his spiritual life. This development was most interesting and fruitful.

He was not a man of books: he had Rollins’ Ancient History, Josephus and Plutarch and lives of Napoleon and Cromwell. With these went Baxter’s Saints’ Rest, Henry On Meekness and Pilgrim’s Progress. “But above all others the Bible was his favorite volume and he had such perfect knowledge of it that when any person was reading he would correct the least mistake.”[^[16]]

Into John Brown’s religious life entered two strong elements; the sense of overruling inexorable fate, and the mystery and promise of death. He pored over the Old Testament until the freer religious skepticism of his earlier youth became more formal and straight. The brother of his first wife says, “Brown was an austere fellow,” and when the young man called on the sister and mother Sundays, as his only holiday, Brown said to him: “Milton, I wish you would not make your visits here on the Sabbath.”

When the panic of 1837 nearly swept Brown from his feet, he saw behind it the image of the old Hebrew God and wrote his wife: “We all must try to trust in Him who is very gracious and full of compassion and of almighty power; for those that do will not be made ashamed. Ezra the prophet prayed and afflicted himself before God, when himself and the Captivity were in a strait and I have no doubt you will join with me under similar circumstances. Don’t get discouraged, any of you, but hope in God, and try all to serve Him with a perfect heart.”[^[17]]

When Napoleon III seized France and Kossuth came to America, Brown looked with lofty contempt on the “great excitement” which “seems to have taken all by surprise.” “I have only to say in regard to those things, I rejoice in them from the full belief that God is carrying out His eternal purpose in them all.”[^[18]]

The gloom and horror of life settled early on John Brown. His childhood had had little formal pleasure, his young manhood had been serious and filled with responsibility, and almost before he himself knew the full meaning of life, he was trying to teach it to his children. The iron of bitterness entered his soul with the coming of death, and a deep religious fear and foreboding bore him down as it took away member after member of his family. In 1831 he lost a boy of four and in 1832 his first wife died insane, and her infant son was buried with her. In 1843 four children varying in ages from one to nine years were swept away. Two baby girls went in 1846 and 1859 and an infant boy in 1852. The struggle of a strong man to hold his faith is found in his words, “God has seen fit to visit us with the pestilence and four of our number sleep in the dust; four of us that are still living have been more or less unwell.... This has been to us all a bitter cup indeed and we have drunk deeply; but still the Lord reigneth and blessed be His holy name forever.” Again three years later he writes his wife from the edge of a new-made grave: “I feel assured that notwithstanding that God has chastised us often and sore, yet He has not entirely withdrawn Himself from us nor forsaken us utterly. The sudden and dreadful manner in which He has seen fit to call our dear little Kitty to take her leave of us, is, I need not tell you how much, in my mind. But before Him I will bow my head in submission and hold my peace.... I have sailed over a somewhat stormy sea for nearly half a century, and have experienced enough to teach me thoroughly that I may most reasonably buckle up and be prepared for the tempest. Mary, let us try to maintain a cheerful self-command while we are tossing up and down, and let our motto still be action, action,—as we have but one life to live.”[^[19]]

His soul gropes for light in the great darkness: “Sometimes my imagination follows those of my family who have passed behind the scenes; and I would almost rejoice to be permitted to make them a personal visit. I have outlived nearly half of all my numerous family, and I ought to realize that in any event a large proportion of my life is traveled over.”[^[20]]

Then there rose grimly, as life went on in its humdrum round of failure and trouble, the thought that in some way his own sin and shortcomings were bringing upon him the vengeful punishment of God. He laments the fact that he has done little to help others and the world: “I feel considerable regret by turns that I have lived so many years and have in reality done so little to increase the amount of human happiness. I often regret that my manner is not more kind and affectionate to those I really love and esteem. But I trust my friends will overlook my harsh rough ways, when I cease to be in their way as an occasion of pain and unhappiness.”[^[21]]

The death of a friend fills him with self-reproach: “You say he expected to die, but do not say how he felt in regard to the change as it drew near. I have to confess my unfaithfulness to my friend in regard to his most important interest.... When I think how very little influence I have even tried to use with my numerous acquaintances and friends in turning their minds toward God and heaven, I feel justly condemned as a most wicked and slothful servant; and the more so as I have very seldom had any one refuse to listen when I earnestly called him to hear. I sometimes have dreadful reflections about having fled to go down to Tarshish.”[^[22]]

Especially did the religious skepticism of his children, so like his own earlier wanderings, worry and dismay the growing man until it loomed before his vision as his great sin, calling for mighty atonement. He pleads with his older children continually:

“My attachments to this world have been very strong and divine Providence has been cutting me loose, one cord after another. Up to the present time notwithstanding I have so much to remind me that all ties must soon be severed, I am still clinging like those who have hardly taken a single lesson. I really hope some of my family may understand that this world is not the home of man, and act in accordance. Why may I not hope this for you? When I look forward as regards the religious prospects of my numerous family—the most of them,—I am forced to say, and feel too, that I have little—very little to cheer. That this should be so is, I perfectly well understand, the legitimate fruit of my own planting; and that only increases my punishment. Some ten or twelve years ago I was cheered with the belief that my elder children had chosen the Lord to be their God and I relied much on their influence and example in atoning for my deficiency and bad example with the younger children. But where are we now? Several have gone where neither a good nor a bad example from me will better their condition or prospects or make them worse. I will not dwell longer on this distressing subject but only say that so far as I have gone it is from no disposition to reflect on any one but myself. I think I can clearly discover where I wandered from the road. How now to get on it with my family is beyond my ability to see or my courage to hope. God grant you thorough conversion from sin, and full purpose of heart to continue steadfast in His way through the very short season you will have to pass.”[^[23]]

And again he writes: “One word in regard to the religious belief of yourself and the ideas of several of my children. My affections are too deep-rooted to be alienated from them; but ‘my gray hairs must go down in sorrow to the grave’ unless the true God forgive their denial and rejection of Him and open their eyes.”

And again: “I would fain hope that the spirit of God has not done striving in our hard hearts. I sometimes feel encouraged to hope that my sons will give up their miserable delusions and believe in God and in His Son, our Saviour.”[^[24]]

All this is evidence of a striving soul, of a man to whom the world was a terribly earnest thing. Here was neither the smug content of the man beyond religious doubt, nor the carelessness of the unharassed conscience. To him the world was a mighty drama. God was an actor in the play and so was John Brown. But just what his part was to be his soul in the long agony of years tried to know, and ever and again the chilling doubt assailed him lest he be unworthy of his place or had missed the call. Often the brooding masculine mind which demanded “Action! Action!” sought to pierce the mystic veil. His brother-in-law became a spiritualist, and he himself hearkened for voices from the Other Land. Once or twice he thought he heard them. Did not the spirit of Dianthe Lusk guide him again and again in his perplexity? He once said it did.

And so this saturation in Hebrew prophecy, the chastisement of death, the sense of personal sin and shortcoming and the voices from nowhere, deepened, darkened and broadened his religious life. Yet with all this there went a peculiar common sense, a spirit of thrift and stickling for detail, a homely shrewd attention to all the little facts of daily existence. Sometimes this prosaic tinkering with things burdened, buried and submerged the spiritual life and striving. There was nothing left except the commonplace, unstable tanner, but ever as one is tempted thus to fix his place in the world, there wells up surging spiritual life out of great unfathomed depths—the intellectual longing to see, the moral wistfulness of the hesitating groping doer. This was the deeper, truer man, although it was not the whole man. “Certainly I never felt myself in the presence of a stronger religious influence than while in this man’s house,” said Frederick Douglass in 1847.

CHAPTER IV
THE SHEPHERD OF THE SHEEP

“And there were in the same country shepherds abiding in the field, keeping watch over their flock by night.

“And, lo, the angel of the Lord came upon them, and the glory of the Lord shone round about them; and they were sore afraid.”

The vastest physical fact in the life of John Brown was the Alleghany Mountains—that beautiful mass of hill and crag which guards the sombre majesty of the Maine coast, crumples the rivers on the rocky soil of New England, and rolls and leaps down through busy Pennsylvania to the misty peaks of Carolina and the red foothills of Georgia. In the Alleghanies John Brown was all but born; their forests were his boyhood wonderland; in their villages he married his wives and begot his clan. On the sides of the Alleghanies, he tended his sheep and dreamed of his terrible dream. It was the mystic, awful voice of the mountains that lured him to liberty, death and martyrdom within their wildest fastness, and in their bosom he sleeps his last sleep.

So, too, in the development of the United States from the War of 1812 to the Civil War, it was the Alleghanies that formed the industrial centre of the land and lured young men to their waters and mines, valleys and factories, as they lured John Brown. His life from 1805 to 1854 was almost wholly spent on the western slope of the Alleghanies in a small area of Ohio and Pennsylvania, beginning eighty miles north of Pittsburg and ending twenty-five miles southeast of Cleveland. Here in a half-dozen small towns, but chiefly in Hudson, O., he worked in his young manhood to support his growing family. From 1819 to 1825, he was a tanner at Hudson. Then he moved seventy miles westward toward the crests of the Alleghanies in Pennsylvania, where he set up his tannery again and became a man of importance in the town. John Quincy Adams made him postmaster, the village school was held at his log house and the new feverish prosperity of the post-bellum period began to stir him as it stirred this whole western world. Indeed, the economic history of the land from the War of 1812 to the Civil War covers a period of extraordinary developments—so much so that no man’s life which fell in these years may be written without knowledge of and allowance for the battling of gigantic social forces and welding of material, out of which the present United States was designed.

Three phases roughly mark these days: First, the slough of despond following the war, when England forced her goods upon us at nominal prices to kill the new-sprung infant industries; secondly, the new protection from the competition of foreign goods from 1816 to 1857, rising high in the prohibitory schedules of 1828, and falling to the lower duties of the forties and the free trade of the fifties, and stimulating irregularly and spasmodically but tremendously the cotton, woolen and iron manufactories; and finally, the three whirlwinds of 1819, 1837–1839, and 1857, marking frightful maladjustments in the mushroom growth of our industrial life.

John Brown, coming to full industrial manhood in the buoyant prosperity of 1825, soon began to sense the new spirit. After ten years’ work in Pennsylvania, he again removed westward, nearer the projected transportation lines between East and West. He began to invest his surplus in land along the new canal routes, became a director in one of the rapidly multiplying banks and was currently rated to be worth $20,000 in 1835. But his prosperity, like that of his neighbors, and indeed, of the whole country, was partly fictitious, and built on a fast expanding credit which was far outstretching the rapid industrial development. Jackson’s blind tinkering with banking precipitated the crisis. The storm broke in 1837. Over six hundred banks failed, ten thousand employees were thrown out of work, money disappeared and prices went down to a specie level. John Brown, his tannery and his land speculations, were sucked into the maelstrom.

The overthrow was no ordinary blow to a man of thirty-seven with eight children, who had already trod the ways of spiritual doubt and unrest. For three or four years he seemed to flounder almost hopelessly, certainly with no settled plan or outlook. He bred race-horses till his conscience troubled him; he farmed and did some surveying; he inquired into the commission business in various lines, and still did some tanning. Then gradually he began to find himself. He was a lover of animals. In 1839 he took a drove of cattle to Connecticut and wrote to his wife: “I have felt distressed to get my business done and return ever since I left home, but know of no way consistent with duty but to make thorough work of it while there is any hope. Things now look more favorable than they have but I may still be disappointed.”[^[25]] His diary shows that he priced certain farms for sale, but especially did he inquire carefully into sheep-raising and its details, and eventually bought a flock of sheep, which he drove home to Ohio. This marked the beginning of a new occupation, that of shepherd, “being a calling for which in early life he had a kind of enthusiastic longing.” He began sheep-farming near Hudson, keeping his own and a rich merchant’s sheep and also buying wool on commission.

This industry in the United States had at that time passed through many vicissitudes. The change from household to factory economy and the introduction of effective machinery had been slow, and one of the chief drawbacks was ever the small quantity of good wool. Consequently our chief supply came from England until the embargo and war cut off that supply and stimulated domestic manufacture. Between 1810 and 1815 the value of the manufacture increased five-fold, but after the war, when England sent goods over here below the price, Americans rightly clamored for tariff protection. This they got, but their advantage was nearly upset by the wool farmers who also got protection on the commodity, although less on low than on better qualities; and it was the low grades that America produced. From 1816 to 1832 the tariff wall against wool and woolens rose steadily until it reached almost prohibitive figures, save on the cheapest kind. In this way the wool manufacture had by 1828 recovered its war-time prosperity; by 1840 the mills were sending out twenty and a half million dollars’ worth of goods yearly, and nearly fifty millions by 1860 even though meanwhile the tariff wall was weakening. Thus by 1841 when John Brown turned his attention to sheep-farming, there was a large and growing demand for wool, especially of the better grades, and by the abolition of the English tariff in 1824, there was even a chance of invading England.

