John Brown, Soldier of Fortune: A Critique

CHAPTER XVII

"YET SHALL HE LIVE"

Much ado about nothing.
—Shakespeare

John Brown's fame is an unearned increment. It was secured by misrepresentations put forth by himself and members of his family, and by the Disunionists—"Union-splitters"—of his time, who inspired his final actions. Through these agencies he acquired a creditable rating in history; not because of the things which he did; nor because of the things which he sought to do; but because of the things which were said about him; and because of the things which were done to him. His fame is the result of an exploitation, in eloquent phrases, of virtues, purposes, and motives, which were attributed to him. It has thus been overcapitalized. The stock was watered. In respect to the truth of history, his fame is all "water." It was not based upon fact, but upon fancy; upon untenable conclusions concerning his character, and wildly extravagant and irrelevant assumptions concerning his emotions. These are the sole assets to be found in the appraisement of his public estate.

Of him Mr. Redpath said, in part:

He was too large a man to stand on any platform. He planted his feet on the Rock of Ages—the Eternal truth—and was therefore never shaken in his policy or principles.

He scouted the idea of rest while he held a commission direct from God Almighty to act against Slavery....

Where the Republicans said, Halt! John Brown shouted, Forward! to the rescue! He was an abolitionist of the Bunker Hill school.

It did not concern Mr. Redpath that the "Bunker Hill" school of abolitionists were themselves slave-holders.

Mr. Thoreau, who was also a Union-splitter, said:

No man in America has ever stood up so persistently for the dignity of human nature, knowing himself for man and the equal of any and all governments. He could not have been tried by his peers, for his peers did not exist....

He did not go to Harvard. He was not fed on the pap that is there furnished, but he went to the University of the West where he studied the science of Liberty, and having taken his degree, he finally commenced the practice of humanity in Kansas.

Of Thoreau, Mr. Alcott wrote in his diary, Saturday. November 5, 1859:

... Thoreau talks freely and enthusiastically about Brown, denouncing the Union, the President, the States, and Virginia particularly; wishes to publish his late speech, and has seen Boston publishers, but failed to find any to print it for him.[495]

Mr. Sanborn said:

Such was the man—of the best New England blood, of the stock of the Plymouth Pilgrims, and bred up like them "in the nurture and admonition of the Lord"—who was selected by God, and knew himself to be so chosen, to overthrow the bulwark of oppression in America. He seems to have declared a definite plan of attacking slavery in one of its strongholds, by force, as early as 1839; and it was to obtain money for this enterprise that he engaged in land-speculations and wool-merchandise for the next ten or twelve years.... Other men might have been spared but Brown was indispensable.[496]

Said Wendell Phillips:

God makes him the text, and all he asks of our comparatively cowardly lips is to preach the sermon, and say to the American people that, whether this old man succeeded in a worldly sense or not, he stood as a representative of law, of government, of right, of justice, of religion, and they were pirates that gathered about him, and sought to wreak vengeance by taking his life. The banks of the Potomac are doubly dear now to History and to Man! The dust of Washington rests there; and History will see forever on that river side the brave old man on his pallet, whose dust, when God calls him hence, the Father of his Country would be proud to make room for beside his own.

Mr. Higginson said:

Such men as he needed are not to be found ordinarily; they must be reared. John Brown did not merely look for men, therefore, he reared them in his sons.

John A. Andrew, who did not believe that Brown was present or in any way connected with the robberies and murders on the Pottawatomie, said:

Whatever may be thought of John Brown's acts, John Brown himself was right.

The Rev. Theodore Parker, who believed in slave insurrections and their horrors, wrote:

Let the American State hang his body and the American Church damn his soul. Still, the blessing of such as are ready to perish will fall on him, and the universal justice of the Infinitely Perfect God will make him welcome home. The road to heaven is as short from the gallows as from the throne.

Mr. Emerson said:

That new saint, than whom none purer or more brave was ever led by love of men into conflict and death—the new saint awaiting his martyrdom, and who, if he shall suffer, will make the gallows glorious like the cross.

Into a carnival of rhetoric so picturesque, Mr. John James Ingalls could not fail to enter the lists and compete for the prize. Poising his shining lance he delivered this thrust:

But the three men of this era who will loom forever against the remotest horizon of time, as the pyramids above the voiceless desert, or the mountain peaks above the subordinate plains, are Abraham Lincoln, Ulysses S. Grant and Old John Brown of Osawatomie.

Victor Hugo said:

The punishment of John Brown may consolidate slavery in Virginia, but it will certainly shatter the American Democracy. You preserve your shame but you kill your glory.

