THE WANDERJAHRE
“Where is the promise of His coming? For since the fathers fell
asleep, all things continue as they were from the beginning of the
creation.”
In 1819 a tall, sedate, dignified young man named John Brown was entered
among the students of the Rev. Moses Hallock at Plainfield, Mass., where
men were prepared for Amherst College. He was beginning his years of
wandering—spiritual searching for the way of life, physical wandering in
the wilderness where he must earn his living. In after years he wrote to
a boy:
“I wish you to have some definite plan. Many seem to have none; others
never stick to any that they do form. This was not the case with John.
He followed up with great tenacity whatever he set about as long as it
answered his general purpose; hence he rarely failed in some degree to
effect the things he undertook. This was so much the case that he
habitually expected to succeed in his undertakings.”[4] In this case he
expected to get an education and he came to his task equipped with that
rare mixture of homely thrift and idealism which characterized his whole
life. His father could do little to help him, for the war was followed
by the “hard times” which are the necessary fruit of fighting. As the
father wrote: “Money became scarce, property fell and that which I
thought well bought would not bring its cost. I had made three or four
large purchases, in which I was a heavy loser.”
It was therefore as a poor boy ready to work his way that John started
out at Plainfield. The son of the principal tells how “he brought with
him a piece of sole leather about a foot square, which he had himself
tanned for seven years, to resole his boots. He had also a piece of
sheepskin which he had tanned, and of which he cut some strips about an
eighth of an inch wide, for other students to pull upon. Father took one
string, and winding it around his finger said with a triumphant turn of
the eye and mouth, ‘I shall snap it.’ The very marked, yet kind
immovableness of the young man’s face on seeing father’s defeat,
father’s own look, and the position of the people and the things in the
old kitchen somehow gave me a fixed recollection of this little
incident.”[5]
But all his thrift and planning here were doomed to disappointment. He
was, one may well believe, no brilliant student, and his only chance of
success lay in long and steady application. This he was prepared to make
when inflammation of the eyes set in, of so grave a type that all hopes
of long study must be given up. Several times before he had attempted
regular study, but for the most part these excursions to New England
schools had been but tentative flashes on a background of hard work in
his father’s Hudson tannery: “From fifteen to twenty years of age he
spent most of his time working at the tanner’s and currier’s trade;” and
yet, naturally, ever looking here and there in the world to find his
place. And that place, he came gradually to decide in his quiet firm
way, was to be an important one. He felt he could do things; he grew
used to guiding and commanding men. He kept his own lonely home and was
both foreman and cook in the tannery. His “close attention to business
and success in its management, together with the way he got along with a
company of men and boys, made him quite a favorite with the serious and
more intelligent portion of older persons. This was so much the case and
secured for him so many little notices from those he esteemed, that his
vanity was very much fed by it, and he came forward to manhood quite
full of self-conceit and self-confidence, notwithstanding his extreme
bashfulness. The habit so early formed of being obeyed rendered him in
after life too much disposed to speak in an imperious or dictating
way.”[6] Thus he spoke of himself, but others saw only that peculiar
consciousness of strength and quiet self-confidence, which characterized
him later on.
Just how far his failure to get a college training was a disappointment
to John Brown one is not able to say with certainty. It looks, however,
as if his attempts at higher training were rather the obedient following
of the conventional path, by a spirit which would never have found in
those fields congenial pasture. One suspects that the final decision
that college was impossible came to this strong free spirit with a
certain sense of relief—a relief marred only by the perplexity of
knowing what ought to be the path for his feet, if the traditional way
to accomplishment and distinction was closed.
That he meant to be not simply a tanner was disclosed in all his doing
and thinking. He undertook to study by himself, mastering common
arithmetic and becoming in time an expert surveyor. He “early in life
began to discover a great liking to fine cattle, horses, sheep, and
swine.” Meantime, however, the practical economic sense of his day and
occupation pointed first of all to marriage, as his father, who had had
three wives and sixteen or more children, was at pains to impress upon
him. Nor was John Brown himself disinclined. He was as he quaintly says,
“naturally fond of females, and withal extremely diffident.” One can
easily imagine the deep disappointment of this grave young man in his
first unfortunate love affair, when he felt With many another unloved
heart, this old world through, “a steady, strong desire to die.”
