Midnight Rising: John Brown and the Raid That Sparked the Civil War Hardcover – Bargain Price

by Tony Horwitz

  Brown’s main objective, he told Douglass, was to undermine slavery by “rendering such property insecure.” He also believed his mission would focus national attention on slavery, as had happened after Nat Turner’s revolt in 1831. The two men debated the scheme until three in the morning. Brown sought the black abolitionist’s support; Douglass doubted the plan’s feasibility. But he came away deeply impressed by the wool merchant’s sincerity and commitment.

  Douglass had begun his own abolitionist career as a protégé of Garrison’s. But by the late 1840s, he’d come to question whether pacifism and moral suasion were sufficient tools for slaves’ liberation. He also bristled at the prejudice and condescension displayed by many white abolitionists. Brown seemed remarkably free of this.

  “Though a white gentleman,” Douglass wrote in his abolitionist weekly, the North Star, soon after his Springfield visit, Brown “is in sympathy, a black man, and as deeply interested in our cause, as though his own soul had been pierced with the iron of slavery.”

  BROWN GAVE FURTHER EVIDENCE of this sympathy in 1848, when he sought the support of Gerrit Smith, one of the most exceptional, eccentric, and philanthropic men of his day. Born into the landed gentry of upstate New York, Smith profitably managed his family’s estates while cycling through the many reform movements of the early 1800s, including temperance, women’s rights, vegetarianism, and sexual “purity” (a creed advocated by Sylvester Graham, who claimed his coarse-grained crackers curbed lust and masturbation).

  But Smith’s abiding passion was abolitionism. He helped found the antislavery Liberty Party and ran as its presidential candidate in 1848 (receiving 0.1 percent of the vote). The small town his family founded in New York was so strongly abolitionist that a black visitor wrote Frederick Douglass, “There are yet two places where slaveholders cannot come, Heaven and Peterboro.”

  Smith also had a prior tie to Brown’s family. Years before, the New Yorker had donated twenty thousand acres of his holdings in western Virginia to Oberlin, the radical new college in Ohio of which Owen Brown was a trustee. Owen arranged for his then destitute son to survey the land, and it was during this trip that Brown first visited the Allegheny Mountains.

  Smith had since undertaken a utopian project: he granted free blacks thousands of acres in upstate New York, so they could farm and own enough property to qualify for the vote. But the land was poor and remote; the few blacks who settled in an Adirondacks colony called Timbucto struggled from the first.

  Gerrit Smith

  Brown had a solution, which he proposed to Smith upon visiting the magnate’s Peterboro mansion in 1848. He would move to upstate New York himself and help black pioneers survey, farm, and raise stock. “I can think of no place where I think I would sooner go,” he wrote his father, “than to live with those poor despised Africans to try, & encourage them; & show them a little as far as I am capable.”

  Smith was impressed by the idealistic wool merchant and deeded him 244 acres at $1 an acre. In the spring of 1849, Brown settled near Lake Placid, in the village of North Elba. That June, Richard Henry Dana, the author of Two Years Before the Mast, was hiking in the Adirondacks when he stumbled on “a log-house and half-cleared farm”—the Browns’ temporary home. Dana joined the family of nine for dinner. Two black neighbors were also at the table. Brown “called the negroes by their surnames, with the prefixes of Mr. and Mrs.,” Dana observed. “It was plain they had not been so treated or spoken to often before.”

  The 1850 census listed a twenty-three-year-old black laborer from Florida, a fugitive slave, living with the Browns. Many black farm families dwelled close by. Brown’s oldest daughter, Ruth—“a bonny, buxom young woman,” Dana wrote, “with fair skin and red hair”—married a white neighbor, Henry Thompson, who would later join his father-in-law’s abolitionist crusade, as would two of his brothers.

  But Brown himself rarely stayed in North Elba for long. Soon after moving his family to upstate New York, he undertook a desperate scheme to wind up his wool business in Springfield. Rather than sell to domestic buyers at low prices, he shipped tons of his firm’s finest wool to Great Britain, convinced he could break the American cartel.

