Part 2

Mary Brown was the best wife a John Brown could have found. She had great physical ruggedness, and she bore for her husband thirteen children, seven of whom died in childhood, and two of whom were killed in early manhood at Harper’s Ferry. She did more than her full share of the arduous labor of a large pioneer household, and she endured hardships like a Spartan mother. She was strong; and she had a noble and unflinching character. It was only a heroic woman such as this who could have been the wife of a hero; who could have given husband and sons cheerfully to the cause of abolition, and been so silent and brave even after their death.

John Brown worked hard; he had no vices, he was honest and painstaking, but somehow success in business always eluded him. This was another of the griefs of his life. He blamed himself for his failures, but it was really not his fault. It requires a real worship of money to make one a business success, and John Brown never took money as seriously as it demands of its lovers. After ten years in Pennsylvania, of much hard work with little results, he moved to Franklin Mills, in Ohio, where he entered the tanning business with Zenas Kent, a well-to-do business man of that town. Here he also became involved in a land development scheme that was ruined by a large corporation’s maneuvers. He was so deeply involved in this and other ventures that in the bad times of 1837 he failed. In 1842 he was again compelled to go through bankruptcy proceedings.

In after years John Brown explained these failures to his oldest son as the result of the false doctrine of doing business on credit.

“Instead of being thoroughly imbued with the doctrine of pay as you go,” he wrote, “I started out in life with the idea that nothing could be done without capital, and that a poor man must use his credit and borrow; and this pernicious doctrine has been the rock on which I, as well as many others, have split. The practical effect of this false doctrine has been to keep me like a toad under a harrow most of my business life. Running into debt includes so much evil that I hope all my children will shun it as they would a pestilence.”

John Brown never gave up in despair anything he had attempted; his business failures bruised him sorely, but he arose each time like a rugged wrestler and began a new endeavor. In 1839, at one of his darkest periods, he began a sheep growing and wool marketing venture in which he engaged for many years, going into partnership with Simon Perkins, a wealthy merchant of Akron, Ohio. This partnership was the longest and final one of Brown’s business career.

So that is how one must think of Brown, too; not only as the consecrated, almost inhuman battler and martyr, but also as the sane, plodding, patient farmer, tanner, surveyor, real estate speculator, and practical shepherd. He was a tall, spare, silent man, terribly pious, terribly honest, a good neighbor and community leader, and the father of a large family of sons and daughters--a patriarch out of the Bible, tending his flocks and gathering about him a tribe of young and stalwart sons.

He was a typical pioneer American of those rough days in the settling of the middle west. He had no time for frivolity, though there was a grim humor in the man; he brought his children up strictly, yet with a justice that made them all love, revere and respect him until the end; and he had his share of those private sorrows that crush so many men; his first beloved wife had died, with an infant son; he had failed in business; and he had lost by death no less than nine children, three of whom perished in one month in those hard surroundings, and one of whom, a little daughter, was accidently scalded to death by an elder sister. These deaths hurt John Brown cruelly, for though stern and stoic, he was a fiercely tender father; all his affections were fierce, though inexpressible and deep, as a lion’s.

“I seem to be struck almost dumb by the dreadful news,” he wrote his family, when he heard of this accident. “One more dear little feeble child I am to meet no more till the dead, small and great, shall stand before God. I trust that none of you will feel disposed to cast an unreasonable blame on my dear Ruth on account of the dreadful trial we are called to suffer. This is a bitter cup indeed; but blessed be God; a brighter day shall dawn; and let us not sorrow as they who have no hope.”

The Browns had made at least ten moves in the years from 1830 to 1845, and John Brown had engaged in no less than seven different occupations. But always, under the business man and farmer, there had been the solemn philosopher brooding on God and the mystery and terror of life; and always, under the sober father and citizen, there had been planning and brooding and suffering keenly the tender humanitarian, the Christ-like martyr, the relentless fighter who would finally pay with his life to strike a blow at Slavery, “that sum of all villainies.”

In this patriarchal farmer of the middle west, Freedom was forging and sharpening a terrible weapon that was some day to be turned against Tyranny. Quietly, in peaceful surroundings the work was being done; no one knew the fire in this man, least of all himself.

THE GROWTH OF AN ABOLITIONIST

For though John Brown had always been an abolitionist, though he had learned from his father, and from his own experiences to hate slavery and its manifold brutalities, it was not until his thirty-fifth year that John Brown showed any more active hatred of it than did hundreds of Ohio farmers around him. Like them, he aided when he could, in the work of the Underground Railroad. Thousands of free Negroes and white abolitionists were engaged in this work of passing fugitive slaves from the South up over the Canadian line, where they were being restored to manhood under the flag of monarchism.