But youth is stronger even than first love, and the widow who came to
keep house for him had a grown daughter, a homely, good-hearted and
simple-minded country lass; the natural result was that John Brown was
married at the age of twenty to Dianthe Lusk, whom he describes as “a
remarkably plain, but neat, industrious and economical girl, of
excellent character, earnest piety and practical common sense.”[7]
Then ensued a period of life which puzzles the casual onlooker with its
seemingly aimless changing character, its wandering restlessness, its
planless wavering. He was now a land surveyor, now a tanner and now a
lumber dealer; a postmaster, a wool-grower, a stock-raiser, a shepherd,
and a farmer. He lived at Hudson, at Franklin and at Richfield in Ohio;
in Pennsylvania, New York, and Massachusetts. And yet in all this
wavering and wandering, there were certain great currents of growth,
purpose and action. First of all he became the father of a family: in
the eleven years from 1821 to 1832, seven children were born—six sons
and one girl. The patriarchal ideal of family life handed down by his
fathers, strengthened by his own saturation in Hebrew poetry, and by his
own bent, grew up in his home.
His eldest son and daughter tell many little incidents illustrating his
family government: “Our house, on a lane which connects two main roads,
was built under father’s direction in 1824, and still stands much as he
built it with the garden and orchard around it which he laid out. In the
rear of the house was then a wood, now gone, on a knoll leading down to
the brook which supplied the tan-pits.”[8]
“Father used to hold all his children while they were little at night
and sing his favorite songs,” says the eldest daughter. “The first
recollection I have of father was being carried through a piece of woods
on Sunday to attend a meeting held at a neighbor’s house. After we had
been at the house a little while, father and mother stood up and held
us, while the minister put water on our faces. After we sat down father
wiped my face with a brown silk handkerchief with yellow spots on it in
diamond shape. It seemed beautiful to me and I thought how good he was
to wipe my face with that pretty handkerchief. He showed a great deal of
tenderness in that and other ways. He sometimes seemed very stern and
strict with me, yet his tenderness made me forget he was stern....
“When he would come home at night tired out with labor, he would before
going to bed, ask some of the family to read chapters (as was his usual
course night and morning); and would almost always say: ‘Read one of
David’s Psalms.’...
“Whenever he and I were alone, he never failed to give me the best of
advice, just such as a true and anxious mother would give a daughter. He
always seemed interested in my work, and would come around and look at
it when I was sewing or knitting; and when I was learning to spin he
always praised me if he saw that I was improving. He used to say: ‘Try
to do whatever you do in the very best possible manner.’”[9]
“Father had a rule not to threaten one of his children. He commanded and
there was obedience,” writes his eldest son. “My first apprenticeship to
the tanning business consisted of a three years’ course at grinding bark
with a blind horse. This, after months and years, became slightly
monotonous. While the other children were out at play in the sunshine,
where the birds were singing, I used to be tempted to let the old horse
have a rather long rest, especially when father was absent from home;
and I would then join the others at their play. This subjected me to
frequent admonitions and to some corrections for eye-service as father
termed it.... He finally grew tired of these frequent slight admonitions
for my laziness and other shortcomings, and concluded to adopt with me a
sort of book-account something like this:
“John, Jr.,
“For disobeying mother—8 lashes.
“For unfaithfulness at work—3 lashes.
“For telling a lie—8 lashes.
“This account he showed to me from time to time. On a certain Sunday
morning he invited me to accompany him from the house to the tannery,
saying that he had concluded it was time for a settlement. We went into
the upper or finishing room, and after a long and tearful talk over my
faults, he again showed me my account, which exhibited a fearful footing
up of debits. I had no credits or offsets and was of course bankrupt. I
then paid about one-third of the debt, reckoned in strokes from a nicely
prepared blue-beach switch, laid on ‘masterly.’ Then to my utter
astonishment, father stripped off his shirt and seating himself on a
block gave me the whip and bade me lay it on to his bare back. I dared
not refuse to obey, but at first I did not strike hard. ‘Harder,’ he
said, ‘harder, harder!’ until he received the balance of the account.
Small drops of blood showed on his back where the tip end of the
tingling beach cut through. Thus ended the account and settlement, which
was also my first practical illustration of the doctrine of the
atonement.”[10]
Even the girls did not escape whipping. “He used to whip me often for
telling lies,” says a daughter, “but I can’t remember his ever punishing
me but once when I thought I didn’t deserve, and then he looked at me so
stern that I didn’t dare to tell the truth. He had such a way of saying,
‘Tut, tut!’ if he saw the first sign of a lie in us, that he often
frightened us children.