  Yet again, Brown’s business instincts proved poor. British buyers scorned the American wool, forcing him to ship most of it back home, at great expense, for sale at ruinously low prices. His already troubled business collapsed, and Brown found himself mired in debt and lawsuits, just as he’d been a decade before. He would spend much of the next five years shuttling from court to court, contesting legal claims that “if lost will leave me nice and flat.”

  Meanwhile, Mary Brown had been left overseeing a cash-strapped household, in a land so harsh that snow still lay in the fields in late May. Since the loss of four children in 1843, Brown’s wife had given birth to three more; two of them died as infants. Her frequently absent husband acknowledged the hardships she endured in an unusually tender letter in 1847, noting his “follies,” “the verry considerable difference in our age,” and the fact that “I sometimes chide you severely.” The toll was evident to Richard Dana when he visited the Browns’ Adirondack home; he described Mary, then just thirty-three, as “rather an invalid.”

  Later that summer, as Brown sailed for Britain, Mary decided “she must do something, at once, or she would not live but a little while,” John junior wrote his father overseas. Leaving her stepdaughter Ruth in charge of her young children, Mary left North Elba for a “Water-Cure Infirmary” in Northampton, Massachusetts, where she was diagnosed as suffering from a nervous disorder and “a Scrofulous humour seated in her glands.”

  Mary Brown with daughters Annie and Sarah, ca. 1851

  Mary wrote John junior complaining that his father “never believed there was any dissease about me,” and had left her very little money. To extend her treatment (“plunge, douche, drenches, and spray baths”) she pleaded with her stepson: “If you can send me twenty or twenty five dollars I should like it.” Mary also mentioned a lecture by Lucy Stone, an abolitionist and suffragist. “I went to hear for the first time that I ever heard a Woman speak,” she wrote, and she “liked her very well.”

  After her water cure, Mary recovered somewhat, bore another son, (who died aged three weeks), and gave birth a thirteenth and final time when she was thirty-eight. The one surviving photograph of her during her marriage shows a woman with strong cheekbones, severe hair, and downturned lips, seated between two bilious-looking girls.

  AT MIDCENTURY, AS BROWN struggled to settle his family and finances, the fragile concord between free and slave states that had prevailed for three decades began to unravel. In the years since the Missouri Compromise, a new euphemism for slavery had emerged: “the peculiar institution.” In the early nineteenth century, this phrase connoted that slavery was “peculiar” or distinctive to the South. As long as it remained so, most Northerners chose to tolerate or ignore it. “It is an existing evil, for which we are not responsible,” President Millard Fillmore said in 1850, expressing a common view. “We must endure it, and give it such protection as is guaranteed by the Constitution.”

  But Northerners recoiled whenever slavery threatened to bleed outside its existing boundaries. Their fear had much more to do with self-interest than with sympathy for blacks—indeed, the latter was so scarce that several northern states passed laws to exclude black immigrants altogether. At bottom, whites didn’t want to compete with slave labor and see their own status and prospects diminished. “The workingmen of the north, east, and west,” Walt Whitman wrote in 1847, “shall not be sunk to the miserable level of what is little above brutishness—sunk to be like owned goods, and driven cattle!”

  Whitman’s outburst was prompted by national debate over the land grab under way during the Mexican War. Launched in 1846, under President James Polk—like Andrew Jackson, a slave-owning cotton planter—the war concluded in 1848 with the United States increasing its geographic size by a third at Mexico’s expense. That same year, the gold rus
h to California began. This rapid expansion brought the slavery question to a fiercer boil than ever before. Could Southerners carry their “property” into the new territories, and would these territories become free states or slave?

  After heated wrangling, Congress put off a reckoning by cutting a deal, just as it had done in 1820 over Missouri. The Compromise of 1850 carved the newly acquired land into three pieces: the free state of California and two territories, Utah and New Mexico, where the slavery question was left unresolved. In a major concession to Southerners, Congress also enacted a new and much tougher Fugitive Slave Act. Federal officials and ordinary citizens were now required to aid in the capture and return of runaways, even to the point of forming posses. In effect, every Northerner could be deputized as a slave catcher. Civil liberties were sharply curtailed, too, denying fugitive slaves the right to testify on their own behalf or to be tried before a jury.

