by Tony Horwitz
William Lloyd Garrison
This onslaught, in turn, fed Garrison fresh material for his crusade. In his view, the southern backlash gave evidence not only of slavery’s cruelty but of the threat the institution posed to freedom of speech and the entire nation’s liberty. Garrison sent salvo after salvo from The Liberator, each round prompting return fire from slavery’s newly energized defenders, who began to espouse a brazenly unapologetic doctrine.
In earlier decades, Southerners had often spoken of slavery as a necessary evil, an uncomfortable inheritance from those who first brought Africans to the colonies. “I take higher ground,” John Calhoun told Congress in 1837. “Instead of an evil,” slavery was “a positive good.” It was rooted in the Bible and racial difference, which made whites the natural and rightful masters of “savage” Africans. Slaves were secure and well cared for, unlike wage laborers in northern mills; white Southerners were freed from drudgery and class conflict.
George Fitzhugh, of Virginia, later took Calhoun’s thesis to its logical extreme. In tracts such as Cannibals All!, he argued that if slavery was right, then the Founders themselves had been wrong. “All men are created equal” wasn’t a manifest truth; it was a self-evident lie.
Ten days after Nat Turner’s revolt, William Lloyd Garrison had written in The Liberator: “The first step of the earthquake, which is ultimately to shake down the fabric of oppression, leaving not one stone upon another, has been made.” Garrison’s words were to prove prophetic, though perhaps not in the way he imagined. In and of itself, Turner’s revolt was a tremor. But it cracked open a rift between fundamentally opposed views of America’s destiny. With each fresh denunciation and demonization, the chasm widened, until North and South came to regard each other not just as distinct regions but as separate peoples.
THE 1831 REVOLT AND its aftermath also stirred John Brown, who soon began plotting his own work against slavery. Bred of the same New England stock as William Lloyd Garrison and born the same year as Nat Turner, Brown shared essential traits with both the austere Yankee editor and the messianic slave preacher. In a sense, his antislavery career would trace an arc from one man to the other.
Brown’s father was an early subscriber to The Liberator and shared it with his son, who often visited Owen in Ohio and would soon move his family back there. Owen also became an early supporter of organized abolitionism, which effectively emerged as a movement in the United States with the founding of the American Anti-Slavery Society in 1833, under Garrison’s leadership.
The next year, Brown wrote his brother: “I have been trying to devise some means to do something in a practical way for my fellow-men who are in bondage.” This is the earliest surviving mention of slavery in Brown’s writing. He told his brother that he wanted to bring a black youth into his household, provide him an education, “and, above all, try to teach him the fear of God.” He also hoped to start a school for blacks. Education, he wrote, would free blacks’ minds and encourage Southerners to emancipate their slaves. “Perhaps we might, under God, in that way do more towards breaking their yoke effectually than in any other.”
These words seem mild for a man who would later take up arms, but they meshed closely with the abolitionism espoused in The Liberator. Garrison believed education, moral suasion, and Christian uplift would convince Americans, North and South, that slavery was a sin and a stain on the nation that must be expunged. Though vehement in word, Garrison was nonviolent in deed, a passionate “non-resistant.” He felt that violence, even in the cause of freedom, only recapitulated the sins of slave drivers. “I deny the right of any people to fight for liberty, and so far am a Quaker in principle.”
Brown initially shared Garrison’s pacifism. As a boy, he’d been so disgusted by what he saw of soldiers during the War of 1812 that he later refused to drill with local militias and paid fines to avoid military service. Throughout his life, he felt a strong affinity with Quakers, admiring their plainness, independent spirit, and long-standing opposition to slavery.
Brown and Garrison were also alike in their moral absolutism. Both hated compromise and felt “all on fire” to root out sin. Typical was their embrace of temperance, minus the moderation that word implies. Brown smashed jugs and barrels of whiskey; Garrison campaigned for abstinence that was “Total with a capital Tee”—the origin of the word “teetotaler.”
