John Brown

Front matter

THE BEACON BIOGRAPHIES Edited by M. A. DeWOLFE HOWEJOHN BROWN BY Joseph Edgar Chamberlin

byJoseph Edgar ChamberlinBOSTON SMALL, MAYNARD & COMPANY MDCCCXCIX

Copyright, 1899 By Small, Maynard & Company (Incorporated)Entered at Stationers' HallPress of George H. Ellis, Boston

Preface

To present a picture of the man, separating him as much as possible from the controversies and hatreds which commonly rise up at the mention of his name, and to tell the story of his life plainly, without inquiry into the effect of his work, or any further estimate and comparison, would be quite enough to attempt in a biography of John Brown of Osawatomie as brief as this one must be. Brown's sacrifice has been classed sometimes with that of Jesus of Nazareth; he has often been called murderer, brigand, and traitor. He has been written about much and well, and for the most part fiercely. It would seem that the time has come for a calmer account of him, given with no heat or bitterness. Both sides of the controversy with which he concerned himself so actively should have learned much in forty years.

Yet the story of Brown is so strongly simple, so utterly governed by an ideal, so glowing and tragical, that any one who follows it closely is likely to find himself kindling before he is aware of it.

JOSEPH EDGAR CHAMBERLIN.

Boston, October 15, 1899.

Chronology

1800

May 9. John Brown was born at Torrington, Connecticut.

1805

His family removed to Ohio.

1816

Joined the Congregational church at Hudson, Ohio.

1821

June 21. Married Dianthe Lusk.

1825

Appointed postmaster at Randolph, Pennsylvania.

1832

August 10. His first wife died.

1833

July 11. Married Mary Anne Day.

1835

Returned to Ohio.

1837

Swore his family to active opposition to slavery.

1840

Made a trip to western Virginia to survey lands for Oberlin College.

1846

Removed to Springfield, Massachusetts, as selling agent of the Western wool-growers.

1847

Unfolded to Frederick Douglass a plan for a negro insurrection in the Virginia mountains.

1849

Went to England to sell wool, and visited the Continent.

Became associated with Gerrit Smith's plan to colonize negroes on Adirondack lands, and removed his family to a farm at North Elba, on these lands.

1850

Thanksgiving Day. Addressed a meeting of negroes at Springfield, and wrote to his wife concerning it, suggesting a militant intention regarding slavery.

1859

January–March. Conducted a small party of liberated Missouri slaves through the Northwestern States to Canada.

July 3. Appeared at Harper's Ferry. Hired a farm near there. Assembled men and munitions.

October 16. Attacked and captured Harper's Ferry with his band.

October 17. Was attacked by United States forces, wounded, and made prisoner.

October 26. Placed on trial at Charlestown.

November 2. Found guilty.

December 2. John Brown died on the gallows.

Chapter 1

John Brown was born at Torrington, Connecticut on the ninth day of May, 1800, in a poor wooden house among the round Appalachian hills which the man loved, in a peculiar way, to the day of his death. His father, a tanner and shoemaker, had lived in that house and township but a year when John Brown was born; but in the country within the little circle made by Windsor, Canton, Norfolk, Litchfield, and Torrington, the father and all the folk had been born and bred, and their fathers before them. It was all a part of the same land of round hills and winding valleys, inhabited by the same hard-working and fiercely thinking people.

Mr. W. E. Forster sums up well enough the story of Brown's ancestry when he says that he "was of the best blood in America." Some careful gene- alogists have thrown a little doubt upon his descent, as assumed by himself and by everybody else who has written about him, from Peter Brown, the carpenter, who came over in the Mayflower. I see no good reason to doubt this descent; but it makes little difference whether his blood came down from this man or not. He was at least descended, like nearly all the people in his part of Connecticut, from the remarkable colony who settled Windsor, Connecticut, and who were in every way quite equal to the Mayflower group. They were an intensely pious and devoted band, carefully chosen, man by man and woman by woman, "especially that their efforts might bring the Indians to the knowledge of the gospel." Apostles every one of them, on their way over in the ship Mary and John they "had preaching and expounding the word of God every day for ten weeks together." They went on foot through the pathless forest from Dorchester, Massachusetts, to Windsor. They were five weeks on the way, and winter closed in on them before their stuff and provisions could come up the Connecticut by boats; and then they starved and shivered and prayed and preached. Their sufferings are a part of the story of John Brown. These early apostles and martyrs were compressed into him.