But John Brown, in 1834, began thinking that education of the Negroes might be an important way toward the solution of their problems. He formed plans of starting a school for them. He and his family at this time, though his wool-business was going comfortably, lived in extreme frugality, for they had agreed to save all they could toward the establishment of some such school. For years John Brown dreamed of such ventures as these; and he read all the journals of the small abolitionist groups, and met many of the leaders. He always spoke against slavery in churches or political meetings where he happened to be; and he made friends with many Negroes, and showed a deep interest in all their problems. But not yet had he formed any of those belligerent plans that later were his whole life. He still believed that abolition might be effected by education and peaceful agitation.

Events were piling up too rapidly against such a view, however. The South grew more aggressive every day. The slave system seemed to carry everything before it. It had broken the agreement of 1820 by extending slavery above the Mason and Dixon line into Missouri. It had forced the war against Mexico, and had carved out huge new tracts for slavery. It dominated the government of the United States. All of the Presidents were pro-slavery, or they could not hope for office. Congress was pro-slavery, and the Senate, too.

And it was not only in the South that the life of an abolitionist was worth little more than a pinch of snuff. The slavery venom had crept into the North, for powerful economic reasons. The Northern merchants and manufacturers made their profits by selling machinery, and the goods made by machinery, to the agricultural, cotton-raising South. And the South threatened to secede from the union, or at the least, to force a low tariff on imports, and buy its goods in Europe, if the abolitionists were not curbed.

There were not many of these abolitionists; but they were outspoken, intense, and made themselves heard at all costs. They paid a heavy price for this courage. They were persecuted, tarred and feathered, and in many cases lynched by the Northern mobs.

Then the Southern slave system seemed to have reached a triumphant climax in two events: the first, the passing of the Fugitive Slave Law, in 1851, and the other, the battle over the admission of Kansas as free soil or slave territory.

The fugitive slave law incensed John Brown to fury, as it did every other abolitionist. It was a federal law forced by the South which forced the state officials of every Northern state, however much they might hate slavery, to join in the hunt for runaway slaves and their helpers.

A United States sloop was sent to bring back a slave who had fled to Boston. The abolitionists tried to rescue him, but were foiled, with two men killed. Scenes such as these marked, everywhere in the North, the enforcement of the law. Abolitionists were arrested in communities where every one of their neighbors was also anti-slavery. Slaves, who had been freemen for years and years in the North, were captured and dragged back to bondage by government officials.

The abolitionists became more fiery in their desperation. Many of them, like Garrison, began preaching that the North set up a government of its own: “No Union With Slave-holders!” was the slogan.

And the Kansas affair heaped coal on this fire. Under the Missouri Compromise, both North and South had agreed to restrict slavery within the states already burdened with it; they had agreed also, that the citizens of a new territory could decide whether or not they wanted slavery or freedom, and could vote their choice when the territory was admitted to the union. In other words, both sides would keep their hands off new territory; and the federal government would not interfere.

Kansas was such a territory; it was being rapidly settled, and in a few years was to come up for admission as a state.

And what was happening was that the South was flooding this territory with spurious settlers; idle, whiskey-drinking ruffians armed with shotguns and revolvers, who were intimidating the Northern settlers who had come, and were stealing the elections from them, by force of arms.

The South was openly breaking its agreement with the north; it was openly declaring its intent to make Kansas another addition to the slave states.

To the abolitionists in the North this seemed like the last straw. The South was at its flood-tide of domination; it controlled everything in the American union; and now it was moving forward to make its domination permanent by any means; even by the means of murder and intimidation.

Reports of assassinations, whippings, and the burning down of Northern settlers’ cabins came every week from Kansas. The abolitionists began raising emigrant companies of Northerners who would go to Kansas to vote for freedom, even though the South sent its cannon against them.

The Brown family had by now moved to North Elba, New York, a little Adirondack colony of fugitive Negroes who had settled on the lands owned by Gerrit Smith, a wealthy and sincere abolitionist. John Brown had been of much practical service to the Negroes there; but he and his sons, like every other foe of slavery, were deeply shaken by the events in Kansas.

It seemed horrible to everyone, that after twenty years of bitter agitation, slavery was not waning, but was stronger than ever--indeed, was threatening to swallow up even the North.

