John Brown · W. E. B. Du Bois
“Remember them that are in bonds as bound with them.”
There was hell in Hayti in the red waning of the eighteenth century, in the days when John Brown was born. The dark wave of the French Revolution had raised the brilliant sinister Napoleon to its crest. Already he had stretched greedy arms toward American empire in the rich vale of the Mississippi, when in a flash, out of the dirt and sloth and slavery of the West Indies, the black inert and heavy cloud of African degradation writhed to sudden life and lifted up the dark figure of Toussaint. Ten thousand Frenchmen gasped and died in the fever-haunted hills, while the black men in sudden frenzy fought like devils for their freedom and won it. Napoleon saw his gateway to the Mississippi closed; armed Europe was at his back. What was this wild and empty America to him, anyway? So he sold Louisiana for a song and turned to the shame of Trafalgar and the glory of Austerlitz.
John Brown was born just as the shudder of Hayti was running through all the Americas, and from his earliest boyhood he saw and felt the price of repression--the fearful cost that the western world was paying for slavery. From his earliest boyhood he had dimly conceived, and the conception grew with his growing, that the cost of liberty was less than the price of repression. Perhaps he was so near the humanistic enthusiasm of the French Revolution that he undervalued the cost of liberty. But yet he was right, for it was scarce possible to overrate the price of repression. True, in these latter days men and women of the South, and honest ones, too, have striven feverishly to paint Negro slavery in bright alluring colors. They have told of childlike devotion, faithful service and light-hearted irresponsibility, in the fine old aristocracy of the plantation. Much they have said is true. But when all is said and granted, the awful fact remains congealed in law and indisputable record that American slavery was the foulest and filthiest blot on nineteenth century civilization. As a school of brutality and human suffering, of female prostitution and male debauchery; as a mockery of marriage and defilement of family life; as a darkening of reason, and spiritual death, it had no parallel in its day. It took millions upon millions of men--human men and lovable, light and liberty-loving children of the sun, and threw them with no sparing of brutality into one rigid mold: humble, servile, dog-like devotion, surrender of body, mind and soul, and unaspiring animal content--toward this ideal the slave might strive, and did. Wonderful, even beautiful examples of humble service he brought forth and made the eternal heritage of men. But beyond this there was nothing. All were crushed to this mold and of them that did not fit, the sullen were cowed, the careless brutalized and the rebellious killed. Four things make life worthy to most men: to move, to know, to love, to aspire. None of these was for Negro slaves. A white child could halt a black man on the highway and send him slinking to his kennel. No black slave could legally learn to read. And love? If a black slave loved a lass, there was not a white man from the Potomac to the Rio Grande that could not prostitute her to his lust. Did the proud sons of Virginia and Carolina stoop to such bestial tyranny? Ask the grandmothers of the two million mulattoes that dot the states to-day. Ask the suffering and humiliated wives of the master caste. If a Negro married a wife, there was not a master in the land that could not take her from him.
John Brown’s father, Owen Brown, saw such a power stretched all the way from Virginia to Connecticut. A Southern slaveholding minister, Thomson by name, had brought his slaves North and preached in the local church. Then he attempted to take the unwilling chattels back South. Of what followed, Owen Brown says: “There was some excitement amongst the people, some in favor and some against Mr. Thomson; there was quite a debate, and large numbers to hear. Mr. Thomson said he should carry the woman and children, whether he could get the man or not. An old man asked him if he would part man and wife, contrary to their minds. He said: ‘I married them myself, and did not enjoin obedience on the woman.’” Owen Brown added, “Ever since I have been an Abolitionist.”[60]
If a slave begat children, there was not a law south of the Ohio that could stop their eventual sale to any brute with the money. Aspiration in a slave was suspicious, dangerous, fatal. For him there was no inviting future, no high incentive, no decent reward. The highest ambition to which a black woman could aspire was momentarily to supplant the white man’s wife as a concubine; and the ambition of black men ended with the carelessly tossed largess of a kinglet. To reduce the slave to this groveling, what was the price which the master paid? Tyranny, brutality, and lawlessness reigned and to some extent still reign in the South. The sweeter, kindlier feelings were blunted: brothers sold sisters to serfdom and fathers debauched even their own dark daughters. The arrogant, strutting bully, who shot his enemy and thrashed his dogs and his darkies, became a living, moving ideal from the cotton-patch to the United States Senate from 1808 onward. No worthy art nor literature, nor even the commerce of daily life could thrive in this atmosphere.