His grandfather was Captain John Brown of the Revolutionary army, who died in the service in 1775. This grandfather's wife, Hannah Owen, was of Welsh descent. Our John Brown's father was Owen Brown, born in Canton, Connecticut, in 1771. His mother was Ruth Mills, of Dutch descent; but these mothers, as well as the fathers, were bred in the Yankee hills, and their blood was well mixed with that of the Puritan Yankees. John Brown, even with his dash of Dutch and Welsh blood, was a Yankee of the Yankees.

Brown's mother, Ruth Mills, was a godly, sane woman, without a story. His father, Owen Brown, emigrated in 1805 to Ohio, and there became a trustee of Oberlin College. Hudson, the place where he settled, in the Western Reserve, was then in the midst of a wild country. There young John Brown went to school to herdsmen and Indians, learning of the herdsmen such mastery of their trade that he drove great herds of cattle long distances alone at an early age, and of the Indians the arts of shooting and riding and dressing skins. He did not learn here to hate the Indians, as other frontiersmen did, but learned instead to love them; and years afterward on the frontiers of Kansas they paid back his love with kind services. In his little Autobiography, sent in 1857 to young Harry Stearns of Medford, and written throughout in the third person, there is a note which shows that sensibility was born in him: "When John was in his Sixth year, a poor Indian boy gave him a Yellow Marble, the first he had ever seen. This he thought a great deal of, and kept it a good while; but at last he lost it beyond recovery. It took years to heal the wound, and I think he cried at times about it."

He had a rough time in this "University of the West," as Thoreau called his early life. He was dressed in buckskin and fars, and spent long days in the woods, with only cattle or sheep for his companions. He tells us that he was for a time "quite skeptical," but the Bible triumphed over all the other books that he was able to read; and he tells, too, of having the "free use of a good library." He "joined the church" (Orthodox Congregational) at Hudson, Ohio, in 1816, and never wavered in his Puritan belief. He was, he tells us, "naturally fond of females" as a boy, yet "diffident in their company." We have evidence that in his mature life women were always strongly drawn to him, but in no sentimental way. His life was unmarked by the faintest suggestion of an irregular attachment.

He had next to no schooling. He went at the age of about sixteen to his birthplace in Connecticut, and it was then proposed to educate him for the ministry. He attended for a time the school of the Rev. Moses Hallock at Plainfield, Massachusetts, a school famous for turning out preachers and missionaries, and studied also at the Morris Academy in Connecticut. But his training here was soon cut short by inflammation of the eyes, and he went back to Ohio and the tannery. With this schooling, and, no doubt, with much reading of old books and the Bible, he picked up an admirable epistolary style, clean cut and expressive, often eloquent, showing thought about words and fine discrimination in the use of them. His spelling was somewhat er- ratic, but, barring a too free use of capitals and peculiar punctuation, he could have written a sermon or leading article that would pass muster exceedingly well at the present day. He learned the tanner's and currier's trades, and was foreman in his father's tannery. He picked up, too, the surveyor's art, and became proficient in this, so that his surveys have stood the test of later scrutiny. But the real love of his heart was for the calling of the shepherd. Early in his life, he says, he had an "enthusiastic longing" for it; and in his later life he returned to it as often as he could. His casual memoranda indicated that he thought more about sheep than he did about anything else. Joined with this love was the kindred passion, which never left him, for fine cattle and horses.

