existed all over the North, and even to some extent in the border
slave states. To help fugitive slaves on their way to freedom became a
passionate occupation of young and old, however, only after Garrison’s
doctrines had given a religious sanction to the practice. Social
conditions in America, at this time, led to a confusion of moral ideas
and sometimes to a perversion of the moral sense. We are familiar with
the perplexities that distressed tender-hearted people in the border
free states. In the border slave states moral questions were equally
complex. There is a page or two in Huckleberry Finn in which Mark Twain
has depicted the feelings of a boy, living in the border slave state
Missouri, as to the ethics of helping a runaway slave to escape. Surely
the passage is among the greatest pages which that great author ever
penned....
I says; “All right; but wait a minute. There’s one more thing--a thing
that nobody don’t know but me. And that is, there’s a nigger here that
I’m trying to steal out of slavery, and his name is Jim--old Miss
Watson’s Jim.”
He says: “What! Why Jim is--” He stopped and went to studying.
I says: “I know what you’ll say. You’ll say its dirty, low-down
business; but what if it is? _I’m_ low down; and I’m going to
steal him and I want you to keep mum and not let on. Will you?”
His eye lit up, and he says: “I’ll _help_ you steal him!”
Well, I let go all holts then, like I was shot. It was the most
astonishing speech I ever heard--and I’m bound to say Tom Sawyer fell
considerable in my estimation. Only I couldn’t believe it. Tom Sawyer
a _nigger stealer_!...
Well, one thing was dead sure, and that was that Tom Sawyer was in
earnest, and was actually going to help steal that nigger out of
slavery. That was the thing that was too many for me. Here was a boy
that was respectable and well brung up; and had a character to lose,
and folks at home that had characters; and he was bright and not
leather-headed; and knowing and not ignorant, and not mean, but kind;
and yet here he was, without any more pride, or rightness, or feeling,
than to stoop to this business, and make himself a shame, and his
family a shame, before everybody. I _couldn’t_ understand it no
way at all. It was outrageous, and I knowed I ought to just up and tell
him so; and so be his true friend, and let him quit the thing right
where he was and save himself. And I _did_ start to tell him;
but he shut me up and says: “Don’t you reckon I know what I’m about?”
“Yes.” “Didn’t I say I’d steal him?” “Yes.” “Well, then.” That’s all he
said and that’s all I said....
That the angel-minded Dr. Howe should have headed a vigilance committee
was no more extraordinary than many other strange and terrible things
in that epoch. Dr. Howe was perhaps by nature and early experience
fitted to head such a committee; but nothing could be farther removed
from such work than the twenty years of peaceful work in philanthropy
which had followed his stormy youth; above all, he was no longer young.
At forty-five a man cannot learn a new trade. Howe could not meet
the world on a political basis or express himself through political
agencies--whether through the constitutional vehicles of legislature,
party, and public meeting--or through the improvised vehicles of
vigilance committee and underground railroad. His activity in both of
these fields was splendid, yet lame; it was the work of a man who only
half understood his own function. In his own work, the only realities
for him are metaphysical realities. But in politics, he has the mind of
an ordinary man; his thought creeps from point to point, treats human
institutions with respect, and subordinates itself to the opinions of
other people. It is positively amazing to find Howe, the pioneer, the
fire-brand--or rather the torch-bearer--in one department of thought,
becoming a mere linkboy in another and nearly allied department.
Howe’s incapacity for leadership in politics was first shown during the
Freesoil movement. The “Coalition” which the Freesoilers made with the
Democrats in Massachusetts, soon after Webster’s defection in 1850,
was one of those political unions which are nowadays called “deals.”
Persons of conflicting principles join together in order to defeat a
common opponent, and, of course, to divide the offices. Some people
object to such deals on the ground that there is always an element
of betrayal, a lie, a debauchery of conscience somewhere and somehow
involved in them.
