# John Brown (Chamberlin)/Chapter 3

Frederick Douglass says that Brown unfolded to him in 1847 a plan for insurrectionary work among the negroes, with headquarters in the Virginia mountains. This is another indication, one of many, that he entertained the insurrectionary purpose. But his plans remained in abeyance. His later and active interest in the anti-slavery cause seems to have flashed up into a sudden flame about the year 1850. From that time forward his letters abound with references to the subject; his memorandum book contains entries associated with his work in that field, and the motive becomes clearly apparent in his acts. Did Brown's discovery of his own unfitness to be a man of business help him to see more clearly his way toward devoting the remainder of his life to the freeing of the blacks? Did he conceive an ambition to be a great liberator, and ​acquire world-wide fame as the Moses of a whole people? I suppose that an inquiry whether Brown was ever animated by a personal ambition for power or fame would be entirely fair, especially since, as ambitions go, a purpose to attain power or fame in this way would surely be a worthy one.
For that matter the question would seem to be easily answered. A man who is at once meditative, intense, and fond of reading as Brown was, and yet uneducated in the liberal sense, is made by his books. What books did Brown read! Dana found that he had many in his Adirondack cabin. His daughter has written: "My dear father's favorite books of a historical character were Rollin's Ancient History, Josephus, Plutarch's Lives, 'Napoleon and his Marshals,' and the Life of Oliver Cromwell. Of religious books, Baxter's 'Saint's Rest' (in speaking of which at one time he said he could not see how ​any person could read it through carefully without becoming a Christian), the 'Pilgrim's Progress,' and Henry 'On Meekness.' But above all others the Bible was his favorite volume, and he had such a perfect knowledge of it that when any one was reading it he would correct the least mistake." The daughter appends a list of his favorite passages in the Bible. Nearly all of them refer to the poor and to "them that are in bonds." He was fond of the Apocrypha, and doubtless had pleasure in the warlike deeds therein reported. His daughter records that one of his favorite hymns was "With songs and honors sounding loud," and another, "Blow ye the trumpet." But there is one point, one item of his Scriptural reading, which affords us a special insight. One of his companions at Harper's Ferry, John E. Cook, who had lived closely with him for a long time, has left the statement that "the Bible story of Gideon had a ​great influence on Brown." It is manifest that it had. If we read this fine story in the book of Judges in the light of Brown's long brooding over the Scriptures, and also in the light of his subsequent career and acts, noting as we go his organization of the League of Gileadites among the negroes, we find that we can understand Brown much better than we could without this knowledge. The story fired his intense spirit and prompted his actions again and again. He belonged to the epoch of Gideon rather than to the nineteenth century.
That he aspired to do for the blacks what Gideon did for the children of Israel does not prove that he was actuated by personal ambition. It indicates the stirring of a sentiment in him which was something like personal ambition; yet, if he really had a dream of earthly fame and greatness, he suppressed it, and acted as if he had no such dream. In a ​great measure he separated himself from men, and carried on his work alone. In spite of his magnificent moral strength and the fact that all the men who came close to him, after the anti-slavery movement fully fired him, at once recognized his power, he never had above twenty-two men attached to his cause and person! Here was the sifting process of Gideon carried farther than Gideon carried it. The thing which we ordinarily call ambition should, first of all, have sent him on his revolutionary way earlier; and after that it should have put into him at least something of the craft which wins crowds.
In Springfield, Brown either fell in with, or else assembled, a circle of ciolored men, part of them refugees from slavery, and others presumably the bright Northern mulattoes who were eager to do what they could for the freedom of their brothers in the South, though apparently they could not bring ​themselves to anything really revolutionary. One of these men, a refugee from Maryland; named Thomas Thomas, worked for Brown as porter in his wool warehouse. Thomas declares that at the very outset of his employment in the warehouse Brown communicated to him the general features of a scheme to liberate the slaves by force, and asked him to join the enterprise. This was early in 1846. Much doubt has been cast upon the accuracy of Thomas's recollection. But Brown was sometimes unfathomable, and he may have seen something in this negro porter which led him to reveal more of his inner thoughts to him than he had ever revealed to any one else.
