John Brown · W. E. B. Du Bois
Despite his own knowledge, however, he felt the need of expert advice, and meeting a former lieutenant of Garibaldi, one Hugh Forbes, he was captivated by him, and forthwith hired him to drill his men. Forbes was an excitable, ill-balanced Englishman, who had fought in Italy and at last landed penniless in New York. He thought Brown simply an agent of wealthy and powerful interests and that the whole North was ready to attack slavery. He proposed translating and publishing a manual of guerrilla warfare and John Brown gave him $600 for this work. He was then to join the leader and they would together go to the West and gather and drill a company. This large outlay left John Brown but little in his purse, for, after all, his efforts had been disappointing, and he departed from New England with a quaint half-sarcastic “Farewell to the Plymouth Rocks, Bunker Hill monuments, Charter Oaks and Uncle Tom’s Cabins.” He wrote:
“He has left for Kansas; has been trying since he came out of the Territory to secure an outfit, or, in other words, the means of arming and thoroughly equipping his regular minutemen, who are mixed up with the people of Kansas. And he leaves the states with the deepest sadness, that after exhausting his own small means, and with his family and with his brave men suffering hunger, cold, nakedness, and some of them sickness, wounds, imprisonment in irons with extreme cruel treatment, and others death; that, lying on the ground for months in the most sickly, unwholesome, and uncomfortable places, some of the time with the sick and wounded, destitute of shelter, hunted like wolves, and sustained in part by Indians; that after all this, in order to sustain a cause which every citizen of this ‘glorious Republic’ is under equal moral obligation to do, and for the neglect of which he will be held accountable by God,--a cause in which every man, woman, and child of the entire human family has a deep and awful interest,--that when no wages are asked or expected, he cannot secure, amid all wealth, luxury, and extravagance of this ‘heaven-exalted’ people, even the necessary supplies of the common soldier. ‘How are the mighty fallen!’
“I am destitute of horses, baggage wagons, tents, harness, saddles, bridles, holsters, spurs, and belts; camp equipage, such as cooking and eating utensils, blankets, knapsacks, intrenching tools, axes, shovels, spades, mattocks, crowbars; have not a supply of ammunition; have not money sufficient to pay freight and traveling expenses; and left my family poorly supplied with common necessaries.”[154]
Forbes also disappointed him by his delay, lingering in New York and not appearing in Iowa until August. Brown, who had been sick again, was nevertheless pushing matters among his Kansas friends. He wrote in June: “There are some half-dozen men I want a visit from at Tabor, Ia., to come off in the most quiet way; ... I have some very important matters to confer with some of you about. Let there be no words about it.”[155]
Arriving at Tabor early in August, Brown’s first business was to secure the arms voted him. Because of a previous failure to equip emigrants at points further east, the Massachusetts Kansas State Committee had sent 200 Sharps rifles to Tabor, Ia. Here they were stored in a minister’s barn until John Brown called for and removed them. Hugh Forbes finally arrived August 9th, bringing with him copies of his “Manual for the Patriotic Volunteer.” Brown wrote home that he and his son Owen were “beginning to take lessons and have, we think, a capable teacher.”
Differences, however, soon arose. Forbes wanted $100 per month in addition to the $600 previously paid, while Brown apparently considered that he had already advanced a half year’s wage. Then too matters were on a meaner scale than Forbes had dreamed; there was no money, few followers and little glory in sight. He felt himself duped; he despised Brown’s ability and proposed taking full command himself, projecting slave raids into Missouri and other states. Brown was obdurate, and early in November, the foreign tactician suddenly left for the East. This disturbed Brown’s plans. He had intended to establish two or three military schools, one in Iowa, one in northern Ohio and one in Canada. Forbes’s desertion made him determine to give up the Iowa school and hasten to Ohio. He therefore passed quickly to Kansas, arriving in the vicinity of Lawrence, November 5, 1857.
