An Introduction to John Brown
“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 very much blood shed it might be done.”[1] This was the final written statement of abolitionist John Brown, passed to his jailer as he was marched to his execution, Charlestown, Virginia 2nd December 1859.
There are Americans that have larger-than-life personas. Abraham Lincoln, for example. But along with the political movers and shakers, others though for much of their life obscure, nevertheless secured their place as agents of change. Such is the case with John Brown, a humble shepherd who saw an injustice and dedicated his life to eradicating it. In an antebellum America looking for heroes and villains, Brown was happy to oblige both sides with an uncompromising dedication to his faith and political beliefs. Examining his story will go far in understanding the forces that sought to rip the young nation apart, Brown himself, not the least of them. Brown’s most salient actions were accomplished during the last seven weeks of his life; most his fifty-nine years were spent setting the stage for his death on the gallows. It was there that he accomplished his greatest work.
Constitutional and Legislative Considerations
The United States of America was on a collision course with civil war from its inception. The issue was slavery, an institution that was losing prominence around the globe even as the Declaration of Independence was being written. With respect to the Constitution, non-slave holding American colonies held a seven to six numerical advantage over their slave-holding counterparts. Nevertheless, to gain the two-thirds vote required for ratification, slave holders had to be placated. Political reality dictated that the nation be founded on a series of concessions, not least of which was the “three/fifths compromise.” This provision counted African slaves as sixty percent of a free person for purposes of representation and taxation. However, the word “slave” does not appear in the Constitution as the practice was a major point of contention, hence the creative language to avoid using the offensive term.[2]
The three/fifths compromise also provided the slave states with a built-in numerical advantage as to congressional influence that lasted for decades. True, if slaves would have been counted as a whole person slave states would have had greater representation, but also higher taxes. Non-slave holding colonies for their part were loathed to give slave interests extra representation, extra tax revenue notwithstanding, hence the compromise.
Another provision gave Congress authority to ban the slave trade in 1808. The founders placed this mechanism in the document to limit the spread of slavery- the best they could do under the circumstances, but one that at the same time guaranteed future confrontations. Nevertheless, this essentially guaranteed the practice for two decades and further entrenched it in states where it existed, particularly the Upper and Deep South.[3]
Congress banned the importation of slaves in 1808. Of course, when the trade of any commodity is excluded a thriving illicit market often arises. Slavery was no exception with numerous trafficking operations commencing. Additionally, slave births more than made up for any deficit smuggling could not cover. Far from disappearing as some hoped, the South’s “peculiar institution” which numbered just under 700,000 in 1790, according to the first U.S. census- was flourishing in 1860 with nearly four million souls held, primarily in the Cotton South.[4] The fruits of their labor produced the nation’s largest export crop while at the same time feeding the North’s textile mills. This production and trade benefitted production and shipping interests, along with various governmental entities, federal, state and local that collected taxes on the transactions.
Another compromise, the Northwest Ordinance of July13,1787, prohibited slavery north of the Ohio River.[5] The Louisiana Purchase of 1803, however, added vast tracts of land that were not covered by the agreement’s provisions and by the second decade of the nineteenth century northerly expansion rekindled the slavery issue when Missouri applied for statehood. Southern interests immediately saw an opportunity to extend the practice while bolstering their influence in the Senate, their last line of defense, as the North by this point controlled the House of Representatives due to its larger population. Northerners predictably sought to limit such expansion.
Weeks of intense debate during the winter of 1819-20 forged the Compromise of 1820, also known as the Missouri Compromise. This legislation permitted slavery north of thirty-six degrees and thirty minutes’ north latitude or 360 30’, Missouri’s proposed southern border, and only in that state. At the same time, a provision offered by then Representative Henry Clay of Kentucky provided for Massachusetts to be carved into two political subdivisions with the creation of Maine which would be admitted as free.[6] The legislation effectively gave the South and slavery, a base in a region that would have otherwise been free. Southerners would seek to build upon this exception. The upshot of the agreement, and of vital importance to the South, was parity was maintained in the Senate.
The Missouri Compromise functioned for nearly three decades until the Mexican Cession of 1848 brought millions of acres of western land into play as future states. Most troubling to the South was the California Territory which encompassed lands both above and below a projected 360 30’ line. Additionally, there was the matter of land that would become Colorado, Kansas and Wyoming- all of which lay above the 360 30’. The ever-paranoid Southerners possessed enough influence to marshal another compromise through Congress. Northerners once again attempted to minimize its effects.
The final decade prior to the Civil War saw an intensive action on the legislative and legal fronts that further made conflict inevitable. The aging Senator Henry Clay of Kentucky wrote the Compromise of 1850. Among its provisions: the admittance of California as a free state[7], and of vital interest to Southerners, a strengthened Fugitive Slave Act.[8] Also, pertinent to this discussion was a section concerning the newly organized territories of Utah and New Mexico regarding slavery. On this issue, the people would directly decide by “popular sovereignty.” The brainchild of Lewis Cass of Michigan, this thoroughly democratic concept would later be skillfully wielded by Senator Stephen Douglas of Illinois in his Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854, another piece of legislation that will be explored in detail as it probably had more influence in igniting the Civil War than any other.
Northerners, while not uniformly abolitionist, nevertheless held a certain repugnance towards slavery and some facets were simply beyond the pale. The open selling of slaves in the nation’s capital, was a source of considerable embarrassment, particularly when world leaders were witness to the practice. The banning of these sales in-Washington D.C., but not the actual ownership of slaves, was another feature of the 1850 Compromise. Northern outrage, however, was more symbolic than anything as District of Columbia slaves primarily consisted of house servants comprising an insignificant number compared to the legions of field hands throughout the Deep South.[9]
As more land was organized into territories and finally states, Southerners saw their influence in the Senate wane. Another key of Henry Clay’s compromise in assuaging these fears came in the form of a much stronger version of the Fugitive Slave Act of 1793. Chief among the differences was the ability to pursue runaways into their northern havens while forcing law enforcement and even citizens to be impressed as slave catchers.[10]
As alluded to previously, the Senate was the South’s main bulwark against attacks on slavery itself and what Southerners came to believe, their very culture and heritage. One idea that was promoted skillfully by South Carolina Senator John C. Calhoun and began to gain currency in the 1820s, was the institution was not in fact evil, but “a positive good.” David S. Reynolds reports magazines such as Charles Chauncey Burr’s Old Guard built on the concept during the Civil War declaring “enslaved blacks were fortunate, because they were removed from the barbarism of Africa.”[11]
The Motivation of John Brown
Northern response to the enhanced fugitive slave provisions ranged from indifference to rage. Many Northerners, however, were quite content to sit on the fence; lukewarm in the parlance of the New Testament.[12] One man, though, fit squarely into the rage category: John Brown. Aggrieved by the premature deaths of his first wife and several of his children, an unquenchable fire nevertheless burned deep inside him. The fuel was the injustice of chattel slavery. The idea that one human should own another was morally bankrupt to Brown.
The Compromise of 1850 was particularly galling to Northerners directly involved with, or at least sympathetic to the Underground Railroad. Historian Stephen B. Oates reports that Brown himself was involved with operations in Ohio for a time where he was “prepared to fight like a lion” should anyone try and take the slaves he was escorting to freedom.[13]
But almost as repulsive as actual slavery and the laws bolstering it to Brown, was the shabby treatment free blacks often received in the North. Oates tells the story of a revival service where Brown witnessed black worshippers being forced to sit at the back of the church. In Oates’ words “such discrimination in the House of God made Brown blazing mad.” Brown’s defiant solution the next night was to escort some of the blacks to his family’s pew at the front of the church. This act triggered his family’s expulsion from the congregation, albeit through less than forthright actions on the part of the church board. The Browns were purged from the membership roll due to non-attendance while they were out of the area for a time, a provision that was enacted after the fact.[14] The Biblical precept violated by the church’s actions according to Brown, was evident in James 2:3-4:
2 Suppose a man comes into your meeting wearing a gold ring and fine clothes, and a poor man in shabby clothes also comes in. 3 If you lavish attention on the man in fine clothes and say, “- here is a seat of honor,” but say to the poor man “You must stand” or “sit at my feet.” 4 have you not discriminated among yourselves and become judges with evil thoughts?[15]
John Brown was not given to pulling his theology and political philosophy out of thin air. Instead, the Bible, along with the Declaration of Independence were the principle sources upon which he based his beliefs.[16] Unsurprisingly, Brown considered himself at once a Christian and a patriot; he saw no contradiction in this dual role- so long as allegiance to the temporal government did not run afoul of his dedication to Christian duty. This concept was at the core of who he was and goes far to explain his obsession with the destruction of slavery. He simply could not reconcile his faith with the government’s promotion and defense of Slave Power.[17]
Born in 1800 in Torrington, Connecticut, Brown’s father Owen, was a strict Calvinist and harsh disciplinarian, traits Brown mimicked in adulthood. His personal Bible analysis placed an emphasis on Old Testament stories of often violent retribution. This interpretation informed much of Brown’s world-view and later influenced him to embrace violence as a political tool. In many ways, he was the archetypical American domestic terrorist. Brown comparisons to the original revolutionaries and considered his cause to be a natural extension and perfecting of the founders’ acts. His metamorphosis from anxious observer to forceful righter of wrongs took several decades, but the seeds were planted early. At age twelve when after driving his father’s cattle one hundred miles, he witnessed the abuse of a slave boy by the livestock buyer who beat the child with a shovel.[18]
On a practical level, the responsibility delivering the cattle safely to their new owner was one of many that served to forge a self-reliant spirit of resourcefulness in young John, traits that would serve him well later in life. It can be assumed the trip took several days at a minimum. Brown would have had to obtain provisions for himself and fodder for the cattle. There would have likely been wild animals and possibly people that may or may not have been friendly to contend with.
While living in the Western Reserve of Ohio with his family, Brown spent a great deal of time with the local Native American children, both playing with them, and learning their skills. When he was in his twenties, Brown moved to western Pennsylvania, an area where tribes from New York would annually migrate to hunt. Brown often supplied them with food and provisions. David S. Reynolds recounts an instance when several armed neighbors showed up at his house, seeking his help in driving the Indians off. His response was firm and to the point: “I will have nothing to do with so mean an act. I would sooner take my gun and drive you out of the country.”[19] Once in Kansas, Brown continued extending a hand of friendship to tribes he encountered, such as the Sacs, Foxes and Ottawas. His sympathetic tendencies obviously were not limited to blacks, but extended to other oppressed peoples as well.
Political Radicalization of John Brown
If one were looking for a concrete event and specific date pointing to the radicalization of John Brown regarding abolitionism, it would be his response to the murder of Alton, Illinois abolitionist Elijah Lovejoy in November of 1837 which rekindled the smoldering embers of his memory of the slave boy’s abuse. After learning of the Lovejoy tragedy Brown stood up at a church service and declared he would “. . . consecrate his life to the destruction of slavery.”[20]
It is notable that the some of the pro-slavery mob that killed Lovejoy hailed from the west side of the Mississippi River. It must be remembered that Missouri was a slave state per the Missouri Compromise. From the legislation’s inception slave holders and their agents jealously defended the practice against perceived threats. As with Lovejoy, violence was sometimes the remedy. Almost two decades later Brown himself would become embroiled in a border conflict with pro-slavery Missourians on the opposite end of that state.