Because, then, of his natural liking for the work, and the growing prosperity of the wool trade, John Brown chose this line of employment. But not for this alone. His spirit was longing for air and space. He wanted to think and read; time was flying and his life as yet had been little but a mean struggle for bread and that, too, only partially successful. Already he had had a vision of vast service. Already he had broached the matter to friends and family, and at the age of thirty-nine he entered his new life distinctly and clearly with “the idea that as a business it bid fair to afford him the means of carrying out his greatest or principal object.”[^[26]]

His first idea was to save enough from the wreck of his fortune to buy and stock a large sheep farm, and in accordance with his already forming plans as to Negro emancipation, he wanted this farm in or near the South. A chance seemed opening when through his father, a trustee of Oberlin College, he learned of the Virginia lands lately given that institution by Gerrit Smith, whom Brown came to know better. Oberlin College was dear to John Brown’s heart, for it had almost from the beginning taken a strong anti-slavery stand. The titles to the Virginia land, however, were clouded by the fact of many squatters being in possession, which gave ample prospects of costly lawsuits. Brown wrote the trustees early in 1840, proposing to survey the lands for a nominal price, provided he could be allowed to buy on reasonable terms and establish his family there. He also spoke of school facilities which he proposed for Negroes as well as whites, according to a long cherished plan. The college records in April, 1840, say: “Communication from Brother John Brown of Hudson was presented and read by the secretary, containing a proposition to visit, survey and make the necessary investigation respecting boundaries, etc., of those lands, for one dollar per day and a moderate allowance for necessary expenses; said paper frankly expressing also his design of viewing the lands as a preliminary step to locating his family upon them, should the opening prove a favorable one; whereupon, voted that said proposition be acceded to, and that a commission and needful outfit be furnished by the secretary and treasurer.”[^[27]] The treasurer sent John Brown fifty dollars and wrote his father, as a trustee of Oberlin, commending the son’s purpose and hoping “for a favorable issue both for him and the institution.” He added, “Should he succeed in clearing up titles without difficulty or lawsuits, it would be easy, as it appears to me, to make provision for religious and school privileges and by proper efforts with the blessing of God, soon see that wilderness bud and blossom as the rose.”[^[28]]

Thus John Brown first saw Virginia and looked upon the rich and heavy land which rolls westward to the misty Blue Ridge. That he visited Harper’s Ferry on this trip is doubtful but possible. The lands of Oberlin, however, lay two hundred miles westward in the foothills and along the valley of the Ohio. He wrote home from Ripley, Va., in April (for he had gone immediately): “I like the country as well as I expected, and its inhabitants rather better; and I have seen the spot where if it be the will of Providence, I hope one day to live with my family.... Were the inhabitants as resolute and industrious as the Northern people and did they understand how to manage as well, they would become rich.”[^[29]]

By the summer of 1840 his work was accomplished with apparent success. He had about selected his dwelling-place, having “found on the right branch of Big Battle a valuable spring, good stone-coal, and excellent bottoms, good timber, sugar orchard, good hill land and beautiful situation for dwelling—all right. Course of this branch at the forks is south twenty-one degrees west from a beautiful white oak on which I marked my initials, 23d April.”[^[30]]

The Oberlin trustees in August, “voted, that the Prudential Committee be authorized to perfect negotiations and convey by deed to Brother John Brown of Hudson, one thousand acres of our Virginia land on the conditions suggested in the correspondence which has already transpired between him and the committee.”[^[31]]

Here, however, negotiations stopped, for the renewal of the panic in 1839 overthrew all business calculations until 1842 and later, and forced John Brown to take refuge in formal bankruptcy in 1842. This step, his son says, was wholly “owing to his purchase of land on credit—including the Haymaker farm at Franklin, which he bought in connection with Seth Thompson, of Hartford, Trumbull County, Ohio, and his individual purchase of three rather large adjoining farms in Hudson. When he bought those farms, the rise in value of his place in Franklin was such that good judges estimated his property worth fully twenty thousand dollars. He was then thought to be a man of excellent business judgment and was chosen one of the directors of a bank at Cayahoga Falls.”[^[32]] Probably after the crash of 1837, Brown hoped to extricate enough to buy land in Virginia and move there, but things went from bad to worse. Through endorsing a note for a friend, one of his best pieces of farm property was attached, put up at auction and bought by a neighbor. Brown, on legal advice, sought to retain possession, but was arrested and placed in the Akron jail. The property was lost. Legal bankruptcy followed in October, 1842, but Brown would not take the full advantage of it. He gave the New England Woolen Company of Rockville, Conn., a note declaring that “whereas I, John Brown, on or about the 15th day of June, A. D. 1839, received of the New England Company (through their agent, George Kellogg, Esq.) the sum of twenty-eight hundred dollars for the purchase of wool for said company, and imprudently pledged the same for my own benefit and could not redeem it; and whereas I have been legally discharged from my obligations by the laws of the United States—I hereby agree (in consideration of the great kindness and tenderness of said company toward me in my calamity, and more particularly of the moral obligation I am under to render to all their due) to pay the same and the interest thereon from time to time as divine Providence shall enable me to do.”[^[33]]

He wrote Mr. Kellogg at the same time: “I am sorry to say that in consequence of the unforeseen expense of getting the discharge, the loss of an ox, and the destitute condition in which a new surrender of my effects has placed me, with my numerous family, I fear this year must pass without my effecting in the way of payment what I have encouraged you to expect.”[^[34]] He was still paying this debt when he died and left fifty dollars toward it in his will.

It was a labyrinth of disaster in which the soul of John Brown was well-nigh choked and lost. We hear him now and then gasping for breath: “I have been careful and troubled with so much serving that I have in a great measure neglected the one thing needful, and pretty much stopped all correspondence with heaven.”[^[35]] He goes on to tell his son: “My worldly business has borne heavily and still does; but we progress some, have our sheep sheared, and have done something at our haying. Have our tanning business going on in about the same proportion—that is, we are pretty fairly behind in business and feel that I must nearly or quite give up one or the other of the branches for want of regular troops on whom to depend.”[^[36]] He again tells his son: “I would send you some money, but I have not yet received a dollar from any source since you left. I should not be so dry of funds, could I but overtake my work;”[^[37]] and then follows the teeth-gritting word of a man whose grip is slipping: “But all is well; all is well.”[^[38]]

Gradually matters began to mend. His tannery, perhaps never wholly abandoned, was started again and his wool interests increased. Early in 1844 “we seem to be overtaking our business in the tannery,” he says, and “I have lately entered into a co-partnership with Simon Perkins, Jr., of Akron, with a view of carrying on the sheep business extensively. He is to furnish all the feed and shelter for wintering, as a set-off against our taking all the care of the flock. All other expenses we are to share equally, and to divide the property equally.” John Brown and his family were to move to Akron and he says: “I think that is the most comfortable and the most favorable arrangement of my worldly concerns that I ever had and calculated to afford us more leisure for improvement by day and by night than any other. I do hope that God has enabled us to make it in mercy to us, and not that He should send leanness into our souls. Our time will all be at our own command, except the care of the flock. We have nothing to do with providing for them in the winter, excepting harvesting rutabagas and potatoes. This I think will be considered no mean alliance for our family and I most earnestly hope they will have wisdom given to make the most of it. It is certainly endorsing the poor bankrupt and his family, three of whom were but recently in Akron jail in a manner quite unexpected, and proves that notwithstanding we have been a company of ‘belted knights,’ our industrious and steady endeavors to maintain our integrity and our character have not been wholly overlooked.”[^[39]]

Indeed, the offer seemed to John Brown a flood of light: a beloved occupation with space and time to think, to study and to dream, to get acquainted with himself and the world after the long struggle for bread and butter and the deep disappointment of failure almost in sight of success. By July, 1844, Brown was reporting 560 lambs raised and 2,700 pounds of wool, for which he had been offered fifty-six cents a pound, showing it to be of high grade. He began closing up his tanning business. “The general aspect of our worldly affairs is favorable. Hope we do not entirely forget God,”[^[40]] he writes.

His daughter says: “As a shepherd, he showed the same watchful care over his sheep. I remember one spring a great many of his sheep had a disease called ‘grub in the head,’ and when the lambs came, the ewes would not own them. For two weeks he did not go to bed, but sat up or slept an hour or two at a time in his chair, and then would take a lantern, go out and catch the ewes, and hold them while the lambs sucked. He would very often bring in a little dead-looking lamb, and put it in warm water and rub it until it showed signs of life, and then wrap it in a warm blanket, feed it warm milk with a teaspoon, and work over it with such tenderness that in a few hours it would be capering around the room. One Monday morning I had just got my white clothes in a nice warm suds in the wash-tub, when he came in bringing a little dead-looking lamb. There seemed to be no sign of life about it. Said he, ‘Take out your clothes quick, and let me put this lamb in the water.’ I felt a little vexed to be hindered with my washing, and told him I didn’t believe he could make it live; but in an hour or two he had it running around the room, and calling loudly for its mother. The next year he came from the barn and said to me, ‘Ruth, that lamb I hindered you with when you were washing, I have just sold for one hundred dollars.’ It was a pure-blooded Saxony lamb.”[^[41]]

By 1845 wealth again seemed all but within the grasp of John Brown. The country was entering fully upon one of the most remarkable of many note-worthy periods of industrial expansion and the situation in the wool business was particularly favorable. The flock of Saxony sheep owned by Perkins and Brown was “said to be the finest and most perfect flock in the United States and worth about $20,000.” The only apparent danger to the prosperity of the western wool-growers was the increasing power of the manufacturers and their desire for cheap wool. The tariff on woolen goods was lower than formerly, but until war-time, remained at about twenty to thirty per cent. ad valorem, which afforded sufficient protection. The tariff on cheap wool decreased until, in 1857, all wool costing less than twenty cents a pound came in free and in 1854 Canadian wool of all grades was admitted without duty. This meant practically free trade in wool. The manufacturers of hosiery and carpets increased and the demand for domestic wool was continually growing. There were, however, many difficulties in realizing just prices for domestic wool: it was bought up by the manufacturer’s agents, dealing with isolated, untrained farmers and offering the lowest prices; it was bought in bulk ungraded and as wool differs enormously in quality and price, the lowest grade often set the price for all. No sooner did John Brown grasp the details of the wool business than he began to work out plans of amelioration. And he conceived of this amelioration not as measured simply in personal wealth. To him business was a philanthropy. We have not even to-day reached this idea, but, urged on by the Socialists, we are faintly perceiving it. Brown proposed nothing Quixotic or unpractical, but he did propose a more equitable distribution of the returns of the whole wool business between the producers of the raw material and the manufacturers. He proceeded first to arouse and organize the wool-growers. He traveled extensively among the farmers of Pennsylvania and Ohio. “I am out among the wool-growers, with a view to next summer’s operations,” he writes March 24, 1846; “our plan seems to meet with general favor.” And then thinking of greater plans he adds: “Our unexampled success in minor affairs might be a lesson to us of what unity and perseverance might do in things of some importance.”[^[42]] For what indeed were sheep as compared with men, and money weighed with liberty?

The plan outlined by Brown before a convention of wool-growers involved the placing of a permanent selling agent in the East, the grading and warehousing of the wool, and a pooling of profits according to the quality of the fleece. The final result was that in 1846 Perkins and Brown sent out a circular, saying: “The undersigned, commission wool-merchants, wool-graders, and exporters, have completed arrangements for receiving wool of growers and holders, and for grading and selling the same for cash at its real value, when quality and condition are considered.”[^[43]]

John Brown was put in special charge of this business while his son ran the sheep farm in Ohio. The idea underlying this movement was excellent and it was soon started successfully. John Brown went to live in Springfield with his family. In December, 1846, he writes: “We are getting along with our business slowly, but prudently, I trust, and as well as we could reasonably expect under all the circumstances; and so far as we can discover, we are in favor with this people, and also with the many we have had to do business with.”[^[44]]

In two weeks during 1847 he has “turned about four thousand dollars’ worth of wool into cash since I returned; shall probably make it up to seven thousand by the 16th.”[^[45]]

Yet great as was this initial prosperity, the business eventually failed and was practically given up in 1851. Why? It was because of one of those strange economic paradoxes which bring great moral questions into the economic realm;—questions which we evaded yesterday and are trying to evade to-day, but which we must answer to-morrow. Here was a man doing what every one knew was for the best interests of a great industry,—grading and improving the quality of its raw material and systematizing its sale. His methods were absolutely honest, his technical knowledge was unsurpassed and his organization efficient. Yet a combination of manufacturers forced him out of business in a few months. Why? The ordinary answer of current business ethics would be that John Brown was unable to “corner” the wool market against the manufacturers. But this he never tried to do. Such a policy of financial free-booting never occurred to him, and he would have repelled it indignantly if it had. He wished to force neither buyer nor seller. He was offering worthy goods at a fair price and making a just return for them. That this system was best for the whole trade every one knew, yet it was weak. It was weak in the same sense that the merchants of the Middle Ages were weak against the lawless onslaughts of robber barons. Any compact organization of manufacturers could force John Brown to take lower prices for his wool—that is, to allow the farmer a smaller proportion of the profit of the business of clothing human beings. In other words, well-organized industrial highwaymen could hold up the wool farmer and make him hand over some of his earnings. But John Brown knew, as did, indeed, the manufacturing gentlemen of the road that the farmers were getting only moderate returns. It was the millmen who made fortunes. Now it was possible to oppose the highwaymen’s demand by counter organization like the Middle-Age Hanse. The difficulty here would be to bring all the threatened parties into an organization. They could be forced in by killing off or starving out the ignorant or recalcitrant. This is the modern business method. Its result is arraying two industrial armies in a battle whose victims are paupers and prostitutes, and whose victory comes by compromising, whereby a half-dozen millionaires are born to the philanthropic world.