John Brown's mother died when he was eight years old. His father soon remarried, but John always mourned his own mother. He matured early, and as a young man was described as of remarkably fine and noble appearance. As his father had done before him, he married young, at the age of twenty; and he is said to have had previously one disappointment in love. His wife, Dianthe Lusk, lived to the age of thirty, having, in eleven years, borne him seven children. She is said to have died in a demented state; and one or two of the children of this marriage apparently inherited from her a certain occasional mental weakness. Even in the early years of this marriage Brown followed Puritan and patriarchal ways,—conducting family worship, ruling his children firmly, instructing them at his knee, and singing hymns to them.

In 1825 Brown was made postmaster at Randolph, Pennsylvania, by President Jackson. He also established a tannery at that place, which he conducted evidently with some success. It was there that his first wife died, in 1832; and there that, a year afterward, he married Mary Anne Day, the faithful, devoted, wise and patient wife who survived him twenty-five years. She bore him thirteen children, seven of whom died very young.

The large surviving family of children of these two marriages, as well as other persons who knew him, have left abundant memories of his life and character. These represent him as headstrong, but humane and kind, possessing great tenderness and grave sweetness of manner, and exceedingly fond of his family. Though his children testify to his use of the rod on a few occasions, they affirm that he never applied it unjustly. He was fond of music and singing. Sanborn says that he "sang a good part," and tells of seeing him weeping at a performance of Schubert's "Serenade." He taught a singing-school for a time at North Elba. He is said to have been "rather dull in speech," though when he was much interested he spoke fluently enough, in a resonant and somewhat metallic voice. He distrusted utterly his powers as a public speaker, though late in life he made several very creditable addresses, and could engage in religious exhortation.

John Brown was a trifle less than six feet tall. He dressed neatly and plainly, in a somewhat rustic and sober rendering of the fashion of the time. The best description of his personal appearance is Bronson Alcott's, made when Brown was fifty-nine years old: "Nature obviously was deeply intent in the making of him. He is of imposing appearance, personally,—tall, with square shoulders and standing; eyes of deep gray, and couchant, as if ready to spring at the least rustling, dauntless yet kindly; his hair shooting backward from low down on his forehead; nose trenchant and Romanesque; set lips, his voice suppressed, yet metal- lic, suggesting deep reserves; decided mouth; the countenance and frame charged with power throughout. . . . I think him about the manliest man I have ever seen,—the type and synonym of the Just." Others described his eyes as "blue-gray," and Dana found him "dark-complexioned." Brown never wore the beard in which all the world now sees his face until his fifty-eighth year, when it helped him to a needed disguise in Kansas. One or two of his unbearded daguerreotypes make of him a grimmer, less intellectual Emerson. In the frontispiece of this book he is shown in the height of his wild period in Kansas, when fighting, exposure, and fever had rendered him somewhat haggard; but the picture brings us nearer to the soul of the man, it seems to me, than any other does.

Brown early began to shift about and show the wandering characteristics which afterward became so marked in him. In 1835 he went back to Ohio, took up the tanning business there, bought wool, raised fancy live-stock, including racehorses, speculated very indiscreetly in land, indorsed a note for a friend, failed disastrously, and in his bankruptcy attempted, in pursuance of a lawyer's advice, to hold a farm against which there was an attachment, and was arrested on a peace warrant and taken to Akron jail; but the key does not appear actually to have been turned on him. He had pledged for his own benefit some twenty-eight hundred dollars put in his hands by the New England Woollen Company for the purchase of wool; but this he made no secret of, and was not troubled on account of it by the company, which still trusted him. He was all the rest of his life—and more, for he left fifty dollars for the purpose in his will—in paying up this debt. His friends and business men in general went on trusting him with large amounts of money, which, in two or three cases, he found it hard to repay. In 1840 he went to Virginia—the portion of it on the Ohio River, now in West Virginia—to survey some lands belonging to Oberlin College, and fell completely in love with the country. From there he wrote to his family, "I have seen the spot where, if it be the will of Providence, I hope one day to live with my family." These Virginia hills exercised upon Brown a fascination which made it easier, no doubt, for him to associate with them his subsequent revolutionary schemes.

