John Brown · W. E. B. Du Bois
“Awake, awake, put on thy strength, O Zion.”
The decade 1830 to 1840 was one of the severest seasons of trial through which the black American ever passed. The great economic change which made slavery the corner-stone of the cotton kingdom was definitely finished and all the subtle moral adjustments which follow were in full action. New immigrants took advantage of the growing prejudice which found a profitable place for the Negro in slavery, and was determined to keep him in it. They began to crowd the free Northern Negro in a fierce economic battle. With a precarious social foothold, little economic organization, and no support in public opinion, the Northern free Negro was forced to yield. In Philadelphia from 1829 to 1849 six mobs of hoodlums and foreigners cowed and murdered the Negroes. In the Middle West and, especially in Ohio, severe Black Laws had been enacted in 1804 to 1807 providing that (a) No Negro should be allowed to settle in Ohio unless he could within twenty days give bond to the amount of $500 signed by two bondsmen, who should guarantee his good behavior and support; (b) The fine for harboring or concealing a fugitive was at first $50, then $100, one-half to go to the informer and one-half to the overseer of the poor in the district; (c) No Negro was allowed to give evidence in any case where a white man was a party.[167]
These laws, however, were dead letters until 1829, when increased Negro immigration induced the Cincinnati authorities to enforce them. The Negroes obtained a respite of thirty days and sent a deputation to Canada. They were absent for sixty days, and when the whites saw no effort to enforce the law further, they organized a riot. For three days Negroes were killed in the streets until they barricaded their homes and shot back. Meantime the governor of upper Canada sent word that he “would extend to them a cordial welcome.” He said: “Tell the republicans on your side of the line that we royalists do not know men of their color. Should you come to us you will be entitled to all the privileges of the rest of His Majesty’s subjects.”[168]
On receipt of this, fully two thousand Negroes went to Canada and founded Wilberforce; while a national convention of Negroes was called in Philadelphia in 1830--the first of its kind. This convention at an adjourned session in 1831 addressed the public as follows:
“The cause of general emancipation is gaining powerful and able friends abroad. Britain and Denmark have performed such deeds as will immortalize them for their humanity, in the breasts of the philanthropists of the present day; whilst as a just tribute to their virtues, after-ages will yet erect imperishable monuments to their memory. (Would to God we could say thus of our own native soil.)
“And it is only when we look to our own native land, to the birthplace of our fathers, to the land for whose prosperity their blood and our sweat have been shed and cruelty extorted, that the convention has had cause to hang its head and blush. Laws as cruel in themselves as they were unconstitutional and unjust, have in many places been enacted against our poor unfriended and unoffending brethren; laws (without a shadow of provocation on our part) at whose bare recital the very savage draws him up for fear of the contagion, looks noble, and prides himself because he bears not the name of a Christian. But the convention would not wish to dwell long on this subject, as it is one that is too sensibly felt to need description....
“This spirit of persecution was the cause of our convention. It was this that induced us to seek an asylum in the Canadas; and the convention feels happy to report to its brethren, that our efforts to establish a settlement in that province have not been made in vain. Our prospects are cheering; our friends and funds are daily increasing; wonders have been performed far exceeding our most sanguine expectations; already have our brethren purchased eight hundred acres of land--and two thousand of them have left the soil of their birth, crossed the lines, and laid the foundation for a structure which promises to prove an asylum for the colored population of these United States. They have erected two hundred log-houses, and have five hundred acres under cultivation.”
A college “on the manual labor system” was planned: “For the present ignorant and degraded condition of many of our brethren in these United States (which has been a subject of much concern to the convention) can excite no astonishment (although used by our enemies to show our inferiority in the scale of human beings); for, what opportunities have they possessed for mental cultivation or improvement? Mere ignorance, however, in a people divested of the means of acquiring information by books, or an extensive connection with the world, is no just criterion of their intellectual incapacity; and it has been actually seen, in various remarkable instances, that the degradation of the mind and character, which has been too hastily imputed to a people kept, as we are, at a distance from those sources of knowledge which abound in civilized and enlightened communities, has resulted from no other causes than our unhappy situation and circumstances.”[169]
The convention met again in 1833 and resolved on further plans for settling in Canada. These conventions continued to assemble annually for five years, when they were succeeded by the convention of the American Moral Reform Society which met two years longer. Meantime Nat Turner had terrorized Virginia and the South and sent a wave of repression over the North that led to the disfranchisement of Pennsylvania Negroes in 1837.