By the 1850s railroads were becoming the dominant American industry. A long-desired goal of many Americans was a transcontinental line. Senator Stephen Douglas of Illinois held that the natural eastern terminus would be Chicago. The problem was a direct westerly route would run through unorganized territory. His Kansas-Nebraska Bill would deal with the issue by organizing the land, thus opening it for settlement and ultimate statehood.[21] Southern votes, however, would be necessary; getting them would require a concession to slave interests.
Douglas’ goal was achieved by applying Lewis Cass’s popular sovereignty. The territories would not be organized as slave directly, thereby sidestepping a protracted and probably unwinnable congressional debate. Instead, the voters of the affected territory would decide the issue at the ballot box. Geography would play an important part in the drama that was about to unfold. In the case of Nebraska there was little chance that a pro-slavery majority would carry the day as it was bordered by free Iowa. Kansas on the other hand, shared a border with the slave state of Missouri.
W.E.B. DuBois, civil rights icon and early 19th century rehabilitator of Brown’s reputation, postulates there was no free choice at all. “It was the secret understanding of the promoters of the bill that Kansas would become slave territory and Nebraska free, and this tacit compact was expressed in the formula that the people of each territory should have the right to form and regulate their domestic institutions in their own way, subject only to the Constitution of the United States.”[22]
With ratification of the Kansas-Nebraska Act in 1854, the Missouri Compromise was effectively repealed, throwing open the door of the West to potential slavery. Pro and anti-slavery forces began to jockey for control of Kansas. From the North, the New England Emigrant Aid Society sprung up quickly, providing monetary assistance for those willing to settle the territory and effect its establishment as a state sans slavery. Five of John Brown’s sons, John Jr., Frederick, Owen, Salmon and Jason were among the early settlers.[23]
The northern emigrants while nominally migrating to establish a free Kansas by peaceful means via the ballot box, nevertheless were prepared to utilize the cartridge box if necessary. Understanding that self-government could not be achieved sans weapons, New York City minister Henry Ward Beecher, for example, solicited donations from his congregation with which he purchased two dozen Sharps rifles. Shipped to Kansas in crates marked “Bibles,” they came to be referred to as “Beecher’s Bibles.”[24]
Southern states had similar organizations to facilitate the placement of individuals friendly to the cause of slavery. W.E.B. DuBois provides excellent perspective on how high the stakes were for the South. “The slavery of the new Cotton Kingdom must either die or conquer a nation- it could not hesitate or pause.”[25]
To be sure, there were many legitimate settlers that hailed from states such as Georgia, Alabama and the Carolinas- the prospect of fertile land for a bargain price and a new beginning was as enticing to them as any American. Nevertheless, elections in Kansas often reflected a much larger vote count than the number of actual residents. Such situations were more frequent on the border, whether by invasion or outright fraud. Nicole Etcheson reports of one instance where the tiny town of Oxford, Kansas with its six dwellings- recording sixteen hundred ballots. Crucially, the entire surrounding district contained no more than fifty legal voters.[26]
Individuals who crossed the border from Missouri no doubt felt compelled to do so based on large numbers of well-financed New Englanders and other emigrants from the old northwest. The Missourians, after all, lived there and were seeking to protect their way of life from what they perceived as outside interference of their natural rights in the territory.[27] Donald L. Gilmore, in Civil War on the Missouri-Kansas Border likens the Missourians voting in Kansas and returning home, to New Englanders who did essentially the same thing by settling for a time, voting, and then leaving the territory. Gilmore points out that Congress was at least partly to blame with ambiguous language that made “almost any ‘actual resident’ a legal voter.”[28]
Northerners on the other hand, doubtless also were attracted by the lure of cheap land. Nevertheless, many held similar attitudes towards blacks as Southerners. Racism was prevalent on both sides of the Mason-Dixon line, a fact that escapes many modern observers. Even Abraham Lincoln had reservations about whether black’s physical differences compared to whites would preclude the races from living together. A direct Lincoln quote per David S. Reynolds: “Negro equality! Fudge!”[29]
Many of the Northerners that made to move to Kansas and fought for free-state status wanted freedom from black labor and the competition for jobs and other resources that four million potential freedmen represented. David S. Reynolds explains “Free State meant free of any blacks, whether slaves or not . . .”[30] According to Reynolds, when Free State forces offered their constitution for ratification with a “Negro Exclusion Clause,” it passed overwhelmingly, with three quarters of the Territory’s Free State settlers approving it.[31] W.E.B. DuBois gives this estimation of Northern attitudes, which generally extended to Kansans as well: “They found themselves in three parties: a few who hated slavery, more who hated Negros, and many who hated slaves.”[32]
John Brown and Egalitarianism
John Brown in his absolute commitment to egalitarianism was rather unique among white men. It was this characteristic that endeared him to blacks such as DuBois. Indeed, Brown spent several years living among free blacks in the upstate New York community of North Elba.
Established on 120,000 acres owned by wealthy industrialist and Brown benefactor Gerrit Smith, North Elba served as a type of pilot program aimed at providing freedmen and women with an opportunity to own land, farm and prove to the world that the black race could indeed govern themselves and direct their own affairs. Unfortunately, the cold climate and rocky soil made farming difficult. Brown believed he could be of service and approached Smith with a proposition which is reproduced here, per Stephen B. Oates:
I am something of a pioneer. I grew up among the woods and wild Indians of Ohio, and am used to the climate and way of life that your colony find so trying. I will take one of your farms myself, clear it up, plant it, and show my colored neighbors how much work should be done; will give them work as I have occasion, look after them in all needful ways, and be a kind father to them.[33]
Smith took Brown up on his offer. Another major component in Brown’s view was teaching his neighbors about God.[34] Brown forged numerous friendships at North Elba and was a well-respected. The connection to the community was so strong that it served as his burial location. The state of New York preserves the property including Brown’s grave, as the John Brown Farm State Historic Site. The colony eventually succumbed to the previously mentioned difficulties of weather and terrain, leading some contemporary observers to term North Elba “an utter failure.”[35] But David S. Reynolds offers a counter to this conclusion. He contends that the experiment allowed black leaders such as Frederick Douglas, W.E.B. DuBois, and others in the twentieth century to defend Brown to other blacks.[36]
John Brown and Bleeding Kansas
The primary objective of the competing factions in Kansas was to secure control of the territorial government. Whoever ran the legislature would write the constitution favoring their position, slave or free, per the Kansas-Nebraska Act which was signed into law by President Franklin Pierce. During much of Bleeding Kansas, the seat of territorial government recognized by the United States was the town of Lecompton. There, proslavery forces generated the Lecompton Constitution which endorsed slavery.[37] This instrument was the one favored by the Pierce administration in effect giving the Federal government’s blessing to slavery in Kansas.[38] This largely validates W.E.B. Dubois’ assertion that there was a predetermined goal of a Kansas with slavery tacitly written into the Kansas-Nebraska Act.
John Brown, quite predictably, was no fan of President Pierce writing to his wife “we hear that Franklin Pierce means to crush the men of Kansas. I do not know how well he may succeed; but I think he may find his hands full before it is over.”[39] The succeeding Buchanan administration continued this appeasement of Slave Power by a Northern administration and was no better in Brown’s eyes.
President Buchanan in turn was no fan of John Brown. He added $250 to the $3000 bounty Missouri Governor Robert M. Stewart had placed on Brown’s head for slave stealing, or as Brown put it, liberating slaves. On one mission that commenced on December 20, 1856, Brown and a group of followers liberated ten slaves in Missouri. When they arrived safely in Canada after a thousand-mile trek, there were eleven free blacks with the birth of John Brown Daniels who was delivered on the journey and named in Brown’s honor.[40]
The Free State group was primarily based in Lawrence, which was the reason for frequent attacks by proslavery forces on the town during Bleeding Kansas and throughout the Civil War. The constitution they constructed was called the Topeka Constitution and was offered to the voters “with” or “with no” slavery. The latter in a nod to the U.S. Constitution’s compromise banned only future importation, not ownership. Additionally, no future amendment could affect the right to own existing slave property.[41] In keeping with the concept of a Kansas free of black labor, slave or otherwise, the previously discussed “Negro Exclusion clause” was also ratified on December 15, 1855.[42] Both groups, the Topeka and Lecompton rejected each other’s documents, thus setting the stage for years of strife and bloodshed.
Because of the Missouri Compromise and its endorsement of slavery in that state, Southerners formed a sizable portion of the settlers. They established farms principally in the Missouri River valley where the fertile soil was ideal for growing hemp, a crop well-suited to slave labor. The individuals that migrated to Missouri were as a rule hostile to John Brown and what he hoped to accomplish.
Kansas was settled under the guiding principles of the Kansas-Nebraska Act, which as previously discussed, left the slavery question wholly to the residents. As a consequence, Southern interests, which due to geography consisted heavily of Missourians, migrated in large numbers along with representatives’ other Southern states.
As there would be no corresponding free state coming into the Union with Kansas as was the case with Missouri and Maine, Northerners saw making Kansas free a necessity. They came in large numbers from New England and what is now the Midwest, that is, Ohio, Indiana and Illinois. The question of whether Kansas was favorable to slave-driven production was in many ways overridden by the political realities of the time.
Though violence and political wrangling, Free State interests eventually carried the day in Kansas. Once in control of the legislature, future status as a free state was a certainty. When the Sunflower State joined the union in 1861, it was sans slavery.
Vestiges of the border conflict can be observed in the present day in the fierce rivalry between University of Kansas and University of Missouri sports teams. The former’s team nickname “Jayhawks” hearkens to the time when armed men from Kansas ran roughshod over hapless Missourians. Per the Rantoul Citizen in an issue of the paper from 1896, the name was applied to citizens of Osawatomie who served as night watchmen during Bleeding Kansas. An actual Jayhawk was an Irish bird that lived on the eggs and young of its enemies.[43] Considering the looting and plundering Jayhawkers often committed under cover law and order, the moniker is an apt one.
Not to be outdone, similar groups hailing from the east side of the line carried the name Border Ruffians or Bushwhackers. While Missouri sports teams have not officially embraced either of those handles, it has been reported to the author of this paper by a former resident of Kansas, that Kansans often applied the terms to Missourians.
