John Brown was an American abolitionist. He was a lifelong abolitionist who tried to eradicate slavery from the United States through increasingly radical means.
Background
John Brown was born on May 9, 1800 at Torrington, Connecticut, the son of Owen and Ruth (Mills) Brown. His biographers have pointed out with much satisfaction that he came of the best New England stock, with only slight dilution of the strain from a Dutch ancestor on the maternal side. They have passed over lightly much more significant facts of inheritance. John Brown's mother, who died when he was only eight years old, was insane for a number of years before her death and died insane, as had her mother before her.
A sister of Ruth Mills had also died insane, while three sons of her brother Gideon Mills became insane and were confined in asylums (affidavit of Gideon Mills). Two sons of another brother were also adjudged insane. Owen Brown plied various trades in the Connecticut villages in which he sojourned. By his own admission he was "very quick on the moove. " One of these moves took him to Hudson, Ohio, where John passed his boyhood.
Owen Brown was twice married and became the father of sixteen children. He was a man of much piety, an abolitionist, and an agent of the underground railroad.
Education
John's schooling was scanty, and reading formed the principal part of his early education. As he himself said, school always meant to him, even in later life, confinement and restraint. More to his liking was the free life of the wilderness.
Career
John Brown delighted in the long journeys with droves of beef cattle with which he was sent to supply troops in the War of 1812. Later he worked at the tanner's trade, acting as his father's foreman.
In 1825 Brown moved to Richmond, Pennsylvania, where he cleared the land of timber and set up a tannery. This was the first of ten migrations before his adventures in Kansas, in the course of which he established and sold tanneries, dabbled unsuccessfully in land speculation, and incurred debts. Then he turned shepherd, buying Saxon sheep on credit. One sum advanced by the New England Woolen Company he seems--apparently without any dishonest intent--to have diverted to his own use, but he was treated with leniency by his creditors after he had declared himself a bankrupt.
He earnestly hoped that "Devine Providence" would enable him to make full amends--but it never did. His family also changed its abode frequently as he changed his pursuits; but he was often absent for long stretches of time. The story of his business career is a tale of repeated failures, complicated by law-suits which aggrieved parties instituted to recover money loaned on notes or to secure damages for non-fulfilment of contracts.
Many of these were decided against the defendant, proving clearly enough his utter incapacity for business. Brown went to Springfield, Massachussets, and opened an office, but failure soon overtook this enterprise.
Prolonged litigation followed; and one suit involving $60, 000 for breach of contract was settled out of court by Brown's counsel. As his various ventures came to naught and his inability to earn a livelihood for his numerous progeny became manifest, he began to take more thought about the affairs of others, particularly about those who were or who had been in bondage.
He determined to settle with his family in a newly-founded community of negroes at North Elba, New York, on lands donated by Gerrit Smith. His purpose was "to aid them by precept and example, " avers his latest biographer without any intentional humor. Within two years, however, he had again moved, to Akron, Ohio, followed by his family.
In the spring of 1855, five of his sons went to Kansas to help win the territory for freedom and incidentally to take up lands for themselves.
In May John Brown, Jr. , sent a Macedonian cry to his father for arms to fight the battle for free soil. Brown then transferred what was left of his family to North Elba again, and in August set out for Kansas in a one-horse wagon filled with guns and ammunition.
Ostensibly he was to join the colony on the Osawatomie as surveyor. At once, however, he became their leader and captain of the local militia company. As such he commanded it in the bloodless Wakarusa War, whose indecisive outcome left him ill at ease. The ensuing disorders, particularly the sack of Lawrence in May 1856 by the pro-slavery forces, preyed upon his mind. The cause of free-soil took on the aspect of a crusade.
Members of his company met and resolved that acts of retaliation were necessary "to cause a restraining fear". A list of victims was made out and on May 23, Captain John Brown with a party of six, four of whom were his sons, set out for the Potawatomi country to discharge their bloody mission. During the night of May 24 they fell upon their five hapless victims without warning and hacked them to pieces with their sabers.
Probably Brown killed no one with his own hand, but he assumed full responsibility for the massacre, asserting as he was wont to do that he was but an instrument in the hands of God. From this time on the name of "Old Osawatomie Brown" became a terror to pro-slavery settlers. Eventually, however, he and his men were beaten and dispersed, while in revenge Osawatomie was sacked and burned. In this guerrilla warfare, Frederick, one of the sons whose mind had become unbalanced, was killed.
