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+*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 77258 ***
+
+               LITTLE BLUE BOOK NO. 521
+             Edited by E. Haldeman-Julius
+
+
+                  Life of John Brown
+
+                     Michael Gold
+
+
+               HALDEMAN-JULIUS COMPANY
+                    GIRARD, KANSAS
+
+
+
+
+                   Copyright, 1924,
+               Haldeman-Julius Company.
+
+
+       PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
+
+
+
+
+FOREWORD.
+
+
+John Brown’s life is a grand, simple epic that should inspire one to
+heroism. No one asks for dates and minute details on hearing the life
+of Jesus or Socrates. There are men who have proved their superiority
+to the pettiness of life, and who seem almost divine. John Brown is one
+of them. I think he was almost our greatest American. I know that he
+was the greatest man the common people of America have yet produced.
+
+He did not become a President, a financier, a great scientist or
+artist; he was a plain and rather obscure farmer until his death.
+That is his greatness. He had no great offices, no recognition
+or applause of multitudes to spur him on, to feed his vanity and
+self-righteousness. He did his duty in silence; he was an outlaw. Only
+after he had been hung like a common murderer, and only after the Civil
+War had come to fulfill his prophecies, was he recognized as a great
+figure.
+
+But in his life he was a common man to the end, a hard-working, honest,
+Puritan farmer with a large family, a man worried with the details of
+poverty, and obscure as ourselves. Now we are taught as school-children
+that only those who become Presidents and captains of finance are the
+successful ones in our democracy. John Brown proved that there is
+another form of success, within the reach of everyone, and that is to
+devote one’s life to a great and pure cause.
+
+John Brown was hung as an outlaw; but he was a success, as Jesus and
+Socrates were successes. Some day school-children will be taught that
+his had been the only sort of success worth striving for in his time.
+The rest was dross; the personal success of the beetle that rolls
+itself a huger ball of dung than its fellow-beetles, and exults over it.
+
+John Brown is a legend; but I still see him in the simple, obscure
+heroes who fight for freedom today in America. That is why I am telling
+his story. It is the story of thousands of men living in America now,
+did we but know it. John Brown is still in prison in America; yes, and
+he has been hung and shot down a hundred times since his first death.
+For his soul is marching on; it is the soul of liberty and justice,
+which cannot die, or be suppressed.
+
+
+
+
+LIFE OF JOHN BROWN
+
+WHEN SLAVERY WAS RESPECTABLE
+
+
+To understand any of the outstanding men of history one must also
+understand something of their background. The Roman Emperor Marcus
+Aurelius persecuted and burned the primitive Christians; yet he is
+accounted one of the most religious and humane of historical figures,
+and his Meditations are commonly considered a book of the gentlest and
+wisest counsel toward the good life.
+
+You cannot understand this paradox unless you know the history of the
+Roman state. And you cannot understand John Brown unless you understand
+the history of his times.
+
+John Brown, until the age of fifty, had lived the peaceful, laborious
+life of a Yankee farmer with a large family. He hated war, and was
+almost a Quaker; had never handled fire-arms, and was a man of deep
+and silent affections. He was deeply religious, read the Bible daily;
+Christianity imbued all the acts of his daily existence.
+
+This man, nearing his sixtieth year, assembled a group of young men
+with rifles and took the field to wage guerrilla war on slavery. He
+became a warrior, an outlaw. What drove him to this desperate stand?
+
+I think the answer is: Respectability. There is nothing more maddening
+to a man of deep moral feeling than to find that slavery has become
+respectable, while freedom is considered the mad dream of a fanatic.
+
+The slavery of black men had become the most respectable institution in
+America in John Brown’s time. It had had a dark and bloody history of a
+hundred years in which to become firmly rooted into American life.
+
+There had been slavery in Europe for centuries before the discovery of
+America--but it was white slavery. Each feudal baron owned hordes of
+serfs--white farmers--who were as much a part of his land-holdings as
+his castles, horses and ploughs.
+
+With the invention of printing, gunpowder and machine production the
+system of feudalism declined. The French Revolution helped deal it
+a death blow. The last country where this ancient slavery of white
+men was not dead was in Russia; but African slavery, the slavery of
+Negroes, who were heathens, and therefore could morally be bought and
+sold by Christians, had been reintroduced on the northern coast of the
+Mediterranean by Moorish traders. In the year 990 these Moors from the
+Barbary Coast first reached the cities of Nigrita, and established
+an uninterrupted exchange of Saracen and European luxuries for black
+slaves.
+
+Columbus tried to introduce Indian slavery into Europe but the church
+forbade it, for Indians were accounted Christians when converted.
+The unhappy Negroes were not considered convertible; their slavery
+was sanctified by the church. And for the next few centuries the
+African slave-trade was the most lucrative traffic pursued by mankind.
+Black slaves were to be found in the whole vast area of Spanish and
+Portuguese America, also in Dutch and French Guinea and the West
+Indies. It was black men who cleared the jungles, tilled the fields,
+built the cities and roads and laid down, in their sweat and blood,
+the foundations of civilization in the New World. Great jealous and
+prosperous monopolies were formed in this traffic of slaves; and its
+profits were greedily shared by philosophers, statesmen and kings.
+
+In 1776, the American colonies were inhabited by two and a half million
+white persons, who owned half a million slaves. Many of the most
+rational and humane leaders of the Revolution saw the inconsistency of
+slave-holders making a revolution in the name of freedom. There was
+some early agitation against slavery, but the humanitarians were in a
+minority. Even then slavery had become respectable and profitable. It
+would have been easy and cheap to have freed the slaves then. It would
+have been the most practicable thing the young nation could have done.
+Not a life would have been lost; and the development of the country
+might have been even more rapid. But it was not done; such acts need
+more far-sightedness than the average man possesses.
+
+Slavery grew by leaps and bounds, as the country was growing.
+
+The slave trader, shrewd, intelligent and rich, kidnapped young men
+and women in Africa and did a huge business. His markets became the
+feature of every Southern town. The planters lolled at their ease, and
+devised ways and means of forcing their slaves to breed more rapidly.
+The slaves were treated as impersonally as animals. Mothers were sold
+away from their children, and husbands from their wives. Generations
+of black men died in bondage, and left their children only the sad
+inheritance of slavery.
+
+The South developed an aristocrat class of indolent white men and women
+who looked down on all work as ignominious, and who used their minds,
+not in the arts or sciences, but to find new moral justifications for
+slavery.
+
+Slavery was respectable. “It is an act of philanthropy to keep the
+Negro here, as we keep our children in subjection for their own
+good,” said a Southern statesman. Slavery was moral. Even most of
+the respectability of the North enlisted in its defense. In 1826,
+Edward Everett, the great Massachusetts statesman, said in Congress
+that slavery was sanctioned by religion and by the United States
+Constitution.
+
+The churches of almost every denomination were solidly behind slavery.
+The Supreme Court ruled that it was constitutional. A pro-slavery
+President occupied the White House, and Senator Sumner, a lonely
+abolitionist, was beaten down with a loaded cane on the senate floor
+because he dared say a brave word against the nation’s crime.
+
+In 1838 William Lloyd Garrison founded the Liberator, first of the
+abolitionist journals. He said that “the constitution is a covenant
+with death, and an agreement with hell,” and he fought slavery with
+all his power. “Our country is the world, our countrymen all mankind,”
+was the slogan of his journal. Garrison was beaten by a mob in a
+northern city for his courage; and other abolitionists were tarred
+and feathered, lynched, and attacked by mobs of respectable northern
+merchants and church-goers, much as pacifists were beaten by mobs
+during the late war.
+
+Slavery was respectable. Negro field hands sold for $1,000 each, and
+innocent black babies were worth $100 each to the white master as they
+suckled at a Negro mother’s breast.
+
+To attack slavery was to attack the constitution, the church, the
+government, and the institution of private property. To attack
+respectability has always been the crime of the saviours, and
+respectability is the cross on which they are forever hung.
+
+
+
+
+HOW JOHN BROWN BECAME AN ABOLITIONIST
+
+In the pagan ages and in the more distant days of savagery, men were
+individuals. They had no social imagination. They could stand by and
+see another man writhe in tortures, and laugh at him. Civilization
+has been developing social imagination; it has been breeding more and
+more the type of human being who feels the suffering and injustice of
+another as his own.
+
+John Brown was perhaps born with this strain in him. In 1857, when he
+had already plunged into his life-work, and was in the thick of bloody
+fights in Kansas, he sat down to write a most charming and tender
+letter to a little boy who was the son of one of his friends in the
+east. Those who think of fighters like John Brown as possessed by only
+a lust for battle, ought to read this letter. It reveals how soft was
+his heart under the grim mask of the Kansas warrior.
+
+The letter is autobiographical. It tells how John Brown first became
+acquainted with the horrors of slavery, and what effect it had on his
+imagination.
+
+This letter is so touching, and so remarkable for the picture it gives
+of John Brown’s early years, also for the picture of the man’s mature
+character as revealed by his own words, that I am tempted to give it in
+full. I shall give only parts of it, however.
+
+
+
+
+THE LETTER TO MASTER HENRY L. STEARNS
+
+“My dear Young Friend:--I had not forgotten my promise to write you;
+but my constant care and anxiety have obliged me to put it off a long
+time. I do not flatter myself I can write anything that will very much
+interest you; but have concluded to send you a short story of a certain
+boy of my acquaintance; and for convenience and shortness of name, I
+will call him John.
+
+“This story will be mainly a narration of follies and errors, which I
+hope you may avoid; but there is one thing connected with it, which
+will be calculated to encourage any young person to persevering effort,
+and that is the degree of success in accomplishing his objects which
+to a great extent marked the course of this boy throughout my entire
+acquaintance with him; notwithstanding his moderate capacity, and still
+more moderate acquirements.
+
+“John was born May 9, 1800, at Torrington, Connecticut; of poor and
+hard-working parents; a descendant on the side of his father of one of
+the company of the Mayflower who landed at Plymouth, 1620. His mother
+was descended from a man who came at an early period to New England
+from Amsterdam, in Holland. Both his father’s and his mother’s fathers
+served in the war of the revolution; his father’s father died in a barn
+at New York while in the service, in 1776.
+
+“I cannot tell you of anything in the first four years of John’s life
+worth mentioning save that at an early age he was tempted by three
+large brass pins belonging to a girl who lived in the family; and stole
+them. In this he was detected by his mother; and after having a full
+day to think of the wrong, received from her a thorough whipping.
+
+“When he was five years old his father moved to Ohio, then a wilderness
+filled with wild beasts and Indians. During the long journey which
+was performed in part or mostly with an ox-team, he was called on by
+turns to assist a boy five years older, and learned to think he could
+accomplish smart things in driving the cows and riding the horses.
+Sometimes he met with rattlesnakes which were very large, and which
+some of the company generally managed to kill.
+
+“After getting to Ohio he was for some time rather afraid of the
+Indians, and of their rifles; but this soon wore off, and he used to
+hang about them quite as much as was consistent with good manners, and
+learned a trifle of their talk. His father at this time learned to
+dress deer skin, and John, who was perhaps rather observing, ever after
+remembered the entire process of deer skin dressing, so that he could
+at any time dress his own leather such as squirrel, raccoon, cat, wolf
+or dog skins; and also he learned to make whip lashes, which brought
+him in some change at various times, and was useful in many ways.
+
+“At six years old John began to be quite a rambler in the new wild
+country, finding birds and squirrels, and sometimes a wild turkey’s
+nest. Once a poor Indian boy gave him a yellow marble, the first he had
+ever seen. This he thought a good deal of, and kept it a good while;
+but at last he lost it one day. It took years to heal the wound, and
+I think he cried at times about it. About five months after this he
+caught a young squirrel, tearing off its tail in doing it; and getting
+severely bitten at the same time himself. He however held on to the
+little bob-tailed squirrel and finally got him perfectly tamed, so
+that he almost idolized his pet. This, too, he lost, by its wandering
+away; and for a year or two John was in mourning; and looking at all
+the squirrels he could see to try and discover Bobtail, if possible. He
+had also at one time become the owner of a little ewe lamb which did
+finely until it was about two-thirds grown, when it sickened and died.
+This brought another protracted mourning season; not that he felt the
+pecuniary loss so heavily, for that was never his disposition; but so
+strong and earnest were his attachments. It was a school of adversity
+for John; you may laugh at all this, but they were sore trials to him.
+
+“John was never quarrelsome; but was excessively fond of the roughest
+and hardest kind of play; and could never get enough of it. He would
+always choose to stay at home and work hard, rather than go to school.
+To be sent off alone through the wilderness to very considerable
+distances was particularly his delight; and in this he was often
+indulged; so that by the time he was twelve years old he was sent off
+more than a hundred miles with companies of cattle; and he would have
+thought his character much injured had he been obliged to be helped in
+such a job. This was a boyish feeling, but characteristic, nevertheless.
+
+“When the war broke out with England in 1812 his father soon commenced
+furnishing the troops with beef cattle, the collection and driving of
+which afforded John some opportunity for the chase, on foot, of wild
+steers and other cattle through the woods. During this war he had some
+chance to form his own boyish judgment of men and measures; and the
+effect of what he saw was to so far disgust him with military affairs
+that he would neither train nor drill, but got off by paying fines;
+and got along like a Quaker until his age had finally cleared him of
+military duty.
+
+“During the war with England a circumstance occurred that in the end
+made him a most determined Abolitionist and led him to swear eternal
+war with slavery. John was stopping for a short time with a very
+gentlemanly landlord, since made a United States Marshal. This man
+owned a slave boy near John’s age, a boy very active, intelligent and
+full of good feeling to whom John was under considerable obligation for
+numerous little acts of kindness.
+
+“The Master made a great pet of John; brought him to table with his
+finest company and friends and called their attention to every little
+smart thing he said or did, and to the fact of his being more than
+a hundred miles from home with a company of cattle alone; while the
+Negro boy (who was fully if not more than his equal) was badly clothed,
+poorly fed and lodged in cold weather, and beaten before John’s eyes
+with iron shovels or any other thing that came first to hand.
+
+“This brought John to reflect on the wretched, hopeless condition
+of fatherless and motherless slave children; for such children have
+neither fathers or mothers to protect and provide for them.
+
+“He sometimes would raise the question in his mind: Is God, then, their
+father?”
+
+
+
+
+HOW JOHN BROWN EDUCATED HIMSELF
+
+There are other matters treated in this long and charming letter,
+written by an outlaw 57 years old, to a boy of twelve. One detail that
+is important is the analysis of his own character. John Brown says his
+father early made him a sort of foreman in his tanning establishment,
+and that though he got on in the most friendly way with everyone, “the
+habit so early formed of being obeyed rendered him in after life too
+much disposed to speak in an imperious or dictating way.” John Brown
+was ever humble, and severely chastised his own faults, but this habit
+of being a leader served him in good stead, and made him the born
+captain of forlorn hopes he later became.
+
+Another detail that interests us is his account of his early reading.
+Working-class Americans, and they are the majority of the nation, do
+not go to the high schools and universities. Neither did John Brown.
+But they can read history, as he did at ten years, and they can study
+and make themselves proficient in some field, as he made a surveyor of
+himself by home study. He also read passionately, he says, the lives
+of great, good and wise men; their sayings and writings; the school of
+biography that seems to have nurtured so many great men. John Brown
+never went to school after his childhood; but he became an expert
+surveyor, he learned the fine points of cattle breeding and tanning,
+he was a student of astronomy, he knew the Bible almost by heart, he
+studied military tactics later in life, he was familiar with the lives
+and times of most of the great leaders of mankind, and best of all, he
+knew how to stir men to great deeds, and lead them in the battle.
+
+Great men do not need to own a college diploma; they teach themselves,
+they are taught by Life.
+
+How meaningless college degrees would sound if attached after the names
+of Brutus, Pericles, Socrates, Caius Gracchus, Buddha, Jesus, Wat
+Tyler, Jefferson, Danton, William Lloyd Garrison!
+
+As for instance: Jesus Christ, D.D.; Robert Burns, M.A.; Victor
+Hugo, B.S.; John Brown, Ph.D.! How superfluous the titles of man’s
+universities, when Life has crowned the student with real and greener
+laurels! Yes, there are many things not taught in the colleges!
+
+
+
+
+THE MOULDING OF JOHN BROWN
+
+And so by his own pen, we have had illuminated for us the life of John
+Brown up to his twentieth year. We see him, a big, strong boy, fond
+of hard work, capable in all he put his hand to, a young man bred in
+the hard college of life in an early pioneer settlement. He was fond
+of reading good books, and improving his mind; he was rather shy, and
+yet filled with an extraordinary self-confidence, which made him a
+born leader, one who could show the way to men older than himself, and
+command them, and himself, in the straight line of duty.
+
+The subsequent life of John Brown cannot be understood unless one knows
+all the environmental forces and the heredity that went to mould him.
+John Brown, a Puritan in the austerity of his manner of living, the
+narrow yet burning reality of his vision, and the hardships he later
+underwent, came of a family of American pioneers. To John Brown life
+from the outset meant incessant strife, first against unconquered
+nature, then in the struggle for a living, and finally in that effort
+to be a Samson to the pro-slavery Philistines in which his existence
+culminated.
+
+At twenty John Brown married Dianthe Lusk, a plain but quiet and
+amiable girl, as deeply religious as her young husband, and as ready as
+he to assume all the serious burdens of life.
+
+He was working in his father’s tanning establishment at this time,
+at Hudson, Ohio. But in May, 1825, John Brown moved his family to
+Richmond, near Meadville, Pennsylvania, the first of his many moves for
+he was imbued with a deep restlessness, the hunger of the pioneer for
+virgin lands and new enterprises.
+
+Here, with his characteristic energy, he cleared twenty-five acres of
+timber land, built a fine tannery, sunk vats, and in a few months had
+leather tanning in all of them. Like his father, Owen Brown, John was
+of a marked ethical and social nature. He proved of great value to the
+new settlement at Richmond by his devotion to the cause of religion and
+civil order. He surveyed new roads, was instrumental in building school
+houses, procuring preachers, “and encouraging anything that would
+have a moral tendency.” It became almost a proverb in Richmond, so an
+early neighbor records, to say of a progressive man that he was “as
+enterprising and honest as John Brown, and as useful to the county.”
+
+In Richmond the family dwelt for ten years. John Brown raised corn,
+did his tanning, brought the first blooded stock into the county, and
+became the first postmaster. Here, also, at Richmond, the first great
+grief came into John Brown’s life, to school him in that stoicism that
+later made him the hero of a great cause. A four year old son died in
+1831, and the next year his wife, Dianthe, died after having lived and
+worked beside him like a good, faithful woman for twelve years, giving
+birth to seven children in that time, five of whom grew to vigorous
+manhood and womanhood.
+
+Nearly a year later John Brown was married for the second time, to Mary
+Anne Day, daughter of a blacksmith. She was then a large, silent girl
+of sixteen, who had come to John Brown’s home with an older sister to
+care for his children after his wife’s death. He quickly grew fond of
+the young pioneer girl; one day he gave her a letter offering marriage.
+She was so overcome that she dared not read it. Next morning she found
+courage to do so, and when she went down to the spring for water for
+the house, he followed her and she gave him her answer there.
+
+Mary Brown was the best wife a John Brown could have found. She had
+great physical ruggedness, and she bore for her husband thirteen
+children, seven of whom died in childhood, and two of whom were killed
+in early manhood at Harper’s Ferry. She did more than her full share
+of the arduous labor of a large pioneer household, and she endured
+hardships like a Spartan mother. She was strong; and she had a noble
+and unflinching character. It was only a heroic woman such as this who
+could have been the wife of a hero; who could have given husband and
+sons cheerfully to the cause of abolition, and been so silent and brave
+even after their death.
+
+John Brown worked hard; he had no vices, he was honest and painstaking,
+but somehow success in business always eluded him. This was another of
+the griefs of his life. He blamed himself for his failures, but it was
+really not his fault. It requires a real worship of money to make one
+a business success, and John Brown never took money as seriously as it
+demands of its lovers. After ten years in Pennsylvania, of much hard
+work with little results, he moved to Franklin Mills, in Ohio, where
+he entered the tanning business with Zenas Kent, a well-to-do business
+man of that town. Here he also became involved in a land development
+scheme that was ruined by a large corporation’s maneuvers. He was so
+deeply involved in this and other ventures that in the bad times of
+1837 he failed. In 1842 he was again compelled to go through bankruptcy
+proceedings.
+
+In after years John Brown explained these failures to his oldest son as
+the result of the false doctrine of doing business on credit.
+
+“Instead of being thoroughly imbued with the doctrine of pay as you
+go,” he wrote, “I started out in life with the idea that nothing could
+be done without capital, and that a poor man must use his credit and
+borrow; and this pernicious doctrine has been the rock on which I, as
+well as many others, have split. The practical effect of this false
+doctrine has been to keep me like a toad under a harrow most of my
+business life. Running into debt includes so much evil that I hope all
+my children will shun it as they would a pestilence.”
+
+John Brown never gave up in despair anything he had attempted; his
+business failures bruised him sorely, but he arose each time like
+a rugged wrestler and began a new endeavor. In 1839, at one of his
+darkest periods, he began a sheep growing and wool marketing venture
+in which he engaged for many years, going into partnership with Simon
+Perkins, a wealthy merchant of Akron, Ohio. This partnership was the
+longest and final one of Brown’s business career.
+
+So that is how one must think of Brown, too; not only as the
+consecrated, almost inhuman battler and martyr, but also as the sane,
+plodding, patient farmer, tanner, surveyor, real estate speculator,
+and practical shepherd. He was a tall, spare, silent man, terribly
+pious, terribly honest, a good neighbor and community leader, and the
+father of a large family of sons and daughters--a patriarch out of the
+Bible, tending his flocks and gathering about him a tribe of young and
+stalwart sons.
+
+He was a typical pioneer American of those rough days in the settling
+of the middle west. He had no time for frivolity, though there was a
+grim humor in the man; he brought his children up strictly, yet with a
+justice that made them all love, revere and respect him until the end;
+and he had his share of those private sorrows that crush so many men;
+his first beloved wife had died, with an infant son; he had failed in
+business; and he had lost by death no less than nine children, three
+of whom perished in one month in those hard surroundings, and one of
+whom, a little daughter, was accidently scalded to death by an elder
+sister. These deaths hurt John Brown cruelly, for though stern and
+stoic, he was a fiercely tender father; all his affections were fierce,
+though inexpressible and deep, as a lion’s.
+
+“I seem to be struck almost dumb by the dreadful news,” he wrote his
+family, when he heard of this accident. “One more dear little feeble
+child I am to meet no more till the dead, small and great, shall stand
+before God. I trust that none of you will feel disposed to cast an
+unreasonable blame on my dear Ruth on account of the dreadful trial we
+are called to suffer. This is a bitter cup indeed; but blessed be God;
+a brighter day shall dawn; and let us not sorrow as they who have no
+hope.”
+
+The Browns had made at least ten moves in the years from 1830 to 1845,
+and John Brown had engaged in no less than seven different occupations.
+But always, under the business man and farmer, there had been the
+solemn philosopher brooding on God and the mystery and terror of
+life; and always, under the sober father and citizen, there had been
+planning and brooding and suffering keenly the tender humanitarian, the
+Christ-like martyr, the relentless fighter who would finally pay with
+his life to strike a blow at Slavery, “that sum of all villainies.”
+
+In this patriarchal farmer of the middle west, Freedom was forging and
+sharpening a terrible weapon that was some day to be turned against
+Tyranny. Quietly, in peaceful surroundings the work was being done; no
+one knew the fire in this man, least of all himself.