Similar exhibits, in the hyperbolical optimism that constitutes this promotion by wind, might be added hereto indefinitely; for the output of such fantastical flights was limited only by the boundaries of taste and imagination. Probably the best things have been said. But that does not wholly discourage the later generations. Emulation in the phrase making competition still places a premium upon inconsistency. Mr. Villard said fifty years after:

In Virginia, John Brown atoned for Pottawatomie by the nobility of his philosophy and his sublime devotion to principle, even on the gallows.

Perhaps nowhere else than in the peculiar philosophy of those who attribute virtue to Brown as a motive for vice, may we find nobility in dissimulation; atonement without reconciliation; and the sublimity of devotion to principle in the denial of the truth. Awaiting death in the Charlestown jail, Brown denied that he had been a party to the murders and the robberies on the Pottawatomie; and went from the gallows into the presence of the Almighty to answer for both his participation in that horror and for his repeated denials of having been personally concerned in it.[497]

December 10, 1911, Mr. Clyde McGee, of Chicago, said, among many other worked-over things:

It grew upon him as he prayed, for John Brown was a man who talked with God as confidently as a friend speaketh with friend.[498]

When Brown and his sons planned, during March and April and May, 1856, to steal Doyle's, and Wilkinson's, and other settlers' horses and leave the country; they planned, as a precautionary measure, to first make widows and orphans of the wives and children of these men, and then to steal the horses; not from the dead men, but from the weeping women and helpless children. Who think you talked with Brown and his swaggering sons as "friend speaketh with friend" during the time their plans were being made for these assassinations and robberies, and while they executed them: The Almighty, or the Devil? Brown was not sure who it was that prompted him to incite the slaves to strike for their liberty, by assassinating their masters. He answered Mr. Vallandigham at Harper's Ferry:

No man sent me here; it was my own prompting and that of my Maker, or that of the Devil; whichever you please to ascribe it to. I acknowledge no master in human form.[499]

Kansas has done much in honor of John Brown. An association, organized for the purpose, erected a stately monument at Osawatomie, which was dedicated to his memory August 30, 1877, by Kansas' most picturesque orator and statesman, the late John James Ingalls. Later, the patriotic women connected with the society of the Grand Army of the Republic, in Kansas, purchased the site of the Battle of Osawatomie, for a "State Park": which was dedicated, as such, by ex-President Theodore Roosevelt, August 30, 1910. Also, the State Legislature of 1895, authorized a society to place a statue of Brown in the national hall of fame, Statuary Hall, in the rotunda of the national capitol; thus, to the world, certifying his life and public services to have been the most conspicuous and illustrious of all its citizens. The text of the resolution concerning this statue is as follows:

Whereas, The Lincoln Sailors' and Soldiers' National Monument Association now has in process of construction a statue or monument of John Brown; and

Whereas, Said association has made application to the authorities at Washington to have such monument put in statuary hall in the capitol building, and has been advised by the general government that before this permission could be granted a request from the legislature of the State of Kansas would be necessary: therefore, be it

Resolved by the House of Representatives, the Senate Concurring therein, That we hereby request the proper authorities in charge of the United States Statuary hall, at Washington, D. C., to permit such monument to be placed therein; be it further

Resolved, That a copy of these resolutions be forwarded to each of our senators and representatives in Washington, D. C.

For a reason unexplained by his later biographers, the authority to confer this honor upon Brown—the highest honor within the power of the State to bestow—was never exercised; a delinquency which excites a suspicion that the resolution stated conditions, as existing, which did not exist.

At the head of the schedule of assumptions concerning the innocence of Brown's intentions, the purity of his motives, and the exaltation of his devotion to humanity, is his "martyrdom." This item has been illuminated with a halo of holiness. As "Christ died to make men holy," so Brown is said to have died to "make men free." No one has claimed that Hugh Forbes was an humanitarian, or other than an adventurer. Yet in relation to Brown's insurrection, the minds of the two men—John Brown and Hugh Forbes—met in full accord; there was agreement between them. Together they planned the invasion of the South, for the promotion of their personal fortunes. Their aims, their ambitions, and their hopes were identical. If Brown's exchequer had been ample, Forbes too would have appeared at Harper's Ferry and there would have been a pair of martyrs there: "Two of a kind."