Old acquaintances who saw Brown after his return from Kansas, in the autumn of 1856, commented on the change in his appearance and manner.
His inability to talk about anything except slavery, and that always with abnormal intensity, left many with the impression that he had become a monomaniac (affidavits).
Upon less keen observers in Massachusetts--less keen perhaps, because more preoccupied with the struggle for Kansas--he made a happier impression. It is charitable to suppose that the Concord philosopher was at this time ignorant of the murders on the Potawatomi; but another ardent resident of Concord, Frank B. Sanborn, could hardly have been so ignorant, nor his friends, G. L. Stearns, T. W. Higginson, Theodore Parker, and S. G. Howe, who were members of the Massachusetts State Kansas Committee and who gave Brown some supplies and arms, a little money, and many assurances of moral support in the fight for freedom in Kansas.
When Brown returned to Kansas in the late autumn of 1857, he found both parties disposed to have recourse to ballots instead of bullets, and therefore had no opportunity to employ his peculiar methods of persuasion. He now began to recruit a body of men for a new enterprise. He proposed to transfer his offensive against slavery to a new front.
In the following spring, at an extraordinary convention of his followers and negroes at Chatham in Canada, he divulged his plans for the liberation of slaves in the Southern states. He and his band were to establish a base in the mountains of Maryland and Virginia, to which slaves and free negroes would resort, and there--beating off all attacking forces whether state or federal--were to form a free state under a constitution. A provisional constitution was then adopted by the convention and Brown elected commander-in-chief.
Brown's funds were now exhausted and he turned again to Gerrit Smith and to his Massachusetts friends. That they were aware of the wide reach of his new plans cannot now be doubted; yet they encouraged him with promises of financial support in what was essentially a treasonable conspiracy. For the immediate present, however, they counseled delay; and in the early summer of 1858 Brown returned to Kansas to resume operations under the name of Shubel Morgan. His chief exploit was a descent upon some plantations across the border in Missouri, in the course of which one planter was killed while defending his property and some eleven slaves were liberated.
In the eyes of the government he was now no better than a dangerous outlaw. The president of the United States and the governor of Missouri offered rewards for his arrest; but Brown and his men, appropriating horses, wagons, and whatever served their purpose, eluded pursuit and finally succeeded in reaching Canada with the liberated slaves. Even this exploit did not cost Brown the confidence of his supporters.
He made public speeches at Cleveland and at Rochester, and no one attempted to arrest him. Gerrit Smith declared him "most truly a Christian" and headed a subscription list with a pledge of $400. From the Massachusetts group Brown received $3, 800, "with a clear knowledge of the use to which it would be put". In the early summer of 1859, Brown fixed upon Harper's Ferry as the base of his operations in Virginia and rented a farm about five miles distant where he could collect his arms and his band of followers.
By midsummer his little army of twenty-one men had rendezvoused secretly at Kennedy Farm; but it was not until the night of October 16 that the commander-in-chief gave the order to proceed to the Ferry. Even after all these weeks of preparation he seems to have had no coherent plan of attack. That he should have fixed upon this quiet town of mechanics, many of whom came from the North, as the place for an assault upon slavery, is inexplicable on any rational grounds.
Neither it nor its environs contained many slaves; and it is one of the tragic ironies of the affair that the first man killed should have been a respectable free negro who was discharging his duty as baggage-master at the railroad station. When morning dawned, Brown and his men were in possession of the United States armory and the bridges leading to the Ferry, had made many inhabitants prisoners, among them one slaveholder from a plantation five miles away, and had persuaded a few slaves to join them; but there Brown's initiative failed. For some unexplained reason he did not make off to the mountains as he might easily have done. Meantime the news of the raid spread through the country-side.
By mid-day local militia companies from Charlestown had arrived on the scene and had closed Brown's only way of escape. Desultory firing followed, with some casualties on both sides, while Brown with the remnant of his forces, the slaves, and some of his prisoners were shut up in the engine-house of the armory.
