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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"
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