Society there was of a certain type--courtly and lavish, but quarrelsome; seductive and lazy; with a half Oriental sheen and languor spread above peculiar poverty of resource; a fineness and delicacy in certain details, coupled with coarseness and self-indulgence in others; a mingling of the sexes only in play and seldom in work, with its concomitant tendency toward seclusion and helplessness among its whiter women. Withal a society strong indeed, but wholly without vigor or invention.
It was not all as dark as it might have been. Human life, thank God, is never as bad as it may be, but it is too often desperately bad. Nor do men easily realize how bad life about them is. The full have scant sympathy with the empty,--the rich know all the faults of the poor, and the master sees the horrors of slavery with unseeing eyes. True, there were flashes of light and longing here and there--noble sacrifice, eager help, determined emancipation. But all this was local, spasmodic and exceptional. The unrelenting dead brutality of human bondage to a thousand tyrants, petty wills and caprice was the rule from Florida to Missouri and from the Mississippi to the sea. Under it the wretched writhed like some great black and stricken beast. The flaming fury of their mad attempts at vengeance echoes all down the blood-swept path of slavery. In Jamaica they upturned the government and harried the land until England crept and sued for peace. In the Danish Isles they started a whirlwind of slaughter; in Hayti they drove their masters into the sea; and in South Carolina they rose twice like a threatening wave against the terror-stricken whites, but were betrayed. Such outbreaks here and there foretold the possibility of coördinate action and organic development. To be sure, the successful outbreaks were few and spasmodic; but the flare of Hayti lighted the night and made the world remember that these, too, were men.
Among these black men, changes significant and momentous, were coming. The native born Africans were passing away, with their native tongues and their wild customs. Such were the slaves of John Brown’s father’s time. “When I was a child four or five years old,” writes Owen Brown, “one of the nearest neighbors had a slave that was brought from Guinea. In the year 1776 my father was called into the army at New York, and left his work undone. In August, our good neighbor, Captain John Fast, of West Simsbury, let my mother have the labor of his slave to plough a few days. I used to go out into the field with this slave,--called Sam,--and he used to carry me on his back, and I fell in love with him. He worked but a few days, and went home sick with the pleurisy, and died very suddenly. When told that he would die, he said he should go to Guinea, and wanted victuals put up for the journey. As I recollect, this was the first funeral I ever attended in the days of my youth.”
Such slaves and others went into the Revolutionary army and three thousand of them fought for their masters’ freedom. After the war, their bravery, the upheaval in Hayti, and the new enthusiasm for human rights, led to a wave of emancipation which started in Vermont during the Revolution and swept through New England and Pennsylvania, ending finally in New York and New Jersey early in the nineteenth century. This freeing of the Northern slaves led to new complications, for in the South, after a hesitating pause, the opposite course was pursued and the thumbscrews were applied; the plantations were isolated, the roads were guarded, the refractory were whipped till they screamed and crawled, and the ringleaders were lynched. A long awful process of selection chose out the listless, ignorant, sly, and humble and sent to heaven the proud, the vengeful and the daring. The old African warrior spirit died away of violence and a broken heart.