The logic of the fiction of his martyrdom is founded upon the assumption that Brown held an option upon his life which he elected to forfeit; and that he offered it as a sacrifice: that he chose to die, as the Redeemer of Men died; and in thus dying made "the gallows glorious like the cross." Brown did not contemplate dying at Harper's Ferry any more than did Hugh Forbes, or Stevens, or Cook, or Kagi: and he would not have died at Charlestown if he could have controlled the event. These men knew that some of them would, probably, die, but each passed the subject over lightly, believing that in some inscrutable way, if fatalities occurred, it would be some of the others who would fall. Men of their type "die but once." Brown accepted the chances of war as did his followers, and as Forbes sought the opportunity of doing. Men who have similarly risked their lives, times almost without number, are not impressed by such martyrdoms. To his faithful Sanborn, Brown wrote: "I am now rather anxious to live for a few years."[500] He desired to live to organize, and to command the army of the Provisional Government: and to be the head of a new nation: a new "United States." He hoped for longevity, that he might wear the honors and enjoy the fame and the emoluments of his prospective achievement.

The years of Brown's life were a constant, persistent, strenuous struggle to get money. As to the means which should be employed in the getting of it, he was indifferent. In his philosophy, results were paramount; the means to the end were of no consequence. A stranger to honor, he violated every confidence that should be held sacred among men: and in his avarice trampled upon every law, moral and statute, human and Divine. Consistent with the speculative instinct so distinctly characteristic of his life, his greatest or principal object was to get money, and to get it quickly.

Mr. Villard asserts that Brown's greatest or principal object was to assault slavery, and so entitles an important chapter in the recent biography. Assuming his premises to be correct, he commences the chapter with this inquiry:

When was it that John Brown, practical shepherd, tanner, farmer, surveyor, cattle expert, real-estate speculator and wool merchant, first conceived what he calls in his autobiography "his greatest or principal object" in life—the forcible overthrow of slavery in his native land? The question is not an idle one, etc.[501]

The question, nevertheless, is an idle one. During the interview which Brown gave out at Harper's Ferry, October 18th, Mr. Vallandigham asked him this pointed question: "How long have you been engaged in this business?"[502] To which Brown replied:

From the breaking out of the difficulties in Kansas. Four of my sons had gone there to settle and they wanted me to go.[503]

Also, Brown stated over his signature, in March, 1859, that it was "since 1855" that it had been his judgment that the way to successfully oppose slavery "would be to meddle directly with the peculiar institution."[504] That he had the subject under consideration prior to 1845 is expressly discredited by Brown, in his autobiography, in the statement that he was "averse to military affairs"; that he refused to "train or drill; but paid fines & got along like a Quaker until his age finally cleared him of military duty."[505]

The record of Brown's life, prior to 1857, is barren of any contemporaneous expression by him or by any member of his family which even remotely suggests the possibility that he might have contemplated attempting a forcible assault against slavery. If his mind had been preoccupied with a desire of such overshadowing importance the fact would have shone in the letters which he wrote to his children January 23, and August 6, 1852, relating to the conduct of their lives.[506] There is much, however, in this history which discredits the assumption that he gave the subject any consideration whatever. A man whose life was a "burning" devotion to an ambition so heroic as to become the "David of the Goliath of Slavery,"[507] ought to have shown some personal interest in the matter; he should not have left it wholly to his panegyrists. It appears however that the peaceful "tanner and shepherd" was so unconscious of having any object in life worth living for that he "felt," during this time, "a strong and steady desire to die";[508] a condition of mind wholly inconsistent with heroism or with one "burning" to bear arms, or with a "man of war emerging from the chrysalis of peace."[509] The assumptions upon which Mr. Villard relies for the relevancy of his question are gratuitous. The chapter is a scholarly example, put forth by a scholar, of the art of making "much ado about nothing."

It would be proper to say that the conquest of the Southern States was the greatest or principal undertaking in Brown's career, and that it was in 1857 that he first planned to attempt it. His capture of Pate's horses and mules at Black Jack in June; and the days which he spent in stealing cattle, at and around Osawatomie, during the last days of August, 1856; and his plundering in Missouri and Kansas in 1858, may be called meddling with slavery; though grafting upon the anti-slavery sentiment of the time, would more accurately describe the relation, if any, of his operations to slavery.

There was this difference between Nat Turner and John Brown: the negro was a religious fanatic; he was sincere and consistent. Falsehood, deception, greed, selfishness, are not attributes of fanaticism, but they are characteristic of Brown's life. The sincerity of his "death-bed" professions of godliness, and of sympathy for the men in bondage, is discredited by the actions of a lifetime as conspicuous for its turpitude as it was barren of virtues. Neither charitable deed, nor manifestation of a benevolent, or of a patriotic spirit, appears, even incidentally, along the lines of his life, to break the monotone of selfishness that distinguishes it. In public affairs he took no part worthy of consideration.