During the following night a company of United States marines arrived under the command of Colonel Robert E. Lee; and at dawn, upon Brown's refusal to surrender, carried the building by assault. Brown fought with amazing coolness and courage over the body of his dying son but was finally overpowered with four of his men. Seven had already been taken prisoner and ten had either been killed or mortally wounded, including two of Brown's sons. Brown himself was wounded but not seriously. Next morning he was taken to Charlestown and lodged in the jail. One week later he was indicted for "treason to the Commonwealth, conspiring with slaves to commit treason and murder. "
His trial was conducted with expedition but with exemplary fairness and decorum. It ended inevitably in the sentence of death; and on December 2, John Brown was hanged. From the moment of his capture to his execution Brown conducted himself with a fortitude and dignity that commanded the respect of his captors and judges.
To all questions regarding his motives he had only one answer: he had desired to free the slaves--he believed himself an instrument in the hands of Providence to this end. When confronted with the bloody consequences of his acts and with the designs he had entertained to incite a slave insurrection, he would recognize no inconsistency. It was this obsession regarding his mission and his unaccountableness to anybody but his Maker that created doubts as to his sanity. Before his execution seventeen affidavits from neighbors and relatives who believed Brown to be insane were sent to Governor Wise, but he decided for some reason not to follow his first inclination and have an alienist examine Brown.
These remarkable affidavits with their unimpeachable testimony as to Brown's family history and his own erratic behavior constitute prima facie evidence which no modern court of law could ignore. It is significant of the passions aroused by the Harper's Ferry raid that Brown was hailed both as a noble martyr in a great cause and as a common assassin.
Achievements
ohn Brown was a fervent abolitionist who was accused of massacring pro-slavery settlers in Kansas in 1856 and who, in 1859, led an unsuccessful raid on Harpers Ferry, Virginia (in what is now West Virginia), in an attempt to start a slave insurrection. His raid on the federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry, Virginia made him a martyr to the antislavery cause and was instrumental in heightening sectional animosities that led to the American Civil War (1861–65).
Works
book
book
Religion
John Brown was a devout Christian.
Views
Brown was well over fifty years of age before the idea of freeing the slaves by force dominated his mind. He had always been an abolitionist; he had made his barn at Richmond a station on the underground railroad; he had formed a League of Gileadites among the negroes in Springfield, to help them protect themselves and fugitive slaves. Now he began to have visions of a servile insurrection--the establishment of a stronghold somewhere in the mountains whence fugitive slaves and their white friends could sally forth and terrorize slaveholders. These visions were never very clear or very coherent, and they were overcast by events in Kansas where protagonists of slavery and free-soilers from the North were contending passionately for possession of the territorial government and where a condition bordering on civil war was soon to exist.
Quotations:
Probably Abraham Lincoln anticipated the final verdict of history when he said in his Cooper Union speech (February 27, 1860): "That affair, in its philosophy, corresponds with the many attempts, related in history, at the assassination of kings and emperors. An enthusiast broods over the oppression of a people till he fancies himself commissioned by Heaven to liberate them. He ventures the attempt, which ends in little else than his own execution. Orsini's attempt on Louis Napoleon, and John Brown's attempt at Harper's Ferry were in their philosophy precisely the same. "
Personality
With his gray hair and bent figure he looked like an old man. One keen observer, who did not know Brown's family history, detected "a little touch of insanity about his glittering gray-blue eyes".
Quotes from others about the person
Emerson spoke of him as "a pure idealist of artless goodness. "
Thomas Wentworth Higginson, a cohort of Brown's and a member of the Secret Six, stated that Brown's plan involved getting "together bands and families of fugitive slaves" and "establish them permanently in those [mountain] fastnesses, like the Maroons of Jamaica and Surinam. "
Connections
In 1820 he married Dianthe Lusk, who in the twelve years of her married life bore him seven children. She, like her husband's mother, suffered from mental aberration in her later years and died in 1831. Two of her sons were of unsound mind. Within a year John Brown married Mary Anne Day, a girl of sixteen, of robust physique, who in twenty-one years bore him thirteen more children.
Father:
Owen Brown
Mother:
Ruth (Mills) Brown
1st wife:
Dianthe Lusk
2nd wife:
Mary Anne Day
Partner:
Simon Perkins
His last business venture was a partnership with one Simon Perkins to raise sheep and to establish a brokerage for wool-growers.