In 1844 he formed, with a substantial wool-grower and dealer, Simon Perkins, of Akron, Ohio, a partnership which continued for some years. Long after Brown's death, Perkins summed up his business qualifications thus: "He had little judgment, always followed his own will, and lost much money. I had no controversy with John Brown, for it would have done no good." Brown bought much wool, and had the care of the flocks of the firm. Perkins admits that he was an expert in grading wools. Indeed, as an instant and accurate classifier of fleeces, he seems to have won an almost national reputation in the trade.

In 1846 he was sent to live at Springfield, Massachusetts, as the agent of sheep farmers of northern Ohio, Pennsylvania, New York, and Virginia. He graded and sold their wool for them direct to the manufacturers of New England. He lived at Springfield, with certain absences, some five years, carrying on a considerable business, which he finally brought to disaster by refusing what seemed to him too small a price offered for a large consignment of wool from the Ohio growers, and taking the wool to England in order to get a larger. There he obtained, instead of a better figure, only half the price which had been offered him in New England. This bankrupted him again, and really ended his commercial career. The very same wool which he carried to England was bought to be shipped back to America, and was so shipped. It was one of the most picturesque failures of a bold stroke of business on record.

After this Brown removed with his family to North Elba, in the Adirondack mountains of northern New York, where he was interested in an experiment which Gerrit Smith, the rich abolitionist and philanthropist, was making in the settling of negroes on wild land.

North Elba continued to be the home of Brown's family until after his death, though he himself lived there very little. The wanderings of his apostolate, following his mercantile travels, had now begun. Thenceforth he farmed and shepherded here and there to supply his own and his family's immediate needs. There are indications, in his abounding correspondence, that he had sometimes dreamed, in the years before 1850, of making a fortune in business; but after that it is clear that he had quite another end in view.

Chapter 2

What made John Brown an abolitionist, and when and why did his abolitionism take its strenuous, militant, and peculiar form? The psychology of his apostleship is a strange and interesting study. He was never in the current of the anti-slavery movement. Though we shall see that he regarded himself, and that his family regarded him, as devoted in a special way to negro emancipation, there is no documentary evidence, no proof from the man's own letters or written memoranda or acts, that the movement "took hold of him" at all actively before his fiftieth year. That he was deeply sympathetic with the enslaved blacks all his life is perfectly incontestable, and that he felt himself especially devoted to the cause of their liberation as far back as 1837 we know on the testimony of his wife and children.

For that matter he was born an abolitionist. His father had been one before him. The motive-spring of John Brown's abolitionism was touched in the year 1790, when the Rev. Samuel Hopkins, of Rhode Island, a man whose opposition to negro slavery was practical and well known, and who was one of the earliest of the abolitionists, visited the Rev. Jeremiah Hallock at Canton, Connecticut. Young Owen Brown (John Brown's father), then nineteen years old, lived with Hallock, probably as a sort of privileged helper, and heard Hopkins talk against negro slavery, "denouncing it as a great sin." Hopkins was a man of native power. He made a life convert of young Owen Brown, who afterward taught his own children abolitionism at his knee. There had been a chance for the development in the boy John Brown of the bent which gave rise to the touching incident so vividly related in his own autobiograph- ical letter to young Harry Stearns, already referred to, written in 1857: "During the war with England [1812–1815] a circumstance occurred that in the end made him a most determined abolitionist, and led him to declare, or swear, eternal war with slavery. He was staying for a short time with a very gentlemanly landlord, since a United States marshal, who held a slave boy near his own age,—very active, intelligent and good feeling,—and to whom John was under obligations for numerous little acts of kindness. The master made a great pet of John,—brought him to table with his first company and Mends, called their attention to every little smart thing he said or did, and to the fact of his being more than a hundred miles from home with a company of cattle alone; while the negro boy (who was fully, if not more than his equal) was badly clothed, poorly fed and lodged in cold weather, and beaten before his eyes with iron shovels or anything that came first to hand. This brought John to reflect on the wretched, hopeless condition of fatherless and motherless slave children; for such children have neither fathers nor mothers to protect and provide for them. He sometimes would raise the question, Is God their father?"