John Brown initially declined to join his sons in Kansas. However, certain events changed his mind. In the fall of 1855, the boys were woefully unprepared for the primitive conditions on the frontier including harsh weather. Additionally, free-state migrants such as themselves encountered increasingly hostile Missourians. Letters from his sons convinced Brown to head west, but instead of the customary farm implements carried by most pioneers, his wagon was loaded with rifles, revolvers and swords. He had no intention of settling. This was an opportunity to make Kansas a free state and prosecute what he believed to be his holy war on slavery while at the same time provide for the temporal needs of his family.[44]
Within weeks of his arrival, Brown had constructed basic shelter for his sons and reconnoitered the area surrounding their claim, Brown’s Station, which lay on the Pottawatomie Creek a few miles southeast of Osawatomie. A series of events occurred as 1856 unfolded, including the May 21st murder of six Free-State men during the sacking of the abolitionist stronghold Lawrence, Kansas by pro-slavery Missourians. The outrages prompted Brown to escalate the violence in the sectional civil war that would come to be known as Bleeding Kansas.[45]
While the law required actual residency as a prerequisite for voting in territorial elections, in practice this was flaunted by Missourians who simply crossed the border and voted for pro-slavery candidates. Often this was accomplished by the force of arms overwhelming the beleaguered Kansans, including Brown’s sons, with intimidation and actual violence. W.E.B. DuBois recounts the story of an encounter when Brown surreptitiously wandered into the camp of some pro-slavery Georgians that lay on Pottawatomie Creek, not far from his sons’ claim: “We’ve come here to stay. We won’t make no war on them as minds their own business; but all the Abolitionists such as them damn Browns over there, we’re going to whip, drive out, or kill, -any way to get shut of them, by God!”[46]
Upon this provocation, Brown decided some proactive intimidation of his own was in order. On the night of May 25, 1856, he, along with a party of five raiders including two of his sons crept into the Georgian’s camp. There, they selected five men living in three cabins and hacked and shot them to death. The women and younger children were spared, as was a man who provided “correct answers” when questioned. The victims, then, were not chosen at random as is sometimes reported to cast Brown in a diabolical or fanatical light. Instead they were known by him to have made threats against Free-State settlers including his family.
Brown’s brutal act came to be called the Pottawatomie Massacre and has been credited with the escalation of violence on the border. Using a bit of biblical metaphor that was pointedly on track, Thomas Goodrich in Black Flag: Guerrilla Warfare on the Western Border, 1861-1865, summarizes what Brown accomplished: “With his terrible swift sword, the shape of things to come had been hewn by the master’s hand. John Brown, Army of the Lord, had struck.”[47]
Brown was often evasive when later questioned about Pottawatomie Creek, though it is widely held that did not actually commit any of the murders. But when probed by his son Jason who asked, “if he had a hand in it,” Brown said, “I did not do it, but I approved of it.” When Jason pressed the point, Brown rebuked him saying “God is my judge, we were justified under the circumstances.[48]
Brown’s idea was to serve notice to pro-slavery forces that there were Northerners who would not shy away from their provocations and were willing to fight. Notably, Kansas marked his first use of small group guerilla tactics and violence as a political tool. It would not be his last. Believing as he did that he was an avenger sent by God, Brown had little patience when questioned as to the morality of his actions. The choice of victim to Brown was of less consequence than the idea that anyone who condoned slavery, whether they personally held slaves or not was guilty and therefore a legitimate target of Brown’s divine retribution. After the territory was firmly in Free-State hands in 1858, Brown returned to Pottawatomie Creek. He found that his former neighbors generally acknowledged the killings were “a justifiable act” given proslavery threats. Brown believed this all along, but was nevertheless happy to be vindicated.[49]
Historian Nicole Etcheson examines Brown’s activities from a socio/political perspective rather than a purely military one in Bleeding Kansas: Contested Liberty in the Civil War Era. In short, she is not a fan of Brown and refers to other writers who attempt to justify his violent acts as “apologists.” It is her contention that the Pottawatomie murders hurt the free-state cause. This position was derived from statements made by then Territorial Governor Charles Robinson who was a moderate as far as Kansans went. He hoped for a peaceful solution to agitation on the border and was imprisoned for a time by proslavery forces that initially controlled the territorial government. Robinson held that “the Brown’s actions justified the use of military force against free staters.”[50] Donald L. Gilmore concurs with Etcheson’s assessment. In his estimation “terrorism, a new dimension of violence, erupted in the Border Wars with the cold-blooded assassinations by John Brown and his party on Pottawatomie Creek.[51]
If only examined in the context of Kansas, Etcheson and Gilmore make a perfectly reasonable assumption. Identifying Brown’s goal of causing terror among proslavery factions in both Kansas and Missouri, something Gilmore ruefully admits “he [Brown] had succeeded royally.”[52] But Brown was being drawn into something else. He eventually came to see the border conflict as a vehicle to a much larger project: an invasion into the heart of Slave Power, which to him meant Virginia. This had been on his mind as early as 1843. Part of the grand plan was what he referred to as his “Subterranean Pass Way” through the Allegany Mountains which would provide a route that would facilitate the movement of runaways into the North.[53]
John Brown Moves Towards Attacking the Heart of Slave Power
Brown’s Pass Way would have proved an ambitious undertaking had it become operational. Essentially an expanded version of the Underground Railroad, it would not just siphon off slaves from border states who had a relatively short trek to safety in the North. Instead, it would have struck at the heart of the plantation system in the Deep South where most slaves were held. There, due to distance, difficulty procuring rations, slave patrols and lack of familiarity with terrain, slaves in states like Georgia, Alabama, Louisiana and Mississippi among others had little chance of successful escape.
Brown’s slave liberation undertakings were hardly a secret. And per Stephen B. Oates, he was not shy about sharing his mission with other people, including the violence, telling one couple in Lawrence that “. . . ‘God had used him as an instrument for killing’ and would use him ‘to kill a great many more.’ And ‘others heard Brown say that he had is mission just as Christ did- that God had appointed him ‘a special angel of death’ to destroy slavery with the sword.”[54] Many abolitionists were driven to do the work of God in eradicating slavery. This can be seen in the number of ministers such as Henry Ward Beecher who supported Brown along with Secret Six members Thomas Wentworth Higginson and Theodore Parker who were Unitarian minsters.
As the summer of 1856 wore on, Captain Brown as he came to be known participated in several paramilitary actions including the Battle of Black Jack, the unsuccessful defense of Osawatomie, and an aborted mission to defend Lawrence from another invasion by proslavery forces. By the fall, Brown’s renown was heralded on both sides of the border, albeit with markedly different receptions. When he headed back east on a fund-raising tour, his reputation preceded, providing Osawatomie Brown-another one of his handles- an audience with some of the most influential abolitionists of the day, men and women who hated slavery but chiefly fought it with words.
These pacifists were captivated by Brown. Here was a man who applied violent action to his convictions, and in doing so began to swing the pendulum from Garrison-style non-violence to a more aggressive posture. “Garrison-style” as used here refers to the style of non-violent resistance championed by early abolitionist stalwart William Lloyd Garrison, publisher of the influential abolitionist newspaper the Liberator. But contrary to Garrison and others like him, Brown was quite rigid in holding to his doctrine of righteous violence. And though he cared little of what others thought of him, some of these individuals had money for the cause. Though uncompromising his principles, Brown, nevertheless would be happy to let them play a part by financing his campaign. The closest Brown came to pretending that he was non-violent, was by omission. That is, unless his supporters specifically asked about his anti-slavery tactics, he volunteered no information.
The move of abolitionists towards accepting political violence and financially supporting the prosecutors of it such as Brown, unsurprisingly, was controversial among 19th century progressives as evidenced by men like William Lloyd Garrison’s initial hesitance in supporting his methods, though not his anti-slavery convictions. It remains so today among some of their modern counterparts. Professor and Politics department chair at Willamette University in Salem, Oregon, Richard J. Ellis, is a self-described “. . . lifelong Democrat . . . card carrying member of the American Civil Liberties Union and an avid supporter of public broadcasting and Big Bird.” He writes in The Dark Side of the Left: Illiberal Egalitarianism in America:
The abolitionists knew “Old Brown” of Kansas as a heroic fighter against the proslavery “border ruffians,” but few were willing to credit the allegation of his role in the previous spring’s [Pottawatomie Creek] massacre. Eager to believe the best of this antislavery warrior, they accepted Brown’s denials at face value and insisted the allegations against Brown were part of a proslavery plot to discredit him.[55]
Ellis tracks the evolution of William Lloyd Garrison’s attitude regarding Brown at Harpers Ferry through a series of editorials in the Liberator. Garrison was careful to call attention to his own “well-known opposition to all violence” and that he was still “an ‘ultra’ peace man.” As such, shortly after the raid, he presented Brown as “misguided wild and apparently insane” yet “disinterested and well-intended.” A week later, the act was “wild and futile” and “sadly misguided.” But then Garrison went on to say, “[a] more honest, truthful, brave, disinterested man (however misguided or unfortunate) does not exist . . .” On the day of Brown’s execution, Garrison was unapologetically complementary “. . .thanking God [for] ‘when men who believe in the right and duty of wielding carnal weapons are so far advanced that they will take those weapons out of the scale of despotism, and throw them to the scale of freedom.’”[56]
Henry David Thoreau was likewise enthralled by Brown, a man who did not merely criticize the government, but took violent action. After Harpers Ferry Thoreau made no excuses for endorsing Brown’s violence. It must be remembered the Thoreau had been a champion of non-violent resistance through the 1840s. Events of the late 1840s and1850s, however, such as the Mexican War and passage of the Fugitive Slave Act did much to radicalize him, as these developments did with Brown for that matter.[57]
Some of Thoreau’s reflections from the era would eventually be assembled in the work, Civil Disobedience, which among other things chronicled his night in jail for refusing to pay his poll tax, something he had refused to do for six years. Withholding the nominal fee was in protest of many grievance against the government including slavery and the Mexican War. While not on the scale of Brown’s agitations, it nonetheless represented a commitment on the part of Thoreau to link self-sacrifice with the advancement of a political goal. But what irritated him most was not being imprisoned, this was something he welcomed. The issue was someone “interfered” by paying the tax in his name, thus putting an end to his demonstration. [58] This passage from Civil Disobedience gives insight into Thoreau’s attitude on the relationship of government and citizen.
The government itself, which is the only mode which the people have chosen to execute their will, is equally liable to be abused and perverted before the people can act through it. Witness the present Mexican War, the work of comparatively few individuals using the standing government as their tool; for in the outset, the people would not have consented to this measure. [59]
Next to the Bible, an 1848 rendition of Oliver Cromwell’s life was Brown’s favorite book. David S. Reynolds explains how Cromwell was recast by an American author Joel Tyler Headley to appeal to American audiences. Brown identified with Headley’s Cromwell in all his righteous Calvinist violence.[60] British author Thomas Carlyle had in many ways laid the foundation Headley and Brown’s Cromwell connection when he rehabilitated the 17th century revolutionary/king’s reputation by postulating stern times call for in-kind actions. This was not lost on Brown, or even Transcendentalists such as Thoreau who had previously repudiated violence but now understood it was necessary.[61]
Besides the Bible and Cromwell, everything Brown read was for a specific purpose; idle past-time pursuits did not interest him. The texts he did consume had to do with practical subjects, whether animal husbandry, which was his avocation, or those dealing with the slave rebellions along with small group fighting techniques which was another one of his passions.
He had on a smaller scale honed the concept in Kansas when he took to the bush to evade various posses and U.S. Army patrols. Historian David S. Reynolds relates that Brown told Henry David Thoreau who questioned whether the price on his head concerned him: “It is perfectly well understood that I will not be taken.”[62] What smacks of bravado was up until this point a simple matter of fact. Brown’s record with respect to the authorities in Kansas and Missouri validated this claim.