Cook says:
“I met him at the house of E. B. Whitman, about four miles from Lawrence, K. T., which, I think, was about the first of November following. I was told that he intended to organize a company for the purpose of putting a stop to the aggressions of the pro-slavery men. I agreed to join him and was asked if I knew of any other young men who were perfectly reliable whom I thought would join also. I recommended Richard Realf, L. F. Parsons, and R. J. Hinton. I received a note on the next Sunday morning, while at breakfast in the Whitney House, from Captain Brown, requesting me to come up that day, and to bring Realf, Parsons, and Hinton with me. Realf and Hinton were not in town, and therefore I could not extend to them the invitation. Parsons and myself went and had a long talk with Captain Brown. A few days afterward I received another note from Captain Brown, which read, as near as I can recollect, as follows:
“‘CAPTAIN COOK:--Dear Sir--You will please get everything ready to join me at Topeka by Monday night next. Come to Mrs. Sheridan’s, two miles south of Topeka, and bring your arms, ammunition, clothing and other articles you may require. Bring Parsons with you if he can get ready in time. Please keep very quiet about this matter. Yours, etc.,
JOHN BROWN.’
“I made all my arrangements for starting at the time appointed. Parsons, Realf, and Hinton could not get ready. I left them at Lawrence, and started in a carriage for Topeka. Stopped at a hotel over night, and left early next morning for Mrs. Sheridan’s to meet Captain Brown. Staid a day and a half at Mrs. S.’s--then left for Topeka, at which place we were joined by Whipple, Moffett, and Kagi. Left Topeka for Nebraska City, and camped at night on the prairie northeast of Topeka. Here, for the first, I learned that we were to leave Kansas to attend a military school during the winter. It was the intention of the party to go to Ashtabula County, Ohio.”[156]
In this way Brown enlisted John E. Cook, whom he had met about the time of the turn of the battle of Black Jack; Luke F. Parsons, who was a member of his old Kansas company; and Richard Realf, a newspaper man. At Topeka Aaron D. Stevens, a veteran free state fighter, joined, with Charles W. Moffett, an Iowa man, and John Henry Kagi, who became his right hand. With these six he returned to Tabor, where he found William H. Seeman and Charles Plummer Tidd, two of his former followers; Richard Richardson, an intelligent Negro fugitive; and his son Owen. This party of eleven started hurriedly for Ashtabula, O., late in November. “Good-bye,” said John Brown, “you will hear from me. We’ve had enough talk about ‘bleeding Kansas.’ I will make a bloody spot at another point to be talked about.”[157]
So the band started and pressed on their lonely way over two hundred and fifty miles across the wild wastes of Iowa until they came to the village of Springdale, about fifty miles from the Missouri. This was a little settlement intensely anti-slavery in sentiment. Here Brown had planned to stop long enough to sell his teams and then proceed by railroad, eastward. The panic of this year, beginning late in August, was by December in full swing, and he found himself without funds, and with no remittances from the East. He therefore decided to have his men spend the winter at Springdale while he went East alone. The Quakers received them gladly and they were quartered at a farmhouse three miles from the village, where they paid only a dollar a week for board. The winter passed pleasantly but busily.
Stevens was made drill-master; all arose at five, breakfasted, studied until ten and drilled from ten to twelve. In the afternoon they practiced gymnastics and shooting at targets. Five nights in the week a mock legislature was held either at the home or in the schoolhouse near by. Sometimes Realf and others listened to the townspeople, and there was much visiting. Before John Brown left for the East, he revealed his plans in part to his landlord and two other citizens of Springdale.