Thus the great black mass of Southern slaves were cowed, but they were not conquered. Stretched as they were over wide miles of land, and isolated; guarded in speech and religion; peaceful and light-hearted as was their nature, still the fire of liberty burned in them. In Louisiana and Tennessee and twice in Virginia they raised the night cry of revolt, and once slew fifty Virginians, holding the state for weeks at bay there in those same Alleghanies which John Brown loved and listened to. On the ships of the sea they rebelled and murdered; to Florida they fled and turned like beasts on their pursuers till whole armies dislodged them and did them to death in the everglades; and again and again over them and through them surged and quivered a vast unrest which only the eternal vigilance of the masters kept down. Yet the fear of that great bound beast was ever there--a nameless, haunting dread that never left the South and never ceased, but ever nerved the remorseless cruelty of the master’s arm.
One thing saved the South from the blood-sacrifice of Hayti--not, to be sure, from so successful a revolt, for the disproportion of races was less, but from a desperate and bloody effort--and that was the escape of the fugitive.
Along the Great Black Way stretched swamps and rivers, and the forests and crests of the Alleghanies. A widening, hurrying stream of fugitives swept to the havens of refuge, taking the restless, the criminal and the unconquered--the natural leaders of the more timid mass. These men saved slavery and killed it. They saved it by leaving it to a false seductive dream of peace and the eternal subjugation of the laboring class. They destroyed it by presenting themselves before the eyes of the North and the world as living specimens of the real meaning of slavery. What was the system that could enslave a Frederick Douglass? They saved it too by joining the free Negroes of the North, and with them organizing themselves into a great black phalanx that worked and schemed and paid and finally fought for the freedom of black men in America.
Thus it was that John Brown, even as a child, saw the puzzling anomalies and contradictions in human right and liberty all about him. Ever and again he saw this in the North, leading to concerted action among the free Negroes, especially in cities where they were brought in contact with one another, and had some chance of asserting their nominal freedom. Just at the close of the eighteenth century, first in Philadelphia and then in New York, small groups of them withdrew from the white churches to escape disgraceful discrimination and established churches of their own, which still live with millions of adherents. In the year of John Brown’s birth, 1800, Gabriel planned his formidable uprising in Virginia, and the year after his marriage, 1821, Denmark Vesey of South Carolina went grimly to the scaffold, after one of the shrewdest Negro plots that ever frightened the South into hysterics. Of all this John Brown, the boy and young man, knew little. In after years he learned of Gabriel and Vesey and Turner, and told of their exploits and studied their plans; but at the time he was far off from the world, carrying on his tannery and marrying a wife. Perhaps as a lad he heard some of the oratory that celebrated the act of 1808, stopping the slave trade, as the beginning of the end of slavery. Perhaps not, for the act did little good until it was reënforced in 1820. All the time, however, John Brown’s keen eyes were searching for the way of life and his tender heart was sensitive to injustice and wrong everywhere. Indeed, it is not unlikely that the first black folk to gain his aid and sympathies and direct his thoughts to what afterward became his life-work, were the fugitive slaves from the South.
Three paths were opened to the slaves: to submit, to fight or to run away. Most of them submitted as do most people everywhere to force and fate. To fight singly meant death and to fight together meant plot and insurrection--a difficult thing but one often tried. Easiest of all was to run away, for the land was wide and bare and the slaves were many. At first, they ran to the swamps and mountains, and starved and died. Then they ran to the Indians and in Florida founded a nation to overthrow which cost the United States $20,000,000 and more in slave raids known as Seminole “wars.” Then gradually, after the War of 1812 had used so many black sailors to fight for free trade that the Negroes learned of the North and Canada as cities of refuge, they fled northward. While John Brown was a tanner at Hudson, he began helping these dark panting refugees who flitted by in the night. His eldest son says:
“When I was four or five years old, and probably no later than 1825, there came one night a fugitive slave and his wife to father’s door--sent, perhaps, by some townsman who knew John Brown’s compassion for such wayfarers, then but few. They were the first colored people I had seen; and when the woman took me upon her knee and kissed me, I ran away as quick as I could, and rubbed my face ‘to get the black off’; for I thought she would ‘crock’ me, like mother’s kettle. Mother gave the poor creatures some supper; but they thought themselves pursued and were uneasy. Presently father heard the trampling of horses crossing a bridge on one of the main roads, half a mile off; so he took his guests out the back door and down into the swamp near the brook to hide, giving them arms to defend themselves, but returning to the house to await the event. It proved a false alarm; the horsemen were people of the neighborhood going to Hudson village. Father then went out into the dark wood,--for it was night,--and had some difficulty in finding his fugitives; finally he was guided to the spot by the sound of the man’s heart throbbing for fear of capture. He brought them into the house again, sheltered them a while, and sent them on their way.”[61]
The atmosphere in these days was becoming more and more charged with the slavery problem. That same Louisiana which Toussaint had given America, was gradually filling with settlers until the question of admitting parts of it as states faced the nation, and led to the Missouri Compromise. The discussion of the measure was fierce in John Brown’s neighborhood, and it must have strengthened his dislike of slavery and turned his earnest mind more and more toward the Negroes.
