THE MAKING OF THE MAN
“There was a man called of God and his name was John.”
A tall big boy of twelve or fifteen, “barefoot and bareheaded, with
buckskin breeches, suspended often with one leather strap over his
shoulder”[3] roamed in the forests of northern Ohio. He remembered the
days of his coming to the strange wild land—the lowing oxen, the great
white wagon that wandered from Connecticut to Pennsylvania and over the
swelling hills and mountains, where the wide-eyed urchin of five sat
staring at the new world of a wild beast and the wilder brown men. Then
came life itself in its realness—the driving of cows and the killing of
rattlesnakes, and swift free rides on great mornings alone with earth
and tree and the sky. He became “a rambler in the wild new country,
finding birds and squirrels and sometimes a wild turkey’s nest.” At
first, the Indians filled him with a strange fear. But his kindly old
father thought of Indians as neither vermin nor property and this fear
“soon wore off and he used to hang about them quite as much as was
consistent with good manners.”
The tragedy and comedy of this broad silent life turned on things
strangely simple and primitive—the stealing of “three large brass pins”;
the disappearance of the wonderful yellow marble which an Indian boy had
given him; the love and losing of a little bob-tailed squirrel for which
he wept and hunted the world in vain; finally the shadow of death which
is ever here—the death of a ewe-lamb and the death of the boy’s mother.
All these things happened before he was eight and they were his main
education. He could dress leather and make whip-lashes; he could herd
cattle and talk Indian; but of books and formal schooling he had little.
“John was never quarrelsome, but was excessively fond of the hardest and
roughest kind of plays, and could never get enough of them. Indeed when
for a short time, he was sometimes sent to school, the opportunity it
afforded to wrestle and snowball and run and jump and knock off old
seedy wool hats, offered to him almost the only compensation for the
confinements and restraints of school.
“With such a feeling and but little chance of going to school at all, he
did not become much of a scholar. He would always choose to stay at home
and work hard rather than be sent to school.” Consequently, “he learned
nothing of grammar, nor did he get at school so much knowledge of common
arithmetic as the four ground rules.”
Almost his only reading at the age of ten was a little history to which
the open bookcase of an old friend tempted him. He knew nothing of games
or sports; he had few or no companions, but, “to be sent off through the
wilderness alone to very considerable distances was particularly his
delight.... By the time he was twelve years old he was sent off more
than a hundred miles with companies of cattle.” So his soul grew apart
and alone and yet untrammeled and unconfined, knowing all the depths of
secret self-abasement, and the heights of confident self-will. With
others he was painfully diffident and bashful, and little sins that
smaller souls would laugh at and forget loomed large and awful to his
heart-searching vision. John had “a very bad foolish habit.... I mean
telling lies, generally to screen himself from blame or from
punishment,” because “he could not well endure to be reproached and I
now think had he been oftener encouraged to be entirely frank ... he
would not have been so often guilty of this fault, nor have been (in
after life) obliged to struggle so long with so mean a habit.”
Such a nature was in its very essence religious, even mystical, but
never superstitious nor blindly trustful in half-known creeds and
formulas. His family was not rigidly Puritan in its thought and
discipline but had rather fallen into the mild heathenism of the
hard-working frontier until just before John’s birth. Then, his father
relates in quaint Calvinistic _patois_: “I lived at home in 1782; this
was a memorable year, as there was a great revival of religion in the
town of Canton. My mother and my older sisters and brother John dated
their hopes of salvation from that summer’s revival under the ministry
of the Rev. Edward Mills. I cannot say as I was a subject of the work;
but this I can say that I then began to hear preaching. I can now
recollect most if not all of those I heard preach, and what their texts
were. The change in our family was great; family worship set up by
brother John was ever afterward continued. There was a revival of
singing in Canton and our family became singers. Conference meetings
were kept up constantly and singing meetings—all of which brought our
family into a very good association—a very great aid of restraining
grace.”
Thus this young freeman of the woods was born into a religious
atmosphere; not that of stern, intellectual Puritanism, but of a milder
and a more sensitive type. Even this, however, the naturally skeptical
bent of his mind did not receive unquestioningly. The doctrines of his
day and church did not wholly satisfy him and he became only “to some
extent a convert to Christianity.” One answer to his questionings did
come, however, bearing its own wonderful credentials—and credentials all
the more wonderful to the man of few books and narrow knowledge of the
world of thought—the English Bible. He grew to be “a firm believer in
the divine authenticity of the Bible. With this book he became very
familiar.” He read and reread it; he committed long passages to memory;
he copied the simple vigor of its English, and wove into the very
essence of his being, its history, poetry, philosophy and truth. To him
the cruel grandeur of the Old Testament was as true as the love and
sacrifice of the New, and both mingled to mold his soul. “This will give
you some general idea of the first fifteen years of his life, during
which time he became very strong and large of his age, and ambitious to
perform the full labor of a man at almost any kind of hard work.”
Young John Brown’s first broad contact with life and affairs came with
the War of 1812, during which Hull’s disastrous campaign brought the
scene of fighting near his western home. His father, a simple wandering
old soul, thrifty without foresight, became a beef contractor, and the
boy drove his herds of cattle and hung about the camp. He met men of
position, was praised for his prowess and let listen to talk that seemed
far beyond his years. Yet he was not deceived. The war he felt was real
war and not the war of fame and fairy tale. He saw shameful defeat,
heard treason broached, and knew of cheating and chicanery. Disease and
death left its slimy trail as it crept homeward through the town of
Hudson from Detroit: “The effect of what he saw during the war went so
far to disgust him with military affairs that he would neither train nor
drill.”
But in all these early years of the making of this man, one incident
stands out as foretaste and prophecy—an incident of which we know only
the indefinite outline, and yet one which unconsciously foretold to the
boy the life deed of the man. It was during the war that a certain
landlord welcomed John to his home whither the boy had ridden with
cattle, a hundred miles through the wilderness. He praised the big,
grave and bashful lad to his guests and made much of him. John, however,
discovered something far more interesting than praise and good food in
the landlord’s parlor, and that was another boy in the landlord’s yard.
Fellow souls were scarce with this backwoodsman and his diffidence
warmed to the kindly welcome of the stranger, especially because he was
black, half-naked, and wretched. In John’s very ears the kind voices of
the master and his folk turned to harsh abuse with this black boy. At
night the slave lay in the bitter cold and once they beat the wretched
thing before John’s very eyes with an iron shovel, and again and again
struck him with any weapon that chanced. In wide-eyed silence John
looked on and questioned, Was the boy bad or stupid? No, he was active,
intelligent and with the great warm sympathy of his race did the
stranger “numerous little acts of kindness,” so that John readily, in
his straightforward candor, acknowledged him “fully if not more than his
equal.” That the black worked and worked hard and steadily was in John’s
eyes no hardship—rather a pleasure. Was not the world work? But that
this boy was fatherless and motherless, and that all slaves must of
necessity be fatherless and motherless with none to protect them or
provide for them, save at the will or caprice of the master—this was to
the half-grown man a thing of fearful portent and he asked, “Is God
their Father?” And what he asked, a million and a half black bondmen
were asking through the land.