THE SHEPHERD OF THE SHEEP
“And there were in the same country shepherds abiding in the field,
keeping watch over their flock by night.
“And, lo, the angel of the Lord came upon them, and the glory of the
Lord shone round about them; and they were sore afraid.”
The vastest physical fact in the life of John Brown was the Alleghany
Mountains—that beautiful mass of hill and crag which guards the sombre
majesty of the Maine coast, crumples the rivers on the rocky soil of New
England, and rolls and leaps down through busy Pennsylvania to the misty
peaks of Carolina and the red foothills of Georgia. In the Alleghanies
John Brown was all but born; their forests were his boyhood wonderland;
in their villages he married his wives and begot his clan. On the sides
of the Alleghanies, he tended his sheep and dreamed of his terrible
dream. It was the mystic, awful voice of the mountains that lured him to
liberty, death and martyrdom within their wildest fastness, and in their
bosom he sleeps his last sleep.
So, too, in the development of the United States from the War of 1812 to
the Civil War, it was the Alleghanies that formed the industrial centre
of the land and lured young men to their waters and mines, valleys and
factories, as they lured John Brown. His life from 1805 to 1854 was
almost wholly spent on the western slope of the Alleghanies in a small
area of Ohio and Pennsylvania, beginning eighty miles north of Pittsburg
and ending twenty-five miles southeast of Cleveland. Here in a
half-dozen small towns, but chiefly in Hudson, O., he worked in his
young manhood to support his growing family. From 1819 to 1825, he was a
tanner at Hudson. Then he moved seventy miles westward toward the crests
of the Alleghanies in Pennsylvania, where he set up his tannery again
and became a man of importance in the town. John Quincy Adams made him
postmaster, the village school was held at his log house and the new
feverish prosperity of the post-bellum period began to stir him as it
stirred this whole western world. Indeed, the economic history of the
land from the War of 1812 to the Civil War covers a period of
extraordinary developments—so much so that no man’s life which fell in
these years may be written without knowledge of and allowance for the
battling of gigantic social forces and welding of material, out of which
the present United States was designed.
Three phases roughly mark these days: First, the slough of despond
following the war, when England forced her goods upon us at nominal
prices to kill the new-sprung infant industries; secondly, the new
protection from the competition of foreign goods from 1816 to 1857,
rising high in the prohibitory schedules of 1828, and falling to the
lower duties of the forties and the free trade of the fifties, and
stimulating irregularly and spasmodically but tremendously the cotton,
woolen and iron manufactories; and finally, the three whirlwinds of
1819, 1837–1839, and 1857, marking frightful maladjustments in the
mushroom growth of our industrial life.
John Brown, coming to full industrial manhood in the buoyant prosperity
of 1825, soon began to sense the new spirit. After ten years’ work in
Pennsylvania, he again removed westward, nearer the projected
transportation lines between East and West. He began to invest his
surplus in land along the new canal routes, became a director in one of
the rapidly multiplying banks and was currently rated to be worth
$20,000 in 1835. But his prosperity, like that of his neighbors, and
indeed, of the whole country, was partly fictitious, and built on a fast
expanding credit which was far outstretching the rapid industrial
development. Jackson’s blind tinkering with banking precipitated the
crisis. The storm broke in 1837. Over six hundred banks failed, ten
thousand employees were thrown out of work, money disappeared and prices
went down to a specie level. John Brown, his tannery and his land
speculations, were sucked into the maelstrom.
The overthrow was no ordinary blow to a man of thirty-seven with eight
children, who had already trod the ways of spiritual doubt and unrest.