+
+
+
+
+THE GROWTH OF AN ABOLITIONIST
+
+For though John Brown had always been an abolitionist, though he had
+learned from his father, and from his own experiences to hate slavery
+and its manifold brutalities, it was not until his thirty-fifth year
+that John Brown showed any more active hatred of it than did hundreds
+of Ohio farmers around him. Like them, he aided when he could, in the
+work of the Underground Railroad. Thousands of free Negroes and white
+abolitionists were engaged in this work of passing fugitive slaves from
+the South up over the Canadian line, where they were being restored to
+manhood under the flag of monarchism.
+
+But John Brown, in 1834, began thinking that education of the Negroes
+might be an important way toward the solution of their problems. He
+formed plans of starting a school for them. He and his family at
+this time, though his wool-business was going comfortably, lived in
+extreme frugality, for they had agreed to save all they could toward
+the establishment of some such school. For years John Brown dreamed
+of such ventures as these; and he read all the journals of the small
+abolitionist groups, and met many of the leaders. He always spoke
+against slavery in churches or political meetings where he happened
+to be; and he made friends with many Negroes, and showed a deep
+interest in all their problems. But not yet had he formed any of those
+belligerent plans that later were his whole life. He still believed
+that abolition might be effected by education and peaceful agitation.
+
+Events were piling up too rapidly against such a view, however. The
+South grew more aggressive every day. The slave system seemed to carry
+everything before it. It had broken the agreement of 1820 by extending
+slavery above the Mason and Dixon line into Missouri. It had forced the
+war against Mexico, and had carved out huge new tracts for slavery. It
+dominated the government of the United States. All of the Presidents
+were pro-slavery, or they could not hope for office. Congress was
+pro-slavery, and the Senate, too.
+
+And it was not only in the South that the life of an abolitionist was
+worth little more than a pinch of snuff. The slavery venom had crept
+into the North, for powerful economic reasons. The Northern merchants
+and manufacturers made their profits by selling machinery, and the
+goods made by machinery, to the agricultural, cotton-raising South.
+And the South threatened to secede from the union, or at the least,
+to force a low tariff on imports, and buy its goods in Europe, if the
+abolitionists were not curbed.
+
+There were not many of these abolitionists; but they were outspoken,
+intense, and made themselves heard at all costs. They paid a heavy
+price for this courage. They were persecuted, tarred and feathered, and
+in many cases lynched by the Northern mobs.
+
+Then the Southern slave system seemed to have reached a triumphant
+climax in two events: the first, the passing of the Fugitive Slave Law,
+in 1851, and the other, the battle over the admission of Kansas as free
+soil or slave territory.
+
+The fugitive slave law incensed John Brown to fury, as it did every
+other abolitionist. It was a federal law forced by the South which
+forced the state officials of every Northern state, however much they
+might hate slavery, to join in the hunt for runaway slaves and their
+helpers.
+
+A United States sloop was sent to bring back a slave who had fled to
+Boston. The abolitionists tried to rescue him, but were foiled, with
+two men killed. Scenes such as these marked, everywhere in the North,
+the enforcement of the law. Abolitionists were arrested in communities
+where every one of their neighbors was also anti-slavery. Slaves, who
+had been freemen for years and years in the North, were captured and
+dragged back to bondage by government officials.
+
+The abolitionists became more fiery in their desperation. Many of them,
+like Garrison, began preaching that the North set up a government of
+its own: “No Union With Slave-holders!” was the slogan.
+
+And the Kansas affair heaped coal on this fire. Under the Missouri
+Compromise, both North and South had agreed to restrict slavery within
+the states already burdened with it; they had agreed also, that the
+citizens of a new territory could decide whether or not they wanted
+slavery or freedom, and could vote their choice when the territory was
+admitted to the union. In other words, both sides would keep their
+hands off new territory; and the federal government would not interfere.
+
+Kansas was such a territory; it was being rapidly settled, and in a few
+years was to come up for admission as a state.
+
+And what was happening was that the South was flooding this territory
+with spurious settlers; idle, whiskey-drinking ruffians armed with
+shotguns and revolvers, who were intimidating the Northern settlers who
+had come, and were stealing the elections from them, by force of arms.
+
+The South was openly breaking its agreement with the north; it was
+openly declaring its intent to make Kansas another addition to the
+slave states.
+
+To the abolitionists in the North this seemed like the last straw. The
+South was at its flood-tide of domination; it controlled everything
+in the American union; and now it was moving forward to make its
+domination permanent by any means; even by the means of murder and
+intimidation.
+
+Reports of assassinations, whippings, and the burning down of Northern
+settlers’ cabins came every week from Kansas. The abolitionists began
+raising emigrant companies of Northerners who would go to Kansas to
+vote for freedom, even though the South sent its cannon against them.
+
+The Brown family had by now moved to North Elba, New York, a little
+Adirondack colony of fugitive Negroes who had settled on the lands
+owned by Gerrit Smith, a wealthy and sincere abolitionist. John Brown
+had been of much practical service to the Negroes there; but he and his
+sons, like every other foe of slavery, were deeply shaken by the events
+in Kansas.
+
+It seemed horrible to everyone, that after twenty years of bitter
+agitation, slavery was not waning, but was stronger than ever--indeed,
+was threatening to swallow up even the North.
+
+Strong men were needed in Kansas; and so John Brown’s sons went there.
+They were men of peace: they went there as bona fide settlers, to take
+up claims, and to cast their vote, when the time came, for freedom.
+But in two months they were writing letters to North Elba asking their
+father to send them all the rifles he could collect.
+
+“We have seen some of the curses of slavery, and they are many,” wrote
+one of the sons in the very first letter home. “The boys have all their
+feelings worked up, and are ready to fight. Send us arms; we need them
+more than we do bread.”
+
+John Brown collected the arms; and what was more, he delivered them
+with his own hands. He wound up his business affairs, left his strong,
+patient wife in charge of the North Elba farm, and went to join his
+sons in Kansas. The curtain was now rising in the first act of the
+universal drama called John Brown. The man of God, the tender friend of
+little slave children, and old, tortured slave mammies, the man of the
+plough and the counter, the patriarch and citizen was at last ready to
+become Captain John Brown of Osawatomie; John Brown, the outlaw, the
+warrior, the soldier of freedom.
+
+At the mere mention of his name Border Ruffians and swashbuckling
+adherents of slavery were soon to tremble and even fly, as though a
+devil were behind. And he was bowed with cares and rapidly turning
+gray; and he had never handled fire-arms; and he was at the age when
+other men begin to talk of retiring from business and life, when they
+long for peace and reflection, in some quiet country scene, away from
+the world and its problems.
+
+He was fifty-five years old.
+
+
+
+
+THE SITUATION IN KANSAS
+
+As John Brown left for Kansas, he turned to his wife and the remaining
+members of his family and said: “If it is so painful for us to part
+with the hope of meeting again, how must it be with the poor slaves,
+who have no hope?”
+
+John Brown was always sanguine in his ventures; but the events before
+him would have tried the hope of a superman; they were to be bloody,
+exacting, terrible. It was what he needed, however, for John Brown went
+to Kansas with a greater project in his mind, the attack on Virginia
+and the South, and Kansas was to be for him the rough, harsh school in
+which he could train himself for that supreme effort.
+
+With his youngest son, Oliver, then about eighteen years old, and a
+son-in-law, Henry Thompson, John Brown left Chicago in August. The
+party had a heavily loaded wagon drawn by a “nice, stout young horse,”
+that was stricken with distemper when they reached Missouri, and could
+barely drag himself along. Their progress was therefore slow; a scant
+seven or eight miles a day. But it gave them an opportunity to see and
+hear things in Missouri, then fiercely pro-slavery, and the reservoir
+from which were drawn most of the Border Ruffians who were raiding
+Kansas, and trying to force it into the phalanx of slavery states.
+
+Companies of armed men were constantly passing and re-passing on the
+route to Kansas, and they were continually boasting “of what deeds of
+patriotism and chivalry they had performed there, and of the still more
+mighty deeds they were yet to do.” As Brown wrote home in a letter,
+“No man of them would blush when telling of their cruel treading down
+and terrifying of defenceless Free State men; seemed to take peculiar
+satisfaction in telling of the fine horses and mules they had killed in
+their numerous expeditions against the damned Abolitionists.”
+
+John Brown was roused by all this; already he was changing from the
+peaceful patriarch to the fearless warrior in the field. One incident
+illustrates this. When the little party reached the Missouri River at
+Brunswick, Missouri, they sat themselves down to wait for the ferry.
+There came to them an old man, frankly Missourian, frankly inquisitive
+after the manner of the frontier. “Where are you going?” he asked. “To
+Kansas,” replied John Brown. “Where from?” asked the old man. “From New
+York,” answered John Brown.
+
+“You won’t live to get there,” the old Missourian said, grimly.
+
+“We are prepared,” John Brown answered, “not to die alone.” Before that
+spirit and that eagle eye the old Missourian quailed; he turned and
+left.
+
+It was in October, after an arduous trip, that John Brown and his party
+reached the family settlement at Osawatomie. They arrived weary and all
+but destitute, with about sixty cents between them. And they found the
+settlement in great distress; all of the Browns, except the wife of
+John, Jr., were completely prostrated with fever and ague, gotten from
+the rough conditions. They were living in a tent exposed to the chill
+winds, and were shivering over little fires on the bare ground. All the
+food left was a small supply of milk from their cows, some corn and a
+few potatoes. It was an unusually cold winter that year; on October
+26 John Brown saw the hardest freezing he had ever witnessed south of
+his bleak farm-house in the Adirondacks; and all the Kansas pioneers
+suffered in it as did the Browns.
+
+Nobody in Kansas that first winter knew what comforts were. While the
+Browns paid the penalty for living on low ground in a ravine and in
+tents, their bitter experience with sickness and hunger was not as bad
+as that of many other Northern families. Starvation and death looked
+in at many a door where parents lay helpless, while famished children
+crawled about the dirt floors crying for food, and shrieking with
+fear if any footstep approached, lest the comer be a Border Ruffian,
+(as the Southerners were called) instead of a friend. For pure misery
+and heart-breaking suffering these pioneer tales of Kansas are not
+surpassed by any in the whole history of the winning of the West.
+
+But old John Brown was indomitable; he put new life and energy into his
+six sons; by November two shanties were well advanced, and the food
+problem had been lightened. They were getting into good shape for the
+winter, and preparing to take up their share in the settling of Kansas,
+when the hot breath of war scorched all these plans, as it did many
+another Northern settler’s.
+
+There would be little time for growing corn for the Browns thereafter,
+or for the other settlers; the slavery question demanded an answer
+first.
+
+One dread that had worried the Browns before leaving home proved
+unnecessary. It was their fear of the Indians. The Browns were
+terrified when the first big band of Sacs and Foxes in war-paint
+surrounded their tent, whooping and yelling, but they had the good
+sense to ground their arms, and the Indians did likewise. Thereafter
+both sides were great friends. John, Jr., went often to visit their old
+chief; once, when in the following summer, the Indians came to call
+again, they were “fought” with gifts of melons and green corn. “That,”
+said Jason Brown, “was the nicest party I ever saw.”
+
+John Brown, Jr., used to ask the old chief questions, as, “Why do you
+Sacs and Foxes not build houses and barns like the Ottawas and the
+Chippewas? Why do you not have schools and churches like the Delawares
+and Shawnees? Why do you have no preachers and teachers?” And the
+chief replied in a staccato which summed up wonderfully the bitter,
+century-long experience of his people: “We want no houses and barns. We
+want no schools and churches. We want no preachers and teachers. We bad
+enough now.”
+
+No, the Indians were friends. The men really to be feared were not long
+in putting in their appearance. One night six or seven heavily-armed
+Missourians rode up to the door, and asked whether any stray cattle had
+been seen. The Browns replied in the negative; and then, as newcomers,
+they were asked, in the border slang, how they were “on the goose.”
+
+“We are Free State,” was the answer, “and what is more, we are
+Abolitionists.”
+
+The men rode away, but from that moment the Browns were marked for
+destruction. They did not shrink from danger, however. They nailed
+their flag to the mast; armed themselves, and plunged into the thick of
+all the political battles then raging. In a short time their settlement
+was to become known as a center of fearless, and if necessary, violent
+resistance to all who wished to see human slavery introduced into the
+Territory. John Brown’s life work had begun.
+
+
+
+
+THE BORDER RUFFIANS HOLD AN ELECTION
+
+No fair-minded reader of history can doubt, in glancing over the
+records of that time, that the South took the first bloody and brutal
+offensive in their attempt to force slavery on Kansas. Later, the
+Free State men from the north, under leaders like John Brown, General
+Lane and Captain James Montgomery, took up arms, too, and defended
+themselves bravely; but at first, they were victims of the South’s
+determination to carry its point.
+
+The Southerners began the attack by stealing the elections for the
+Territorial legislature. Thousands of Missourians, on horseback and
+in wagons, with guns, bowie-knives, revolvers and plenty of whisky,
+poured over the line in November, 1854, and encamped near the polling
+places. The ballot boxes were extravagantly, even humorously, stuffed;
+the elections were carried for the South. There was nothing concealed
+about the affair; in fact, the Missouri newspapers had gaily whipped up
+recruits for the raid.
+
+Many of these men, Border Ruffians, as the North called them, were
+hired for the work. Others came for the fun; others because they hated
+Yankees; others because they were devout believers in Slavery.
+
+“They wore the most savage looks and gave utterance to the most
+horrible imprecations and blasphemies,” said Thomas Gladstone, a
+relative of the great statesman of that name, who was in Kansas at the
+time. “In groups of drunken, bellowing, blood-thirsty demons, armed to
+the teeth, they crowded about the bars and shouted for drink, or made
+the night hideous with noise on the streets.”
+
+Their fraudulent Pawnee legislature convened and passed a code of
+punishments for Free State men. Under the code, no one opposed to
+slavery in any manner could serve on a jury, or hold any office in
+Kansas.
+
+Death itself was the penalty for advising slaves to rebel, or even
+supplying them with literature that would have that effect.
+
+The mere voicing of a belief that slavery was illegal in Kansas was
+made a grave crime. Any person who said in public that slavery was
+wrong, or any person who even “introduced into the Territory, any
+book, paper, magazine, pamphlet or circular,”--saying this, was to be
+punished by imprisonment at hard labor for a term of not less than
+five years.
+
+This notorious Clause 12 was obviously aimed at the New York Tribune
+and other anti-slavery journals, and was meant to shut off every
+whisper of free speech. And it did not work.
+
+For the Free State settlers would not recognize the legality of the
+Legislature, and held an election of their own. And so there were two
+legislatures in Kansas Territory, two governors and governments. All
+the fighting that followed centered about this dualism, and about the
+mad, desperate butcheries and burnings begun by the Southerners, when
+they saw they could not cow the Northerners into submission.
+
+President Pierce, who was pro-slavery, sent a message to Congress in
+which he sided with the fraudulent legislature and its code, declaring
+it legal, and threatening the Free State men, whom he called traitors,
+insurrectionists, and seditionists against the United States government.
+
+In all the Kansas conflict, he threw federal troops and federal
+politicians against the Free State men. The South rejoiced at his
+stand, but the Free State men went on with their work. And John Brown
+and his sons took a leading position in the fight.
+
+
+
+
+THE SACK OF LAWRENCE
+
+“Yet we will continue to tar and feather, drown, lynch and hang every
+white-livered abolitionist who dares to pollute our soil,” said a
+flamboyant editorial in the Squatter Sovereign, a pro-slavery paper
+published at Atchison, Kansas, a Border Ruffian stronghold.
+
+The Slaveryites lived up to this promise. The Free State men at
+this time had not begun to arm, but doggedly and quietly went about
+organizing their own government at Topeka. Their actions infuriated
+the Southerners. Now began the long list of crimes that made the soil
+of Kansas reek with blood.
+
+It would be impossible to give a full record here of all those crimes.
+The least that happened was the destruction of newspapers that
+protested against Southern injustice, such as the Parkville, Missouri,
+Luminary, which was burned down, the machinery thrown in the river, and
+the editors threatened with a similar fate if they indulged in further
+free speech.
+
+There were hundreds of abolitionists murdered in Kansas; hundreds of
+their wives and children were gibed at and threatened and terrified;
+hundreds of their cabins were burnt down, and thousands of head of
+cattle stolen.
+
+One of the murders was the killing of Samuel Collins, owner of a
+saw-mill near Atchison, by Patrick Laughlin, a pro-slavery man. No
+effort was made to punish him by the authorities. But something was
+done by them in another case. Charles Dow, a young Free State man
+from Ohio, was cruelly shot down from behind by Franklin Coleman, a
+pro-slavery settler from Virginia.
+
+What the authorities did in this case was to arrest Jacob Branson, with
+whom the dead man had lived. A pro-slavery sheriff charged Branson with
+having made threats to revenge his friend. Branson was rescued by a
+group of his friends with rifles, and taken to Lawrence for protection,
+Lawrence being entirely settled by the Free State men.
+
+The Sheriff called on the Governor, and the Governor called on the
+militia, and with the aid of Missouri citizens, about twelve hundred
+armed men marched on Lawrence, to “put down the rebellion.”
+
+The men of Lawrence sent out a call to all Northerners; and John Brown
+and his men were among those who responded. There were five hundred
+settlers in Lawrence, and they feverishly fortified the town with
+embankments; but the whole affair ended by a compromise; there was no
+fighting; only two men were killed in a light skirmish.
+
+The Southerners left, weak with all the whisky they had drunk on the
+expedition, according to reliable observers, and angered that they had
+not been given the chance to burn Lawrence down.
+
+For Lawrence was a sore spot to the pro-slavery men. It was the
+largest Free State town in Kansas, and the center of all the political
+activities of that group. It published a newspaper, and its Free State
+Hotel was the headquarters of the Northerner’s government.
+
+There were other murders, despite the treaty signed at this time. And
+then in February, as Free State men were holding another of their
+elections, they were assaulted at Leavenworth, and many of them forced
+to flee to Lawrence.
+
+One of the leaders of the Free State men, as he was returning from
+Leavenworth after the election, was captured by a company of Border
+Ruffian militia. Wounded and defenceless though he was, they literally
+hacked the unfortunate foe of slavery into pieces with their hatchets
+and knives. Not an effort was made to punish these murderers, though
+their names were known by everyone. Some of the slavery journals even
+praised the deed, and called for more. Said the Kansas Pioneer of
+Kickapoo:
+
+“Sound the bugle of war over the length and breadth of the land, and
+leave not an Abolitionist in the Territory to relate their treacherous
+and contaminating deeds. Strike your piercing rifle balls and your
+glittering steel to their black and poisonous hearts.”
+
+And in May of that year, after further alarms and disturbances,
+Sheriff Jones returned with an army of 750 “swearing, whisky-drinking
+ruffians,” armed with rifles, and even two pieces of artillery. This
+time the Free State men were unprepared. John Brown was not there, nor
+any other real leader. The Free State men still believed in peace, and
+legality. And they saw their Free State Hotel go up in flames, their
+newspaper plant destroyed, and an orgy of drunken destruction let loose
+among their homes.
+
+    “Let Yankees tremble, Abolitionists fall,
+    Our Motto is, Give Southern Rights to All.”
+
+This was the inscription on one of the banners of the invading army.
+Lawrence was the first city to receive these rights. Thereafter Free
+State men knew what to expect; they began forming companies of riflemen
+and guerrilla fighters to protect their communities against Southern
+rights.
+
+
+
+
+THE LIBERTY GUARDS
+
+One of these companies was the Liberty Guards, as commander of which
+John Brown first received his historic title of Captain. Besides four
+of Brown’s stalwart sons, there were fourteen other Free State settlers
+in the company, and they were present at the first attempted raid on
+Lawrence, which had resulted in a compromise and an abortive “treaty.”
+
+Captain John Brown had gathered his men, and was on the way to
+Lawrence for the second time when they were informed by a messenger
+that Lawrence had already been destroyed. The Border Ruffians had
+captured the town without meeting any resistance, and had razed it to
+the ground, the breathless courier reported. This startling news was
+received in a bitter silence by the little company. They pushed on,
+nevertheless, and encamped near Prairie City, hearing from passing
+stragglers further reports of burnings, killings and drunken threats of
+the Southern invaders.
+
+It was a period of great excitement. The Kansans felt as if war had
+commenced in earnest on them, and that they were to be wiped out. Some
+of the men who lived on the Pottawatomie Creek, near Dutch’s Crossing,
+heard reports that their women had been threatened by a group of the
+toughest pro-slavery ruffians who lived there.
+
+“We expect to be butchered, every Free State settler in our region,”
+one of these men told John Brown.
+
+Here was a story John Brown heard a few days before from the lips of a
+pretty young girl named Mary Grant, a settler’s daughter in the region:
+
+“Dutch Bill arrived at our house, horribly drunk, with a whisky bottle
+with a corncob stopper, and an immense butcher knife in his belt. Mr.
+Grant, my father, was sick in bed, but when they told him that Bill
+Sherman was coming, he had a shotgun put by his side. ‘Old woman,’
+said the ruffian to my mother, ‘you and I are pretty good friends, but
+damn your daughter, I’ll drink her heart’s blood.’ My little brother
+Charley succeeded in cajoling the drunken man away.”
+
+An old settler named Morse was hung and let down again by this same
+group of ruffians. Then they threatened to kill him with an axe, but
+his little boys set up a terrible wailing, and begged for his life. The
+ruffians spared him, but gave him until sundown to leave the community.
+He wandered in the brush for two or three days with his children,
+frightened to death, and finally died of the excitement.
+
+There were other such tales, including one horrible story of a similar
+attack on a woman in childbirth. The ruffians had also put up a notice,
+advising every Free State settler to leave the community in thirty days
+or have his throat cut.
+
+John Brown and his men discussed this matter, and grimly decided to “do
+something to show these barbarians we have some rights.” They moved
+down that night on the Pottawatomie, and calling out the five men who
+had done most of the killing, threatening, and burning down of houses
+in the region, executed them as a measure of self-defense.
+
+It was a bloody, stern act, but it proceeded out of the same inflamed
+spirit with which the miners at Herrin recently shot down the armed
+strikebreakers who had been brought into their section. Many, including
+some sympathetic historians like Oswald Garrison Villard, have
+condemned this brutal deed, and have called it a stain on John Brown’s
+life. Murder is murder, and it cannot be defended on ethical or logical
+grounds. But when a thug assails one with a gun, or threatens one’s
+wife and children, is one to practice non-resistance on him? Is his
+life more valuable than one’s own? In such moments men do not think,
+they act as nature tells them to; even a Villard would refuse to yield
+up his life to a thug; he would forget logic and ethics, and defend
+himself. And that was what John Brown did; his act was a stern and
+immediate answer to the long-continued murders and threats against the
+Free State men of Kansas. It shook the Territory to its foundations,
+and it made of John Brown a hunted outlaw. Thereafter he grew no
+more corn and built no more cabins for his family; he was a guerrilla
+captain in the field.
+
+
+
+
+AFTER POTTAWATOMIE
+
+John Brown, Jr., and Jason Brown, two of the fighter’s sons, were
+captured by Missourians and suffered incredible tortures after the
+Pottawatomie affair. Both men were burning with fever, but they were
+dragged at the ends of ropes for two or three days, beaten, hung up
+and then let down, and then chained to oxcarts in the wind and rain.
+John Jr., always of a nervous temperament, went temporarily insane
+under this treatment, but his captors had no mercy. Though he shrieked
+wildly, and though his brother Jason begged that the Southerns have
+pity, their hearts were hard as flint.