In the very year that death first entered his family and took a boy of four, and just before the sombre days when his earnest young wife died demented in childbirth and was buried with her babe, occurred the Nat Turner insurrection in Virginia, the most successful and bloody of slave uprisings since Hayti.
Squire Hudson, the father of the town where John Brown lived and one of the founders of Western Reserve University, heard the news in stern joy; a neighbor met him “one day in September, 1831, coming from his post-office, and reading a newspaper he had just received, which seemed to excite him very much as he read. As Mr. Wright came within hearing, the old Calvinist was exclaiming, ‘Thank God for that! I am glad of it! Thank God they have risen at last!’ Inquiring what the news was, Squire Hudson replied, ‘Why, the slaves have risen down in Virginia, and are fighting for their freedom as we did for ours. I pray God that they may get it.’”[62]
They did not get freedom but death. And yet there on the edge of Dismal Swamp they slaughtered fifty whites, held the land in terror for more than a month, and set going a tremendous wave of reaction. In the South, Negro churches and free Negro schools were sternly restricted, just at the time Great Britain was freeing her West Indian slaves. In the North, came two movements: a determined anti-slavery campaign, and an opposing movement which disfranchised Negroes, burned their churches and schools, and robbed them of their friends. The Negroes rushed together for counsel and defense, and held their first national meeting in Philadelphia, where they deliberated earnestly on migration to Canada and on schools. But schools for Negroes were especially feared North as well as South, and in John Brown’s native state of Connecticut a white woman was shamefully persecuted for attempting to teach Negroes. All this aroused John Brown’s antipathy to slavery and made it more definite and purposeful. In November of the year which witnessed the burning of Prudence Crandall’s school, and a year after his second marriage, he wrote to his brother:
“Since you have left me, I have been trying to devise some means whereby I might do something in a practical way for my poor fellow men who are in bondage; and having fully consulted the feelings of my wife and my three boys, we have agreed to get at least one Negro boy or youth, and bring him up as we do our own,--viz., give him a good English education, learn him what we can about the history of the world, about business, about general subjects, and, above all, try to teach him the fear of God. We think of three ways to obtain one: First, to try to get some Christian slaveholder to release one to us. Second, to get a free one, if no one will let us have one that is a slave. Third, if that does not succeed, we have all agreed to submit to considerable privation in order to buy one. This we are now using means in order to effect, in the confident expectation that God is about to bring them all out of the house of bondage.