Strong men were needed in Kansas; and so John Brown’s sons went there. They were men of peace: they went there as bona fide settlers, to take up claims, and to cast their vote, when the time came, for freedom. But in two months they were writing letters to North Elba asking their father to send them all the rifles he could collect.

“We have seen some of the curses of slavery, and they are many,” wrote one of the sons in the very first letter home. “The boys have all their feelings worked up, and are ready to fight. Send us arms; we need them more than we do bread.”

John Brown collected the arms; and what was more, he delivered them with his own hands. He wound up his business affairs, left his strong, patient wife in charge of the North Elba farm, and went to join his sons in Kansas. The curtain was now rising in the first act of the universal drama called John Brown. The man of God, the tender friend of little slave children, and old, tortured slave mammies, the man of the plough and the counter, the patriarch and citizen was at last ready to become Captain John Brown of Osawatomie; John Brown, the outlaw, the warrior, the soldier of freedom.

At the mere mention of his name Border Ruffians and swashbuckling adherents of slavery were soon to tremble and even fly, as though a devil were behind. And he was bowed with cares and rapidly turning gray; and he had never handled fire-arms; and he was at the age when other men begin to talk of retiring from business and life, when they long for peace and reflection, in some quiet country scene, away from the world and its problems.

He was fifty-five years old.

THE SITUATION IN KANSAS

As John Brown left for Kansas, he turned to his wife and the remaining members of his family and said: “If it is so painful for us to part with the hope of meeting again, how must it be with the poor slaves, who have no hope?”

John Brown was always sanguine in his ventures; but the events before him would have tried the hope of a superman; they were to be bloody, exacting, terrible. It was what he needed, however, for John Brown went to Kansas with a greater project in his mind, the attack on Virginia and the South, and Kansas was to be for him the rough, harsh school in which he could train himself for that supreme effort.

With his youngest son, Oliver, then about eighteen years old, and a son-in-law, Henry Thompson, John Brown left Chicago in August. The party had a heavily loaded wagon drawn by a “nice, stout young horse,” that was stricken with distemper when they reached Missouri, and could barely drag himself along. Their progress was therefore slow; a scant seven or eight miles a day. But it gave them an opportunity to see and hear things in Missouri, then fiercely pro-slavery, and the reservoir from which were drawn most of the Border Ruffians who were raiding Kansas, and trying to force it into the phalanx of slavery states.

Companies of armed men were constantly passing and re-passing on the route to Kansas, and they were continually boasting “of what deeds of patriotism and chivalry they had performed there, and of the still more mighty deeds they were yet to do.” As Brown wrote home in a letter, “No man of them would blush when telling of their cruel treading down and terrifying of defenceless Free State men; seemed to take peculiar satisfaction in telling of the fine horses and mules they had killed in their numerous expeditions against the damned Abolitionists.”

John Brown was roused by all this; already he was changing from the peaceful patriarch to the fearless warrior in the field. One incident illustrates this. When the little party reached the Missouri River at Brunswick, Missouri, they sat themselves down to wait for the ferry. There came to them an old man, frankly Missourian, frankly inquisitive after the manner of the frontier. “Where are you going?” he asked. “To Kansas,” replied John Brown. “Where from?” asked the old man. “From New York,” answered John Brown.

“You won’t live to get there,” the old Missourian said, grimly.

“We are prepared,” John Brown answered, “not to die alone.” Before that spirit and that eagle eye the old Missourian quailed; he turned and left.

It was in October, after an arduous trip, that John Brown and his party reached the family settlement at Osawatomie. They arrived weary and all but destitute, with about sixty cents between them. And they found the settlement in great distress; all of the Browns, except the wife of John, Jr., were completely prostrated with fever and ague, gotten from the rough conditions. They were living in a tent exposed to the chill winds, and were shivering over little fires on the bare ground. All the food left was a small supply of milk from their cows, some corn and a few potatoes. It was an unusually cold winter that year; on October 26 John Brown saw the hardest freezing he had ever witnessed south of his bleak farm-house in the Adirondacks; and all the Kansas pioneers suffered in it as did the Browns.

Nobody in Kansas that first winter knew what comforts were. While the Browns paid the penalty for living on low ground in a ravine and in tents, their bitter experience with sickness and hunger was not as bad as that of many other Northern families. Starvation and death looked in at many a door where parents lay helpless, while famished children crawled about the dirt floors crying for food, and shrieking with fear if any footstep approached, lest the comer be a Border Ruffian, (as the Southerners were called) instead of a friend. For pure misery and heart-breaking suffering these pioneer tales of Kansas are not surpassed by any in the whole history of the winning of the West.

