THE VISION OF THE DAMNED
“Remember them that are in bonds as bound with them.”
There was hell in Hayti in the red waning of the eighteenth century, in
the days when John Brown was born. The dark wave of the French
Revolution had raised the brilliant sinister Napoleon to its crest.
Already he had stretched greedy arms toward American empire in the rich
vale of the Mississippi, when in a flash, out of the dirt and sloth and
slavery of the West Indies, the black inert and heavy cloud of African
degradation writhed to sudden life and lifted up the dark figure of
Toussaint. Ten thousand Frenchmen gasped and died in the fever-haunted
hills, while the black men in sudden frenzy fought like devils for their
freedom and won it. Napoleon saw his gateway to the Mississippi closed;
armed Europe was at his back. What was this wild and empty America to
him, anyway? So he sold Louisiana for a song and turned to the shame of
Trafalgar and the glory of Austerlitz.
John Brown was born just as the shudder of Hayti was running through all
the Americas, and from his earliest boyhood he saw and felt the price of
repression—the fearful cost that the western world was paying for
slavery. From his earliest boyhood he had dimly conceived, and the
conception grew with his growing, that the cost of liberty was less than
the price of repression. Perhaps he was so near the humanistic
enthusiasm of the French Revolution that he undervalued the cost of
liberty. But yet he was right, for it was scarce possible to overrate
the price of repression. True, in these latter days men and women of the
South, and honest ones, too, have striven feverishly to paint Negro
slavery in bright alluring colors. They have told of childlike devotion,
faithful service and light-hearted irresponsibility, in the fine old
aristocracy of the plantation. Much they have said is true. But when all
is said and granted, the awful fact remains congealed in law and
indisputable record that American slavery was the foulest and filthiest
blot on nineteenth century civilization. As a school of brutality and
human suffering, of female prostitution and male debauchery; as a
mockery of marriage and defilement of family life; as a darkening of
reason, and spiritual death, it had no parallel in its day. It took
millions upon millions of men—human men and lovable, light and
liberty-loving children of the sun, and threw them with no sparing of
brutality into one rigid mold: humble, servile, dog-like devotion,
surrender of body, mind and soul, and unaspiring animal content—toward
this ideal the slave might strive, and did. Wonderful, even beautiful
examples of humble service he brought forth and made the eternal
heritage of men. But beyond this there was nothing. All were crushed to
this mold and of them that did not fit, the sullen were cowed, the
careless brutalized and the rebellious killed. Four things make life
worthy to most men: to move, to know, to love, to aspire. None of these
was for Negro slaves. A white child could halt a black man on the
highway and send him slinking to his kennel. No black slave could
legally learn to read. And love? If a black slave loved a lass, there
was not a white man from the Potomac to the Rio Grande that could not
prostitute her to his lust. Did the proud sons of Virginia and Carolina
stoop to such bestial tyranny? Ask the grandmothers of the two million
mulattoes that dot the states to-day. Ask the suffering and humiliated
wives of the master caste. If a Negro married a wife, there was not a
master in the land that could not take her from him.
John Brown’s father, Owen Brown, saw such a power stretched all the way
from Virginia to Connecticut. A Southern slaveholding minister, Thomson
by name, had brought his slaves North and preached in the local church.
Then he attempted to take the unwilling chattels back South. Of what
followed, Owen Brown says: “There was some excitement amongst the
people, some in favor and some against Mr. Thomson; there was quite a
debate, and large numbers to hear. Mr. Thomson said he should carry the
woman and children, whether he could get the man or not. An old man
asked him if he would part man and wife, contrary to their minds. He
said: ‘I married them myself, and did not enjoin obedience on the
woman.’” Owen Brown added, “Ever since I have been an Abolitionist.”[60]
If a slave begat children, there was not a law south of the Ohio that
could stop their eventual sale to any brute with the money. Aspiration
in a slave was suspicious, dangerous, fatal. For him there was no
inviting future, no high incentive, no decent reward. The highest
ambition to which a black woman could aspire was momentarily to supplant
the white man’s wife as a concubine; and the ambition of black men ended
with the carelessly tossed largess of a kinglet. To reduce the slave to
this groveling, what was the price which the master paid? Tyranny,
brutality, and lawlessness reigned and to some extent still reign in the
South. The sweeter, kindlier feelings were blunted: brothers sold
sisters to serfdom and fathers debauched even their own dark daughters.
The arrogant, strutting bully, who shot his enemy and thrashed his dogs
and his darkies, became a living, moving ideal from the cotton-patch to
the United States Senate from 1808 onward. No worthy art nor literature,
nor even the commerce of daily life could thrive in this atmosphere.
Society there was of a certain type—courtly and lavish, but quarrelsome;
seductive and lazy; with a half Oriental sheen and languor spread above
peculiar poverty of resource; a fineness and delicacy in certain
details, coupled with coarseness and self-indulgence in others; a
mingling of the sexes only in play and seldom in work, with its
concomitant tendency toward seclusion and helplessness among its whiter
women. Withal a society strong indeed, but wholly without vigor or
invention.
It was not all as dark as it might have been. Human life, thank God, is
never as bad as it may be, but it is too often desperately bad. Nor do
men easily realize how bad life about them is. The full have scant
sympathy with the empty,—the rich know all the faults of the poor, and
the master sees the horrors of slavery with unseeing eyes. True, there
were flashes of light and longing here and there—noble sacrifice, eager
help, determined emancipation. But all this was local, spasmodic and
exceptional. The unrelenting dead brutality of human bondage to a
thousand tyrants, petty wills and caprice was the rule from Florida to
Missouri and from the Mississippi to the sea. Under it the wretched
writhed like some great black and stricken beast. The flaming fury of
their mad attempts at vengeance echoes all down the blood-swept path of
slavery. In Jamaica they upturned the government and harried the land
until England crept and sued for peace. In the Danish Isles they started
a whirlwind of slaughter; in Hayti they drove their masters into the
sea; and in South Carolina they rose twice like a threatening wave
against the terror-stricken whites, but were betrayed. Such outbreaks
here and there foretold the possibility of coördinate action and organic
development. To be sure, the successful outbreaks were few and
spasmodic; but the flare of Hayti lighted the night and made the world
remember that these, too, were men.
Among these black men, changes significant and momentous, were coming.
The native born Africans were passing away, with their native tongues
and their wild customs. Such were the slaves of John Brown’s father’s
time. “When I was a child four or five years old,” writes Owen Brown,
“one of the nearest neighbors had a slave that was brought from Guinea.
In the year 1776 my father was called into the army at New York, and
left his work undone. In August, our good neighbor, Captain John Fast,
of West Simsbury, let my mother have the labor of his slave to plough a
few days. I used to go out into the field with this slave,—called
Sam,—and he used to carry me on his back, and I fell in love with him.
He worked but a few days, and went home sick with the pleurisy, and died
very suddenly. When told that he would die, he said he should go to
Guinea, and wanted victuals put up for the journey. As I recollect, this
was the first funeral I ever attended in the days of my youth.”
