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.
[Illustration: Owen Brown]
[Illustration: 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 ability to
“wrestle, & Snow ball, & run, & jump, & knock off old seedy Wool hats.”
[Illustration: 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.” Outraged
by this, John returned home “a most determined Abolitionist” swearing
“Eternal war with Slavery.”
[Illustration: 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.]
[Illustration: 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.
[Illustration: 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.
Proclaiming himself an instrument of God’s will, he, with four of his
sons and three others, deliberately and brutally murdered five
pro-slavery men along the banks of Pottawatomie Creek. In the months
that followed, Brown terrorized the Missouri-Kansas border by a series
of bloody guerrilla attacks that brought him to the attention of the
Nation’s abolitionist faction. In late August 1856, about a month before
he left Kansas, Brown and his men clashed with pro-slavery Missourians
at the small settlement of Osawatomie. That action earned him the
nickname “Osawatomie” and cost him the life of his son Frederick. It
also hardened his stand against slavery. “I have only a short time to
live—only one death to die,” he said, “and I will die fighting for this
cause. There will be no more peace in this land until slavery is done
for. I will give them something else to do than to extend slave
territory. I will carry this war into Africa.”
Three of John Brown’s most trusted lieutenants in the Harpers Ferry
raid:
[Illustration: John E. Cook]
[Illustration: Aaron D. Stevens]
[Illustration: 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 fight for their liberty. Brown had decided, from
studying European fortifications and military operations, that somewhere
along the Allegheny Mountain chain a small force could achieve those
objectives.
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.”
[Illustration: 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.
[Illustration: Samuel Gridley Howe]
[Illustration: Thomas Wentworth Higginson]
[Illustration: Franklin B. Sanborn]
[Illustration: George Luther Stearns]
[Illustration: Gerrit Smith]
[Illustration: 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.