  This noxious statute instantly roused antislavery fury in the North. Boston mobs set upon slave hunters and freed captured fugitives. In Pennsylvania, armed blacks, aided by local whites, fought off an attempt to recover four runaways and shot their owner dead. The Fugitive Slave Act also led Harriet Beecher Stowe to write Uncle Tom’s Cabin, which sold three hundred thousand copies during its first year in print and brought the cruelties of slavery alive for a mainstream audience.

  The furor reenergized John Brown as well. “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,” he exulted in a letter to Mary in late 1850. Brown was back in Springfield at the time, trying to salvage what he could from his wool business. While there, he also devised a secret organization to fight slave catchers. He gave this self-defense group a telling name: the United States League of Gileadites. This referred to allies of Gideon, who guarded fords across the Jordan River and slew wicked Midianites fleeing across it.

  Brown laid out his tactics in his “Words of Advice” to the Gileadites. He counseled them to act swiftly, secretly, and decisively, like Gideon. “Let the first blow be the signal for all to engage; and when engaged do not work by halves, but make clean work with your enemies.” Brown also set out a stringent code of honor: never confess, never betray, never renounce the cause. “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.”

  Forty-four people in Springfield, most if not all of them black, signed an agreement to form the first branch of the League of Gileadites. Little else is known of the group or of Brown’s role beyond his “Words of Advice.” But he had laid out a blueprint for future action, even to the point of anticipating his own dramatic end.

  THE FUGITIVE SLAVE ACT of 1850 was just one of a series of provocations that propelled Brown toward violent action, and the nation toward disunion and conflict. Southern cotton production boomed in the 1840s and 1850s, supplying most of the world’s demand and outstripping all other American exports combined. By the eve of the Civil War, the nation’s twelve richest counties all lay in the South, a region that constituted, on its own, the fourth largest economy in the world.

  The stereotypical “Old South” of columned mansions, hoop skirts, and endless rows of cotton was, in reality, new, and its bloom lasted for only the final decades of slavery’s 246-year history in North America. But it gave little sign of withering in the years before the Civil War. To the contrary, slaveholders sought ceaselessly to expand their reach, proclaiming it the nation’s manifest destiny to annex still more lands beyond those taken from Mexico and native tribes.

  “Cuba must be ours,” declared Mississippi senator Jefferson Davis. He also wanted the Yucatán peninsula, so that the Gulf of Mexico would become “a basin of water belonging to the United States.” His fellow Mississippian, Senator Albert Brown, coveted Central America. “I want these countries for the spread of slavery,” he said. “I would spread the blessings of slavery, like the religion of our Divine Master, to the uttermost ends of the earth.”

  In the 1850s, proslavery partisans known as “filibusters” invaded Cuba. They failed, but another filibuster, William Walker, briefly established the “Republic of Baja California” after seizing the peninsula from Mexico. Two years later, he led a private army into Nicaragua, installed himself as president, and reinstituted slavery (which had ended there in 1824).

  Walker’s dictatorship even won recognition from the White House, which was occupied in the 1850s by three of the weakest presidents in U.S. history. Millard Fillmore, Franklin Pierce, and James Buchanan were all Northerners who supported or appeased southern interests, a breed derisively known as “doughfaces”—half-baked and malleable in the hands of slave holders. This pliability was all the more exasperating to antislavery Northerners because of their region’s dominance in other realms. By mid-century, the North was home to roughly 70 percent of the nation’s free population and more than 80 percent of its industry.

  This rapid expansion only heightened the South’s insecurity—and the brashness of its leaders’ demands for more slaveholding territory and even for the resumption of the transatlantic slave trade, outlawed by Constitutional decree since 1808. “Slavery,” Horace Greeley wrote in the New York Tribune, “loves aggression, for when it ceases to be aggressive it stagnates and decays. It is the leper of modern civilization, but a leper whom no cry of ‘unclean’ will keep from intrusion into uninfected company.”