But Brown’s beliefs would part ways with Garrison’s as conflict over slavery escalated from angry words and petitions to fists and clubs and guns. Garrison, heeding the New Testament admonition to “resist not evil,” believed in turning the other cheek. Brown, more of an Old Testament Christian, sought divine retribution. He also displayed a visceral loathing of behavior he judged craven. Nothing galvanized him more than bullying that went unanswered.
The first sign of Brown’s brewing militancy came in 1837, when a pro-slavery mob in Illinois killed an abolitionist editor, Elijah Lovejoy, and threw his printing press into the Mississippi. Garrison, who had narrowly escaped lynching two years before, disapproved of Lovejoy’s arming himself in self-defense. Brown, at a church meeting called to protest Lovejoy’s killing, lifted his right hand and declared: “Here before God, in the presence of these witnesses, from this time, I consecrate my life to the destruction of slavery.”
Brown’s father attended the same meeting and spoke in praise of Lovejoy. About this time, Owen also left his conservative church to join one affiliated with abolitionism. And he became an early trustee of Oberlin, a radical new college in Ohio that accepted blacks and women. One of Oberlin’s first female graduates was Florella Brown, Owen’s daughter by his second wife.
John Brown also broke with his church in the bold fashion that would become his hallmark. During a revival, he was angered to see the congregation’s few black worshippers confined to the back of the church; he escorted them forward to his own family’s pew and took their seats in back. Church deacons later reprimanded him.
Brown manifested his independence in another, more covert way. Abolitionists created scores of societies in the 1830s and 1840s, from national organizations to local knitting circles. Brown joined none of them. Instead, one night in the late 1830s, he gathered his wife and three teenaged sons by the fire and spoke of his determination to wage war on slavery. “He asked who of us were willing to make common cause with him in doing all in our power to ‘break the jaws of the wicked and pluck the spoil out of his teeth,’” his eldest son wrote. “Are you, Mary, John, Jason and Owen?” As each family member assented, Brown knelt in prayer and administered an oath, pledging them to secrecy and devotion to slavery’s defeat. He later brought his younger children into this secret army, including a daughter who would accompany him to Virginia.
But as imposing as Brown could be as a father, he wasn’t a cult figure to his family. Nor did he command automatic obedience from his offspring. To the contrary, they often found amusement in his stern and ceaseless efforts to inculcate his beliefs. During the family’s twice-daily prayers, his son Salmon recalled, Brown would become “dead to the world and to the pranks of his unregenerate boys, who slyly prodded each other with pins and trampled upon each other’s toes to relieve the tension.”
None of Brown’s sons adopted their father’s orthodox faith, and several openly challenged it—an apostasy that vexed him tremendously. But all seven of his “unregenerate boys” who survived childhood would take up arms against slavery. They “held firmly to the idea that father was right,” Salmon recalled. “Where he had led we were glad to follow—and every one of us had the courage of his convictions.” Brown’s brothers, in-laws, and other kin would also lend support to his antislavery crusade. “There was a Brown family conspiracy,” his eldest son said, “to break the power of slavery.”
Over the course of this decades-long struggle, Brown drew inspiration from a number of Old Testament figures. But the one he returned to most often was Gideon. Called on by God to save Israel from the wicked Midianites, Gideon gathered a small
force and crept up on his enemy’s vast camp in the dark. Then he blew his trumpet and so did his men, raising their torches and crying, “The sword of the Lord, and of Gideon!” The Midianites “ran, and cried, and fled,” until their leaders were hunted down and slain.
The story of Gideon embodied Brown’s belief that a righteous band, boldly led, could bring divine wrath upon the wicked of the land. With God as his protector, he needed only a small tribe, beginning with the four family members he inducted by his hearth in the late 1830s.
BROWN’S INITIATION OF HIS wife and sons, however, coincided with a collapse in his worldly affairs. He’d moved back to Ohio in 1835, during a property boom in the Western Reserve that was fueled by easy credit and the many transportation projects under way in the rapidly expanding nation. Brown began speculating on land along a proposed canal route, borrowing money and subdividing lots and then borrowing again and buying more property.