+
+The following scene is described by Jason:
+
+“Captain Wood said to me: ‘Keep that man still.’ ‘I can’t keep an
+insane man still,’ said I. ‘He is no more insane than you are. If you
+don’t keep him still, we’ll do it for you.’ I tried my best, but John
+had not a glimmer of reason and could not understand anything. He went
+on yelling. Three troopers came in. One struck him a terrible blow on
+the jaw with his fist, throwing him on his side. A second knelt on him
+and pounded him with his fist. The third stood off and kicked him with
+all his force in the back of the neck. ‘Don’t kill a crazy man!’ cried
+I. ‘No more crazy than you are, but we’ll fetch it out of him.’ After
+that John lay unconscious for three or four hours. We camped about one
+and a half miles southeast of the Adairs. There we stayed about two
+weeks. Then we were ordered to move again. They drove us on foot, all
+the prisoners, chained two and two. At Ottawa ford young Kilbourne
+dropped of a sun-stroke.”
+
+The men were later released, for they had done nothing that could be
+prosecuted in the court where the pro-slavery government “troops” had
+driven them. This was the sort of thing John Brown was fighting; it was
+life and death, and no mercy could be expected from the Southerners.
+Mr. Villard and other timorous friends of John Brown do not seem
+to understand the nature of the battle; and they do not understand
+what giant faith and courage it must have taken for an old farmer of
+fifty-five to continue fighting in such an atmosphere.
+
+John Brown did not flinch. Another son, Frederick, was shot down in
+cold blood on the steps of the family home at Osawatomie, but the old
+fighter, shedding a silent tear for the loss, for he deeply loved his
+children, went on his stern path.
+
+The spuriously-elected slavery governor offered a reward of $3,000 for
+John Brown, and the President of the United States a reward of $250.
+Federal troops scoured the territory for him. For months he and his men
+slept out in the fields, flitting from place to place, and fighting in
+many battles.
+
+With only nine men he fought off a troop of twenty-three Southerners
+at the “battle of Black Jack,” and forced them to surrender. In
+August, 250 men moved on Osawatomie, to destroy it as they had
+destroyed Lawrence. John Brown gathered about forty men to resist the
+Southerners, and a hot battle was fought, in which, of course, Brown
+had to retreat. The town was thoroughly wiped out, and also granted
+“Southern rights.”
+
+There were many other skirmishes; the name of Captain John Brown, old
+Brown of Osawatomie, became a legend in Kansas. He became a sort of
+Pancho Villa figure to the South; a hundred times he was reported dead
+or captured; a hundred times he was blamed for wild deeds he had never
+done.
+
+Here are two contemporary pictures of John Brown in the field. The
+first is written by August Bondi, a brave and able young Austrian Jew,
+who put himself under Brown’s leadership after the Pottawatomie affair:
+
+“We stayed here up to the morning of Sunday, June 1st, and during those
+few days I fully succeeded in understanding the exalted character of my
+old friend, John Brown. He exhibited at all times the most affectionate
+care for each of us. He also attended to the cooking. We had two meals
+daily, consisting of bread, baked in skillets; this was washed down
+with creek water, mixed with a little ginger and a spoon of molasses to
+each pint. Nevertheless, we kept in excellent spirits; we considered
+ourselves as one family, allied to one another by the consciousness
+that it was our duty to undergo all these privations for the good
+cause. We were determined to share any danger with one another, that
+victory or death might find us together; and we were united, as a band
+of brothers, by the love and affection toward the man who with tender
+words and wise counsel, in the depth of the wilderness of Ottawa creek,
+prepared a handful of young men for the work of laying the foundation
+of a free commonwealth.
+
+“His words have ever remained firmly engraved in my mind. Many and
+various were the instructions he gave during the days of our compulsory
+leisure in this camp. He expressed himself to us that we should never
+allow ourselves to be tempted by any consideration to acknowledge laws
+and institutions to exist if our conscience and reason condemned them.
+
+“He admonished us not to care whether a majority, no matter how large,
+opposed our principles and opinions. The largest majorities were
+sometimes only organized mobs, whose howlings never changed black to
+white or night into day. A minority convinced of its rights, based on
+moral principles, would, under a republican government, sooner or later
+become the majority.”
+
+The other description is that of William A. Phillips, then a
+correspondent of the New York Tribune, and later a Colonel in the Civil
+War. Brown, still an outlaw, was on his way to Topeka, to be on hand at
+whatever crisis might arise at the opening of the legislature elected
+by the Free State settlers. Phillips met him on the way.
+
+His account is important, for it shows that John Brown saw much
+farther than his own times. He knew that there were many other things
+wrong with the social system in America besides slavery. There are
+plain indications here, as in other accounts, that John Brown was one
+of those early American Socialists, such as Horace Greeley, Albert
+Brisbane, father of Arthur Brisbane, Bronson Alcott, Ralph Waldo
+Emerson, and others, who felt that the abolition of slavery was only
+the first step toward a free America. Wendell Phillips, for instance,
+one of this abolitionist band, became after the Civil War one of the
+leading champions of the rights of workingmen in their battle against
+the capitalists.
+
+But here is Colonel Phillips giving his charming picture, in the
+Atlantic Monthly for December, 1879, of that night ride and the
+conversation he had with Brown as they lay bivouacking in the open
+beneath the stars:
+
+“He seemed as little disposed to sleep as I was, and we talked; or
+rather, he did, for I said little. I found that he was a thorough
+astronomer; he pointed out the different constellations and their
+movements. ‘Now,’ he said, ‘it is midnight,’ as he pointed to the
+finger marks of his great clock in the sky. The whispering of the
+wind in the prairies was full of voices to him, and the stars as they
+shone in the firmament of God seemed to inspire him. ‘How admirable
+is the symmetry of the heavens; how grand and beautiful! Everything
+moves in sublime harmony in the government of God. Not so with us poor
+creatures. If one star is more brilliant than others, it is continually
+shooting in some erratic way into space.’
+
+“He criticized both parties in Kansas. Of the pro-slavery men he said
+that slavery besotted everything, and made men more brutal and coarse;
+nor did the Free State men escape his sharp censure. He said we had
+many true and noble men, but too many broken down politicians from
+the older states, who would rather pass resolutions than act, and who
+criticized all who did real work.
+
+“A professional politician, he went on, you could never trust; for even
+if he had convictions, he was always ready to sacrifice his principles
+for his advantage.
+
+“One of the most interesting things in Captain Brown’s conversation
+that night, and one that marked him as a thinker, was his treatment of
+our forms of social and political life. He thought society ought to
+be reorganized on a less selfish basis; for while material interests
+gained by competition for bread, men and women lost much by it. He
+condemned the sale of land as a chattel, and thought there was an
+infinite number of wrongs to right before society would be what
+it should be, but that in our country slavery was the sum of all
+villainies, and its abolition the first essential work.”
+
+
+
+
+THE GREAT PLAN EVOLVES
+
+Much more can be written of this Kansas period in John Brown’s life;
+a large bibliography of Robin Hood literature has gathered about it.
+John Brown, and other men like him, hastened the solution of the
+slavery question by their firm stand in Kansas. If the South had been
+allowed to add Kansas to the roster of slave states, it would have
+crept further north, until perhaps there would have been slavery up to
+Canada. It is easy for any institution to become permanent; man is a
+creature of conventions. Slavery, like cannibalism among savages, would
+have in time become a matter-of-fact doctrine with all America, had not
+the Kansas abolitionists challenged it.
+
+John Brown left Kansas in 1857, and made a trip through New England,
+gathering friends, money, arms and recruits for a new great plan that
+was working in his mind.
+
+He saw that the abolitionists would be successful in making Kansas a
+free state. The job was already half done; but when it was completed,
+what next? There would still be the vast groaning empire of slavery
+in the South; there would still be five million black folk bought and
+sold like cattle; beaten, raped, murdered as if they were lower than
+cattle. The South would still be in the saddle at the White House; the
+fugitive slave law would still be enforced; and churches, business men,
+newspapers, mobs, and United States troops, all would join in upholding
+the devil’s doctrine that slavery was respectable, the law of the land.
+
+The Abolitionists, with their few journals, were ever agitating against
+this infamy that was being protected by the United States flag. But
+John Brown knew that only a bold deed could shake the union; could make
+men see clearly what slavery was.
+
+Slavery had become so firmly settled into the national life that the
+few thousand abolitionists only seemed like gadflies biting at the hide
+of a rhinoceros. John Brown saw that a pick-axe was needed to draw
+the blood. The pocket-books of the slave-holders must be attacked.
+Slavery must be sabotaged, and made unprofitable. It was such a safe
+and sane business now; it must be made dangerous. John Brown planned
+to go boldly into Virginia, with a band of men, and start there a
+large movement of runaway slaves. When slaves were no longer meek and
+submissive, when every slave became a potential runaway and rebel,
+slavery would cease to be a paying business. Thus reasoned John Brown.
+
+In December, 1858, with things at last peaceful in Kansas Territory,
+and a Free State almost assured, John Brown made a last stirring raid
+into Missouri. A Negro slave named Jim Daniels had come to one of
+Brown’s men with a pathetic tale. He and his wife and babies were to
+be sold at auction in a few weeks, and perhaps separated forever. He
+was a fine-looking, intelligent mulatto, and he wept as he told the
+story. John Brown and ten of his men rescued Daniels’ little family and
+carried off to freedom eleven other slaves of the vicinity. At dawn
+the next day the caravan of freedom set forth on its long journey to
+the Northern Star--to Canada, where slaves were free. It was a perilous
+and arduous undertaking. The party had to sleep by stealth in barns
+and icy fields, with armed sentinels posted all night. The Governor of
+Missouri wired to Washington; money rewards were offered for Brown,
+armed posses were sent searching for him, the Federal troops combed the
+state. There were prairie snowstorms, and there were little provisions.
+But the old lion brought his charges through to Canada.
+
+One incident of the trip is worth repeating. It shows what a terror the
+mere name of John Brown had become in Kansas.
+
+At one place, the ford of a river, Brown’s party learned there was a
+posse of 80 armed slavery ruffians waiting to capture him. The old
+man did not turn back, though he had only 22 men, black and white. He
+marched down on the ruffians. “They had as good a position as 80 men
+could wish,” wrote one of Brown’s men, “they could have defeated a
+thousand opponents, but the closer we got to the ford, the farther they
+got from it. We found some of their horses, for they were in such haste
+to fly that some of them mounted two on a saddle, and we gave chase and
+took three or four prisoners, whom we later released. The marshal who
+led them went so fast one would think he feared the fate of Lot’s wife.”
+
+“Old Captain Brown is not to be taken by boys,” said the Leavenworth
+Times, now Free State, “and he invites cordially all pro-slavery men to
+try their hands at arresting him.”
+
+On March 12th the slaves were safe in Canada, rejoicing in their happy
+fortune, after having been brought in the dead of winter, through
+hostile country, some 1,100 miles in 82 days. One of the slave women
+had had six masters, and four of the party had served sixteen owners in
+all. Now they were free. And their little children were free, and would
+never be whipped by a Southern gentleman, or stood on the auction block
+like a horse or cow. The outlaw John Brown had done what was forbidden
+by the Supreme Court and the President of the United States; and now he
+was planning greater deeds.
+
+
+
+
+THE EVE OF THE TRAGEDY
+
+John Brown was now fifty-nine years old, and in the last year of his
+life. He had been disciplined in a terrible school in Kansas, but what
+he was about to attempt seemed so mad, so reckless, and so suicidally
+brave that many men of the South claimed, after the attempt, that he
+was but an insane man, and many of his conservative friends chose to
+take this view of the case, also.
+
+Yet John Brown was not insane. Coolly, rationally, like a clear-headed
+strategist, he had figured out the situation. He was an Abolitionist,
+and was determined to do anything to end the brutal slave-system.
+Peaceful agitation had been going on for decades, but the North was
+still apathetic, and the South was only more inflamed and settled in
+its ideas.
+
+What John Brown felt was needed now, was to make the men of the North
+and the South realize that there would be no peace in the land while
+slavery endured. What they must see was that men like himself would
+rise to break that loathsome peace. He would go to the South, capture
+the arsenal at Harper’s Ferry, in Virginia, and run off all the slaves
+he could find. He would take the hills about the Ferry, and with a
+guerrilla band move through the countryside, making slavery a shaky
+institution.
+
+If he failed, he could but lose his life. He would at least stir the
+nation on the issue of slavery, and force men to take sides. There
+was too much neutrality and silence in the land on this issue, this
+institution that to him was a bloody crime against God and humanity.
+He could not fail, he felt; success or failure would achieve the same
+results. Events proved that he was right.
+
+John Brown spent that winter and spring in New England, giving
+occasional lectures, and meeting all the leading men of the Abolition
+movement, who collected money for him, though he did not fully reveal
+his plans to anyone.
+
+George L. Stearns, Gerrit Smith, the philanthropist, Frank B. Sanborn,
+the Concord school-master and author; Thomas Wentworth Higginson, a
+brave, noble commander in the Civil War, and a charming man of letters
+afterward; Theodore Parker, one of the greatest and most sincere
+Christian clergymen produced in America; Samuel G. Howe, and others
+were among John Brown’s supporters. Thoreau and Emerson he also met at
+various times, and both were passionate admirers of the stern, pure
+soldier of liberty.
+
+While their Captain was gathering arms and money for the raid, some of
+Brown’s men were quartered in a farm-house near Harper’s Ferry, while
+others were studying the region, and mapping out routes for the attack
+and the retreat to the hills.
+
+It was a cool fall night, the 16th of October, 1859, when Captain
+John Brown gave the command his men had been impatiently awaiting for
+months: “Men, get on your arms; we will proceed to the Ferry.” Says Mr.
+Villard, at times an eloquent chronicler:
+
+“It took but a minute to bring the horse and wagon to the door, to
+place in it some pikes, fagots, a sledge hammer, and a crow-bar.
+The men had been in readiness for hours; they had but to buckle on
+their arms and throw over their shoulders, like army blankets, the
+long gray shawls which served some for a few brief hours in lieu of
+overcoats, and then became their winding sheets. In a moment more, the
+commander-in-chief donned his old battle-worn Kansas cap, mounted the
+wagon, and began the solemn march through the chill night to the bridge
+into Harper’s Ferry, nearly six miles away.
+
+“Tremendous as the relief of action was, there was no thought of
+cheering or demonstration. As the eighteen men with John Brown swung
+down the little lane to the road from the farm-house that had been
+their prison for so many weary weeks, they bade farewell to Captain
+Owen Brown, and Privates Barclay Coppoc and F. J. Meriam, who remained
+as rear-guard in charge of the arms and supplies. The brothers Coppoc
+read the future correctly, for they embraced and parted as men do who
+know they are to meet no more on earth. The damp, lonely night, too,
+added to the solemnity of it all, as they passed through its gloom.
+As if to intensify the sombreness, they met not a living soul on the
+road to question their purpose, or to start with fright at the sight of
+eighteen soldierly men coming two by two through the darkness as though
+risen from the grave.
+
+“There was not a sound but the tramping of the men and the creaking of
+the wagon, before which, in accordance with a general order, drawn up
+and carefully read to all, walked Captains Cook and Tidd, their Sharp’s
+rifles hung from their shoulders, their commission, duly signed by John
+Brown, and officially sealed, in their pockets. They were detailed
+to destroy the telegraph wire on the Maryland side, and then on the
+Virginian, while Captains John H. Kagi and Aaron D. Stevens, bravest
+of the brave, were to take the bridge watchman and so strike the first
+blow for liberty. But as they and their comrades marched rapidly over
+the rough road, Death himself moved by their side.”
+
+
+
+
+THE ARSENAL IS CAPTURED
+
+Events flashed sharp and terrible and swift as lightning after this
+sombre opening of the storm. The telegraph wires were cut, the watchman
+at the bridge captured, guards were placed at the two bridges leading
+out of the town, and many citizens were taken from the streets and held
+as prisoners in the Arsenal.
+
+Perhaps the most distinguished prisoner was Colonel Lewis W.
+Washington, a great-grand-nephew of the first President, and like him,
+a gentleman farmer and slave-owner. He lived five miles from the Ferry,
+and with the instinct of a dramatist, John Brown seized him and freed
+his slaves as a means of impressing on the American imagination that a
+new revolution for human rights was being ushered in.
+
+The little town was peaceful and unprepared for this sudden attack,
+as unprepared as it would be today for a similar raid. By morning,
+however, the alarm had been spread; the church bells rang, military
+companies from Charlestown and other neighboring towns began pouring
+in, the saloons were crowded with nervous and hard-drinking men, and
+there was the clamor and furor of thousands of awe-struck Southerners.
+No one knew how many men were in the Arsenal. No one knew whether the
+whole South was not being attacked by abolitionists, or whether or not
+all the slaves had armed and risen against their masters, as they had
+attempted to years before in Nat Turner’s and other rebellions.
+
+By noon the Southerners had begun the attack. They killed or drove out
+all the guards John Brown had stationed at various strategic points in
+the town; they murdered two of Brown’s men they had taken prisoners,
+and tortured another. They managed to cut off all of Brown’s paths of
+retreat, and by nightfall, he and the few survivors of his men were in
+a trap.
+
+His young son Oliver, only twenty years old, and recently married,
+died in the night. He had been painfully wounded, and begged, in his
+agony, that his father shoot him and relieve him from pain. But the
+old Spartan held his boy’s hand, and told him to be calm, and to die
+like a man. Another young son, Watson, had been killed earlier in the
+fighting. John Brown had now given three sons to freedom, and was soon
+himself to be a sacrifice.
+
+There were left alive and unwounded but five of Brown’s men. The
+Virginia militia, numbering, with the civilians in the town, up to the
+thousands, seemed afraid to attack this little group of desperate men.
+In the dawn of the next morning, however, United States marines, under
+the famous commander, Robert E. Lee, then a Colonel in the Federal
+forces, attacked the arsenal and captured it easily. John Brown refused
+to surrender to the last; and he stood waiting proudly for the marines
+when they broke down the door and came raging like tigers at him.
+
+A fierce young Southern officer ran at him with a sword, that
+bent double as it pierced to the old man’s breast-bone. The young
+Southerner then took the bent weapon in his hands and beat Brown’s head
+unmercifully with the hilt, bringing the blood, and knocking senseless
+the old unselfish and tender champion of poor Negro men and women.
+Those near him thought John Brown was dead; but he was still alive; he
+had still his greatest work to do.
+
+
+
+
+JOHN BROWN’S MEN
+
+I have written almost entirely of John Brown, and because of
+necessities of space I have given little attention to the brave youths
+who fought under him at Harper’s Ferry. Yet here I must stop and with
+only the facts, paint some portrait of the men who followed John Brown.
+It will be seen that they were no ordinary ruffians, no bandits,
+adventurers or madmen, as the South called them at the time. They were
+young crusaders, thoughtful, sensitive and brave. They had a philosophy
+of life; and they were filled with passion for social justice. One may
+disagree with such men, but one must not fail to respect them.
+
+There were twenty-one men with John Brown at Harper’s Ferry, sixteen of
+whom were white and five colored. Only one was of foreign birth; nearly
+all were of old American pioneer stock.
+
+_John Henry Kagi_ was the best educated of the raiders, largely
+self-taught, a fine debater and speaker, and an able correspondent
+for the New York Tribune and the New York Evening Post. He had been
+a school-teacher in Virginia, and had come to know and hate slavery
+there, protesting so vigorously that he was finally run out of the
+State. He practised law in Nebraska, but left this to join John Brown
+in the Kansas fighting. He was killed at Harper’s Ferry.
+
+_Aaron Dwight Stevens_ was in many ways the most attractive and
+interesting of the personalities about John Brown. He ran away from
+his home in Massachusetts at the age of sixteen, and joined the United
+States army, serving in Mexico during the Mexican War. Later he was
+sentenced to death for leading a soldiers’ mutiny against an offensive
+pro-slavery Major at Taos, New Mexico. President Pierce commuted the
+sentence to three years at hard labor in Fort Leavenworth. Stevens
+escaped from this prison, and joined the Free State forces in Kansas,
+for he had always been a firm abolitionist. Stevens came of old Puritan
+stock, his great-grandfather having been a captain in the Revolutionary
+War. He was a man of superb bravery and of wonderful physique; well
+over six feet, handsome, with black penetrating eyes and a fine brow.
+He had a charming sense of humor, and a beautiful baritone voice, with
+which he sang in camp and in prison. He was hung soon after John Brown
+for the Harper’s Ferry raid.
+
+_John E. Cook_ was a young law student of Brooklyn, New York, a
+reckless, impulsive and rather indiscreet youth, to whom much was
+forgiven because of his genial smile and generous nature.
+
+_Charles Plummer Tidd_ escaped after the raid, and died a First
+Sergeant in one of the battles of the Civil War. He had not much
+education, but good common sense, and was always reading and studying
+in an attempt to repair his lack of training. Quick-tempered, but
+kindhearted, a fine singer and with strong family affections.
+
+_Jeremiah Goldsmith Anderson_, killed at Harper’s Ferry in his 27th
+year, was also of Revolutionary American stock. A sworn abolitionist,
+he wrote in a letter three months before his death: “Millions of
+fellow-beings require it of us; their cries for help go out to the
+universe daily and hourly. Whose duty is it to help them? Is it yours?
+Is it mine? It is every man’s, but how few there are to help. But there
+are a few to answer this call, and dare to answer it in a manner that
+shall make this land of liberty and equality shake to the center.”
+
+_Albert Hazlett_, executed after Brown, was a Pennsylvania farm worker,
+“a good-sized, fine-looking fellow, overflowing with good nature and
+social feelings.”
+
+_Edwin Coppoc_, also one of those captured and hung, was well-liked
+even by the Southerners who saw him in jail, and some of them hoped to
+get him pardoned. He came of Quaker farmer stock.
+
+_Barclay Coppoc_, his brother, was not yet twenty-one when he fought
+at the Arsenal. He escaped after the raid, but was killed in the Civil
+War. After the raid he had returned to Kansas, and had nearly lost his
+life in an attempt to free some slaves in Missouri.
+
+_William Thompson_, a neighbor of the Browns at North Elba, in New
+York, was killed at Harper’s Ferry, in his 26th year. He was full of
+fun and good nature, and bore himself unflinchingly when face to face
+with death.
+
+_Dauphin Osgood Thompson_, his brother, was only twenty years old, when
+he met the same fate for the cause of freedom. Dauphin was a handsome,
+inexperienced country boy, “more like a shy young girl than a warrior,
+quiet and good,” said one of the Brown women later.
+
+_Oliver Brown_, John Brown’s youngest son, was also twenty years old
+when he died at Harper’s Ferry. His girl-wife and her baby died early
+the next year. “Oliver developed rather slowly,” says Miss Sarah Brown.
+“In his earlier teens he was always pre-occupied, absent-minded--always
+reading, and then it was impossible to catch his attention. But in his
+last few years he came out very fast. His awkwardness left him. He
+read every solid book that he could find, and was especially fond of
+Theodore Parker’s writings, as was his father. Had Oliver lived, and
+not killed himself with over-study, he would have made his mark. By his
+exertions the sale of liquor was stopped at North Elba.”
+
+_John Anthony Copeland_, a free colored man, 25 years old, was educated
+at Oberlin College. He was dignified and manly, and in jail there were
+prominent Southerners who were forced to admit his fine qualities. He
+was hung for the raid.
+
+_Stewart Taylor_, the only one of the raiders not of American birth,
+was a young Canadian wagon-maker, 23 years old. He was fond of history
+and debating, and heart and soul in the abolition cause. Killed in the
+Arsenal.
+
+_William H. Leeman_, the youngest of the raiders, killed in his 19th
+year. He had gone to work in a shoe factory at Haverhill, Mass., when
+only 14 years old, and though with little education, “had a good
+intellect and great ingenuity.” He was the “wildest” of Brown’s men,
+for he smoked and drank occasionally, but the Old Puritan captain liked
+him, nevertheless, for he was boyish, handsome, and brave.