Brown’s primary eastern financial backers came to be known as the “Secret Six.” They consisted of Samuel Gridley Howe, physician and educator and husband of poet Julia Ward Howe who memorialized Brown in verse; Unitarian minister Thomas Wentworth Higginson; schoolteacher Franklin B. Sanborn; Theodore Parker, also a Unitarian minister; George Luther Stearns, chairman of the Massachusetts Kansas Committee which funneled guns and money to Brown; Gerrit Smith New York industrialist, landowner, reformer and Brown’s chief benefactor. It was Smith’s property in the Adirondack Mountains of upstate New York where the North Elba freedman community was established.
Whether by design or fate, the business in Kansas thrust Brown into the national spotlight and gave him credibility with these men and women who had a sincere desire, the social connections and financial wherewithal, to oppose slavery, but lacked the initiative to confront the institution on a down-in-the-dirt personal basis. In Brown, they found the perfect agent of change they craved, one who would do the gritty work of fighting and killing as they cheered him on from the comfort and safety of their homes. Where Brown was an actual social justice warrior, they were of the virtual type. As Richard J. Ellis noted, that their champion was often sketchy as to the details of his activities suited his backers just fine.
The constitutional concept of slaves as property was reinforced with the March 6, 1857 Supreme Court decision Dred Scott versus Sanford. The opinion was written by Chief Justice Roger B. Taney, who incidentally had served as Attorney General under Andrew Jackson. The ruling strengthened the precept that slaves were not American citizens, but property, and therefore had no constitutional rights. Particularly pertinent to this discussion, the court held the prohibition of slavery in the territories per the Missouri Compromise was unconstitutional. This placed a chilling effect on the attempt of such regulation by Congress in any future territories and states.
Upon these considerations, it is the opinion of the court that the act of Congress which prohibited a citizen from holding and owning property of this kind in the territory of the United States north of the line therein mentioned, is not warranted by the Constitution, and is therefore void; and that neither Dred Scott himself, nor any of his family, were made free by being carried into this territory; even if they had been carried there by the owner, with the intention of becoming a permanent resident.[63]
Brown as previously noted was on a fundraising tour on the east coast when Dred Scott was handed down. Predictably the decision stoked his rage, but not only at the court and Slave Power. What also disturbed him was a lack of contributions from supporters where “. . . only a few hundred paltry dollars ‘for the struggle of liberty’ in the territory could be raised. Stephen Oates reports this deficiency left him “sullen and bitter.” Brown further questioned “what was wrong with these people” and pondered “what was he to make of the signs?”[64] Still, he could lay much blame for his frustration on himself for he viewed the struggle in absolutes and had little patience for those who did not see things his way completely.
Brown’s solicitation for support in the east included an appeal on March 4 in the New York Tribune addressed to “The Friends of Freedom.” His request was for funds to keep the work going in Kansas. It is notable that within the body of the piece he directed the plea to both gentlemen and ladies, an indication he saw equality as more than just racial. This attitude was also a rarity in antebellum America.[65]
Brown’s petition generated no funds, but did draw at least one letter of moral support. A man named E. Brigham wrote Brown on March 9, 1857 advising that he would have sent money except “. . . recent failures had prostrated [him] to a very hard condition.” Nevertheless, Brigham’s correspondence, a portion of which is reproduced here, hit at the heart of Brown’s lament regarding fund raising and failure of people to support the abolitionist cause in general. This was something the North was deficient in beyond just fiscal aspects in Brigham’s view, as well as Brown’s.
The truth is – and it is an enigma to me – our people in New England do not sufficiently realize their duty in this case – they really think they have a right to give, or not to give as they please – now I contend the very question they have to decide upon, so far as loans or donations are called for to sustain Freedom in Kansas, is, whether the money will be appropriated with good judgement – and even to risk it under any circumstances than not give at all. The blessings of civil and religious liberty we enjoy in this age, are not of our own creating – They are the result of somebody’s toil, suffering, wounds, and death – of the sacrifice of good men, of noble men of all ages and natures.[66]
Brigham’s last two sentences are quite telling in that they acknowledge that Brown was embarked on a campaign that was a fulfillment of the founding fathers’ unfinished struggle to create a nation steeped in freedom for all. As previously discussed, due to political realities of the day those men were not able to deliver on this promise. Interestingly, Brown had an ancestor that fought in the American Revolution, Captain John Brown, for whom he was named. Captain Brown died after a brief time of service due to dysentery.[67] Brown felt a connection and duty to the Revolution through his relative’s sacrifice.[68] Brigham while not able to offer Brown financial support, nevertheless provided him with something that probably meant a great deal more given the despondency he felt at the apathy of Northerners.
Kansas, quite frankly, had become too peaceful for Brown when he returned in the summer of 1857. Oddly enough he was disappointed that Free-State operatives were now in control of the legislature, although this was nominally for which he had struggled. At any rate, the stage was set for the territory’s admittance to the Union as a free state, again, success in what he purported to be his primary mission.
John Brown Chooses a New Target
With Kansas, pacified, Brown began in earnest to bring to fruition a plan that had long fermented in his mind, one to which Kansas had been a stepping stone: taking the fight against Slave Power directly into the heart of the South. This would be the natural extension of his violent campaign in Kansas, and have its conclusion on roughhewn gallows in Charleston, Virginia. The crimes of treason albeit against the State of Virginia and not the United States, insurrection and inciting a slave rebellion would put him on a course with destiny.
The Allegany Mountains in what is now West Virginia seemed to be the ideal place for Brown to conduct his liberation campaign. Having spent considerable time in the region while surveying property owned by Oberlin College, Brown was intimately familiar with the area’s ridges, valleys and hollows.[69] His ultimate plan was quite ambitious, with the formation of a new state with its own constitution and government structure. Of course, there were bound to be constitutional, not to mention legal issues with such a scheme regarding forming a state within the boundaries of an existing state. This issue, however, was bypassed with somewhat shaky legal reasoning by the United States government when West Virginia was created by dividing Virginia at the Allegany Mountains during the Civil War, an action that was taken without the latter’s consent.
For inspiration, Brown looked to the Haitian slave rebellion of 1791. There, escaped slaves established Maroon communities in the jungle. These settlements served as bases for the fugitives’ guerilla actions against British and French forces. Brown was also familiar with the Seminole tribes of Florida, which utilized a similar strategy against the United States government. Both groups carried the fight on for years. Per their example, Brown believed that a small, motivated force using concealment and cover, along with extreme mobility could confound and ultimately defeat an entire army. David S. Reynolds reports that Brown deduced “a ravine is better than a plain. Woods and mountain-sides can be held by resolute men against ten times their force.”[70]
The concept of a smaller force tying up a larger one is hardly unique. Along with the Haitians and Seminoles, one need only look at the American Revolution, and the defeat of the mighty British Empire, the Vietnam conflict which wore down first the French and then the Americans, and the Mujahedeen of Afghanistan who in various forms achieved victory over the British, Soviets, and for all intents and purposes, the Americans as well. In these instances, small groups of often ill-equipped fighters simply outlasted their larger, better-furnished foes.
The federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry Virginia was Brown’s chosen target to springboard his invasion of the South and set off what he hoped would be mass slave insurrection. The town held a huge cache of weapons and was surprisingly lightly defended. The surrounding countryside was home to many slaves as well. Brown hoped to utilize them as his initial shock troops after they rallied to his side. The arsenal’s weapons would be carried away to supply the force that was sure to multiply in the aftermath.
During the timeframe of Brown’s military operations in Kansas and his slave liberating forays into Missouri, he had assembled a small cadre of men who would form the nucleus of his Southern expeditionary force. Included in the number were anti-slavery zealots not unlike himself, adventurers who likewise hated slavery but also sought fame and glory in a cause they hoped would be celebrated in the Northern press and remembered ruefully by their Southern counterparts. Some of the men were devout Christians, but also among the number were several agnostics, Brown’s son Owen among them. These individuals cared little for Brown’s “Bible talk.” Still, they respected him as a leader and were willing to put theological differences aside to further the cause of eradicating slavery, as was Brown; he was loathed to turn down willing, dedicated troops.[71]
Brown’s plan called for twenty-five to fifty guerrilla fighters. However, his strike force that invaded Harpers Ferry numbered just twenty men. He had previously retained the services of a British soldier of fortune named Hugh Forbes to help drill the recruits and produce a manual of tactics. Brown seemed genuinely convinced that he could prevail against Slave Power in America with his little band of revolutionaries and brushed aside Forbes’ concerns about certain facets of the plan. Chiefly, Forbes was concerned that the uneducated, uninformed slaves would rally to Brown’s side without any sort of prior knowledge of the attack. Furthermore, Forbes felt that any slave involvement might be “a flash in the pan,” or deteriorate into anarchy and confusion.[72]
The latter was certainly a possibility given the unfettered carnage rampaging slaves wrought on Southern men, women and children during the Nat Turner Insurrection of 1831. Ultimately, Turner and his band were apprehended and punished severely; seventeen including Turner were hanged, and twelve sold out of state.[73] Nevertheless, they had instilled a palpable dread in the mind of Southerners. This prospect of another slave rebellion and the terror it would create, however, was exactly what Brown sought to capitalize on. The aftermath of the Nat Turner incident was also not lost on the slave population. They may have been largely illiterate, but their strong oral tradition preserved and passed the story down and served as a warning to future generations.
But slave involvement was also crucial to Brown for another reason. He believed that anyone deserving of freedom must be willing to fight for it. Still, as Forbes pointed out, the slaves in their ignorant condition could hardly be expected to know of Brown’s plans and understand his tactics. To his credit, Brown at least anticipated their lack of training in firearms and had ordered one thousand pikes, simple-edged weapons with which he planned to equip his burgeoning slave army.[74] In many ways, the visceral image of slaves so armed could be expected to induce terror among their owners. Again, just the reaction Brown sought to provoke.
John Brown’s Inspiration
David S. Reynolds writes, “Richard Realf, one of Brown’s followers in Kansas, reported Brown studied all the books on insurrectionary warfare he could find, paying special attention to the Maroons of Jamaica and Toussaint Louverture’s liberation of Haiti.”[75] As Brown considered the slave revolt, Louverture’s success no doubt made an impression on him. But at the same time, it appears he glossed over the fact that Haiti was liberated over a decade, and not in a hit-and-run type of operation he had in mind for his Southern invasion. Below is an excerpt from Birth of the First Black Republic: 1791-1804 Toussaint Louverture and the Haitian Revolution. It provides a brief overview of what Louverture accomplished once he joined the revolution. The body count is impressive and probably caused Brown to overestimate what he could do with a similar slave-based force, that is, should it materialize.
