  This man who would electrify the Nation and bring it closer to civil war by his audacious attack on slavery was born at Torrington, Conn., on May 9, 1800, the son of Owen and Ruth Mills Brown. The Browns were a simple, frugal, and hard-working family. They had a deep and abiding interest in religion, and from earliest childhood John Brown was taught the value of strong religious habits. He was required, along with his brothers and sisters, to participate in daily Bible reading and prayer sessions. “Fear God & keep his commandments” was his father’s constant admonition. It was also his father who taught him to view the enslavement of Negroes as a sin against God. Owen Brown The future abolitionist and martyr in the cause of Negro freedom was born in this stark, shutterless farmhouse in Torrington, Conn. He lived here only 5 years. In 1805 his father, Owen Brown (above), sold the farm and moved the family west to Ohio. In 1805 the Browns, like many other families of the period, moved west to Ohio. There, in the little settlement of Hudson, about 25 miles south of Cleveland, John grew to manhood. He received little formal education; most of what he learned came from what he afterwards called the “School of adversity.” He cared little for studies, preferring life in the open. Consistently choosing the “hardest & roughest” kinds of play because they afforded him “almost the only compensation for the confinement & restraints of school,” he was extremely proud of his John Brown probably never saw a slave auction, portrayed here in an illustration from the 1852 edition of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin, but his horror and hatred of slavery made its destruction the “greatest or principle object” of his life. When John was 8 years old his mother died, and for awhile he believed that he would never recover from so “complete & permanent” a loss. His father remarried, but John never accepted his stepmother emotionally and “continued to pine after his own Mother for years.” An indifferent student, and “not ... much of a schollar” anyway, John quit school and went to work at his father’s tannery. Owen Brown, who had been a tanner and a shoemaker before moving to Hudson, had already taught his son the art of dressing leather from “Squirel, Raccoon, Cat, Wolf, or Dog Skins,” and John soon displayed remarkable ability in the trade. When the War of 1812 broke out, Owen contracted to supply beef to the American forces in Michigan. He gave John the task of rounding up wild steers and other cattle in the woods and then driving them, all by himself, to army posts more than 100 miles away. Contact with the soldiers and their profanity and lack of discipline so disgusted young Brown that he later resolved to pay fines rather than take part in the militia drills required of all Hudson males of a certain age. It was during the war, or so Brown later claimed, that he first came to understand what his father meant about the evil of slavery. He had just completed one of his cattle drives and was staying with a “very gentlemanly landlord” who owned a slave about the same age as John. The Negro boy was “badly clothed, poorly fed ... & beaten before his eyes with Iron Shovels or any other thing that came first to hand.” John Brown had not yet grown his famous beard when this picture was taken in Kansas in 1856. Though 3 years away from the deed that would make his name immortal, he had already begun his private war against slavery. Mary Ann Day, Brown’s loyal and self-sacrificing second wife, stoically endured her husband’s constant wanderings in business and anti-slavery activities. She is shown here about 1851 with two of their daughters, Annie and Sarah. In 1816 John joined the Congregational Church in Hudson and soon developed a strong interest in becoming a minister. For a while he attended a divinity school in Plainfield, Mass., then transferred to another school in Litchfield, Conn. At that time Litchfield was a center of abolitionist sentiment; it was also the birthplace of Harriet Beecher Stowe, whose book Uncle Tom’s Cabin, published in 1852, would stir passions North and South, win international support for the anti-slavery cause, and help to bring on civil war in 1861. How much of Litchfield’s abolitionist atmosphere young Brown absorbed is not known. A shortage of funds and an inflammation of the eyes forced him to return to Ohio in the summer of 1817. His dream of becoming a minister was forever shattered, but he never lost his religious fervor. When he was 20 years old, “led by his own inclination & prompted also by his Father,” Brown married Dianthe Lusk, a “remarkably plain” and pious girl a year younger than himself. She died 12 years later, in August 1832, following the birth of their seventh child. Brown remarried within a year, and fathered 13 children by his second wife, Mary Ann Day. In a never-ending struggle to feed and clothe his growing family, Brown