On the other hand, to offer no opposition to organized economic aggression is to depend on the simple justice of your cause in an industrial world that recognizes no justice. It means industrial death and that was what it meant to John Brown. The Tariff of 1846 had cut the manufacturers’ profits. The growing woolen trade would more than recoup them in a few years, but they “were not in business for their health”; that is, they recognized no higher moral law than money-making and therefore determined to keep present profits where they were, and add possible future profits to them. They continued their past efforts to force down the price of wool and got practical free trade in wool by 1854. Meantime local New England manufacturers began to boycott John Brown. They expected him to see his danger and lower his prices on the really fine grades he carried. He was obdurate. His prices were right and he thought justice counted in the wool business. The manufacturers objected. He was not playing according to the rules of the game. He was, as a fellow merchant complained, “no trader: he waited until his wools were graded and then fixed a price; if this suited the manufacturers they took the fleeces; if not, they bought elsewhere.... Yet he was a scrupulously honest and upright man—hard and inflexible, but everybody had just what belonged to him. Brown was in a position to make a fortune and a regular bred merchant would have done so.”[^[46]]

Thereupon the combination turned the screws a little closer. Brown’s clerks were bribed, and other “competitive” methods resorted to. But Brown was inflexible and serene. The prospect of great wealth did not tempt but rather repelled him. Indeed this whole warehouse business, successful and important as it had hitherto been, was drawing him away from his plans of larger usefulness. It took his time and thought, and his surroundings more and more made it mere money-getting. The manufacturers were after dollars, of course; his clients were waiting simply for returns, and his partner was ever anxiously scanning the balance-sheet. This whole aspect of things more and more disquieted Brown. He therefore writes soberly in December, 1847:

“Our business seems to be going on middling well and will not probably be any the worse for the pinch in the money concerns. I trust that getting or losing money does not entirely engross our attention; but I am sensible that it quite occupies too large a share in it. To get a little property together to leave, as the world would have done, is really a low mark to be firing at through life.

“‘A nobler toil may I sustain,

A nobler satisfaction gain.’”[^[47]]

The next year, however, came a severe money pressure, “one of the severest known for many years. The consequence to us has been, that some of those who have contracted for wool of us are as yet unable to pay for and take the wool as they agreed, and we are on that account unable to close our business.”[^[48]] This brought a fall in the price and complaint on all sides: on the part of the wool-growers, because their profits were not continuing to rise; and from manufacturers who demurred more and more clamorously at the prices demanded by Brown.

He writes early in 1849: “We have been selling wool middling fast of late, on contract, at 1847 prices;” but he adds, scenting the coming storm: “We have in this part of the country the strongest proofs that the great majority have made gold their hope, their only hope.”[^[49]]

Evidently a crisis was approaching. The boycott against the firm was more evident and the impatience of wool farmers growing. The latter kept calling for advances on their stored wool. If they had been willing to wait quietly, there was still a chance, for Perkins and Brown had undoubtedly the best in the American market and as good as the better English grades. But the growers were restive and in some cases poor. The result was shown in the balance-sheet of 1849. Brown had bought 130,000 pounds of wool and paid for it, including freight and commissions, $57,884.48. His sales had amounted to $49,902.67, leaving him $7,981.81 short, and 200,000 pounds of wool in the warehouse.[^[50]] Perkins afterward thought Brown was stubborn. It would have been easily possible for them to have betrayed the growers and accepted a lower price. Their commissions would have been larger, the manufacturers were friendly, and the sheepmen too scattered and poor to protest. Indeed, low prices and cash pleased them better than waiting. But John Brown conceived that a principle was at stake. He knew that his wool was worth even more than he asked. He knew that English wool of the same grade sold at good prices. Why not, then, he argued, take the wool to England and sell it, thus opening up a new market for a great American product? Then, too, he had other and, to him, better reasons for wishing to see Europe. He decided quickly and in August, 1849, he took his 200,000 pounds of wool to England. He had graded every bit himself, and packed it in new sacks: “The bales were firm, round, hard and true, almost as if they had been turned out in a lathe.”[^[51]]

In this English venture John Brown showed one weakness of his character: he did not know or recognize the subtler twistings of human nature. He judged it ever from his own simple, clear standpoint and so had a sort of prophetic vision of the vaster and the eternal aspects of the human soul. But of its kinks and prejudices, its little selfishnesses and jealousies and dishonesties, he knew nothing. They always came to him as a sort of surprise, uncalculated for and but partially comprehended. He could fight the devil and his angels, and he did, but he could not cope with the million misbirths that hover between heaven and hell.

Thus to his surprise he found his calculations all at fault in England. His wool was good, his knowledge of the technique of sorting and grading unsurpassed and yet because Englishmen believed it was not possible to raise good wool in America, they obstinately refused to take the evidence of their own senses. They “seemed highly pleased”; they said that they “had never seen superior wools” and that they “would see me again” but they did not offer decent prices. Then, too, American woolen men had long arms and they were tipped with gold. They fingered busily across the seas about this prying Yankee, and English wool-growers responded very willingly, so that John Brown acknowledged mournfully late in September, “I have a great deal of stupid obstinate prejudice to contend with, as well as conflicting interests both in this country and from the United States.”[^[52]] In the end the wool was sacrificed at prices fifty per cent. below its American value and some of it actually resold in America. The American woolen men chuckled audibly:

“A little incident occurred in 1850. Perkins and Brown’s clip had come forward, and it was beautiful; the little compact Saxony fleeces were as nice as possible. Mr. Musgrave of the Northampton Woolen Mill, who was making shawls and broadcloths, wanted it, and offered Uncle John [Brown] sixty cents a pound for it. ‘No, I am going to send it to London.’ Musgrave, who was a Yorkshire man, advised Brown not to do it, for American wool would not sell in London,—not being thought good. He tried hard to buy it, but without avail.... Some little time after, long enough for the purpose, news came that it was sold in London, but the price was not stated. Musgrave came into my counting-room one forenoon all aglow, and said he wanted me to go with him,—he was going to have some fun. Then he went to the stairs and called Uncle John, and told him he wanted him to go over to the Hartford depot and see a lot of wool he had bought. So Uncle John put on his coat, and we started. When we arrived at the depot, and just as we were going into the freight-house, Musgrave says: ‘Mr. Brune, I want you to tell me what you think of this lot of wull that stands me in just fifty-two cents a pund.’ One glance at the bags was enough. Uncle John wheeled, and I can see him now as he ‘put back’ to the lofts, his brown coat-tails floating behind him, and the nervous strides fairly devouring the way. It was his own clip, for which Musgrave, some three months before, had offered him sixty cents a pound as it lay in the loft. It had been graded, new bagged, shipped by steamer to London, sold, and reshipped, and was in Springfield at eight cents in the pound less than Musgrave offered.”[^[53]]

It was a great joke and it made American woolen men smile.

This English venture was a death-blow to the Perkins and Brown wool business. It was not entirely wound up until four years later, but in 1849 Brown removed his family from Springfield up to the silent forests of the farthest Adirondacks, where the great vision of his life unfolded itself. It was, however, not easy for him to extricate himself from the web wound about him. Two currents set for his complete undoing: the wool-growers whom he had over-advanced and who did not deliver the promised wool; and certain manufacturers to whom the firm had contracted to deliver this wool which they could not get. Claims and damages to the amount of $40,000 appeared and some of these got into court; while, on the other hand, the scattered and defaulting wool-growers were scarcely worth suing by the firm. Long drawn-out legal battles ensued, intensely distasteful to Brown’s straightforward nature and seemingly endless. Collections and sales continued hard and slow and Perkins began to get restless. John Brown sighed for the older and simpler life of his young manhood with its love and dreams: “I can look back to our log cabin at the centre of Richfield with a supper of porridge and johnny cake as a place of far more interest to me than the Massasoit of Springfield.”[^[54]] He says to his children on the Ohio sheep farm: “I am much pleased with the reflection that you are all three once more together, and all engaged in the same calling that the old patriarchs followed. I will say but one word more on that score, and that is taken from their history: ‘See that ye fall not out by the way; and all will be exactly right in the end.’ I should think matters were brightening a little in this direction in regard to our claims, but I have not yet been able to get any of them to a final issue. I think, too, that the prospect for the fine wool business rather improves. What burdens me most of all is the apprehension that Mr. Perkins expects of me in the way of bringing matters to a close, what no living man can possibly bring about in a short time and that he is getting out of patience and becoming distrustful.”[^[55]]

Meantime Brown was racing from court to court in Boston, New York, Troy and elsewhere, seeking to settle up the business and know where he stood financially, and, above all, to keep peace with and do justice to his partner. Cases were now settled and now appealed and the progress was “miserably slow. My journeys back and forth this winter have been very tedious.” Then, too, his mind was elsewhere. The nation was in turmoil and so was he. At the time Anthony Burns was arrested in Boston he was advising with his lawyers at Troy. Redpath says:

“The morning after the news of the Burns affair reached here, Brown went at his work immediately after breakfast; but in a few minutes started up from his chair, walked rapidly across the room several times, then suddenly turned to his counsel, and said, ‘I am going to Boston.’ ‘Going to Boston!’ said the astonished lawyer. ‘Why do you want to go to Boston?’ Old Brown continued walking vigorously, and replied, ‘Anthony Burns must be released, or I will die in the attempt.’ The counsel dropped his pen in consternation. Then he began to remonstrate; told him the suit had been in progress a long time, and a verdict just gained. It was appealed from, and that appeal must be answered in so many days, or the whole labor would be lost; and no one was sufficiently familiar with the whole case except himself. It took a long earnest talk with old Brown to persuade him to remain. His memory and acuteness in that long and tedious lawsuit—not yet ended, I am told—often astonished his counsel. While here he wore an entire suit of snuff-colored cloth, the coat of a decidedly Quakerish cut in collar and skirt. He wore no beard, and was a clean-shaven, scrupulously neat, well-dressed, quiet old gentleman. He was, however, notably resolute in all that he did.”[^[56]]

He spent the time not taken up by his lawsuits at Akron, and in the manner of a patriarch of old, temporarily brought his family back to Ohio. “I wrote you last week that the family is on the road: the boys are driving on the cattle, and my wife and little girls are at Oneida depot waiting for me to go on with them.”[^[57]] He returned to farming again with interest, taking prizes for his stock at state fairs and raising many sheep. He had 550 lambs in 1853 and Perkins is urging him to continue with him, but things changed and on January 25, 1854, he writes: “This world is not yet freed from real malice and envy. It appears to be well settled now that we go back to North Elba in the spring. I have had a good-natured talk with Mr. Perkins about going away and both families are now preparing to carry out that plan.”[^[58]] His departure was delayed a year, but he was finally able to remove with a little surplus on hand.

Back then to the crests and forests of the Alleghanies came John Brown at the age of fifty-four. “A tall, gaunt, dark-complexioned man ... a grave, serious man ... with a marked countenance and a natural dignity of manner,—that dignity which is unconscious, and comes from a superior habit of mind.”[^[59]]

CHAPTER V
THE VISION OF THE DAMNED

“Remember them that are in bonds as bound with them.”

There was hell in Hayti in the red waning of the eighteenth century, in the days when John Brown was born. The dark wave of the French Revolution had raised the brilliant sinister Napoleon to its crest. Already he had stretched greedy arms toward American empire in the rich vale of the Mississippi, when in a flash, out of the dirt and sloth and slavery of the West Indies, the black inert and heavy cloud of African degradation writhed to sudden life and lifted up the dark figure of Toussaint. Ten thousand Frenchmen gasped and died in the fever-haunted hills, while the black men in sudden frenzy fought like devils for their freedom and won it. Napoleon saw his gateway to the Mississippi closed; armed Europe was at his back. What was this wild and empty America to him, anyway? So he sold Louisiana for a song and turned to the shame of Trafalgar and the glory of Austerlitz.

John Brown was born just as the shudder of Hayti was running through all the Americas, and from his earliest boyhood he saw and felt the price of repression—the fearful cost that the western world was paying for slavery. From his earliest boyhood he had dimly conceived, and the conception grew with his growing, that the cost of liberty was less than the price of repression. Perhaps he was so near the humanistic enthusiasm of the French Revolution that he undervalued the cost of liberty. But yet he was right, for it was scarce possible to overrate the price of repression. True, in these latter days men and women of the South, and honest ones, too, have striven feverishly to paint Negro slavery in bright alluring colors. They have told of childlike devotion, faithful service and light-hearted irresponsibility, in the fine old aristocracy of the plantation. Much they have said is true. But when all is said and granted, the awful fact remains congealed in law and indisputable record that American slavery was the foulest and filthiest blot on nineteenth century civilization. As a school of brutality and human suffering, of female prostitution and male debauchery; as a mockery of marriage and defilement of family life; as a darkening of reason, and spiritual death, it had no parallel in its day. It took millions upon millions of men—human men and lovable, light and liberty-loving children of the sun, and threw them with no sparing of brutality into one rigid mold: humble, servile, dog-like devotion, surrender of body, mind and soul, and unaspiring animal content—toward this ideal the slave might strive, and did. Wonderful, even beautiful examples of humble service he brought forth and made the eternal heritage of men. But beyond this there was nothing. All were crushed to this mold and of them that did not fit, the sullen were cowed, the careless brutalized and the rebellious killed. Four things make life worthy to most men: to move, to know, to love, to aspire. None of these was for Negro slaves. A white child could halt a black man on the highway and send him slinking to his kennel. No black slave could legally learn to read. And love? If a black slave loved a lass, there was not a white man from the Potomac to the Rio Grande that could not prostitute her to his lust. Did the proud sons of Virginia and Carolina stoop to such bestial tyranny? Ask the grandmothers of the two million mulattoes that dot the states to-day. Ask the suffering and humiliated wives of the master caste. If a Negro married a wife, there was not a master in the land that could not take her from him.