Notwithstanding all this the Negroes were struggling on. Beside the general conventions arose the Phœnix Societies, which “planned an organization of the colored people in their municipal subdivisions with the special object of the promotion of their improvement in morals, literature and the mechanic arts.” Lewis Tappan refers to them in his biography. The “Mental Feast,” which was a social feature, survived thirty years later in some of the interior towns of Pennsylvania and the West.[170]
The first Negro paper, Freedom’s Journal, had been established in 1827 and organizations like the Massachusetts General Colored Association were coöperating with the Abolitionists. The news of emancipation in the British West Indies cheered the Negroes, and indeed without the long effective and self-sacrificing efforts of the Northern freed Negroes, the Abolition movement in the United States could not have been successful. Garrison’s first subscriber to The Liberator was a black man of Philadelphia, and before and after the Negroes were admitted to membership in the anti-slavery societies, their aid was invaluable. In the West, despite proscription, a fight for schools was carried on from 1830 to 1840, which finally resulted in a wide system of Negro schools partially supported by public funds. Toward 1840 signs of promise began gradually to appear. A West Indian endowed a Negro school in Philadelphia in 1837. The Negro population increased from two and one-third to two and nine-tenths millions in the decade, and evidences of economic success were seen among the free Negroes. Philadelphia had in 1838 one hundred small beneficial societies; Ohio Negroes owned ten thousand acres of land in 1840, while the Canada refugees were beginning to prosper. The mutiny on the Creole, the establishment of the Negro Odd Fellows, and the doubling, in ten years, of the membership of the African Methodist Episcopal Church, all pointed to an awakening after the long period of distress.
The decade of 1840 to 1850 was a new era--an era of self-assertion and rapid advance for the free Northern Negro. For the first time conscious leadership of undoubted ability appeared. In Boston there was De Grasse, a physician, trained in this country and in France and a member of the Massachusetts Medical Society. Robert Morris was a member of the bar, as was E. R. Walker, whose “Appeal” in 1829 startled the country. William Wells Brown and William Nell were writing, while Charles Lennox Remond was one of the first of the Abolition orators. In New York were the gifted preacher, Henry Highland Garnet; the teachers, Reason and Peterson who made the Negro schools effective; and the physician, McCune Smith, one of the best trained men of his day. In Philadelphia were Robert Purvis, the Abolitionist; William Still, of the Underground Railroad; the three men who made the catering business--Dorsey, Jones and Minton; and the rich Negro lumber merchant, Stephen Smith, whose magnificent endowment for aged Negroes stands to-day at the corner of Girard and Belmont Avenues and is valued at $400,000. In western Pennsylvania were Vashon and Woodson, and in the West were Day, librarian of the Cleveland library; the three Langstons of Oberlin, and the merchants Boyd and Wilcox of Cincinnati. Elsewhere appeared the unlettered, but brave and shrewd leaders of the fugitive slaves. It is said that 500 black messengers of this sort were passing backward and forward between the slave and the free states in this decade, and noticeable among them were Harriet Tubman and Josiah Henson, who brought thousands to the North and to Canada. Foremost of all came Frederick Douglass, born in 1817 and reborn to freedom in 1838. He made his first speech in 1841 and took a prominent part in the anti-slavery campaign of the next decade. In 1845-6, he was in England and, returning in 1847, he established his paper and met John Brown. From that time on he was Brown’s chief Negro confidant, and in his house Brown’s Eastern campaign was started and largely carried on. The churches also were training men in social leadership in the persons of their bishops, like John Brown’s friend Loguen and the noble Daniel Payne.
About 1847 new life appeared in the free Negro group. The Odd Fellows, under Peter Ogden, maintained their independence against aggressions of the whites, and the first of a new series of national colored conventions assembled at Troy, N. Y. “The first article in the first number of Frederick Douglass’s North Star, published January, 1848, was an extended notice of this convention held at the Liberty Street Church, Troy, N. Y., 1847.”