Yet the battle had been joined. It was at this time that Toussaint Louverture threw in his lot with the rebels. Toussaint was, as his best biographer, C.L.R. James has written, undoubtedly one of the political and military geniuses of the late 18th century. In ten years of warfare, he forged groups of illiterate slaves into a disciplined army which evoked the astonishment of European commanders and defeated both a British expeditionary force and the best troops Napoleon could muster at the height of his power. A British military historian, Fortescue, has put total British losses at 100,000, including 40,000 dead – more than the total losses of Wellington’s army from all causes in the Spanish Peninsular campaign. The French lost over 55,000 soldiers in Saint-Domingue, including veteran troops of Napoleonic victories.[76]
A chief difference between Haiti and Brown’s Southern invasion was the leader of the former, Toussaint Louverture was a slave himself, and black. Brown’s action came at a time when American slaves were justifiably dubious of a white man’s intentions. Furthermore, Louverture’s master had allowed him to learn to read. This was a skill American slaves were rarely permitted to acquire. Louverture had also been given management positions. The two skills, reading and administration served him well in the revolution. Crucially, Brown had no black counterpart to Louverture to assist in organizing the slaves he proposed to liberate.
To be sure, Brown knew several educated, free blacks, among them Frederick Douglas. Douglas first met Brown in Springfield, Massachusetts in 1847 and considered him a dear friend. But though in awe of Brown’s commitment to the black race and his willingness to sacrifice his life for them, Douglas nevertheless had grave concerns about Brown’s Harpers Ferry plan and declined to participate as a combatant. Previously he had helped with fund raising, networking and published glowing editorials regarding Brown in his newspaper, the North Star. But when it came to actual fighting, Douglas begged off.
Shortly before the action at Harpers Ferry was to commence, Douglas met Brown at an abandoned quarry not far from the rented Kennedy farm he was using as headquarters for his operations. Tony Horowitz recreates their conversation in Midnight Rising: John Brown and the Raid That Sparked the Civil War:
He [Douglas] argued that opening the campaign with an attack on a federal armory “would array the whole country against us,” rather than rally Americans to the antislavery cause. Brown shrugged this off. “It seemed to him something startling was just what the nation needed.”
Douglas raised military objections, too, arguing Brown and his men would be easily surrounded in Harpers Ferry. Again, Brown seemed unperturbed. He said he could “find means for cutting his way out,” but wouldn’t need to because he would take prominent citizens hostage. That way, if worse came to worst, he could “dictate terms” to his foes. This confidence astonished Douglas, who believed the Virginians would blow Brown and his hostages “sky high” rather than let the abolitionists hold Harpers Ferry.
There in the old quarry, the two men debated through that day and part of the next, with Douglas, a formidable orator, mustering “all the arguments at my command.” None of them moved Brown. He was utterly fixed in his course. “Come with me Douglas,” he finally said, wrapping his arms tightly around his friend. “I want you for a special purpose. When I strike the bees will begin to swarm, and I shall want you to help hive them.”
But Douglas could see nothing but menace in Harpers Ferry. “All his descriptions of that place, convinced me he was going into a perfect steel trap.” Douglas wrote, “and that once in he would never get out alive.” Having escaped slavery as a young man, Douglas had no illusions about his own prospects if he went along. “My discretion or cowardice,” he admitted “determined my course.” He would not go with Brown.[77]
Douglas had brought a man with him to meet Brown, Shields Green, a runaway from South Carolina. When offered the option to return to New York and safety with Douglas, Green simply said “I b’leve I’ll go wid de old man.”[78] Though Brown was not able to secure Douglas’ participation in his invasion, he nevertheless had his first black recruit.
To reinforce the value of an educated black leader who had contacts among the slave population in staging a successful revolution, let us consider another passage from Birth of the First Black Republic: 1791-1804 Toussaint Louverture and the Haitian Revolution:
After Boukman’s death, Toussaint rose rapidly. A small, frail man with an iron will, Toussaint had led a relatively privileged life under an enlightened master. He was literate and had read widely, including the 1780 treatise on the politics and economics of the Indies by Abbé Raynal, who declared of the fugitive slaves: “Those lightnings announce the thunder. A courageous chief only is wanted.” From Caesar’s Commentaries he derived valuable military knowledge. He had already gained organizational experience, having risen to the position of steward of livestock, in charge of hundreds of slaves and foremen. With this background, at the age of 45, “Old Toussaint” joined the slave revolt. But with the Constituent Assembly under Girondins in alliance with the mulattos, the former slaves faced the combined forces of the mulattos and the French.[79]
Brown if nothing else announced his presence with lightning and thunder and was a courageous chief. Nevertheless, in the cause of motivating what he hoped would be millions of slaves to action he was found lacking. But by most reports, it was not until the inevitability of failure at Harpers Ferry, that is, when he was in custody, that he began to see himself as a martyr. He then began to see that condition might serve his purpose, and more importantly, God’s, best.
The fact that Brown did not recruit enough blacks, free or slave, prior to initiating the raid did not appear to enter his thinking. As previously discussed, one of the reasons Brown wanted Frederick Douglas to accompany him was help in hiving the bees when they swarmed. In other words, when the slaves appeared, Brown wanted Douglas to direct and organize them. This may sound farfetched, but nothing the author of this paper has read gives any indication that Brown had any inclination that the raid might fail, up until the point it in fact had.
John Brown Takes Harpers Ferry
Harpers Ferry, Virginia, now West Virginia, is situated on a rise above the confluence of the Potomac and Shenandoah Rivers. On October 16, 1859, John Brown learned what Union and Confederate armies would subsequently discover; the town was easy to take, but hard to hold.[80] After easily overpowering the lone night watchman, Brown and a portion of his men took control of the railroad bridges and rifle works. Essentially, the town was theirs. Then in the wee hours of October 17, two of the raiding party kidnapped Lewis Washington, great nephew of the first president.[81] This was one of the “prominent citizens” whom Brown referred when he spoke to Frederick Douglas at the quarry- the bartering chip to secure his band’s escape.
In short order Brown had forty hostages under guard at the armory. In the morning, he surprised them with breakfast he ordered from a nearby restaurant.[82] While seemingly going according as planned, Brown’s invasion, nevertheless, soon began to unravel. Initially, there was confusion among the few citizens who were awake as to just what was transpiring. Only after shots were fired did it become apparent the town was under attack, and even then, the shots were at first attributed to Harpers Ferry being a “boisterous town.”[83] Nonetheless, alarm bells soon attracted armed citizens and militia, both much more rapidly than Brown had anticipated.
Sporadic shooting, some of it heavy, went on between the raiders and defending force of townspeople and those from nearby towns who streamed in during the day of October 17. Cut off from escape and needing refuge, Brown moved his men and hostages to the arsenal’s brick engine house. By nightfall, four townspeople and eight raiders were dead, including Brown’s son, Oliver. His other son, Watson, lay on the engine house floor with a bullet in his stomach begging to be put out of his misery. Brown’s calm reply was “No, my son have patience: I think you will get well, [but] if you die, you die in a glorious cause.”[84]
A dispatch had been sent to Washington three hours after the incursion. As it so happened, two officers were in town, Colonel Robert E. Lee, and Lieutenant J. E. B. Stuart who were ordered to take a detachment of ninety marines to Harpers Ferry to assess the situation. Reports had the raiders pegged at more than 100 men.[85]
On October 18, Stuart approached the engine house under a flag of truce. He carried a message from Colonel Lee. In an odd turn of events, Stuart recognized Brown from his deployment out west in 1856, saying “You are Osawatomie Brown.” After some back and forth banter, Stuart continued “This a bad business you are engaged in Captain. The United States troops have arrived, and I am sent to demand your surrender.” When Brown understood Lee’s terms called for unconditional surrender, he declared “he preferred to die fighting.” After some more discussion, Stuart asked “Is that your final answer, Captain?” Brown replied “Yes.” With that, Stuart gave a pre-agreed signal and the marines immediately attacked.[86]
Brown’s Southern invasion was careening out of control. Many of his men were dead or would be soon enough, including his son Watson. An overwhelming military force had arrived to counter his rag-tag group of fighters. And yet, he was calm. J.E.B. Stuart for his part was thoroughly professional, even polite. His addressing Brown as “Captain” could be viewed as rendering a measured amount of respect.
A dozen marines attacked the heavy engine house door, first with sledge hammers, and then with a heavy ladder used as an improvised battering ram. Once breached, Lee’s men quickly subdued the insurgents. A couple surrendered outright, others were shot. Once Brown’s position was overpowered Lieutenant Green, the officer leading the assault, set on him with his sword, striking Brown’s head and stabbing him in the breast. Under normal circumstances, either would have been a fatal wound. But in the excitement, Green had neglected to bring his heavy combat saber. The light, ceremonial version he carried resulted in the relatively mild wounds.[87] And despite Green pummeling him into unconsciousness, Osawatomie Brown, through a twist of fate lived to stand trial where he would seize the attention of the nation. Brown’s time of fighting slavery with the sword was over. He would now battle it with a pen and oratory skills.
Northern papers tended to express regret that a system such as slavery existed at all. However, they were often critical of Brown, owing to the prevailing Northern attitude of not wishing to provoke an armed conflict. The New York Tribune, for example, used phrases such as “deplorable affair,” [and] “work of a madman,” along with “the way to Universal Emancipation lies not through insurrection, civil war and bloodshed, but through peace, discussion, and the quiet diffusion of sentiments of humanity and justice.”[88] In other words more talk, something Brown had decided the time for was long past. Conversely, as David S. Reynolds points out, “[Brown]. . . failed in military action but created a huge effect because of how he talked: to his prisoners during the raid, to his interrogators after it, and to the world during his trial and from prison. He won the battle not with bullets but with words.” [89]
Southern papers on the other hand predictably attacked Brown directly, and the Union by association. Stephen B. Oates provides an example from the Charlestown, South Carolina Mercury, long a fire-breathing, pro-secession newspaper. It gives a glimpse of the more radical of Southern attitudes: “’The day of compromise is passed.’ Brown’s ignominious raid proved even to ‘the most bigoted Unionist that there is no peace for the South in the Union. The South must control her own destinies or perish.’”[90]
This linking of Brown and the Union as working in concert was far-fetched. Many Northerners were still ambivalent on slavery, or at least what should be done about it. The militant attitudes projected in articles such as the one from the Mercury, however, did much to move them to a more aggressive posture. As previously discussed, this was exactly what Brown hoped to achieve when he told Frederick Douglas “It seemed to him something startling was just what the nation needed.”
John Brown and His Primary Mission: Trial and Execution
David S. Reynolds opines “The raid on Harpers Ferry helped dislodge slavery, but not in the way Brown had foreseen.” He goes on to point out it was Brown’s actions and words, both spoken and written in the interim weeks before his execution that set the works in motion that would finish the battle he started in Kansas. In Reynolds view “The raid did not cause the storm. John Brown and the reaction to him did.”[91]
Virginia governor Henry Wise was determined to make an example of Brown. While admiring his “toughness, honor, daring, and humaneness,” qualities Southerners generally ascribed to themselves, Virginia had been badly embarrassed by him. Brown also was an enigma, in that abolitionists were believed to be pacifists who “talked about violence, [but] did not commit it.” [92] Brown, of course, did both. Ultimately, he was brought up on charges of treason against the state of Virginia, inciting slaves to rebellion, and murder.