“I will just mention that when this subject was first introduced, Jason had gone to bed; but no sooner did he hear the thing hinted, than his warm heart kindled, and he turned out to have a part in the discussion of a subject of such exceeding interest. I have for years been trying to devise some way to get a school a-going here for blacks, and I think that on many accounts it would be a most favorable location. Children here would have no intercourse with vicious people of their own kind, nor with openly vicious persons of any kind. There would be no powerful opposition influence against such a thing; and should there be any, I believe the settlement might be so effected in future as to have almost the whole influence of the place in favor of such a school. Write me how you would like to join me, and try to get on from Hudson and thereabouts some first-rate Abolitionist families with you. I do honestly believe that our united exertions alone might soon, with the good hand of our God upon us, effect it all.”[63]
Nothing came of this project, except that John Brown grew more deeply interested. He was now worth $20,000, a man of influence and he felt more and more moved toward definite action to help the Negroes. They were keeping up their conventions and the stream of fugitives was augmenting. The problem, however, was not simply one of slavery. The plight of the free Negro was particularly pitiable. He was liable to be seized and sold South whether an actual slave or not; he was discriminated against and despised in all walks. This was bad enough in every-day life, but to a straightforward religious soul like John Brown it was simply intolerable in the church of God. His eldest daughter says:
“One evening after he had been singing to me, he asked me how I would like to have some poor little black children that were slaves (explaining to me the meaning of slaves) come and live with us; and asked me if I would be willing to divide my food and clothes with them. He made such an impression on my sympathies, that the first colored person that I ever saw (it was a man I met on the street in Meadville, Pa.) I felt such pity for, that I wanted to ask him if he did not want to come and live at our house. When I was six or seven years old, a little incident took place in the church at Franklin, O. (of which all the older part of our family were members), which caused quite an excitement.”[64]
His son tells the details of this incident:
“About 1837, mother, Jason, Owen and I, joined the Congregational Church at Franklin, the Rev. Mr. Burritt, pastor. Shortly after, the other societies, including Methodists and Episcopalians, joined ours in an undertaking to hold a protracted meeting under the special management of an evangelist preacher from Cleveland, named Avery. The house of the Congregationalists being the largest, it was chosen as the place for this meeting. Invitations were sent out to church folks in adjoining towns to ‘come up to the help of the Lord against the mighty;’ and soon the house was crowded, the assembly occupying by invitation the pews of the church generally. Preacher Avery gave us in succession four sermons from one text,--‘Cast ye up, cast ye up! Prepare ye the way of the Lord; make His paths straight!’ Soon lukewarm Christians were heated up to a melting condition, and there was a bright prospect of a good shower of grace. There were at that time in Franklin a number of free colored persons and some fugitive slaves. These became interested and came to the meetings, but were given seats by themselves, where the stove had stood, near the door,--not a good place for seeing ministers or singers. Father noticed this, and when the next meeting (which was at evening) had fairly opened, he arose and called attention to the fact that, in seating the colored portion of the audience, a discrimination had been made, and said that he did not believe God ‘is a respecter of persons.’ He then invited the colored people to occupy his slip. The blacks accepted, and all of our family took their vacated seats. This was a bombshell, and the Holy Spirit in the hearts of Pastor Burritt and Deacon Beach at once gave up His place to another tenant. The next day father received a call from the deacons to admonish him and ‘labor’ with him; but they returned with new views of Christian duty. The blacks during the remainder of that protracted meeting continued to occupy our slip, and our family the seats around the stove. We soon after moved to Hudson, and though living three miles away, became regular attendants at the Congregational Church in the centre of the town. In about a year we received a letter from good Deacon Williams, informing us that our relations with the church in Franklin were ended in accordance with a rule made by the church since we left, that ‘any member being absent a year without reporting him or herself to that church should be cut off.’ This was the first intimation we had of the existence of the rule. Father, on reading the letter, became white with anger. This was my first taste of the pro-slavery diabolism that had intrenched itself in the church, and I shed a few uncalled for tears over the matter, for instead I should have rejoiced in my emancipation. From that day my theological shackles were a good deal broken, and I have not worn them since (to speak of),--not even for ornament.”[65]
The years of 1837 and 1838 were the years of persecution for the Abolition cause. Lovejoy was murdered in Illinois and mobs raged in Massachusetts and Pennsylvania. Pennsylvania Hall, in Philadelphia, was burned, and Marlborough Chapel in Boston, where John Brown himself seems to have been present fighting back the people, was sacked. Indeed, as he afterward said, he had seen some of the “principal Abolition mobs.”
Whatever John Brown may have wished to do at this time was frustrated by the panic, which swept away his fortune, and left him bankrupt. Yet something he must do--he must at least promise God that he and his family would eternally oppose slavery. How, he did not know--he was not sure--but somehow he was determined, and his old idea of educating youth was still uppermost.