But old John Brown was indomitable; he put new life and energy into his six sons; by November two shanties were well advanced, and the food problem had been lightened. They were getting into good shape for the winter, and preparing to take up their share in the settling of Kansas, when the hot breath of war scorched all these plans, as it did many another Northern settler’s.

There would be little time for growing corn for the Browns thereafter, or for the other settlers; the slavery question demanded an answer first.

One dread that had worried the Browns before leaving home proved unnecessary. It was their fear of the Indians. The Browns were terrified when the first big band of Sacs and Foxes in war-paint surrounded their tent, whooping and yelling, but they had the good sense to ground their arms, and the Indians did likewise. Thereafter both sides were great friends. John, Jr., went often to visit their old chief; once, when in the following summer, the Indians came to call again, they were “fought” with gifts of melons and green corn. “That,” said Jason Brown, “was the nicest party I ever saw.”

John Brown, Jr., used to ask the old chief questions, as, “Why do you Sacs and Foxes not build houses and barns like the Ottawas and the Chippewas? Why do you not have schools and churches like the Delawares and Shawnees? Why do you have no preachers and teachers?” And the chief replied in a staccato which summed up wonderfully the bitter, century-long experience of his people: “We want no houses and barns. We want no schools and churches. We want no preachers and teachers. We bad enough now.”

No, the Indians were friends. The men really to be feared were not long in putting in their appearance. One night six or seven heavily-armed Missourians rode up to the door, and asked whether any stray cattle had been seen. The Browns replied in the negative; and then, as newcomers, they were asked, in the border slang, how they were “on the goose.”

“We are Free State,” was the answer, “and what is more, we are Abolitionists.”

The men rode away, but from that moment the Browns were marked for destruction. They did not shrink from danger, however. They nailed their flag to the mast; armed themselves, and plunged into the thick of all the political battles then raging. In a short time their settlement was to become known as a center of fearless, and if necessary, violent resistance to all who wished to see human slavery introduced into the Territory. John Brown’s life work had begun.

THE BORDER RUFFIANS HOLD AN ELECTION

No fair-minded reader of history can doubt, in glancing over the records of that time, that the South took the first bloody and brutal offensive in their attempt to force slavery on Kansas. Later, the Free State men from the north, under leaders like John Brown, General Lane and Captain James Montgomery, took up arms, too, and defended themselves bravely; but at first, they were victims of the South’s determination to carry its point.

The Southerners began the attack by stealing the elections for the Territorial legislature. Thousands of Missourians, on horseback and in wagons, with guns, bowie-knives, revolvers and plenty of whisky, poured over the line in November, 1854, and encamped near the polling places. The ballot boxes were extravagantly, even humorously, stuffed; the elections were carried for the South. There was nothing concealed about the affair; in fact, the Missouri newspapers had gaily whipped up recruits for the raid.

Many of these men, Border Ruffians, as the North called them, were hired for the work. Others came for the fun; others because they hated Yankees; others because they were devout believers in Slavery.

“They wore the most savage looks and gave utterance to the most horrible imprecations and blasphemies,” said Thomas Gladstone, a relative of the great statesman of that name, who was in Kansas at the time. “In groups of drunken, bellowing, blood-thirsty demons, armed to the teeth, they crowded about the bars and shouted for drink, or made the night hideous with noise on the streets.”

Their fraudulent Pawnee legislature convened and passed a code of punishments for Free State men. Under the code, no one opposed to slavery in any manner could serve on a jury, or hold any office in Kansas.

Death itself was the penalty for advising slaves to rebel, or even supplying them with literature that would have that effect.

The mere voicing of a belief that slavery was illegal in Kansas was made a grave crime. Any person who said in public that slavery was wrong, or any person who even “introduced into the Territory, any book, paper, magazine, pamphlet or circular,”--saying this, was to be punished by imprisonment at hard labor for a term of not less than five years.

This notorious Clause 12 was obviously aimed at the New York Tribune and other anti-slavery journals, and was meant to shut off every whisper of free speech. And it did not work.

For the Free State settlers would not recognize the legality of the Legislature, and held an election of their own. And so there were two legislatures in Kansas Territory, two governors and governments. All the fighting that followed centered about this dualism, and about the mad, desperate butcheries and burnings begun by the Southerners, when they saw they could not cow the Northerners into submission.

President Pierce, who was pro-slavery, sent a message to Congress in which he sided with the fraudulent legislature and its code, declaring it legal, and threatening the Free State men, whom he called traitors, insurrectionists, and seditionists against the United States government.