+
+_Osborn Perry Anderson_ was also a Negro. He escaped after the raid,
+and fought through the Civil War.
+
+_Francis Jackson Meriam_, was a wealthy, young abolitionist who put
+all his fortune into the cause, and came from New England to join John
+Brown in the raid. He escaped also, and died in 1865, after having been
+the captain of a Negro company in the Civil War.
+
+_Lewis Sheridan Leary_, colored, left a wife and a six-months-old baby
+at Oberlin, Ohio, to go to Harper’s Ferry. He was a harness maker by
+trade, and descended on one side from an Irishman, Jeremiah O’Leary,
+who fought in the Revolution. Leary was 25 years old when he died of
+his terrible wounds in the Arsenal fighting.
+
+_Owen Brown_, another of John Brown’s sons, was stalwart and reliable,
+and is reported original in expression and thought, like all the
+Browns. He is also said to have been quite humorous. He survived the
+raid, and died in Pasadena, Calif., in 1891.
+
+_Watson Brown_, another son, 24 years old when killed at the Ferry,
+was tall and rather fair, very strong, and a man of marked ability and
+sterling character.
+
+_Dangerfield Newby_ was born a slave in Virginia, but his father, a
+Scotchman, freed him with other mulatto children. Newby had a wife and
+seven children still in slavery, and he was trying to raise money to
+buy them, for they were to be sold further south. He failed at this;
+and joined John Brown in desperation. He was killed at the Ferry, and
+so failed to free his poor family, as he had dreamed.
+
+_Shields Green_, colored, was also born a slave, but escaped, leaving
+a little son in slavery. He met Brown through Frederick Douglass, the
+great Negro orator, and joined in the raid, though many warned him it
+would mean his death. He was uneducated, but deeply emotional, and
+deeply attached to the “ole man,” as he called John Brown. He was hung
+after the raid; his age 23.
+
+They were all young men; the average age of the band was 25 years and
+five months. They were all strong, intelligent, in love with life and
+eager for the future; but they chose to attempt this mad, dangerous
+deed rather than consent any longer to the lie and to the power of
+black slavery.
+
+John Brown they followed and loved as one would a strong and kindly
+father. There was always something patriarchal about John Brown and his
+soldiers, many observers said. It made his deed seem like some story
+out of the Bible, the swift and terrible Justice of the Lord of Hosts.
+
+
+
+
+THE “NIGGER-THIEF”
+
+When the South heard of John Brown’s raid, there was a wave of
+immediate fury. Men poured by the thousands into the little Virginia
+town, and the bars were filled with savage, half-drunk men, who talked
+of lynching the “old nigger-thief.” Governor Wise had come down
+from the capital, and he and others prevented any such disgraceful
+procedure. He himself was mystified by the raid. It seemed an
+incredible performance, for these Southerners could not understand the
+moral passion that animated the Abolitionists. To the south Negroes
+were property--private property. And an attempt to free slaves was to
+them insane, illegal and criminal. When men came with arms for this
+purpose and Southerners were killed in defending slavery, the crime
+became doubly damnable.
+
+John Brown, after his capture, was taken with Aaron Stevens to a
+room nearby. Lying on a cot, his head bandaged, his hair clotted and
+tangled, hands and clothing powder-stained and blood-smeared, the
+old lion was questioned by Governor Wise and a party of officials,
+who included Robert E. Lee, Colonel J. E. B. Stuart, Senator Mason,
+Congressman Vallandigham of Ohio, and other pro-slaveryites.
+
+Their questions were a summary of the attitude of the South to such
+as he. And John Brown, though he was wounded and a prisoner, though
+everywhere enemies surrounded him, and the gallows stared him full in
+the face, answered their questions calmly and courteously, without the
+slightest show of fear.
+
+“Who sent you here?” one official asked. They were trying to worm out
+the names of Northerners who had given Brown money for the raid, so as
+to prosecute them for conspiracy in murder.
+
+“No man sent me here,” John Brown answered calmly. “It was my own
+prompting, and that of my Maker, or that of the devil, which ever you
+please. I acknowledge no man in human form.”
+
+“What was your object in coming?”
+
+“I came to free the slaves.”
+
+“And you think you were acting righteously?”
+
+“Yes. I think, my friends, you are guilty of a great wrong, against God
+and humanity. I think it right to interfere with you to free those you
+hold in bondage. I hold that the Golden Rule applies to the slaves,
+too.”
+
+“And do you mean to say you believe in the Bible?” some one said,
+incredulously. They could not understand this man; they only saw a
+wild, mad “nigger-thief” in him.
+
+“Certainly I do,” John Brown said with dignity.
+
+“Don’t you know you are a seditionist, a traitor, and that you have
+taken up arms against the United States government?”
+
+“I was trying to free the slaves. I have tried moral suasion for this
+purpose, but I don’t think the people in the slave states will ever be
+convinced they are wrong.”
+
+“You are mad and fanatical.”
+
+“And I think you people of the South are mad and fanatical. Is it sane
+to keep five million men in slavery? Is it sane to think such a system
+can last? Is it sane to suppress all who would speak against this
+system, and to murder all who would interfere with it? Is it sane to
+talk of war rather than give it up?”
+
+Thus John Brown uttered his challenge to the South; but they failed to
+understand.
+
+
+
+
+THE TRIAL AT CHARLESTOWN
+
+And they failed to understand that it was not he who was on trial at
+the Charlestown court-house a month later, but the whole slavery system.
+
+Every moment of that trial was reported in the newspapers of the
+nation. Every reader in America knew of the wonderful strength and
+majesty of John Brown in the court-room. The North began thinking about
+slavery as it had never thought before. John Brown was so manifestly
+pure in his intentions; manifestly a crusader, and people were forced
+to try to understand why an old, gray-haired farmer should have taken
+up arms at the age of sixty, after a life spent in useful occupations.
+
+His dignity, his piety, his reputation as a terrible fighter, and the
+Biblical sublimity of the picture of this white-bearded patriarch
+surrounded by his seven sons, all of them armed with rifles, all of
+them ready to die for the cause of abolition--these had their powerful
+effect on the imagination of the North. Hosts of new friends rose up in
+Brown’s defense; legislatures passed resolutions asking for his pardon,
+Congressmen began speaking out, newspapers suddenly found themselves in
+danger of losing their subscribers if they spoke against John Brown;
+everywhere in the North men found themselves waking from a dream, and
+coming into the clear, white vision of John Brown. They saw slavery as
+if for the first time in all its horrors; they could not help taking
+sides. And the South became more and more inflamed with rage as the
+trial progressed, and those reverberations reached it from the North.
+
+John Brown was tried on three charges, murder, treason, and inciting
+the slaves to rebellion. The trial was quickly over; it was but a
+formality. The jury, of course, returned the verdict of guilty, and
+John Brown, lying on his cot in the court-room, said not a word, but
+turned quietly over on his side, when he heard it.
+
+A few days later, Judge Parker pronounced the sentence of death, and
+this time John Brown rose from his cot, and drawing himself up to his
+full stature, with flashing eagle eyes, and calm, clear and distinct
+tones, he addressed the citizens of America. He said many things that
+they were soon to understand clearly on the battlefields of the Civil
+War.
+
+“Had I taken up arms in behalf of the rich, the powerful, the
+intelligent, the so-called great, or in behalf of any of their friends,
+or any of their class, every man in this court would have deemed it
+an act worthy of reward rather than of punishment. But this Court
+acknowledges the validity of the law of God. I see a book kissed here
+which is the Bible, and which teaches me that all things that I would
+have men do unto me, so must I do unto them. I endeavored to act up to
+that instruction. I fought for the poor; and I say it was right, for
+they are as good as any of you; God is no respecter of persons.
+
+“I believe that to have interfered as I have done, as I have always
+freely admitted I have done, in behalf of His despised poor, I did no
+wrong, but right. Now, if it is deemed necessary that I should forfeit
+my life for the furtherance of the ends of justice, and mingle my blood
+further with the blood of my children, and with the blood of millions
+in this slave country whose rights are disregarded by wicked, cruel and
+unjust enactments, I say, let it be done.”
+
+Judge Parker fixed the date for hanging on December 2nd, 1859, a month
+away. It was a fatal mistake for the South, and John Brown’s finest
+gift at the hands of the God he believed in.
+
+
+
+
+THE AGITATOR IN JAIL
+
+For in that month, John Brown accomplished more for abolition than
+even the stern deeds of Kansas had effected. He had put by the sword
+forever, and now for a month took up the pen and made it as powerful
+a weapon. He wrote innumerable letters to Northern friends and they
+were published and read everywhere. Their tone was Christ-like; no
+longer was Brown the militant Captain in the field, but the sweet,
+patient martyr waiting for his end in tranquil joy. In many letters he
+repeats the statement that he is glad to die; that his death is of
+more value to the cause than ever his life could have been. This was no
+vainglorious hysterical gesture with John Brown; he was calmly certain
+of it; he slept peacefully as a child at night, and wrote his letters
+by day, secure in his tranquil wisdom. Friends were planning an attempt
+to rescue him, but he forbade them to try, for he really felt that his
+death was necessary. “I am worth now infinitely more to die, than to
+live,” he said.
+
+And in his letters he gave Americans his last warning on the slavery
+question. He told them it must be settled; it could not go on. His
+letters were so strong, manly, and yet so touching, that even the
+jailor wept as he censored them in the course of his duties. As Wendell
+Phillips said, the million hearts of his countrymen had been melted by
+that old Puritan soul.
+
+With absolute equanimity, John Brown wrote his will, wrote his last
+few letters to his family, determined the coffin in which he was to
+be buried, and the inscription on the family monument, said farewell
+to his fellow-prisoners and jail-keepers. On the morning of December
+2nd he stood calmly on the steps of the scaffold and gazed about him.
+Before leaving his cell he had handed to another prisoner the following
+last and uncompleted message:
+
+“I, John Brown, am now quite certain that the crimes of this guilty
+land will never be purged away but with blood. I had, as I now think,
+vainly flattered myself that without much bloodshed it might be done.”
+
+Now, as he looked about, he could see massed beyond the fifteen hundred
+soldiers Virginia had felt necessary for this execution, the hazy
+outlines of the Blue Ridge mountains. The sun was shining; the sky
+was blue, and his heart was at peace. “This is a beautiful country,”
+he said, “I never had the pleasure of really seeing it before.” He
+walked with perfect composure up the steps, watched by the eyes of
+the soldiery and officialdom of slave-holding Virginia. They saw not
+a tremor in his face or body; not even when the cap was drawn over
+his head, his arms pinioned at the elbows, the noose slipped around
+his neck. He had refused to have the solace of any ministers, for
+they believed in slavery, and he told them he did not regard them as
+Christians. He needed no man’s solace; he was braver than any one
+there. “Shall I give you the signal when the trap is to be sprung?”
+said a friendly sheriff. “No, no,” the serene old man answered, “just
+get it over quickly.”
+
+And quickly enough, it was all over for John Brown. The trap was
+sprung; his body hung between heaven and earth. In the painful silence
+that followed, the voice of Colonel Preston declaimed solemnly, the
+official epitaph, “So perish all such enemies of Virginia! All such
+enemies of the Union! All such foes of the human race!”
+
+That was the verdict of the South, still infatuated and blinded by its
+slave system. But on the other side of the Mason-Dixon line men were
+pronouncing a different verdict on John Brown, and on the other side of
+the Atlantic, the greatest man of letters in Europe, Victor Hugo, was
+saying:
+
+“In killing Brown, the Southern States have committed a crime which
+will take its place among the calamities of history. The rupture of
+the Union will fatally follow the assassination of Brown. As for John
+Brown, he was an apostle and a hero. The gibbet has only increased his
+glory, and made him a martyr.”
+
+
+
+
+HIS SOUL GOES MARCHING ON
+
+John Brown was hung on December 2, 1859. Exactly eleven months later
+Abraham Lincoln was elected President of the United States. Exactly
+eight months after that, Northern troops were marching southward, to
+put down the rebellion of the slave states that had hung Brown.
+
+No one at the time believed events would march so swiftly after Brown’s
+death. There were many who knew that some sort of conflict between the
+North and South was inevitable; it had been brewing for decades. But
+there were as many more who were confident that slavery would win its
+legal fight, and would spread over the whole continent. And the great
+mass of Americans just faintly understood the issues involved; to most
+of them, John Brown seemed some kind of mad fanatic.
+
+President Lincoln’s election undoubtedly provoked the Civil War. And
+his election was undoubtedly due to the discussion on slavery that
+raged after John Brown’s deed. Lincoln was the first Northerner to be
+elected in forty years; the South had always carried things before it,
+and would have done so again had not John Brown roused the entire North
+to a consciousness of what slavery meant.
+
+He did more than all the abolitionists had been able to do in their
+fifty years of agitation.
+
+And yet even most of his friends thought him mad at the time of the
+deed. Abraham Lincoln, in a campaign speech at Cooper Union, in New
+York, said: “Old John Brown has been executed for treason against a
+state. We cannot object, even though he agreed with us in thinking
+slavery wrong. That cannot excuse violence, bloodshed and treason.”
+
+Only men of the stamp of Wendell Phillips fully understood what John
+Brown had done. His funeral oration at the last resting place of John
+Brown’s body had all the vision of the prophets:
+
+“Marvelous old man!... He has abolished slavery in Virginia. You may
+say that this is too much. Our neighbors are the very last men we know.
+The hours that pass us are the ones we appreciate the least. Men walked
+Boston streets, when night fell on Bunker Hill, and pitied Warren,
+saying, ‘Foolish man! Thrown away his life! Why didn’t he measure his
+means better?’ Now we see him standing colossal on that blood-stained
+sod, and severing that day the tie which bound Boston to Great Britain.
+That night George III ceased to rule in New England. History will date
+Southern emancipation from Harper’s Ferry. True, the slave is still
+there. So, when the tempest uproots a pine in your hills, it looks
+green for months, for a year. Still, it is timber, not a tree. John
+Brown has loosened the roots of the slave system; it only breathes--it
+does not live--hereafter.”
+
+Wendell Phillips was a prophet; and even men of wide vision like
+Lincoln could not attain his lofty view. At first there was a rush of
+Northern politicians to disavow and condemn John Brown’s deed. Later,
+there was approval; still later understanding; still later, worship.
+
+Yes, the old man seemed mad, as all pioneers are mad. Gorky has called
+it the madness of the brave. But such madness seems necessary to the
+world; the world would sink into a bog of respectable tyranny and
+stagnation were there not these fresh, strong, ruthless tempests to
+keep the waters of life in motion.
+
+Who knows but that some time in America the John Browns of today
+will be worshipped in like manner? The outlaws of today, the unknown
+soldiers of freedom.
+
+“And his soul goes marching on.”
+
+
+
+
+Transcriber’s Note:
+
+Text that was in italics is enclosed by underscores (_italics_).
+
+- Inconsistencies in hyphenation have been standardized.
+
+- Minor punctuation errors have been changed without notice.
+
+- Spelling was retained as in the original except for the following
+  changes:
+
+  Page 6: "civilization in the New world" to "civilization in the
+    New World"
+  Page 12: "a circumstance occured" to "a circumstance occurred"
+  Page 20: "his thirty-fith" to "his thirty-fifth"
+  Page 22: "in communities where everyone" to "in communities where
+    every one"
+  Page 24: "John Brown of Osawotamie" to "John Brown of Osawatomie"
+  Page 25: "most of the Border Ruffins" to "most of the Border
+    Ruffians"
+  Page 26: "settlement at Osawotamie" to "settlement at Osawatomie"
+  Page 32: "It publishe a newspaper" to "It published a newspaper"
+  Page 34: "on the Pottawotamie" to "on the Pottawatomie"
+  Page 34: "he had a shot gun" to "he had a shotgun"
+  Page 42: "eleven other slave" to "eleven other slaves"
+  Page 44: "not insane. Cooly" to "not insane. Coolly"
+  Page 57: "suddenly found themelves" to "suddenly found themselves"
+*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 77258 ***
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+<div style='text-align:center'>*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 77258 ***</div>
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+<figure class="figcenter illowp45" id="cover" style="max-width: 100.0em;">
+  <img class="w100" src="images/cover.jpg" alt="">
+</figure>
+
+<br>
+<p class="ph2">LITTLE BLUE BOOK NO. 521</p>
+<p class="ph3">Edited by E. Haldeman-Julius</p>
+
+<h1>Life of John Brown</h1>
+
+<p class="ph2">Michael Gold</p>
+<br><br>
+<p class="ph3">HALDEMAN-JULIUS COMPANY</p>
+<p class="ph3">GIRARD, KANSAS</p>
+<br>
+<p class="ph4">Copyright, 1924,
+Haldeman-Julius Company.</p>
+
+<p class="ph4">PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA</p>
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+<div class="chapter">
+
+  <h2 class="nobreak" id="FOREWORD">
+    FOREWORD.
+  </h2>
+</div>
+
+<p>John Brown’s life is a grand, simple epic that
+should inspire one to heroism. No one asks for
+dates and minute details on hearing the life of
+Jesus or Socrates. There are men who have
+proved their superiority to the pettiness of life,
+and who seem almost divine. John Brown is
+one of them. I think he was almost our greatest
+American. I know that he was the greatest man
+the common people of America have yet produced.</p>
+
+<p>He did not become a President, a financier, a
+great scientist or artist; he was a plain and
+rather obscure farmer until his death. That
+is his greatness. He had no great offices, no
+recognition or applause of multitudes to spur
+him on, to feed his vanity and self-righteousness.
+He did his duty in silence; he was an
+outlaw. Only after he had been hung like a
+common murderer, and only after the Civil
+War had come to fulfill his prophecies, was he
+recognized as a great figure.</p>
+
+<p>But in his life he was a common man to the
+end, a hard-working, honest, Puritan farmer
+with a large family, a man worried with the details
+of poverty, and obscure as ourselves. Now
+we are taught as school-children that only those
+who become Presidents and captains of finance
+are the successful ones in our democracy. John
+Brown proved that there is another form of
+success, within the reach of everyone, and that
+is to devote one’s life to a great and pure
+cause.</p>
+
+<p>John Brown was hung as an outlaw; but he
+was a success, as Jesus and Socrates were successes.
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_4">[Pg 4]</span>Some day school-children will be taught
+that his had been the only sort of success worth
+striving for in his time. The rest was dross;
+the personal success of the beetle that rolls
+itself a huger ball of dung than its fellow-beetles,
+and exults over it.</p>
+
+<p>John Brown is a legend; but I still see him
+in the simple, obscure heroes who fight for
+freedom today in America. That is why I am
+telling his story. It is the story of thousands
+of men living in America now, did we but know
+it. John Brown is still in prison in America;
+yes, and he has been hung and shot down a
+hundred times since his first death. For his
+soul is marching on; it is the soul of liberty
+and justice, which cannot die, or be suppressed.</p>
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_5">[Pg 5]</span></p>
+
+  <h2 class="nobreak" id="LIFE_OF_JOHN_BROWN">
+    LIFE OF JOHN BROWN
+    <br><br>
+    WHEN SLAVERY WAS RESPECTABLE
+  </h2>
+</div>
+
+<p>To understand any of the outstanding men of
+history one must also understand something of
+their background. The Roman Emperor Marcus
+Aurelius persecuted and burned the primitive
+Christians; yet he is accounted one of the most
+religious and humane of historical figures, and
+his Meditations are commonly considered a
+book of the gentlest and wisest counsel toward
+the good life.</p>
+
+<p>You cannot understand this paradox unless
+you know the history of the Roman state. And
+you cannot understand John Brown unless you
+understand the history of his times.</p>
+
+<p>John Brown, until the age of fifty, had lived
+the peaceful, laborious life of a Yankee farmer
+with a large family. He hated war, and was
+almost a Quaker; had never handled fire-arms,
+and was a man of deep and silent affections.
+He was deeply religious, read the Bible daily;
+Christianity imbued all the acts of his daily
+existence.</p>
+
+<p>This man, nearing his sixtieth year, assembled
+a group of young men with rifles and took
+the field to wage guerrilla war on slavery. He
+became a warrior, an outlaw. What drove him
+to this desperate stand?</p>
+
+<p>I think the answer is: Respectability. There
+is nothing more maddening to a man of deep
+moral feeling than to find that slavery has
+become respectable, while freedom is considered
+the mad dream of a fanatic.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_6">[Pg 6]</span></p>
+
+<p>The slavery of black men had become the
+most respectable institution in America in John
+Brown’s time. It had had a dark and bloody
+history of a hundred years in which to become
+firmly rooted into American life.</p>
+
+<p>There had been slavery in Europe for centuries
+before the discovery of America—but it
+was white slavery. Each feudal baron owned
+hordes of serfs—white farmers—who were as
+much a part of his land-holdings as his castles,
+horses and ploughs.</p>
+
+<p>With the invention of printing, gunpowder
+and machine production the system of feudalism
+declined. The French Revolution helped
+deal it a death blow. The last country where
+this ancient slavery of white men was not dead
+was in Russia; but African slavery, the slavery
+of Negroes, who were heathens, and therefore
+could morally be bought and sold by Christians,
+had been reintroduced on the northern coast of
+the Mediterranean by Moorish traders. In the
+year 990 these Moors from the Barbary Coast
+first reached the cities of Nigrita, and established
+an uninterrupted exchange of Saracen
+and European luxuries for black slaves.</p>
+
+<p>Columbus tried to introduce Indian slavery
+into Europe but the church forbade it, for
+Indians were accounted Christians when converted.
+The unhappy Negroes were not considered
+convertible; their slavery was sanctified
+by the church. And for the next few centuries
+the African slave-trade was the most
+lucrative traffic pursued by mankind. Black
+slaves were to be found in the whole vast area
+of Spanish and Portuguese America, also in
+Dutch and French Guinea and the West Indies.
+It was black men who cleared the jungles, tilled
+the fields, built the cities and roads and laid
+down, in their sweat and blood, the foundations
+of civilization in the New <ins id="World" title="Original has 'world'">World</ins>. Great
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_7">[Pg 7]</span>jealous and prosperous monopolies were formed
+in this traffic of slaves; and its profits were
+greedily shared by philosophers, statesmen and
+kings.</p>
+
+<p>In 1776, the American colonies were inhabited
+by two and a half million white persons, who
+owned half a million slaves. Many of the most
+rational and humane leaders of the Revolution
+saw the inconsistency of slave-holders making
+a revolution in the name of freedom. There
+was some early agitation against slavery, but
+the humanitarians were in a minority. Even
+then slavery had become respectable and profitable.
+It would have been easy and cheap to
+have freed the slaves then. It would have been
+the most practicable thing the young nation
+could have done. Not a life would have been
+lost; and the development of the country might
+have been even more rapid. But it was not
+done; such acts need more far-sightedness than
+the average man possesses.</p>
+
+<p>Slavery grew by leaps and bounds, as the
+country was growing.</p>
+
+<p>The slave trader, shrewd, intelligent and rich,
+kidnapped young men and women in Africa and
+did a huge business. His markets became the
+feature of every Southern town. The planters
+lolled at their ease, and devised ways and means
+of forcing their slaves to breed more rapidly.
+The slaves were treated as impersonally as
+animals. Mothers were sold away from their
+children, and husbands from their wives. Generations
+of black men died in bondage, and left
+their children only the sad inheritance of slavery.</p>
+
+<p>The South developed an aristocrat class of
+indolent white men and women who looked
+down on all work as ignominious, and who used
+their minds, not in the arts or sciences, but to
+find new moral justifications for slavery.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_8">[Pg 8]</span></p>
+
+<p>Slavery was respectable. “It is an act of philanthropy
+to keep the Negro here, as we keep
+our children in subjection for their own good,”
+said a Southern statesman. Slavery was moral.