It was in 1839, when a Negro preacher named Fayette was visiting Brown, and bringing his story of persecution and injustice, that this great promise was made. Solemnly John Brown arose; he was then a man of nearly forty years, tall, dark and clean-shaven; by him sat his young wife of twenty-two and his oldest boys of eighteen, sixteen and fifteen. Six other children slept in the room back of the dark preacher. John Brown told them of his purpose to make active war on slavery, and bound his family in solemn and secret compact to labor for emancipation. And then, instead of standing to pray, as was his wont, he fell upon his knees and implored God’s blessing on his enterprise.
This marks a turning-point in John Brown’s life: in his boyhood he had disliked slavery and his antipathy toward it grew with his years; yet of necessity it occupied but little of a life busy with breadwinning. Gradually, however, he saw the gathering of the mighty struggle about him; the news of the skirmish battles of the greatest moral war of the century aroused and quickened him, and all the more when they struck the tender chords of his acquaintanceships and sympathies. He saw his friends hurt and imposed on until at last, gradually, then suddenly, it dawned upon him that he must fight this monster slavery. He did not now plan physical warfare--he was yet a non-resistant, hating war, and did not dream of Harper’s Ferry; but he set his face toward the goal and whithersoever the Lord led, he was ready to follow. He still, too, had his living to earn--his family to care for. Slavery was not yet the sole object of his life, but as he passed on in his daily duties he was determined to seize every opportunity to strike it a blow.
This, at least it seems to me, is a fair interpretation of John Brown’s thought and action from the evidence at hand. Some have believed that John Brown planned Harper’s Ferry or something similar in 1839; others have doubted whether he had any plans against slavery before 1850. The truth probably lies between these extreme views. Human purposes grow slowly and in curious ways; thought by thought they build themselves until in their full panoplied vigor and definite outline not even the thinker can tell the exact process of the growing, or say that here was the beginning or there the ending. Nor does this slow growth and gathering make the end less wonderful or the motive less praiseworthy. Few Americans recognized in 1839 that the great central problem of America was slavery; and of that few, fewer still were willing to fight it as they knew it should be fought. Of this lesser number, two men stood almost alone, ready to back their faith by action--William Lloyd Garrison and John Brown.
These men did not then know each other--they had in these early days scarcely heard each other’s names. They never came to be friends or sympathizers. When John Brown was in Boston he never went to The Liberator office, and in after years, now and then, he dropped words very like contempt for “non-resistants”; while Garrison flayed the leader of the Harper’s Ferry raid. They were alike only in their intense hatred of slavery, and spiritually they crossed each other’s paths in curious fashion, Garrison drifting from a willingness to fight slavery in all ways or in any way to a fateful attitude of non-resistance and withdrawal from the contamination of slaveholders; John Brown drifting from non-resistance to the red path of active warfare.
Nowhere did the imminence of a great struggle show itself more clearly than among the Negroes themselves. Organized insurrection ceased in the South, not because of the increased rigors of the slave system, but because the great safety-valve of escape northward was opened wider and wider, and the methods were gradually coördinated into that mysterious system known as the Underground Railroad. The slaves and freedmen started the work and to the end bore the brunt of danger and hardship; but gradually they more and more secured the coöperation of men like John Brown, and of others less radical but just as sympathetic. Here and there the free Negroes in the North began to gain economic footing as servants in cities, as farmers in Ohio and even as entrepreneurs in the great catering business of Philadelphia and New York.
The schools were still for the most part closed to them. They made strenuous efforts to counteract this and established dozens of schools of their own all over the land. At last in 1839 Oberlin was founded and certain earnest students of Cincinnati, disgusted with the color line at Lane College, seceded to Oberlin and brought the color question there. It was fairly met and Negroes were admitted.