The next year, 1848, Cleveland welcomed a similar national convention. Nearly seventy delegates assembled there on September 6th, “the sessions alternating between the Court-House and the Tabernacle. Frederick Douglass was chosen president. As in previous conventions education was encouraged, the importance of statistical information stated and temperance societies urged.”[171]
The representative character of the delegates was shown by the fact that printers, carpenters, blacksmiths, shoemakers, engineers, dentists, gunsmiths, farmers, physicians, plasterers, masons, college students, clergymen, barbers, hair-dressers, laborers, coopers, livery-stable keepers, bath-house keepers and grocers were among the members who were present.[172]
The same year Frederick Douglass attended a Free Soil convention at Buffalo, N. Y., and writes: “I was not the only colored man well known to the country who was present at this convention. Samuel Ringgold Ward, Henry Highland Garnet, Charles L. Remond, and Henry Bibb were there and made speeches which were received with surprise and gratification by the thousands there assembled. As a colored man I felt greatly encouraged and strengthened for my cause while listening to these men, in the presence of the ablest men of the Caucasian race. Mr. Ward especially attracted attention at that convention. As an orator and thinker he was vastly superior, I thought, to any of us, and being perfectly black and of unmixed African descent, the splendors of his intellect went directly to the glory of race. In depth of thought, fluency of speech, readiness of wit, logical exactness, and general intelligence, Samuel R. Ward has left no successor among the colored men amongst us, and it was a sad day for our cause when he was laid low in the soil of a foreign country.”[173]
The next decade opened with over three and one-half millions of Negroes in the United States--an enormous increase since 1840--and a remarkable indication of virility and prosperity despite the new Fugitive Slave Law. The Canadian Negroes were being organized in the Elgin and other settlements, the colored Baptists reported 150,000 members, and the Negroes of New York, replying to the Black Law recommendations of Governor Ward Hunt, proved unincumbered ownership of $1,160,000 worth of property. The escape of fugitive slaves was now systematized in the Underground Railroad and in the secret organization known to outsiders variously as the “League of Freedom,” “Liberty League,” or “American Mysteries.” To these were added the fourteen Canadian “True Bands” with several hundred members each.
State conventions were called in many instances, and the most representative and intelligent national convention held up to that time met in Rochester, N. Y., Douglass’s home, in 1853. This convention developed definite opposition to any hope of permanent relief for the colored freeman through schemes of emigration. On the contrary, it directed its energies to affirmative constructive action and planned three measures:
(1) An industrial college “on the manual labor plan.” Harriet Beecher Stowe, who was to make a visit to England at the instance of friends in that country, was authorized to receive funds in the name of the colored people of the country for that purpose. “The successful establishment and conduct of such an institution of learning would train youth to be self-reliant and skilled workmen, fitted to hold their own in the struggle of life on the conditions prevailing here.”
(2) A registry of colored mechanics, artisans, and business men throughout the Union, and also, “of all the persons willing to employ colored men in business, to teach colored boys mechanic trades, liberal and scientific professions and farming; also a registry of colored men and youth seeking employment or instruction.”
(3) A committee on publication “to collect all facts, statistics and statements; all laws and historical records and biographies of the colored people and all books by colored authors.” This committee was further authorized “to publish replies of any assaults worthy of note, made upon the character or condition of the colored people.”[174]
The radical stand of this assembly against emigration caused a call for a distinct emigration Negro convention in 1854. This convention was held under the presidency of the same man who afterward presided at the Chatham conclave of John Brown, and with some of the same Negroes present. The account of it continues:
“There were three parties in the emigration convention, ranged according to the foreign fields they preferred to emigrate to. Dr. Delaney headed the party that desired to go to the Niger Valley in Africa, Whitfield the party which preferred to go to Central America, and Holly the party which preferred to go to Haiti.
“All these parties were recognized and embraced by the convention. Dr. Delaney was given a commission to go to Africa, in the Niger Valley, Whitfield to go to Central America, and Holly to Haiti, to enter into negotiations with the authorities of these various countries for Negro emigrants and to report to future conventions. Holly was the first to execute his mission, going down to Haiti in 1855, when he entered into relations with the Minister of the Interior, the father of the late President Hyppolite, and by him was presented to Emperor Faustin I. The next emigration convention was held at Chatham, Canada West, in 1856, when the report on Haiti was made. Dr. Delaney went off on his mission to the Niger Valley, Africa, via England, in 1858. There he concluded a treaty signed by himself and eight kings, offering inducements to Negro emigrants to their territories. Whitfield went to California, intending later to go thence to Central America, but died in San Francisco before he could do so. Meanwhile [James] Redpath went to Haiti as a John Brownist after the Harper’s Ferry raid, and reaped the first fruits of Holly’s mission by being appointed Haitian Commissioner of Emigration in the United States by the Haitian government, but with the express injunction that Rev. Holly should be called to coöperate with him. On Redpath’s arrival in the United States, he tendered Rev. Holly a commission from the Haitian government at $1,000 per annum and traveling expenses to engage emigrants to go to Haiti. The first load of emigrants were from Philadelphia in 1861.”[175]
In 1853 when the American Anti-Slavery Society was formed, Negroes like Purvis and Barbadoes, trained in the Negro convention movement, were among its founders. By 1856 the African Methodist Church had 20,000 members and $425,000 worth of property.