+Even most of the respectability of the North
+enlisted in its defense. In 1826, Edward Everett,
+the great Massachusetts statesman, said in Congress
+that slavery was sanctioned by religion
+and by the United States Constitution.</p>
+
+<p>The churches of almost every denomination
+were solidly behind slavery. The Supreme
+Court ruled that it was constitutional. A pro-slavery
+President occupied the White House,
+and Senator Sumner, a lonely abolitionist, was
+beaten down with a loaded cane on the senate
+floor because he dared say a brave word
+against the nation’s crime.</p>
+
+<p>In 1838 William Lloyd Garrison founded the
+Liberator, first of the abolitionist journals. He
+said that “the constitution is a covenant with
+death, and an agreement with hell,” and he
+fought slavery with all his power. “Our country
+is the world, our countrymen all mankind,”
+was the slogan of his journal. Garrison was
+beaten by a mob in a northern city for his
+courage; and other abolitionists were tarred
+and feathered, lynched, and attacked by mobs
+of respectable northern merchants and church-goers,
+much as pacifists were beaten by mobs
+during the late war.</p>
+
+<p>Slavery was respectable. Negro field hands
+sold for $1,000 each, and innocent black babies
+were worth $100 each to the white master as
+they suckled at a Negro mother’s breast.</p>
+
+<p>To attack slavery was to attack the constitution,
+the church, the government, and the
+institution of private property. To attack respectability
+has always been the crime of the
+saviours, and respectability is the cross on
+which they are forever hung.</p>
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_9">[Pg 9]</span></p>
+
+  <h2 class="nobreak" id="HOW_JOHN_BROWN_BECAME_AN_ABOLITIONIST">
+    HOW JOHN BROWN BECAME AN ABOLITIONIST
+  </h2>
+</div>
+
+<p>In the pagan ages and in the more distant
+days of savagery, men were individuals. They
+had no social imagination. They could stand
+by and see another man writhe in tortures, and
+laugh at him. Civilization has been developing
+social imagination; it has been breeding
+more and more the type of human being who
+feels the suffering and injustice of another as
+his own.</p>
+
+<p>John Brown was perhaps born with this
+strain in him. In 1857, when he had already
+plunged into his life-work, and was in the thick
+of bloody fights in Kansas, he sat down to write
+a most charming and tender letter to a little
+boy who was the son of one of his friends in
+the east. Those who think of fighters like
+John Brown as possessed by only a lust for
+battle, ought to read this letter. It reveals
+how soft was his heart under the grim mask of
+the Kansas warrior.</p>
+
+<p>The letter is autobiographical. It tells how
+John Brown first became acquainted with the
+horrors of slavery, and what effect it had on
+his imagination.</p>
+
+<p>This letter is so touching, and so remarkable
+for the picture it gives of John Brown’s early
+years, also for the picture of the man’s mature
+character as revealed by his own words, that I
+am tempted to give it in full. I shall give only
+parts of it, however.</p>
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+<div class="chapter">
+  <h2 class="nobreak" id="THE_LETTER_TO_MASTER_HENRY_L_STEARNS">
+    THE LETTER TO MASTER HENRY L. STEARNS
+  </h2>
+</div>
+
+<p>“My dear Young Friend:—I had not forgotten
+my promise to write you; but my constant care
+and anxiety have obliged me to put it off a
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_10">[Pg 10]</span>long time. I do not flatter myself I can write
+anything that will very much interest you; but
+have concluded to send you a short story of a
+certain boy of my acquaintance; and for convenience
+and shortness of name, I will call him
+John.</p>
+
+<p>“This story will be mainly a narration of
+follies and errors, which I hope you may avoid;
+but there is one thing connected with it, which
+will be calculated to encourage any young
+person to persevering effort, and that is the
+degree of success in accomplishing his objects
+which to a great extent marked the course of
+this boy throughout my entire acquaintance
+with him; notwithstanding his moderate capacity,
+and still more moderate acquirements.</p>
+
+<p>“John was born May 9, 1800, at Torrington,
+Connecticut; of poor and hard-working parents;
+a descendant on the side of his father of one
+of the company of the Mayflower who landed
+at Plymouth, 1620. His mother was descended
+from a man who came at an early period to
+New England from Amsterdam, in Holland.
+Both his father’s and his mother’s fathers
+served in the war of the revolution; his father’s
+father died in a barn at New York while in the
+service, in 1776.</p>
+
+<p>“I cannot tell you of anything in the first
+four years of John’s life worth mentioning save
+that at an early age he was tempted by three
+large brass pins belonging to a girl who lived
+in the family; and stole them. In this he was
+detected by his mother; and after having a full
+day to think of the wrong, received from her
+a thorough whipping.</p>
+
+<p>“When he was five years old his father moved
+to Ohio, then a wilderness filled with wild
+beasts and Indians. During the long journey
+which was performed in part or mostly with an
+ox-team, he was called on by turns to assist
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_11">[Pg 11]</span>a boy five years older, and learned to think
+he could accomplish smart things in driving
+the cows and riding the horses. Sometimes he
+met with rattlesnakes which were very large,
+and which some of the company generally managed
+to kill.</p>
+
+<p>“After getting to Ohio he was for some time
+rather afraid of the Indians, and of their rifles;
+but this soon wore off, and he used to hang
+about them quite as much as was consistent
+with good manners, and learned a trifle of their
+talk. His father at this time learned to dress
+deer skin, and John, who was perhaps rather
+observing, ever after remembered the entire
+process of deer skin dressing, so that he could
+at any time dress his own leather such as squirrel,
+raccoon, cat, wolf or dog skins; and also
+he learned to make whip lashes, which brought
+him in some change at various times, and was
+useful in many ways.</p>
+
+<p>“At six years old John began to be quite a
+rambler in the new wild country, finding birds
+and squirrels, and sometimes a wild turkey’s
+nest. Once a poor Indian boy gave him a yellow
+marble, the first he had ever seen. This
+he thought a good deal of, and kept it a good
+while; but at last he lost it one day. It took
+years to heal the wound, and I think he cried
+at times about it. About five months after
+this he caught a young squirrel, tearing off
+its tail in doing it; and getting severely bitten
+at the same time himself. He however held on
+to the little bob-tailed squirrel and finally got
+him perfectly tamed, so that he almost idolized
+his pet. This, too, he lost, by its wandering
+away; and for a year or two John was in
+mourning; and looking at all the squirrels he
+could see to try and discover Bobtail, if possible.
+He had also at one time become the
+owner of a little ewe lamb which did finely
+until it was about two-thirds grown, when it
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_12">[Pg 12]</span>sickened and died. This brought another protracted
+mourning season; not that he felt the
+pecuniary loss so heavily, for that was never
+his disposition; but so strong and earnest were
+his attachments. It was a school of adversity
+for John; you may laugh at all this, but they
+were sore trials to him.</p>
+
+<p>“John was never quarrelsome; but was excessively
+fond of the roughest and hardest kind
+of play; and could never get enough of it. He
+would always choose to stay at home and work
+hard, rather than go to school. To be sent off
+alone through the wilderness to very considerable
+distances was particularly his delight;
+and in this he was often indulged; so that by
+the time he was twelve years old he was sent
+off more than a hundred miles with companies
+of cattle; and he would have thought his character
+much injured had he been obliged to be
+helped in such a job. This was a boyish feeling,
+but characteristic, nevertheless.</p>
+
+<p>“When the war broke out with England in
+1812 his father soon commenced furnishing the
+troops with beef cattle, the collection and driving
+of which afforded John some opportunity
+for the chase, on foot, of wild steers and other
+cattle through the woods. During this war he
+had some chance to form his own boyish judgment
+of men and measures; and the effect of
+what he saw was to so far disgust him with
+military affairs that he would neither train nor
+drill, but got off by paying fines; and got
+along like a Quaker until his age had finally
+cleared him of military duty.</p>
+
+<p>“During the war with England a circumstance
+<ins id="occurred" title="Original has 'occured'">occurred</ins> that in the end made him a most
+determined Abolitionist and led him to swear
+eternal war with slavery. John was stopping
+for a short time with a very gentlemanly landlord,
+since made a United States Marshal. This
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_13">[Pg 13]</span>man owned a slave boy near John’s age, a boy
+very active, intelligent and full of good feeling
+to whom John was under considerable obligation
+for numerous little acts of kindness.</p>
+
+<p>“The Master made a great pet of John;
+brought him to table with his finest company
+and friends and called their attention to every
+little smart thing he said or did, and to the
+fact of his being more than a hundred miles
+from home with a company of cattle alone;
+while the Negro boy (who was fully if not more
+than his equal) was badly clothed, poorly fed
+and lodged in cold weather, and beaten before
+John’s eyes with iron shovels or any other
+thing that came first to hand.</p>
+
+<p>“This brought John to reflect on the wretched,
+hopeless condition of fatherless and motherless
+slave children; for such children have neither
+fathers or mothers to protect and provide
+for them.</p>
+
+<p>“He sometimes would raise the question in
+his mind: Is God, then, their father?”</p>
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+<div class="chapter">
+  <h2 class="nobreak" id="HOW_JOHN_BROWN_EDUCATED_HIMSELF">
+    HOW JOHN BROWN EDUCATED HIMSELF
+  </h2>
+</div>
+
+<p>There are other matters treated in this long
+and charming letter, written by an outlaw 57
+years old, to a boy of twelve. One detail that
+is important is the analysis of his own character.
+John Brown says his father early made
+him a sort of foreman in his tanning establishment,
+and that though he got on in the most
+friendly way with everyone, “the habit so early
+formed of being obeyed rendered him in after
+life too much disposed to speak in an imperious
+or dictating way.” John Brown was ever humble,
+and severely chastised his own faults, but
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_14">[Pg 14]</span>this habit of being a leader served him in good
+stead, and made him the born captain of forlorn
+hopes he later became.</p>
+
+<p>Another detail that interests us is his account
+of his early reading. Working-class Americans,
+and they are the majority of the nation, do
+not go to the high schools and universities.
+Neither did John Brown. But they can read
+history, as he did at ten years, and they can
+study and make themselves proficient in some
+field, as he made a surveyor of himself by home
+study. He also read passionately, he says, the
+lives of great, good and wise men; their sayings
+and writings; the school of biography that
+seems to have nurtured so many great men.
+John Brown never went to school after his
+childhood; but he became an expert surveyor,
+he learned the fine points of cattle breeding and
+tanning, he was a student of astronomy, he
+knew the Bible almost by heart, he studied military
+tactics later in life, he was familiar with
+the lives and times of most of the great leaders
+of mankind, and best of all, he knew how to
+stir men to great deeds, and lead them in the
+battle.</p>
+
+<p>Great men do not need to own a college
+diploma; they teach themselves, they are taught
+by Life.</p>
+
+<p>How meaningless college degrees would sound
+if attached after the names of Brutus, Pericles,
+Socrates, Caius Gracchus, Buddha, Jesus, Wat
+Tyler, Jefferson, Danton, William Lloyd Garrison!</p>
+
+<p>As for instance: Jesus Christ, D.D.; Robert
+Burns, M.A.; Victor Hugo, B.S.; John Brown,
+Ph.D.! How superfluous the titles of man’s
+universities, when Life has crowned the student
+with real and greener laurels! Yes, there are
+many things not taught in the colleges!</p>
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_15">[Pg 15]</span></p>
+
+  <h2 class="nobreak" id="THE_MOULDING_OF_JOHN_BROWN">
+    THE MOULDING OF JOHN BROWN
+  </h2>
+</div>
+
+<p>And so by his own pen, we have had illuminated
+for us the life of John Brown up to his
+twentieth year. We see him, a big, strong boy,
+fond of hard work, capable in all he put his
+hand to, a young man bred in the hard college
+of life in an early pioneer settlement. He was
+fond of reading good books, and improving his
+mind; he was rather shy, and yet filled with
+an extraordinary self-confidence, which made
+him a born leader, one who could show the
+way to men older than himself, and command
+them, and himself, in the straight line of duty.</p>
+
+<p>The subsequent life of John Brown cannot be
+understood unless one knows all the environmental
+forces and the heredity that went to
+mould him. John Brown, a Puritan in the
+austerity of his manner of living, the narrow
+yet burning reality of his vision, and the hardships
+he later underwent, came of a family of
+American pioneers. To John Brown life from
+the outset meant incessant strife, first against
+unconquered nature, then in the struggle for
+a living, and finally in that effort to be a Samson
+to the pro-slavery Philistines in which his
+existence culminated.</p>
+
+<p>At twenty John Brown married Dianthe Lusk,
+a plain but quiet and amiable girl, as deeply
+religious as her young husband, and as ready
+as he to assume all the serious burdens of life.</p>
+
+<p>He was working in his father’s tanning establishment
+at this time, at Hudson, Ohio. But in
+May, 1825, John Brown moved his family to
+Richmond, near Meadville, Pennsylvania, the
+first of his many moves for he was imbued with
+a deep restlessness, the hunger of the pioneer
+for virgin lands and new enterprises.</p>
+
+<p>Here, with his characteristic energy, he
+cleared twenty-five acres of timber land, built
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_16">[Pg 16]</span>a fine tannery, sunk vats, and in a few months
+had leather tanning in all of them. Like his
+father, Owen Brown, John was of a marked
+ethical and social nature. He proved of great
+value to the new settlement at Richmond by
+his devotion to the cause of religion and civil
+order. He surveyed new roads, was instrumental
+in building school houses, procuring
+preachers, “and encouraging anything that
+would have a moral tendency.” It became almost
+a proverb in Richmond, so an early neighbor
+records, to say of a progressive man that he
+was “as enterprising and honest as John Brown,
+and as useful to the county.”</p>
+
+<p>In Richmond the family dwelt for ten years.
+John Brown raised corn, did his tanning,
+brought the first blooded stock into the county,
+and became the first postmaster. Here, also, at
+Richmond, the first great grief came into John
+Brown’s life, to school him in that stoicism that
+later made him the hero of a great cause. A
+four year old son died in 1831, and the next
+year his wife, Dianthe, died after having lived
+and worked beside him like a good, faithful
+woman for twelve years, giving birth to seven
+children in that time, five of whom grew to
+vigorous manhood and womanhood.</p>
+
+<p>Nearly a year later John Brown was married
+for the second time, to Mary Anne Day, daughter
+of a blacksmith. She was then a large,
+silent girl of sixteen, who had come to John
+Brown’s home with an older sister to care for
+his children after his wife’s death. He quickly
+grew fond of the young pioneer girl; one day he
+gave her a letter offering marriage. She was
+so overcome that she dared not read it. Next
+morning she found courage to do so, and when
+she went down to the spring for water for the
+house, he followed her and she gave him her
+answer there.</p>
+
+<p>Mary Brown was the best wife a John Brown
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_17">[Pg 17]</span>could have found. She had great physical ruggedness,
+and she bore for her husband thirteen
+children, seven of whom died in childhood,
+and two of whom were killed in early manhood
+at Harper’s Ferry. She did more than her full
+share of the arduous labor of a large pioneer
+household, and she endured hardships like a
+Spartan mother. She was strong; and she had
+a noble and unflinching character. It was only
+a heroic woman such as this who could have
+been the wife of a hero; who could have given
+husband and sons cheerfully to the cause of
+abolition, and been so silent and brave even
+after their death.</p>
+
+<p>John Brown worked hard; he had no vices,
+he was honest and painstaking, but somehow
+success in business always eluded him. This
+was another of the griefs of his life. He blamed
+himself for his failures, but it was really not
+his fault. It requires a real worship of money
+to make one a business success, and John Brown
+never took money as seriously as it demands of
+its lovers. After ten years in Pennsylvania, of
+much hard work with little results, he moved
+to Franklin Mills, in Ohio, where he entered
+the tanning business with Zenas Kent, a well-to-do
+business man of that town. Here he also
+became involved in a land development scheme
+that was ruined by a large corporation’s maneuvers.
+He was so deeply involved in this and
+other ventures that in the bad times of 1837
+he failed. In 1842 he was again compelled to
+go through bankruptcy proceedings.</p>
+
+<p>In after years John Brown explained these
+failures to his oldest son as the result of the
+false doctrine of doing business on credit.</p>
+
+<p>“Instead of being thoroughly imbued with the
+doctrine of pay as you go,” he wrote, “I started
+out in life with the idea that nothing could be
+done without capital, and that a poor man must
+use his credit and borrow; and this pernicious
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_18">[Pg 18]</span>doctrine has been the rock on which I, as well
+as many others, have split. The practical effect
+of this false doctrine has been to keep me like
+a toad under a harrow most of my business life.
+Running into debt includes so much evil that
+I hope all my children will shun it as they
+would a pestilence.”</p>
+
+<p>John Brown never gave up in despair anything
+he had attempted; his business failures
+bruised him sorely, but he arose each time like
+a rugged wrestler and began a new endeavor.
+In 1839, at one of his darkest periods, he began
+a sheep growing and wool marketing venture in
+which he engaged for many years, going into
+partnership with Simon Perkins, a wealthy
+merchant of Akron, Ohio. This partnership was
+the longest and final one of Brown’s business
+career.</p>
+
+<p>So that is how one must think of Brown, too;
+not only as the consecrated, almost inhuman
+battler and martyr, but also as the sane, plodding,
+patient farmer, tanner, surveyor, real
+estate speculator, and practical shepherd. He
+was a tall, spare, silent man, terribly pious,
+terribly honest, a good neighbor and community
+leader, and the father of a large family of sons
+and daughters—a patriarch out of the Bible,
+tending his flocks and gathering about him a
+tribe of young and stalwart sons.</p>
+
+<p>He was a typical pioneer American of those
+rough days in the settling of the middle west.
+He had no time for frivolity, though there was
+a grim humor in the man; he brought his
+children up strictly, yet with a justice that
+made them all love, revere and respect him
+until the end; and he had his share of those
+private sorrows that crush so many men; his
+first beloved wife had died, with an infant
+son; he had failed in business; and he had
+lost by death no less than nine children, three
+of whom perished in one month in those hard
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_19">[Pg 19]</span>surroundings, and one of whom, a little daughter,
+was accidently scalded to death by an elder
+sister. These deaths hurt John Brown cruelly,
+for though stern and stoic, he was a fiercely
+tender father; all his affections were fierce,
+though inexpressible and deep, as a lion’s.</p>
+
+<p>“I seem to be struck almost dumb by the
+dreadful news,” he wrote his family, when he
+heard of this accident. “One more dear little
+feeble child I am to meet no more till the dead,
+small and great, shall stand before God. I
+trust that none of you will feel disposed to
+cast an unreasonable blame on my dear Ruth
+on account of the dreadful trial we are called
+to suffer. This is a bitter cup indeed; but
+blessed be God; a brighter day shall dawn;
+and let us not sorrow as they who have no
+hope.”</p>
+
+<p>The Browns had made at least ten moves in
+the years from 1830 to 1845, and John Brown
+had engaged in no less than seven different
+occupations. But always, under the business
+man and farmer, there had been the solemn
+philosopher brooding on God and the mystery
+and terror of life; and always, under the sober
+father and citizen, there had been planning
+and brooding and suffering keenly the tender
+humanitarian, the Christ-like martyr, the relentless
+fighter who would finally pay with
+his life to strike a blow at Slavery, “that sum
+of all villainies.”</p>
+
+<p>In this patriarchal farmer of the middle
+west, Freedom was forging and sharpening a
+terrible weapon that was some day to be turned
+against Tyranny. Quietly, in peaceful surroundings
+the work was being done; no one
+knew the fire in this man, least of all himself.</p>
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_20">[Pg 20]</span></p>
+
+  <h2 class="nobreak" id="THE_GROWTH_OF_AN_ABOLITIONIST">
+    THE GROWTH OF AN ABOLITIONIST
+  </h2>
+</div>
+
+<p>For though John Brown had always been an
+abolitionist, though he had learned from his
+father, and from his own experiences to hate
+slavery and its manifold brutalities, it was not
+until his <ins id="thirty-fifth" title="Original has 'thirty-fith'">thirty-fifth</ins> year that John Brown
+showed any more active hatred of it than did
+hundreds of Ohio farmers around him. Like
+them, he aided when he could, in the work of
+the Underground Railroad. Thousands of free
+Negroes and white abolitionists were engaged
+in this work of passing fugitive slaves from
+the South up over the Canadian line, where
+they were being restored to manhood under
+the flag of monarchism.</p>
+
+<p>But John Brown, in 1834, began thinking
+that education of the Negroes might be an important
+way toward the solution of their problems.
+He formed plans of starting a school
+for them. He and his family at this time,
+though his wool-business was going comfortably,
+lived in extreme frugality, for they had
+agreed to save all they could toward the establishment
+of some such school. For years John
+Brown dreamed of such ventures as these; and
+he read all the journals of the small abolitionist
+groups, and met many of the leaders. He
+always spoke against slavery in churches or
+political meetings where he happened to be;
+and he made friends with many Negroes, and
+showed a deep interest in all their problems.
+But not yet had he formed any of those belligerent
+plans that later were his whole life.
+He still believed that abolition might be effected
+by education and peaceful agitation.</p>
+
+<p>Events were piling up too rapidly against
+such a view, however. The South grew more
+aggressive every day. The slave system seemed
+to carry everything before it. It had broken
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_21">[Pg 21]</span>the agreement of 1820 by extending slavery
+above the Mason and Dixon line into Missouri.
+It had forced the war against Mexico, and had
+carved out huge new tracts for slavery. It
+dominated the government of the United States.
+All of the Presidents were pro-slavery, or they
+could not hope for office. Congress was pro-slavery,
+and the Senate, too.</p>
+
+<p>And it was not only in the South that the
+life of an abolitionist was worth little more
+than a pinch of snuff. The slavery venom had
+crept into the North, for powerful economic
+reasons. The Northern merchants and manufacturers
+made their profits by selling machinery,
+and the goods made by machinery, to
+the agricultural, cotton-raising South. And
+the South threatened to secede from the union,
+or at the least, to force a low tariff on imports,
+and buy its goods in Europe, if the
+abolitionists were not curbed.</p>
+
+<p>There were not many of these abolitionists;
+but they were outspoken, intense, and made
+themselves heard at all costs. They paid a
+heavy price for this courage. They were persecuted,
+tarred and feathered, and in many
+cases lynched by the Northern mobs.</p>
+
+<p>Then the Southern slave system seemed to
+have reached a triumphant climax in two
+events: the first, the passing of the Fugitive
+Slave Law, in 1851, and the other, the battle
+over the admission of Kansas as free soil or
+slave territory.</p>
+
+<p>The fugitive slave law incensed John Brown
+to fury, as it did every other abolitionist. It
+was a federal law forced by the South which
+forced the state officials of every Northern
+state, however much they might hate slavery,
+to join in the hunt for runaway slaves and
+their helpers.</p>
+
+<p>A United States sloop was sent to bring back
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_22">[Pg 22]</span>a slave who had fled to Boston. The abolitionists
+tried to rescue him, but were foiled, with
+two men killed. Scenes such as these marked,
+everywhere in the North, the enforcement of
+the law. Abolitionists were arrested in communities
+where <ins id="every_one" title="Original has 'everyone'">every one</ins> of their neighbors
+was also anti-slavery. Slaves, who had been
+freemen for years and years in the North, were
+captured and dragged back to bondage by government
+officials.</p>
+
+<p>The abolitionists became more fiery in their
+desperation. Many of them, like Garrison, began
+preaching that the North set up a government
+of its own: “No Union With Slave-holders!”
