The negroes in New York and Brooklyn were not the only people in the
North falling under the influence of the strange man who answered to the
name of John Brown. There was something magnetic about him that drew all
sorts and conditions of men.
The statesmen who still used reason as the guiding principle of life had
no use for him. Henry Wilson, the new Senator from Massachusetts, met
him and was repelled by the something that drew others. Governor Andrew
was puzzled by his strange personality.
The secret of his power lay in a mystic appeal to the Puritan
conscience. He had been from childhood afflicted with this conscience in
its most malignant form. He knew instinctively its process of action.
The Puritan had settled New England and fixed the principles both of
economic and political life. The civilization he set up was compact and
commercial. He organized it in towns and townships. The Meeting House
was the center, the source of all power and authority. No dwelling could
be built further than two miles from a church and attendance on worship
was made compulsory by law.
The South, against whose life Brown was organizing his militant crusade,
was agricultural, scattered, individual. Individualism was a passion
with the Southerner, liberty his battle cry. He scorned the "authority"
of the church and worshipped God according to the dictates of his own
conscience. The Court House, not the Meeting House, was his forum,
and he rode there through miles of virgin forests to dispute with his
neighbor.
The mental processes of the Puritan, therefore, were distinctly
different from that of the Southerner. The Puritan mind was given to
hours of grim repression which he called "Conviction of Sin." Resistance
became the prime law of life. The world was a thing of evil. A morass of
Sin to be attacked, to be reformed, to be "abolished." The Southerner
perceived the evils of Slavery long before the Puritan, but he made a
poor Abolitionist. The Puritan was born an Abolitionist. He should not
only resist and attack the world; he should _hate_ it. He early learned
to love the pleasure of hating. He hated himself if no more promising
victim loomed on the horizon. He early became the foremost Persecutor
and Vice-Crusader of the new world. He made witch-hunting one of the
sports of New England.
When not busy with some form of the witch hunt, the Puritan found an
outlet for his repressed instincts in the ferocity with which he fought
the Indians or worked to achieve the conquest of Nature and lay up
worldly goods for himself and his children. Prosperity, therefore,
became the second principle of his religion, next to vice crusading.
When he succeeded in business, he praised God for his tender mercies.
His goods and chattels became the visible evidence of His love. The only
holiday he established or permitted was the day on which he publicly
thanked God for the goods which He had delivered. Through him the New
England Puritan Thanksgiving Day became a national festival and through
him a religious reverence for worldly success has become a national
ideal.
The inner life of the Puritan was soul-fear. Driven by fear and
repression he attacked his rock-ribbed country, its thin soil, its
savage enemies and his own fellow competitors with fury.
And he succeeded.
The odds against him sharpened his powers, made keen his mind, toughened
his muscles.
The Southern planter, on the other hand, represented the sharpest
contrast to this mental and physical attitude toward life. He came of
the stock of the English Squire. And if he came from Scotland he found
this English ideal already established and accepted it as his own.
The joy of living, not the horror of life, was the mainspring of his
action and the secret of his character. The Puritan hated play. The
Southerner loved to play. He dreamed of a life rich and full of
spiritual and physical leisure. He enjoyed his religion. He did not
agonize over it. His character was genial. He hated fear and drove it
from his soul. He loved a fiddle and a banjo. He was brave. He was loyal
to his friends. He loved his home and his kin. He despised trade. He
disliked hard work.
To this hour in the country's life his ideal had dominated the nation.
The Puritan Abolitionists now challenged this ideal for a fight to the
finish. Slavery was protected by the Constitution. All right, they burn
the Constitution and denounce it as a Covenant with Death, an agreement
with Hell. They begin a propaganda to incite servile insurrection in
the South. They denounce the Southern Slave owner as a fiend. Even
the greatest writers of the North caught the contagion of this mania.
Longfellow, Lowell, Whittier and Emerson used their pens to blacken the
name of the Southern people. From platform, pulpit and forum, through
pamphlet, magazine, weekly and daily newspapers the stream of abuse
poured forth in ever-increasing volume.
That the proud Southerner would resent the injustice of this wholesale
indictment was inevitable. Their habit of mind, their born instinct of
leadership, their love of independence, their hatred of dictation, their
sense of historic achievement in the building of the republic would
resent it. Their critics had not only been Slave holders themselves as
long as it paid commercially, but their skippers were now sailing the
seas in violation of Southern laws prohibiting the slave trade. Our
early Slave traders were nearly all Puritans. When one of their ships
came into port, the minister met her at the wharf, knelt in prayer and
thanked Almighty God for one more cargo of heathen saved from hell.
Brown's whole plan of attack was based on the certainty of resentment
from the South. He set out to provoke his opponents. This purpose was
now the inspiration of every act of his life.
A group of six typical Northern minds had fallen completely under his
power: Dr. Samuel G. Howe, Rev. Theodore Parker, Rev. Thomas Wentworth
Higginson, Frank B. Sanborn, George L. Stearns and the Rev. Hon. Gerrit
Smith.