For three or four years he seemed to flounder almost hopelessly,
certainly with no settled plan or outlook. He bred race-horses till his
conscience troubled him; he farmed and did some surveying; he inquired
into the commission business in various lines, and still did some
tanning. Then gradually he began to find himself. He was a lover of
animals. In 1839 he took a drove of cattle to Connecticut and wrote to
his wife: “I have felt distressed to get my business done and return
ever since I left home, but know of no way consistent with duty but to
make thorough work of it while there is any hope. Things now look more
favorable than they have but I may still be disappointed.”[25] His diary
shows that he priced certain farms for sale, but especially did he
inquire carefully into sheep-raising and its details, and eventually
bought a flock of sheep, which he drove home to Ohio. This marked the
beginning of a new occupation, that of shepherd, “being a calling for
which in early life he had a kind of enthusiastic longing.” He began
sheep-farming near Hudson, keeping his own and a rich merchant’s sheep
and also buying wool on commission.
This industry in the United States had at that time passed through many
vicissitudes. The change from household to factory economy and the
introduction of effective machinery had been slow, and one of the chief
drawbacks was ever the small quantity of good wool. Consequently our
chief supply came from England until the embargo and war cut off that
supply and stimulated domestic manufacture. Between 1810 and 1815 the
value of the manufacture increased five-fold, but after the war, when
England sent goods over here below the price, Americans rightly clamored
for tariff protection. This they got, but their advantage was nearly
upset by the wool farmers who also got protection on the commodity,
although less on low than on better qualities; and it was the low grades
that America produced. From 1816 to 1832 the tariff wall against wool
and woolens rose steadily until it reached almost prohibitive figures,
save on the cheapest kind. In this way the wool manufacture had by 1828
recovered its war-time prosperity; by 1840 the mills were sending out
twenty and a half million dollars’ worth of goods yearly, and nearly
fifty millions by 1860 even though meanwhile the tariff wall was
weakening. Thus by 1841 when John Brown turned his attention to
sheep-farming, there was a large and growing demand for wool, especially
of the better grades, and by the abolition of the English tariff in
1824, there was even a chance of invading England.
Because, then, of his natural liking for the work, and the growing
prosperity of the wool trade, John Brown chose this line of employment.
But not for this alone. His spirit was longing for air and space. He
wanted to think and read; time was flying and his life as yet had been
little but a mean struggle for bread and that, too, only partially
successful. Already he had had a vision of vast service. Already he had
broached the matter to friends and family, and at the age of thirty-nine
he entered his new life distinctly and clearly with “the idea that as a
business it bid fair to afford him the means of carrying out his
greatest or principal object.”[26]
His first idea was to save enough from the wreck of his fortune to buy
and stock a large sheep farm, and in accordance with his already forming
plans as to Negro emancipation, he wanted this farm in or near the
South. A chance seemed opening when through his father, a trustee of
Oberlin College, he learned of the Virginia lands lately given that
institution by Gerrit Smith, whom Brown came to know better. Oberlin
College was dear to John Brown’s heart, for it had almost from the
beginning taken a strong anti-slavery stand. The titles to the Virginia
land, however, were clouded by the fact of many squatters being in
possession, which gave ample prospects of costly lawsuits. Brown wrote
the trustees early in 1840, proposing to survey the lands for a nominal
price, provided he could be allowed to buy on reasonable terms and
establish his family there. He also spoke of school facilities which he
proposed for Negroes as well as whites, according to a long cherished
plan. The college records in April, 1840, say: “Communication from
Brother John Brown of Hudson was presented and read by the secretary,
containing a proposition to visit, survey and make the necessary
investigation respecting boundaries, etc., of those lands, for one
dollar per day and a moderate allowance for necessary expenses; said
paper frankly expressing also his design of viewing the lands as a
preliminary step to locating his family upon them, should the opening
prove a favorable one; whereupon, _voted_ that said proposition be
acceded to, and that a commission and needful outfit be furnished by the
secretary and treasurer.”[27] The treasurer sent John Brown fifty
dollars and wrote his father, as a trustee of Oberlin, commending the
son’s purpose and hoping “for a favorable issue both for him and the
institution.” He added, “Should he succeed in clearing up titles without
difficulty or lawsuits, it would be easy, as it appears to me, to make
provision for religious and school privileges and by proper efforts with
the blessing of God, soon see that wilderness bud and blossom as the
rose.”[28]
Thus John Brown first saw Virginia and looked upon the rich and heavy
land which rolls westward to the misty Blue Ridge. That he visited
Harper’s Ferry on this trip is doubtful but possible. The lands of
Oberlin, however, lay two hundred miles westward in the foothills and
along the valley of the Ohio. He wrote home from Ripley, Va., in April
(for he had gone immediately): “I like the country as well as I
expected, and its inhabitants rather better; and I have seen the spot
where if it be the will of Providence, I hope one day to live with my
family.... Were the inhabitants as resolute and industrious as the
Northern people and did they understand how to manage as well, they
would become rich.”[29]
By the summer of 1840 his work was accomplished with apparent success.