Such slaves and others went into the Revolutionary army and three
thousand of them fought for their masters’ freedom. After the war, their
bravery, the upheaval in Hayti, and the new enthusiasm for human rights,
led to a wave of emancipation which started in Vermont during the
Revolution and swept through New England and Pennsylvania, ending
finally in New York and New Jersey early in the nineteenth century. This
freeing of the Northern slaves led to new complications, for in the
South, after a hesitating pause, the opposite course was pursued and the
thumbscrews were applied; the plantations were isolated, the roads were
guarded, the refractory were whipped till they screamed and crawled, and
the ringleaders were lynched. A long awful process of selection chose
out the listless, ignorant, sly, and humble and sent to heaven the
proud, the vengeful and the daring. The old African warrior spirit died
away of violence and a broken heart.
Thus the great black mass of Southern slaves were cowed, but they were
not conquered. Stretched as they were over wide miles of land, and
isolated; guarded in speech and religion; peaceful and light-hearted as
was their nature, still the fire of liberty burned in them. In Louisiana
and Tennessee and twice in Virginia they raised the night cry of revolt,
and once slew fifty Virginians, holding the state for weeks at bay there
in those same Alleghanies which John Brown loved and listened to. On the
ships of the sea they rebelled and murdered; to Florida they fled and
turned like beasts on their pursuers till whole armies dislodged them
and did them to death in the everglades; and again and again over them
and through them surged and quivered a vast unrest which only the
eternal vigilance of the masters kept down. Yet the fear of that great
bound beast was ever there—a nameless, haunting dread that never left
the South and never ceased, but ever nerved the remorseless cruelty of
the master’s arm.
One thing saved the South from the blood-sacrifice of Hayti—not, to be
sure, from so successful a revolt, for the disproportion of races was
less, but from a desperate and bloody effort—and that was the escape of
the fugitive.
Along the Great Black Way stretched swamps and rivers, and the forests
and crests of the Alleghanies. A widening, hurrying stream of fugitives
swept to the havens of refuge, taking the restless, the criminal and the
unconquered—the natural leaders of the more timid mass. These men saved
slavery and killed it. They saved it by leaving it to a false seductive
dream of peace and the eternal subjugation of the laboring class. They
destroyed it by presenting themselves before the eyes of the North and
the world as living specimens of the real meaning of slavery. What was
the system that could enslave a Frederick Douglass? They saved it too by
joining the free Negroes of the North, and with them organizing
themselves into a great black phalanx that worked and schemed and paid
and finally fought for the freedom of black men in America.
Thus it was that John Brown, even as a child, saw the puzzling anomalies
and contradictions in human right and liberty all about him. Ever and
again he saw this in the North, leading to concerted action among the
free Negroes, especially in cities where they were brought in contact
with one another, and had some chance of asserting their nominal
freedom. Just at the close of the eighteenth century, first in
Philadelphia and then in New York, small groups of them withdrew from
the white churches to escape disgraceful discrimination and established
churches of their own, which still live with millions of adherents. In
the year of John Brown’s birth, 1800, Gabriel planned his formidable
uprising in Virginia, and the year after his marriage, 1821, Denmark
Vesey of South Carolina went grimly to the scaffold, after one of the
shrewdest Negro plots that ever frightened the South into hysterics. Of
all this John Brown, the boy and young man, knew little. In after years
he learned of Gabriel and Vesey and Turner, and told of their exploits
and studied their plans; but at the time he was far off from the world,
carrying on his tannery and marrying a wife. Perhaps as a lad he heard
some of the oratory that celebrated the act of 1808, stopping the slave
trade, as the beginning of the end of slavery. Perhaps not, for the act
did little good until it was reënforced in 1820. All the time, however,
John Brown’s keen eyes were searching for the way of life and his tender
heart was sensitive to injustice and wrong everywhere. Indeed, it is not
unlikely that the first black folk to gain his aid and sympathies and
direct his thoughts to what afterward became his life-work, were the
fugitive slaves from the South.
Three paths were opened to the slaves: to submit, to fight or to run
away. Most of them submitted as do most people everywhere to force and
fate. To fight singly meant death and to fight together meant plot and
insurrection—a difficult thing but one often tried. Easiest of all was
to run away, for the land was wide and bare and the slaves were many. At
first, they ran to the swamps and mountains, and starved and died. Then
they ran to the Indians and in Florida founded a nation to overthrow
which cost the United States $20,000,000 and more in slave raids known
as Seminole “wars.” Then gradually, after the War of 1812 had used so
many black sailors to fight for free trade that the Negroes learned of
the North and Canada as cities of refuge, they fled northward. While
John Brown was a tanner at Hudson, he began helping these dark panting
refugees who flitted by in the night. His eldest son says:
“When I was four or five years old, and probably no later than 1825,
there came one night a fugitive slave and his wife to father’s
door—sent, perhaps, by some townsman who knew John Brown’s compassion
for such wayfarers, then but few. They were the first colored people I
had seen; and when the woman took me upon her knee and kissed me, I ran
away as quick as I could, and rubbed my face ‘to get the black off’; for
I thought she would ‘crock’ me, like mother’s kettle. Mother gave the
poor creatures some supper; but they thought themselves pursued and were
uneasy. Presently father heard the trampling of horses crossing a bridge
on one of the main roads, half a mile off; so he took his guests out the
back door and down into the swamp near the brook to hide, giving them
arms to defend themselves, but returning to the house to await the
event. It proved a false alarm; the horsemen were people of the
neighborhood going to Hudson village. Father then went out into the dark
wood,—for it was night,—and had some difficulty in finding his
fugitives; finally he was guided to the spot by the sound of the man’s
heart throbbing for fear of capture. He brought them into the house
again, sheltered them a while, and sent them on their way.”[61]
The atmosphere in these days was becoming more and more charged with the
slavery problem. That same Louisiana which Toussaint had given America,
was gradually filling with settlers until the question of admitting
parts of it as states faced the nation, and led to the Missouri
Compromise. The discussion of the measure was fierce in John Brown’s
neighborhood, and it must have strengthened his dislike of slavery and
turned his earnest mind more and more toward the Negroes.
In the very year that death first entered his family and took a boy of
four, and just before the sombre days when his earnest young wife died
demented in childbirth and was buried with her babe, occurred the Nat
Turner insurrection in Virginia, the most successful and bloody of slave
uprisings since Hayti.
Squire Hudson, the father of the town where John Brown lived and one of
the founders of Western Reserve University, heard the news in stern joy;
a neighbor met him “one day in September, 1831, coming from his
post-office, and reading a newspaper he had just received, which seemed
to excite him very much as he read. As Mr. Wright came within hearing,
the old Calvinist was exclaiming, ‘Thank God for that! I am glad of it!
