John Brown · W. E. B. Du Bois
“Is not this the fast that I have chosen? To loose the bands of wickedness, to undo the heavy burdens, and to let the oppressed go free, and that ye break every yoke?”
“Sir, the angel of the Lord will camp round about me,” said John Brown with stern eyes when the timid foretold his doom.[137] With a steadfast almost superstitious faith in his divine mission, the old man had walked unscathed out of Kansas in the fall of 1856, two years and a half before the slave raid into Missouri related in the last chapter. In his mind lay a definitely matured plan for attacking slavery in the United States in such a way as would shake its very foundations. The plan had been long forming, and changing in shape from 1828, when he proposed a Negro school in Hudson, until 1859 when he finally fixed on Harper’s Ferry. At first he thought to educate Negroes in the North and let them leaven the lump of slaves. Then, moving forward a step, he determined to settle in a border state and educate slaves openly or clandestinely and send them out as emissaries. As gradually he became acquainted with the great work and wide ramifications of the Underground Railroad, he conceived the idea of central depots for running off slaves in the inaccessible portions of the South, and he began studying Southern geography with this in view. He noted the rivers, swamps and mountains, and more especially, the great struggling heights of the Alleghanies, which swept from his Pennsylvania home down to the swamps of Virginia, Carolina and Georgia. His Kansas experiences suggested for a time the southwest pathway to Louisiana by the swamps of the Red and Arkansas Rivers, but this was but a passing thought; he soon reverted to the great spur of the Alleghanies.
“I never shall forget,” writes Thomas Wentworth Higginson, “the quiet way in which he once told me that ‘God had established the Alleghany Mountains from the foundation of the world that they might one day be a refuge for fugitive slaves.’ I did not know then that his own home was among the Adirondacks.”[138]
More and more, as he thought and worked, did his great plan present itself to him clearly and definitely until finally it stood in 1858 as Kagi told it to Hinton:
“The mountains of Virginia were named as the place of refuge, and as a country admirably adapted in which to carry on guerrilla warfare. In the course of the conversation, Harper’s Ferry was mentioned as a point to be seized, but not held,--on account of the arsenal. The white members of the company were to act as officers of different guerrilla bands, which, under the general command of John Brown, were to be composed of Canadian refugees, and the Virginia slaves who would join them. A different time of the year was mentioned for the commencement of the warfare from that which had lately been chosen. It was not anticipated that the first movement would have any other appearance to the masters than a slave stampede, or local insurrection, at most. The planters would pursue their chattels and be defeated. The militia would then be called out, and would also be defeated. It was not intended that the movement should appear to be of large dimension, but that, gradually increasing in magnitude, it should, as it opened, strike terror into the heart of the slave states by the amount of the organization it would exhibit, and the strength it gathered. They anticipated, after the first blow had been struck, that, by the aid of the free and Canadian Negroes who would join them, they could inspire confidence in the slaves, and induce them to rally. No intention was expressed of gathering a large body of slaves, and removing them to Canada. On the contrary, Kagi clearly stated, in answer to my inquiries, that the design was to make the fight in the mountains of Virginia, extending it to North Carolina, and Tennessee, and also to the swamps of South Carolina if possible. Their purpose was not the extradition of one or a thousand slaves, but their liberation in the states wherein they were born, and were now held in bondage. ‘The mountains and swamps of the South were intended by the Almighty,’ said John Brown to me afterward, ‘for a refuge for the slave, and a defense against the oppressor.’ Kagi spoke of having marked out a chain of counties extending continuously through South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, and Mississippi. He had traveled over a large portion of the region indicated, and from his own personal knowledge, and with the assistance of Canadian Negroes who had escaped from those states, they had arranged a general plan of attack.