He had about selected his dwelling-place, having “found on the right
branch of Big Battle a valuable spring, good stone-coal, and excellent
bottoms, good timber, sugar orchard, good hill land and beautiful
situation for dwelling—all right. Course of this branch at the forks is
south twenty-one degrees west from a beautiful white oak on which I
marked my initials, 23d April.”[30]
The Oberlin trustees in August, “voted, that the Prudential Committee be
authorized to perfect negotiations and convey by deed to Brother John
Brown of Hudson, one thousand acres of our Virginia land on the
conditions suggested in the correspondence which has already transpired
between him and the committee.”[31]
Here, however, negotiations stopped, for the renewal of the panic in
1839 overthrew all business calculations until 1842 and later, and
forced John Brown to take refuge in formal bankruptcy in 1842. This
step, his son says, was wholly “owing to his purchase of land on
credit—including the Haymaker farm at Franklin, which he bought in
connection with Seth Thompson, of Hartford, Trumbull County, Ohio, and
his individual purchase of three rather large adjoining farms in Hudson.
When he bought those farms, the rise in value of his place in Franklin
was such that good judges estimated his property worth fully twenty
thousand dollars. He was then thought to be a man of excellent business
judgment and was chosen one of the directors of a bank at Cayahoga
Falls.”[32] Probably after the crash of 1837, Brown hoped to extricate
enough to buy land in Virginia and move there, but things went from bad
to worse. Through endorsing a note for a friend, one of his best pieces
of farm property was attached, put up at auction and bought by a
neighbor. Brown, on legal advice, sought to retain possession, but was
arrested and placed in the Akron jail. The property was lost. Legal
bankruptcy followed in October, 1842, but Brown would not take the full
advantage of it. He gave the New England Woolen Company of Rockville,
Conn., a note declaring that “whereas I, John Brown, on or about the
15th day of June, A. D. 1839, received of the New England Company
(through their agent, George Kellogg, Esq.) the sum of twenty-eight
hundred dollars for the purchase of wool for said company, and
imprudently pledged the same for my own benefit and could not redeem it;
and whereas I have been legally discharged from my obligations by the
laws of the United States—I hereby agree (in consideration of the great
kindness and tenderness of said company toward me in my calamity, and
more particularly of the moral obligation I am under to render to all
their due) to pay the same and the interest thereon from time to time as
divine Providence shall enable me to do.”[33]
He wrote Mr. Kellogg at the same time: “I am sorry to say that in
consequence of the unforeseen expense of getting the discharge, the loss
of an ox, and the destitute condition in which a new surrender of my
effects has placed me, with my numerous family, I fear this year must
pass without my effecting in the way of payment what I have encouraged
you to expect.”[34] He was still paying this debt when he died and left
fifty dollars toward it in his will.