The coalition which Dr. Howe’s associates entered into was very
famous at the time and thereafter. I will not attempt to define its
immorality; but I will only say that it was, as Richard H. Dana Jr.
notes in his diary, “an error in moral science.” Dr. Howe did not, in
political matters, understand his own nature sufficiently to keep clear
of this coalition. He plunged into it. He was never happy thereafter.
It violated his conscience and plagued him for years. He could never
forgive the leaders of the Freesoil party, nor forget the treason. He
writes to Sumner in 1852: “I have always had an instinct in me which
I have never been able to body forth clearly--which tells me that all
this manœuvring and political expediency is all wrong, and that each
man should go for the right regardless of others.”
And again in 1853: “Now every element in my nature rises up indignantly
at the thought of our principles being bartered for considerations of
a personal and selfish nature; and all my feelings bid me do what my
reason forbids--that is, make open war, cause a clean split, appeal to
the Conscience Whigs who formed the nucleus of our party, and march out
of the ranks with a banner of our own.” He makes moan throughout six
years over this coalition. As late as 1857 he still grinds his teeth.
“Not even Sumner’s election was worth the price paid by the coalition.”
This is all admirable; but it is not enough. Had Howe understood reform
politics as he understood philanthropy, had he had an early training
in reform politics, he would have taken a sledge-hammer and battered
the coalition in public. If the matter had occurred in philanthropy,
Howe would have cleared the air. If, for instance, Dr. Howe had
returned from Europe and found Charles Sumner giving Laura Bridgman
dogmatic religious instruction, he would have stopped it; yes, even
if he had been obliged to placard the town against the Sumner. But in
politics he was helpless. As to the Whigs, he says: “I have done what I
could, for where else can I go? Under what organization can I fight in
this terrible emergency?”
Alas, there is no banner for a man like Howe to fight under. He must
weave his own banner. For his own philanthropic work, Dr. Howe had done
this; but he could not do it for politics. The anti-slavery problems
came to him on top of his multitudinous activities. He was already
superhumanly active, but he was a man incapable of refusing work which
was offered to him. He took on the abolition duties in addition to
his regular work. His health broke down almost immediately; but there
was no leisure for him to attend to his health. His solution of all
problems was by work, work, work. He was not, it must be remembered,
of a thoughtful nature. His thinking was usually done for him by the
energy of his temperament, which handed him a list of agenda each
morning and at night sent him to the slumbers of fatigue. Thus there
was no very distinct philosophy underlying his course of action in
regard to slavery--no historic point of view, or reasoned theory, no
illumination.
It is very terrible to see Howe making journeys to Kansas at a time
when he should have been in bed with a sick-nurse beside him. Pegasus
at the plow is good; but this was not exactly the right plow for Howe.
The sight is a sublime one, all the same. The old buccaneer retains
an instinctive belief in force. “Force is not yet eliminated from the
means employed by God, bloodshed is necessary, bloodshed will come. But
when, but how?--Under what circumstances may we resort to it?” This
is the burden of many letters. In the meantime he and his vigilance
committee were getting into deeper water all the time with the fugitive
slave law, and with the still fiercer Kansas-Nebraska problems, until
finally matters were brought to a crisis by John Brown’s raid, of which
I must say a few words here.
It is wrong to compare John Brown with Joan of Arc, as is so often
done. John Brown’s name is stained with massacre. He is a spirit of
a far lower heaven than Joan of Arc. And yet he is to be classified
under Joan of Arc; because he is an example of the symbolism inherent
in human nature and in human society. Everyone understands both Joan
of Arc and John Brown, but nobody can explain them. It takes an epoch,
it takes the whole of a society, it takes a national and religious
birthpang to produce either Joan of Arc or John Brown. Everyone living
at the time takes some part in the episode; and thereafter, the story
remains as a symbol, an epitome of the national and religious idea,
which was born through the crisis. John Brown and his raid are an
epitome, a popular summary of the history of the United States between
the Missouri Compromise and the Gettysburg celebration. Not a child
has been born in the country since his death to whom John Brown does
not symbolize the thing that happened to the heart and brain of the
American people between 1820 and 1865. He is as big as a myth, and the
story of him is an immortal legend--perhaps the only one in our history.