Gerrit Smith was many times a millionaire, one of the great land owners
of the country, a former partner in business with John Jacob Astor, the
elder, and at this time a philanthropist by profession. He had built a
church at Peterboro, New York, and had preached a number of years. In
his growing zeal as an Abolitionist he had entered politics and had just
been elected to Congress from his district.
He was a man of gentle, humane impulses and looked out upon the world
with the kindliest fatherly eyes. It was one of the curious freaks of
fate that he should fall under the influence of Brown. The stern old
Puritan was his antithesis in every line of face and mental make-up.
Smith was the preacher, the theorist, and the dreamer.
Brown had become the man of Action.
And by Action he meant exactly what the modern Social anarchist means
by _direct action_. The plan he had developed was to come to "close
quarters" with Slavery. He had organized the Band of Gileadites to kill
every officer of the law who attempted to enforce the provisions of the
Constitution of the United States relating to Slavery. His eyes were now
fixed on the Territory of Kansas.
There could be no doubt about the abnormality of the mind of the man who
had constituted himself the Chosen Instrument of Almighty God to destroy
chattel Slavery in the South.
He was pacing the floor of the parlor of the New Astor House awaiting
the arrival of his friend, Congressman Gerrit Smith, for a conference
before the meeting scheduled for eight o'clock. It was a characteristic
of Brown that he couldn't sit still. He paced the floor.
The way he walked marked him with distinction, if not eccentricity. He
walked always with a quick, springing step. He didn't swing his foot. It
worked on springs. And the spring in it had a furtive action not unlike
the movement of a leopard. His muscles, in spite of his fifty-four
years, were strong and sinewy. He was five feet ten inches in height.
His head was remarkable for its small size. The brain space was limited
and the hair grew low on his forehead, as if a hark back to the
primitive man out of which humanity grew. His chin protruded into an
aggressive threat. His mouth was not only stern, it was as inexorable as
an oath.
His hair was turning gray and he wore it trimmed close to his small
skull. His nose was an aggressive Roman type. The expression of his face
was shrewd and serious, with a touch always of cunning.
A visitor at his house at North Elba whispered one day to one of his
sons:
"Your father looks like an eagle."
The boy hesitated and replied in deep seriousness:
"Yes, or some other carnivorous bird."
The thing above all others that gave him the look of a bird of prey was
his bluish-gray eye. An eye that was never still and always shone with a
glitter. The only time this strange light was not noticeable was during
the moments when he drew the lids down half-way. He was in the habit of
holding his eyes half shut in times of deep thinking. At these moments
if he raised his head, his eyes glowed two pin points of light.
No matter what the impression he made, either of attraction or
repulsion, his personality was a serious proposition. No man looked once
only. And no man ever attempted undue familiarity or ridicule. His life
to this time had been a series of tragic failures in everything he had
undertaken. A study of his intense Puritan face revealed at once his
fundamental character. A soul at war with the world. A soul at war with
himself. He was the incarnation of repressed emotions and desires. He
had married twice and his fierce passions had made him the father of
twenty children before fifty years of age. His first wife had given
birth to seven in ten years and died a raving maniac during the birth of
her last. Two of his children had already shown the signs of unbalanced
mentality.
The grip of his mind on the individuals who allowed themselves to be
drawn within the circle of his influence became absolute.
He was a man of earnest and constant prayer to his God. The God he
worshipped was one whose face was not yet revealed to the crowd that
hung on his strangely halting words. He spoke in mystic symbols. His
mysticism was always the source of his power over the religious leaders
who had gathered about him. They had not stopped to analyze the meaning
of this appeal. They looked once into his shining blue-gray eyes and
became his followers. He never stopped to reason.
He spoke with authority.
He claimed a divine commission for action and they did not pause to
examine his credentials. He had failed at every enterprise he had
undertaken. And then he suddenly discovered his power over the Puritan
imagination.
To Brown's mind, from the day of his devotion to the fixed idea
of destroying Slavery in the South, "Action" had but one
meaning--bloodshed. He knew that revolutionary ideas are matters of
belief. He asserted beliefs. The elect believed. The damned refused to
believe.
Long before Smith had entered the room Brown had dropped into a seat by
the window, his eyes two pin points. His abstraction was so deep, his
absorption in his dreams so complete that when Smith spoke, he leaped to
his feet and put himself in an attitude of defense.
He gazed at his friend a moment and rubbed his eyes in a dazed way
before he could come back to earth.
In a moment he had clasped hands with the philanthropist. Smith looked
into his eyes and his will was one with the man of Action. He had not
yet grasped the full meaning of the Action. He was to awake later to
its tremendous import--primitive, barbaric, animal, linking man through
hundreds of thousands of years to the beast who was his jungle father.
Smith did not know that he was to preside at the meeting until Brown
told him. He consented without a moment's hesitation.