I have already mentioned the scheme of Gerrit Smith to give a hundred thousand acres of Adirondack land to negro people who should settle upon and cultivate small farms on the tract. It was a foolish idea; for latitude and alti​tude made these lands the most arctic spot, of an equal area, within the proper limits of the United States. Neither maize nor wheat will thrive there. The lands are rough and sterile. No place more unfit for the colonization of the soft and unenterprising blacks could have been found. But Smith's scheme instantly attracted Brown's sympathy. Loving these hills so much, they also drew him to them of their own force. The shepherd of other days, homesick for the hills and the soil, saw in Smith's scheme a chance to do good to the negroes, while he himself returned to the life he loved best. He visited Mr. Smith, proposed to take up some of the land for himself and his children, and to guide and superintend the work of the black colony. Smith promptly accepted his services; and in 1848 and 1849, without as yet giving up his business at Springfield, Brown moved his family into a rude cabin in those great North ​Woods, at a place called—whether or not as the result of Brown's partiality for Napoleon I do not know—North Elba. Here Brown's wife and youngest children continued to live until 1864. He himself spent most of his time at Springfield or elsewhere, with occasional visits to the North Elba farm. The life there was pioneering of a sort only less stern than that which Brown and his sons entered upon subsequently in Kansas. He found the work of coaching negroes in Northern agriculture quite discouraging, and apparently had to take several of these people into his own cabin. Charles A. Dana, on a visit there, found several negroes at Brown's table, to whom he was introduced in due form: "Mr. Dana, Mr. Jefferson; Mr. Jefferson, Mr. Dana," and so on. There was never any hypocrisy in Brown, in this regard or any other: the negro at his board was the equal of any guest.
All this and more Brown could do for ​the negro. But up to this time we do not see him preparing or threatening an armed conflict. And the very first plain reference in his correspondence to the great movement which had for years engrossed many great minds occurs in a letter from Springfield, Massachusetts, to his wife at North Elba, dated Nov. 28, 1850. It is important as marking a turning-point in Brown's life, and it is also so curiously like him in its diction and matter that it is worth quoting:—
"Dear Wife,—. . . Since leaving home I have thought that, under all the circumstances of doubt attending the time of our removal, and the possibility that we may not remove at all, I had perhaps encouraged the boys to feed out the potatoes too freely. . . . I want to have them very careful to have no hay or straw wasted, but I would have them use enough straw in bedding the cattle to keep them from lying in the mire. I heard from Ohio a few days since; ​all were then well. It now seems that the Fugitive Slave Law was to be the means of making more abolitionists than all the lectures that we have had for years. It really looks as if God had his hand on this wickedness also. I of course keep encouraging my colored friends to 'trust in God and keep their powder dry.' I did so to-day, at Thanksgiving meeting, publicly. . . . While here, and at almost all places where I stop, I am treated with all kindness and attention; but it does not make home. I feel lonely and restless, no matter how neat and comfortable my room and bed, nor how richly loaded may be the table; they have few charms for me, away from home. I can look back to our log cabin at the centre of Richfield, with supper of porridge and Johnny-cake, as a place of far more interest to me than the Massasoit of Springfield."
This leads me to the reflection that ​Brown, in the matter of abstemiousness, was somewhat idealized by Emerson and Thoreau, who met him when he was at the stage of his highest exaltation in the anti-slavery work and fresh from the fields and camps of Kansas. All they said of him was true, I have no doubt; yet it was hardly true of his whole life. Brown always lived very plainly; and his house and table at Springfield, at the time when money was most plentiful with him, were extremely simple. Yet he was normally fond of good viands. His household diet, though so simple, consisted largely of meat; and the praise that he sent home of the English mutton, when he was abroad, could only have come from a man who knew good mutton. Though absolutely temperate, he was not a total abstainer, and kept wine in his house for cases of illness. Redpath, who was not careful, says Brown "never drank spirits." Sanborn, who is careful, says he "seldom drank ​spirits." He had a way, when travelling on business, of putting up at the best hotels. He seems to have been, in fact, a sane, sound, sensible man in most of these material particulars, and not at all inclined to eccentric notions. The hasty way in which he has been idealized, as if his fame were likely to be increased by representing him as subjecting himself to petty and unnecessary martyrdoms, is amusingly illustrated by the frequent statement that he was so habitually abstemious and unaccustomed to luxuries that he refused to eat butter on his bread. The fact was that he never liked butter and cheese, and could not eat them. Sanborn relates that as a boy, ten years old, he was once sent on an errand to a place where a lady gave him a piece of bread and butter. He dared not tell her that he could not eat butter; but "as soon as he was out of the house he ran as fast as he could for a long time, and then threw the bread and butter out of sight."