John Brown’s father, Owen Brown, saw such a power stretched all the way from Virginia to Connecticut. A Southern slaveholding minister, Thomson by name, had brought his slaves North and preached in the local church. Then he attempted to take the unwilling chattels back South. Of what followed, Owen Brown says: “There was some excitement amongst the people, some in favor and some against Mr. Thomson; there was quite a debate, and large numbers to hear. Mr. Thomson said he should carry the woman and children, whether he could get the man or not. An old man asked him if he would part man and wife, contrary to their minds. He said: ‘I married them myself, and did not enjoin obedience on the woman.’” Owen Brown added, “Ever since I have been an Abolitionist.”[^[60]]

If a slave begat children, there was not a law south of the Ohio that could stop their eventual sale to any brute with the money. Aspiration in a slave was suspicious, dangerous, fatal. For him there was no inviting future, no high incentive, no decent reward. The highest ambition to which a black woman could aspire was momentarily to supplant the white man’s wife as a concubine; and the ambition of black men ended with the carelessly tossed largess of a kinglet. To reduce the slave to this groveling, what was the price which the master paid? Tyranny, brutality, and lawlessness reigned and to some extent still reign in the South. The sweeter, kindlier feelings were blunted: brothers sold sisters to serfdom and fathers debauched even their own dark daughters. The arrogant, strutting bully, who shot his enemy and thrashed his dogs and his darkies, became a living, moving ideal from the cotton-patch to the United States Senate from 1808 onward. No worthy art nor literature, nor even the commerce of daily life could thrive in this atmosphere.

Society there was of a certain type—courtly and lavish, but quarrelsome; seductive and lazy; with a half Oriental sheen and languor spread above peculiar poverty of resource; a fineness and delicacy in certain details, coupled with coarseness and self-indulgence in others; a mingling of the sexes only in play and seldom in work, with its concomitant tendency toward seclusion and helplessness among its whiter women. Withal a society strong indeed, but wholly without vigor or invention.

It was not all as dark as it might have been. Human life, thank God, is never as bad as it may be, but it is too often desperately bad. Nor do men easily realize how bad life about them is. The full have scant sympathy with the empty,—the rich know all the faults of the poor, and the master sees the horrors of slavery with unseeing eyes. True, there were flashes of light and longing here and there—noble sacrifice, eager help, determined emancipation. But all this was local, spasmodic and exceptional. The unrelenting dead brutality of human bondage to a thousand tyrants, petty wills and caprice was the rule from Florida to Missouri and from the Mississippi to the sea. Under it the wretched writhed like some great black and stricken beast. The flaming fury of their mad attempts at vengeance echoes all down the blood-swept path of slavery. In Jamaica they upturned the government and harried the land until England crept and sued for peace. In the Danish Isles they started a whirlwind of slaughter; in Hayti they drove their masters into the sea; and in South Carolina they rose twice like a threatening wave against the terror-stricken whites, but were betrayed. Such outbreaks here and there foretold the possibility of coördinate action and organic development. To be sure, the successful outbreaks were few and spasmodic; but the flare of Hayti lighted the night and made the world remember that these, too, were men.

Among these black men, changes significant and momentous, were coming. The native born Africans were passing away, with their native tongues and their wild customs. Such were the slaves of John Brown’s father’s time. “When I was a child four or five years old,” writes Owen Brown, “one of the nearest neighbors had a slave that was brought from Guinea. In the year 1776 my father was called into the army at New York, and left his work undone. In August, our good neighbor, Captain John Fast, of West Simsbury, let my mother have the labor of his slave to plough a few days. I used to go out into the field with this slave,—called Sam,—and he used to carry me on his back, and I fell in love with him. He worked but a few days, and went home sick with the pleurisy, and died very suddenly. When told that he would die, he said he should go to Guinea, and wanted victuals put up for the journey. As I recollect, this was the first funeral I ever attended in the days of my youth.”

Such slaves and others went into the Revolutionary army and three thousand of them fought for their masters’ freedom. After the war, their bravery, the upheaval in Hayti, and the new enthusiasm for human rights, led to a wave of emancipation which started in Vermont during the Revolution and swept through New England and Pennsylvania, ending finally in New York and New Jersey early in the nineteenth century. This freeing of the Northern slaves led to new complications, for in the South, after a hesitating pause, the opposite course was pursued and the thumbscrews were applied; the plantations were isolated, the roads were guarded, the refractory were whipped till they screamed and crawled, and the ringleaders were lynched. A long awful process of selection chose out the listless, ignorant, sly, and humble and sent to heaven the proud, the vengeful and the daring. The old African warrior spirit died away of violence and a broken heart.

Thus the great black mass of Southern slaves were cowed, but they were not conquered. Stretched as they were over wide miles of land, and isolated; guarded in speech and religion; peaceful and light-hearted as was their nature, still the fire of liberty burned in them. In Louisiana and Tennessee and twice in Virginia they raised the night cry of revolt, and once slew fifty Virginians, holding the state for weeks at bay there in those same Alleghanies which John Brown loved and listened to. On the ships of the sea they rebelled and murdered; to Florida they fled and turned like beasts on their pursuers till whole armies dislodged them and did them to death in the everglades; and again and again over them and through them surged and quivered a vast unrest which only the eternal vigilance of the masters kept down. Yet the fear of that great bound beast was ever there—a nameless, haunting dread that never left the South and never ceased, but ever nerved the remorseless cruelty of the master’s arm.

One thing saved the South from the blood-sacrifice of Hayti—not, to be sure, from so successful a revolt, for the disproportion of races was less, but from a desperate and bloody effort—and that was the escape of the fugitive.

Along the Great Black Way stretched swamps and rivers, and the forests and crests of the Alleghanies. A widening, hurrying stream of fugitives swept to the havens of refuge, taking the restless, the criminal and the unconquered—the natural leaders of the more timid mass. These men saved slavery and killed it. They saved it by leaving it to a false seductive dream of peace and the eternal subjugation of the laboring class. They destroyed it by presenting themselves before the eyes of the North and the world as living specimens of the real meaning of slavery. What was the system that could enslave a Frederick Douglass? They saved it too by joining the free Negroes of the North, and with them organizing themselves into a great black phalanx that worked and schemed and paid and finally fought for the freedom of black men in America.

Thus it was that John Brown, even as a child, saw the puzzling anomalies and contradictions in human right and liberty all about him. Ever and again he saw this in the North, leading to concerted action among the free Negroes, especially in cities where they were brought in contact with one another, and had some chance of asserting their nominal freedom. Just at the close of the eighteenth century, first in Philadelphia and then in New York, small groups of them withdrew from the white churches to escape disgraceful discrimination and established churches of their own, which still live with millions of adherents. In the year of John Brown’s birth, 1800, Gabriel planned his formidable uprising in Virginia, and the year after his marriage, 1821, Denmark Vesey of South Carolina went grimly to the scaffold, after one of the shrewdest Negro plots that ever frightened the South into hysterics. Of all this John Brown, the boy and young man, knew little. In after years he learned of Gabriel and Vesey and Turner, and told of their exploits and studied their plans; but at the time he was far off from the world, carrying on his tannery and marrying a wife. Perhaps as a lad he heard some of the oratory that celebrated the act of 1808, stopping the slave trade, as the beginning of the end of slavery. Perhaps not, for the act did little good until it was reënforced in 1820. All the time, however, John Brown’s keen eyes were searching for the way of life and his tender heart was sensitive to injustice and wrong everywhere. Indeed, it is not unlikely that the first black folk to gain his aid and sympathies and direct his thoughts to what afterward became his life-work, were the fugitive slaves from the South.

Three paths were opened to the slaves: to submit, to fight or to run away. Most of them submitted as do most people everywhere to force and fate. To fight singly meant death and to fight together meant plot and insurrection—a difficult thing but one often tried. Easiest of all was to run away, for the land was wide and bare and the slaves were many. At first, they ran to the swamps and mountains, and starved and died. Then they ran to the Indians and in Florida founded a nation to overthrow which cost the United States $20,000,000 and more in slave raids known as Seminole “wars.” Then gradually, after the War of 1812 had used so many black sailors to fight for free trade that the Negroes learned of the North and Canada as cities of refuge, they fled northward. While John Brown was a tanner at Hudson, he began helping these dark panting refugees who flitted by in the night. His eldest son says:

“When I was four or five years old, and probably no later than 1825, there came one night a fugitive slave and his wife to father’s door—sent, perhaps, by some townsman who knew John Brown’s compassion for such wayfarers, then but few. They were the first colored people I had seen; and when the woman took me upon her knee and kissed me, I ran away as quick as I could, and rubbed my face ‘to get the black off’; for I thought she would ‘crock’ me, like mother’s kettle. Mother gave the poor creatures some supper; but they thought themselves pursued and were uneasy. Presently father heard the trampling of horses crossing a bridge on one of the main roads, half a mile off; so he took his guests out the back door and down into the swamp near the brook to hide, giving them arms to defend themselves, but returning to the house to await the event. It proved a false alarm; the horsemen were people of the neighborhood going to Hudson village. Father then went out into the dark wood,—for it was night,—and had some difficulty in finding his fugitives; finally he was guided to the spot by the sound of the man’s heart throbbing for fear of capture. He brought them into the house again, sheltered them a while, and sent them on their way.”[^[61]]

The atmosphere in these days was becoming more and more charged with the slavery problem. That same Louisiana which Toussaint had given America, was gradually filling with settlers until the question of admitting parts of it as states faced the nation, and led to the Missouri Compromise. The discussion of the measure was fierce in John Brown’s neighborhood, and it must have strengthened his dislike of slavery and turned his earnest mind more and more toward the Negroes.

In the very year that death first entered his family and took a boy of four, and just before the sombre days when his earnest young wife died demented in childbirth and was buried with her babe, occurred the Nat Turner insurrection in Virginia, the most successful and bloody of slave uprisings since Hayti.

Squire Hudson, the father of the town where John Brown lived and one of the founders of Western Reserve University, heard the news in stern joy; a neighbor met him “one day in September, 1831, coming from his post-office, and reading a newspaper he had just received, which seemed to excite him very much as he read. As Mr. Wright came within hearing, the old Calvinist was exclaiming, ‘Thank God for that! I am glad of it! Thank God they have risen at last!’ Inquiring what the news was, Squire Hudson replied, ‘Why, the slaves have risen down in Virginia, and are fighting for their freedom as we did for ours. I pray God that they may get it.’”[^[62]]

They did not get freedom but death. And yet there on the edge of Dismal Swamp they slaughtered fifty whites, held the land in terror for more than a month, and set going a tremendous wave of reaction. In the South, Negro churches and free Negro schools were sternly restricted, just at the time Great Britain was freeing her West Indian slaves. In the North, came two movements: a determined anti-slavery campaign, and an opposing movement which disfranchised Negroes, burned their churches and schools, and robbed them of their friends. The Negroes rushed together for counsel and defense, and held their first national meeting in Philadelphia, where they deliberated earnestly on migration to Canada and on schools. But schools for Negroes were especially feared North as well as South, and in John Brown’s native state of Connecticut a white woman was shamefully persecuted for attempting to teach Negroes. All this aroused John Brown’s antipathy to slavery and made it more definite and purposeful. In November of the year which witnessed the burning of Prudence Crandall’s school, and a year after his second marriage, he wrote to his brother:

“Since you have left me, I have been trying to devise some means whereby I might do something in a practical way for my poor fellow men who are in bondage; and having fully consulted the feelings of my wife and my three boys, we have agreed to get at least one Negro boy or youth, and bring him up as we do our own,—viz., give him a good English education, learn him what we can about the history of the world, about business, about general subjects, and, above all, try to teach him the fear of God. We think of three ways to obtain one: First, to try to get some Christian slaveholder to release one to us. Second, to get a free one, if no one will let us have one that is a slave. Third, if that does not succeed, we have all agreed to submit to considerable privation in order to buy one. This we are now using means in order to effect, in the confident expectation that God is about to bring them all out of the house of bondage.