Thank God they have risen at last!’ Inquiring what the news was, Squire
Hudson replied, ‘Why, the slaves have risen down in Virginia, and are
fighting for their freedom as we did for ours. I pray God that they may
get it.’”[62]
They did not get freedom but death. And yet there on the edge of Dismal
Swamp they slaughtered fifty whites, held the land in terror for more
than a month, and set going a tremendous wave of reaction. In the South,
Negro churches and free Negro schools were sternly restricted, just at
the time Great Britain was freeing her West Indian slaves. In the North,
came two movements: a determined anti-slavery campaign, and an opposing
movement which disfranchised Negroes, burned their churches and schools,
and robbed them of their friends. The Negroes rushed together for
counsel and defense, and held their first national meeting in
Philadelphia, where they deliberated earnestly on migration to Canada
and on schools. But schools for Negroes were especially feared North as
well as South, and in John Brown’s native state of Connecticut a white
woman was shamefully persecuted for attempting to teach Negroes. All
this aroused John Brown’s antipathy to slavery and made it more definite
and purposeful. In November of the year which witnessed the burning of
Prudence Crandall’s school, and a year after his second marriage, he
wrote to his brother:
“Since you have left me, I have been trying to devise some means whereby
I might do something in a practical way for my poor fellow men who are
in bondage; and having fully consulted the feelings of my wife and my
three boys, we have agreed to get at least one Negro boy or youth, and
bring him up as we do our own,—viz., give him a good English education,
learn him what we can about the history of the world, about business,
about general subjects, and, above all, try to teach him the fear of
God. We think of three ways to obtain one: First, to try to get some
Christian slaveholder to release one to us. Second, to get a free one,
if no one will let us have one that is a slave. Third, if that does not
succeed, we have all agreed to submit to considerable privation in order
to buy one. This we are now using means in order to effect, in the
confident expectation that God is about to bring them all out of the
house of bondage.
“I will just mention that when this subject was first introduced, Jason
had gone to bed; but no sooner did he hear the thing hinted, than his
warm heart kindled, and he turned out to have a part in the discussion
of a subject of such exceeding interest. I have for years been trying to
devise some way to get a school a-going here for blacks, and I think
that on many accounts it would be a most favorable location. Children
here would have no intercourse with vicious people of their own kind,
nor with openly vicious persons of any kind. There would be no powerful
opposition influence against such a thing; and should there be any, I
believe the settlement might be so effected in future as to have almost
the whole influence of the place in favor of such a school. Write me how
you would like to join me, and try to get on from Hudson and thereabouts
some first-rate Abolitionist families with you. I do honestly believe
that our united exertions alone might soon, with the good hand of our
God upon us, effect it all.”[63]
Nothing came of this project, except that John Brown grew more deeply
interested. He was now worth $20,000, a man of influence and he felt
more and more moved toward definite action to help the Negroes. They
were keeping up their conventions and the stream of fugitives was
augmenting. The problem, however, was not simply one of slavery. The
plight of the free Negro was particularly pitiable. He was liable to be
seized and sold South whether an actual slave or not; he was
discriminated against and despised in all walks. This was bad enough in
every-day life, but to a straightforward religious soul like John Brown
it was simply intolerable in the church of God. His eldest daughter
says:
“One evening after he had been singing to me, he asked me how I would
like to have some poor little black children that were slaves
(explaining to me the meaning of slaves) come and live with us; and
asked me if I would be willing to divide my food and clothes with them.
He made such an impression on my sympathies, that the first colored
person that I ever saw (it was a man I met on the street in Meadville,
Pa.) I felt such pity for, that I wanted to ask him if he did not want
to come and live at our house. When I was six or seven years old, a
little incident took place in the church at Franklin, O. (of which all
the older part of our family were members), which caused quite an
excitement.”[64]
His son tells the details of this incident:
“About 1837, mother, Jason, Owen and I, joined the Congregational Church
at Franklin, the Rev. Mr. Burritt, pastor. Shortly after, the other
societies, including Methodists and Episcopalians, joined ours in an
undertaking to hold a protracted meeting under the special management of
an evangelist preacher from Cleveland, named Avery. The house of the
Congregationalists being the largest, it was chosen as the place for
this meeting. Invitations were sent out to church folks in adjoining
towns to ‘come up to the help of the Lord against the mighty;’ and soon
the house was crowded, the assembly occupying by invitation the pews of
the church generally. Preacher Avery gave us in succession four sermons
from one text,—‘Cast ye up, cast ye up! Prepare ye the way of the Lord;
make His paths straight!’ Soon lukewarm Christians were heated up to a
melting condition, and there was a bright prospect of a good shower of
grace. There were at that time in Franklin a number of free colored
persons and some fugitive slaves. These became interested and came to
the meetings, but were given seats by themselves, where the stove had
stood, near the door,—not a good place for seeing ministers or singers.
Father noticed this, and when the next meeting (which was at evening)
had fairly opened, he arose and called attention to the fact that, in
seating the colored portion of the audience, a discrimination had been
made, and said that he did not believe God ‘is a respecter of persons.’
He then invited the colored people to occupy his slip. The blacks
accepted, and all of our family took their vacated seats. This was a
bombshell, and the Holy Spirit in the hearts of Pastor Burritt and
Deacon Beach at once gave up His place to another tenant. The next day
father received a call from the deacons to admonish him and ‘labor’ with
him; but they returned with new views of Christian duty. The blacks
during the remainder of that protracted meeting continued to occupy our
slip, and our family the seats around the stove. We soon after moved to
Hudson, and though living three miles away, became regular attendants at
the Congregational Church in the centre of the town. In about a year we
received a letter from good Deacon Williams, informing us that our
relations with the church in Franklin were ended in accordance with a
rule made by the church since we left, that ‘any member being absent a
year without reporting him or herself to that church should be cut off.’
This was the first intimation we had of the existence of the rule.
Father, on reading the letter, became white with anger. This was my
first taste of the pro-slavery diabolism that had intrenched itself in
the church, and I shed a few uncalled for tears over the matter, for
instead I should have rejoiced in my emancipation. From that day my
theological shackles were a good deal broken, and I have not worn them
since (to speak of),—not even for ornament.”[65]
The years of 1837 and 1838 were the years of persecution for the
Abolition cause. Lovejoy was murdered in Illinois and mobs raged in
Massachusetts and Pennsylvania. Pennsylvania Hall, in Philadelphia, was
burned, and Marlborough Chapel in Boston, where John Brown himself seems
to have been present fighting back the people, was sacked. Indeed, as he
afterward said, he had seen some of the “principal Abolition mobs.”
Whatever John Brown may have wished to do at this time was frustrated by
the panic, which swept away his fortune, and left him bankrupt. Yet
something he must do—he must at least promise God that he and his family
would eternally oppose slavery. How, he did not know—he was not sure—but
somehow he was determined, and his old idea of educating youth was still
uppermost.
It was in 1839, when a Negro preacher named Fayette was visiting Brown,
and bringing his story of persecution and injustice, that this great
promise was made. Solemnly John Brown arose; he was then a man of nearly
forty years, tall, dark and clean-shaven; by him sat his young wife of
twenty-two and his oldest boys of eighteen, sixteen and fifteen. Six
other children slept in the room back of the dark preacher. John Brown
told them of his purpose to make active war on slavery, and bound his
family in solemn and secret compact to labor for emancipation. And then,
instead of standing to pray, as was his wont, he fell upon his knees and
implored God’s blessing on his enterprise.