+was the slogan.</p>
+
+<p>And the Kansas affair heaped coal on this
+fire. Under the Missouri Compromise, both
+North and South had agreed to restrict slavery
+within the states already burdened with it;
+they had agreed also, that the citizens of a new
+territory could decide whether or not they
+wanted slavery or freedom, and could vote
+their choice when the territory was admitted
+to the union. In other words, both sides would
+keep their hands off new territory; and the
+federal government would not interfere.</p>
+
+<p>Kansas was such a territory; it was being
+rapidly settled, and in a few years was to
+come up for admission as a state.</p>
+
+<p>And what was happening was that the South
+was flooding this territory with spurious settlers;
+idle, whiskey-drinking ruffians armed
+with shotguns and revolvers, who were intimidating
+the Northern settlers who had
+come, and were stealing the elections from
+them, by force of arms.</p>
+
+<p>The South was openly breaking its agreement
+with the north; it was openly declaring
+its intent to make Kansas another addition
+to the slave states.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_23">[Pg 23]</span></p>
+
+<p>To the abolitionists in the North this seemed
+like the last straw. The South was at its
+flood-tide of domination; it controlled everything
+in the American union; and now it was
+moving forward to make its domination
+permanent by any means; even by the means
+of murder and intimidation.</p>
+
+<p>Reports of assassinations, whippings, and the
+burning down of Northern settlers’ cabins came
+every week from Kansas. The abolitionists
+began raising emigrant companies of Northerners
+who would go to Kansas to vote for
+freedom, even though the South sent its cannon
+against them.</p>
+
+<p>The Brown family had by now moved to
+North Elba, New York, a little Adirondack
+colony of fugitive Negroes who had settled on
+the lands owned by Gerrit Smith, a wealthy
+and sincere abolitionist. John Brown had been
+of much practical service to the Negroes there;
+but he and his sons, like every other foe of
+slavery, were deeply shaken by the events in
+Kansas.</p>
+
+<p>It seemed horrible to everyone, that after
+twenty years of bitter agitation, slavery was
+not waning, but was stronger than ever—indeed,
+was threatening to swallow up even the
+North.</p>
+
+<p>Strong men were needed in Kansas; and so
+John Brown’s sons went there. They were
+men of peace: they went there as bona fide
+settlers, to take up claims, and to cast their
+vote, when the time came, for freedom. But in
+two months they were writing letters to North
+Elba asking their father to send them all the
+rifles he could collect.</p>
+
+<p>“We have seen some of the curses of slavery,
+and they are many,” wrote one of the sons in
+the very first letter home. “The boys have all
+their feelings worked up, and are ready to
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_24">[Pg 24]</span>fight. Send us arms; we need them more than
+we do bread.”</p>
+
+<p>John Brown collected the arms; and what
+was more, he delivered them with his own
+hands. He wound up his business affairs, left
+his strong, patient wife in charge of the North
+Elba farm, and went to join his sons in Kansas.
+The curtain was now rising in the first
+act of the universal drama called John Brown.
+The man of God, the tender friend of little
+slave children, and old, tortured slave mammies,
+the man of the plough and the counter, the
+patriarch and citizen was at last ready to become
+Captain John Brown of <ins id="Osawatomie1" title="Original has 'Osawotamie'">Osawatomie</ins>;
+John Brown, the outlaw, the warrior, the soldier
+of freedom.</p>
+
+<p>At the mere mention of his name Border
+Ruffians and swashbuckling adherents of
+slavery were soon to tremble and even fly,
+as though a devil were behind. And he was
+bowed with cares and rapidly turning gray;
+and he had never handled fire-arms; and he
+was at the age when other men begin to talk
+of retiring from business and life, when they
+long for peace and reflection, in some quiet
+country scene, away from the world and its
+problems.</p>
+
+<p>He was fifty-five years old.</p>
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+<div class="chapter">
+  <h2 class="nobreak" id="THE_SITUATION_IN_KANSAS">
+    THE SITUATION IN KANSAS
+  </h2>
+</div>
+
+<p>As John Brown left for Kansas, he turned to
+his wife and the remaining members of his
+family and said: “If it is so painful for us to
+part with the hope of meeting again, how must
+it be with the poor slaves, who have no hope?”</p>
+
+<p>John Brown was always sanguine in his ventures;
+but the events before him would have
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_25">[Pg 25]</span>tried the hope of a superman; they were to be
+bloody, exacting, terrible. It was what he
+needed, however, for John Brown went to Kansas
+with a greater project in his mind, the
+attack on Virginia and the South, and Kansas
+was to be for him the rough, harsh school in
+which he could train himself for that supreme
+effort.</p>
+
+<p>With his youngest son, Oliver, then about
+eighteen years old, and a son-in-law, Henry
+Thompson, John Brown left Chicago in August.
+The party had a heavily loaded wagon drawn
+by a “nice, stout young horse,” that was
+stricken with distemper when they reached
+Missouri, and could barely drag himself along.
+Their progress was therefore slow; a scant
+seven or eight miles a day. But it gave them
+an opportunity to see and hear things in Missouri,
+then fiercely pro-slavery, and the reservoir
+from which were drawn most of the Border
+<ins id="Ruffians" title="Original has 'Ruffins'">Ruffians</ins> who were raiding Kansas, and trying
+to force it into the phalanx of slavery states.</p>
+
+<p>Companies of armed men were constantly
+passing and re-passing on the route to Kansas,
+and they were continually boasting “of what
+deeds of patriotism and chivalry they had performed
+there, and of the still more mighty
+deeds they were yet to do.” As Brown wrote
+home in a letter, “No man of them would
+blush when telling of their cruel treading down
+and terrifying of defenceless Free State men;
+seemed to take peculiar satisfaction in telling
+of the fine horses and mules they had killed
+in their numerous expeditions against the
+damned Abolitionists.”</p>
+
+<p>John Brown was roused by all this; already
+he was changing from the peaceful patriarch to
+the fearless warrior in the field. One incident
+illustrates this. When the little party reached
+the Missouri River at Brunswick, Missouri,
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_26">[Pg 26]</span>they sat themselves down to wait for the ferry.
+There came to them an old man, frankly Missourian,
+frankly inquisitive after the manner
+of the frontier. “Where are you going?” he
+asked. “To Kansas,” replied John Brown.
+“Where from?” asked the old man. “From New
+York,” answered John Brown.</p>
+
+<p>“You won’t live to get there,” the old Missourian
+said, grimly.</p>
+
+<p>“We are prepared,” John Brown answered,
+“not to die alone.” Before that spirit and that
+eagle eye the old Missourian quailed; he turned
+and left.</p>
+
+<p>It was in October, after an arduous trip, that
+John Brown and his party reached the family
+settlement at <ins id="Osawatomie2" title="Original has 'Osawotamie'">Osawatomie</ins>. They arrived
+weary and all but destitute, with about sixty
+cents between them. And they found the settlement
+in great distress; all of the Browns,
+except the wife of John, Jr., were completely
+prostrated with fever and ague, gotten from
+the rough conditions. They were living in a
+tent exposed to the chill winds, and were
+shivering over little fires on the bare ground.
+All the food left was a small supply of milk
+from their cows, some corn and a few potatoes.
+It was an unusually cold winter that year; on
+October 26 John Brown saw the hardest freezing
+he had ever witnessed south of his bleak
+farm-house in the Adirondacks; and all the
+Kansas pioneers suffered in it as did the
+Browns.</p>
+
+<p>Nobody in Kansas that first winter knew
+what comforts were. While the Browns paid
+the penalty for living on low ground in a
+ravine and in tents, their bitter experience with
+sickness and hunger was not as bad as that of
+many other Northern families. Starvation and
+death looked in at many a door where parents
+lay helpless, while famished children crawled
+about the dirt floors crying for food, and shrieking
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_27">[Pg 27]</span>with fear if any footstep approached, lest
+the comer be a Border Ruffian, (as the Southerners
+were called) instead of a friend. For
+pure misery and heart-breaking suffering these
+pioneer tales of Kansas are not surpassed by
+any in the whole history of the winning of
+the West.</p>
+
+<p>But old John Brown was indomitable; he put
+new life and energy into his six sons; by November
+two shanties were well advanced, and
+the food problem had been lightened. They
+were getting into good shape for the winter,
+and preparing to take up their share in the
+settling of Kansas, when the hot breath of
+war scorched all these plans, as it did many
+another Northern settler’s.</p>
+
+<p>There would be little time for growing corn
+for the Browns thereafter, or for the other
+settlers; the slavery question demanded an
+answer first.</p>
+
+<p>One dread that had worried the Browns before
+leaving home proved unnecessary. It was
+their fear of the Indians. The Browns were
+terrified when the first big band of Sacs and
+Foxes in war-paint surrounded their tent,
+whooping and yelling, but they had the good
+sense to ground their arms, and the Indians
+did likewise. Thereafter both sides were great
+friends. John, Jr., went often to visit their old
+chief; once, when in the following summer, the
+Indians came to call again, they were “fought”
+with gifts of melons and green corn. “That,”
+said Jason Brown, “was the nicest party I
+ever saw.”</p>
+
+<p>John Brown, Jr., used to ask the old chief
+questions, as, “Why do you Sacs and Foxes not
+build houses and barns like the Ottawas and
+the Chippewas? Why do you not have schools
+and churches like the Delawares and Shawnees?
+Why do you have no preachers and teachers?”
+And the chief replied in a staccato which summed
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_28">[Pg 28]</span>up wonderfully the bitter, century-long experience
+of his people: “We want no houses
+and barns. We want no schools and churches.
+We want no preachers and teachers. We bad
+enough now.”</p>
+
+<p>No, the Indians were friends. The men really
+to be feared were not long in putting in their
+appearance. One night six or seven heavily-armed
+Missourians rode up to the door, and
+asked whether any stray cattle had been seen.
+The Browns replied in the negative; and then,
+as newcomers, they were asked, in the border
+slang, how they were “on the goose.”</p>
+
+<p>“We are Free State,” was the answer, “and
+what is more, we are Abolitionists.”</p>
+
+<p>The men rode away, but from that moment
+the Browns were marked for destruction. They
+did not shrink from danger, however. They
+nailed their flag to the mast; armed themselves,
+and plunged into the thick of all the political
+battles then raging. In a short time their
+settlement was to become known as a center of
+fearless, and if necessary, violent resistance
+to all who wished to see human slavery introduced
+into the Territory. John Brown’s life
+work had begun.</p>
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+<div class="chapter">
+  <h2 class="nobreak" id="THE_BORDER_RUFFIANS_HOLD_AN_ELECTION">
+    THE BORDER RUFFIANS HOLD AN ELECTION
+  </h2>
+</div>
+
+<p>No fair-minded reader of history can doubt,
+in glancing over the records of that time, that
+the South took the first bloody and brutal offensive
+in their attempt to force slavery on
+Kansas. Later, the Free State men from the
+north, under leaders like John Brown, General
+Lane and Captain James Montgomery, took up
+arms, too, and defended themselves bravely;
+but at first, they were victims of the South’s
+determination to carry its point.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_29">[Pg 29]</span></p>
+
+<p>The Southerners began the attack by stealing
+the elections for the Territorial legislature.
+Thousands of Missourians, on horseback and
+in wagons, with guns, bowie-knives, revolvers
+and plenty of whisky, poured over the line in
+November, 1854, and encamped near the polling
+places. The ballot boxes were extravagantly,
+even humorously, stuffed; the elections were
+carried for the South. There was nothing concealed
+about the affair; in fact, the Missouri
+newspapers had gaily whipped up recruits for
+the raid.</p>
+
+<p>Many of these men, Border Ruffians, as the
+North called them, were hired for the work.
+Others came for the fun; others because they
+hated Yankees; others because they were devout
+believers in Slavery.</p>
+
+<p>“They wore the most savage looks and gave
+utterance to the most horrible imprecations and
+blasphemies,” said Thomas Gladstone, a relative
+of the great statesman of that name, who
+was in Kansas at the time. “In groups of
+drunken, bellowing, blood-thirsty demons,
+armed to the teeth, they crowded about the
+bars and shouted for drink, or made the night
+hideous with noise on the streets.”</p>
+
+<p>Their fraudulent Pawnee legislature convened
+and passed a code of punishments for Free
+State men. Under the code, no one opposed to
+slavery in any manner could serve on a jury,
+or hold any office in Kansas.</p>
+
+<p>Death itself was the penalty for advising
+slaves to rebel, or even supplying them with
+literature that would have that effect.</p>
+
+<p>The mere voicing of a belief that slavery was
+illegal in Kansas was made a grave crime. Any
+person who said in public that slavery was
+wrong, or any person who even “introduced
+into the Territory, any book, paper, magazine,
+pamphlet or circular,”—saying this, was to be
+punished by imprisonment at hard labor for
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_30">[Pg 30]</span>a term of not less than five years.</p>
+
+<p>This notorious Clause 12 was obviously aimed
+at the New York Tribune and other anti-slavery
+journals, and was meant to shut off every
+whisper of free speech. And it did not work.</p>
+
+<p>For the Free State settlers would not recognize
+the legality of the Legislature, and held
+an election of their own. And so there were
+two legislatures in Kansas Territory, two governors
+and governments. All the fighting that
+followed centered about this dualism, and about
+the mad, desperate butcheries and burnings begun
+by the Southerners, when they saw they
+could not cow the Northerners into submission.</p>
+
+<p>President Pierce, who was pro-slavery, sent a
+message to Congress in which he sided with
+the fraudulent legislature and its code, declaring
+it legal, and threatening the Free State
+men, whom he called traitors, insurrectionists,
+and seditionists against the United States government.</p>
+
+<p>In all the Kansas conflict, he threw federal
+troops and federal politicians against the Free
+State men. The South rejoiced at his stand,
+but the Free State men went on with their
+work. And John Brown and his sons took a
+leading position in the fight.</p>
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+<div class="chapter">
+  <h2 class="nobreak" id="THE_SACK_OF_LAWRENCE">
+    THE SACK OF LAWRENCE
+  </h2>
+</div>
+
+<p>“Yet we will continue to tar and feather,
+drown, lynch and hang every white-livered
+abolitionist who dares to pollute our soil,” said
+a flamboyant editorial in the Squatter Sovereign,
+a pro-slavery paper published at Atchison,
+Kansas, a Border Ruffian stronghold.</p>
+
+<p>The Slaveryites lived up to this promise. The
+Free State men at this time had not begun
+to arm, but doggedly and quietly went about
+organizing their own government at Topeka.
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_31">[Pg 31]</span>Their actions infuriated the Southerners. Now
+began the long list of crimes that made the soil
+of Kansas reek with blood.</p>
+
+<p>It would be impossible to give a full record
+here of all those crimes. The least that happened
+was the destruction of newspapers that
+protested against Southern injustice, such as
+the Parkville, Missouri, Luminary, which was
+burned down, the machinery thrown in the
+river, and the editors threatened with a similar
+fate if they indulged in further free speech.</p>
+
+<p>There were hundreds of abolitionists murdered
+in Kansas; hundreds of their wives and
+children were gibed at and threatened and terrified;
+hundreds of their cabins were burnt
+down, and thousands of head of cattle stolen.</p>
+
+<p>One of the murders was the killing of Samuel
+Collins, owner of a saw-mill near Atchison, by
+Patrick Laughlin, a pro-slavery man. No effort
+was made to punish him by the authorities.
+But something was done by them in another
+case. Charles Dow, a young Free State man
+from Ohio, was cruelly shot down from behind
+by Franklin Coleman, a pro-slavery settler from
+Virginia.</p>
+
+<p>What the authorities did in this case was
+to arrest Jacob Branson, with whom the dead
+man had lived. A pro-slavery sheriff charged
+Branson with having made threats to revenge
+his friend. Branson was rescued by a group
+of his friends with rifles, and taken to Lawrence
+for protection, Lawrence being entirely
+settled by the Free State men.</p>
+
+<p>The Sheriff called on the Governor, and the
+Governor called on the militia, and with the
+aid of Missouri citizens, about twelve hundred
+armed men marched on Lawrence, to “put
+down the rebellion.”</p>
+
+<p>The men of Lawrence sent out a call to all
+Northerners; and John Brown and his men
+were among those who responded. There were
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_32">[Pg 32]</span>five hundred settlers in Lawrence, and they
+feverishly fortified the town with embankments;
+but the whole affair ended by a compromise;
+there was no fighting; only two men
+were killed in a light skirmish.</p>
+
+<p>The Southerners left, weak with all the
+whisky they had drunk on the expedition, according
+to reliable observers, and angered that
+they had not been given the chance to burn
+Lawrence down.</p>
+
+<p>For Lawrence was a sore spot to the pro-slavery
+men. It was the largest Free State
+town in Kansas, and the center of all the
+political activities of that group. It <ins id="published" title="Original has 'publishe'">published</ins>
+a newspaper, and its Free State Hotel was the
+headquarters of the Northerner’s government.</p>
+
+<p>There were other murders, despite the treaty
+signed at this time. And then in February,
+as Free State men were holding another of
+their elections, they were assaulted at Leavenworth,
+and many of them forced to flee to
+Lawrence.</p>
+
+<p>One of the leaders of the Free State men,
+as he was returning from Leavenworth after
+the election, was captured by a company of
+Border Ruffian militia. Wounded and defenceless
+though he was, they literally hacked the
+unfortunate foe of slavery into pieces with
+their hatchets and knives. Not an effort was
+made to punish these murderers, though their
+names were known by everyone. Some of the
+slavery journals even praised the deed, and
+called for more. Said the Kansas Pioneer of
+Kickapoo:</p>
+
+<p>“Sound the bugle of war over the length
+and breadth of the land, and leave not an
+Abolitionist in the Territory to relate their
+treacherous and contaminating deeds. Strike
+your piercing rifle balls and your glittering
+steel to their black and poisonous hearts.”</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_33">[Pg 33]</span></p>
+
+<p>And in May of that year, after further alarms
+and disturbances, Sheriff Jones returned with
+an army of 750 “swearing, whisky-drinking ruffians,”
+armed with rifles, and even two pieces
+of artillery. This time the Free State men
+were unprepared. John Brown was not there,
+nor any other real leader. The Free State
+men still believed in peace, and legality. And
+they saw their Free State Hotel go up in
+flames, their newspaper plant destroyed, and
+an orgy of drunken destruction let loose among
+their homes.</p>
+
+<div class="poetry-container">
+  <div class="poetry">
+    <div class="stanza">
+      <div class="verse indent0">“Let Yankees tremble, Abolitionists fall,</div>
+      <div class="verse indent0">Our Motto is, Give Southern Rights to All.”</div>
+    </div>
+  </div>
+</div>
+
+<p>This was the inscription on one of the banners
+of the invading army. Lawrence was the
+first city to receive these rights. Thereafter
+Free State men knew what to expect; they began
+forming companies of riflemen and guerrilla
+fighters to protect their communities
+against Southern rights.</p>
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+<div class="chapter">
+  <h2 class="nobreak" id="THE_LIBERTY_GUARDS">
+    THE LIBERTY GUARDS
+  </h2>
+</div>
+
+<p>One of these companies was the Liberty
+Guards, as commander of which John Brown
+first received his historic title of Captain. Besides
+four of Brown’s stalwart sons, there were
+fourteen other Free State settlers in the company,
+and they were present at the first attempted
+raid on Lawrence, which had resulted
+in a compromise and an abortive “treaty.”</p>
+
+<p>Captain John Brown had gathered his men,
+and was on the way to Lawrence for the second
+time when they were informed by a messenger
+that Lawrence had already been destroyed. The
+Border Ruffians had captured the town without
+meeting any resistance, and had razed it
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_34">[Pg 34]</span>to the ground, the breathless courier reported.
+This startling news was received in a bitter
+silence by the little company. They pushed on,
+nevertheless, and encamped near Prairie City,
+hearing from passing stragglers further reports
+of burnings, killings and drunken threats of
+the Southern invaders.</p>
+
+<p>It was a period of great excitement. The
+Kansans felt as if war had commenced in earnest
+on them, and that they were to be wiped
+out. Some of the men who lived on the <ins id="Pottawatomie" title="Original has 'Pottawotamie'">Pottawatomie</ins>
+Creek, near Dutch’s Crossing, heard
+reports that their women had been threatened
+by a group of the toughest pro-slavery ruffians
+who lived there.</p>
+
+<p>“We expect to be butchered, every Free State
+settler in our region,” one of these men told
+John Brown.</p>
+
+<p>Here was a story John Brown heard a few
+days before from the lips of a pretty young
+girl named Mary Grant, a settler’s daughter
+in the region:</p>
+
+<p>“Dutch Bill arrived at our house, horribly
+drunk, with a whisky bottle with a corncob
+stopper, and an immense butcher knife in his
+belt. Mr. Grant, my father, was sick in bed,
+but when they told him that Bill Sherman was
+coming, he had a <ins id="shotgun" title="Original has 'shot gun'">shotgun</ins> put by his side.
+‘Old woman,’ said the ruffian to my mother,
+‘you and I are pretty good friends, but damn
+your daughter, I’ll drink her heart’s blood.’
+My little brother Charley succeeded in cajoling
+the drunken man away.”</p>
+
+<p>An old settler named Morse was hung and
+let down again by this same group of ruffians.
+Then they threatened to kill him with an axe,
+but his little boys set up a terrible wailing, and
+begged for his life. The ruffians spared him,
+but gave him until sundown to leave the community.
+He wandered in the brush for two
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_35">[Pg 35]</span>or three days with his children, frightened to
+death, and finally died of the excitement.</p>
+
+<p>There were other such tales, including one
+horrible story of a similar attack on a woman
+in childbirth. The ruffians had also put up
+a notice, advising every Free State settler to
+leave the community in thirty days or have
+his throat cut.</p>
+
+<p>John Brown and his men discussed this matter,
+and grimly decided to “do something to
+show these barbarians we have some rights.”
+They moved down that night on the Pottawatomie,
+and calling out the five men who had
+done most of the killing, threatening, and burning
+down of houses in the region, executed
+them as a measure of self-defense.</p>
+
+<p>It was a bloody, stern act, but it proceeded
+out of the same inflamed spirit with which
+the miners at Herrin recently shot down the
+armed strikebreakers who had been brought
+into their section. Many, including some sympathetic
+historians like Oswald Garrison Villard,
+have condemned this brutal deed, and have
+called it a stain on John Brown’s life. Murder
+is murder, and it cannot be defended on ethical
+or logical grounds. But when a thug assails
+one with a gun, or threatens one’s wife and
+children, is one to practice non-resistance on
+him? Is his life more valuable than one’s own?
+In such moments men do not think, they act
+as nature tells them to; even a Villard would
+refuse to yield up his life to a thug; he would
+forget logic and ethics, and defend himself.
+And that was what John Brown did; his act
+was a stern and immediate answer to the long-continued
+murders and threats against the
+Free State men of Kansas. It shook the Territory
+to its foundations, and it made of John
+Brown a hunted outlaw. Thereafter he grew
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_36">[Pg 36]</span>no more corn and built no more cabins for
+his family; he was a guerrilla captain in the
+field.</p>
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+<div class="chapter">
+  <h2 class="nobreak" id="AFTER_POTTAWATOMIE">
+    AFTER POTTAWATOMIE
+  </h2>
+</div>
+
+<p>John Brown, Jr., and Jason Brown, two of
+the fighter’s sons, were captured by Missourians
+and suffered incredible tortures after the Pottawatomie
+affair. Both men were burning
+with fever, but they were dragged at the ends
+of ropes for two or three days, beaten, hung
+up and then let down, and then chained to oxcarts
+in the wind and rain. John Jr., always
+of a nervous temperament, went temporarily
+insane under this treatment, but his captors
+had no mercy. Though he shrieked wildly, and
+though his brother Jason begged that the
+Southerns have pity, their hearts were hard as
+flint.</p>
+
+<p>The following scene is described by Jason:</p>
+
+<p>“Captain Wood said to me: ‘Keep that man
+still.’ ‘I can’t keep an insane man still,’ said
+I. ‘He is no more insane than you are. If
+you don’t keep him still, we’ll do it for you.’
