The Insurrectionist

by Herb Karl

  “Gentlemen,” he said, “I aim to restore our slave-cursed republic to the principles of the Declaration of Independence and am prepared to die in the attempt.”

  Both men were puzzled by Brown’s plan. A constitution? A provisional government? And what about numbers? It seemed like the old man was willing to undertake an enormous task with a relatively small number of soldiers.

  Nothing either of them said could dissuade Brown. He countered every objection, cutting off debate with the words “If God be for us, who can be against us?”

  Smith looked to Sanborn and said, “You see how it is. Our dear friend has made up his mind to his course and cannot be turned from it. We cannot give him up to die alone. We must support him.”

  When Brown left Smith and Sanborn, he began a two-month journey that took him to New York, Massachusetts, Connecticut, and Pennsylvania. He met with other well-heeled abolitionists—black and white—and told them of his plans for a convention and subsequent invasion. Of course he would gladly accept donations to support his venture.

  By the end of his journey, he was ready to head to Canada West and the place he chose for the convention: the town of Chatham, located some fifty miles east of Detroit. But first he would return to Iowa to pick up the men he’d left in the capable hands of his drill officer, Aaron Stevens. The volunteers who’d endured the hardships of marching across Iowa in the dead of winter had earned the right to be introduced to the men he hoped to recruit in Canada West.

  When the company finally got to Chatham, Brown was told that the invitations he extended to his six principal benefactors were declined. Not even the consistently loyal Sanborn chose to come. Apparently Hugh Forbes’s campaign of misinformation was working.

  Of the forty-five men who attended the Chatham convention, one-quarter were from Brown’s military school in Springdale. His promotional efforts netted only thirty-four former slaves and free blacks. He expected hundreds. No matter. He announced he was ready to begin his invasion; those wishing to join him should be ready to assemble at a location near the border of Virginia.

  As the convention drew to a close, Brown received an urgent message summoning him to Boston. His benefactors—who now identified themselves as “the secret committee”—had made a decision that would require him to revise his plans. They needed to talk to him—immediately.

  Before leaving, Brown told the men he brought from Springdale to find whatever work they could during his absence—but they should be ready to report to him at a moment’s notice. For the impatient John Cook, who expressed an interest in scouting possible sites for the invasion, Brown had a special assignment: Find a job in a town in northern Virginia. Reconnoiter the surrounding countryside and gather intelligence. The town the old man had in mind was located some fifty miles northwest of Washington, DC, at the confluence of the Shenandoah and Potomac Rivers. It was situated in a region of gentlemen farmers who possessed few slaves. It was a mill town and the site of a federal armory: Harpers Ferry.

  When Brown’s cab pulled up to his Boston hotel, he was exhausted. He’d been continuously on the move for almost five months, traveling throughout the Northeast, soliciting money and attempting to recruit soldiers, his odyssey finally coming to an end at the convention in Canada West. And while he always took pride in being well groomed and neatly attired when in the company of his benefactors, on the day he was to meet them his clothing was soiled and he hadn’t shaved.

  Higginson met him at the hotel and gave an account of what had transpired in recent weeks. Other members of the secret committee, Higginson said, met earlier and reached an agreement. “They want you to suspend plans for operations in the South. It appears Colonel Forbes has made them nervous.”

  Higginson said Forbes had accelerated his vendetta of character assassination and that he traveled to Washington, where he spoke to antislavery senators, including New York’s William Seward, New Hampshire’s John Hale, and the junior senator from Massachusetts, Henry Wilson. Forbes had slandered Brown and named the members of the secret committee as coconspirators in a plan to invade the South in order to incite a slave uprising. According to Higginson, things spun out of control when Forbes declared that textile manufacturer Amos Adams Lawrence stood to make a fortune with the increase in the price of cotton goods that was sure to follow an invasion of a Southern state. Forbes had tried to create the impression that the whole venture was nothing more than a scheme to make money.

  Higginson said the secret committee dreaded seeing its work shattered by the allegations of a lunatic. “I’m afraid the charge of sedition would be too much to bear for most of them.” Not so for Higginson. The man who had tried to free the fugitive slave Anthony Burns urged Brown to go ahead with his plans regardless of the consequences.