It was a labyrinth of disaster in which the soul of John Brown was
well-nigh choked and lost. We hear him now and then gasping for breath:
“I have been careful and troubled with so much serving that I have in a
great measure neglected the one thing needful, and pretty much stopped
all correspondence with heaven.”[35] He goes on to tell his son: “My
worldly business has borne heavily and still does; but we progress some,
have our sheep sheared, and have done something at our haying. Have our
tanning business going on in about the same proportion—that is, we are
pretty fairly behind in business and feel that I must nearly or quite
give up one or the other of the branches for want of regular troops on
whom to depend.”[36] He again tells his son: “I would send you some
money, but I have not yet received a dollar from any source since you
left. I should not be so dry of funds, could I but overtake my
work;”[37] and then follows the teeth-gritting word of a man whose grip
is slipping: “But all is well; all is well.”[38]
Gradually matters began to mend. His tannery, perhaps never wholly
abandoned, was started again and his wool interests increased. Early in
1844 “we seem to be overtaking our business in the tannery,” he says,
and “I have lately entered into a co-partnership with Simon Perkins,
Jr., of Akron, with a view of carrying on the sheep business
extensively. He is to furnish all the feed and shelter for wintering, as
a set-off against our taking all the care of the flock. All other
expenses we are to share equally, and to divide the property equally.”
John Brown and his family were to move to Akron and he says: “I think
that is the most comfortable and the most favorable arrangement of my
worldly concerns that I ever had and calculated to afford us more
leisure for improvement by day and by night than any other. I do hope
that God has enabled us to make it in mercy to us, and not that He
should send leanness into our souls. Our time will all be at our own
command, except the care of the flock. We have nothing to do with
providing for them in the winter, excepting harvesting rutabagas and
potatoes. This I think will be considered no mean alliance for our
family and I most earnestly hope they will have wisdom given to make the
most of it. It is certainly endorsing the poor bankrupt and his family,
three of whom were but recently in Akron jail in a manner quite
unexpected, and proves that notwithstanding we have been a company of
‘belted knights,’ our industrious and steady endeavors to maintain our
integrity and our character have not been wholly overlooked.”[39]
Indeed, the offer seemed to John Brown a flood of light: a beloved
occupation with space and time to think, to study and to dream, to get
acquainted with himself and the world after the long struggle for bread
and butter and the deep disappointment of failure almost in sight of
success. By July, 1844, Brown was reporting 560 lambs raised and 2,700
pounds of wool, for which he had been offered fifty-six cents a pound,
showing it to be of high grade. He began closing up his tanning
business. “The general aspect of our worldly affairs is favorable. Hope
we do not entirely forget God,”[40] he writes.
His daughter says: “As a shepherd, he showed the same watchful care over
his sheep. I remember one spring a great many of his sheep had a disease
called ‘grub in the head,’ and when the lambs came, the ewes would not
own them. For two weeks he did not go to bed, but sat up or slept an
hour or two at a time in his chair, and then would take a lantern, go
out and catch the ewes, and hold them while the lambs sucked. He would
very often bring in a little dead-looking lamb, and put it in warm water
and rub it until it showed signs of life, and then wrap it in a warm
blanket, feed it warm milk with a teaspoon, and work over it with such
tenderness that in a few hours it would be capering around the room. One
Monday morning I had just got my white clothes in a nice warm suds in
the wash-tub, when he came in bringing a little dead-looking lamb. There
seemed to be no sign of life about it. Said he, ‘Take out your clothes
quick, and let me put this lamb in the water.’ I felt a little vexed to
be hindered with my washing, and told him I didn’t believe he could make
it live; but in an hour or two he had it running around the room, and
calling loudly for its mother. The next year he came from the barn and
said to me, ‘Ruth, that lamb I hindered you with when you were washing,
I have just sold for one hundred dollars.’ It was a pure-blooded Saxony
lamb.”[41]
By 1845 wealth again seemed all but within the grasp of John Brown. The
country was entering fully upon one of the most remarkable of many
note-worthy periods of industrial expansion and the situation in the
wool business was particularly favorable. The flock of Saxony sheep
owned by Perkins and Brown was “said to be the finest and most perfect
flock in the United States and worth about $20,000.” The only apparent
danger to the prosperity of the western wool-growers was the increasing
power of the manufacturers and their desire for cheap wool. The tariff
on woolen goods was lower than formerly, but until war-time, remained at
about twenty to thirty per cent. _ad valorem_, which afforded sufficient
protection. The tariff on cheap wool decreased until, in 1857, all wool
