John Brown, Jr., and Jason Brown, two of the fighter’s sons, were
captured by Missourians and suffered incredible tortures after the
Pottawatomie affair. Both men were burning with fever, but they were
dragged at the ends of ropes for two or three days, beaten, hung up
and then let down, and then chained to oxcarts in the wind and rain.
John Jr., always of a nervous temperament, went temporarily insane
under this treatment, but his captors had no mercy. Though he shrieked
wildly, and though his brother Jason begged that the Southerns have
pity, their hearts were hard as flint.
The following scene is described by Jason:
“Captain Wood said to me: ‘Keep that man still.’ ‘I can’t keep an
insane man still,’ said I. ‘He is no more insane than you are. If you
don’t keep him still, we’ll do it for you.’ I tried my best, but John
had not a glimmer of reason and could not understand anything. He went
on yelling. Three troopers came in. One struck him a terrible blow on
the jaw with his fist, throwing him on his side. A second knelt on him
and pounded him with his fist. The third stood off and kicked him with
all his force in the back of the neck. ‘Don’t kill a crazy man!’ cried
I. ‘No more crazy than you are, but we’ll fetch it out of him.’ After
that John lay unconscious for three or four hours. We camped about one
and a half miles southeast of the Adairs. There we stayed about two
weeks. Then we were ordered to move again. They drove us on foot, all
the prisoners, chained two and two. At Ottawa ford young Kilbourne
dropped of a sun-stroke.”
The men were later released, for they had done nothing that could be
prosecuted in the court where the pro-slavery government “troops” had
driven them. This was the sort of thing John Brown was fighting; it was
life and death, and no mercy could be expected from the Southerners.
Mr. Villard and other timorous friends of John Brown do not seem
to understand the nature of the battle; and they do not understand
what giant faith and courage it must have taken for an old farmer of
fifty-five to continue fighting in such an atmosphere.
John Brown did not flinch. Another son, Frederick, was shot down in
cold blood on the steps of the family home at Osawatomie, but the old
fighter, shedding a silent tear for the loss, for he deeply loved his
children, went on his stern path.
The spuriously-elected slavery governor offered a reward of $3,000 for
John Brown, and the President of the United States a reward of $250.
Federal troops scoured the territory for him. For months he and his men
slept out in the fields, flitting from place to place, and fighting in
many battles.
With only nine men he fought off a troop of twenty-three Southerners
at the “battle of Black Jack,” and forced them to surrender. In
August, 250 men moved on Osawatomie, to destroy it as they had
destroyed Lawrence. John Brown gathered about forty men to resist the
Southerners, and a hot battle was fought, in which, of course, Brown
had to retreat. The town was thoroughly wiped out, and also granted
“Southern rights.”
There were many other skirmishes; the name of Captain John Brown, old
Brown of Osawatomie, became a legend in Kansas. He became a sort of
Pancho Villa figure to the South; a hundred times he was reported dead
or captured; a hundred times he was blamed for wild deeds he had never
done.
Here are two contemporary pictures of John Brown in the field. The
first is written by August Bondi, a brave and able young Austrian Jew,
who put himself under Brown’s leadership after the Pottawatomie affair:
“We stayed here up to the morning of Sunday, June 1st, and during those
few days I fully succeeded in understanding the exalted character of my
old friend, John Brown. He exhibited at all times the most affectionate
care for each of us. He also attended to the cooking. We had two meals
daily, consisting of bread, baked in skillets; this was washed down
with creek water, mixed with a little ginger and a spoon of molasses to
each pint. Nevertheless, we kept in excellent spirits; we considered
ourselves as one family, allied to one another by the consciousness
that it was our duty to undergo all these privations for the good
cause. We were determined to share any danger with one another, that
victory or death might find us together; and we were united, as a band
of brothers, by the love and affection toward the man who with tender
words and wise counsel, in the depth of the wilderness of Ottawa creek,
prepared a handful of young men for the work of laying the foundation
of a free commonwealth.
“His words have ever remained firmly engraved in my mind. Many and
various were the instructions he gave during the days of our compulsory
leisure in this camp. He expressed himself to us that we should never
allow ourselves to be tempted by any consideration to acknowledge laws
and institutions to exist if our conscience and reason condemned them.
“He admonished us not to care whether a majority, no matter how large,
opposed our principles and opinions. The largest majorities were
sometimes only organized mobs, whose howlings never changed black to
white or night into day. A minority convinced of its rights, based on
moral principles, would, under a republican government, sooner or later
become the majority.”
The other description is that of William A. Phillips, then a
correspondent of the New York Tribune, and later a Colonel in the Civil
War. Brown, still an outlaw, was on his way to Topeka, to be on hand at
whatever crisis might arise at the opening of the legislature elected
by the Free State settlers. Phillips met him on the way.
His account is important, for it shows that John Brown saw much
farther than his own times. He knew that there were many other things
wrong with the social system in America besides slavery. There are
plain indications here, as in other accounts, that John Brown was one
of those early American Socialists, such as Horace Greeley, Albert
Brisbane, father of Arthur Brisbane, Bronson Alcott, Ralph Waldo
Emerson, and others, who felt that the abolition of slavery was only
the first step toward a free America. Wendell Phillips, for instance,
one of this abolitionist band, became after the Civil War one of the
leading champions of the rights of workingmen in their battle against
the capitalists.
But here is Colonel Phillips giving his charming picture, in the
Atlantic Monthly for December, 1879, of that night ride and the
conversation he had with Brown as they lay bivouacking in the open
beneath the stars:
“He seemed as little disposed to sleep as I was, and we talked; or
rather, he did, for I said little. I found that he was a thorough
astronomer; he pointed out the different constellations and their
movements. ‘Now,’ he said, ‘it is midnight,’ as he pointed to the
finger marks of his great clock in the sky. The whispering of the
wind in the prairies was full of voices to him, and the stars as they
shone in the firmament of God seemed to inspire him. ‘How admirable
is the symmetry of the heavens; how grand and beautiful! Everything
moves in sublime harmony in the government of God. Not so with us poor
creatures. If one star is more brilliant than others, it is continually
shooting in some erratic way into space.’
“He criticized both parties in Kansas. Of the pro-slavery men he said
that slavery besotted everything, and made men more brutal and coarse;
nor did the Free State men escape his sharp censure. He said we had
many true and noble men, but too many broken down politicians from
the older states, who would rather pass resolutions than act, and who
criticized all who did real work.
“A professional politician, he went on, you could never trust; for even
if he had convictions, he was always ready to sacrifice his principles
for his advantage.
“One of the most interesting things in Captain Brown’s conversation
that night, and one that marked him as a thinker, was his treatment of
our forms of social and political life. He thought society ought to
be reorganized on a less selfish basis; for while material interests
gained by competition for bread, men and women lost much by it. He
condemned the sale of land as a chattel, and thought there was an
infinite number of wrongs to right before society would be what
it should be, but that in our country slavery was the sum of all
villainies, and its abolition the first essential work.”