“When I first began to go to school,” she continues, “I found a piece of
calico one day behind one of the benches—it was not large, but seemed
quite a treasure to me, and I did not show it to any one until I got
home. Father heard me then telling about it and said, ‘Don’t you know
what girl lost it?’ I told him I did not. ‘Well, when you go to school
to-morrow take it with you and find out if you can who lost it. It is a
trifling thing but always remember that if you should lose anything you
valued, no matter how small, you would want the person who found it to
give it back to you.’” He “showed a great deal of tenderness to me,”
continues the daughter, “and one thing I always noticed was my father’s
peculiar tenderness and devotion to his father. In cold weather he
always tucked the bedclothes around grandfather when he went to bed, and
would get up in the night to ask him if he slept warm—always seeming so
kind and loving to him that his example was beautiful to see.”
Especially were his sympathy and devotion evident in sickness: “When his
children were ill with scarlet fever, he took care of us himself and if
he saw persons coming to the house, would go to the gate and meet them,
not wishing them to come in, for fear of spreading the disease.[11]...
When any of the family were sick he did not often trust watchers to care
for the sick one, but sat up himself and was like a tender mother. At
one time he sat up every night for two weeks while mother was sick, for
fear he would oversleep if he went to bed, and then the fire would go
out and she take cold.”[12]
The death of one little girl shows how deeply he could be moved: “He
spared no pains in doing all that medical skill could do for her
together with the tenderest care and nursing. The time that he could be
at home was mostly spent in caring for her. He sat up nights to keep an
even temperature in the room, and to relieve mother from the constant
care which she had through the day. He used to walk with the child and
sing to her so much that she soon learned his step. When she heard him
coming up the steps to the door, she would reach out her hands and cry
for him to take her. When his business at the wool store crowded him so
much that he did not have time to take her, he would steal around
through the wood-shed into the kitchen to eat his dinner, and not go
into the dining-room where she could see or hear him. I used to be
charmed myself with his singing to her. He noticed a change in her one
morning and told us he thought she would not live through the day, and
came home several times to see her. A little before noon he came home
and looked at her and said, ‘She is almost gone.’ She heard him speak,
opened her eyes and put up her little wasted hands with such a pleading
look for him to take her that he lifted her up from the cradle with the
pillows she was lying on, and carried her until she died. He was very
calm, closed her eyes, folded her hands and laid her in her cradle. When
she was buried father broke down completely and sobbed like a
child.”[13]
Dianthe Lusk, John Brown’s first wife, died in childbirth, August 10,
1832, having borne him seven children, two of whom died very young. On
July 11, 1833, now thirty-three years of age, he married Mary Ann Day, a
girl of seventeen, only five years older than his oldest child. She bore
him thirteen children, seven of whom died young. Thus seven sons and
four daughters grew to maturity and his wife, Mary, survived him
twenty-five years. It was, all told, a marvelous family—large and
well-disciplined, yet simple almost to poverty, and hard-working. No
sooner were the children grown than the wise father ceased to command
and simply asked or advised. He wrote to his eldest son when first he
started in life in characteristic style:
“I think the situation in which you have been placed by Providence at
this early period of your life will afford to yourself and others some
little test of the sway you may be expected to exert over minds in after
life and I am glad on the whole to have you brought in some measure to
the test in your youth. If you cannot now go into a disorderly country
school and gain its confidence and esteem, and reduce it to good order
and waken up the energies and the very soul of every rational being in
it—yes, of every mean, ill-behaved, ill-governed boy and girl that
compose it, and secure the good-will of the parents,—then how are you to
stimulate asses to attempt a passage of the Alps? If you run with
footmen and they should weary you, how should you contend with horses?
If in the land of peace they have wearied you, then how will you do in
the swelling of Jordan? Shall I answer the question myself? ‘If any man
lack wisdom, let him ask of God, who giveth liberally and upbraideth
not.’”[14]
Not that Brown was altogether satisfied with his method of dealing with
his children; he said to his wife: “If the large boys do wrong, call
them alone into your room and expostulate with them kindly, and see if
you cannot reach them by a kind but powerful appeal to their honor. I do
not claim that such a theory accords very well with my practice; I
frankly confess it does not; but I want your face to shine even if my
own should be dark and cloudy.”[15]
The impression which he made on his own family was marvelous. A
granddaughter writes me of him, saying: “The attitude of John Brown’s
family and descendants has always been one of exceeding reverence toward
him. This speaks for something. Stern, unyielding, Puritanic, requiring
his wife and daughters to dress in sober brown, disliking show and
requesting that mourning colors be not worn for him—a custom which still
obtains with us—laying the rod heavily upon his boys for their boyish
pranks, he still was wonderfully tender—would invariably walk up hill
rather than burden his horse, loved his family devotedly, and when
sickness occurred, always installed himself as nurse.”