Of all this development John Brown knew far more than most white men and it was on this great knowledge that his great faith was based. To most Americans the inner striving of the Negro was a veiled and an unknown tale: they had heard of Douglass, they knew of fugitive slaves, but of the living, organized, struggling group that made both these phenomena possible they had no conception.
From his earliest interest in Negroes, John Brown sought to know individuals among them intimately and personally. He invited them to his home and he went to theirs. He talked to them, and listened to the history of their trials, advised them and took advice from them. His dream was to enlist the boldest and most daring spirits among them in his great plan.
When, therefore, John Brown came East in January, 1858, his object was not simply to further his campaign for funds, but more especially definitely to organize the Negroes for his work. Already he had disclosed his intentions to Thomas Thomas of Springfield and to Frederick Douglass. He now determined to enlist a larger number and he particularly had in mind the Negroes of New York and Philadelphia, and those in Canada. At no time, however, did John Brown plan to begin his foray with many Negroes. He knew that he must gain the confidence of black men first by a successful stroke, and that after initial success he could count on large numbers. His object then was to interest a few leaders like Douglass, organize societies with wide ramifications, and after the first raid to depend on these societies for aid and recruits.
During his stay with Douglass in February, 1858, he wrote to many colored leaders: Henry Highland Garnet and James N. Gloucester in New York; John Jones in Chicago, and J. W. Loguen of the Zion Church. The addresses of Downing of Rhode Island, and Martin R. Delaney were also noted. On February 23d, after he had been in Boston and Peterboro he notes writing to Loguen, one of the closest of his Negro friends: “Think I shall be ready to go with him [to Canada] by the first of March or about that time.”[176]
On March 10th, John Brown and his eldest son, Henry Highland Garnet, William Still and others met at the house of Stephen Smith, the rich Negro lumber merchant, of 921 Lombard Street, Philadelphia. Brown seems to have stayed nearly a week in that city, and probably had long conferences with all the chief Philadelphia Negro leaders. On March 18th, he was in New Haven where he wrote Frederick Douglass and J. W. Loguen, saying: “I expect to be on the way by the 28th or 30th inst.” After a flying visit home, involving a long walk to save expense, he appeared again at Douglass’s in April. Gloucester collected a little money for him in New York and he probably received some in Philadelphia; at last he turned his face toward Canada.
He had long wished to see Canada, and had planned a visit as far back as 1846. Hither he had sent one of the earliest of his North Elba refugees, Walter Hawkins, who became Bishop of the British African Church. On April 8th, John Brown writes his son: “I came on here direct with J. W. Loguen the day after you left Rochester. I am succeeding, to all appearance, beyond my expectations. Harriet Tubman hooked on his whole team at once. He (Harriet) is the most of a man, naturally, that I ever met with. There is the most abundant material, and of the right quality, in this quarter, beyond all doubt. Do not forget to write Mr. Case (near Rochester) at once about hunting up every person and family of the reliable kind about, at, or near Bedford, Chambersburg, Gettysburg, and Carlisle, in Pennsylvania, and also Hagerstown and vicinity, Maryland, and Harper’s Ferry, Va.”[177]
He stayed at St. Catherines until the 14th or 15th, chiefly in consultation with that wonderful woman, Harriet Tubman, and sheltered in her home. Harriet Tubman was a full-blooded African, born a slave on the eastern shore of Maryland in 1820. When a girl she was injured by having an iron weight thrown on her head by an overseer, an injury that gave her wild, half-mystic ways with dreams, rhapsodies and trances. In her early womanhood she did the rudest and hardest man’s work, driving, carting and plowing. Finally the slave family was broken up in 1849, when she ran away. Then began her wonderful career as a rescuer of fugitive slaves. Back and forth she traveled like some dark ghost until she had personally led over three hundred blacks to freedom, no one of whom was ever lost while in her charge. A reward of $10,000 for her, alive or dead, was offered, but she was never taken. A dreamer of dreams as she was, she ever “laid great stress on a dream which she had had just before she met Captain Brown in Canada. She thought she was in ‘a wilderness sort of place, all full of rocks, and bushes,’ when she saw a serpent raise its head among the rocks, and as it did so, it became the head of an old man with a long white beard, gazing at her, ‘wishful like, jes as ef he war gwine to speak to me,’ and then two other heads rose up beside him, younger than he,--and as she stood looking at them, and wondering what they could want with her, a great crowd of men rushed in and struck down the younger heads, and then the head of the old man, still looking at her so ‘wishful!’ This dream she had again and again, and could not interpret it; but when she met Captain Brown, shortly after, behold he was the very image of the head she had seen. But still she could not make out what her dream signified, till the news came to her of the tragedy of Harper’s Ferry, and then she knew the two other heads were his two sons.”[178]
In this woman John Brown placed the utmost confidence. Wendell Phillips says: “The last time I ever saw John Brown was under my own roof, as he brought Harriet Tubman to me, saying: ‘Mr. Phillips, I bring you one of the best and bravest persons on this continent--General Tubman, as we call her.’ He then went on to recount her labors and sacrifices in behalf of her race.”[179]
Only sickness, brought on by her toil and exposure, prevented Harriet Tubman from being present at Harper’s Ferry.