“The counties he named were those which contained the largest proportion of slaves, and would, therefore, be the best in which to strike. The blow struck at Harper’s Ferry was to be in the spring, when the planters were busy, and the slaves most needed. The arms in the arsenal were to be taken to the mountains, with such slaves that joined. The telegraph wires were to be cut, and the railroad tracks torn up in all directions. As fast as possible other bands besides the original ones were to be formed, and a continuous chain of posts established in the mountains. They were to be supported by provisions taken from the farms of the oppressors. They expected to be speedily and constantly reënforced; first, by the arrival of those men, who, in Canada, were anxiously looking and praying for the time of deliverance, and then by the slaves themselves. The intention was to hold the egress to the free states as long as possible, in order to retreat when that was advisable. Kagi, however, expected to retreat southward, not in the contrary direction. The slaves were to be armed with pikes, scythes, muskets, shotguns, and other simple instruments of defense; the officers, white or black, and such of the men as were skilled and trustworthy, to have the use of the Sharps rifles and revolvers. They anticipated procuring provisions enough for subsistence by forage, as also arms, horses, and ammunition. Kagi said one of the reasons that induced him to go into the enterprise was a full conviction that at no very distant day forcible efforts for freedom would break out among the slaves, and that slavery might be more speedily abolished by such efforts, than by any other means. He knew by observation in the South, that in no point was the system so vulnerable as in its fear of slave-rising. Believing that such a blow would soon be struck, he wanted to organize it so as to make it more effectual, and also, by directing and controlling the Negroes, to prevent some of the atrocities that would necessarily arise from the sudden upheaval of such a mass as the Southern slaves.”[139]
The knowledge of the country was obtained by personal inspection. Kagi and others of Brown’s lieutenants went out on trips; the old man himself had been in western, northern and southern Virginia, and his Negro friends especially knew these places and routes. One of Brown’s men writes:
“My object in wishing to see Mr. Reynolds, who was a colored man (very little colored, however), was in regard to a military organization which, I had understood, was in existence among the colored people. He assured me that such was the fact, and that its ramifications extended through most, or nearly all, of the slave states. He, himself, I think, had been through many of the slave states visiting and organizing. He referred me to many references in the Southern papers, telling of this and that favorite slave being killed or found dead. These, he asserted, must be taken care of, being the most dangerous element they had to contend with. He also asserted that they were only waiting for Brown, or some one else to make a successful initiative move when their forces would be put in motion. None but colored persons could be admitted to membership, and, in part to corroborate his assertions, he took me to the room in which they held their meetings and used as their arsenal. He showed me a fine collection of arms. He gave me this under the pledge of secrecy which we gave to each other at the Chatham Convention.
“On my return to Cleveland he passed me through the organization, first to J. J. Pierce, colored, at Milan, who paid my bill over night at the Eagle Hotel, and gave me some money, and a note to E. Moore, at Norwalk, who in turn paid my hotel bill and purchased a railroad ticket through to Cleveland for me.”[140]
Speaking of this league, Hinton also says:
“As one may naturally understand, looking at conditions then existing, there existed something of an organization to assist fugitives and for resistance to their masters. It was found all along the borders from Syracuse, New York, to Detroit, Michigan. As none but colored men were admitted into direct and active membership with this ‘League of Freedom,’ it is quite difficult to trace its workings or know how far its ramifications extended. One of the most interesting phases of slave life, so far as the whites were enabled to see or impinge upon it, was the extent and rapidity of communication among them. Four geographical lines seem to have been chiefly followed. One was that of the coast south of the Potomac, whose almost continuous line of swamps from the vicinity of Norfolk, Va., to the northern border of Florida afforded a refuge for many who could not escape and became ‘marooned’ in their depths, while giving facility to the more enduring to work their way out to the North Star Land. The great Appalachian range and its abutting mountains were long a rugged, lonely, but comparatively safe route to freedom. It was used, too, for many years. Doubtless a knowledge of that fact, for John Brown was always an active Underground Railroad man, had very much to do, apart from its immediate use strategically considered, with the captain’s decision to begin operations therein. Harriet Tubman, whom John Brown met for the first time at St. Catherines in March or April, 1858, was a constant user of the Appalachian route.”[141]
The trained leadership John Brown found in his Kansas experience, and his wide acquaintance with colored men; the organization of the Negroes culminated in a convention at Chatham, Canada. The raising of money for this work, as time went on, was more and more the object of his various occupations and commercial ventures. These visions of personal wealth to be expended for great deeds failed because the pressure of work for the ideal overcame the pressure of work for funds to finance it. When once he discovered at Syracuse men of means, ready to pay the expenses of men of deeds, he dropped all further thought of his physical necessities, gave himself to the cause and called on them for money. In his earlier calls he regards this not as charity but as wages. He said once: “From about the 20th of May of last year hundreds of men like ourselves lost their whole time, and entirely failed of securing any kind of crop whatever. I believe it safe to say that five hundred free state men lost each one hundred and twenty-five days, at $1.50 per day, which would be, to say nothing of attendant losses, $90,000. I saw the ruins of many free state men’s houses at different places in the Territory, together with stacks of grain wasted and burning, to the amount of, say $50,000; making, in lost time and destruction of property, more than $150,000.”[142]
And again: “John Brown has devoted the service of himself and two minor sons to the free state cause for more than a year; suffered by the fire before named and by robbery; has gone at his own cost for that period, except that he and his company together have received forty dollars in cash, two sacks of flour, thirty-five pounds bacon, thirty-five pounds sugar, and twenty pounds rice.