“Some time toward spring, John Brown came to my house one Sunday afternoon,” said this man. “He informed me that he wished to have some private talk with me; we went into the parlor. He then told me his plans for the future. He had not then decided to attack the armory at Harper’s Ferry, but intended to take some fifty to one hundred men into the hills near the Ferry and remain there until he could get together quite a number of slaves, and then take what conveyances were needed to transport the Negroes and their families to Canada. And in a short time after the excitement had abated, to make a strike in some other Southern state; and to continue on making raids, as opportunity offered, until slavery ceased to exist. I did my best to convince him that the probabilities were that all would be killed. He said that, as for himself, he was willing to give his life for the slaves. He told me repeatedly, while talking, that he believed he was an instrument in the hands of God through which slavery would be abolished. I said to him: ‘You and your handful of men cannot cope with the whole South.’ His reply was: ‘I tell you, Doctor, it will be the beginning of the end of slavery.’ He also told me that but two of his men, Kagi and Stevens, knew what his intentions were.”[158]
The landlord several times sat late into the night arguing with Brown about his plans. Some of the neighbors were persuaded to join the band, among them the two Coppocs, and George B. Gill, a Canadian. Stewart Taylor also enlisted there. Hinton, however, still supposed the battle-ground would be Kansas. He says:
“There was no attempt to make a secret of their drilling, and as Gill shows and Cook stated in his ‘confession,’ the neighborhood folks all understood that this band of earnest young men were preparing for something far out of the ordinary. Of course Kansas was presumed to be the objective point. But generally the impression prevailed that when the party moved again, it would be somewhere in the direction of the slave states. The atmosphere of those days was charged with disturbance. It is difficult to determine how many of the party actually knew that John Brown designed to invade Virginia. All the testimony goes to show that it is most probable that not until after the assembling at the Maryland farm in 1859 was there a full, definite announcement of Harper’s Ferry as the objective point. That he fully explained his purpose to make reprisals on slavery wherever the opportunity offered is without question, but except to Owen, who was vowed to work in his early youth, and Kagi, who informed me at Osawatomie in July, 1858, that Brown gave him his fullest confidence upon their second interview at Topeka in 1857, there is every reason to believe that among the men the details of the intended movement were matters of after confidence. My own experience illustrates this. I was absent from Lawrence when John Brown recruited his little company. He had left already for Iowa before I returned. I met Realf just as he was leaving, and we talked without reserve, he assuring me that the purpose was just to prepare a fighting nucleus for resisting the enforcement of the Lecompton Constitution, which it was then expected Congress might try to impose upon us. Through this, advantage was to be taken of the agitation to prepare for a movement against slavery in Missouri, Arkansas, the Indian Territory and possibly Louisiana. At Kagi’s request (with whom I maintained for nearly two years an important, if irregular, correspondence), I began a systematic investigation of the conditions, roads and topography of the Southwest, visiting a good deal of the Indian Territory, with portions of southwest Missouri, western Arkansas, and northern Texas, also, under the guise of examining railroad routes, etc.”[159]
Forbes in the meantime hurried East, nursing his wrath. He had all of a foreigner’s difficulty in following the confused threads of another nation’s politics at a critical time. He classed Seward, Wilson, Sumner, Phillips and John Brown together as anti-slavery men who were ready to attack the institution vi et armis. This movement which he proposed to lead had been started, and then, as he supposed, shamelessly neglected by its sponsors while he had been thrust upon the tender mercies of John Brown. He was angry and penniless and he intended to have reparation. He first sought out Frederick Douglass, but was received coldly. He appears to have been more successful with McCune Smith and the New York group of Negro leaders. He immediately, too, began to address letters to prominent Republicans.
John Brown was annoyed at Forbes’s behavior but seems at first not to have taken it seriously. He left his men at Springdale, and started East in January, arriving at Douglass’s Rochester home in February. Douglass says:
“He desired to stop with me several weeks, but added, ‘I will not stay unless you will allow me to pay board.’ Knowing that he was no trifler, but meant all he said, and desirous of retaining him under my roof, I charged him three dollars a week. While here he spent most of his time in correspondence. He wrote often to George L. Stearns, of Boston, Gerrit Smith, of Peterboro, and many others, and received many letters in return. When he was not writing letters, he was writing and revising a constitution, which he meant to put in operation by means of the men who should go with him in the mountains. He said that to avoid anarchy and confusion there should be a regularly constituted government, which each man who came with him should be sworn to honor and support.... His whole time and thought were given to this subject. It was the first thing in the morning and the last thing at night till, I confess, it began to be something of a bore to me. Once in a while he would say he could, with a few resolute men, capture Harper’s Ferry and supply himself with arms belonging to the government at that place; but he never announced his intention to do so.