“I will just mention that when this subject was first introduced, Jason had gone to bed; but no sooner did he hear the thing hinted, than his warm heart kindled, and he turned out to have a part in the discussion of a subject of such exceeding interest. I have for years been trying to devise some way to get a school a-going here for blacks, and I think that on many accounts it would be a most favorable location. Children here would have no intercourse with vicious people of their own kind, nor with openly vicious persons of any kind. There would be no powerful opposition influence against such a thing; and should there be any, I believe the settlement might be so effected in future as to have almost the whole influence of the place in favor of such a school. Write me how you would like to join me, and try to get on from Hudson and thereabouts some first-rate Abolitionist families with you. I do honestly believe that our united exertions alone might soon, with the good hand of our God upon us, effect it all.”[^[63]]

Nothing came of this project, except that John Brown grew more deeply interested. He was now worth $20,000, a man of influence and he felt more and more moved toward definite action to help the Negroes. They were keeping up their conventions and the stream of fugitives was augmenting. The problem, however, was not simply one of slavery. The plight of the free Negro was particularly pitiable. He was liable to be seized and sold South whether an actual slave or not; he was discriminated against and despised in all walks. This was bad enough in every-day life, but to a straightforward religious soul like John Brown it was simply intolerable in the church of God. His eldest daughter says:

“One evening after he had been singing to me, he asked me how I would like to have some poor little black children that were slaves (explaining to me the meaning of slaves) come and live with us; and asked me if I would be willing to divide my food and clothes with them. He made such an impression on my sympathies, that the first colored person that I ever saw (it was a man I met on the street in Meadville, Pa.) I felt such pity for, that I wanted to ask him if he did not want to come and live at our house. When I was six or seven years old, a little incident took place in the church at Franklin, O. (of which all the older part of our family were members), which caused quite an excitement.”[^[64]]

His son tells the details of this incident:

“About 1837, mother, Jason, Owen and I, joined the Congregational Church at Franklin, the Rev. Mr. Burritt, pastor. Shortly after, the other societies, including Methodists and Episcopalians, joined ours in an undertaking to hold a protracted meeting under the special management of an evangelist preacher from Cleveland, named Avery. The house of the Congregationalists being the largest, it was chosen as the place for this meeting. Invitations were sent out to church folks in adjoining towns to ‘come up to the help of the Lord against the mighty;’ and soon the house was crowded, the assembly occupying by invitation the pews of the church generally. Preacher Avery gave us in succession four sermons from one text,—‘Cast ye up, cast ye up! Prepare ye the way of the Lord; make His paths straight!’ Soon lukewarm Christians were heated up to a melting condition, and there was a bright prospect of a good shower of grace. There were at that time in Franklin a number of free colored persons and some fugitive slaves. These became interested and came to the meetings, but were given seats by themselves, where the stove had stood, near the door,—not a good place for seeing ministers or singers. Father noticed this, and when the next meeting (which was at evening) had fairly opened, he arose and called attention to the fact that, in seating the colored portion of the audience, a discrimination had been made, and said that he did not believe God ‘is a respecter of persons.’ He then invited the colored people to occupy his slip. The blacks accepted, and all of our family took their vacated seats. This was a bombshell, and the Holy Spirit in the hearts of Pastor Burritt and Deacon Beach at once gave up His place to another tenant. The next day father received a call from the deacons to admonish him and ‘labor’ with him; but they returned with new views of Christian duty. The blacks during the remainder of that protracted meeting continued to occupy our slip, and our family the seats around the stove. We soon after moved to Hudson, and though living three miles away, became regular attendants at the Congregational Church in the centre of the town. In about a year we received a letter from good Deacon Williams, informing us that our relations with the church in Franklin were ended in accordance with a rule made by the church since we left, that ‘any member being absent a year without reporting him or herself to that church should be cut off.’ This was the first intimation we had of the existence of the rule. Father, on reading the letter, became white with anger. This was my first taste of the pro-slavery diabolism that had intrenched itself in the church, and I shed a few uncalled for tears over the matter, for instead I should have rejoiced in my emancipation. From that day my theological shackles were a good deal broken, and I have not worn them since (to speak of),—not even for ornament.”[^[65]]

The years of 1837 and 1838 were the years of persecution for the Abolition cause. Lovejoy was murdered in Illinois and mobs raged in Massachusetts and Pennsylvania. Pennsylvania Hall, in Philadelphia, was burned, and Marlborough Chapel in Boston, where John Brown himself seems to have been present fighting back the people, was sacked. Indeed, as he afterward said, he had seen some of the “principal Abolition mobs.”

Whatever John Brown may have wished to do at this time was frustrated by the panic, which swept away his fortune, and left him bankrupt. Yet something he must do—he must at least promise God that he and his family would eternally oppose slavery. How, he did not know—he was not sure—but somehow he was determined, and his old idea of educating youth was still uppermost.

It was in 1839, when a Negro preacher named Fayette was visiting Brown, and bringing his story of persecution and injustice, that this great promise was made. Solemnly John Brown arose; he was then a man of nearly forty years, tall, dark and clean-shaven; by him sat his young wife of twenty-two and his oldest boys of eighteen, sixteen and fifteen. Six other children slept in the room back of the dark preacher. John Brown told them of his purpose to make active war on slavery, and bound his family in solemn and secret compact to labor for emancipation. And then, instead of standing to pray, as was his wont, he fell upon his knees and implored God’s blessing on his enterprise.

This marks a turning-point in John Brown’s life: in his boyhood he had disliked slavery and his antipathy toward it grew with his years; yet of necessity it occupied but little of a life busy with breadwinning. Gradually, however, he saw the gathering of the mighty struggle about him; the news of the skirmish battles of the greatest moral war of the century aroused and quickened him, and all the more when they struck the tender chords of his acquaintanceships and sympathies. He saw his friends hurt and imposed on until at last, gradually, then suddenly, it dawned upon him that he must fight this monster slavery. He did not now plan physical warfare—he was yet a non-resistant, hating war, and did not dream of Harper’s Ferry; but he set his face toward the goal and whithersoever the Lord led, he was ready to follow. He still, too, had his living to earn—his family to care for. Slavery was not yet the sole object of his life, but as he passed on in his daily duties he was determined to seize every opportunity to strike it a blow.

This, at least it seems to me, is a fair interpretation of John Brown’s thought and action from the evidence at hand. Some have believed that John Brown planned Harper’s Ferry or something similar in 1839; others have doubted whether he had any plans against slavery before 1850. The truth probably lies between these extreme views. Human purposes grow slowly and in curious ways; thought by thought they build themselves until in their full panoplied vigor and definite outline not even the thinker can tell the exact process of the growing, or say that here was the beginning or there the ending. Nor does this slow growth and gathering make the end less wonderful or the motive less praiseworthy. Few Americans recognized in 1839 that the great central problem of America was slavery; and of that few, fewer still were willing to fight it as they knew it should be fought. Of this lesser number, two men stood almost alone, ready to back their faith by action—William Lloyd Garrison and John Brown.

These men did not then know each other—they had in these early days scarcely heard each other’s names. They never came to be friends or sympathizers. When John Brown was in Boston he never went to The Liberator office, and in after years, now and then, he dropped words very like contempt for “non-resistants”; while Garrison flayed the leader of the Harper’s Ferry raid. They were alike only in their intense hatred of slavery, and spiritually they crossed each other’s paths in curious fashion, Garrison drifting from a willingness to fight slavery in all ways or in any way to a fateful attitude of non-resistance and withdrawal from the contamination of slaveholders; John Brown drifting from non-resistance to the red path of active warfare.

Nowhere did the imminence of a great struggle show itself more clearly than among the Negroes themselves. Organized insurrection ceased in the South, not because of the increased rigors of the slave system, but because the great safety-valve of escape northward was opened wider and wider, and the methods were gradually coördinated into that mysterious system known as the Underground Railroad. The slaves and freedmen started the work and to the end bore the brunt of danger and hardship; but gradually they more and more secured the coöperation of men like John Brown, and of others less radical but just as sympathetic. Here and there the free Negroes in the North began to gain economic footing as servants in cities, as farmers in Ohio and even as entrepreneurs in the great catering business of Philadelphia and New York.

The schools were still for the most part closed to them. They made strenuous efforts to counteract this and established dozens of schools of their own all over the land. At last in 1839 Oberlin was founded and certain earnest students of Cincinnati, disgusted with the color line at Lane College, seceded to Oberlin and brought the color question there. It was fairly met and Negroes were admitted.

It was the establishment of Oberlin College in 1839 and the appointment of his father as trustee that gave John Brown a new vision of life and usefulness—of a life which would at once combine the pursuit of a great moral ideal and the honest earning of a good living for a family. Brown proposed to survey the Virginia lands of Oberlin, as we have shown, locate a large farm for himself and settle there with his family. Here he undoubtedly expected to carry out the plan previously laid before his brother Frederick. He consulted the Oberlin authorities concerning “provision for religious and school privileges” and they thought it possible to have these, although nothing was said specifically of Negroes. The position was strategic and John Brown knew it: in the non-slaveholding portion of a slave state, near the river and not far from the foothills of mountains, beyond which lay the Great Black Way, was formed a highway for the Underground Railroad and a place for experiment in the uplift of black men. That he would meet opposition, and strong opposition, John Brown must have known, but probably at this time he counted on the prevalence of law and justice and the stern principles of his religion rather than on the sword of Gideon, which was his later reliance. But it was not the “will of Providence” as we have seen, that Brown should then settle in Virginia, since his increasing financial straits and final bankruptcy overthrew all plans of purchasing the one thousand acres for which he had already bargained.

The slough of despond through which John Brown passed in the succeeding years, from 1842 to 1846, was never fully betrayed by this stern, self-repressing Puritan. Yet the loss of a fortune and the shattering of a dream, the bankruptcy and imprisonment, and the death of five children, while around him whirled the struggle of the churches with slavery and Abolition mobs, all dropped a sombre brooding veil of stern inexorable fate over his spirit—a veil which never lifted. The dark mysterious tragedy of life gripped him with awful intensity—the iron entered his soul. He became sterner and more silent. He brooded and listened for the voice of the avenging God, and girded up his loins in readiness.

“My husband always believed,” said his wife in after years, “that he was to be an instrument in the hands of Providence, and I believed it too.... Many a night he had lain awake and prayed concerning it.”[^[66]]

It began to dawn upon him that he had sinned in the selfish pursuit of petty ends: that he must be about his Father’s business of giving the death-blow to that “sum of all villanies—slavery.” He had erred in making his great work a side object—a secondary thing; it must be his first and only duty, and let God attend to the nurture of his family. As his conception of his own relation to slavery thus broadened and deepened, so too did his plan of attacking the system become clearer and more definite and he spent hours discussing the matter. In Springfield, “he used to talk much on the subject, and had the reputation of being quite ultra. His bookkeeper tells me that he and his eldest son used to discuss slavery by the hour in his counting-room, and he used to say that it was right for slaves to kill their masters and escape, and thought slaveholders were guilty of a very great wickedness.”[^[67]]

He studied the census returns and the distribution of the Negroes and made maps of fugitive slave routes with roads, plantations, and supplies. He learned of Isaac, Denmark Vesey, Nat Turner and the Cumberland region insurrections in South Carolina, Virginia, and Tennessee; he knew of the organized resistance to slave-catchers in Pennsylvania, and the history of Hayti and Jamaica.

It needed, as he soon saw, something more radical than schools and moral suasion; so deep-seated and radical a disease demanded “Action! Action!” He welcomed his new and long-loved calling of shepherd because of the leisure it gave him to study out his great moral problem. He sought and gained the acquaintance of Negro leaders like Garnet, Loguen, Gloucester and McCune Smith. As his sheep business broadened, he traveled about and probably at this time first saw Harper’s Ferry—the mighty pass where Potomac and Shenandoah, hurling aside the mountain masses, rush to their singular wedding.

Thus the distraction of the Springfield wool business came to John Brown almost in the guise of a temptation to be shunned. For a moment about 1845 he looked again on the lure of wealth and dreamed how useful it would be to what was now his great life object. But only for a moment, for when he realized the price he must pay—the time, the chicanery, the petty detail—he turned from it in disgust. It was at this time that he studied the history of insurrection and became familiar with the Abolition movement; as early as 1846 his Harper’s Ferry project began to form itself more or less clearly in his mind.

One thing alone reconciled him to his Springfield sojourn and that was the Negroes whom he met there. He had met black men singly here and there all his life, but now he met a group. It was not one of the principal Negro groups of the day—they were in Philadelphia and New York, Cincinnati and Boston, and in Canada, working largely alone with only imperfect intercommunication, but working manfully and effectively for emancipation and full freedom. The Springfield group was a smaller body without conspicuous leadership, and on that account more nearly approximated the great mass of their enslaved race. He sought them in home and church and out on the street, and he hired them in his business. He came to them on a plane of perfect equality—they sat at his table and he at theirs. He neither descended upon them from above nor wallowed with their lowest, and the result was that as Redpath says, “Captain Brown had a higher notion of the capacity of the Negro race than most white men. I have often heard him dwell on this subject, and mention instances of their fitness to take care of themselves, saying, in his quaint way, that ‘they behaved so much like “folks” that he almost thought they were so.’ He thought that perhaps a forcible separation of the connection between master and slave was necessary to educate the blacks for self-government; but this he threw out as a suggestion merely.”[^[68]]

Nor did this appreciation of the finer qualities and capacity of the Negroes blind him to their imperfections. He found them “intensely human,” but with their human frailties weakened by slavery and caste; and with perfect faith in their ability to rise above their faults, he criticized and inspired them. In his quaint essay on “Sambo’s Mistakes,” putting himself in the black man’s place, he enumerates his errors: His failure to improve his time in good reading; his waste of money in indulgent luxuries and societies and consequent lack of capital; his servile occupations; his talkativeness and inaptitude for organization; his sectarian bias. In part of his arraignment, which will bear thoughtful reading to-day by black men as well as white, he makes his Sambo say:

“Another trifling error of my life has been, that I have always expected to secure the favor of the whites by tamely submitting to every species of indignity, contempt, and wrong, instead of nobly resisting their brutal aggressions from principle, and taking my place as a man, and assuming the responsibilities of a man, a citizen, a husband, a father, a brother, a neighbor, a friend,—as God requires of every one (if his neighbor will allow him to do it); but I find that I get, for all my submission, about the same reward that the Southern slaveocrats render to the dough-faced statesmen of the North, for being bribed and browbeat and fooled and cheated, as Whigs and Democrats love to be, and think themselves highly honored if they may be allowed to lick up the spittle of a Southerner. I say to get the reward. But I am uncommon quick-sighted; I can see in a minute where I missed it.”[^[69]]

No one knew better than John Brown how slavery had contributed to these faults: for how many slaves could read anything, or when had they been taught the use of money or the A. B. C. of organization? Not in condemnation but in faith was this excellent paper written and delicately worded as from one who has learned his own faults and will not repeat those of others.

Not only did John Brown thus criticize, but he led these black folk. As early as 1846 he revealed something of his final plans to Thomas Thomas, his black porter and friend, with whom he once was photographed in mutual friendly embrace, holding the sign “S. P. W.”—“Subterranean Pass Way” of slaves to freedom.