This marks a turning-point in John Brown’s life: in his boyhood he had
disliked slavery and his antipathy toward it grew with his years; yet of
necessity it occupied but little of a life busy with breadwinning.
Gradually, however, he saw the gathering of the mighty struggle about
him; the news of the skirmish battles of the greatest moral war of the
century aroused and quickened him, and all the more when they struck the
tender chords of his acquaintanceships and sympathies. He saw his
friends hurt and imposed on until at last, gradually, then suddenly, it
dawned upon him that he must fight this monster slavery. He did not now
plan physical warfare—he was yet a non-resistant, hating war, and did
not dream of Harper’s Ferry; but he set his face toward the goal and
whithersoever the Lord led, he was ready to follow. He still, too, had
his living to earn—his family to care for. Slavery was not yet the sole
object of his life, but as he passed on in his daily duties he was
determined to seize every opportunity to strike it a blow.
This, at least it seems to me, is a fair interpretation of John Brown’s
thought and action from the evidence at hand. Some have believed that
John Brown planned Harper’s Ferry or something similar in 1839; others
have doubted whether he had any plans against slavery before 1850. The
truth probably lies between these extreme views. Human purposes grow
slowly and in curious ways; thought by thought they build themselves
until in their full panoplied vigor and definite outline not even the
thinker can tell the exact process of the growing, or say that here was
the beginning or there the ending. Nor does this slow growth and
gathering make the end less wonderful or the motive less praiseworthy.
Few Americans recognized in 1839 that the great central problem of
America was slavery; and of that few, fewer still were willing to fight
it as they knew it should be fought. Of this lesser number, two men
stood almost alone, ready to back their faith by action—William Lloyd
Garrison and John Brown.
These men did not then know each other—they had in these early days
scarcely heard each other’s names. They never came to be friends or
sympathizers. When John Brown was in Boston he never went to _The
Liberator_ office, and in after years, now and then, he dropped words
very like contempt for “non-resistants”; while Garrison flayed the
leader of the Harper’s Ferry raid. They were alike only in their intense
hatred of slavery, and spiritually they crossed each other’s paths in
curious fashion, Garrison drifting from a willingness to fight slavery
in all ways or in any way to a fateful attitude of non-resistance and
withdrawal from the contamination of slaveholders; John Brown drifting
from non-resistance to the red path of active warfare.
Nowhere did the imminence of a great struggle show itself more clearly
than among the Negroes themselves. Organized insurrection ceased in the
South, not because of the increased rigors of the slave system, but
because the great safety-valve of escape northward was opened wider and
wider, and the methods were gradually coördinated into that mysterious
system known as the Underground Railroad. The slaves and freedmen
started the work and to the end bore the brunt of danger and hardship;
but gradually they more and more secured the coöperation of men like
John Brown, and of others less radical but just as sympathetic. Here and
there the free Negroes in the North began to gain economic footing as
servants in cities, as farmers in Ohio and even as _entrepreneurs_ in
the great catering business of Philadelphia and New York.
The schools were still for the most part closed to them. They made
strenuous efforts to counteract this and established dozens of schools
of their own all over the land. At last in 1839 Oberlin was founded and
certain earnest students of Cincinnati, disgusted with the color line at
Lane College, seceded to Oberlin and brought the color question there.
It was fairly met and Negroes were admitted.
It was the establishment of Oberlin College in 1839 and the appointment
of his father as trustee that gave John Brown a new vision of life and
usefulness—of a life which would at once combine the pursuit of a great
moral ideal and the honest earning of a good living for a family. Brown
proposed to survey the Virginia lands of Oberlin, as we have shown,
locate a large farm for himself and settle there with his family. Here
he undoubtedly expected to carry out the plan previously laid before his
brother Frederick. He consulted the Oberlin authorities concerning
“provision for religious and school privileges” and they thought it
possible to have these, although nothing was said specifically of
Negroes. The position was strategic and John Brown knew it: in the
non-slaveholding portion of a slave state, near the river and not far
from the foothills of mountains, beyond which lay the Great Black Way,
was formed a highway for the Underground Railroad and a place for
experiment in the uplift of black men. That he would meet opposition,
and strong opposition, John Brown must have known, but probably at this
time he counted on the prevalence of law and justice and the stern
principles of his religion rather than on the sword of Gideon, which was
his later reliance. But it was not the “will of Providence” as we have
seen, that Brown should then settle in Virginia, since his increasing
financial straits and final bankruptcy overthrew all plans of purchasing
the one thousand acres for which he had already bargained.
The slough of despond through which John Brown passed in the succeeding
years, from 1842 to 1846, was never fully betrayed by this stern,
self-repressing Puritan. Yet the loss of a fortune and the shattering of
a dream, the bankruptcy and imprisonment, and the death of five
children, while around him whirled the struggle of the churches with
slavery and Abolition mobs, all dropped a sombre brooding veil of stern
inexorable fate over his spirit—a veil which never lifted. The dark
mysterious tragedy of life gripped him with awful intensity—the iron
entered his soul. He became sterner and more silent. He brooded and
listened for the voice of the avenging God, and girded up his loins in
readiness.
“My husband always believed,” said his wife in after years, “that he was
to be an instrument in the hands of Providence, and I believed it
too.... Many a night he had lain awake and prayed concerning it.”[66]
It began to dawn upon him that he had sinned in the selfish pursuit of
petty ends: that he must be about his Father’s business of giving the
death-blow to that “sum of all villanies—slavery.” He had erred in
making his great work a side object—a secondary thing; it must be his
first and only duty, and let God attend to the nurture of his family. As
his conception of his own relation to slavery thus broadened and
deepened, so too did his plan of attacking the system become clearer and
more definite and he spent hours discussing the matter. In Springfield,
“he used to talk much on the subject, and had the reputation of being
quite ultra. His bookkeeper tells me that he and his eldest son used to
discuss slavery by the hour in his counting-room, and he used to say
that it was right for slaves to kill their masters and escape, and
thought slaveholders were guilty of a very great wickedness.”[67]
He studied the census returns and the distribution of the Negroes and
made maps of fugitive slave routes with roads, plantations, and
supplies. He learned of Isaac, Denmark Vesey, Nat Turner and the
Cumberland region insurrections in South Carolina, Virginia, and
Tennessee; he knew of the organized resistance to slave-catchers in
Pennsylvania, and the history of Hayti and Jamaica.
It needed, as he soon saw, something more radical than schools and moral
suasion; so deep-seated and radical a disease demanded “Action! Action!”
He welcomed his new and long-loved calling of shepherd because of the
leisure it gave him to study out his great moral problem. He sought and
gained the acquaintance of Negro leaders like Garnet, Loguen, Gloucester
and McCune Smith. As his sheep business broadened, he traveled about and
probably at this time first saw Harper’s Ferry—the mighty pass where
Potomac and Shenandoah, hurling aside the mountain masses, rush to their
singular wedding.