The relation which the anti-slavery people bore to the John Brown
episode is that of a chorus: they hailed the coming of the Lord. It is
also that of a client: they backed him with money and arms. They are
the link between the myth and the fact. They lived inside the swirl
of rhapsody which was bearing Brown across the horizon. The progress
of righteous-minded law-breaking, which began as soon as Garrison
had explained the iniquity of the Federal Constitution, was very
rapid after the passage of the fugitive slave law in 1850. To help
fugitive slaves escape was a good training for those who were to supply
anti-slavery swords and guns to the private war in Kansas. Criticism
stands dumb before this situation: no man can tell what he himself
would have done under the circumstances. The anti-slavery scholars and
saints regarded themselves as the representatives of law and order in
fomenting this carnage; and perhaps they were.
But the mind of John Brown took one more stride, and imagined a holy
war to be begun through a slave insurrection. Nobody could have stopped
Brown: he was wound up: he was going to do the thing. He naturally
came to his Eastern partisans for support, and of course obtained a
different degree of support from each individual to whom his horrifying
scheme was disclosed. The people who would listen sifted themselves
down by natural law to half a dozen, and among this half-dozen was
Dr. Howe. Brown moved about under assumed names, and his accomplices
corresponded in cryptic language, raising money and arms. The natural
power and goodness of the man cast a spell over many who met him. It
was more than a spell, it was the presence and shadow of martyrdom.
And it fell upon the imagination of enthusiasts who had spent years
of their lives in romantic, sacrificial law-breaking. More than
this: John Brown was the living embodiment of an idea with which the
anti-slavery mind was always darkly battling--the idea of atonement,
of vicarious suffering. Howe and his associates somehow felt that they
would be untrue to themselves--false to God--if they did not help John
Brown, even if he were going to do something that would not bear the
telling. John Brown thus fulfilled the dreams of the abolitionists; he
was their man. He portended bloodshed--salvation through bloodshed.
It was to come. Brown himself hardly knew his own significance or he
would have demanded personal service, not money, from his patrons.
Suppose John Brown had said to Gerrit Smith, and to Sanborn and Howe
and Higginson and Stearns: “I do not want your money, but come with me.
And if you will not come now, yet next year you will come--and the year
after--you, and your sons by the thousand. You will follow me and you
will not return, as I shall not return.”
Brown did not say this, but the truth of it was in the sky already,
and when the raid occurred at Harper’s Ferry men shuddered not only
with horror, but with awe. The raid took place. It took place, not in
Kansas, a long way off, but within a few miles of Washington. Innocent
men were killed. No one could tell whether a slave insurrection was to
follow. A wave of panic swept across the South, and of something not
unlike panic across the North. The keynote was struck. There was no
doubt about that, anywhere. The conspirators, that is to say Brown’s
secret committee, fled to Canada, with the exception of Gerrit Smith
who went into an asylum--and of Higginson who went about his business
as usual. They burnt their papers and look legal advice as to the
law concerning conspiracy and armed rebellion. Dr. Howe, under the
belief that his doing so would somehow shield Brown, published a card
disclaiming knowledge and complicity in the raid.
It is interesting to note the various reasons which moved the
conspirators to flight, at least to contrast the reasons which they
afterward gave for their several sudden disappearances. Sanborn ran
away because he feared that if the conspirators were arrested, their
personal insignificance might damage the cause. It seemed to him “very
important that the really small extent of any movement should be
concealed and its reach and character exaggerated.” But Howe published
his disclaimer for the very opposite reason. He wished that the
smallness of extent and reach of the movement should be thoroughly well
exposed to the public. This, he thought, would “rather help Brown than
otherwise, because if he were shown to be an isolated individual acting
for himself and not the agent of others, the affair would be less
formidable and the desire for vengeance less strong.” Perhaps anyone
implicated in a terrible crime is apt to discover some reason why his
own temporary disappearance will serve the cause of righteousness.