“How early shall I come to-morrow?” asked Thomas one morning.

“We begin work at seven,” answered John Brown. “But I wish you would come around earlier so that I can talk with you.” Then Brown disclosed a plan of increasing and systematizing the work of the Underground Railroad by running off larger bodies of slaves. This was the first form of his Harper’s Ferry plan and it rapidly grew in detail, so that its disclosure to Douglass in 1847 showed thought and advance.

The first national Negro leader, Frederick Douglass, had delivered his wonderful salutatory in New Bedford in 1844. After publishing his biography, he went to England for safety, but returned in 1847, ransomed from slavery and ready to launch his paper, The North Star. No sooner had he landed than the black Wise Men of New York told him of the new Star in the East, whispering of the strange determined man of Springfield who flitted silently here and there among the groups of black folk and whose life was devoted to eternal war upon slavery. Both were eager to meet each other—John Brown to become acquainted with the greatest leader of the race which he aimed to free; Frederick Douglass to know an intense foe of slavery. The historic meeting took place in Springfield and is best told in Douglass’ own words:

“About the time I began my enterprise [i. e., his newspaper] in Rochester, I chanced to spend a night and a day under the roof of a man whose character and conversation, and whose objects and aims in life, made a very deep impression upon my mind and heart. His name had been mentioned to me by several prominent colored men; among whom were the Rev. Henry Highland Garnet and J. W. Loguen. In speaking of him their voices would drop to a whisper, and what they said of him made me very eager to see and to know him. Fortunately, I was invited to see him at his own house. At the time to which I now refer this man was a respectable merchant in a populous and thriving city, and our first place of meeting was at his store. This was a substantial brick building on a prominent, busy street. A glance at the interior, as well as at the massive walls without, gave me the impression that the owner must be a man of considerable wealth. My welcome was all that I could have asked. Every member of the family, young and old, seemed glad to see me, and I was made much at home in a very little while. I was, however, a little disappointed with the appearance of the house and its location. After seeing the fine store I was prepared to see a fine residence in an eligible locality, but this conclusion was completely dispelled by actual observation. In fact, the house was neither commodious nor elegant, nor its situation desirable. It was a small wooden building on a back street, in a neighborhood chiefly occupied by laboring men and mechanics; respectable enough, to be sure, but not quite the place, I thought, where one would look for the residence of a flourishing and successful merchant.

“Plain as was the outside of this man’s house, the inside was plainer. Its furniture would have satisfied a Spartan. It would take longer to tell what was not in this house than what was in it. There was an air of plainness about it which almost suggested destitution. My first meal passed under the misnomer of tea, though there was nothing about it resembling the usual significance of that term. It consisted of beef-soup, cabbage, and potatoes—a meal such as a man might relish after following the plow all day or performing a forced march of a dozen miles over a rough road in frosty weather. Innocent of paint, veneering, varnish, or table-cloth, the table announced itself unmistakably of pine and of the plainest workmanship. There was no hired help visible. The mother, daughters, and sons did the serving, and did it well. They were evidently used to it, and had no thought of any impropriety or degradation in being their own servants. It is said that a house in some measure reflects the character of its occupants; this one certainly did. In it there were no disguises, no illusions, no make-believes. Everything implied stern truth, solid purpose, and rigid economy. I was not long in company with the master of this house before I discovered that he was indeed the master of it, and was likely to become mine too if I stayed long enough with him. His wife believed in him, and his children observed him with reverence. Whenever he spoke his words commanded earnest attention. His arguments, which I ventured at some points to oppose, seemed to convince all; his appeals touched all, and his will impressed all. Certainly I never felt myself in the presence of a stronger religious influence than while in this man’s house.

“In person he was lean, strong, and sinewy, of the best New England mold, built for times of trouble and fitted to grapple with the flintiest hardships. Clad in plain American woolen, shod in boots of cowhide leather, and wearing a cravat of the same substantial material, under six feet high, less than 150 pounds in weight, aged about fifty, he presented a figure straight and symmetrical as a mountain pine. His bearing was singularly impressive. His head was not large, but compact and high. His hair was coarse, strong, slightly gray and closely trimmed, and grew low on his forehead. His face was smoothly shaved, and revealed a strong, square mouth, supported by a broad and prominent chin. His eyes were bluish gray, and in conversation they were full of light and fire. When on the street, he moved with a long, springing, racehorse step, absorbed by his own reflections, neither seeking nor shunning observation. Such was the man whose name I had heard in whispers; such was the spirit of his house and family; such was the house in which he lived; and such was Captain John Brown, whose name has now passed into history, as that of one of the most marked characters and greatest heroes known to American fame.

“After the strong meal already described, Captain Brown cautiously approached the subject which he wished to bring to my attention; for he seemed to apprehend opposition to his views. He denounced slavery in look and language fierce and bitter; thought that slaveholders had forfeited their right to live; that the slaves had the right to gain their liberty in any way they could; did not believe that moral suasion would ever liberate the slave, or that political action would abolish the system. He said that he had long had a plan which could accomplish this end, and he had invited me to his house to lay that plan before me. He said he had been for some time looking for colored men to whom he could safely reveal his secret, and at times he had almost despaired of finding such men; but that now he was encouraged, for he saw heads of such rising up in all directions. He had observed my course at home and abroad, and he wanted my coöperation. His plan as it then lay in his mind had much to commend it. It did not, as some suppose, contemplate a general rising among the slaves, and a general slaughter of the slave-masters. An insurrection, he thought, would only defeat the object; but his plan did contemplate the creating of an armed force which should act the very heart of the South. He was not averse to the shedding of blood, and thought the practice of carrying arms would be a good one for the colored people to adopt, as it would give them a sense of their manhood. No people, he said, could have self-respect, or be respected, who would not fight for their freedom. He called my attention to a map of the United States, and pointed out to me the far-reaching Alleghanies, which stretch away from the borders of New York into the Southern states.

“‘These mountains,’ he said, ‘are the basis of my plan. God has given the strength of the hills to freedom; they were placed here for the emancipation of the Negro race; they are full of natural forts, where one man for defense will be equal to a hundred for attack; they are full also of good hiding-places, where large numbers of brave men could be concealed, and baffle and elude pursuit for a long time. I know these mountains well, and could take a body of men into them and keep them there despite of all efforts of Virginia to dislodge them. The true object to be sought is first of all to destroy the money value of slavery property; and that can only be done by rendering such property insecure. My plan, then, is to take at first about twenty-five picked men, and begin on a small scale; supply them with arms and ammunition and post them in squads of fives on a line of twenty-five miles. The most persuasive and judicious of these shall go down to the fields from time to time, as opportunity offers, and induce the slaves to join them, seeking and selecting the most restless and daring.’

“He saw that in this part of the work the utmost care must be used to avoid treachery and disclosure. Only the most conscientious and skilful should be sent on this perilous duty. With care and enterprise he thought he could soon gather a force of one hundred hardy men, men who would be content to lead the free and adventurous life to which he proposed to train them; when these were properly drilled, and each man had found the place for which he was best suited, they would begin work in earnest; they would run off the slaves in large numbers, retain the brave and strong ones in the mountains, and send the weak and timid to the North by the Underground Railroad. His operations would be enlarged with increasing numbers and would not be confined to one locality.

“When I asked him how he would support these men, he said emphatically that he would subsist them upon the enemy. Slavery was a state of war, and the slave had a right to anything necessary to his freedom. ‘But,’ said I, ‘suppose you succeed in running off a few slaves, and thus impress the Virginia slaveholders with a sense of insecurity in their slaves further south.’ ‘That,’ he said, ‘will be what I want first to do; then I would follow them up. If we could drive slavery out of one county, it would be a great gain; it would weaken the system throughout the state.’ ‘But they would employ bloodhounds to hunt you out of the mountains.’ ‘That they might attempt,’ said he, ‘but the chances are, we should whip them, and when we should have whipped one squad, they would be careful how they pursued.’ ‘But you might be surrounded and cut off from your provisions or means of subsistence.’ He thought that this could not be done so that they could not cut their way out; but even if the worst came he could but be killed, and he had no better use for his life than to lay it down in the cause of the slave. When I suggested that we might convert the slaveholders, he became much excited, and said that could never be. He knew their proud hearts and they would never be induced to give up their slaves, until they felt a big stick about their heads.

“He observed that I might have noticed the simple manner in which he lived, adding that he had adopted this method in order to save money to carry out his purposes. This was said in no boastful tone, for he felt that he had delayed already too long, and had no room to boast either his zeal or his self-denial. Had some men made such display of rigid virtue, I should have rejected it as affected, false, and hypocritical, but in John Brown, I felt it to be real as iron or granite. From this night spent with John Brown in Springfield, Mass., 1847, while I continued to write and speak against slavery, I became all the same less hopeful of its peaceful abolition. My utterances became more and more tinged by the color of this man’s strong impressions.”[^[70]]

Tremendously impressed as was Douglass in mind and heart with John Brown and his plan, his reason was never convinced even up to the last; and naturally because here two radically opposite characters saw slavery from opposite sides of the shield. Both hated it with all their strength, but one knew its physical degradation, its tremendous power and the strong sympathies and interests that buttressed it the world over; the other felt its moral evil and knowing simply that it was wrong, concluded that John Brown and God could overthrow it. That was all—a plain straightforward path; but to the subtler darker man, more worldly-wise and less religious, the arm of the Lord was not revealed, while the evil of this world had seared his vitals. He uncovered himself if not reverently, certainly respectfully before the Seer; he gave him much help and information; he turned almost imperceptibly but surely toward Brown’s darker view of the blood-sacrifice of slavery, but he could never quite believe that John Brown’s tremendous plan was humanly possible. And this attitude of Douglass was in various degrees and strides the attitude of the leading Negroes of his day. They believed in John Brown but not in his plan. They knew he was right, but they knew that for any failure in his project they, the black men, would probably pay the cost. And the horror of that cost none knew as they.

If John Brown was to carry out his idea as he had now definitely conceived it, he must first find the men who could help him. On this point there seems to have been deliberation and development of plan, particularly as he consulted Douglass and the Negro leaders. His earlier scheme probably looked toward the use of Negro allies almost exclusively outside his own family. This was eminently fitting but impractical, as Douglass and his fellows must have urged. White men could move where they would in the United States, but to introduce an armed band exclusively or mainly of Negroes from the North into the South was difficult, if not impossible. Nevertheless, some Negroes of the right type were needed and to John Brown’s mind the Underground Railroad was bringing North the very material he required. It could not, however, be properly trained in cities whither it drifted both for economic reasons and for self-protection. Brown therefore heard of Gerrit Smith’s offer of August 1, 1846, with great interest. This wealthy leader of the New York Abolition group took occasion at the celebration of the twelfth anniversary of British emancipation to offer free Negroes 100,000 acres of his lands in the Adirondack region on easy terms. It was not a well thought-out scheme: the climate was bleak for Negroes, the methods of culture then suitable, were unknown to them; while the surveyor who laid out these farms cheated them as cheerily as though philanthropy had no concern with the project. The Gerrit Smith offer was not wholly a failure. It turned out some good Negro farmers, gave some of its best Negro citizens of to-day to northern New York, and trained a bishop of the British African Church. But it did far less than it might have done if better planned, and much if not all of its success was due to John Brown. He saw possibilities here both to shelter his family when he turned definitely to what was now his single object in life, and to train men to help him. He went to Gerrit Smith at Peterboro, N. Y., in April, 1848, and said: “I am something of a pioneer; I grew up among the woods and wild Indians of Ohio and am used to the climate and the way of life that your colony find so trying. I will take one of your farms myself, clear it up and plant it, and show my colored neighbors how such work should be done; will give them work as I have occasion, look after them in all needful ways and be a kind of father to them.”[^[71]]

His offer was gladly accepted and he moved his family there the following year. It was a wild, lonely place. Thomas Wentworth Higginson wrote once: “The Notch seems beyond the world, North Elba and its half-dozen houses are beyond the Notch, and there is a wilder little mountain road which rises beyond North Elba. But the house we seek is not even on that road, but behind it and beyond it; you ride a mile or two, then take down a pair of bars; beyond the bars faith takes you across a half-cleared field, through the most difficult of wood-paths, and after half a mile of forest you come out upon a clearing. There is a little frame house, unpainted, set in a girdle of black stumps, and with all heaven about it for a wider girdle; on a high hillside, forests on north and west,—the glorious line of the Adirondacks on the east, and on the south one slender road leading off to Westport, a road so straight that you could sight a United States marshal for five miles.”[^[72]]

To his family John Brown’s word was usually not merely law but wish. They went to North Elba cheerfully and with full knowledge of the import of the change, for the father was frank. The daughter Ruth writes: “While we were living in Springfield, our house was plainly furnished, but very comfortably, all excepting the parlor. Mother and I had often expressed a wish that the parlor might be furnished too, and father encouraged us that it should be; but after he made up his mind to go to North Elba he began to economize in many ways. One day he called us older ones to him and said: ‘I want to plan with you a little; and I want you all to express your minds. I have a little money to spare; and now shall we use it to furnish the parlor, or spend it to buy clothing for the colored people who may need help in North Elba another year?’ We all said, ‘Save the money.’”[^[73]]

It was no paradise, even for the enthusiast. Redpath says: “It is too cold to raise corn there; they can scarcely, in the most favorable seasons, obtain a few ears for roasting. Stock must be wintered there nearly six months in every year. I was there on the first of November, the ground was snowy, and winter had apparently begun—and it would last till the middle of May. They never raise anything to sell off that farm, except sometimes a few fleeces. It was well, they said, if they raised their own provisions, and could spin their own wool for clothing.”[^[74]]

Meantime the scattered isolated eddies of the anti-slavery battles were swirling to one great current, and more and more John Brown was becoming the man of one idea. Impatiently he neglected his pressing wool business. Instead of keeping his eye on his critical London venture, he hastened across Europe perfecting military observations. He returned to America in time to hear all the feverish discussion of the Fugitive Slave Law and see its final passage. In November, 1850, he writes his wife from Springfield: “It now seems that the Fugitive Slave Law was to be the means of making more Abolitionists than all the lectures we have had for years. It really looks as if God had His hand on this wickedness also. I of course keep encouraging my colored friends to ‘trust in God and keep their powder dry.’ I did so to-day at Thanksgiving meeting publicly.”[^[75]]

His Springfield meetings led to the formation of his “League of Gileadites,” the first of his steps toward the armed organization of Negroes. Forty-four Negroes signed the following agreement:

“As citizens of the United States of America, trusting in a just and merciful God, whose spirit and all-powerful aid we humbly implore, we will ever be true to the flag of our beloved country, always acting under it. We, whose names are hereunto affixed, do constitute ourselves a branch of the United States League of Gileadites. That we will provide ourselves at once with suitable implements, and will aid those who do not possess the means, if any such are disposed to join us. We invite every colored person whose heart is engaged in the performance of our business, whether male or female, old or young. The duty of the aged, infirm, and young members of the League shall be to give instant notice to all members in case of an attack upon any of our people. We agree to have no officers except a treasurer and secretary pro tem., until after some trial of courage and talent of able-bodied members shall enable us to elect officers from those who shall have rendered the most important services. Nothing but wisdom and undaunted courage, efficiency, and general good conduct shall in any way influence us in electing officers.”[^[76]]

To this was added exhortation and advice by John Brown.