“It was, however, very evidently passing in his mind as a thing that he might do. I paid but little attention to such remarks, although I never doubted that he thought just what he said. Soon after his coming to me he asked me to get for him two smoothly planed boards, upon which he could illustrate, with a pair of dividers, by a drawing, the plan of fortification which he meant to adopt in the mountains. These forts were to be so arranged as to connect one with the other by secret passages, so that if one was carried, another could easily be fallen back upon, and be the means of dealing death to the enemy at the very moment when he might think himself victorious. I was less interested in these drawings than my children were; but they showed that the old man had an eye to the means as well as to the end, and was giving his best thought to the work he was about to take in hand.”[160]
From Rochester went letters sounding his friends, as he was uncertain of the real devotion of the many types of Abolitionists. He wrote Theodore Parker:
“I am again out of Kansas and at this time concealing my whereabouts; but for very different reasons, however, from those I had for doing so at Boston last spring. I have nearly perfected arrangements for carrying out an important measure in which the world has a deep interest, as well as Kansas; and only lack from five to eight hundred dollars to do so,--the same object for which I asked for the secret-service money last fall. It is my only errand here; and I have written to some of my mutual friends in regard to it, but they none of them understand my views so well as you do, and I cannot explain without their first committing themselves more than I know of their doing. I have heard that Parker Pillsbury, and some others in your quarters hold out ideas similar to those on which I act; but I have no personal acquaintance with them, and know nothing of their influence or means. Cannot you either by direct or indirect action do something to further me? Do you know of some parties whom you could induce to give their Abolition theories a thoroughly practical shape? I hope that this will prove to be the last time I shall be driven to harass a friend in such a way. Do you think any of my Garrisonian friends, either at Boston, Worcester, or any other place, can be induced to supply a little ‘straw,’ if I will absolutely make ‘brick’? I have written George L. Stearns, of Medford, and Mr. F. B. Sanborn, of Concord; but I am not informed as to how deeply-dyed Abolitionists those friends are, and must beg you to consider this communication strictly confidential, unless you know of parties who will feel and act, and hold their peace. I want to bring the thing about during the next sixty days.”[161]
To Higginson he wrote: “Railroad business on a somewhat extended scale is the identical object for which I am trying to get means. I have been connected with that business, as commonly conducted, from my childhood, and never let an opportunity slip. I have been operating to some purpose the past season; but I know I have a measure on foot that I feel sure would awaken in you something more than a common interest if you could understand it. I have just written to my friends G. L. Stearns, and F. B. Sanborn, asking them to meet me for consultation at Peterboro, N. Y. I am very anxious to have you come along, as I feel certain that you will never regret having been one of the council.”[162]
The Boston folk hesitated and suggested that Brown come there. He demurred on account of his being too well known. Finally Sanborn alone went to meet Brown and thus relates his experience:
“After dinner, and after a few minutes spent with our guests in the parlor, I went with Mr. Smith, John Brown, and my classmate Morton, to the room of Mr. Morton in the third story. Here, in the long winter evening which followed, the whole outline of Brown’s campaign in Virginia was laid before our little council, to the astonishment and almost the dismay of those present. The constitution which he had drawn for the government of his men, and of such territory as they might occupy, was exhibited by Brown, its provisions recited and explained, the proposed movements of his men indicated, and the middle of May was named as the time of the attack. To begin his hazardous adventure he asked for but eight hundred dollars, and would think himself rich with a thousand. Being questioned and opposed by his friends, he laid before them in detail his methods of organization and fortification; of settlement in the South, if that were possible, and of retreat through the North, if necessary; and his theory of the way in which such an invasion would be received in the country at large. He desired from his friends a patient hearing of his statements, a candid opinion concerning his plan, and, if that were favorable, then such aid in money and support as we could give him. We listened until after midnight, proposing objections and raising difficulties; but nothing could shake the purpose of the old Puritan. Every difficulty had been foreseen and provided against in some manner; the grand difficulty of all,--the manifest hopelessness of undertaking anything so vast with such slender means,--was met with the text of Scripture: ‘If God be for us, who can be against us?’ He had made nearly all his arrangements: he had so many men enlisted, so many hundred weapons; all he now wanted was the small sum of money. With that he would open his campaign in the spring, and he had no doubt that the enterprise ‘would pay’ as he said.