John Brown, Jr., born in 1821, says that his own earliest recollection is of his father sheltering runaway slaves. While he was postmaster at Randolph, Pennsylvania, John Brown made his house a refuge for such runaways, and in a letter to his brother Frederick, in 1834, he unfolded a scheme for procuring the adoption in Northern families of "negro boys or youth," who were to be brought up as the children of these families were, and educated with them. "Christian slaveholders were to be prevailed upon, if possible, to release slave boys for this purpose." Failing such means, Brown said, "We have all agreed to submit to considerable privation to buy one." In this letter he wrote, "If the young blacks of our country could once become enlightened, it would most assuredly operate on slavery like firing powder confined in a rock." All this was very peaceful. Brown was evidently reflecting on Nat Turner's poor insurrection in 1831, and the numerous other attempts up to that time, all of which had failed for the want of adherence on the part of the blacks themselves to the movements stirred up in their behalf. Very evidently, he saw that the time had not yet come to attack slavery by force,—that the negroes themselves must be prepared for it.

After Brown returned to Ohio to live, he was a member of the Congregational church at Franklin. He had a respectable negro man and woman working for him. They sat at his table, and on Sunday he took the pair into his pew. The preacher and congregation angrily objected to this. Brown left the church on account of it; and though he was all his life a devout Calvinist, conducting family worship daily and sometimes "exhorting" in public, he never belonged to another church. This certainly shows that at this period there was no want of earnestness in his devotion to the blacks.

In 1837 there occurred the episode which first indicated Brown's intention to attack slavery vî et armis. His children have testified that in that year he assembled them one day at family prayer, swore them all to work with him for the emancipation of the slaves, and, kneeling on the floor, invoked the blessing of God on the undertaking. There is no reason to believe that either Brown or his children forgot this compact. He seems never to have reminded his sons of it, nor to have been under the necessity of doing so. His children were not relig- ious in the way he was religious. They were, for the most part, inclined to free thought; and their disinclination to make a profession of religion gave him great sorrow. He never, in his letters, ceased to implore them to do so. They did not in the least depend for the seconding of their devotion to him in this anti-slavery work upon the invocation of a kind of religious ceremony. They were quite ready to give up their lives at the inspiration of their own sense of duty and their strong personal loyalty and devotion to their father.

After this solemn pledge, Brown went on with his wool business and his farming, travelled almost incessantly between East and West, and set down in his little memorandum book many recipes for curing diseases of sheep, and some wise saws, but never a word applicable to the cause of the blacks. He sent home scores of letters, many of which have been preserved carefully; and in them there is much connected with his business and with the fanning and stock-raising operations at home, and much about religion and morality. But until a much later date there is nothing in them about the slaves. He went to Boston in 1838, but is not known to have visited any of the abolitionists, though from his Virginia prison, years afterward, he wrote: "I once set myself to oppose a mob in Boston where she [Lucretia Mott] was. The meeting was, I think, in Marlborough street Church." The Marlborough chapel was burned in May, 1838. His note-book contains seven Boston business addresses, and memoranda of business undertakings. There is no reason to suppose that he ever took or read the Liberator, and in all that he ever wrote I discover but a single reference to any one of the great abolitionist leaders of New England.

He had in him, in business matters, a bit of native Yankee craft. A letter of admonition to his son John when this young man went into the business of buying wool warns him against all the dishonest wiles of the sellers of wool, and coaches him in some of the careful tactics of the buyers.