At any rate, it is too much to expect the humor of the situation to
appear very strongly in the correspondence of the secret committee.
Dr. Howe afterward went to Washington to testify in the investigation
which followed, partly, no doubt, that he might rectify the impression
created by his card, which had led people to believe that he knew less
of Brown’s plans than was the case.
This momentary concern for their own safety a little tarnishes the
heroic glamor that hangs about the conspirators, and which in another
age would have been quickly restored by their execution. But they were
really safe. All that the South had hoped for was to implicate the
leaders of the Republican party in the raid, and in this it failed. The
panic which seized all the conspirators except Higginson was a natural
reaction in men who were dominated by another man’s idea, sustained
above themselves by another man’s will and thought. They believed they
understood; but they did not understand. When the climax came--a climax
proper to that will and thought--they were thrown to the ground. They
forsook him and fled. This does not mean that when their own hour shall
come these same men will not die cheerfully at the stake or on the
cross.
One word must be added as to the effect of casuistry upon the intellect
of those enthusiasts who backed Brown while begging him to be gentle.
Dr. Howe writes to Theodore Parker: “And I sent him a draft of fifty
dollars as an earnest of my confidence in him and faith of his adhesion
to what he so often assured me was his purpose--to avoid bloodshed
and servile insurrection.” Now Brown’s previous history and avowed
intentions made bloodshed an integral part of his scheme; and no one
knew this better than the secret committee. But destiny endows each
man with so much blindness as enables him to fulfil his part in the
drama of history. It was necessary for Dr. Howe to support John Brown.
His nature required it of him. In order to do so, it was necessary
for Howe to undergo a slight mental obfuscation; and lo, how easily
it was accomplished! He gives Brown a pistol and begs him not to use
it; he seriously remonstrates with Brown as to the stealing of horses,
even when done in aiding slaves to escape. This is not humbug but
hallucination.
It should no more be counted against Howe that he could not express
himself through the medium of politics than it is counted against
Goethe that he could not paint. To have mastered one vehicle is enough
for one man in this world. To have seen life from a point of view
which unifies contradictions, merges thought with feeling, identifies
religion and common sense, is enough to give a man a niche in the
temple of humanity--yes, even though this power of vision is accorded
to him only at moments, or when he is dealing with a particular
subject, or when he has a violin or a paint-brush in his hand.
It is the man that makes this unity--this stained-glass window through
which truth shines. The artists have had a monopoly of logic, and are
the only people who get the credit of being expressive. Yet now and
then a philosopher like Kant draws together a lot of old junk, and
thinks over it, and arranges it till it becomes--to anyone who can
follow the reasoning--a sort of cathedral of logic. Or again, a man who
is the very antipodes of Kant--a man of action who arranges nothing,
but whose thought and conduct are arranged for him by nature--becomes
so polarized and at one with himself that he sheds a sort of glow about
him; but whether this glow comes out of his words or from his conduct
and words taken together we hardly know. The vehicle is nothing; the
man is all. Such unitary natures are rare enough; and Howe, within his
own limitations, and while standing over his own tripod with his own
peculiar lyre in his hand, is one of them.
The outbreak of the war put an end to all those conditions which had
been turning human nature inside out during the fifties. It was no
longer necessary for idealism to seek its outlet in crime, nor for
half-good men to be turned into devils because they had not in them the
stuff that makes martyrs. When the war came, the average man found the
sacrifice prepared for him in a form which he could understand. He gave
himself freely. He gave all he had. There followed such an outpouring
of virtue and heroism that the crimes of all humanity might seem to
have been wiped out by it; and at the end of the war the United States
resumed her place among modern nations, and took up the conventional
problems of modern life.
During the war Dr. Howe was a member of the Sanitary Commission; and
during the remainder of his life he continued to be the greatest
authority on everything that concerned organized charity, and probably
the most active individual who had ever taken part in such things in
the United States.