Thus the distraction of the Springfield wool business came to John Brown
almost in the guise of a temptation to be shunned. For a moment about
1845 he looked again on the lure of wealth and dreamed how useful it
would be to what was now his great life object. But only for a moment,
for when he realized the price he must pay—the time, the chicanery, the
petty detail—he turned from it in disgust. It was at this time that he
studied the history of insurrection and became familiar with the
Abolition movement; as early as 1846 his Harper’s Ferry project began to
form itself more or less clearly in his mind.
One thing alone reconciled him to his Springfield sojourn and that was
the Negroes whom he met there. He had met black men singly here and
there all his life, but now he met a group. It was not one of the
principal Negro groups of the day—they were in Philadelphia and New
York, Cincinnati and Boston, and in Canada, working largely alone with
only imperfect intercommunication, but working manfully and effectively
for emancipation and full freedom. The Springfield group was a smaller
body without conspicuous leadership, and on that account more nearly
approximated the great mass of their enslaved race. He sought them in
home and church and out on the street, and he hired them in his
business. He came to them on a plane of perfect equality—they sat at his
table and he at theirs. He neither descended upon them from above nor
wallowed with their lowest, and the result was that as Redpath says,
“Captain Brown had a higher notion of the capacity of the Negro race
than most white men. I have often heard him dwell on this subject, and
mention instances of their fitness to take care of themselves, saying,
in his quaint way, that ‘they behaved so much like “folks” that he
almost thought they were so.’ He thought that perhaps a forcible
separation of the connection between master and slave was necessary to
educate the blacks for self-government; but this he threw out as a
suggestion merely.”[68]
Nor did this appreciation of the finer qualities and capacity of the
Negroes blind him to their imperfections. He found them “intensely
human,” but with their human frailties weakened by slavery and caste;
and with perfect faith in their ability to rise above their faults, he
criticized and inspired them. In his quaint essay on “Sambo’s Mistakes,”
putting himself in the black man’s place, he enumerates his errors: His
failure to improve his time in good reading; his waste of money in
indulgent luxuries and societies and consequent lack of capital; his
servile occupations; his talkativeness and inaptitude for organization;
his sectarian bias. In part of his arraignment, which will bear
thoughtful reading to-day by black men as well as white, he makes his
Sambo say:
“Another trifling error of my life has been, that I have always expected
to secure the favor of the whites by tamely submitting to every species
of indignity, contempt, and wrong, instead of nobly resisting their
brutal aggressions from principle, and taking my place as a man, and
assuming the responsibilities of a man, a citizen, a husband, a father,
a brother, a neighbor, a friend,—as God requires of every one (if his
neighbor will allow him to do it); but I find that I get, for all my
submission, about the same reward that the Southern slaveocrats render
to the dough-faced statesmen of the North, for being bribed and browbeat
and fooled and cheated, as Whigs and Democrats love to be, and think
themselves highly honored if they may be allowed to lick up the spittle
of a Southerner. I say to get the reward. But I am uncommon
quick-sighted; I can see in a minute where I missed it.”[69]
No one knew better than John Brown how slavery had contributed to these
faults: for how many slaves could read anything, or when had they been
taught the use of money or the A. B. C. of organization? Not in
condemnation but in faith was this excellent paper written and
delicately worded as from one who has learned his own faults and will
not repeat those of others.
Not only did John Brown thus criticize, but he led these black folk. As
early as 1846 he revealed something of his final plans to Thomas Thomas,
his black porter and friend, with whom he once was photographed in
mutual friendly embrace, holding the sign “S. P. W.”—“Subterranean Pass
Way” of slaves to freedom.
“How early shall I come to-morrow?” asked Thomas one morning.
“We begin work at seven,” answered John Brown. “But I wish you would
come around earlier so that I can talk with you.” Then Brown disclosed a
plan of increasing and systematizing the work of the Underground
Railroad by running off larger bodies of slaves. This was the first form
of his Harper’s Ferry plan and it rapidly grew in detail, so that its
disclosure to Douglass in 1847 showed thought and advance.
The first national Negro leader, Frederick Douglass, had delivered his
wonderful salutatory in New Bedford in 1844. After publishing his
biography, he went to England for safety, but returned in 1847, ransomed
from slavery and ready to launch his paper, _The North Star_. No sooner
had he landed than the black Wise Men of New York told him of the new
Star in the East, whispering of the strange determined man of
Springfield who flitted silently here and there among the groups of
black folk and whose life was devoted to eternal war upon slavery. Both
were eager to meet each other—John Brown to become acquainted with the
greatest leader of the race which he aimed to free; Frederick Douglass
to know an intense foe of slavery. The historic meeting took place in
Springfield and is best told in Douglass’ own words:
“About the time I began my enterprise [_i. e._, his newspaper] in
Rochester, I chanced to spend a night and a day under the roof of a man
whose character and conversation, and whose objects and aims in life,
made a very deep impression upon my mind and heart. His name had been
mentioned to me by several prominent colored men; among whom were the
Rev. Henry Highland Garnet and J. W. Loguen. In speaking of him their
voices would drop to a whisper, and what they said of him made me very
eager to see and to know him. Fortunately, I was invited to see him at
his own house. At the time to which I now refer this man was a
respectable merchant in a populous and thriving city, and our first
place of meeting was at his store. This was a substantial brick building
on a prominent, busy street. A glance at the interior, as well as at the
massive walls without, gave me the impression that the owner must be a
man of considerable wealth. My welcome was all that I could have asked.
Every member of the family, young and old, seemed glad to see me, and I
was made much at home in a very little while. I was, however, a little
disappointed with the appearance of the house and its location. After
seeing the fine store I was prepared to see a fine residence in an
eligible locality, but this conclusion was completely dispelled by
actual observation. In fact, the house was neither commodious nor
elegant, nor its situation desirable. It was a small wooden building on
a back street, in a neighborhood chiefly occupied by laboring men and
mechanics; respectable enough, to be sure, but not quite the place, I
thought, where one would look for the residence of a flourishing and
successful merchant.
“Plain as was the outside of this man’s house, the inside was plainer.
Its furniture would have satisfied a Spartan. It would take longer to
tell what was not in this house than what was in it. There was an air of
plainness about it which almost suggested destitution. My first meal
passed under the misnomer of tea, though there was nothing about it
resembling the usual significance of that term. It consisted of
beef-soup, cabbage, and potatoes—a meal such as a man might relish after
following the plow all day or performing a forced march of a dozen miles
over a rough road in frosty weather. Innocent of paint, veneering,
varnish, or table-cloth, the table announced itself unmistakably of pine
and of the plainest workmanship. There was no hired help visible. The
mother, daughters, and sons did the serving, and did it well. They were
evidently used to it, and had no thought of any impropriety or
degradation in being their own servants. It is said that a house in some
measure reflects the character of its occupants; this one certainly did.