From St. Catherines John Brown went to Ingersoll, Hamilton and Chatham. He also visited Toronto, holding meetings with Negroes in Temperance Hall, and at the house of the “late Mr. Holland, a colored man, on Queen Street West. On one occasion Captain Brown remained as a guest with his friend, Dr. A. M. Ross, who is distinguished as a naturalist, as well as an intrepid Abolitionist, who risked his life on several occasions in excursions into the South to enable slaves to flee to Canada!”[180]
Having finally perfected plans for a convention, Brown hurried back to Iowa for his men. During his three months’ absence they had been working and drilling in the Quaker settlement of Springdale, Ia., as most persons supposed, for future troubles in “bleeding Kansas.” On John Brown’s arrival they all hurriedly packed up--Owen Brown, Realf, Kagi, Cook, Stevens, Tidd, Leeman, Moffett, Parsons, and the colored man Richardson, together with their recruits, Gill and Taylor. The Coppocs were to come later. “The leave-taking between them and the people of Springdale was one of tears. Ties which had been knitting through many weeks were sundered, and not only so, but the natural sorrow at parting was intensified by the consciousness of all that the future was full of hazard for Brown and his followers. Before quitting the house and home of Mr. Maxon, where they had spent so long a time, each of Brown’s band wrote his name in pencil on the wall of the parlor, where the writing still can be seen by the interested traveler.” They all immediately started for Canada by way of Chicago and Detroit. At Chicago they had to wait twelve hours, and the first hotel refused to accommodate Richardson at the breakfast table. John Brown immediately sought another place. The company arrived shortly in Chatham and stopped at a hotel kept by Mr. Barber, a colored man. While at Chatham, John Brown, as Anderson relates, “made a profound impression upon those who saw or became acquainted with him. Some supposed him to be a staid but modernized ‘Quaker’; others a solid business man, from ‘somewhere,’ and without question a philanthropist. His long white beard, thoughtful and reverent brow and physiognomy, his sturdy, measured tread, as he circulated about with hands, portrayed in the best lithograph, under the pendant coat-skirt of plain brown tweed, with other garments to match, revived to those honored with his acquaintance and knowing his history the memory of a Puritan of the most exalted type.”[181]
John Brown’s choice of Canada as a centre of Negro culture, was wise. There were nearly 50,000 Negroes there, and the number included many energetic, intelligent and brave men, with some wealth. Settlements had grown up, farms had been bought, schools established and an intricate social organization begun. Negroes like Henson had been loyally assisted by white men like King, and fugitives were welcomed and succored. Near Buxton, where King and the Elgin Association were working, was Chatham, the chief town of the county of Kent, with a large Negro population of farmers, merchants and mechanics; they had a graded school, Wilberforce Institute, several churches, a newspaper, a fire-engine company and several organizations for social intercourse and uplift. One of the inhabitants said:
“Mr. Brown did not overestimate the state of education of the colored people. He knew that they would need leaders, and require training. His great hope was that the struggle would be supported by volunteers from Canada, educated and accustomed to self-government. He looked on our fugitives as picked men of sufficient intelligence, which, combined with a hatred for the South, would make them willing abettors of any enterprise destined to free their race.”
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End of part 14 of 19
Continue readingChapter 9: The Black Phalanx (Part 2)
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