I have mentioned his trip to Europe in 1849. While he was there, he did some highly unsuccessful wool business, as we have seen, wrote home to his son something about the live-stock, the mutton, the architecture and habits of the English, but had never a word to say about the English friends of the blacks and their work. He made a hasty trip to the Continent, and there, as he afterward told Mr. Sanborn, made some study of military matters, and visited some of Napoleon's battlefields. He "had followed the military career of Napoleon with great interest,"—that is evident from all his children's account of his reading,—and he even ventured to criticise Bonaparte in some points. Brown had acquired, undoubtedly deriving the idea in the first instance from the Bible story of Gideon's sifting of his five-and-twenty thousand men down to three hundred, a view greatly in favor of small and extremely mobile bodies of men. He had made as close study as his opportunities permitted of the art of intrenching such small bodies of men and fortifying their positions. But he certainly never had practical knowledge of any other form of warfare than the guerilla campaigning which he practised in Kansas.

Chapter 3

Frederick Douglass says that Brown unfolded to him in 1847 a plan for insurrectionary work among the negroes, with headquarters in the Virginia mountains. This is another indication, one of many, that he entertained the insurrectionary purpose. But his plans remained in abeyance. His later and active interest in the anti-slavery cause seems to have flashed up into a sudden flame about the year 1850. From that time forward his letters abound with references to the subject; his memorandum book contains entries associated with his work in that field, and the motive becomes clearly apparent in his acts. Did Brown's discovery of his own unfitness to be a man of business help him to see more clearly his way toward devoting the remainder of his life to the freeing of the blacks? Did he conceive an ambition to be a great liberator, and acquire world-wide fame as the Moses of a whole people? I suppose that an inquiry whether Brown was ever animated by a personal ambition for power or fame would be entirely fair, especially since, as ambitions go, a purpose to attain power or fame in this way would surely be a worthy one.

For that matter the question would seem to be easily answered. A man who is at once meditative, intense, and fond of reading as Brown was, and yet uneducated in the liberal sense, is made by his books. What books did Brown read! Dana found that he had many in his Adirondack cabin. His daughter has written: "My dear father's favorite books of a historical character were Rollin's Ancient History, Josephus, Plutarch's Lives, 'Napoleon and his Marshals,' and the Life of Oliver Cromwell. Of religious books, Baxter's 'Saint's Rest' (in speaking of which at one time he said he could not see how any person could read it through carefully without becoming a Christian), the 'Pilgrim's Progress,' and Henry 'On Meekness.' But above all others the Bible was his favorite volume, and he had such a perfect knowledge of it that when any one was reading it he would correct the least mistake." The daughter appends a list of his favorite passages in the Bible. Nearly all of them refer to the poor and to "them that are in bonds." He was fond of the Apocrypha, and doubtless had pleasure in the warlike deeds therein reported. His daughter records that one of his favorite hymns was "With songs and honors sounding loud," and another, "Blow ye the trumpet." But there is one point, one item of his Scriptural reading, which affords us a special insight. One of his companions at Harper's Ferry, John E. Cook, who had lived closely with him for a long time, has left the statement that "the Bible story of Gideon had a great influence on Brown." It is manifest that it had. If we read this fine story in the book of Judges in the light of Brown's long brooding over the Scriptures, and also in the light of his subsequent career and acts, noting as we go his organization of the League of Gileadites among the negroes, we find that we can understand Brown much better than we could without this knowledge. The story fired his intense spirit and prompted his actions again and again. He belonged to the epoch of Gideon rather than to the nineteenth century.

That he aspired to do for the blacks what Gideon did for the children of Israel does not prove that he was actuated by personal ambition. It indicates the stirring of a sentiment in him which was something like personal ambition; yet, if he really had a dream of earthly fame and greatness, he suppressed it, and acted as if he had no such dream. In a great measure he separated himself from men, and carried on his work alone. In spite of his magnificent moral strength and the fact that all the men who came close to him, after the anti-slavery movement fully fired him, at once recognized his power, he never had above twenty-two men attached to his cause and person! Here was the sifting process of Gideon carried farther than Gideon carried it. The thing which we ordinarily call ambition should, first of all, have sent him on his revolutionary way earlier; and after that it should have put into him at least something of the craft which wins crowds.