In it there were no disguises, no illusions, no make-believes.
Everything implied stern truth, solid purpose, and rigid economy. I was
not long in company with the master of this house before I discovered
that he was indeed the master of it, and was likely to become mine too
if I stayed long enough with him. His wife believed in him, and his
children observed him with reverence. Whenever he spoke his words
commanded earnest attention. His arguments, which I ventured at some
points to oppose, seemed to convince all; his appeals touched all, and
his will impressed all. Certainly I never felt myself in the presence of
a stronger religious influence than while in this man’s house.
“In person he was lean, strong, and sinewy, of the best New England
mold, built for times of trouble and fitted to grapple with the
flintiest hardships. Clad in plain American woolen, shod in boots of
cowhide leather, and wearing a cravat of the same substantial material,
under six feet high, less than 150 pounds in weight, aged about fifty,
he presented a figure straight and symmetrical as a mountain pine. His
bearing was singularly impressive. His head was not large, but compact
and high. His hair was coarse, strong, slightly gray and closely
trimmed, and grew low on his forehead. His face was smoothly shaved, and
revealed a strong, square mouth, supported by a broad and prominent
chin. His eyes were bluish gray, and in conversation they were full of
light and fire. When on the street, he moved with a long, springing,
racehorse step, absorbed by his own reflections, neither seeking nor
shunning observation. Such was the man whose name I had heard in
whispers; such was the spirit of his house and family; such was the
house in which he lived; and such was Captain John Brown, whose name has
now passed into history, as that of one of the most marked characters
and greatest heroes known to American fame.
“After the strong meal already described, Captain Brown cautiously
approached the subject which he wished to bring to my attention; for he
seemed to apprehend opposition to his views. He denounced slavery in
look and language fierce and bitter; thought that slaveholders had
forfeited their right to live; that the slaves had the right to gain
their liberty in any way they could; did not believe that moral suasion
would ever liberate the slave, or that political action would abolish
the system. He said that he had long had a plan which could accomplish
this end, and he had invited me to his house to lay that plan before me.
He said he had been for some time looking for colored men to whom he
could safely reveal his secret, and at times he had almost despaired of
finding such men; but that now he was encouraged, for he saw heads of
such rising up in all directions. He had observed my course at home and
abroad, and he wanted my coöperation. His plan as it then lay in his
mind had much to commend it. It did not, as some suppose, contemplate a
general rising among the slaves, and a general slaughter of the
slave-masters. An insurrection, he thought, would only defeat the
object; but his plan did contemplate the creating of an armed force
which should act the very heart of the South. He was not averse to the
shedding of blood, and thought the practice of carrying arms would be a
good one for the colored people to adopt, as it would give them a sense
of their manhood. No people, he said, could have self-respect, or be
respected, who would not fight for their freedom. He called my attention
to a map of the United States, and pointed out to me the far-reaching
Alleghanies, which stretch away from the borders of New York into the
Southern states.
“‘These mountains,’ he said, ‘are the basis of my plan. God has given
the strength of the hills to freedom; they were placed here for the
emancipation of the Negro race; they are full of natural forts, where
one man for defense will be equal to a hundred for attack; they are full
also of good hiding-places, where large numbers of brave men could be
concealed, and baffle and elude pursuit for a long time. I know these
mountains well, and could take a body of men into them and keep them
there despite of all efforts of Virginia to dislodge them. The true
object to be sought is first of all to destroy the money value of
slavery property; and that can only be done by rendering such property
insecure. My plan, then, is to take at first about twenty-five picked
men, and begin on a small scale; supply them with arms and ammunition
and post them in squads of fives on a line of twenty-five miles. The
most persuasive and judicious of these shall go down to the fields from
time to time, as opportunity offers, and induce the slaves to join them,
seeking and selecting the most restless and daring.’
“He saw that in this part of the work the utmost care must be used to
avoid treachery and disclosure. Only the most conscientious and skilful
should be sent on this perilous duty. With care and enterprise he
thought he could soon gather a force of one hundred hardy men, men who
would be content to lead the free and adventurous life to which he
proposed to train them; when these were properly drilled, and each man
had found the place for which he was best suited, they would begin work
in earnest; they would run off the slaves in large numbers, retain the
brave and strong ones in the mountains, and send the weak and timid to
the North by the Underground Railroad. His operations would be enlarged
with increasing numbers and would not be confined to one locality.
“When I asked him how he would support these men, he said emphatically
that he would subsist them upon the enemy. Slavery was a state of war,
and the slave had a right to anything necessary to his freedom. ‘But,’
said I, ‘suppose you succeed in running off a few slaves, and thus
impress the Virginia slaveholders with a sense of insecurity in their
slaves further south.’ ‘That,’ he said, ‘will be what I want first to
do; then I would follow them up. If we could drive slavery out of one
county, it would be a great gain; it would weaken the system throughout
the state.’ ‘But they would employ bloodhounds to hunt you out of the
mountains.’ ‘That they might attempt,’ said he, ‘but the chances are, we
should whip them, and when we should have whipped one squad, they would
be careful how they pursued.’ ‘But you might be surrounded and cut off
from your provisions or means of subsistence.’ He thought that this
could not be done so that they could not cut their way out; but even if
the worst came he could but be killed, and he had no better use for his
life than to lay it down in the cause of the slave. When I suggested
that we might convert the slaveholders, he became much excited, and said
that could never be. He knew their proud hearts and they would never be
induced to give up their slaves, until they felt a big stick about their
heads.
“He observed that I might have noticed the simple manner in which he
lived, adding that he had adopted this method in order to save money to
carry out his purposes. This was said in no boastful tone, for he felt
that he had delayed already too long, and had no room to boast either
his zeal or his self-denial. Had some men made such display of rigid
virtue, I should have rejected it as affected, false, and hypocritical,
but in John Brown, I felt it to be real as iron or granite. From this
night spent with John Brown in Springfield, Mass., 1847, while I
continued to write and speak against slavery, I became all the same less
hopeful of its peaceful abolition. My utterances became more and more
tinged by the color of this man’s strong impressions.”[70]
Tremendously impressed as was Douglass in mind and heart with John Brown
and his plan, his reason was never convinced even up to the last; and
naturally because here two radically opposite characters saw slavery
from opposite sides of the shield. Both hated it with all their
strength, but one knew its physical degradation, its tremendous power
and the strong sympathies and interests that buttressed it the world
over; the other felt its moral evil and knowing simply that it was
wrong, concluded that John Brown and God could overthrow it. That was
all—a plain straightforward path; but to the subtler darker man, more
worldly-wise and less religious, the arm of the Lord was not revealed,
while the evil of this world had seared his vitals. He uncovered himself
if not reverently, certainly respectfully before the Seer; he gave him
much help and information; he turned almost imperceptibly but surely
toward Brown’s darker view of the blood-sacrifice of slavery, but he
could never quite believe that John Brown’s tremendous plan was humanly
possible. And this attitude of Douglass was in various degrees and
strides the attitude of the leading Negroes of his day. They believed in
John Brown but not in his plan. They knew he was right, but they knew
that for any failure in his project they, the black men, would probably
pay the cost. And the horror of that cost none knew as they.