Mr. Gill gave up a view of his natural or unassumed personality that is consistently discreditable, and Brown's correspondence is a confirmation of that estimate. It teaches the lesson that he administered his deportment to suit the circumstances of the occasion existing at the time; and that it covered the entire range of the various phases of human intercourse; from that of a coarse, brutal vulgarity, to the saintliness of his latest metamorphosis; from the use of language so distinctly vulgar and obscene, as to be, in the opinion of the writer, unprintable,[510] to the crafty assumptions of godliness contained in his letter to the innocent Quakeress.[511]

Brown was crafty in the sublimest degree of the art. His craftiness was a distinction. It will be difficult to find in our literature a more interesting example of the refinements of the art than the piece which he set for Mrs. Stearns: his "Old Brown's Farewell: to the Plymouth Rocks; Bunker Hill Monuments; Charter Oaks; and Uncle Toms Cabbins." In the setting, and in the dramatic execution of the play, he exhibited the perfection of the actor. The paper was not drawn for Mr. Parker to read to his congregation. Brown was not "casting his pearls before swine." It was for Mrs. Stearns personally that the paper was written; it was her heart that he intended to touch, and her generous emotions that he intended to prey upon. How successfully he played the part she has related.[512]

Of Brown, it may be truthfully said that within the limits of his resources, he did nothing in a small way, nor did he move with a faint heart. With him, there was neither halting nor trifling in action. He was consistently an adventurer. His theology scorned all creeds. Without capital he was a plunger among speculators. The deception which he practiced upon the New England Woolen Company netted him a fortune little below the average of that period. In the commission business he was an acrobat, rather than a merchant: his operations were a series of feats in commercial gymnastics. Chafing because of the restrictions of an extreme poverty that kept him "like a toad under a harrow," he determined to burst the bands of his environment, and there was a massacre in the valley of the Pottawatomie out of which he rode with a herd of horses. And he would have ridden away from Black Jack with Pate's horses and mules, if Pate had not deceived him, and led him to believe that he held his sons—John and Jason—prisoners, as hostages. A guerrilla leader for six days, he drove two hundred and fifty head of cattle into his camp at Osawatomie, and in 1858, as a Kansas raider, he dwarfed the operations of James Montgomery. In the East, as a crafty imposter and grafter, he secured $30,000 in cash and plunder, and attempted a coup upon the Legislatures of Massachusetts and New York for $200,000 more. And then, within one year from the date of the outburst of his determination to be freed from poverty, he indulged hopes of a successful conquest: hopes of riches and of fame. An habitual cruelty in his domestic life, which is more than hinted at by his friend and confidant, George R. Gill, nerved his hand to execute the ferocious butchery of his neighbors on the Pottawatomie, and steeled his heart to incite the slaves at Harper's Ferry to emulate the example of Southampton. His attempt at revolution was not the result of a previous conviction and consecration to duty and to the cause of humanity, but of a growth—the indulgence and development of an abnormal passion for speculation: the culmination downward of his speculative and criminal instincts. Closing a commercial sas indulging the reasonable hope that in the new country he would find opportunity to improve his condition. In the horses owned by the Shermans, and by other well-to-do neighbors, he saw, and grasped, the opportunity—a desperate one—to make a "coup to restore his fortunes." Out of that plunge in robbery and murder came the leader of a gang of horse thieves—the chrysalis of the guerrilla captain of Osawatomie.

Driven out of the Territory by the establishment of order, the crafty marauder raided the East as the militant defender of Kansas. In the practice of his impositions there, he met and established confidential relations with men who plotted against the life of the nation; men who planned how to provoke a revolution; how best to "split the Union";[513] men who wished "success to every slave insurrection." From this atmosphere, pregnant with the sentiment of disloyalty to the Union, Brown derived the inspiration which encouraged him to plan to do what his mentors had not the courage to undertake. Out of his negotiations with them came money; munitions of war; Hugh Forbes, the revolutionist; mutual planning for a revolution, and a dream of empire.

John Brown will live in history; but his name will not be found among the names of those who have wrought for humanity and for righteousness; or among the names of the martyrs and the saints who "washed their robes and made them white in the blood of the Lamb."

"YET SHALL HE LIVE": but it will be as a soldier of fortune, an adventurer. He will take his place in history as such: and will rank among adventurers as Napoleon ranks among marshals: as Captain Kidd among pirates: and as Jonathan Wild among thieves.

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