“I propose to serve hereafter in the free state cause (provided my needful expenses can be met), should that be desired; and to raise a small regular force to serve on the same condition. My own means are so far exhausted that I can no longer continue in the service at present without the means of defraying my expenses are furnished me.”[143]
Finally, however, he had to appeal more directly to philanthropy. He was especially encouraged by the Kansas committees. These committees had sprung up in various ways and places in 1854, but had nearly all united in Thayer’s New England Emigrant Aid Company in 1855. This company proposed to aid free state emigration as an investment, but it failed in this respect because of the political troubles, and the panic of 1857. It did, however, arouse great interest throughout the nation. The National Kansas Committee, formed after the sacking of Lawrence, was more belligerent than philanthropic in its projects, while the Boston Relief Committee was distinctly radical. John Brown had some connection with Thayer’s company, but his hopes were especially built on the National Kansas Committee, which Lane had done so much to bring into being, and to which Gerrit Smith contributed many thousands of dollars.
Leaving Kansas secretly in October, 1856, John Brown hastened to the Chicago headquarters of this National Kansas Committee with a proposal that they equip a company for him. The Chicago committee referred this proposal to a full meeting of the members to be held in New York in January. John Brown immediately started East, clad in new clothes which the committee furnished and armed with letters from the governors of Kansas and Ohio. Gerrit Smith welcomed him and said: “Captain John Brown,--you did not need to show me letters from Governor Chase and Governor Robinson to let me know who and what you are. I have known you for many years, and have highly esteemed you as long as I have known you. I know your unshrinking bravery, your self-sacrificing benevolence, your devotion to the cause of freedom, and have long known them. May Heaven preserve your life and health, and prosper your noble purpose!”[144]
But his half-brother in Ohio wrote:
“Since the trouble growing out of the settlement of the Kansas Territory, I have observed a marked change in brother John. Previous to this, he devoted himself entirely to business; but since these troubles he has abandoned all business, and has become wholly absorbed by the subject of slavery. He had property left him by his father, and of which I had the agency. He has never taken a dollar of it for the benefit of his family, but has called for a portion of it to be expended in what he called the Service. After his return to Kansas he called on me, and I urged him to go home to his family and attend to his private affairs; that I feared his course would prove his destruction and that of his boys.... He replied that he was sorry that I did not sympathize with him; that he knew that he was in the line of his duty, and he must pursue it, though it should destroy him and his family. He stated to me that he was satisfied that he was a chosen instrument in the hands of God to war against slavery. From his manner and from his conversation at this time, I had no doubt he had become insane upon the subject of slavery, and gave him to understand that this was my opinion of him!”[145]
Mrs. George L. Stearns, the wife of the Massachusetts anti-slavery leader, writes:
“At this juncture, Mr. Stearns wrote to John Brown, that if he would come to Boston and consult with the friends of freedom, he would pay his expenses. They had never met, but ‘Osawatomie Brown’ had become a cherished household name during the anxious summer of 1856. Arriving in Boston they were introduced to each other in the street by a Kansas man, who chanced to be with Mr. Stearns on his way to the committee rooms in Nilis’s Block, School Street. Captain Brown made a profound impression on all who came within the sphere of his moral magnetism. Emerson called him ‘the most ideal of men, for he wanted to put all his ideas into action.’ His absolute superiority to all selfish aims and narrowing pride of opinion touched an answering chord in the self-devotion of Mr. Stearns. A little anecdote illustrates the modest estimate of the work he had in hand. After several efforts to bring together certain friends to meet Captain Brown at his home, in Medford, he found that Sunday was the only day that would serve their several conveniences, and being a little uncertain how it might strike his ideas of religious propriety, he prefaced his invitation with something like an apology. With characteristic promptness came the reply: ‘Mr. Stearns, I have a little ewe-lamb that I want to pull out of the ditch, and the Sabbath will be as good a day as any to do it.’