“Nothing so charms the American people as personal bravery,” he wrote. “Witness the case of Cinques, of everlasting memory, on board the Amistad. The trial for life of one bold and to some extent successful man, for defending his rights in good earnest, would arouse more sympathy throughout the nation than the accumulated wrongs and sufferings of more than three millions of our submissive colored population. We need not mention the Greeks struggling against the oppressive Turks, the Poles against Russia, nor the Hungarians against Austria and Russia combined, to prove this. No jury can be found in the Northern states that would convict a man for defending his rights to the last extremity. This is well understood by Southern congressmen, who insisted that the right of trial by jury should not be granted to the fugitive. Colored people have ten times the number of fast friends among the whites than they suppose, and would have ten times the number they have now were they but half as much in earnest to secure their dearest rights as they are to ape the follies and extravagances of their white neighbors, and to indulge in idle show, in ease and luxury. Just think of the money expended by individuals in your behalf for the last twenty years! Think of the number who have been mobbed and imprisoned on your account! Have any of you seen the branded hand? Do you remember the names of Lovejoy and Torrey?”[^[77]]

He then gives definite advice as to procedure in case the arrest and the deportation of a fugitive slave were attempted:

“Should one of your number be arrested, you must collect together as quickly as possible, so as to outnumber your adversaries, who are taking an active part against you. Let no able-bodied man appear on the ground unequipped, or with his weapons exposed to view: let that be understood beforehand. Your plans must be known only to yourself, and with the understanding that all traitors must die, wherever caught and proven to be guilty. ‘Whosoever is fearful or afraid, let him return and depart early from Mount Gilead’ (Judges 7:3; Deut. 20:8). Give all cowards an opportunity to show it on condition of holding their peace. Do not delay one moment after you are ready; you will lose all your resolution if you do. Let the first blow be the signal for all to engage; and when engaged do not do your work in halves, but make clean work with your enemies,—and be sure you meddle not with any others. By going about your business quietly, you will get the job disposed of before the number that an uproar would bring together can collect; and you will have the advantage of those who come out against you, for they will be wholly unprepared with either equipments or matured plans; all with them will be confusion and terror. Your enemies will be slow to attack you after you have done up the work nicely; and if they should, they will have to encounter your white friends as well as you; for you may safely calculate on a division of the whites, and may by that means get to an honorable parley.

“Be firm, determined, and cool; but let it be understood that you are not to be driven to desperation without making it an awful dear job to others as well as to you. Give them to know distinctly that those who live in wooden houses should not throw fire, and that you are just as able to suffer as your white neighbors. After effecting a rescue, if you are assailed, go into the houses of your most prominent and influential white friends with your wives; and that will effectually fasten upon them the suspicion of being connected with you, and will compel them to make a common cause with you, whether they would otherwise live up to their profession or not. This would leave them no choice in the matter.

“Some would doubtless prove themselves true of their own choice; others would flinch. That would be taking them at their own words. You may make a tumult in the court room where a trial is going on by burning gunpowder freely in paper packages, if you cannot think of any better way to create a momentary alarm, and might possibly give one or more of your enemies a hoist. But in such case the prisoner will need to take the hint at once, and bestir himself; and so should his friends improve the opportunity for a general rush. A lasso might possibly be applied to a slave-catcher for once with good effect. Hold on to your weapons, and never be persuaded to leave them, part with them, or have them far away from you. Stand by one another and by your friends, while a drop of blood remains; and be hanged if you must, but tell no tales out of school. Make no confession. Union is strength. Without some well digested arrangements, nothing to any good purpose is likely to be done, let the demand be never so great. Witness the case of Hamlet and Long in New York, when there was no well defined plan of operations or suitable preparation beforehand. The desired end may be effectually secured by the means proposed; namely, the enjoyment of our inalienable rights.”[^[78]]

There is evidence that this league did effective rescue work, as did other groups of Negroes in Boston, Philadelphia, Albany, New York and elsewhere. In this service the Negroes could not act alone—it would have meant mob violence on purely racial lines;—but given a few determined white men to join in, they could and did bear the brunt of the fighting.

John Brown himself was active in such rescue work. He helped in the release of “Jerry” in Syracuse, and writes in 1851 from Springfield: “Since the sending off to slavery of Long from New York, I have improved my leisure hours quite busily with colored people here, in advising them how to act, and in giving them all the encouragement in my power. They very much need encouragement and advice; and some of them are so alarmed that they tell me they cannot sleep on account of either themselves or their wives and children. I can only say I think I have been able to do something to revive their broken spirits. I want all my family to imagine themselves in the same dreadful condition. My only spare time being taken up (often till late hours at night) in the way I speak of, has prevented me from the gloomy homesick feelings which had before so much oppressed me: not that I forget my family at all.”[^[79]]

His hateful lawsuits hung like a weight about John Brown’s neck, and a feverish impatience was seizing him: “Father did not close up his wool business in Springfield when he went to North Elba, and had to make several journeys back and forth in 1819–50. He was at Springfield in January, 1851, soon after the passage of the Fugitive Slave Law, and went around among his colored friends there, who had been fugitives, urging them to resist the law, no matter by what authority it should be enforced. He told them to arm themselves with revolvers, men and women, and not to be taken alive. When he got to North Elba, he told us about the Fugitive Slave Law, and bade us resist any attempt that might be made to take any fugitive from our town, regardless of fine or imprisonment. Our faithful boy Cyrus was one of that class; and our feelings were so aroused that we would all have defended him, though the women folks had resorted to hot water. Father at this time said, ‘Their cup of iniquity is almost full.’ One evening as I was singing, ‘The Slave Father Mourning for his Children,’ containing these words,—

“‘Ye’re gone from me, my gentle ones,

With all your shouts of mirth;

A silence is within my walls,

A darkness round my hearth,’—

father got up and walked the floor, and before I could finish the song, he said, ‘O Ruth! Don’t sing any more; it is too sad!’”[^[80]]

At the same time his thrifty careful attention to minutiæ did not desert him. He keeps his eye on North Elba even after his wife and part of the family returned to Akron and writes: “The colored families appear to be doing well, and to feel encouraged. They all send much love to you. They have constant preaching on the Sabbath; and intelligence, morality and religion appear to be all on the advance.”[^[81]]

His daughter says: “He did not lose interest in the colored people of North Elba, and grieved over the sad fate of one of them, Mr. Henderson, who was lost in the woods in the winter of 1852 and perished with the cold. Mr. Henderson was an intelligent and good man, and was very industrious and father thought much of him.”[^[82]]

Once we find him saying: “If you find it difficult for you to pay for Douglass’ paper, I wish you would let me know, as I know I took liberty in ordering it continued. You have been very kind in helping me and I do not mean to make myself a burden.” And again he writes: “I am much rejoiced at the news of a religious kind in Ruth’s letter and would be still more rejoiced to learn that all the sects who hear the Christian name would have no more to do with that mother of all abominations—man-stealing.”[^[83]]

And the sects were thinking. All men were thinking. A great unrest was on the land. It was not merely moral leadership from above—it was the push of physical and mental pain from beneath;—not simply the cry of the Abolitionist but the up-stretching of the slave. The vision of the damned was stirring the western world and stirring black men as well as white. Something was forcing the issue—call it what you will, the Spirit of God or the spell of Africa. It came like some great grinding ground swell,—vast, indefinite, immeasurable but mighty, like the dark low whispering of some infinite disembodied voice—a riddle of the Sphinx. It tore men’s souls and wrecked their faith. Women cried out as cried once that tall black sibyl, Sojourner Truth:

“Frederick, is God dead?”

“No,” thundered the Douglass, towering above his Salem audience. “No, and because God is not dead, slavery can only end in blood.”

CHAPTER VI
THE CALL OF KANSAS

“Cry aloud, spare not, lift up thy voice like a trumpet, and shew my people their transgression, and the house of Jacob their sins.”

Just three hundred years before John Brown pledged his family to warfare against slavery, a black man stood on the plains of the Southwest looking toward Kansas. It was the Negro Steven, once slave of Dorantes, now leader and interpreter of the Fray Marcos explorers, and the first man of the Old World to look upon the great Southwest, if not upon Kansas itself. Whiter men have since ignored and ridiculed his work, sensualists have charged him with sensuality, lords of greed have called him greedy, and yet withal the plain truth remains: he led the expedition that foreran Coronado, reported back the truth of what he saw and then returned to lay down his life among the savages.[^[84]]

The land he looked upon in those young years of the sixteenth century was big with the tragic fate of his people. Planted far to the eastward a century later, their dark faces traveled fast westward until slavery was secure in the valley of the Mississippi and in the lower Southwest. Then the slave barons looked behind them, and saw to their own dismay that there could be no backward step. The slavery of the new Cotton Kingdom in the nineteenth century must either die or conquer a nation—it could not hesitate or pause. It was an industrial system built on ignorance, force and the cotton plant. The slaves must be curbed with an iron hand. A moment of relaxation and lo! they would be rising either in revenge or ambition. And slavery had made revenge and ambition one. Such a system could not compete with intelligence, nor with individual freedom, nor with miscellaneous and care-demanding crops. It could not divide territory with these things;—to do so meant economic death and the sudden, perhaps revolutionary upheaval of a whole social system. This the South saw as it looked backward in the years from 1820 to 1840. Then its bolder vision pressed the gloom ahead, and dreamed a dazzling dream of empire. It saw the slave system triumphant in the great Southwest—in Mexico, in Central America and the islands of the sea. Its softer souls, timid with a fear prophetic of failure, still held halfheartedly back, but bolder leaders like Davis, Toombs and Floyd went relentlessly, ruthlessly on. Three steps they and their forerunners took in that great western wilderness, and other steps were planned. Three steps—that cost uncounted treasure in gold and blood: the first in 1820, when they set foot beyond the Mississippi into Missouri; the second and bolder when they set their seal on the spoils of raped Mexico and made it possible slave soil; and the third and boldest, when on the soil of Kansas they fought to enslave all territory of the Union.

That these steps would cost much the leaders knew, but they did not rightly reckon how much. They risked the upheaval of parties, the enmity of sections and the angry agitation of visionaries. If worse came to worst, they held the trump-card of disrupting the nation and founding a mighty slave aristocracy to stretch from the Ohio to Venezuela and from Cuba to Texas. One thing alone they did not count upon and that was armed force.

The three steps did raise tremendous opposition. The enslaving of Missouri gave birth to the early Abolitionists—the conscience of the nation awakened to find slavery not dead or dying but growing and aggressive; and in these days John Brown, typifying one phase of that terrible conscience, swore blood-feud with this “sum of all villanies.” Thus the first step cost.

The second step went some ways awry since California was lost to slavery, but a new law to catch runaways brought compensation and brought too redoubled cost, for it raised in opposition to the whole slave system not only Abolitionists, but Free Soilers—those who hated not slavery but slaves. This was a costlier move, for the sneers that checked philanthropy were powerless against democracy, and when the echoes of this step reached the ears of John Brown, he laid aside all and became the man of one idea, and that idea the extinction of slavery in the United States.

But it was the third step that was costliest—the step that sought to impose slavery by law and blood on free labor lands despite the lands’ wish. Of all the steps it was the wildest and most foolish, for it arrayed against slavery not only philanthropy and democracy, but all the world-old forces of plain justice. It compelled those who loved the right to meet law and force by force and lawlessness, and one man that led that lawless fight on the plains of Kansas and struck its bloodiest blow, was John Brown.