drifted through Ohio, Pennsylvania, New York, Connecticut, and Massachusetts plying many trades. He worked at tanning, surveying, and farming; at times he was shepherd, cattleman, wool merchant, and postmaster; for a while he bred race horses and speculated in real estate. Uniformly unsuccessful in these ventures, Brown’s debts mounted, and he was barely able to keep his large family from starvation. Despite his frequent business reversals and his strenuous and consuming efforts to support his family, Brown never abandoned his intense desire to free enslaved Negroes from bondage. His first opportunity to strike a blow at the institution he hated so much came in Kansas, where, following the passage of the Kansas-Nebraska Act in 1854, pro-slavery “Border Ruffians” clashed brutally with anti-slavery “Jayhawkers” over the extension of slavery to Kansas and Nebraska Territories. John Brown, Jr., the oldest of Brown’s sons, fought alongside his father in Kansas. The Pottawatomie murders, in which he took no part, caused him to suffer a mental collapse from which he never fully recovered. Nevertheless, in 1859 he was entrusted with forwarding the weapons for the attack on Harpers Ferry from Ohio to Chambersburg, Pa. Five of Brown’s sons—Owen, Jason, Frederick, Salmon, and John, Jr.—had emigrated to Kansas and joined the free-soil cause. When they appealed to their father for help in May 1855, Brown, another son Oliver, and son-in-law Henry Thompson rushed to Kansas and plunged into the conflict with a fury. As captain of the “Liberty Guards,” a quasi-militia company that he himself formed, Brown shortly gained national notoriety as a bold and ruthless leader. For the next several years, murders, bushwhackings, lynchings, and burnings were common occurrences, and the territory was aptly named “Bleeding Kansas.” Atrocity matched atrocity. When pro-slavery forces sacked and burned the town of Lawrence in May 1856, Brown was outraged. Three of John Brown’s most trusted lieutenants in the Harpers Ferry raid: John E. Cook Aaron D. Stevens John H. Kagi The attack on Harpers Ferry was the culmination of a plan Brown had evolved many years before he went to Kansas. By the early 1850’s he had come to believe that a location within the slave States should be selected where raids on slave plantations could be easily carried out and the freed bondsmen sent to safety in the North. Convinced that mountains throughout history had enabled the few to defend themselves against the many, he believed that even against regular Army troops a small force operating from a mountain stronghold could hold out indefinitely and provide sanctuary for freed slaves, who would be supplied with arms to In the autumn of 1857, on his second trip to Kansas, Brown began recruiting his force for the projected raid. Among the first to join him were three young veterans of the Kansas fighting: John E. Cook, Aaron D. Stevens, and John H. Kagi. Each would play an important role in the attack on Harpers Ferry. Cook, 27-year-old member of a wealthy Connecticut family, had attended Yale University and studied law in New York City before going to Kansas in 1855. He stood about 5 feet 5 inches tall, had long, silk-blond hair that curled about his neck, and “his deep blue eyes were gentle in expression as a woman’s.” Brown’s son Salmon, who knew Cook in Ohio and Kansas, characterized him as “highly erratic” in temperament “and not overly stocked with morality. He was the best pistol-shot I ever saw ... [and] just as much of an expert in getting into the good graces of the girls.” He loved to “talk and rattle on about himself.” Stevens, then 26 years old, was, like Cook, a native of Connecticut. He ran away from home at the age of 16 and joined the Massachusetts Volunteer Regiment to fight in the Mexican War. Honorably discharged at the end of that conflict, he found civilian life so boring that he enlisted as a bugler in a United States dragoon regiment in the West and took part in several campaigns against the Navaho and Apache Indians. Stevens possessed an explosive temper, and at Taos, N. Mex., in the mid-1850’s, he nearly killed an officer in a drunken brawl and was sentenced to death. President Franklin Pierce commuted the sentence to 3 years’ hard labor at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas. In January 1856 Stevens escaped and joined the Free-State cause. As colonel of the Second Kansas Volunteer Regiment, he fought in some of the territory’s bloodiest battles. Standing just over 6 feet tall, Stevens was a powerfully built man who could wield a saber with deadly skill. He had black curly hair, “black, brooding eyes,” and a full beard. In his youth he had been a choir boy (his father and elder brothers taught singing), had a rich baritone voice, and liked to sing. Totally dedicated to the overthrow of slavery, he once told a Kansas sheriff: “We are in the right, and will resist the