  “But they hold the purse,” Brown said. “I am powerless without them.” The old man finally realized he’d underestimated the dissatisfaction of Forbes and overestimated the number of men who would join his crusade. And now he was broke.

  Later, when Stearns, Howe, and Sanborn arrived at the hotel, Brown was prepared for the worst. Stearns said, “We don’t want you to abandon your plan, merely to postpone it.”

  Sanborn added, “Forbes has become a pariah. We have no choice.”

  A visibly distressed Howe: “Captain, you must return to Kansas. It’s the only way to cast doubt on Forbes and his accusations.”

  Then Stearns made an offer. He wouldn’t recall the firearms Brown had been provided. They could be used at his discretion. “But you must agree to tell us nothing of your future plans,” Stearns said. “Your actions will speak for themselves.” He reached into his pocket and withdrew a cloth bag secured by a leather drawstring. “There are five hundred dollars in gold in this bag. The committee is willing to raise more—when you return from Kansas.”

  Brown was puzzled by Stearns’s stipulation but asked no questions. He’d take the money and do as his benefactors wished. He’d go to Kansas—again—and find a way to minimize the damage inflicted by Forbes. He’d do something that would call into question Forbes’s claim that an invasion of the South was imminent. And after things quieted down he’d accept Stearns’s offer of additional funds.

  The old man’s return to Kansas couldn’t have been timed any better. Details of an atrocity in the Fort Scott area had reached Boston newspapers. There had been a massacre of Free State settlers by proslavery marauders. Brown thought an opportunity might lie hidden within this tragedy.

  Wearing a full beard, he quietly slipped into Lawrence in late June 1858. Though most of the soldiers who went with him to Canada were left to fend for themselves, the old man asked Aaron Stevens, John Kagi, and twenty-four-year-old Charles Plummer Tidd—another man enlisted by John Cook—to meet him in Kansas. Their experience in the skirmishes of 1856 would be useful, and maybe they could help recruit a few veteran fighters.

  Brown drew up a document, the title of which included his new alias: “Articles of Agreement for Shubel Morgan’s Company.” As word spread that Shubel Morgan and John Brown were one and the same, volunteers stepped forward. Soon Brown had enlisted enough men to make himself visible in southeastern Kansas, the only part of the territory where clashes between Free State and proslavery factions still persisted.

  When not bedridden with severe and prolonged attacks of his chronic malarial fever, Brown led his new company as it patrolled the area around Fort Scott, scene of the recent massacre. Though he despised those who participated in the massacre, Brown wasn’t interested in revenge. He’d only engage the enemy if challenged. However, if he were presented with an opportunity to fulfill his mission—the divinely inspired mission that took precedence over all else—he wouldn’t hesitate to act.

  And so, almost twenty months after boarding a train in Albany with Owen, Brown had traveled to Kansas, back to the East for the Chatham convention, and back to Kansas again. Though he’d experienced his share of disappointments, he felt closer than ever to realizing his goal of taking his
war on slavery into Africa. All he had to do to get the funding he needed was discredit the rumor that he was conspiring with abolitionists in the North to start a slave uprising.

  His unexpected encounter with the fugitive slave Jim Daniels had come to him as divine intervention. When Daniels asked for help in rescuing his pregnant wife and children from the auction block, the old man was happy to oblige. Such a rescue was sure to the draw the attention of the newspapers. His benefactors in the Northeast would have evidence that Hugh Forbes’s insinuations were false and that John Brown was still roaming the Kansas-Missouri border.

  It was after midnight when the men Brown led into Missouri drew in their reins and came to a halt in front of the two-story house at the end of a snow-covered lane. The moon was still veiled by clouds, but the snowfall had eased. The house was cloaked in dark shadows as the old man sat motionless in the saddle, gazing at the elevated veranda. For many years he’d dreamed of freeing hundreds of slaves—maybe thousands. He was now about to rescue far fewer from a plantation in Missouri.