If John Brown was to carry out his idea as he had now definitely
conceived it, he must first find the men who could help him. On this
point there seems to have been deliberation and development of plan,
particularly as he consulted Douglass and the Negro leaders. His earlier
scheme probably looked toward the use of Negro allies almost exclusively
outside his own family. This was eminently fitting but impractical, as
Douglass and his fellows must have urged. White men could move where
they would in the United States, but to introduce an armed band
exclusively or mainly of Negroes from the North into the South was
difficult, if not impossible. Nevertheless, some Negroes of the right
type were needed and to John Brown’s mind the Underground Railroad was
bringing North the very material he required. It could not, however, be
properly trained in cities whither it drifted both for economic reasons
and for self-protection. Brown therefore heard of Gerrit Smith’s offer
of August 1, 1846, with great interest. This wealthy leader of the New
York Abolition group took occasion at the celebration of the twelfth
anniversary of British emancipation to offer free Negroes 100,000 acres
of his lands in the Adirondack region on easy terms. It was not a well
thought-out scheme: the climate was bleak for Negroes, the methods of
culture then suitable, were unknown to them; while the surveyor who laid
out these farms cheated them as cheerily as though philanthropy had no
concern with the project. The Gerrit Smith offer was not wholly a
failure. It turned out some good Negro farmers, gave some of its best
Negro citizens of to-day to northern New York, and trained a bishop of
the British African Church. But it did far less than it might have done
if better planned, and much if not all of its success was due to John
Brown. He saw possibilities here both to shelter his family when he
turned definitely to what was now his single object in life, and to
train men to help him. He went to Gerrit Smith at Peterboro, N. Y., in
April, 1848, and said: “I am something of a pioneer; I grew up among the
woods and wild Indians of Ohio and am used to the climate and the way of
life that your colony find so trying. I will take one of your farms
myself, clear it up and plant it, and show my colored neighbors how such
work should be done; will give them work as I have occasion, look after
them in all needful ways and be a kind of father to them.”[71]
His offer was gladly accepted and he moved his family there the
following year. It was a wild, lonely place. Thomas Wentworth Higginson
wrote once: “The Notch seems beyond the world, North Elba and its
half-dozen houses are beyond the Notch, and there is a wilder little
mountain road which rises beyond North Elba. But the house we seek is
not even on that road, but behind it and beyond it; you ride a mile or
two, then take down a pair of bars; beyond the bars faith takes you
across a half-cleared field, through the most difficult of wood-paths,
and after half a mile of forest you come out upon a clearing. There is a
little frame house, unpainted, set in a girdle of black stumps, and with
all heaven about it for a wider girdle; on a high hillside, forests on
north and west,—the glorious line of the Adirondacks on the east, and on
the south one slender road leading off to Westport, a road so straight
that you could sight a United States marshal for five miles.”[72]
To his family John Brown’s word was usually not merely law but wish.
They went to North Elba cheerfully and with full knowledge of the import
of the change, for the father was frank. The daughter Ruth writes:
“While we were living in Springfield, our house was plainly furnished,
but very comfortably, all excepting the parlor. Mother and I had often
expressed a wish that the parlor might be furnished too, and father
encouraged us that it should be; but after he made up his mind to go to
North Elba he began to economize in many ways. One day he called us
older ones to him and said: ‘I want to plan with you a little; and I
want you all to express your minds. I have a little money to spare; and
now shall we use it to furnish the parlor, or spend it to buy clothing
for the colored people who may need help in North Elba another year?’ We
all said, ‘Save the money.’”[73]
It was no paradise, even for the enthusiast. Redpath says: “It is too
cold to raise corn there; they can scarcely, in the most favorable
seasons, obtain a few ears for roasting. Stock must be wintered there
nearly six months in every year. I was there on the first of November,
the ground was snowy, and winter had apparently begun—and it would last
till the middle of May. They never raise anything to sell off that farm,
except sometimes a few fleeces. It was well, they said, if they raised
their own provisions, and could spin their own wool for clothing.”[74]
Meantime the scattered isolated eddies of the anti-slavery battles were
swirling to one great current, and more and more John Brown was becoming
the man of one idea. Impatiently he neglected his pressing wool
business. Instead of keeping his eye on his critical London venture, he
hastened across Europe perfecting military observations. He returned to
America in time to hear all the feverish discussion of the Fugitive
Slave Law and see its final passage. In November, 1850, he writes his
wife from Springfield: “It now seems that the Fugitive Slave Law was to
be the means of making more Abolitionists than all the lectures we have
had for years. It really looks as if God had His hand on this wickedness
also. I of course keep encouraging my colored friends to ‘trust in God
and keep their powder dry.’ I did so to-day at Thanksgiving meeting
publicly.”[75]
His Springfield meetings led to the formation of his “League of
Gileadites,” the first of his steps toward the armed organization of
Negroes. Forty-four Negroes signed the following agreement:
“As citizens of the United States of America, trusting in a just and
merciful God, whose spirit and all-powerful aid we humbly implore, we
will ever be true to the flag of our beloved country, always acting
under it. We, whose names are hereunto affixed, do constitute ourselves
a branch of the United States League of Gileadites. That we will provide
ourselves at once with suitable implements, and will aid those who do
not possess the means, if any such are disposed to join us. We invite
every colored person whose heart is engaged in the performance of our
business, whether male or female, old or young. The duty of the aged,
infirm, and young members of the League shall be to give instant notice
to all members in case of an attack upon any of our people. We agree to
have no officers except a treasurer and secretary pro tem., until after
some trial of courage and talent of able-bodied members shall enable us
to elect officers from those who shall have rendered the most important
services. Nothing but wisdom and undaunted courage, efficiency, and
general good conduct shall in any way influence us in electing
officers.”[76]
To this was added exhortation and advice by John Brown.
“Nothing so charms the American people as personal bravery,” he wrote.