It was the establishment of Oberlin College in 1839 and the appointment of his father as trustee that gave John Brown a new vision of life and usefulness--of a life which would at once combine the pursuit of a great moral ideal and the honest earning of a good living for a family. Brown proposed to survey the Virginia lands of Oberlin, as we have shown, locate a large farm for himself and settle there with his family. Here he undoubtedly expected to carry out the plan previously laid before his brother Frederick. He consulted the Oberlin authorities concerning “provision for religious and school privileges” and they thought it possible to have these, although nothing was said specifically of Negroes. The position was strategic and John Brown knew it: in the non-slaveholding portion of a slave state, near the river and not far from the foothills of mountains, beyond which lay the Great Black Way, was formed a highway for the Underground Railroad and a place for experiment in the uplift of black men. That he would meet opposition, and strong opposition, John Brown must have known, but probably at this time he counted on the prevalence of law and justice and the stern principles of his religion rather than on the sword of Gideon, which was his later reliance. But it was not the “will of Providence” as we have seen, that Brown should then settle in Virginia, since his increasing financial straits and final bankruptcy overthrew all plans of purchasing the one thousand acres for which he had already bargained.
The slough of despond through which John Brown passed in the succeeding years, from 1842 to 1846, was never fully betrayed by this stern, self-repressing Puritan. Yet the loss of a fortune and the shattering of a dream, the bankruptcy and imprisonment, and the death of five children, while around him whirled the struggle of the churches with slavery and Abolition mobs, all dropped a sombre brooding veil of stern inexorable fate over his spirit--a veil which never lifted. The dark mysterious tragedy of life gripped him with awful intensity--the iron entered his soul. He became sterner and more silent. He brooded and listened for the voice of the avenging God, and girded up his loins in readiness.
“My husband always believed,” said his wife in after years, “that he was to be an instrument in the hands of Providence, and I believed it too.... Many a night he had lain awake and prayed concerning it.”[66]
It began to dawn upon him that he had sinned in the selfish pursuit of petty ends: that he must be about his Father’s business of giving the death-blow to that “sum of all villanies--slavery.” He had erred in making his great work a side object--a secondary thing; it must be his first and only duty, and let God attend to the nurture of his family. As his conception of his own relation to slavery thus broadened and deepened, so too did his plan of attacking the system become clearer and more definite and he spent hours discussing the matter. In Springfield, “he used to talk much on the subject, and had the reputation of being quite ultra. His bookkeeper tells me that he and his eldest son used to discuss slavery by the hour in his counting-room, and he used to say that it was right for slaves to kill their masters and escape, and thought slaveholders were guilty of a very great wickedness.”[67]
He studied the census returns and the distribution of the Negroes and made maps of fugitive slave routes with roads, plantations, and supplies. He learned of Isaac, Denmark Vesey, Nat Turner and the Cumberland region insurrections in South Carolina, Virginia, and Tennessee; he knew of the organized resistance to slave-catchers in Pennsylvania, and the history of Hayti and Jamaica.
It needed, as he soon saw, something more radical than schools and moral suasion; so deep-seated and radical a disease demanded “Action! Action!” He welcomed his new and long-loved calling of shepherd because of the leisure it gave him to study out his great moral problem. He sought and gained the acquaintance of Negro leaders like Garnet, Loguen, Gloucester and McCune Smith. As his sheep business broadened, he traveled about and probably at this time first saw Harper’s Ferry--the mighty pass where Potomac and Shenandoah, hurling aside the mountain masses, rush to their singular wedding.
Thus the distraction of the Springfield wool business came to John Brown almost in the guise of a temptation to be shunned. For a moment about 1845 he looked again on the lure of wealth and dreamed how useful it would be to what was now his great life object. But only for a moment, for when he realized the price he must pay--the time, the chicanery, the petty detail--he turned from it in disgust. It was at this time that he studied the history of insurrection and became familiar with the Abolition movement; as early as 1846 his Harper’s Ferry project began to form itself more or less clearly in his mind.
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End of part 7 of 19
Continue readingChapter 5: The Vision of the Damned (Part 2)
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