Seven weeks passed from Brown’s capture to his execution. He was kept at the Charlestown, Virginia jail under guard for his own safety as much as anything in deference to the angry crowds that thronged daily. He was given liberal visitation privileges, with friends and well-wishers allowed to provide for his needs as he recovered from the wounds sustained during the marine’s counterattack.
The trial itself took only a few days and the proceedings received heavy media coverage. Reporters hung on Brown’s every word and fed them to a hungry, anxious public. This included the Associated Press that spread Brown’s pronouncements all over the nation.[93] For good or ill, this exposure was a key to the building Brown’s post-Harpers Ferry reputation. But the media access ultimately backfired for the state, irrespective that they easily obtained a conviction and justice, at least in the Southern mind, was served.
Much of time and in deference to his wounds, Brown lay on a cot, often appearing to be disinterested in what was transpiring around him but nevertheless attentive. According to David S. Reynolds, the crux of the matter was Brown had attacked Harpers Ferry. This was an undisputable fact. That people died as a result was “regrettable, but unforeseen by him.” But his purpose of liberating the slaves was just, his “divine, patriotic duty.”[94] This last point, Brown’s purpose, was what he based his attitude towards the affair on.
Brown was at peace with his actions at Harpers Ferry. And he was willing to pay the penalty for them. Tony Horwitz offers a portion of letter Brown wrote to his family which is reproduced here including spelling errors and Brown’s penchant for underlining important words. “Jesus of Nazareth suffered a most excruciating death on the cross as a fellon. Think also of the prophets & Apostles, & Christians of former days; who went through greater tribulations than you & I. His sacrifice will do vastly more towards advancing the cause I have earnestly endeavored to promote, than all I have done in my life or before.” Horwitz adds a comment Brown made to his brother, one that is crucial to the thesis of this paper: “I am worth inconceivably more to hang than any other purpose.”[95]
Brown received many letters while in custody, often from people trying to encourage him. He answered as many as of them possible. One however, from Mahaila Doyle, the widow of one of the victims at Pottawatomie Creek has no record of his responding. Part of her letter is reproduced here, per Stephen B. Oates.
Altho’ vengeance is not mine, I confess I do feel gratified, to hear that you were stopped in your fiendish career at Harper’s Ferry, with the loss of your two sons, you can now appreciate my distress in Kansas, when you . . . entered my house at midnight and arrested my Husband and two boys, and took them out of the yard and in cold blood shot them dead in my hearing, you cant say you done it to free slaves, as we had none and never expected to own one . . .” Mrs. Doyle added in a post script that a son she had begged Brown to spare was now a man. He wanted to be at Charleston to witness Brown’s execution.[96]
In final weeks of his life Brown indeed accepted, even gloried in his part as martyr. He had not actively sought the role, but understood its importance in the war against slavery. Any comparison he might have made to Jesus Christ as a martyr was meant for illustrative purposes only, for as a believer, Brown aspired to emulate Christ, not to be Him.
The jury deliberated for forty-five minutes on November 1, 1859, arriving at a verdict of guilty on all counts: treason against the state of Virginia, inciting slaves to rebellion, and murder. Sentencing was the next day, with the judge allowing Brown the opportunity to explain why he should not be sentenced. Brown rose and calmly spent the first two-thirds of his address refuting the charges. However, he was not disputing the facts of the case. His defense hinged on answering a higher authority than the State of Virginia. The last third of his speech was the most salient and is reproduced here.
This Court acknowledges, too, as I suppose, the validity of the law of God. I see a book kissed which I suppose to be the Bible, or at least the New Testament, which teaches me that all things whatsoever I would that men should do to me, I should do to them. It teaches me further to remember them that are in bonds, as bound with them. I endeavored to act up to that instruction. I say I am yet too young to understand that God is any respecter of persons I believe that to have inferred as I have done on behalf of His despised poor, is 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 with the blood of my children and the millions in this slave country whose rights are disregarded by wicked, cruel, and unjust enactments, I say let it be done.[97]
Browns execution by hanging received more coverage than his trial. The scaffold was built in a forty-acre rye field that had been recently mowed and was devoid of landmarks. The purpose was to confound his followers who might try turn the site into a shrine. Observers of the proceedings were carefully screened, and consisted primarily of the press and various military units providing security. This included a Virginia militia company that was infiltrated by John Wilkes Booth. Tony Horwitz reports, Booth later wrote “[he] was glad to see the ‘traitor’ hanged. But he also regarded the abolitionist as a ‘brave old man’ whose bold act had changed history.”[98] Booth, of course, changed history as well when he assassinated Abraham Lincoln six weeks later. Brown and Lincoln, who each contributed to the fall of slavery, were martyred within weeks of each other. It is an ironic twist of fate that one’s execution was witnessed by the other’s murderer.
John Brown’s Influencers and Emulators
As we have seen, John Brown was influenced by earlier revolutionaries and their struggles. The nature of human interaction unfortunately, guarantees that struggles for liberty will continue. Central America has been a hot-bed of political strife for decades. The 1950s and 60s produced some major actions and Che Guevara is a name frequently associated with the period. His small-group, jungle-based, style of mountain warfare bears striking resemblance to that of what John Brown hoped to accomplish in the mountains of Virginia. Termed the “foco theory,” Guevara’s tactics are an interesting study. This excerpt from Matt, D. Childs. An Historical Critique of the Emergence and Evolution of Ernesto Che Guevara’s Foco Theory gives insight into the political situation Guevara faced.
The foco theory will be elaborated and analyzed later. In brief, the ‘foco’ refers to a small guerrilla band located in the mountains, while the ‘foco theory’, or ‘foquisimo’, refers to the primacy given to the rural armed struggle centralized in the sierra with emphasis on subjective conditions. The terminology may be confusing since the ‘foco theory’ and the ‘foco’ itself have distinct connotations. Throughout this essay the ‘foco theory’ will refer to the guerrilla warfare literature authored by Guevara, Debray, and Castro. The ‘foco’ will represent the insurrectionary force.[99]
For example, the respected Mexican political scientist Jorge G. Castafeda in his latest book, Utopia Unarmed: The Latin American Left After the Cold War, cites Che’s I960 tenet that ‘where a government has come to power through some form of popular vote, fraudulent or not, and maintains at least an appearance of constitutional legality, the guerrilla outbreak cannot be promoted, since the possibilities of peaceful struggle have not yet been exhausted’.[100]
This notion of a popular vote determining the legitimacy of a government is pertinent to the discussion of John Brown. Slavery in the United States as has been demonstrated, was a legal, constitutionally protected institution that had been undergirded through numerous congressional acts, and a Supreme Court decision. Perhaps that is the reason Brown’s revolution never attained the popular support necessary to come to fruition; Americans still held hope for a peaceful solution at the ballot box, on the legislative front, or through the judiciary. Brown had lost patience with all of these. And yet he achieved his prophetic pronunciation of much blood being shed to cleanse the nation with relatively insignificant amounts spilled by his own hand. That is, compared to the massive carnage Abraham Lincoln unleashed as commander-in-chief during the Civil War.
The Civil War was a watershed event in American history. Over one-hundred years after hostilities ceased, the promise of a free America that Brown and Lincoln died for had not been fully realized. The 1960s saw numerous groups seeking to force change with violence, much as Brown and Lincoln had done. Unsurprisingly, the revolutionaries looked to what had been tried elsewhere. Che Guevara’s actions were fresh in the minds of many. Again, Matt D. Childs offers insight into what some prominent potential American revolutionaries were considering.
Che Guevara’s writings on guerrilla warfare found a receptive audience not only in Latin America, but throughout the world. In the United States, during the I960s, several groups went beyond simply quoting Che Guevara, as Stokely Carmichael often did, and put his theory into practice. The ‘Weathermen’ during their ‘Days of Rage’ in Chicago legitimized their actions through Guevara’s doctrine of dividing United States forces through the creation of ‘one, two, three … many Vietnams’. Further, the Black Panthers operated a guerrilla training centre [sic] in Cuba, and, as leader Eldrige Cleaver commented, seriously considered adopting the foco theory: ‘Trained and equipped forces would be dropped into the mountain areas of North America. The plan here was to have small mobile units that could shift easily in and out of rural areas, living off the land, and tying up thousands of troops in fruitless pursuit.[101]
While not specifically mentioning Brown, the tactics Childs discusses are very much like what he was planning for his invasion of the South. The idea of creating many “Vietnams” follows the tried and true method of a small guerrilla force harassing and eventually wearing down a larger, better equipped enemy. Guevara was successful. Carmichael and Cleaver, however, while attracting extensive contemporary news coverage, never achieved revolution on a large scale. But John Brown arguably eclipsed them all with his contribution in starting the Civil War.
Some Counterfactuals on John Brown at Harpers Ferry
Some discussion is in order regarding Brown’s meeting with Frederick Douglas at the quarry prior to Harpers Ferry. Specifically, Brown’s belief that he could “find means for cutting his way out,” should the raid go awry, as it in fact did. Though he and his men were well-armed with rifles and swords, it should be remembered that the primary weapon of the guerrilla in places such as the Kansas-Missouri border was the revolver. Brown was aware of this from his time there and had been so armed himself. Most partisans were outfitted with a minimum of two of the fast-firing arms, but many carried four, five or six. The infamous Missouri guerrilla chief, William, “Bloody Bill” Anderson, for example, had four revolvers on his belt, and two large ones on his saddle.[102]
The reason for the guerrilla’s choice of the revolver was simple- superior fire power. Most firearms of the antebellum and Civil War era, revolvers included, were of the “cap and ball” type. That is, each time they were emptied, they had to be reloaded by a slow, laborious process. Therefore, having multiple preloaded six-shot pistols close at hand was vital to the guerrilla’s success in prosecuting an attack, or alternately, escaping from one.
Fifteen boxes marked “Hardware” were delivered to the Kennedy farm in the weeks prior to Harpers Ferry. They contained Sharps rifles and Maynard revolvers. But Stephen B. Oates points out the revolvers were useless as Brown had mistakenly purchased percussion caps rather than the proprietary Maynard priming tapes the pistols required.[103] Essentially, they were guns without bullets. This is an oversimplification, but not by much. Consequently, aside from a handful of revolvers the more experienced fighters carried, Brown and most of his men did not take the weapon most likely to facilitate breaking a siege such he found himself in at the engine house, in other words, “cutting his way out.”
We may never know the exact reason for this rather obvious deficiency in the execution of Brown’s plan. But one could speculate that he may have harbored thoughts of martyrdom, even before the raid was set into motion. In other words, he wanted to be caught, even if only subconsciously. Since the aftermath and his imprisonment provided a national platform to air his views on abolition and the nation’s rapidly approaching day of reckoning, the possibility is not so farfetched. His execution indeed made him a martyr to many Americans.