John Brown’s decision to go to Kansas was sudden. Unexpectedly the centre of the slavery battle had swung westward. A shrewd bidder for the presidency offered the South the unawaited bribe of Kansas territory for their votes and they eagerly sprang at the offer. Stephen Douglas drove the bill through Congress, and Kansas stood ready for its slave population. But not only for slaves—also for freemen as Eli Thayer quickly saw, and the representations of him and his associates aroused the sons of John Brown.

John Brown himself looked on with interest, but he had other plans. He wrote to his son John: “If you or any of my family are disposed to go to Kansas or Nebraska with a view to help defeat Satan and his legions in that direction, I have not a word to say; but I feel committed to operate in another part of the field. If I were not so committed, I would be on my way this fall.”[^[85]]

John Brown’s plans were in the Alleghanies. At North Elba lay his northern stronghold, and at Harper’s Ferry lay the gates to the Great Black Way. Here he was convinced was the keystone of the slavery arch and here he must strike. So in former years Gabriel and Turner believed; so in after years others believed; but it was not till Grant floated down this path in a sea of blood that slavery finally fell.

The sons of John Brown were, however, greatly attracted by the new western lands. His eldest son writes:

“During the years of 1853 and 1854, most of the leading Northern newspapers were not only full of glowing accounts of the extraordinary fertility, healthfulness, and beauty of the territory of Kansas, then newly opened for settlement, but of urgent appeals to all lovers of freedom who desired homes in a new region to go there as settlers, and by their votes save Kansas from the curse of slavery. Influenced by these considerations, in the month of October, 1854, five of the sons of John Brown,—John, Jr., Jason, Owen, Frederick, and Salmon,—then residents of the state of Ohio, made their arrangements to emigrate to Kansas. Their combined property consisted chiefly of eleven head of cattle, mostly young, and three horses. Ten of this number were valuable on account of the breed. Thinking these especially desirable in a new country, Owen, Frederick, and Salmon took them by way of the lakes to Chicago, thence to Meridosia, Ill., where they were wintered; and in the following spring drove them into Kansas to a place selected by these brothers for settlement, about eight miles west of the town of Osawatomie. My brother Jason and his family, and I with my family followed at the opening of navigation in the spring of 1855, going by way of Ohio and Mississippi Rivers to St. Louis. There we purchased two small tents, a plough, and some smaller farming tools, and a hand-mill for grinding corn. At this period there were no railroads west of St. Louis; our journey must be continued by boat on the Missouri at a time of extremely low water, or by stage at great expense. We chose the river route, taking passage on the steamer New Lucy which too late we found crowded with passengers, mostly men from the South bound for Kansas. That they were from the South was plainly indicated by their language and dress; while their drinking, profanity, and display of revolvers and bowie-knives—openly worn as an essential part of their make-up—clearly showed the class to which they belonged, and that their mission was to aid in establishing slavery in Kansas.

“A box of fruit trees and grape-vines which my brother Jason had brought from Ohio, our plough, and the few agricultural implements we had on the deck of that steamer looked lonesome; for these were all we could see which were adapted to the occupation of peace. Then for the first time arose in our minds the query: Must the fertile prairies of Kansas, through a struggle at arms, be first secured to freedom before freemen can sow and reap? If so, how poorly we were prepared for such work will be seen when I say that for arms five of us brothers had only two small squirrel rifles and one revolver. But before we reached our destination, other matters claimed our attention. Cholera, which then prevailed to some extent at St. Louis, broke out among our passengers, a number of whom died. Among these brother Jason’s son, Austin, aged four years, the elder of his two children, fell a victim to this scourge; and while our boat lay by for repair of a broken rudder at Waverly, Mo., we buried him at night near the panic-stricken town, our lonely way illumined only by the lightning of a furious thunderstorm. True to his spirit of hatred of Northern people, our captain, without warning to us on shore, cast off his lines and left us to make our way by stage to Kansas City to which place we had already paid our fare by boat. Before we reached there, however, we became very hungry, and endeavored to buy food at various farmhouses on the way; but the occupants, judging from our speech that we were not from the South, always denied us, saying, ‘We have nothing for you.’ The only exception to this answer was at the stage house at Independence, Mo.

“Arrived in Kansas, her lovely prairies and wooded streams seemed to us indeed like a haven of rest. Here in prospect we saw our cattle increased to hundreds and possibly to thousands, fields of corn, orchards and vineyards. At once we set about the work through which only our visions of prosperity could be realized. Our tents would suffice to shelter until we could plough our land, plant corn and other crops, fruit trees, and vines, cut and secure as hay enough of the waving grass to supply our stock the coming winter. These cheering prospects beguiled our labors through the late spring until midsummer, by which time nearly all of our number were prostrated by fever and ague that would not stay cured; the grass cut for hay mouldered in the wet for the want of the care we could not bestow, and our crop of corn wasted by cattle we could not restrain. If these minor ills and misfortunes were all, they could be easily borne; but now began to gather the dark clouds of war.

“An election for a first territorial legislature had been held on the 30th of March of this year. On that day the residents of Missouri along the borders came into Kansas by thousands, and took forcible possession of the polls. In the words of Horace Greeley, ‘There was no disguise, no pretense of legality, no regard for decency. On the evening before and the day of the election, nearly a thousand Missourians arrived at Lawrence in wagons and on horseback, well armed with rifles, pistols and bowie-knives, and two pieces of cannon loaded with musket balls. Although but 831 legal electors in the Territory voted, there were no less than 6,320 votes polled. They elected all the members of the legislature, with a single exception in either house,—the two Free Soilers being chosen from a remote district which the Missourians overlooked or did not care to reach.’

“Early in the spring and summer of this year the actual settlers at their convention repudiated this fraudulently chosen legislature, and refused to obey its enactments. Upon this, the border papers of Missouri in flaming appeals urged the ruffian horde that had previously invaded Kansas to arm, and otherwise prepare to march again into the territory when called upon, as they soon would be, to ‘aid in enforcing laws.’ War of some magnitude, at least, now appeared to us brothers to be inevitable; and I wrote to our father, whose home was in North Elba, N. Y., asking him to procure and send us, if he could, arms and ammunition, so that we could be better prepared to defend ourselves and our neighbors.”[^[86]]

John Brown hesitated. His fighting blood was stirred and yet there was the plan of years yet unrealized. Then a new vision dawned in his mind. Perhaps this was the call of the Lord and the path to Virginia might lie through Kansas. He hurriedly consulted his friends—Douglass, McCune Smith, the cultured Negro physician of New York, and Gerrit Smith, and in November, 1854, wrote home: “I feel still pretty much determined to go back to North Elba; but expect Owen and Frederick will set out for Kansas on Monday next, with cattle belonging to John, Jason and themselves, intending to winter somewhere in Illinois.... Gerrit Smith wishes me to go back to North Elba; from Douglass and Dr. McCune Smith I have not yet heard.”[^[87]]

His business delayed him in Ohio and he still wrote of his going to North Elba. Then followed the Syracuse convention of Abolitionists and a new revelation to John Brown. For the first time he came into contact with the great Abolition movement. He found that money was forthcoming. Here were men willing to pay if others would work. It was the call of God and he answered: “Here am I.”

Redpath says: “When in session John Brown appeared in that convention and made a very fiery speech, during which he said he had four sons in Kansas, and had three others who were desirous of going there, to aid in fighting the battles of freedom. He could not consent to go unless he could go armed, and he would like to arm all his sons; but his poverty prevented him from doing so. Funds were contributed on the spot; principally by Gerrit Smith.”[^[88]]

He writes joyfully home:

“Dear wife and children,—I reached here on the first day of the convention, and I have reason to bless God that I came; for I have met with a most warm reception from all, so far as I know, and except by a few sincere, honest, peace friends, a most hearty approval of my intention of arming my sons and other friends in Kansas. I received to-day donations amounting to a little over sixty dollars,—twenty from Gerrit Smith, five from an old British officer; others giving smaller sums with such earnest and affectionate expression of their good wishes as did me more good than money even. John’s two letters were introduced, and read with such effect by Gerrit Smith as to draw tears from numerous eyes in the great collection of people present. The convention has been one of the most interesting meetings I ever attended in my life; and I made a great addition to the number of warm-hearted and honest friends.”[^[89]]

The die was cast and John Brown left for Kansas. Instead of sending the money and arms, says his son John, “he came on with them himself, accompanied by his brother-in-law, Henry Thompson, and my brother Oliver. In Iowa he bought a horse and covered wagon; concealing the arms in this and conspicuously displaying his surveying implements, he crossed into Missouri near Waverly, and at that place disinterred the body of his grandson, and brought all safely through to our settlement, arriving there about the 6th of October, 1855.”[^[90]]

His daughter says: “On leaving us finally to go to Kansas that summer, he said, ‘If it is so painful for us to part with the hope of meeting again, how dreadful must be the feelings of hundreds of poor slaves who are separated for life.’”[^[91]]

So John Brown reached Kansas to strike the blow for freedom. Not that he was the central figure of Kansas territorial history so far as casual eyes could see, or the acknowledged leader of men and measures; rather he seemed and was but a humble coworker, appearing and disappearing here and there,—now startling men with the grim decision of his actions, now lost and hidden from public view. But it is not always the apparent leaders who do the world’s work. More often those who sit in high places, whom men see and hear, do but represent or mask public opinion and the social conscience, while down in the blood and dust of battle stoop those who delivered the master-stroke—the makers of the thoughts of men. So in Kansas Robinson, Lane, Atchison and Geary were the conspicuous public leaders: Robinson, the canny Yankee, whose astute reading of the signs of the times proved in the end wise and correct but left him always the opportunist and politician; Lane, whose impetuous daring and rough devotion led thousands of immigrants out of the North and drove hundreds of slaveholders back to Missouri; Atchison, who led the determination and ruffianism of the South; and Geary, who voiced the saner nation. And yet one cannot read Kansas history without feeling that the man who in all this bewildering broil was least the puppet of circumstances—the man who most clearly saw the real crux of the conflict, most definitely knew his own convictions and was readiest at the crisis for decisive action, was a man whose leadership lay not in his office, wealth or influence, but in the white flame of his utter devotion to an ideal.

To comprehend this, one must pick from the confused tangle of Kansas territorial history the main thread of its unraveling and then show how Brown’s life twined with it. And this is no easy task. Some time before or after 1850 Southern leaders had tacitly fixed the westward extension of the Compromise line of 1820 at the northern line of Missouri. When, then, the bill for organizing this western territory appeared innocently in Congress, it was hustled back to committee, and appeared finally as the celebrated Kansas-Nebraska Bill which formed two territories, Kansas and Nebraska. It was the secret understanding of the promoters of the bill that Kansas would become slave territory and Nebraska free, and this tacit compact was expressed in the formula that the people of each territory should have the right “to form and regulate their domestic institutions in their own way, subject only to the Constitution of the United States.” But the game was so easy, and the price so cheap that the Southern leaders and their office-hunting Northern tools were not satisfied, even with the gain of territory, and so juggled the bill as virtually to leave all territory open to slavery even against the will of its people, while eventually they fortified their daring by a Supreme Court decision.

The North, on the other hand, angry enough at even the necessity of disputing slavery north of the long established line, nevertheless began in good faith to prepare to vote slavery out of Kansas by pouring in free settlers.

Thereupon ensued one of the strangest duels of modern times—a political battle between two economic systems: On the one side were all the machinery of government, close proximity to the battle-field and a deep-seated social ideal which did not propose to abide by the rules of the game; on the other hand were strong moral conviction, pressing economic necessity and capacity for organization. It took four years to fight the battle—from the middle of 1854, when the Kansas-Nebraska Bill was passed and the Indians were hustled out of their rights, until 1858, when the pro-slavery constitution was definitely buried under free state votes.

In the beginning, the fall of 1854, the fatal misunderstanding of the two sections was clear: The New England Emigrant Aid Society assumed that the contest was simply a matter of votes, and that if they hurried settlers to Kansas from the North a majority for freedom was reasonably certain. Missouri and the South, on the other hand, assumed that Kansas was already of right a slave state and resented as an impertinence the attempt to make it free by any means. Thus at Lawrence, on August 1st, the bewildered and unarmed Northern settlers and their immediate successors, such as John Brown’s sons, were literally pounced upon by the furious Missourians, who crossed the border like an invading army. “To those who have qualms of conscience as to violating laws, state or national, the time has come when such impositions must be disregarded, as your rights and property are in danger,” cried Stringfellow of Missouri. Thereupon 5,000 Missourians proceeded to elect a pro-slavery legislature and Congressional delegate; and led by what Sumner called “hirelings, picked from the drunken spew and vomit of an uneasy civilization,” flourished their pistols and bowie-knives, driving some of the free state immigrants back home and the rest into apprehensive inaction and silence.

Snatching thus the whip-hand, with pro-slavery governor, judges, marshal and legislature, they then proceeded in 1855 to deliver blow upon blow to the free state cause until it seemed inevitable that Kansas should become a slave state, with a code of laws which made even an assertion against the right of slaveholding a felony punishable with imprisonment.

The free state settlers hesitatingly began to take serious counsel. They found themselves in three parties: a few who hated slavery, more who hated Negroes, and many who hated slaves. Easily the political finesse, afterward unsuccessfully attempted, might now have pitted the parties against one another in such irreconcilable difference as would slip even slavery through. But unblushing force and fraud united them to an appeal for justice at Big Springs in the fall of 1855—where John Brown’s sons were present and active—and a declaration of passive, with a threat of active, resistance to the “bogus” legislature. A peace program was laid down: they would ignore the patent fraud, organize a state and appeal to Congress and the nation. This they did in October and November, 1855, making Topeka their nominal and Lawrence their real capital.