costing less than twenty cents a pound came in free and in 1854 Canadian
wool of all grades was admitted without duty. This meant practically
free trade in wool. The manufacturers of hosiery and carpets increased
and the demand for domestic wool was continually growing. There were,
however, many difficulties in realizing just prices for domestic wool:
it was bought up by the manufacturer’s agents, dealing with isolated,
untrained farmers and offering the lowest prices; it was bought in bulk
ungraded and as wool differs enormously in quality and price, the lowest
grade often set the price for all. No sooner did John Brown grasp the
details of the wool business than he began to work out plans of
amelioration. And he conceived of this amelioration not as measured
simply in personal wealth. To him business was a philanthropy. We have
not even to-day reached this idea, but, urged on by the Socialists, we
are faintly perceiving it. Brown proposed nothing Quixotic or
unpractical, but he did propose a more equitable distribution of the
returns of the whole wool business between the producers of the raw
material and the manufacturers. He proceeded first to arouse and
organize the wool-growers. He traveled extensively among the farmers of
Pennsylvania and Ohio. “I am out among the wool-growers, with a view to
next summer’s operations,” he writes March 24, 1846; “our plan seems to
meet with general favor.” And then thinking of greater plans he adds:
“Our unexampled success in minor affairs might be a lesson to us of what
unity and perseverance might do in things of some importance.”[42] For
what indeed were sheep as compared with men, and money weighed with
liberty?
The plan outlined by Brown before a convention of wool-growers involved
the placing of a permanent selling agent in the East, the grading and
warehousing of the wool, and a pooling of profits according to the
quality of the fleece. The final result was that in 1846 Perkins and
Brown sent out a circular, saying: “The undersigned, commission
wool-merchants, wool-graders, and exporters, have completed arrangements
for receiving wool of growers and holders, and for grading and selling
the same for cash at its real value, when quality and condition are
considered.”[43]
John Brown was put in special charge of this business while his son ran
the sheep farm in Ohio. The idea underlying this movement was excellent
and it was soon started successfully. John Brown went to live in
Springfield with his family. In December, 1846, he writes: “We are
getting along with our business slowly, but prudently, I trust, and as
well as we could reasonably expect under all the circumstances; and so
far as we can discover, we are in favor with this people, and also with
the many we have had to do business with.”[44]
In two weeks during 1847 he has “turned about four thousand dollars’
worth of wool into cash since I returned; shall probably make it up to
seven thousand by the 16th.”[45]
Yet great as was this initial prosperity, the business eventually failed
and was practically given up in 1851. Why? It was because of one of
those strange economic paradoxes which bring great moral questions into
the economic realm;—questions which we evaded yesterday and are trying
to evade to-day, but which we must answer to-morrow. Here was a man
doing what every one knew was for the best interests of a great
industry,—grading and improving the quality of its raw material and
systematizing its sale. His methods were absolutely honest, his
technical knowledge was unsurpassed and his organization efficient. Yet
a combination of manufacturers forced him out of business in a few
months. Why? The ordinary answer of current business ethics would be
that John Brown was unable to “corner” the wool market against the
manufacturers. But this he never tried to do. Such a policy of financial
free-booting never occurred to him, and he would have repelled it
indignantly if it had. He wished to force neither buyer nor seller. He
was offering worthy goods at a fair price and making a just return for
them. That this system was best for the whole trade every one knew, yet
it was weak. It was weak in the same sense that the merchants of the
Middle Ages were weak against the lawless onslaughts of robber barons.
Any compact organization of manufacturers could force John Brown to take
lower prices for his wool—that is, to allow the farmer a smaller
proportion of the profit of the business of clothing human beings. In
other words, well-organized industrial highwaymen could hold up the wool
farmer and make him hand over some of his earnings. But John Brown knew,
as did, indeed, the manufacturing gentlemen of the road that the farmers
were getting only moderate returns. It was the millmen who made
fortunes. Now it was possible to oppose the highwaymen’s demand by
counter organization like the Middle-Age Hanse. The difficulty here
would be to bring all the threatened parties into an organization. They
could be forced in by killing off or starving out the ignorant or
recalcitrant. This is the modern business method. Its result is arraying
two industrial armies in a battle whose victims are paupers and
prostitutes, and whose victory comes by compromising, whereby a
half-dozen millionaires are born to the philanthropic world.