“On the 23d of February the discussion was renewed, and, as usually happened when he had time enough, Captain Brown began to prevail over the objections of his friends. At any rate, they saw that they must either stand by him, or leave him to dash himself alone against the fortress he was determined to assault. To withhold aid would only delay, not prevent him; nothing short of betraying him to the enemy would do that. As the sun was setting over the snowy hills of the region where we met, I walked for an hour with Gerrit Smith among those woods and fields (then included in his broad manor) which his father had purchased of the Indians and bequeathed to him. Brown was left at home by the fire, discussing the points of theology with Charles Stewart, an old captain under Wellington, who also happened to be visiting at the house. Mr. Smith restated in his eloquent way the daring propositions of Brown, whose import he understood fully; and then said in substance: ‘You see how it is; our dear old friend has made up his mind to this course, and cannot be turned from it. We cannot give him up to die alone; we must support him. I will raise so many hundred dollars for him; you must lay the case before your friends in Massachusetts and perhaps they will do the same. I see no other way.’ For myself, I had reached the same conclusion, and engaged to bring the scheme at once to the attention of the three Massachusetts men to whom Brown had written, and also of Dr. S. G. Howe, who had sometimes favored action almost as extreme as this proposed by Brown. I returned to Boston on the 25th of February, and on the same day communicated the enterprise to Theodore Parker and Wentworth Higginson. At the suggestion of Parker, Brown, who had gone to Brooklyn, N. Y., was invited to visit Boston secretly, and did so on the 4th of March, taking a room at the American House, in Hanover Street, and remaining for the most part in his room during the four days of his stay. Mr. Parker was deeply interested in the project, but not very sanguine of its success. He wished to see it tried, believing that it must do good even if it failed. Brown remained at the American House until Monday, March 8th, when he departed for Philadelphia.”
On the 6th of March he wrote to his son John from Boston: “My call here has met with a hearty response, so that I feel assured of at least tolerable success. I ought to be thankful for this. All has been effected by quiet meeting of a few choice friends, it being scarcely known that I have been in the city.”[163]
Leaving the money-raising to Sanborn and Smith, Brown turned to his Negro friends, saying to his eldest son, meantime: “I have been thinking that I would like to have you make a trip to Bedford, Chambersburg, Gettysburg, and Uniontown in Pennsylvania, traveling slowly along, and inquiring of every man on the way, or every family of the right stripe, and getting acquainted with them as much as you could. When you look at the location of those places, you will readily perceive the advantage of getting some acquaintance in those parts.”[164]
And then he wrote two touching letters; one to his eldest daughter and one to his staunch friend, Sanborn.
To Ruth Brown he wrote: “The anxiety I feel to see my wife and children once more I am unable to describe. I want exceedingly to see my big baby Ruth’s baby, and to see how that little company of sheep look about this time. The cries of my poor sorrow-strieken, despairing children, whose ‘tears on their cheeks’ are ever in my eyes, and whose sighs are ever in my ears, may however prevent my enjoying the happiness I so much desire. But, courage, courage, courage!--the great work of my life (the unseen hand that ‘guided me, and who had indeed holden my right hand, may hold it still,’ though I have not known Him at all as I ought) I may yet see accomplished (God helping), and be permitted to return, and ‘rest at evening.’
“Oh, my daughter Ruth! Could any plan be devised whereby you could let Henry go ‘to school’ (as you expressed it in your letter to him while in Kansas), I would rather now have him ‘for another term’ than to have a hundred average scholars. I have a particular and very important, but not dangerous, place for him to fill in the ‘school,’ and I know of no man living so well adapted to fill it. I am quite confident some way can be devised so that you and your children could be with him, and be quite happy even, and safe; but God forbid me to flatter you in trouble!”[165]
To his friend Sanborn he said: “I believe when you come to look at the ample field I labor in, and the rich harvest which not only this entire country but the whole world during the present and future generations may reap from its successful cultivation, you will feel that you are in it, an entire unit. What an inconceivable amount of good you might so effect by your counsel, your example, your encouragement, your natural and acquired ability for active service! And then, how very little we can possibly lose! Certainly the cause is enough to live for, if not to--for. I have only had this one opportunity, in a life of nearly sixty years; and could I be continued ten times as long again, I might not again have another equal opportunity. God has honored but comparatively a very small part of mankind with any possible chance for such mighty and soul-satisfying rewards. But, my dear friend, if you should make up your mind to do so, I trust it will be wholly from the promptings of your own spirit, after having thoroughly counted the cost. I would flatter no man into such a measure, if I could do it ever so easily.
“I expect nothing but to endure hardness; but I expect to effect a mighty conquest, even though it be like the last victory of Samson. I felt for a number of years, in earlier life, a steady, strong desire to die; but since I saw any prospect of becoming a ‘reaper’ in the great harvest, I have not only felt quite willing to live, but have enjoyed life much; and am now rather anxious to live for a few years more.”[166]
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End of part 13 of 19
Continue readingChapter 9: The Black Phalanx (Part 1)
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