Then again, Brown saw himself as an agent of God charged with destroying slavery, initially this was to be with the sword. As events transpired, however, this proved to be only partly true as we have seen when Brown’s speeches and letters influenced legions of Americans. Believing as he did that his actions were divinely ordered, Brown embraced his national podium. His violence, nevertheless, was a key component, for without it he would have never had nation’s attention in the first place. As a comparison, William Lloyd Garrison preached non-violent resistance to slavery since 1830 and on the eve of the Civil War, the slaves were still in bondage. Brown, in just over six years of prosecuting his war on the institution had brought matters to a head, forcing those on both sides of the issue to take a concrete stand.
Brown, like many Christians, believed that God directs their path and orders events in their lives for His purpose. It is speculation, but what if it was God who caused Brown to buy the wrong primers for the revolvers which he subsequently left at the Kennedy Farm? So armed, it would have been Brown’s men with the advantage in firepower instead of Lee’s. To extend this supposition, what if it was God who caused Lt. Green to bring his dress saber as opposed to the heavier combat version, in which case Brown might have been killed outright? Either development could have resulted in a markedly different outcome.
In the first scenario, Brown could have utilized the revolvers to advantageous effect and indeed cut his way out, with more bloodshed by his hand an inevitable byproduct. But then he would have faced uncertainty in establishing his Maroon camps in the mountains. After all, there is no guarantee the slaves would have rallied to his side after the fact any more than before. In the second scenario, Lt. Green in thrusting and slashing with the heavy sword would have likely killed Brown outright. The outlaw would have been dead, and Virginia would have celebrated. And John Brown would have been a footnote in history, a well-intentioned, but nevertheless insane zealot who died in his folly.
Popular Reactions to John Brown
But neither of these counterfactuals occurred. John Brown was captured, tried and hanged. Even with this apparent serving of justice, the newly elected President Abraham Lincoln was faced with a South that was more paranoid than ever, constantly visualizing John Brown stand-ins and their armies of marauding slaves. This sense of dread was fueled by fire-brand Southern writers. This editorial, “Military Aid to Virginia” of November 28, 1859 carried in the Charleston, South Carolina Mercury captures the mood of the South. Of interest is the exaggerated number of invaders and liberated slaves. As the publication date was six weeks after the failed invasion, the editor obviously took liberty with the facts as the number of raiders and lack of slave participation was well documented.
We are satisfied that every intelligent man in the South has been completely disgusted at the broad and pathetic farce that has been played off before the public about the hanging of that hoary villain, “OLD BROWN.”[sic] From the 500 invaders in possession of Harper’s Ferry and the 1000 negros carried off to the mountains of Pennsylvania — from the further invasions and threats of invasion — the arsons and fears of arson — the marches and counter-marches of the ponies and cessations of ponies — Governor Wise, the energetic, and his troops — down to the final climax of military aid offered by Governor GIST [sic]of South Carolina to the Governor of Virginia, for the purpose of making certain the aforesaid hanging of OLD BROWN, & Co. [sic]. . . [104]
Northerners read about Brown’s raid, trial, and execution in their newspapers for several months. As a result, some were nudged towards doing more than simply talking about the evils of slavery. This in turn pushed President Lincoln to a position he had previously rejected, that is, interfering with slavery where it currently existed. As late as December of 1861, his official policy was illustrated by this quote, “Emancipation would be the equivalent of John Brown raid on a gigantic scale.” David S. Reynolds postulates that Lincoln, by his actions during the war had indeed emulated Brown on a “gigantic scale” when he emancipated the slaves by conquering the South.[105] Brown, of course, was long dead when the Thirteenth Amendment abolished slavery. But it does not stretch credibility that Brown would have been pleased with the sequence of events his death helped to set in motion.
This editorial, “The Fatal Friday” from the Chicago, Illinois Press and Tribune captures the attitudes of many Northerners who had long tolerated slavery in deference to its legal status per the Constitution. When a man like John Brown came on the scene, however, the potential for its destruction through armed struggle increased. The title can be viewed as a metaphor, linking the death of a man, to the eventual death of the institution of slavery itself.
John Brown dies to-day! As Republicans, maintaining as we do, that neither individuals nor parties in the North have a right to interfere with slavery where it exists under the sanction of positive law in the States, we cannot say that he suffers unlawfully. The man’s heroism which is as sublime as that of a martyr, his constancy to his convictions, his suffering, the disgraceful incidents of his trial, the poltroonery of those who will lead him forth to death, have excited throughout all the North strong feeling of sympathy in his behalf, but no where,[sic] within our knowledge, is the opinion entertained that he should not be held answerable, for the legal consequence of his act. . .
We have firm belief that this execution of Brown will hasten the downfall of that accursed system against which he waged war. Throughout all this land, men will not fail to see that there is a conflict between the principles of humanity that have obtained a lodgment in every human heart, and obedience to laws which all have tacitly agreed to support. The shock caused by his death will be more than a nine days [sic] wonder. The emotions excited and the reflections provoked by the tragedy, will go to the very foundations of our political structure; and in all parts of the Union men will ask themselves how long this institution which compels men to put to death their fellows like Brown, who act upon motives and for objects that command the approbation of the world, shall be suffered to disgrace the age and the civilization in which we live. The question will reach hearts that have been callous heretofore; and ere many years it will bring the opposing forces which now distract the country — right on the one side and wrong on the other — enlightenment and barbarism — Christianity and Atheism — Freedom and Slavery — face to face for a final conflict. . . [106]
This editorial was hauntingly accurate. Written as it was months before the onset of national hostilities, it predicted the political forces Brown set in motion. It encompassed virtually every argument that had been previously offered against attacking slavery, while acknowledging the inevitable conflict that would secure its demise. The writer, however, could not have visualized the massive carnage that war on an industrial scale would wreak on the nation. Abraham Lincoln possibly understood this, thus explaining his hesitance in confronting slavery where it currently existed. John Brown, had he lived, might have derived satisfaction that the nation was indeed about to be cleansed with blood.
Other Revolutionaries Reference John Brown
John Brown could not have known it, but Karl Marx had been following his exploits from England. In a letter to Fredrick Engels, Marx mentions Brown in rather glowing terms and compares the significance of his campaign to liberate slaves in America to the agitation of serfs in Russia. He also gives a condensed version of Brown’s activities in an attached note. Aside from some minor points, it is remarkably accurate given that the correspondence was written just over a month after Brown’s execution.
In my opinion, the biggest things that are happening in the: world to-day are on the one hand the movement of the slaves in America, started by the death of John Brown*, and on the other the movement of the serfs in Russia. You will have seen that the Russian aristocracy have thrown themselves directly into agitation for a constitution and that two or three people from the chief families have already found their way to Siberia. At the same time Alexander has spoilt things with the peasants by the latest Manifesto, which declares in so many words that the “communistic principle” must cease with emancipation. Thus the “social” movement has started in the West and in the East. This added to the prospective downbreak [sic] in Central Europe will be grandiose…[107]
Obviously, Marx agreed with Brown’s purpose and the methods he applied in carrying it out. Europe and Central Asia while not having an institution with the title of “slavery,” nevertheless had systems in place that rendered the people subject to them in largely the same condition. Serfdom in Russia was the comparable system in Marx’s letter to Engels.
Over one hundred years after Marx’s letter to Engels, Malcom X weighed in on John Brown’s style of social justice action as compared to other white people that were not of Brown’s mettle. Frustration with pre-Civil Rights Act America of the 1960s, of which Malcom X was a part, had driven some activists to espouse violence, much as Brown had been in antebellum America. Malcom X’s warning to modern-day liberals was like what Brown tried to impress upon their forbearers, the Northern progressives of his day.
There are many white people in this country, especially the younger generation, who realize that the injustice that has been done and is being done to black people cannot go on without the chickens coming home to roost eventually. And those white people, even if they’re not morally motivated, their intelligence forces them to see that something must be done. And many of them would be willing to involve themselves in the type of operation that you were just talking about.
For one, when a white man comes to me and tells me how liberal he is, the first thing I want to know, is he a nonviolent liberal, or the other kind. I don’t go for any nonviolent white liberals. If you are for me and my problems – when I say me, I mean us, our people – then you have to be willing to do as old John Brown did. And if you’re not of the John Brown school of liberals, we’ll get you later – later.[108]
Malcom X did not have the chance to “get to anyone later,” as he was assassinated on February 21, 1965 while delivering an address in Manhattan to the organization of Afro-American Unity. He, too, is thought of as a martyr by many people, another agent of change who paid the ultimate price.
The Conclusion
John Brown has been called many things depending on the individuals point of view: saint- sinner, freedom fighter-common criminal, avenger-murderer. Many believe his actions were the random, reactionary deeds of an insane mind. Others take a different view. Henry David Thoreau likened Brown to Jesus Christ in “A Plea for Captain John Brown” which was delivered in the form of a lecture to the citizens of Concorde, Massachusetts on the evening of October 30, 1859. Thoreau, who was not a Christian, nevertheless recognized Brown’s emulation of Christ through action. He said in part
A man such as the sun may not rise upon again in this benighted land. To whose making went the costliest material, the finest adamant; sent to be the redeemer of those in captivity; and the only use to which you can put him is to hang him at the end of a rope! You who pretend to care for Christ crucified, consider what you are about to do to him who offered himself to be the savior of four millions of men. [109]
One can speculate as to whether Thoreau directed his remarks explicitly at his New England audience, or was speaking to Southerners who were about to literally hang Brown at the end of a rope. Or was he talking to the nation at large? When Brown spoke of the crimes of a guilty nation, he of course meant slave holders directly, but also their enablers in the North. Perhaps A Plea for Captain John Brown was applicable to all Americans as well.
John Brown is memorialized to this day in eastern Kansas, with numerous statues, roads, and battle sites named in his honor. The town of Osawatomie, for example, maintains a sixteen-acer park at the site of the Battle of Osawatomie. It encompasses the John Brown State Historic Site, including the Adair Cabin which served as Brown’s headquarters. The statehouse in Topeka features John Steuart Curry’s eleven by thirty-one-foot mural, Tragic Prelude. It depicts a bearded John Brown with outstretched arms holding a Sharps rifle in one hand, and a Bible in the other. He is surrounded by other antebellum-era symbolism, recalling the storm that was about to be unleashed on Kansas and the entire nation in no small part due to his actions.
John Brown was also memorialized in song. Celebrating his death in verse proved to be a morale booster, at least on the Union side. As Northern troops filed off to battle, they often sang this one-stanza marching song, “John Brown’s Body.”
John Brown’s body lies a moldering in the grave . . .
He’s gone to be a soldier in the army of the Lord,
His soul is marching on!
Julia Ward Howe, poet and wife of Secret Six conspirator Samuel Howe, regarded Brown as a “holy and glorious” martyr. After meeting him several years earlier, she told her husband that they should sell their carriage, and even their entire estate to support the work in Kansas. Upon hearing John Brown’s Body, she was moved to modify the lyrics to what would become “The Battle Hymn of the Republic.”
Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord:
He is tramping out the vintage where the grapes of wrath are stored;
He hath loosed the fateful lightning of His terrible swift sword:
His truth is marching on.