On the other hand, to offer no opposition to organized economic
aggression is to depend on the simple justice of your cause in an
industrial world that recognizes no justice. It means industrial death
and that was what it meant to John Brown. The Tariff of 1846 had cut the
manufacturers’ profits. The growing woolen trade would more than recoup
them in a few years, but they “were not in business for their health”;
that is, they recognized no higher moral law than money-making and
therefore determined to keep present profits where they were, and add
possible future profits to them. They continued their past efforts to
force down the price of wool and got practical free trade in wool by
1854. Meantime local New England manufacturers began to boycott John
Brown. They expected him to see his danger and lower his prices on the
really fine grades he carried. He was obdurate. His prices were right
and he thought justice counted in the wool business. The manufacturers
objected. He was not playing according to the rules of the game. He was,
as a fellow merchant complained, “no _trader_: he waited until his wools
were graded and then fixed a price; if this suited the manufacturers
they took the fleeces; if not, they bought elsewhere.... Yet he was a
scrupulously honest and upright man—hard and inflexible, but everybody
had just what belonged to him. Brown was in a position to make a fortune
and a regular bred merchant would have done so.”[46]
Thereupon the combination turned the screws a little closer. Brown’s
clerks were bribed, and other “competitive” methods resorted to. But
Brown was inflexible and serene. The prospect of great wealth did not
tempt but rather repelled him. Indeed this whole warehouse business,
successful and important as it had hitherto been, was drawing him away
from his plans of larger usefulness. It took his time and thought, and
his surroundings more and more made it mere money-getting. The
manufacturers were after dollars, of course; his clients were waiting
simply for returns, and his partner was ever anxiously scanning the
balance-sheet. This whole aspect of things more and more disquieted
Brown. He therefore writes soberly in December, 1847:
“Our business seems to be going on middling well and will not probably
be any the worse for the pinch in the money concerns. I trust that
getting or losing money does not entirely engross our attention; but I
am sensible that it quite occupies too large a share in it. To get a
little property together to leave, as the world would have done, is
really a low mark to be firing at through life.
“‘A nobler toil may I sustain,
A nobler satisfaction gain.’”[47]
The next year, however, came a severe money pressure, “one of the
severest known for many years. The consequence to us has been, that some
of those who have contracted for wool of us are as yet unable to pay for
and take the wool as they agreed, and we are on that account unable to
close our business.”[48] This brought a fall in the price and complaint
on all sides: on the part of the wool-growers, because their profits
were not continuing to rise; and from manufacturers who demurred more
and more clamorously at the prices demanded by Brown.