  One of the men shouted, “There’s smoke coming from a chimney, Captain.”

  The men were cold. They were getting impatient.

  Then the flickering light of a candle appeared in an upstairs window.

  Daniels had told Brown the deceased owner’s relative—a man named Hicklin—had taken up temporary residency in the house. He had a wife and children.

  Brown called to John Kagi. “Looks like the tenant is awake.” He pointed to the candlelight in the upstairs window. “You know what to do.”

  Kagi dismounted and headed for the front door.

  Brown gave his reins a shake and motioned for Daniels to follow. As they reached the back of the house, the slave quarters came into view—two windowless log cabins. Daniels leaped from the saddle and ran toward the larger of the two cabins. The moon had slipped from behind the clouds, bringing the scene into sharper focus. It didn’t require much illumination for Brown to see that the woman Daniels was embracing was indeed great with child.

  The old man dismounted and walked his horse back to the veranda. Daniels and his wife and children and an older black man followed. There were others, Daniels said, but they’d been sent to plantations at distant locations out of fear that they—as Daniels had—might run away.

  Kagi had stoked the fire in the parlor; the newly liberated slaves warmed themselves at the hearth. Parked outside was an old Conestoga wagon harnessed to a yoke of oxen. The wagon had been appropriated from the barn and was being loaded with bedding, clothing, and provisions. Hicklin and his family watched from the vestibule.

  “Well, you seem to be in a pretty tight place,” Brown told Hicklin. “But you shan’t be hurt if you behave yourself.”

  One of the men stuck his head inside the door. “Captain, the wagon is loaded and all is ready.”

  The emancipated slaves boarded the Conestoga.

  Brown turned to Hicklin. “I hope you understand we are but doing our duty. To do otherwise in the presence of the barbarities of slavery would be an eternal disgrace.” He mounted his horse and added, “You have been visited by Old John Brown of Osawatomie, Kansas. Be advised to remain here with your wife and children until the sun rises.”

  It was well past midnight and more work remained. Daniels suggested that slaves at a plantation three-quarters of a mile away would welcome a visit.

  In half an hour the company arrived at the plantation of John Larue. Larue anticipated an encounter with Free State guerrillas and was prepared to resist.

  “Alright then,” Brown shouted. “We’ll burn you out.”

  Larue surrendered, and five more liberated slaves climbed aboard the Conestoga wagon. The old man also confiscated several horses and a quantity of provisions, and he brought along Larue and his houseguest as hostages.

  The only troubling event of an otherwise successful mission was revealed hours later when Brown met up with the rest of his soldiers at the Little Osage River. A somber Stevens stood amid the property he’d seized: eleven mules, two horses, and a covered farm wagon loaded with salted meat and barrels of flour. He’d liberated only one slave, a young woman who knew Daniels and his wife.

  Stevens’s demeanor had nothing to do with his failure to liberate more slaves. He’d shot dead the owner of the farm he invaded. And he’d done so in the presence of the man’s thirteen-year-old son.

  Stevens struggled to control his emotions. “It grieves me deeply, Captain. He fired first and I had to defend myself.”

  Brown stepped forward, placed his hands on Stevens’s shoulders, and—speaking as earnestly as a minister to a member of his congregation—said, “An all-knowing God decides all things.”

  Apparently Brown’s God decided the old man’s deeds should be made known quickly—and the news created anger and terror along the border. Missouri planters, fearing more raids, sold their slaves south or sent them east to plantations in the interior of the state. At the same time, Free State settlers in southeastern Kansas braced for retaliation from Missourians.

  Meanwhile, newspaper stories leapfrogged eastward: from Lawrence to Saint Louis to Chicago to Cleveland to New York to Boston. Horace Greeley’s New York Tribune correspondents and William Hutchinson of the New York Times rushed to inform their readers of Brown’s raid and his liberation of the slaves. The magnitude of the event grew when the governor of Missouri offered a $3,000 reward for Brown’s capture. President Buchanan was obliged to make a token gesture; he offered a bounty of $250.

