OLD JOHN BROWN
THE MAN WHOSE SOUL IS MARCHING ON
by
WALTER HAWKINS
PREFACE
This book is for busy people who have not the time to read at large
upon the subject. Those who would adequately master all the bearings
of the story here briefly told must read American history, for which
facilities are rapidly increasing. As to John Brown himself, his
friend F. B. Sanborn's LIFE AND LETTERS is a mine of wealth. To its
pages the present writer is greatly indebted, and he commends them to
others.
W. H.
Kilburn, May 1913.
CONTENTS
I. WHY WE WRITE OUR STORY
II. CHILDWOOD AND THE VOW
III. THE LONG WAITING-TIME
IV. HOW THE CALL CAME
V. BIBLE AND SWORD
VI. THE UNDERGROUND RAILWAY
VII. HARPER'S FERRY
VIII. THE HALT OF THE BODY AND THE MARCH OF THE SOUL
CHAPTER I
WHY WE WRITE OUR STORY
There are few who have not a dim notion of John Brown as a name bound
up with the stirring events of the United States in the period which
preceded the Civil War and the emancipation of the slave. Many English
readers, however, do not get beyond the limits of the famous couplet,
John Brown's body lies mouldering in the grave,
But his soul is marching on.
That statement is authentic in both its clauses, but it is interesting
to learn what he did with the body before it commenced a dissolution
which seems to have been regarded as worth recording. Carlyle says in
his grimly humorous way of the gruesome elevation of the head of one of
his patriotic heroes on Temple Bar, 'It didn't matter: he had quite
done with it.' And we might say the same of the body which was hanged
at Charlestown in 1859. In his devoutly fatalistic way John Brown had
presented his body a living sacrifice to the cause of human freedom,
and had at last slowly reached the settled opinion that it was worth
more to the cause dead than alive. Such a soul, so masterful in its
treatment of the body, was likely to march on without it. And it did in
the years that followed, This Abolitionist raider, with a rashness
often sublime in its devotion, precipitated the national crisis which
issued in the Civil War and Emancipation.
There are lives of brave men which set us thinking for the most part of
human power and skill: we watch bold initiators of some wise policy
carrying their enterprise through with indomitable courage and
in-exhaustible patience, and we are lost in admiration of the hero.
But there are other brave lives which leave us thinking more of unseen
forces which impelled them than of their own splendid qualities. They
never seem masters of destiny, but its intrepid servants. They shape
events while they hardly know how or why; they seem to be rather driven
by fate than to be seeking fame or power. They go out like Abraham,
'not knowing whither they go,' only that, like him, they have heard a
call. Sometimes they sorely tax the loyalty of their admirers with
their eccentricities and their defiance of the conventions of their
age. Wisdom is only justified of these, her strange children, in the
next generation. Prominent among such lives is that of John Brown.
The conscience of the Northern States on the question of slavery needed
but some strong irritant to arouse it to vigorous action, and, the
hanging of John Brown sufficed.
The institution of slavery became both ridiculous and hateful to
multitudes because so good a man must be done to death to preserve it.
The verdict of Victor Hugo, 'What the South slew last December was not
John Brown, but slavery,' found an echo in many minds. And when the
long, fierce conflict, through which Emancipation came, was begun, the
quaint lines,
John Brown's body lies mouldering in the grave,
But his soul is marching on,
became one of the mightiest of the battle-songs which urged the Federal
hosts to victory. His name kindled the flame of that passion for
freedom which made the cause of the North triumphant, and there was awe
mingled with the love they bore his memory. Perhaps no man had been
oftener called with plausible reason a fool; but those who knew the
single-hearted devotion to a great cause of this ready victim of the
gallows came reverently to think of him as 'God's fool.' When they
sang 'John Brown died that the slave might be free' they were singing
more than a record of John Brown's generous motive; it was a record of
one of God's strange counsels. 'For God chose the foolish things of
the world that He might put to shame the things that are strong, and
the base things of the world, and the things that are despised, did God
choose, yea, and the things that are not, that He might bring to nought
the things that are, that no flesh should glory before God.' Verily,
then, it might seem worth while to set the story of John Brown in such
a plain, brief form as to make it available for busy folk who have no
time to read longer accounts of him. If it sets some thinking of the
ways of God rather than admiring John Brown, that will be just what he
would have ardently wished who desired always that God should be
magnified in his body, whether in the fighting which he never loved and
never shirked, or the hanging which he often foresaw and never feared.