In his personal habits he was austere: severely clean, sparing in his
food so far as to count butter an unnecessary luxury; once a moderate
user of cider and wine—then a strong teetotaler; a lover of horses with
harassing scruples as to breeding race-horses. All this gave an air of
sedateness and maturity to John Brown’s earlier manhood which belied his
years. Having married at twenty, he was but twenty-one years older than
his eldest son; and while his many children and his varied occupations
made him seem prematurely aged, he was, in fact, during this period,
during the years from twenty to forty, experiencing the great formative
development of his spiritual life. This development was most interesting
and fruitful.
He was not a man of books: he had Rollins’ _Ancient History_, Josephus
and Plutarch and lives of Napoleon and Cromwell. With these went
Baxter’s _Saints’ Rest_, Henry _On Meekness_ and _Pilgrim’s Progress_.
“But above all others the Bible was his favorite volume and he had such
perfect knowledge of it that when any person was reading he would
correct the least mistake.”[16]
Into John Brown’s religious life entered two strong elements; the sense
of overruling inexorable fate, and the mystery and promise of death. He
pored over the Old Testament until the freer religious skepticism of his
earlier youth became more formal and straight. The brother of his first
wife says, “Brown was an austere fellow,” and when the young man called
on the sister and mother Sundays, as his only holiday, Brown said to
him: “Milton, I wish you would not make your visits here on the
Sabbath.”
When the panic of 1837 nearly swept Brown from his feet, he saw behind
it the image of the old Hebrew God and wrote his wife: “We all must try
to trust in Him who is very gracious and full of compassion and of
almighty power; for those that do will not be made ashamed. Ezra the
prophet prayed and afflicted himself before God, when himself and the
Captivity were in a strait and I have no doubt you will join with me
under similar circumstances. Don’t get discouraged, any of you, but hope
in God, and try all to serve Him with a perfect heart.”[17]
When Napoleon III seized France and Kossuth came to America, Brown
looked with lofty contempt on the “great excitement” which “seems to
have taken all by surprise.” “I have only to say in regard to those
things, I rejoice in them from the full belief that God is carrying out
His eternal purpose in them all.”[18]
The gloom and horror of life settled early on John Brown. His childhood
had had little formal pleasure, his young manhood had been serious and
filled with responsibility, and almost before he himself knew the full
meaning of life, he was trying to teach it to his children. The iron of
bitterness entered his soul with the coming of death, and a deep
religious fear and foreboding bore him down as it took away member after
member of his family. In 1831 he lost a boy of four and in 1832 his
first wife died insane, and her infant son was buried with her. In 1843
four children varying in ages from one to nine years were swept away.
Two baby girls went in 1846 and 1859 and an infant boy in 1852. The
struggle of a strong man to hold his faith is found in his words, “God
has seen fit to visit us with the pestilence and four of our number
sleep in the dust; four of us that are still living have been more or
less unwell.... This has been to us all a bitter cup indeed and we have
drunk deeply; but still the Lord reigneth and blessed be His holy name
forever.” Again three years later he writes his wife from the edge of a
new-made grave: “I feel assured that notwithstanding that God has
chastised us often and sore, yet He has not entirely withdrawn Himself
from us nor forsaken us utterly. The sudden and dreadful manner in which
He has seen fit to call our dear little Kitty to take her leave of us,
is, I need not tell you how much, in my mind. But before Him I will bow
my head in submission and hold my peace.... I have sailed over a
somewhat stormy sea for nearly half a century, and have experienced
enough to teach me thoroughly that I may most reasonably buckle up and
be prepared for the tempest. Mary, let us try to maintain a cheerful
self-command while we are tossing up and down, and let our motto still
be action, action,—as we have but one life to live.”[19]
His soul gropes for light in the great darkness: “Sometimes my
imagination follows those of my family who have passed behind the
scenes; and I would almost rejoice to be permitted to make them a
personal visit. I have outlived nearly half of all my numerous family,
and I ought to realize that in any event a large proportion of my life
is traveled over.”[20]
Then there rose grimly, as life went on in its humdrum round of failure
and trouble, the thought that in some way his own sin and shortcomings
were bringing upon him the vengeful punishment of God. He laments the
fact that he has done little to help others and the world: “I feel
considerable regret by turns that I have lived so many years and have in
reality done so little to increase the amount of human happiness. I