“It may not be out of place to describe the impression he made upon the writer on this first visit. When I entered the parlor, he was sitting near the hearth, where glowed a bright, open fire. He rose to greet me, stepping forward with such an erect, military bearing, such fine courtesy of demeanor and grave earnestness, that he seemed to my instant thought some old Cromwellian hero suddenly dropped down before me; a suggestion which was presently strengthened by his saying (proceeding with the conversation my entrance had interrupted), ‘Gentlemen, I consider the Golden Rule and the Declaration of Independence one and inseparable; and it is better that a whole generation of men, women, children should be swept away than that this crime of slavery should exist one day longer.’ These words were uttered like rifle balls; in such emphatic tones and manner that our little Carl, not three years old, remembered it in manhood as one of his earliest recollections. The child stood perfectly still, in the middle of the room, gazing with his beautiful eyes on this new sort of a man, until his absorption arrested the attention of Captain Brown, who soon coaxed him to his knee, though the look and childlike wonder remained. His dress was of some dark brown stuff, quite coarse, but its exactness and neatness produced a singular air of refinement. At dinner, he declined all dainties, saying that he was unaccustomed to luxuries, even to partaking of butter.
“The ‘friends of freedom,’ with whom Mr. Stearns had invited John Brown to consult, were profoundly impressed with his sagacity, integrity, and devotion; notably among these were R. W. Emerson, Theodore Parker, H. D. Thoreau, A. Bronson Alcott, F. B. Sanborn, Dr. S. G. Howe, Col. T. W. Higginson, Governor Andrew, and others.”[146]
Sanborn says:
“He came to me with a note of introduction from George Walker of Springfield--both of us being Kansas committee men, working to maintain the freedom of that Territory, and Brown had been one of the fighting men there in the summer of 1856, just before. His theory required fighting in Kansas; it was the only sure way, he thought, to keep that region free from the curse of slavery. His mission now was to levy war on it, and for that to raise and equip a company of a hundred well-armed men who should resist aggression in Kansas, or occasionally carry the war into Missouri. Behind that purpose, but not yet disclosed, was his intention to use the men thus put into the field for incursions into Virginia or other slave states. Our State Kansas Committee, of which I was secretary, had a stock of arms that Brown wished to use for this company, and these we voted to him. They had been put in the custody of the National Committee at Chicago, and it was needful to follow up our vote by similar action in the National Committee. For this purpose I was sent to a meeting of that committee at the Astor House, in New York, as the proxy of Dr. Howe and Dr. Samuel Cabot--both members of the National Committee. I met Brown there, and aided him in obtaining from the meeting an appropriation of $5,000 for his work in Kansas, of which, however, he received only $500. The committee also voted to restore the custody of two hundred rifles to the Massachusetts committee which bought them, well knowing that we should turn them over to John Brown, as we did. He found them at Tabor, Ia., in the following September, and took possession; it was with part of these rifles that he entered Virginia two years later.