​Brown had now (1850) ten children, seven of whom were sons. He had lost, to his deep and evident sorrow, seven children, all of whom had died in infancy or early childhood. Two more were yet to be born. His older sons he had educated simply; the eldest, John Jr., with some care at good schools. His faithful wife taught the little ones at the cabin at North Elba. Brown for a time went out to Ohio and engaged in farming, where he could get more money for his labor than in the Adirondack hills.
But before he left Springfield, in 1851, he wrote a letter of instruction to the "branch of the United States League of Gileadite," there,—a band of his colored fellow-conspirators against slavery,—which proves definitely enough that he had taken up with a thoroughly revolutionary doctrine. Mason's Fugitive Slave Act had been passed, and the hunting down of negro fugitives had begun in Massachusetts. Brown was now ​fully aroused. He told these negroes, in a manuscript document still extant, that they were fully justified in reisisting any law which tried to send them back into slavery. His pronunciamento is a strange mixture of the principles of the Carbonari and Ravachol and the language of the Hebrew Scriptures. The reference to Mount Oilead and the suggestion for the name of the society are from his own great Bible story of Oideon:—
"Should one of your number be arrested, you must collect together as quickly as possible so as to outnumber your adversaries who are taking an active part against you. Let no able-bodied man appear on the ground unequipped or with his weapons exposed to view. . . . Your plans must be known only to yourself, and with the understanding that all traitors must die whereever caught and proven to be guilty. 'Whosoever is fearful or afraid, let ​him return and part early from Mount Gilead' (Judges vii. 3: Deuteronomy xx. 8). . . . Do not delay one moment after you are ready: you will lose all your resolution if you do. Let the first blow he the signal for all to engage, and, when engaged, do not do your work by halves, but make clean work with your enemies. . . . By going about your business quietly, you will get the job disposed of before the number that an uproar would bring together can collect. . . . You may make a tumult in the court-room where a trial is going on by burning gunpowder freely in paper packages, if you cannot think of any better way to create a momentary alarm, and might possibly give one or more of your enemies a hoist."
Brown seems to have hoped to unite the negroes all over the country, now or afterward, in this revolutionary movement; but he failed. There is no sign that they ever anywhere followed his words of advice. Yet he was not igno​rant of the weaknesses of the African race. He published about this time, in an abolitionist paper called the Ram's Horn, a clever satire on the negro character, entitled "Sambo's Mistakes." The manuscript is still preserved, in Brown's undoubted handwriting. It was evidently intended for an admonition. Or did it merely express a great misgiving with regard to the negro race which had entered Brown's intuitively working mind? It represents Sambo as shallow, vain, "fond of joining societies," bound to spend his money and remain poor, disputatious about things of no moment, tenacious of small points of difference, fond of gewgaws, self-indulgent, obsequious to the whites, and more inclined to fight over religious tenets than for his own liberty.
"Sambo's Mistakes" is said to be Brown's longest literary composition. It is surely a little masterpiece in its way. It has a certain prophetic value, ​too: the abolitionists of that day were so sure that the negroes needed only to be made free to be fitted for freedom! At this late day, we who are the children of the ardent abolitionists of that earlier period can only sigh when we read such a glorious pæan as Emerson's address, Aug. 1, 1844, at the first anniversary of the emancipation of the negroes of the British West Indies. He joyfully took it for granted that the blacks of Jamaica and Barbados had already successfully taken up the burden of civilization with perfect industry and perfect quietness, and that "all disqualifications and distinctions of color had ceased"; and, in following the notion of Swedenborg as to the spiritual superiority of the African, he said: "I esteem the occasion of this jubilee to be the proud discovery that the black race can contend with the white; that, in the great anthem which we call history, a piece of many parts ​and vast compass, after playing a long time a very low and subdued accompaniment, they perceive the time arrived when they can strike in with effect and take a master's part in the music. The civility of the world has reached that pitch that their more than moral genius is becoming indispensable, and the quality of this race is to be honored for itself."