He writes early in 1849: “We have been selling wool middling fast of
late, on contract, at 1847 prices;” but he adds, scenting the coming
storm: “We have in this part of the country the strongest proofs that
the great majority have made gold their hope, their only hope.”[49]
Evidently a crisis was approaching. The boycott against the firm was
more evident and the impatience of wool farmers growing. The latter kept
calling for advances on their stored wool. If they had been willing to
wait quietly, there was still a chance, for Perkins and Brown had
undoubtedly the best in the American market and as good as the better
English grades. But the growers were restive and in some cases poor. The
result was shown in the balance-sheet of 1849. Brown had bought 130,000
pounds of wool and paid for it, including freight and commissions,
$57,884.48. His sales had amounted to $49,902.67, leaving him $7,981.81
short, and 200,000 pounds of wool in the warehouse.[50] Perkins
afterward thought Brown was stubborn. It would have been easily possible
for them to have betrayed the growers and accepted a lower price. Their
commissions would have been larger, the manufacturers were friendly, and
the sheepmen too scattered and poor to protest. Indeed, low prices and
cash pleased them better than waiting. But John Brown conceived that a
principle was at stake. He knew that his wool was worth even more than
he asked. He knew that English wool of the same grade sold at good
prices. Why not, then, he argued, take the wool to England and sell it,
thus opening up a new market for a great American product? Then, too, he
had other and, to him, better reasons for wishing to see Europe. He
decided quickly and in August, 1849, he took his 200,000 pounds of wool
to England. He had graded every bit himself, and packed it in new sacks:
“The bales were firm, round, hard and true, almost as if they had been
turned out in a lathe.”[51]
In this English venture John Brown showed one weakness of his character:
he did not know or recognize the subtler twistings of human nature. He
judged it ever from his own simple, clear standpoint and so had a sort
of prophetic vision of the vaster and the eternal aspects of the human
soul. But of its kinks and prejudices, its little selfishnesses and
jealousies and dishonesties, he knew nothing. They always came to him as
a sort of surprise, uncalculated for and but partially comprehended. He
could fight the devil and his angels, and he did, but he could not cope
with the million misbirths that hover between heaven and hell.
Thus to his surprise he found his calculations all at fault in England.
His wool was good, his knowledge of the technique of sorting and grading
unsurpassed and yet because Englishmen believed it was not possible to
raise good wool in America, they obstinately refused to take the
evidence of their own senses. They “seemed highly pleased”; they said
that they “had never seen superior wools” and that they “would see me
again” but they did not offer decent prices. Then, too, American woolen
men had long arms and they were tipped with gold. They fingered busily
across the seas about this prying Yankee, and English wool-growers
responded very willingly, so that John Brown acknowledged mournfully
late in September, “I have a great deal of stupid obstinate prejudice to
contend with, as well as conflicting interests both in this country and
from the United States.”[52] In the end the wool was sacrificed at
prices fifty per cent. below its American value and some of it actually
resold in America. The American woolen men chuckled audibly:
“A little incident occurred in 1850. Perkins and Brown’s clip had come
forward, and it was beautiful; the little compact Saxony fleeces were as
nice as possible. Mr. Musgrave of the Northampton Woolen Mill, who was
making shawls and broadcloths, wanted it, and offered Uncle John [Brown]
sixty cents a pound for it. ‘No, I am going to send it to London.’
Musgrave, who was a Yorkshire man, advised Brown not to do it, for
American wool would not sell in London,—not being thought good. He tried
hard to buy it, but without avail.... Some little time after, long
enough for the purpose, news came that it was sold in London, but the
price was not stated. Musgrave came into my counting-room one forenoon
all aglow, and said he wanted me to go with him,—he was going to have
some fun. Then he went to the stairs and called Uncle John, and told him
he wanted him to go over to the Hartford depot and see a lot of wool he
had bought. So Uncle John put on his coat, and we started. When we
arrived at the depot, and just as we were going into the freight-house,
Musgrave says: ‘Mr. Brune, I want you to tell me what you think of this
lot of wull that stands me in just fifty-two cents a pund.’ One glance
at the bags was enough. Uncle John wheeled, and I can see him now as he
‘put back’ to the lofts, his brown coat-tails floating behind him, and
the nervous strides fairly devouring the way. It was his own clip, for
which Musgrave, some three months before, had offered him sixty cents a
pound as it lay in the loft. It had been graded, new bagged, shipped by
steamer to London, sold, and reshipped, and was in Springfield at eight
cents in the pound less than Musgrave offered.”[53]
It was a great joke and it made American woolen men smile.
This English venture was a death-blow to the Perkins and Brown wool
business. It was not entirely wound up until four years later, but in
1849 Brown removed his family from Springfield up to the silent forests
of the farthest Adirondacks, where the great vision of his life unfolded
itself. It was, however, not easy for him to extricate himself from the
web wound about him. Two currents set for his complete undoing: the
wool-growers whom he had over-advanced and who did not deliver the
promised wool; and certain manufacturers to whom the firm had contracted
to deliver this wool which they could not get. Claims and damages to the
amount of $40,000 appeared and some of these got into court; while, on
the other hand, the scattered and defaulting wool-growers were scarcely
worth suing by the firm. Long drawn-out legal battles ensued, intensely
distasteful to Brown’s straightforward nature and seemingly endless.
