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.