Alas! is there a keener sorrow than for the children of the men who held this hope, and lived and died upon it, to have to ask themselves, Has the negro question been changed in any essential respect by emancipation and enfranchisement? Have those great things done any good to a people who could not do the good for themselves?
The misgiving expressed by Brown himself in this clever little essay on "Sambo's Mistakes" is, to me, a proof of his clear intuition. The fact that he utterly disregarded the suspicion in his ​life and work is a proof that his idealism was perfect. He marched straight on with his simple purpose, arguing no more, but living out his frank acceptance of his own doctrine. Events soon made a veritable scourge, a man of weapons and bloodshed, out of this peaceable shepherd, this thrifty buyer and expert sorter of fleeces.
His sons John, Jason, Owen, Frederick, and Salmon went to Kansas, as settlers in good faith, in 1854 and 1855. Their emigration was hard, painful, full of privations. Jason's boy, four years old, died on the way. They took with them almost no weapons, but as many tools, fruit-trees, and grape-vines as they could carry. There seems to have been in the removal no prompting of their father nor any distinctly warlike intention on their own part. Brown had written to his son John, when the boys were talking of going: "If you or any of my family are disposed to go to ​Kansas or Nebraska with a view to help defeat Satan and his legions in that direction, I have not a word to say; but I feel committed to operate in another part of the field." Just what he meant by this last reference can only be guessed. Sanborn believes that he was already thinking of Virginia; and Sanborn knew the man well at that time, and has gone more deeply into his life than any other writer. The sons "located" not far from a place called Osawatomie, and lived first in tents, then in rude huts. Fever and hunger overtook them. They were near the border of Missouri, and at the very seat of the struggle between the Pro-slavery and Free State influences.
The issue there was simply this. Kansas had lately been opened to settlement. Although slavery within the territory had, as was supposed, been forever prohibited by the Missouri Compromise of 1820, the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854 ​established what was known as "Squatter Sovereignty"; that is, it empowered the settlers to determine by majority vote whether the Territory should be slave or free. So the opposing forces in the great controversy, practically the North against the South, set themselves to determine the future of Kansas by settling the Territory with their own people and followers. Northerners and Southerners as they came in—"Free State" the ones, "Pro-slavery" the others—confronted each other with hostility.
It was really war from the start. In this war the Brown brothers soon found themselves involved; and John, Jr., wrote back to his father to procure and send to them arms fit to fight with. They also soon asked him to come and help them. He answered that he might like to go; but his agricultural affairs were in such a state that he could not do so unless he could sell some cattle and get pay for some others ​that he had sold. On the contrary, he removed from Ohio back to North Mba. On his way he attended an anti-slavery convention at Syracuse, New York, June 28, 1855. Here, and at this date, his war with force and arms really began; for he raised some money from Glerrit Smith and others with which to arm "his sons and other friends in Kansas." He spent some of the money for rifles, and sent them on.
Brown himself went to Kansas in September, 1855, travelling in a wagon beyond the Mississippi. He wrote picturesque accounts of the journey to his wife and children at North Elba. I note this natural touch in one letter by the way: "We fare very well on crackers, herring, boiled eggs, prairie chicken, tea, and sometimes a little milk. Have three chickens now cooking for our breakfast We shoot enough of them on the wing as we go along to supply us with fresh meat. Oliver succeeds in bringing them ​down quite as well as any of us." This boy Oliver, one of his second wife's children, was then sixteen years old, and no doubt was to the mother as the apple of her eye; and the reference is a pretty one. Oliver was killed fighting at Harper's Ferry four years later. Brown liked this sort of life and travel as well as any Indian or gypsy that ever lived. Farther on in the same letter he said, "With all the comforts we have along our journey, I think, could I hope in any other way to answer the end of my being, I would be quite content to be at North Elba." And from now on we shall not miss references to his liberating mission.