Collections and sales continued hard and slow and Perkins began to get
restless. John Brown sighed for the older and simpler life of his young
manhood with its love and dreams: “I can look back to our log cabin at
the centre of Richfield with a supper of porridge and johnny cake as a
place of far more interest to me than the Massasoit of Springfield.”[54]
He says to his children on the Ohio sheep farm: “I am much pleased with
the reflection that you are all three once more together, and all
engaged in the same calling that the old patriarchs followed. I will say
but one word more on that score, and that is taken from their history:
‘See that ye fall not out by the way; and all will be exactly right in
the end.’ I should think matters were brightening a little in this
direction in regard to our claims, but I have not yet been able to get
any of them to a final issue. I think, too, that the prospect for the
fine wool business rather improves. What burdens me most of all is the
apprehension that Mr. Perkins expects of me in the way of bringing
matters to a close, what no living man can possibly bring about in a
short time and that he is getting out of patience and becoming
distrustful.”[55]
Meantime Brown was racing from court to court in Boston, New York, Troy
and elsewhere, seeking to settle up the business and know where he stood
financially, and, above all, to keep peace with and do justice to his
partner. Cases were now settled and now appealed and the progress was
“miserably slow. My journeys back and forth this winter have been very
tedious.” Then, too, his mind was elsewhere. The nation was in turmoil
and so was he. At the time Anthony Burns was arrested in Boston he was
advising with his lawyers at Troy. Redpath says:
“The morning after the news of the Burns affair reached here, Brown went
at his work immediately after breakfast; but in a few minutes started up
from his chair, walked rapidly across the room several times, then
suddenly turned to his counsel, and said, ‘I am going to Boston.’ ‘Going
to Boston!’ said the astonished lawyer. ‘Why do you want to go to
Boston?’ Old Brown continued walking vigorously, and replied, ‘Anthony
Burns must be released, or I will die in the attempt.’ The counsel
dropped his pen in consternation. Then he began to remonstrate; told him
the suit had been in progress a long time, and a verdict just gained. It
was appealed from, and that appeal must be answered in so many days, or
the whole labor would be lost; and no one was sufficiently familiar with
the whole case except himself. It took a long earnest talk with old
Brown to persuade him to remain. His memory and acuteness in that long
and tedious lawsuit—not yet ended, I am told—often astonished his
counsel. While here he wore an entire suit of snuff-colored cloth, the
coat of a decidedly Quakerish cut in collar and skirt. He wore no beard,
and was a clean-shaven, scrupulously neat, well-dressed, quiet old
gentleman. He was, however, notably resolute in all that he did.”[56]
He spent the time not taken up by his lawsuits at Akron, and in the
manner of a patriarch of old, temporarily brought his family back to
Ohio. “I wrote you last week that the family is on the road: the boys
are driving on the cattle, and my wife and little girls are at Oneida
depot waiting for me to go on with them.”[57] He returned to farming
again with interest, taking prizes for his stock at state fairs and
raising many sheep. He had 550 lambs in 1853 and Perkins is urging him
to continue with him, but things changed and on January 25, 1854, he
writes: “This world is not yet freed from real malice and envy. It
appears to be well settled now that we go back to North Elba in the
spring. I have had a good-natured talk with Mr. Perkins about going away
and both families are now preparing to carry out that plan.”[58] His
departure was delayed a year, but he was finally able to remove with a
little surplus on hand.
Back then to the crests and forests of the Alleghanies came John Brown
at the age of fifty-four. “A tall, gaunt, dark-complexioned man ... a
grave, serious man ... with a marked countenance and a natural dignity
of manner,—that dignity which is unconscious, and comes from a superior
habit of mind.”[59]