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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 ***