In this sketch there has not been time to touch upon the international
side of Howe’s life; his relation to the liberals and philanthropists
of Europe, from Lafayette to Kossuth. I omit the picturesque episodes
which that relation gave rise to, as, for instance, Howe’s imprisonment
in Prussia in 1832, and his being chosen, at a later date, as the
depository for the stolen crown jewels of Hungary. “When the jewels
were recovered,” writes Mr. W. J. Stillman in his autobiography, “they
were to be hidden in a box of a conserve for which that vicinity was
noted, and then carried to Constantinople, from which point I was to
take charge of them and deliver them in Boston to Dr. S. G. Howe, the
well-known Philhellene.” The jewels were recovered by the Austrian
Government before they could be transferred to America, and this was,
no doubt, a fortunate outcome for all concerned. Dr. Howe’s liberalism
remained at the same temperature throughout his life. It led him in
1867 to revisit Greece for the last time, as a distributor of supplies
to the insurgent Cretans. It led him in 1871 to favor the Annexation of
Santo Domingo to the United States.
Howe died in 1876. The rapid cycle of social revolutions in the United
States which followed the Civil War, heightened the contrast between
the veteran and the new age, and strengthened the romance that had
always hung about him. To have taken part in the Greek Revolution
seemed, in 1870, almost the same thing as to have been present at the
siege of Troy. The mantle of Byron and the Isles of Greece never quite
fell from his shoulders.
Dr. Howe seems to have been one of those nimble, playful, light-footed
natures who are as strong as steel and can be as stern as steel upon
occasion. His physical endurance was so great that it led to his
habitually overtaxing himself. His excitability made him a hard man to
live with; and he was occasionally hasty, harsh, and exacting. This
irritability of Dr. Howe’s is deeply related to his whole mind and
being. He was constitutionally deficient in the power to rest. The
blind headaches which clouded the last third of his life were probably
the convulsions through which outraged nature resumed her functions.
He supposed them to be the residuum of Grecian malaria; but anyone
reading of Howe’s daily life would look for breakdown somewhere. There
is a gleaming elfin precocity about him which the human machine cannot
support forever. He was ever in action: as he so wonderfully says of
himself, “he prayed with his hands and feet.”
Dr. Howe had that kind of modesty which seems to be confined to the
heroes of romantic adventure: rough soldiers have it, and people whose
courage has been put to the proof a thousand times.
“I do assure you, my dear Sumner,” he writes in 1846, “the sort of
vulgar notoriety which follows any movement of this kind is a very
great drawback to the pleasure of making it. To the voice of praise
I am sensible, too sensible I know; but I do detest this newspaper
puffing, and I have been put to the blush very often by it.”
The following is his account of his reception by the peasants on the
Isthmus of Corinth when he was recognized in 1844.
“The whole village gathered about the house, and to make a long story
short, I went away amid demonstrations of affectionate remembrance and
continued attachment, so earnest and so obvious that they made one of
my companions shed tears, though he understood not a word of the spoken
language. But I must not enlarge on this now, for I have no time;
perhaps I ought not to do so even had I ever so much time; but you will
not, I know, suspect me of vanity in making any communications to you.”
Charles Sumner is almost the only man to whom he unbosoms himself
on such subjects: “It is quite too bad to keep people under such a
delusion about me. One gentleman, an F. R. S., writes that he wants to
see me more than any other man in Europe. He has published a little
book, with physiological reflections on privation of senses, which
he dedicates “To Dr. Howe, the ingenious and successful teacher of
Laura Bridgman.” The man looks _up_ to me; yet it is evident,
from reading his books, that he has himself tenfold more talent,
acquirement, and merit than I have or ever shall have.”... To Horace
Mann he writes in 1848, “It is absurd for me to reach up from my
littleness to tender counsel to one so high as you; but my love for you
is as great as though we stood face to face.”