This scheme collapsed when the canal company abruptly changed its plans. “I do think it is best to sell all out if we can at any thing like a fair rate,” Brown wrote his long-suffering business partner, Seth Thompson, who wanted to cut their losses as prices spiraled down, “but I think the time unfavourable. If we have been crazy getting in, do try & let exercise a sound mind about the maner of getting out.”
Brown’s judgment proved disastrous: six months later, the economy crashed. During the “Panic of 1837,” almost half the nation’s banks closed, credit evaporated, and the United States entered its first economic depression. Brown, already in trouble, was now buried in debts and lawsuits.
“The prospect is rather dark,” he finally conceded to Thompson in 1839, when he could no longer pay his taxes. “I feel rather more depressed than usual.” Brown returned to tanning, cattle driving, and surveying—even breeding race horses to climb out of debt. But by 1840 he was “flat down” and unable to afford so much as postage.
Things got worse. Brown refused to vacate a piece of land to which he’d lost title. Instead, he armed his sons with muskets and holed up in a cabin on the property until he and two of his boys were arrested and briefly jailed. A year later, in 1842, an Ohio court declared Brown bankrupt and listed the household “necessaries” his family was allowed to keep for its survival. This meager inventory included “2 Earthen Crocks Broke,” “3 Bags old,” 20 pounds of lard, 11 Bibles, “8 Womens and childrens aprons,” and a tin pail valued at 6 cents.
Brown’s plight wasn’t unusual: more than forty thousand Americans filed for bankruptcy under a new law enacted after the 1837 panic. But for a man who hated to “abandon anything he fixed his purpose upon,” failure of this magnitude was especially galling. He’d fallen far short of his own exacting standards and had borrowed heavily from friends and family, including his beloved father, who lost his farm after underwriting one of John’s loans. Brown also badly damaged his reputation by paying off land debts with money he’d been given to buy wool.
His letters from this period were self-lacerating. In one, he signed himself “Unworthily yours.” In another, he asked his wife’s forgiveness for his “many faults & foibles,” and later addressed her as “the sharer of my poverty, trials, discredit, & sore afflictions.”
A year after the bankruptcy, Brown’s family was struck by an even greater catastrophe. Severe dysentery, possibly caused by cholera, swept the large household. Charles Brown, a “swift and strong” six-year-old, was the first to die. Soon after, on three consecutive days, three of his siblings perished. The oldest was nine-year-old Sarah.
“She seemed to have no idea of recovering from the first,” Brown wrote, “nor did she ever express the least desire that she might.” Ill himself, he buried Sarah and the others in a single grave. “They were all children towards whom perhaps we might have felt a little partial,” he wrote his eldest son, John Brown, Jr., who was away at school, “but they all now lie in a little row together.”
In the early 1800s, roughly a third of Americans died before reaching adulthood. Early death was so common that parents recycled their children’s names; the Browns, having lost a Sarah, Frederick, and Ellen, named three newborns Sarah, Frederick, and Ellen. Of the twenty children Brown fathered, nine died before the age of ten, among them a baby girl accidentally scalded to death by an older sister.
Brown, though all too familiar with early death, had always taken losses exceptionally hard, beginning with his prolonged childhood mourning of pets and even of a marble. Burying four of his young flock in the fall of 1843 plunged him into a profound depression. It was “a calamity from which father never fully recovered,” John junior wrote. The family’s impoverishment, which had necessitated moving to a crowded and possibly unsanitary log house, may have deepened the wound. “I felt for a number of years,” Brown later wrote in a letter to a young abolitionist, “a steady, strong desire: to die.”
But in the same letter, he expressed his undying commitment to the destruction of slavery. “Certainly the cause is enough to live for,” Brown wrote, and he was “now rather anxious to live for a few years more.” He knew he would “endure hardness,” as he had throughout his life. “But I expect to effect a mighty conquest, even though it be like the last victory of Samson.”