“Witness the case of Cinques, of everlasting memory, on board the
_Amistad_. The trial for life of one bold and to some extent successful
man, for defending his rights in good earnest, would arouse more
sympathy throughout the nation than the accumulated wrongs and
sufferings of more than three millions of our submissive colored
population. We need not mention the Greeks struggling against the
oppressive Turks, the Poles against Russia, nor the Hungarians against
Austria and Russia combined, to prove this. No jury can be found in the
Northern states that would convict a man for defending his rights to the
last extremity. This is well understood by Southern congressmen, who
insisted that the right of trial by jury should not be granted to the
fugitive. Colored people have ten times the number of fast friends among
the whites than they suppose, and would have ten times the number they
have now were they but half as much in earnest to secure their dearest
rights as they are to ape the follies and extravagances of their white
neighbors, and to indulge in idle show, in ease and luxury. Just think
of the money expended by individuals in your behalf for the last twenty
years! Think of the number who have been mobbed and imprisoned on your
account! Have any of you seen the branded hand? Do you remember the
names of Lovejoy and Torrey?”[77]
He then gives definite advice as to procedure in case the arrest and the
deportation of a fugitive slave were attempted:
“Should one of your number be arrested, you must collect together as
quickly as possible, so as to outnumber your adversaries, who are taking
an active part against you. Let no able-bodied man appear on the ground
unequipped, or with his weapons exposed to view: let that be understood
beforehand. Your plans must be known only to yourself, and with the
understanding that all traitors must die, wherever caught and proven to
be guilty. ‘Whosoever is fearful or afraid, let him return and depart
early from Mount Gilead’ (Judges 7:3; Deut. 20:8). Give all cowards an
opportunity to show it on condition of holding their peace. Do not delay
one moment after you are ready; you will lose all your resolution if you
do. Let the first blow be the signal for all to engage; and when engaged
do not do your work in halves, but make clean work with your
enemies,—and be sure you meddle not with any others. By going about your
business quietly, you will get the job disposed of before the number
that an uproar would bring together can collect; and you will have the
advantage of those who come out against you, for they will be wholly
unprepared with either equipments or matured plans; all with them will
be confusion and terror. Your enemies will be slow to attack you after
you have done up the work nicely; and if they should, they will have to
encounter your white friends as well as you; for you may safely
calculate on a division of the whites, and may by that means get to an
honorable parley.
“Be firm, determined, and cool; but let it be understood that you are
not to be driven to desperation without making it an awful dear job to
others as well as to you. Give them to know distinctly that those who
live in wooden houses should not throw fire, and that you are just as
able to suffer as your white neighbors. After effecting a rescue, if you
are assailed, go into the houses of your most prominent and influential
white friends with your wives; and that will effectually fasten upon
them the suspicion of being connected with you, and will compel them to
make a common cause with you, whether they would otherwise live up to
their profession or not. This would leave them no choice in the matter.
“Some would doubtless prove themselves true of their own choice; others
would flinch. That would be taking them at their own words. You may make
a tumult in the court room where a trial is going on by burning
gunpowder freely in paper packages, if you cannot think of any better
way to create a momentary alarm, and might possibly give one or more of
your enemies a hoist. But in such case the prisoner will need to take
the hint at once, and bestir himself; and so should his friends improve
the opportunity for a general rush. A lasso might possibly be applied to
a slave-catcher for once with good effect. Hold on to your weapons, and
never be persuaded to leave them, part with them, or have them far away
from you. Stand by one another and by your friends, while a drop of
blood remains; and be hanged if you must, but tell no tales out of
school. Make no confession. Union is strength. Without some well
digested arrangements, nothing to any good purpose is likely to be done,
let the demand be never so great. Witness the case of Hamlet and Long in
New York, when there was no well defined plan of operations or suitable
preparation beforehand. The desired end may be effectually secured by
the means proposed; namely, the enjoyment of our inalienable
rights.”[78]
There is evidence that this league did effective rescue work, as did
other groups of Negroes in Boston, Philadelphia, Albany, New York and
elsewhere. In this service the Negroes could not act alone—it would have
meant mob violence on purely racial lines;—but given a few determined
white men to join in, they could and did bear the brunt of the fighting.
John Brown himself was active in such rescue work. He helped in the
release of “Jerry” in Syracuse, and writes in 1851 from Springfield:
“Since the sending off to slavery of Long from New York, I have improved
my leisure hours quite busily with colored people here, in advising them
how to act, and in giving them all the encouragement in my power. They
very much need encouragement and advice; and some of them are so alarmed
that they tell me they cannot sleep on account of either themselves or
their wives and children. I can only say I think I have been able to do
something to revive their broken spirits. I want all my family to
imagine themselves in the same dreadful condition. My only spare time
being taken up (often till late hours at night) in the way I speak of,
has prevented me from the gloomy homesick feelings which had before so
much oppressed me: not that I forget my family at all.”[79]
His hateful lawsuits hung like a weight about John Brown’s neck, and a
feverish impatience was seizing him: “Father did not close up his wool
business in Springfield when he went to North Elba, and had to make
several journeys back and forth in 1819–50. He was at Springfield in
January, 1851, soon after the passage of the Fugitive Slave Law, and
went around among his colored friends there, who had been fugitives,
urging them to resist the law, no matter by what authority it should be
enforced. He told them to arm themselves with revolvers, men and women,
and not to be taken alive. When he got to North Elba, he told us about
the Fugitive Slave Law, and bade us resist any attempt that might be
made to take any fugitive from our town, regardless of fine or
imprisonment. Our faithful boy Cyrus was one of that class; and our
feelings were so aroused that we would all have defended him, though the
women folks had resorted to hot water. Father at this time said, ‘Their
cup of iniquity is almost full.’ One evening as I was singing, ‘The
Slave Father Mourning for his Children,’ containing these words,—
“‘Ye’re gone from me, my gentle ones,
With all your shouts of mirth;
A silence is within my walls,
A darkness round my hearth,’—
father got up and walked the floor, and before I could finish the song,
he said, ‘O Ruth! Don’t sing any more; it is too sad!’”[80]
At the same time his thrifty careful attention to minutiæ did not desert
him. He keeps his eye on North Elba even after his wife and part of the
family returned to Akron and writes: “The colored families appear to be
doing well, and to feel encouraged. They all send much love to you. They
have constant preaching on the Sabbath; and intelligence, morality and
religion appear to be all on the advance.”[81]
His daughter says: “He did not lose interest in the colored people of
North Elba, and grieved over the sad fate of one of them, Mr. Henderson,
who was lost in the woods in the winter of 1852 and perished with the
cold. Mr. Henderson was an intelligent and good man, and was very
industrious and father thought much of him.”[82]
Once we find him saying: “If you find it difficult for you to pay for
Douglass’ paper, I wish you would let me know, as I know I took
liberty in ordering it continued. You have been very kind in helping
me and I do not mean to make myself a burden.” And again he writes: “I
am much rejoiced at the news of a religious kind in Ruth’s letter and
would be still more rejoiced to learn that all the sects who hear the
Christian name would have no more to do with that mother of all
abominations—man-stealing.”[83]
And the sects were thinking. All men were thinking. A great unrest was
on the land. It was not merely moral leadership from above—it was the
push of physical and mental pain from beneath;—not simply the cry of the
Abolitionist but the up-stretching of the slave. The vision of the
damned was stirring the western world and stirring black men as well as
white. Something was forcing the issue—call it what you will, the Spirit
of God or the spell of Africa. It came like some great grinding ground
swell,—vast, indefinite, immeasurable but mighty, like the dark low
whispering of some infinite disembodied voice—a riddle of the Sphinx. It
tore men’s souls and wrecked their faith. Women cried out as cried once
that tall black sibyl, Sojourner Truth:
“Frederick, is God dead?”
“No,” thundered the Douglass, towering above his Salem audience. “No,
and because God is not dead, slavery can only end in blood.”