universe.” Kagi, an Ohio lad of 22, was largely self-educated and had taught school in Virginia until his abolitionist views got him into trouble with local officials and he had to flee the State. Traveling to Kansas in 1856, he became a lawyer in Nebraska City. Occasionally he served as a court stenographer or shorthand reporter. He also functioned as a correspondent for several Eastern newspapers and John Brown dubbed him “our Horace Greeley.” While riding with Stevens’ Second Kansas Regiment in 1856, Kagi was taken prisoner by Federal troops and served 4 months in jail before being released on bail. In January 1857 he was shot by a pro-slavery judge during a disagreement and was still suffering from his wounds when he joined Brown. Tall, with angular features, Kagi was usually unkempt, unshaven, and generally unimpressive in appearance; but he was articulate and highly intelligent, of serene temperament, and not easily aroused. “His fertility of resources made him a tower of strength to John Brown,” wrote George B. Gill, an Iowa youth who signed up for the raid but defected before it took place. “He was a logician of more than ordinary ability. He was full of wonderful vitality and all things were fit food for his brain.” Brown’s target was the United States Armory and Arsenal at Harpers Ferry, shown here in an 1857 lithograph. When he enlisted them, Brown told Cook, Stevens, and Kagi only that he was organizing a company of men to resist pro-slavery aggressions. He did not tell them where he planned to take them. When seven more volunteers joined the group at Tabor, Iowa, he informed his recruits that their “ultimate destination was the State of Virginia.” Shortly afterwards the men finally learned that Harpers Ferry was the probable target. Kagi, who had once taught school in the area, gave Brown valuable information about the town. The place fitted Brown’s requirements perfectly. It lay near the mountains he counted upon to afford a hiding place, and it was on the border of Virginia, a slave State, only 40 miles from the free State of Pennsylvania. It also contained an United States armory and arsenal, where much-needed arms were stored. After a trip to New England to raise funds, Brown called a “Constitutional Convention” of his followers to meet on May 8, 1858, at Chatham, Ontario, Canada. Besides Brown’s group, 34 Negroes attended the meeting and heard the Kansas guerrilla chieftain outline his plan for the deliverance of their enslaved brethren. First, he told them, he intended to strike at a point in the South. This blow would be followed by a general slave uprising in which even free Negroes in the Northern States and Canada would flock to his banner. He would lead them into the mountains and “if any hostile action ... were taken against us, either by the militia of the separate States or by the armies of the United States, we purposed to defeat first the militia, and next, if it were possible, the troops of the United States....” The convention unanimously adopted a “Provisional Constitution and Ordinances for the People of the United States” to serve as the law of the land while the army of liberation instituted a new government—one that would not supplant but exist side-by-side with the U.S. Government and which would explicitly prohibit slavery. John Brown was elected “Commander in Chief” of the new provisional army to be formed, other officers were appointed, and the convention adjourned. Before leaving again for New England to gather supplies and money for the attack, Brown sent Cook to Harpers Ferry to act as a spy; the others scattered, seeking employment to maintain themselves until called together for the march into Virginia. The moral and financial backing of these men, known as “The Secret Six,” made the raid on Harpers Ferry possible. Samuel Gridley Howe Thomas Wentworth Higginson Franklin B. Sanborn George Luther Stearns Gerrit Smith Theodore Parker To equip, maintain, and transport the men needed to carry out his plan, Brown required a considerable amount of money and weapons. He had neither, but because of his Kansas activities, he was able to enlist the support of Northern abolitionists in his fight against slavery. Philosophers, scholars, religious leaders, philanthropists, and businessmen gave freely but discreetly to the cause. Chief among Brown’s backers was a secret committee of six: Dr. Samuel Gridley Howe, Boston, Mass., educator, minister, and reformer; Thomas Wentworth Higginson, militant clergyman of Worcester, Mass.; Theodore Parker, Boston’s outstanding Unitarian minister; Franklin B. Sanborn, editor and schoolmaster of Concord, Mass.; Gerrit Smith, former New York Congressman and a great Peterboro, N.Y., landowner; and George L. Stearns, industrialist and merchant of Medford, Mass. Through them Brown received most of the money and weapons that enabled him to launch his attack. |
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