David S. Reynolds reports the Union did not initially embrace the line: As he died to make men holy, let us die to make men free.[110] That connection would come later. Jesus Christ had indeed died a martyr’s death to make men holy. John Brown laid down his life to make four million of his brothers and sisters free. His determination stemmed from a deep personal faith in God. This trust is what ultimately led him to see martyrdom on the gallows, not as the end of his crusade, but the beginning of the ultimate destruction slavery.
Bibliography
Primary Sources:
Brigham E. “Letter to John Brown” March 9, 1857.
http://www.kansasmemory.org/item/4415/text
Curry, John Stewart. Mural, Kansas State House, Topeka. “Tragic Prelude.”
Dred Scot v. Stanford. Primary Documents in American History. Library of Congress.
https://www.loc.gov/rr/program/bib/ourdocs/DredScott.html
Kansas-Nebraska Act. Primary Documents in American History. Library of Congress.
https://www.loc.gov/rr/program/bib/ourdocs/kansas.html
Karl Marx to Frederick Engels. “Letter.” Written: [London], 11 January, 1860 Published: Gesamtausgabe, International Publishers, 1942 Transcribed: Sally Ryan HTML Markup: Sally Ryan
file:///C:/Users/fktre/OneDrive/Documents/thesis%20class%202017/Marx_Engels_Corre spondence.pdf
Malcom X. “Malcom X on John Brown” A quote from 1965. The Marxist Leninist: A Revolutionary Communist Web Site. Retrieved May 2, 2017. https://marxistleninist.wordpress.com/2009/10/16/malcolm-x-on-john-brown/
Missouri Compromise of 1820.Primary Documents in American History. https://www.loc.gov/rr/program/bib/ourdocs/Missouri.html
The People’s Vote. North West Ordinance (1787). https://www.ourdocuments.gov/doc.php?flash=true&doc=8
Thoreau Henry, David. The Avalon Project: Documents in Law, History and Diplomacy. “A Plea for Captain John Brown.” Boston: Yale Law School. Retrieved, May 4, 2017. http://avalon.law.yale.edu/19th_century/thoreau_001.asp
Primary Source Newspapers:
Mercury Charleston, South Carolina
New York Daily Tribune
Press and Tribune, Chicago..
Rantoul Citizen, Rantoul, Kansas.
Secondary Sources:
Castel, Albert. “A Frontier State at War: Kansas 1861-1865.” Lawrence, Kansas: Kansas Heritage Press, 1958.
Childs, Matt D. “An Historical Critique of the Emergence and Evolution of Ernesto Che Guevara’s Foco Theory.” Cambridge University Press Journal of Latin American Studies, Vol. 27, No. 3 Oct., 1995.
Du Bois, W. E. Burghardt. “John Brown.” New York: International Publishers, 1909-1996.
Etcheson, Nicole. “Bleeding Kansas: Contested Liberty in the Civil War Era.” Lawrence, Kansas: University of Kansas Press, 2004.
Gilmore, Donald L. “Civil War on the Missouri-Kansas Border.” Gretna, Louisiana: Pelican Publishing Company, 2005.
Goodrich, Thomas. “Bloody Dawn: The Story of the Lawrence Massacre.” Kent, Ohio and London England: The Kent State University Press, 1991.
Goodrich, Thomas. “Guerilla Warfare on the Western Border, 1861-1865: Black Flag.” Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1999.
Horwitz, Tony. “Midnight Rising: John Brown and the Raid That Sparked the Civil War.” New York: Henry Holt and Company, 2011.
Oates, Stephen B. “To Purge This Land With Blood: A Biography of John Brown.” Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1984.
Reynolds, David S. “John Brown Abolitionist: The Man Who Killed Slavery, Sparked the Civil War, and Seeded Civil Rights.” New York: Vintage Books, 2005.
Thoreau Henry, David. “Walden and Civil Disobedience.” New York: Barnes and Noble, 2003/1849.
Workers Vanguard. “Birth of the First Black Republic: 1791-1804 Toussaint Louverture and the Haitian Revolution.” Retrieved May 1, 2017. http://www.internationalist.org/toussaintlouverturehaitianrevolution1.html
[1] Stephen B. Oates, To Purge This Land with Blood: A Biography of John Brown. (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1984), 351.
[2] David Brian, Roberson. The Original Compromise: What the Constitution’s Framers Were Really Thinking. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013), 179-180.
[3] Ibid.,189.
[4] U.S. Census Bureau.
[5] The People’s Vote. North West Ordinance (1787).
[6] History of Congress. Admission of Maine and Missouri. 423.
[7] A Century of Lawmaking. 31st Congress, 1st Session.Ch. 60, 1850. 452.
[8] Ibid., 462.
[9] Purdue University Northwest. James S. Pula lectures, Spring, 2017.
[10] Ibid., Spring, 2017.
[11] Reynolds, 115.
[12] New International Version, Revelation 3:15-16: “15I know your deeds, that you are neither cold nor hot, I wish that you were either one or the other.16 So because you are lukewarm- neither cold nor hot- I am about to spit you out of my mouth.” The implication is there is a time for choosing. Brown wanted Northerners to declare whether for or against slavery. A position in the middle was not acceptable to him. His actions were geared to achieve this end.
[13] Oates, 53.
[14] Ibid, 43.
[15] James 2:2-4, New International Version.
[16] Oates, 197.
[17] The term “Slave Power” as used in this paper, refers to the coalition of slave owners, Southern politicians and Northerners who enabled the practice of slavery in the 1840s and 1850s. It is generally credited to Vice President Henry Wilson, who wrote The History of the Rise and Fall of Slave Power in America, which was published in three volumes circa 1872-77. Historians such as Stephen B. Oates who is frequently sourced in this paper, used the term in their work.
[18] Oates, 12.
[19] Reynolds, 169.
[20] Ibid, 42.
[21] Pula, Spring, 2017.
[22] W. E. B. Du Bois, John Brown (New York: International Publishers, 1909-1996), 103.
[23] Oates, 84-85
[24] Nicole Etcheson, Bleeding Kansas: Contested Liberty in the Civil War Era Lawrence, (Kansas: University of Kansas Press, 2004), 135.
[25] Du Bois, 94.
[26] Etcheson, 153.
[27] Ibid, 121.
[28] Donald L. Gilmore Civil War on the Missouri-Kansas Border, (Gretna, Louisiana: Pelican Publishing Company, 2005) 55.
[29] Reynolds, 117.
[30] Ibid., 142.
[31] Ibid., 143.
[32] DuBois,104.
[33] Oates, 65.
[34] Ibid., 66.
[35] Reynolds, 131.
[36] Ibid., 131-132.
[37] Etcheson, .
[38] Oates, 100.
[39] Ibid, 115.
[40] Reynolds, 276-279.
[41] Etcheson, 156.
[42] Oates, 115.
[43] Rantoul Citizen, Rantoul, Kansas. May 21, 1896, Who were the Jayhawkers?
[44] Oates, 97-98.
[45] Ibid, 146.
[46] W. E. B. Du Bois, John Brown (New York: International Publishers, 1909-1996), 115.
[47] Thomas Goodrich, Guerilla Warfare on the Western Border, 1861-1865: Black Flag (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1999), 5.
[48] Oates, 129.
[49] Ibid., 257.
[50] Etcheson, 111.
[51] Gilmore, 82.
[52] Ibid., 87.
[53] Oates, 61.
[54] Ibid., 173.
[55] Richard J. Ellis. The Dark Side of the Left: Illiberal Egalitarianism in America. (Lawrence, Kansas: University Press of Kansas, 1998) 37.
[56] Ibid., 38.
[57] Reynolds, 224.
[58] Henry David Thoreau, Civil Disobedience, 280.
[59] Ibid., 265.
[60] Reynolds, 231.
[61] Ibid, 230.
[62] Reynolds, David S. “John Brown Abolitionist: The Man Who Killed Slavery, Sparked the Civil War, and Seeded Civil Rights” 223.
[63] Library of Congress, The Dred Scott Decision: Opinion of Chief Justice Taney, 22.
[64] Oates, 198.
[65] John Brown op-ed New York Tribune, March 4, 1857.
[66] E. Brigham, letter to John Brown, March 9th, 1857.
[67] Oates, 9.
[68] Ibid., 3.
[69] Oates, 46.
[70] Reynolds, 106-107.
[71] Oates, 222.
[72] Ibid., 224.
[73] Ibid., 53
[74] Oates, 199.
[75] Reynolds, 107.
[76] The following two-part article was published in Workers Vanguard, Nos. 446 and 447, 12 and 26 February 1988. Birth of the First Black Republic: 1791-1804 Toussaint Louverture and the Haitian Revolution
[77] Tony, Horwitz, Midnight Rising: John Brown and the Raid That Sparked the Civil War. (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 2011) 115-116.
[78] Ibid., 116.
[79] The following two-part article was published in Workers Vanguard, Nos. 446 and 447, 12 and 26 February 1988. Birth of the First Black Republic: 1791-1804 Toussaint Louverture and the Haitian Revolution
[80] Reynolds, 309. “The town Brown had chosen to attack, Harpers Ferry, was a crucial location during the war. It changed hands thirteen times, and was the scene of some of the war’s greatest battles . . .”
[81] Horwitz, 133.
[82] Ibid., 141.
[83] Ibid.,138.
[84] Ibid.,171.
[85] Ibid.,173.
[86] Ibid.,177.
[87] Ibid.,180.
[88] Horwitz, 208.
[89] Reynolds, 309.
[90] Oates, 320.
[91] Reynolds, 309.
[92] Ibid., 333.
[93] Ibid., 353.
[94] Ibid., 350.
[95] Horwitz, 217.
[96] Oates, 344-345.
[97] Ibid., 213.
[98] Horwitz, 254.
[99] Matt D. Childs. An Historical Critique of the Emergence and Evolution of Ernesto Che Guevara’s Foco Theory. (Cambridge University Press Journal of Latin American Studies, Vol. 27, No. 3 Oct., 1995), 3.
[100] Ibid., 4.
[101] Ibid., 7.
[102] Thomas Goodrich. Guerilla Warfare on the Western Border, 1861-1865: Black Flag. (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1999), 152.
[103] Oates, 276.
[104] Session Era Editorials Project. Military Aid to Virginia.( Charleston, South Carolina Mercury, November 28, 1859. [Democratic])
[105] Reynolds, 471.
[106] Session Era Editorials Project. The Fatal Friday. (Chicago, Illinois Press and Tribune [Republican]) December 2, 1859.
[107] Correspondence from Karl Marx to Fredrick Engels regarding John Brown. The following note was attached: *January 10, 1860. BROWN, JOHN (1800-59). American revolutionary, opponent of slavery. Leader of partisan troops in the partisan war against the slave owners in Kansas, 1854-55. He tried to form an army of runaway slaves. On October 16, 1859, he took the arsenal at Harper’s Ferry by a daring attack and wanted to arm the slaves in the neighbourhood [sic]. On October 18, 1859, government troops recaptured the arsenal from him. He was executed on December 2, 1859.
[108] Malcom X. Malcom X on John Brown. A quote from 1965.
[109] Henry David Thoreau. A Plea for Captain John Brown. Delivered in the form of a lecture on October 30, 1859.
[110] Reynolds, 277.