CHAPTER 3
A Warlike Spirit
In the 1840s, as Brown battled bankruptcy and depression, his eldest son became enamored of phrenology. This pseudoscience held that character could be read in the contours of the skull. John junior’s father tended to be skeptical of the era’s many heterodox notions, abolitionism excepted. But he consented to a “reading” by Orson Fowler, a well-known phrenologist.
Fowler may have been coached by John Brown, Jr., or he may have gleaned insight from the words and manner of his subject. In any event, his notes on Brown were for the most part astute. “You have a pretty good opinion of yourself—would rather lead than be led,” Fowler wrote. “You like to have your own way, and to think and act for yourself … are positive in your likes and dislikes, ‘go the whole figure or nothing’ & want others to do the same.” He added: “You like to do business on a large scale, and can make money better than save it.”
Fowler wrote this in early 1847, as Brown embarked on a new and ambitious venture. A few years before, he had formed a partnership with a wealthy Akron man, to raise sheep and sell fine wool. Brown was a skilled shepherd and the partnership initially prospered. But as Fowler noted, Brown liked to think big and was very certain of his judgment. Others who knew him described this as “fixedness.”
In this instance, Brown became fixed on the notion that textile manufacturers were fleecing wool producers. He prevailed on his partner to establish a depot in Springfield, Massachusetts, where Brown could buy and grade wool and sell it at a better price while collecting a broker’s commission.
He may have been right that producers were exploited. But fixedness was a trait ill suited to the wildly fluctuating wool market of the late 1840s. When prices plunged, Brown refused to sell. Wool and unpaid bills quickly piled up at the Springfield depot. Brown also gave signs of a growing ambivalence about the enterprise in which he was engaged. This was fed in part by his father’s lifelong admonitions against vanity and materialism.
“I sometimes have dreadful reflections about having fled to go down to Tarshish,” Brown wrote his father. Tarshish was the trade port that Jonah set sail for in an attempt to escape God’s will. En route he was swallowed by a whale, then released to do the Lord’s bidding as a preacher to unbelievers.
But if Springfield tested (and found wanting) Brown’s acumen and dedication as a businessman, it proved an excellent place to pursue the true mission he believed he had from God. The city had a large population of free blacks, many of them fugitives from slavery, and it was a regular stop on the abolitionist circuit. Among those who visited Springfield was Frederick Douglass, the escaped slave, orator, and writer who had become, alongside William Lloyd Garrison, the most prominent abolitionist in the country.
Br
own met Douglass in the winter of 1847–48 and invited him to his home, which the visitor described as extremely humble, with furnishings that “would have satisfied a Spartan.” Douglass also gave a vivid description of Brown as he appeared in his late forties. Standing about five foot ten, he was “lean, strong, and sinewy,” and “straight and symmetrical as a mountain pine.” He had a prominent chin, coarse dark hair, and eyes “full of light and fire.” The earliest surviving portrait of Brown, a studio daguerreotype, dates to the period of Douglass’s visit. Brown’s thin lips are pressed firmly together, forming a slash across his angular face. His deep-set eyes are piercing and hooded, his brow furrowed, his nose long and sharp. Dark, bristly hair crowns his forehead.
Brown’s pose is equally striking. His right hand is raised in oath, as if pledging allegiance to a secret fraternity. His left hand clutches a banner that bore the letters “S.P.W.” This stood for Subterranean Pass Way, shorthand for the radical scheme Brown had devised for slaves’ liberation.
John Brown ca. 1847, daguerreotype by Augustus Washington
He shared this nascent plan with Frederick Douglass after their dinner in Springfield. Brown pointed to a map of the Allegheny Mountains, which run diagonally from Pennsylvania into Maryland and Virginia and deep into the South. Filled with natural forts and caves, these mountains, Brown said, had been placed by God “for the emancipation of the negro race.” He planned to use the Alleghenies as a base for guerrillas, who would make lightning raids on the farm valleys below and “induce slaves to join them.” As the insurgent army grew, it “would run off the slaves in large numbers,” sending them north along the mountain chain to freedom.