often regret that my manner is not more kind and affectionate to those I
really love and esteem. But I trust my friends will overlook my harsh
rough ways, when I cease to be in their way as an occasion of pain and
unhappiness.”[21]
The death of a friend fills him with self-reproach: “You say he expected
to die, but do not say how he felt in regard to the change as it drew
near. I have to confess my unfaithfulness to my friend in regard to his
most important interest.... When I think how very little influence I
have even tried to use with my numerous acquaintances and friends in
turning their minds toward God and heaven, I feel justly condemned as a
most wicked and slothful servant; and the more so as I have very seldom
had any one refuse to listen when I earnestly called him to hear. I
sometimes have dreadful reflections about having fled to go down to
Tarshish.”[22]
Especially did the religious skepticism of his children, so like his own
earlier wanderings, worry and dismay the growing man until it loomed
before his vision as his great sin, calling for mighty atonement. He
pleads with his older children continually:
“My attachments to this world have been very strong and divine
Providence has been cutting me loose, one cord after another. Up to the
present time notwithstanding I have so much to remind me that all ties
must soon be severed, I am still clinging like those who have hardly
taken a single lesson. I really hope some of my family may understand
that this world is not the home of man, and act in accordance. Why may I
not hope this for you? When I look forward as regards the religious
prospects of my numerous family—the most of them,—I am forced to say,
and feel too, that I have little—very little to cheer. That this should
be so is, I perfectly well understand, the legitimate fruit of my own
planting; and that only increases my punishment. Some ten or twelve
years ago I was cheered with the belief that my elder children had
chosen the Lord to be their God and I relied much on their influence and
example in atoning for my deficiency and bad example with the younger
children. But where are we now? Several have gone where neither a good
nor a bad example from me will better their condition or prospects or
make them worse. I will not dwell longer on this distressing subject but
only say that so far as I have gone it is from no disposition to reflect
on any one but myself. I think I can clearly discover where I wandered
from the road. How now to get on it with my family is beyond my ability
to _see_ or my courage to _hope_. God grant you thorough conversion from
sin, and full purpose of heart to continue steadfast in His way through
the very short season you will have to pass.”[23]
And again he writes: “One word in regard to the religious belief of
yourself and the ideas of several of my children. My affections are too
deep-rooted to be alienated from them; but ‘my gray hairs must go down
in sorrow to the grave’ unless the true God forgive their denial and
rejection of Him and open their eyes.”
And again: “I would fain hope that the spirit of God has not done
striving in our hard hearts. I sometimes feel encouraged to hope that my
sons will give up their miserable delusions and believe in God and in
His Son, our Saviour.”[24]
All this is evidence of a striving soul, of a man to whom the world was
a terribly earnest thing. Here was neither the smug content of the man
beyond religious doubt, nor the carelessness of the unharassed
conscience. To him the world was a mighty drama. God was an actor in the
play and so was John Brown. But just what his part was to be his soul in
the long agony of years tried to know, and ever and again the chilling
doubt assailed him lest he be unworthy of his place or had missed the
call. Often the brooding masculine mind which demanded “Action! Action!”
sought to pierce the mystic veil. His brother-in-law became a
spiritualist, and he himself hearkened for voices from the Other Land.
Once or twice he thought he heard them. Did not the spirit of Dianthe
Lusk guide him again and again in his perplexity? He once said it did.
And so this saturation in Hebrew prophecy, the chastisement of death,
the sense of personal sin and shortcoming and the voices from nowhere,
deepened, darkened and broadened his religious life. Yet with all this
there went a peculiar common sense, a spirit of thrift and stickling for
detail, a homely shrewd attention to all the little facts of daily
existence. Sometimes this prosaic tinkering with things burdened, buried
and submerged the spiritual life and striving. There was nothing left
except the commonplace, unstable tanner, but ever as one is tempted thus
to fix his place in the world, there wells up surging spiritual life out
of great unfathomed depths—the intellectual longing to see, the moral
wistfulness of the hesitating groping doer. This was the deeper, truer
man, although it was not the whole man. “Certainly I never felt myself
in the presence of a stronger religious influence than while in this
man’s house,” said Frederick Douglass in 1847.