+I tried my best, but John had not a glimmer
+of reason and could not understand anything.
+He went on yelling. Three troopers came in.
+One struck him a terrible blow on the jaw
+with his fist, throwing him on his side. A
+second knelt on him and pounded him with
+his fist. The third stood off and kicked him
+with all his force in the back of the neck.
+‘Don’t kill a crazy man!’ cried I. ‘No more
+crazy than you are, but we’ll fetch it out of
+him.’ After that John lay unconscious for
+three or four hours. We camped about one
+and a half miles southeast of the Adairs. There
+we stayed about two weeks. Then we were
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_37">[Pg 37]</span>ordered to move again. They drove us on
+foot, all the prisoners, chained two and two.
+At Ottawa ford young Kilbourne dropped of a
+sun-stroke.”</p>
+
+<p>The men were later released, for they had
+done nothing that could be prosecuted in the
+court where the pro-slavery government
+“troops” had driven them. This was the sort
+of thing John Brown was fighting; it was life
+and death, and no mercy could be expected
+from the Southerners. Mr. Villard and other
+timorous friends of John Brown do not seem
+to understand the nature of the battle; and
+they do not understand what giant faith and
+courage it must have taken for an old farmer
+of fifty-five to continue fighting in such an
+atmosphere.</p>
+
+<p>John Brown did not flinch. Another son,
+Frederick, was shot down in cold blood on
+the steps of the family home at Osawatomie,
+but the old fighter, shedding a silent tear for
+the loss, for he deeply loved his children, went
+on his stern path.</p>
+
+<p>The spuriously-elected slavery governor offered
+a reward of $3,000 for John Brown, and
+the President of the United States a reward
+of $250. Federal troops scoured the territory
+for him. For months he and his men slept
+out in the fields, flitting from place to place,
+and fighting in many battles.</p>
+
+<p>With only nine men he fought off a troop
+of twenty-three Southerners at the “battle of
+Black Jack,” and forced them to surrender.
+In August, 250 men moved on Osawatomie,
+to destroy it as they had destroyed Lawrence.
+John Brown gathered about forty men to resist
+the Southerners, and a hot battle was
+fought, in which, of course, Brown had to
+retreat. The town was thoroughly wiped out,
+and also granted “Southern rights.”</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_38">[Pg 38]</span></p>
+
+<p>There were many other skirmishes; the
+name of Captain John Brown, old Brown of
+Osawatomie, became a legend in Kansas. He
+became a sort of Pancho Villa figure to the
+South; a hundred times he was reported dead
+or captured; a hundred times he was blamed
+for wild deeds he had never done.</p>
+
+<p>Here are two contemporary pictures of John
+Brown in the field. The first is written by
+August Bondi, a brave and able young Austrian
+Jew, who put himself under Brown’s
+leadership after the Pottawatomie affair:</p>
+
+<p>“We stayed here up to the morning of Sunday,
+June 1st, and during those few days I
+fully succeeded in understanding the exalted
+character of my old friend, John Brown. He
+exhibited at all times the most affectionate
+care for each of us. He also attended to the
+cooking. We had two meals daily, consisting
+of bread, baked in skillets; this was washed
+down with creek water, mixed with a little
+ginger and a spoon of molasses to each pint.
+Nevertheless, we kept in excellent spirits; we
+considered ourselves as one family, allied to
+one another by the consciousness that it was
+our duty to undergo all these privations for
+the good cause. We were determined to share
+any danger with one another, that victory or
+death might find us together; and we were
+united, as a band of brothers, by the love
+and affection toward the man who with tender
+words and wise counsel, in the depth of the
+wilderness of Ottawa creek, prepared a handful
+of young men for the work of laying the
+foundation of a free commonwealth.</p>
+
+<p>“His words have ever remained firmly engraved
+in my mind. Many and various were
+the instructions he gave during the days of
+our compulsory leisure in this camp. He expressed
+himself to us that we should never allow
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_39">[Pg 39]</span>ourselves to be tempted by any consideration
+to acknowledge laws and institutions to
+exist if our conscience and reason condemned
+them.</p>
+
+<p>“He admonished us not to care whether a
+majority, no matter how large, opposed our
+principles and opinions. The largest majorities
+were sometimes only organized mobs,
+whose howlings never changed black to white
+or night into day. A minority convinced of
+its rights, based on moral principles, would,
+under a republican government, sooner or later
+become the majority.”</p>
+
+<p>The other description is that of William A.
+Phillips, then a correspondent of the New
+York Tribune, and later a Colonel in the Civil
+War. Brown, still an outlaw, was on his way
+to Topeka, to be on hand at whatever crisis
+might arise at the opening of the legislature
+elected by the Free State settlers. Phillips
+met him on the way.</p>
+
+<p>His account is important, for it shows that
+John Brown saw much farther than his own
+times. He knew that there were many other
+things wrong with the social system in America
+besides slavery. There are plain indications
+here, as in other accounts, that John
+Brown was one of those early American Socialists,
+such as Horace Greeley, Albert Brisbane,
+father of Arthur Brisbane, Bronson Alcott,
+Ralph Waldo Emerson, and others, who
+felt that the abolition of slavery was only the
+first step toward a free America. Wendell
+Phillips, for instance, one of this abolitionist
+band, became after the Civil War one of the
+leading champions of the rights of workingmen
+in their battle against the capitalists.</p>
+
+<p>But here is Colonel Phillips giving his charming
+picture, in the Atlantic Monthly for December,
+1879, of that night ride and the conversation
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_40">[Pg 40]</span>he had with Brown as they lay
+bivouacking in the open beneath the stars:</p>
+
+<p>“He seemed as little disposed to sleep as I
+was, and we talked; or rather, he did, for I
+said little. I found that he was a thorough
+astronomer; he pointed out the different constellations
+and their movements. ‘Now,’ he
+said, ‘it is midnight,’ as he pointed to the finger
+marks of his great clock in the sky. The
+whispering of the wind in the prairies was
+full of voices to him, and the stars as they
+shone in the firmament of God seemed to inspire
+him. ‘How admirable is the symmetry of
+the heavens; how grand and beautiful! Everything
+moves in sublime harmony in the government
+of God. Not so with us poor creatures.
+If one star is more brilliant than others,
+it is continually shooting in some erratic way
+into space.’</p>
+
+<p>“He criticized both parties in Kansas. Of
+the pro-slavery men he said that slavery besotted
+everything, and made men more brutal
+and coarse; nor did the Free State men escape
+his sharp censure. He said we had many
+true and noble men, but too many broken down
+politicians from the older states, who would
+rather pass resolutions than act, and who
+criticized all who did real work.</p>
+
+<p>“A professional politician, he went on, you
+could never trust; for even if he had convictions,
+he was always ready to sacrifice his
+principles for his advantage.</p>
+
+<p>“One of the most interesting things in Captain
+Brown’s conversation that night, and one
+that marked him as a thinker, was his treatment
+of our forms of social and political life.
+He thought society ought to be reorganized
+on a less selfish basis; for while material interests
+gained by competition for bread, men
+and women lost much by it. He condemned
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_41">[Pg 41]</span>the sale of land as a chattel, and thought there
+was an infinite number of wrongs to right
+before society would be what it should be,
+but that in our country slavery was the sum
+of all villainies, and its abolition the first
+essential work.”</p>
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+<div class="chapter">
+  <h2 class="nobreak" id="THE_GREAT_PLAN_EVOLVES">
+    THE GREAT PLAN EVOLVES
+  </h2>
+</div>
+
+<p>Much more can be written of this Kansas
+period in John Brown’s life; a large bibliography
+of Robin Hood literature has gathered
+about it. John Brown, and other men like
+him, hastened the solution of the slavery question
+by their firm stand in Kansas. If the
+South had been allowed to add Kansas to the
+roster of slave states, it would have crept
+further north, until perhaps there would have
+been slavery up to Canada. It is easy for any
+institution to become permanent; man is a
+creature of conventions. Slavery, like cannibalism
+among savages, would have in time
+become a matter-of-fact doctrine with all
+America, had not the Kansas abolitionists
+challenged it.</p>
+
+<p>John Brown left Kansas in 1857, and made
+a trip through New England, gathering friends,
+money, arms and recruits for a new great plan
+that was working in his mind.</p>
+
+<p>He saw that the abolitionists would be successful
+in making Kansas a free state. The
+job was already half done; but when it was
+completed, what next? There would still be
+the vast groaning empire of slavery in the
+South; there would still be five million black
+folk bought and sold like cattle; beaten, raped,
+murdered as if they were lower than cattle.
+The South would still be in the saddle at the
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_42">[Pg 42]</span>White House; the fugitive slave law would
+still be enforced; and churches, business men,
+newspapers, mobs, and United States troops,
+all would join in upholding the devil’s doctrine
+that slavery was respectable, the law
+of the land.</p>
+
+<p>The Abolitionists, with their few journals,
+were ever agitating against this infamy that
+was being protected by the United States flag.
+But John Brown knew that only a bold deed
+could shake the union; could make men see
+clearly what slavery was.</p>
+
+<p>Slavery had become so firmly settled into
+the national life that the few thousand abolitionists
+only seemed like gadflies biting at the
+hide of a rhinoceros. John Brown saw that
+a pick-axe was needed to draw the blood. The
+pocket-books of the slave-holders must be attacked.
+Slavery must be sabotaged, and made
+unprofitable. It was such a safe and sane
+business now; it must be made dangerous.
+John Brown planned to go boldly into Virginia,
+with a band of men, and start there a
+large movement of runaway slaves. When
+slaves were no longer meek and submissive,
+when every slave became a potential runaway
+and rebel, slavery would cease to be a paying
+business. Thus reasoned John Brown.</p>
+
+<p>In December, 1858, with things at last peaceful
+in Kansas Territory, and a Free State almost
+assured, John Brown made a last stirring
+raid into Missouri. A Negro slave named
+Jim Daniels had come to one of Brown’s men
+with a pathetic tale. He and his wife and
+babies were to be sold at auction in a few
+weeks, and perhaps separated forever. He
+was a fine-looking, intelligent mulatto, and
+he wept as he told the story. John Brown and
+ten of his men rescued Daniels’ little family
+and carried off to freedom eleven other <ins id="slaves" title="Original has 'slave'">slaves</ins>
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_43">[Pg 43]</span>of the vicinity. At dawn the next day the
+caravan of freedom set forth on its long journey
+to the Northern Star—to Canada, where
+slaves were free. It was a perilous and arduous
+undertaking. The party had to sleep by
+stealth in barns and icy fields, with armed
+sentinels posted all night. The Governor of
+Missouri wired to Washington; money rewards
+were offered for Brown, armed posses were
+sent searching for him, the Federal troops
+combed the state. There were prairie snowstorms,
+and there were little provisions. But
+the old lion brought his charges through to
+Canada.</p>
+
+<p>One incident of the trip is worth repeating.
+It shows what a terror the mere name of John
+Brown had become in Kansas.</p>
+
+<p>At one place, the ford of a river, Brown’s
+party learned there was a posse of 80 armed
+slavery ruffians waiting to capture him. The
+old man did not turn back, though he had
+only 22 men, black and white. He marched
+down on the ruffians. “They had as good a
+position as 80 men could wish,” wrote one of
+Brown’s men, “they could have defeated a
+thousand opponents, but the closer we got to
+the ford, the farther they got from it. We
+found some of their horses, for they were in
+such haste to fly that some of them mounted
+two on a saddle, and we gave chase and took
+three or four prisoners, whom we later released.
+The marshal who led them went so
+fast one would think he feared the fate of
+Lot’s wife.”</p>
+
+<p>“Old Captain Brown is not to be taken by
+boys,” said the Leavenworth Times, now Free
+State, “and he invites cordially all pro-slavery
+men to try their hands at arresting him.”</p>
+
+<p>On March 12th the slaves were safe in Canada,
+rejoicing in their happy fortune, after
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_44">[Pg 44]</span>having been brought in the dead of winter,
+through hostile country, some 1,100 miles in
+82 days. One of the slave women had had
+six masters, and four of the party had served
+sixteen owners in all. Now they were free.
+And their little children were free, and would
+never be whipped by a Southern gentleman,
+or stood on the auction block like a horse or
+cow. The outlaw John Brown had done what
+was forbidden by the Supreme Court and the
+President of the United States; and now he
+was planning greater deeds.</p>
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+<div class="chapter">
+  <h2 class="nobreak" id="THE_EVE_OF_THE_TRAGEDY">
+    THE EVE OF THE TRAGEDY
+  </h2>
+</div>
+
+<p>John Brown was now fifty-nine years old,
+and in the last year of his life. He had been
+disciplined in a terrible school in Kansas, but
+what he was about to attempt seemed so mad,
+so reckless, and so suicidally brave that many
+men of the South claimed, after the attempt,
+that he was but an insane man, and many
+of his conservative friends chose to take this
+view of the case, also.</p>
+
+<p>Yet John Brown was not insane. <ins id="Coolly" title="Original has 'Cooly'">Coolly</ins>,
+rationally, like a clear-headed strategist, he
+had figured out the situation. He was an
+Abolitionist, and was determined to do anything
+to end the brutal slave-system. Peaceful
+agitation had been going on for decades,
+but the North was still apathetic, and the
+South was only more inflamed and settled in
+its ideas.</p>
+
+<p>What John Brown felt was needed now,
+was to make the men of the North and the
+South realize that there would be no peace
+in the land while slavery endured. What they
+must see was that men like himself would
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_45">[Pg 45]</span>rise to break that loathsome peace. He would
+go to the South, capture the arsenal at Harper’s
+Ferry, in Virginia, and run off all the
+slaves he could find. He would take the
+hills about the Ferry, and with a guerrilla
+band move through the countryside, making
+slavery a shaky institution.</p>
+
+<p>If he failed, he could but lose his life. He
+would at least stir the nation on the issue of
+slavery, and force men to take sides. There
+was too much neutrality and silence in the
+land on this issue, this institution that to him
+was a bloody crime against God and humanity.
+He could not fail, he felt; success or failure
+would achieve the same results. Events proved
+that he was right.</p>
+
+<p>John Brown spent that winter and spring in
+New England, giving occasional lectures, and
+meeting all the leading men of the Abolition
+movement, who collected money for him,
+though he did not fully reveal his plans to anyone.</p>
+
+<p>George L. Stearns, Gerrit Smith, the philanthropist,
+Frank B. Sanborn, the Concord school-master
+and author; Thomas Wentworth Higginson,
+a brave, noble commander in the Civil
+War, and a charming man of letters afterward;
+Theodore Parker, one of the greatest and most
+sincere Christian clergymen produced in America;
+Samuel G. Howe, and others were among
+John Brown’s supporters. Thoreau and Emerson
+he also met at various times, and both were
+passionate admirers of the stern, pure soldier
+of liberty.</p>
+
+<p>While their Captain was gathering arms and
+money for the raid, some of Brown’s men were
+quartered in a farm-house near Harper’s Ferry,
+while others were studying the region, and
+mapping out routes for the attack and the retreat
+to the hills.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_46">[Pg 46]</span></p>
+
+<p>It was a cool fall night, the 16th of October,
+1859, when Captain John Brown gave the command
+his men had been impatiently awaiting
+for months: “Men, get on your arms; we
+will proceed to the Ferry.” Says Mr. Villard, at
+times an eloquent chronicler:</p>
+
+<p>“It took but a minute to bring the horse and
+wagon to the door, to place in it some pikes,
+fagots, a sledge hammer, and a crow-bar. The
+men had been in readiness for hours; they had
+but to buckle on their arms and throw over
+their shoulders, like army blankets, the long
+gray shawls which served some for a few brief
+hours in lieu of overcoats, and then became
+their winding sheets. In a moment more, the
+commander-in-chief donned his old battle-worn
+Kansas cap, mounted the wagon, and began the
+solemn march through the chill night to the
+bridge into Harper’s Ferry, nearly six miles
+away.</p>
+
+<p>“Tremendous as the relief of action was, there
+was no thought of cheering or demonstration.
+As the eighteen men with John Brown swung
+down the little lane to the road from the farm-house
+that had been their prison for so many
+weary weeks, they bade farewell to Captain
+Owen Brown, and Privates Barclay Coppoc and
+F. J. Meriam, who remained as rear-guard in
+charge of the arms and supplies. The brothers
+Coppoc read the future correctly, for they embraced
+and parted as men do who know they
+are to meet no more on earth. The damp, lonely
+night, too, added to the solemnity of it all,
+as they passed through its gloom. As if to intensify
+the sombreness, they met not a living
+soul on the road to question their purpose, or
+to start with fright at the sight of eighteen
+soldierly men coming two by two through the
+darkness as though risen from the grave.</p>
+
+<p>“There was not a sound but the tramping
+of the men and the creaking of the wagon,
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_47">[Pg 47]</span>before which, in accordance with a general order,
+drawn up and carefully read to all, walked
+Captains Cook and Tidd, their Sharp’s rifles
+hung from their shoulders, their commission,
+duly signed by John Brown, and officially
+sealed, in their pockets. They were detailed to
+destroy the telegraph wire on the Maryland
+side, and then on the Virginian, while Captains
+John H. Kagi and Aaron D. Stevens,
+bravest of the brave, were to take the bridge
+watchman and so strike the first blow for liberty.
+But as they and their comrades marched
+rapidly over the rough road, Death himself
+moved by their side.”</p>
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+<div class="chapter">
+  <h2 class="nobreak" id="THE_ARSENAL_IS_CAPTURED">
+    THE ARSENAL IS CAPTURED
+  </h2>
+</div>
+
+<p>Events flashed sharp and terrible and swift
+as lightning after this sombre opening of the
+storm. The telegraph wires were cut, the watchman
+at the bridge captured, guards were placed
+at the two bridges leading out of the town,
+and many citizens were taken from the streets
+and held as prisoners in the Arsenal.</p>
+
+<p>Perhaps the most distinguished prisoner was
+Colonel Lewis W. Washington, a great-grand-nephew
+of the first President, and like him, a
+gentleman farmer and slave-owner. He lived
+five miles from the Ferry, and with the instinct
+of a dramatist, John Brown seized him and
+freed his slaves as a means of impressing on
+the American imagination that a new revolution
+for human rights was being ushered in.</p>
+
+<p>The little town was peaceful and unprepared
+for this sudden attack, as unprepared as it
+would be today for a similar raid. By morning,
+however, the alarm had been spread; the church
+bells rang, military companies from Charlestown
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_48">[Pg 48]</span>and other neighboring towns began pouring
+in, the saloons were crowded with nervous
+and hard-drinking men, and there was the
+clamor and furor of thousands of awe-struck
+Southerners. No one knew how many men were
+in the Arsenal. No one knew whether the whole
+South was not being attacked by abolitionists,
+or whether or not all the slaves had armed and
+risen against their masters, as they had attempted
+to years before in Nat Turner’s and
+other rebellions.</p>
+
+<p>By noon the Southerners had begun the attack.
+They killed or drove out all the guards
+John Brown had stationed at various strategic
+points in the town; they murdered two of
+Brown’s men they had taken prisoners, and tortured
+another. They managed to cut off all of
+Brown’s paths of retreat, and by nightfall, he
+and the few survivors of his men were in a
+trap.</p>
+
+<p>His young son Oliver, only twenty years old,
+and recently married, died in the night. He
+had been painfully wounded, and begged, in his
+agony, that his father shoot him and relieve
+him from pain. But the old Spartan held his
+boy’s hand, and told him to be calm, and to
+die like a man. Another young son, Watson,
+had been killed earlier in the fighting. John
+Brown had now given three sons to freedom,
+and was soon himself to be a sacrifice.</p>
+
+<p>There were left alive and unwounded but
+five of Brown’s men. The Virginia militia,
+numbering, with the civilians in the town, up to
+the thousands, seemed afraid to attack this little
+group of desperate men. In the dawn of
+the next morning, however, United States marines,
+under the famous commander, Robert E.
+Lee, then a Colonel in the Federal forces, attacked
+the arsenal and captured it easily. John
+Brown refused to surrender to the last; and he
+stood waiting proudly for the marines when
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_49">[Pg 49]</span>they broke down the door and came raging
+like tigers at him.</p>
+
+<p>A fierce young Southern officer ran at him
+with a sword, that bent double as it pierced
+to the old man’s breast-bone. The young Southerner
+then took the bent weapon in his hands
+and beat Brown’s head unmercifully with the
+hilt, bringing the blood, and knocking senseless
+the old unselfish and tender champion of poor
+Negro men and women. Those near him thought
+John Brown was dead; but he was still alive;
+he had still his greatest work to do.</p>
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+<div class="chapter">
+  <h2 class="nobreak" id="JOHN_BROWNS_MEN">
+    JOHN BROWN’S MEN
+  </h2>
+</div>
+
+<p>I have written almost entirely of John Brown,
+and because of necessities of space I have given
+little attention to the brave youths who fought
+under him at Harper’s Ferry. Yet here I must
+stop and with only the facts, paint some portrait
+of the men who followed John Brown.
+It will be seen that they were no ordinary ruffians,
+no bandits, adventurers or madmen, as
+the South called them at the time. They were
+young crusaders, thoughtful, sensitive and
+brave. They had a philosophy of life; and they
+were filled with passion for social justice. One
+may disagree with such men, but one must not
+fail to respect them.</p>
+
+<p>There were twenty-one men with John Brown
+at Harper’s Ferry, sixteen of whom were white
+and five colored. Only one was of foreign birth;
+nearly all were of old American pioneer stock.</p>
+
+<p><i>John Henry Kagi</i> was the best educated of
+the raiders, largely self-taught, a fine debater
+and speaker, and an able correspondent for the
+New York Tribune and the New York Evening
+Post. He had been a school-teacher in Virginia,
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_50">[Pg 50]</span>and had come to know and hate slavery there,
+protesting so vigorously that he was finally
+run out of the State. He practised law in Nebraska,
+but left this to join John Brown in
+the Kansas fighting. He was killed at Harper’s
+Ferry.</p>
+
+<p><i>Aaron Dwight Stevens</i> was in many ways
+the most attractive and interesting of the personalities
+about John Brown. He ran away
+from his home in Massachusetts at the age of
+sixteen, and joined the United States army,
+serving in Mexico during the Mexican War.