  As for the local newspapers, not all were favorable to the old man. Yet he’d accomplished what his benefactors hoped for. Hugh Forbes would vex him no more. As far as the people in the Northeast were concerned, Brown had never left Kansas.

  The old man may have missed his first opportunity to take his war on slavery into the South. But he wouldn’t miss the next. For the moment, however, he was committed to shepherding a wagon filled with fugitive slaves to Canada—eleven hundred miles from the Kansas-Missouri border.

  10

  Four Months Later

  April 29, 1859

  North Elba, New York

  Brown had written Mary that he’d be home by early spring. By then she’d have heard or read about his emancipation of the eleven slaves from the Missouri plantation. After the slaves were aboard a ferry bound for Canada, he intended to return to North Elba, confident he’d be able to carry out a plan for invading the South.

  But first he wanted to see his wife and young daughters—perhaps for the last time.

  When he arrived with a stranger at the Adirondack homestead, Mary was startled by the change in her husband’s physical appearance. She’d last seen him on the eve of his final expedition to Kansas—the expedition whose purpose was to divert attention from threats made by Hugh Forbes. Prior to his departure he was clean-shaven, but he now wore a full beard that cascaded down his face in bone-white waves.

  The stranger was a former member of James Montgomery’s Kansas Jayhawkers—twenty-six-year-old Jeremiah Goldsmith Anderson. Anderson had joined Brown for the Missouri raid, then accompanied him on the trip east at the insistence of John Kagi, who was worried about the old man’s deteriorating health. The bouts of chills and fever had become more debilitating, and Kagi felt Brown ought not travel alone.

  Mary ushered her husband and Anderson into the warmth of the parlor. They were cold and wet, having trudged along a muddy road in drizzling rain for the better part of the day. In the glow of a cast iron stove stood the three daughters, freshly scrubbed and neatly attired, each nearly a year older than when Brown last saw them. Like their mother, the girls were struck by the change in their father’s appearance. Little Ellen, now almost five, had been reluctant to approach him on previous occasions, but she seemed quite happy to see him and was the first to step forward. A bedraggled Brown dropped to one knee and lifted her into the air.

  “My dear daughter,” he said, kissing her on the cheek, “you shall soon be old enough to understand wh
y your father has spent so little time in your company.”

  He stood up and held out his hands to fifteen-year-old Annie and twelve-year-old Sarah. Both were waiting patiently for their father’s attention, exhibiting the self-restraint emblematic of the Brown household.

  The old man looked to his companion. “Children,” he said, “this is Lieutenant Jerry Anderson—a soldier from Kansas.”

  Brown had barely finished his sentence when he began to cough violently. Mary told the girls to bring water, but it took minutes for the coughing to subside. When the old man finally was able to talk, he blamed the cold and rain.

  It wasn’t long, however, before his chronic illness returned. He took to his bed the following afternoon, and for the next ten days he was nursed by Mary and the girls while Anderson tended to the livestock and performed other chores around the farm.

  A procession of visitors converged on the house almost daily. It included Brown’s sons Salmon, Oliver, and Watson—by now all married—and their wives; daughter Ruth and her husband, Henry Thompson; Henry’s brothers, twenty-five-year-old William and twenty-one-year-old Dauphin; and members of the North Elba community of former slaves.

  The visitors came to stand at the foot of the bed and pay their respects, but Brown had little to say. Once again his body had betrayed him, and he found it difficult to accept another setback at a time when he was so close to fulfilling his mission. Tormented by a fever that left him lying in pools of sweat, he spent the intervals, when the symptoms abated, reflecting on his final days in Kansas.

  Brown had left Kansas under a cloud of controversy. Dr. Charles Robinson condemned him, fearing his liberation of the Missouri slaves would disrupt the delicate transition of power resulting from Congress’s rejection of a proslavery territorial constitution. Brown was vilified in Missouri and Kansas newspapers for jeopardizing the lull in hostilities. The Leavenworth Herald carried an editorial stating there was “no earthly excuse” for the old man’s Missouri raid. Even the Lawrence papers chided him; they worried the progress made by the Free State cause would be dashed by another episode of “Bleeding Kansas.”