“At this Astor House meeting Brown was closely questioned by some of the National Committee, particularly by Mr. Hurd of Chicago, as to what he would do with money and arms. He refused to pledge himself to use them solely in Kansas, and declared that his past record ought to be a sufficient guarantee that he should employ them judiciously. If we chose to trust him, well and good, but he would neither make pledges nor disclose his plans. Mr. Hurd had some inkling that Brown would not confine his warfare to Kansas, but the rest of us were willing to trust Brown, and the money was voted.”[147]
John Brown immediately made a careful estimate of the cost of the necessary equipment which with “two weeks of provisions for men and horses” amounted to $1,774. The funds of the committee, however, were low and the officers suspicious; in April they informed Brown: “The committee are at present out of money, and compelled to decline sending you the five hundred dollars you speak of. They are sorry this has become the case, but it was unavoidable. I need not state to you all the reasons why. The country has stopped sending us contributions, and we have no means of replenishing our treasury. We shall need to have aid from some quarter to enable us to meet our present engagements.”[148]
Immediately Brown set out to raise his own funds and for three months worked fervently. Just before the Dred Scott Decision he spoke to the Massachusetts legislature from which his friends hoped to secure an appropriation for Kansas. This failed, and Brown started on a tour in New England. He spoke at his old home and made a contract for securing one thousand pikes near there. He showed a Kansas bowie-knife and said: “Such a blade as this, mounted upon a strong shaft, or handle, would make a cheap and effective weapon. Our friends in Kansas are without arms or money to get them; and if I could put such weapons into their hands, they could make them very useful. A resolute woman, with such a pike, could defend her cabin door against man or beast.”[149]
In Hartford he spoke and said:
“I am trying to raise from twenty to twenty-five thousand dollars in the free states to enable me to continue my efforts in the cause of freedom. Will the people of Connecticut, my native state, afford me some aid in this undertaking? Will the gentlemen and ladies of Hartford, where I make my appeal in this state, set the example of an earnest effort? Will some gentleman or lady take hold and try what can be done by small contributions from counties, cities, towns, societies, or churches, or in some other way? I think the little beggar children in the street are sufficiently interested to warrant their contributing, if there was any need of it, to secure the object.
“I was told that the newspapers in a certain city were dressed in mourning on hearing that I was killed and scalped in Kansas, but I did not know of it until I reached the place. Much good it did me. In the same place I met a more cool reception than in any other place where I have stopped. If my friends will hold up my hands while I live, I will freely absolve them from any expense over me when I am dead. I do not ask for pay, but shall be most grateful for all the assistance I can get.”[150]
On the day that Buchanan was inaugurated and two days before the Dred Scott Decision, he published a similar appeal in the New York Tribune “with no little sacrifice of personal feeling.” Once he writes: “I am advised that one of Uncle Sam’s hounds is on my track, and I have kept myself hid for a few days to let my track get cold. I have no idea of being taken, and intend (if God will) to go back with irons in, rather than upon, my hands.”[151]
Dr. Wayland met him in Worcester where a Frederick Douglass meeting was being arranged just after Taney’s decision and says: “I called at the house of Eli Thayer, afterward member of Congress from that district, to ask him to sit on the platform. Here I found a stranger, a man of tall, gaunt form, with a face smooth-shaven, destitute of full beard, that later became a part of history. The children were climbing over his knees; he said, ‘The children always come to me.’ I was then introduced to John Brown of Osawatomie. How little one imagined then that in less than three years the name of this plain homespun man would fill America and Europe! Mr. Brown consented to occupy a place on the platform, and at the urgent request of the audience, spoke briefly. It is one of the curious facts, that many men who do it are utterly unable to tell about it. John Brown, a flame of fire in action, was dull in speech.”[152]
Later in the same month Brown accompanied Sanborn and Conway to ex-Governor Reeder’s home in Pennsylvania to induce him to return to Kansas, but he declined. April 1st found Brown back in Massachusetts, where for a week or more he was again in hiding from United States officers, probably among his Negro friends in Springfield. It was in April, too, that he took another step in his plan, namely, toward securing military training for his band. He stated according to Realf that, “for twenty or thirty years the idea had possessed him like a passion of giving liberty to the slaves; that he made a journey to England, during which he made a tour upon the European continent, inspecting all fortifications, and especially all earthwork forts which he could find, with a view of applying the knowledge thus gained, with modifications and inventions of his own, to a mountain warfare in the United States. He stated that he had read all the books upon insurrectionary warfare, that he could lay his hands on: the Roman warfare, the successful opposition of the Spanish chieftains during the period when Spain was a Roman province,--how, with ten thousand men, divided and subdivided into small companies, acting simultaneously, yet separately, they withstood the whole consolidated power of the Roman Empire through a number of years. In addition to this he had become very familiar with the successful warfare waged by Schamyl, the Circassian chief, against the Russians; he had posted himself in relation to the wars of Toussaint L’Ouverture; he had become thoroughly acquainted with the wars in Hayti and the islands round about.”[153]
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End of part 12 of 19
Continue readingChapter 8: The Great Plan (Part 2)
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