+Later he was sentenced to death for leading a
+soldiers’ mutiny against an offensive pro-slavery
+Major at Taos, New Mexico. President Pierce
+commuted the sentence to three years at hard
+labor in Fort Leavenworth. Stevens escaped
+from this prison, and joined the Free State
+forces in Kansas, for he had always been a
+firm abolitionist. Stevens came of old Puritan
+stock, his great-grandfather having been a captain
+in the Revolutionary War. He was a man
+of superb bravery and of wonderful physique;
+well over six feet, handsome, with black penetrating
+eyes and a fine brow. He had a charming
+sense of humor, and a beautiful baritone
+voice, with which he sang in camp and in
+prison. He was hung soon after John Brown
+for the Harper’s Ferry raid.</p>
+
+<p><i>John E. Cook</i> was a young law student of
+Brooklyn, New York, a reckless, impulsive and
+rather indiscreet youth, to whom much was
+forgiven because of his genial smile and generous
+nature.</p>
+
+<p><i>Charles Plummer Tidd</i> escaped after the raid,
+and died a First Sergeant in one of the battles
+of the Civil War. He had not much education,
+but good common sense, and was always reading
+and studying in an attempt to repair his
+lack of training. Quick-tempered, but kindhearted,
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_51">[Pg 51]</span>a fine singer and with strong family
+affections.</p>
+
+<p><i>Jeremiah Goldsmith Anderson</i>, killed at Harper’s
+Ferry in his 27th year, was also of Revolutionary
+American stock. A sworn abolitionist,
+he wrote in a letter three months before his
+death: “Millions of fellow-beings require it of
+us; their cries for help go out to the universe
+daily and hourly. Whose duty is it to help
+them? Is it yours? Is it mine? It is every
+man’s, but how few there are to help. But there
+are a few to answer this call, and dare to answer
+it in a manner that shall make this land
+of liberty and equality shake to the center.”</p>
+
+<p><i>Albert Hazlett</i>, executed after Brown, was a
+Pennsylvania farm worker, “a good-sized, fine-looking
+fellow, overflowing with good nature
+and social feelings.”</p>
+
+<p><i>Edwin Coppoc</i>, also one of those captured
+and hung, was well-liked even by the Southerners
+who saw him in jail, and some of them
+hoped to get him pardoned. He came of Quaker
+farmer stock.</p>
+
+<p><i>Barclay Coppoc</i>, his brother, was not yet twenty-one
+when he fought at the Arsenal. He escaped
+after the raid, but was killed in the Civil
+War. After the raid he had returned to Kansas,
+and had nearly lost his life in an attempt
+to free some slaves in Missouri.</p>
+
+<p><i>William Thompson</i>, a neighbor of the Browns
+at North Elba, in New York, was killed at Harper’s
+Ferry, in his 26th year. He was full of
+fun and good nature, and bore himself unflinchingly
+when face to face with death.</p>
+
+<p><i>Dauphin Osgood Thompson</i>, his brother, was
+only twenty years old, when he met the same
+fate for the cause of freedom. Dauphin was a
+handsome, inexperienced country boy, “more
+like a shy young girl than a warrior, quiet and
+good,” said one of the Brown women later.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_52">[Pg 52]</span></p>
+
+<p><i>Oliver Brown</i>, John Brown’s youngest son,
+was also twenty years old when he died at
+Harper’s Ferry. His girl-wife and her baby
+died early the next year. “Oliver developed
+rather slowly,” says Miss Sarah Brown. “In
+his earlier teens he was always pre-occupied,
+absent-minded—always reading, and then it was
+impossible to catch his attention. But in his
+last few years he came out very fast. His awkwardness
+left him. He read every solid book
+that he could find, and was especially fond of
+Theodore Parker’s writings, as was his father.
+Had Oliver lived, and not killed himself with
+over-study, he would have made his mark. By
+his exertions the sale of liquor was stopped at
+North Elba.”</p>
+
+<p><i>John Anthony Copeland</i>, a free colored man,
+25 years old, was educated at Oberlin College.
+He was dignified and manly, and in jail there
+were prominent Southerners who were forced
+to admit his fine qualities. He was hung for
+the raid.</p>
+
+<p><i>Stewart Taylor</i>, the only one of the raiders
+not of American birth, was a young Canadian
+wagon-maker, 23 years old. He was fond of
+history and debating, and heart and soul in
+the abolition cause. Killed in the Arsenal.</p>
+
+<p><i>William H. Leeman</i>, the youngest of the raiders,
+killed in his 19th year. He had gone to
+work in a shoe factory at Haverhill, Mass., when
+only 14 years old, and though with little education,
+“had a good intellect and great ingenuity.”
+He was the “wildest” of Brown’s men, for
+he smoked and drank occasionally, but the
+Old Puritan captain liked him, nevertheless, for
+he was boyish, handsome, and brave.</p>
+
+<p><i>Osborn Perry Anderson</i> was also a Negro.
+He escaped after the raid, and fought through
+the Civil War.</p>
+
+<p><i>Francis Jackson Meriam</i>, was a wealthy,
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_53">[Pg 53]</span>young abolitionist who put all his fortune into
+the cause, and came from New England to
+join John Brown in the raid. He escaped also,
+and died in 1865, after having been the captain
+of a Negro company in the Civil War.</p>
+
+<p><i>Lewis Sheridan Leary</i>, colored, left a wife and
+a six-months-old baby at Oberlin, Ohio, to go
+to Harper’s Ferry. He was a harness maker
+by trade, and descended on one side from an
+Irishman, Jeremiah O’Leary, who fought in the
+Revolution. Leary was 25 years old when he
+died of his terrible wounds in the Arsenal
+fighting.</p>
+
+<p><i>Owen Brown</i>, another of John Brown’s sons,
+was stalwart and reliable, and is reported
+original in expression and thought, like all the
+Browns. He is also said to have been quite
+humorous. He survived the raid, and died in
+Pasadena, Calif., in 1891.</p>
+
+<p><i>Watson Brown</i>, another son, 24 years old
+when killed at the Ferry, was tall and rather
+fair, very strong, and a man of marked ability
+and sterling character.</p>
+
+<p><i>Dangerfield Newby</i> was born a slave in Virginia,
+but his father, a Scotchman, freed him
+with other mulatto children. Newby had a wife
+and seven children still in slavery, and he was
+trying to raise money to buy them, for they
+were to be sold further south. He failed at this;
+and joined John Brown in desperation. He was
+killed at the Ferry, and so failed to free his
+poor family, as he had dreamed.</p>
+
+<p><i>Shields Green</i>, colored, was also born a slave,
+but escaped, leaving a little son in slavery.
+He met Brown through Frederick Douglass,
+the great Negro orator, and joined in the raid,
+though many warned him it would mean his
+death. He was uneducated, but deeply emotional,
+and deeply attached to the “ole man,”
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_54">[Pg 54]</span>as he called John Brown. He was hung after
+the raid; his age 23.</p>
+
+<p>They were all young men; the average age
+of the band was 25 years and five months.
+They were all strong, intelligent, in love with
+life and eager for the future; but they chose
+to attempt this mad, dangerous deed rather than
+consent any longer to the lie and to the power
+of black slavery.</p>
+
+<p>John Brown they followed and loved as one
+would a strong and kindly father. There was
+always something patriarchal about John
+Brown and his soldiers, many observers said. It
+made his deed seem like some story out of the
+Bible, the swift and terrible Justice of the Lord
+of Hosts.</p>
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+<div class="chapter">
+  <h2 class="nobreak" id="THE_NIGGER-THIEF">
+    THE “NIGGER-THIEF”
+  </h2>
+</div>
+
+<p>When the South heard of John Brown’s raid,
+there was a wave of immediate fury. Men
+poured by the thousands into the little Virginia
+town, and the bars were filled with savage, half-drunk
+men, who talked of lynching the “old
+nigger-thief.” Governor Wise had come down
+from the capital, and he and others prevented
+any such disgraceful procedure. He himself
+was mystified by the raid. It seemed an incredible
+performance, for these Southerners
+could not understand the moral passion that
+animated the Abolitionists. To the south Negroes
+were property—private property. And an
+attempt to free slaves was to them insane, illegal
+and criminal. When men came with arms
+for this purpose and Southerners were killed in
+defending slavery, the crime became doubly
+damnable.</p>
+
+<p>John Brown, after his capture, was taken with
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_55">[Pg 55]</span>Aaron Stevens to a room nearby. Lying on a
+cot, his head bandaged, his hair clotted and tangled,
+hands and clothing powder-stained and
+blood-smeared, the old lion was questioned by
+Governor Wise and a party of officials, who
+included Robert E. Lee, Colonel J. E. B. Stuart,
+Senator Mason, Congressman Vallandigham of
+Ohio, and other pro-slaveryites.</p>
+
+<p>Their questions were a summary of the attitude
+of the South to such as he. And John
+Brown, though he was wounded and a prisoner,
+though everywhere enemies surrounded him,
+and the gallows stared him full in the face,
+answered their questions calmly and courteously,
+without the slightest show of fear.</p>
+
+<p>“Who sent you here?” one official asked.
+They were trying to worm out the names of
+Northerners who had given Brown money for
+the raid, so as to prosecute them for conspiracy
+in murder.</p>
+
+<p>“No man sent me here,” John Brown answered
+calmly. “It was my own prompting, and
+that of my Maker, or that of the devil, which
+ever you please. I acknowledge no man in human
+form.”</p>
+
+<p>“What was your object in coming?”</p>
+
+<p>“I came to free the slaves.”</p>
+
+<p>“And you think you were acting righteously?”</p>
+
+<p>“Yes. I think, my friends, you are guilty of
+a great wrong, against God and humanity. I
+think it right to interfere with you to free
+those you hold in bondage. I hold that the
+Golden Rule applies to the slaves, too.”</p>
+
+<p>“And do you mean to say you believe in the
+Bible?” some one said, incredulously. They
+could not understand this man; they only saw
+a wild, mad “nigger-thief” in him.</p>
+
+<p>“Certainly I do,” John Brown said with dignity.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_56">[Pg 56]</span></p>
+
+<p>“Don’t you know you are a seditionist, a
+traitor, and that you have taken up arms
+against the United States government?”</p>
+
+<p>“I was trying to free the slaves. I have tried
+moral suasion for this purpose, but I don’t think
+the people in the slave states will ever be convinced
+they are wrong.”</p>
+
+<p>“You are mad and fanatical.”</p>
+
+<p>“And I think you people of the South are
+mad and fanatical. Is it sane to keep five million
+men in slavery? Is it sane to think such
+a system can last? Is it sane to suppress all
+who would speak against this system, and to
+murder all who would interfere with it? Is it
+sane to talk of war rather than give it up?”</p>
+
+<p>Thus John Brown uttered his challenge to the
+South; but they failed to understand.</p>
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+<div class="chapter">
+  <h2 class="nobreak" id="THE_TRIAL_AT_CHARLESTOWN">
+    THE TRIAL AT CHARLESTOWN
+  </h2>
+</div>
+
+<p>And they failed to understand that it was
+not he who was on trial at the Charlestown
+court-house a month later, but the whole
+slavery system.</p>
+
+<p>Every moment of that trial was reported in
+the newspapers of the nation. Every reader in
+America knew of the wonderful strength and
+majesty of John Brown in the court-room. The
+North began thinking about slavery as it had
+never thought before. John Brown was so manifestly
+pure in his intentions; manifestly a crusader,
+and people were forced to try to understand
+why an old, gray-haired farmer should
+have taken up arms at the age of sixty, after
+a life spent in useful occupations.</p>
+
+<p>His dignity, his piety, his reputation as a terrible
+fighter, and the Biblical sublimity of the
+picture of this white-bearded patriarch surrounded
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_57">[Pg 57]</span>by his seven sons, all of them armed
+with rifles, all of them ready to die for the
+cause of abolition—these had their powerful
+effect on the imagination of the North. Hosts of
+new friends rose up in Brown’s defense; legislatures
+passed resolutions asking for his pardon,
+Congressmen began speaking out, newspapers
+suddenly found <ins id="themselves" title="Original has 'themelves'">themselves</ins> in danger of
+losing their subscribers if they spoke against
+John Brown; everywhere in the North men
+found themselves waking from a dream, and
+coming into the clear, white vision of John
+Brown. They saw slavery as if for the first
+time in all its horrors; they could not help
+taking sides. And the South became more and
+more inflamed with rage as the trial progressed,
+and those reverberations reached it from the
+North.</p>
+
+<p>John Brown was tried on three charges, murder,
+treason, and inciting the slaves to rebellion.
+The trial was quickly over; it was but a
+formality. The jury, of course, returned the
+verdict of guilty, and John Brown, lying on his
+cot in the court-room, said not a word, but
+turned quietly over on his side, when he heard
+it.</p>
+
+<p>A few days later, Judge Parker pronounced
+the sentence of death, and this time John Brown
+rose from his cot, and drawing himself up to
+his full stature, with flashing eagle eyes, and
+calm, clear and distinct tones, he addressed the
+citizens of America. He said many things that
+they were soon to understand clearly on the
+battlefields of the Civil War.</p>
+
+<p>“Had I taken up arms in behalf of the rich,
+the powerful, the intelligent, the so-called great,
+or in behalf of any of their friends, or any of
+their class, every man in this court would have
+deemed it an act worthy of reward rather than
+of punishment. But this Court acknowledges
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_58">[Pg 58]</span>the validity of the law of God. I see a book
+kissed here which is the Bible, and which
+teaches me that all things that I would have
+men do unto me, so must I do unto them. I
+endeavored to act up to that instruction. I
+fought for the poor; and I say it was right, for
+they are as good as any of you; God is no respecter
+of persons.</p>
+
+<p>“I believe that to have interfered as I have
+done, as I have always freely admitted I have
+done, in behalf of His despised poor, I did no
+wrong, but right. Now, if it is deemed necessary
+that I should forfeit my life for the furtherance
+of the ends of justice, and mingle my
+blood further with the blood of my children,
+and with the blood of millions in this slave
+country whose rights are disregarded by wicked,
+cruel and unjust enactments, I say, let it be
+done.”</p>
+
+<p>Judge Parker fixed the date for hanging on
+December 2nd, 1859, a month away. It was a
+fatal mistake for the South, and John Brown’s
+finest gift at the hands of the God he believed
+in.</p>
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+<div class="chapter">
+  <h2 class="nobreak" id="THE_AGITATOR_IN_JAIL">
+    THE AGITATOR IN JAIL
+  </h2>
+</div>
+
+<p>For in that month, John Brown accomplished
+more for abolition than even the stern deeds
+of Kansas had effected. He had put by the
+sword forever, and now for a month took up
+the pen and made it as powerful a weapon. He
+wrote innumerable letters to Northern friends
+and they were published and read everywhere.
+Their tone was Christ-like; no longer was Brown
+the militant Captain in the field, but the sweet,
+patient martyr waiting for his end in tranquil
+joy. In many letters he repeats the statement
+that he is glad to die; that his death is
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_59">[Pg 59]</span>of more value to the cause than ever his life
+could have been. This was no vainglorious
+hysterical gesture with John Brown; he was
+calmly certain of it; he slept peacefully as a
+child at night, and wrote his letters by day,
+secure in his tranquil wisdom. Friends were
+planning an attempt to rescue him, but he forbade
+them to try, for he really felt that his
+death was necessary. “I am worth now infinitely
+more to die, than to live,” he said.</p>
+
+<p>And in his letters he gave Americans his last
+warning on the slavery question. He told them
+it must be settled; it could not go on. His letters
+were so strong, manly, and yet so touching,
+that even the jailor wept as he censored
+them in the course of his duties. As Wendell
+Phillips said, the million hearts of his countrymen
+had been melted by that old Puritan soul.</p>
+
+<p>With absolute equanimity, John Brown wrote
+his will, wrote his last few letters to his family,
+determined the coffin in which he was to
+be buried, and the inscription on the family
+monument, said farewell to his fellow-prisoners
+and jail-keepers. On the morning of December
+2nd he stood calmly on the steps of the scaffold
+and gazed about him. Before leaving his
+cell he had handed to another prisoner the following
+last and uncompleted message:</p>
+
+<p>“I, John Brown, am now quite certain that
+the crimes of this guilty land will never be
+purged away but with blood. I had, as I now
+think, vainly flattered myself that without
+much bloodshed it might be done.”</p>
+
+<p>Now, as he looked about, he could see massed
+beyond the fifteen hundred soldiers Virginia
+had felt necessary for this execution, the hazy
+outlines of the Blue Ridge mountains. The
+sun was shining; the sky was blue, and his
+heart was at peace. “This is a beautiful country,”
+he said, “I never had the pleasure of really
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_60">[Pg 60]</span>seeing it before.” He walked with perfect composure
+up the steps, watched by the eyes of the
+soldiery and officialdom of slave-holding Virginia.
+They saw not a tremor in his face or
+body; not even when the cap was drawn over
+his head, his arms pinioned at the elbows, the
+noose slipped around his neck. He had refused
+to have the solace of any ministers, for they
+believed in slavery, and he told them he did
+not regard them as Christians. He needed no
+man’s solace; he was braver than any one
+there. “Shall I give you the signal when the
+trap is to be sprung?” said a friendly sheriff.
+“No, no,” the serene old man answered, “just
+get it over quickly.”</p>
+
+<p>And quickly enough, it was all over for John
+Brown. The trap was sprung; his body hung
+between heaven and earth. In the painful silence
+that followed, the voice of Colonel Preston
+declaimed solemnly, the official epitaph,
+“So perish all such enemies of Virginia! All
+such enemies of the Union! All such foes of
+the human race!”</p>
+
+<p>That was the verdict of the South, still infatuated
+and blinded by its slave system. But
+on the other side of the Mason-Dixon line men
+were pronouncing a different verdict on John
+Brown, and on the other side of the Atlantic,
+the greatest man of letters in Europe, Victor
+Hugo, was saying:</p>
+
+<p>“In killing Brown, the Southern States have
+committed a crime which will take its place
+among the calamities of history. The rupture of
+the Union will fatally follow the assassination
+of Brown. As for John Brown, he was an
+apostle and a hero. The gibbet has only increased
+his glory, and made him a martyr.”</p>
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_61">[Pg 61]</span></p>
+
+  <h2 class="nobreak" id="HIS_SOUL_GOES_MARCHING_ON">
+    HIS SOUL GOES MARCHING ON
+  </h2>
+</div>
+
+<p>John Brown was hung on December 2, 1859.
+Exactly eleven months later Abraham Lincoln
+was elected President of the United States.
+Exactly eight months after that, Northern
+troops were marching southward, to put down
+the rebellion of the slave states that had hung
+Brown.</p>
+
+<p>No one at the time believed events would
+march so swiftly after Brown’s death. There
+were many who knew that some sort of conflict
+between the North and South was inevitable;
+it had been brewing for decades. But
+there were as many more who were confident
+that slavery would win its legal fight, and
+would spread over the whole continent. And
+the great mass of Americans just faintly understood
+the issues involved; to most of them,
+John Brown seemed some kind of mad fanatic.</p>
+
+<p>President Lincoln’s election undoubtedly
+provoked the Civil War. And his election
+was undoubtedly due to the discussion on slavery
+that raged after John Brown’s deed. Lincoln
+was the first Northerner to be elected
+in forty years; the South had always carried
+things before it, and would have done so again
+had not John Brown roused the entire North
+to a consciousness of what slavery meant.</p>
+
+<p>He did more than all the abolitionists had
+been able to do in their fifty years of agitation.</p>
+
+<p>And yet even most of his friends thought
+him mad at the time of the deed. Abraham
+Lincoln, in a campaign speech at Cooper
+Union, in New York, said: “Old John Brown
+has been executed for treason against a state.
+We cannot object, even though he agreed with
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_62">[Pg 62]</span>us in thinking slavery wrong. That cannot
+excuse violence, bloodshed and treason.”</p>
+
+<p>Only men of the stamp of Wendell Phillips
+fully understood what John Brown had done.
+His funeral oration at the last resting place
+of John Brown’s body had all the vision of
+the prophets:</p>
+
+<p>“Marvelous old man!... He has abolished
+slavery in Virginia. You may say that this is
+too much. Our neighbors are the very last
+men we know. The hours that pass us are
+the ones we appreciate the least. Men walked
+Boston streets, when night fell on Bunker
+Hill, and pitied Warren, saying, ‘Foolish man!
+Thrown away his life! Why didn’t he measure
+his means better?’ Now we see him standing
+colossal on that blood-stained sod, and
+severing that day the tie which bound Boston
+to Great Britain. That night George III ceased
+to rule in New England. History will date
+Southern emancipation from Harper’s Ferry.
+True, the slave is still there. So, when the
+tempest uproots a pine in your hills, it looks
+green for months, for a year. Still, it is timber,
+not a tree. John Brown has loosened the
+roots of the slave system; it only breathes—it
+does not live—hereafter.”</p>
+
+<p>Wendell Phillips was a prophet; and even
+men of wide vision like Lincoln could not attain
+his lofty view. At first there was a rush
+of Northern politicians to disavow and condemn
+John Brown’s deed. Later, there was
+approval; still later understanding; still later,
+worship.</p>
+
+<p>Yes, the old man seemed mad, as all pioneers
+are mad. Gorky has called it the madness of
+the brave. But such madness seems necessary
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_63">[Pg 63]</span>to the world; the world would sink into a bog
+of respectable tyranny and stagnation were
+there not these fresh, strong, ruthless tempests
+to keep the waters of life in motion.</p>
+
+<p>Who knows but that some time in America
+the John Browns of today will be worshipped
+in like manner? The outlaws of today, the
+unknown soldiers of freedom.</p>
+
+<p>“And his soul goes marching on.”</p>
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+<div class="chapter">
+<div class="tnote">
+  <h2 class="nobreak" id="Transcribers_note">
+    Transcriber’s Note:
+  </h2>
+
+<p>Inconsistencies in hyphenation have been standardized.</p>
+
+<p>Minor punctuation errors have been changed without notice.</p>
+
+<p>Spelling was retained as in the original except for the following changes:</p>
+
+<table class="autotable">
+
+<tr>
+<td class="tdl"></td>
+<td class="tdl">Page <a href="#World">6</a>: "civilization in the New world"</td>
+<td class="tdl">"civilization in the New World"</td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td class="tdl"></td>
+<td class="tdl">Page <a href="#occurred">12</a>: "a circumstance occured"</td>
+<td class="tdl">"a circumstance occurred"</td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td class="tdl"></td>
+<td class="tdl">Page <a href="#thirty-fifth">20</a>: "his thirty-fith"</td>
+<td class="tdl">"his thirty-fifth"</td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td class="tdl"></td>
+<td class="tdl">Page <a href="#every_one">22</a>: "in communities where everyone"</td>
+<td class="tdl">"in communities where every one"</td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td class="tdl"></td>
+<td class="tdl">Page <a href="#Osawatomie1">24</a>: "John Brown of Osawotamie"</td>
+<td class="tdl">"John Brown of Osawatomie"</td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td class="tdl"></td>
+<td class="tdl">Page <a href="#Ruffians">25</a>: "most of the Border Ruffins"</td>
+<td class="tdl">"most of the Border Ruffians"</td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td class="tdl"></td>
+<td class="tdl">Page <a href="#Osawatomie2">26</a>: "settlement at Osawotamie"</td>
+<td class="tdl">"settlement at Osawatomie"</td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td class="tdl"></td>
+<td class="tdl">Page <a href="#published">32</a>: "It publishe a newspaper"</td>
+<td class="tdl">"It published a newspaper"</td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td class="tdl"></td>
+<td class="tdl">Page <a href="#Pottawatomie">34</a>: "on the Pottawotamie"</td>
+<td class="tdl">"on the Pottawatomie"</td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td class="tdl"></td>
+<td class="tdl">Page <a href="#shotgun">34</a>: "he had a shot gun"</td>
+<td class="tdl">"he had a shotgun"</td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td class="tdl"></td>
+<td class="tdl">Page <a href="#slaves">42</a>: "eleven other slave"</td>
+<td class="tdl">"eleven other slaves"</td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td class="tdl"></td>
+<td class="tdl">Page <a href="#Coolly">44</a>: "not insane. Cooly"</td>
+<td class="tdl">"not insane. Coolly"</td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td class="tdl"></td>
+<td class="tdl">Page <a href="#themselves">57</a>: "suddenly found themelves"</td>
+<td class="tdl">"suddenly found themselves"</td>
+</tr>
+
+</table>
+</div>
+</div>
+
+<div style='text-align:center'>*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 77258 ***</div>
+</body>
+</html>
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+This book, including all associated images, markup, improvements,
+metadata, and any other content or labor, has been confirmed to be
+in the PUBLIC DOMAIN IN THE UNITED STATES.
+
+Procedures for determining public domain status are described in
+the "Copyright How-To" at https://www.gutenberg.org.
+
+No investigation has been made concerning possible copyrights in
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+this eBook outside of the United States should confirm copyright
+status under the laws that apply to them.
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+Project Gutenberg (https://www.gutenberg.org) public repository for eBook #77258
+(https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/77258)