  GREELEY’S WORDS, in early 1854, were directed at a new and explosive threat to the nation’s tenuous unity. Senator Stephen Douglas of Illinois (a powerful booster of the railroad, the Midwest, and himself) introduced a bill to open for settlement a vast stretch of prairie and plains comprising today’s Kansas and Nebraska, as well as parts of six other western states. All of this territory lay north of the line demarcated in the Missouri Compromise, above which slavery was to be “forever prohibited.” But to win southern votes in Congress, Douglas agreed to repeal the 1820 pact.

  If the settlers of the new territories so chose, slavery might now extend across a swath of land reaching from Iowa and Minnesota to the Rockies. Signed into law by a compliant President Pierce in May 1854, the Kansas-Nebraska Act ignited a firestorm so intense that its author acknowledged, “I could travel from Boston to Chicago by the light of my own effigy.”

  President Pierce poured more oil on the flames that May by sending federal troops to enforce the Fugitive Slave Act against Anthony Burns, a runaway slave who had been captured and put under guard in a Boston courthouse. Abolitionists tried to free Burns by charging the courthouse with a battering ram. When this failed, he was taken under heavy guard to Boston Harbor, for shipment back to Virginia aboard a U.S. Navy vessel.

  Political cartoon, showing Douglas and Pierce at left

  The bald spectacle of federal forces aiding in the return of a fugitive to bondage—and in Boston, the cradle of liberty, no less—pushed abolitionist fury to the bursting point. “My thoughts are murder to the state,” Henry David Thoreau wrote in his journal, no longer able to reflect on nature during his long walks. A few weeks later, William Lloyd Garrison commemorated July 4 by publicly burning a copy of the U.S. Constitution, branding it “a covenant with death, and an agreement with hell.” As the document went up in flames, he proclaimed, “So perish all compromises with tyranny!”

  Abolitionists were still a small minority in the North, often mocked as cranks, scolds, and “ultras” or extremists, well outside the mainstream. But the Kansas-Nebraska Act, more than any previous event, gave substance to the specter of an insatiable “Slave Power,” intent on devouring the liberties of all Americans. As a group of leading antislavery congressmen warned in a widely circulated appeal to the nation, the bill was “an atrocious plot,” designed “to exclude from a vast unoccupied region, emigrants from the Old World and free laborers from our own States, and convert it into a dreary region of despotism, inhabited by masters and slaves.”

  In the wake of t
he Kansas-Nebraska debate, opponents of slavery’s extension formed a new political coalition: the Republican Party. Societies also sprang up to recruit and assist emigrants to Kansas. Since the territory’s status would be determined by popular vote, antislavery activists—and their proslavery counterparts—sought to fill Kansas with settlers sympathetic to their cause. In doing so, partisans on both sides resorted to scare tactics and crude stereotypes. Southerners conjured a tide of “grasping, skin-flint nigger stealing Yankees” washing over Kansas, while Northerners caricatured southern pioneers as “Pukes”—illiterate backwoodsmen with whiskey-red eyes, tobacco-stained teeth, and bowie knives.

  IN THE SUMMER OF 1854, Kansas fever took hold in drought-stricken Ohio, where John Brown’s grown sons owned farms and orchards. John junior told his father that he’d decided to sell out and move west. Brown approved, expressing praise of any family member “disposed to go to Kansas or Nebraska, with a view to help defeat SATAN and his legions.” But he was unable to join in this laudable mission. “I feel committed to operate in another part of the field,” he wrote John junior on August 21.

  At the time, Brown was living in Akron, where he’d moved his wife and younger children in 1851 while contesting legal claims and wrapping up his wool partnership. He now planned to return with his family to North Elba, to resume work with black farmers in upstate New York, the “part of the field” he referred to in his letter. Also, Mary Brown was eight months pregnant and eager to settle after years of near nomadism. This was no time for her fifty-four-year-old husband to set off on a western adventure.