by Tony Horwitz
By then, conflict raged across eastern Kansas. Partisans on both sides spent the summer raiding, robbing, burning, and murdering, while federal troops struggled to contain the anarchy. The violence climaxed in late August, when several hundred proslavery fighters, armed with cannon, descended on the free-state settlement at Osawatomie, where Brown’s sister and other family members lived. With just forty men, Brown led a spirited defense of Osawatomie, inflicting a number of casualties on the proslavery force. Though he was ultimately forced to retreat, Brown scored another propaganda victory by fearlessly battling a much larger and better-armed foe.
“This has proven most unmistakably that ‘Yankees’ will fight,” John junior wrote of the reaction to Osawatomie. His father, slightly wounded in the combat, was initially reported dead, a mistake that only enhanced his aura. The battle also gave the Captain a new title. As a noted guerrilla and wanted man, he would adopt a number of aliases over the next three years. But the nom de guerre that stuck in public imagination was “Osawatomie Brown,” a tribute to his Kansas stand.
The name also evoked his family’s continued sacrifice in the cause of freedom. Early in the morning before the battle at Osawatomie, proslavery scouts riding into the free-state settlement encountered Frederick Brown on his way to feed horses. Believing himself on friendly ground, Frederick evidently identified himself to the riders. One of them was a proslavery preacher who blamed the Browns for attacks on his property, and he replied by shooting Frederick in the chest. The twenty-five-year-old died in the road.
His father learned of the slaying while rallying his small force to repel Osawatomie’s invaders. Frederick’s older brother Jason took part in the battle, and at its end, he stood with his father on the bank of the Osage River, watching smoke and flames rise in the distance as their foes torched the free-state settlement they’d fought so hard to defend.
“God sees it,” Brown told Jason. “I will die fighting for this cause.” He had made similar pledges before. But this time Brown was in tears, and he mentioned a new field of battle to his son. “I will carry the war into Africa,” he said. This cryptic phrase spoke clearly to Jason, who knew “Africa” was his father’s code for the slaveholding South.
CHAPTER 5
Secret Service
In early October 1856, five weeks after the battle at Osawatomie, Brown left Kansas in the back of a wagon, desperately ill with dysentery and fever. Winter approached, he had nowhere to live, and most of his family had already retreated east, exhausted by the fighting.
Brown had entered Kansas exactly a year before, a weary pioneer with a broken-down horse and sixty cents in his pocket. His health, financial and physical, wasn’t any better upon his departure from the territory. But the failed businessman and virtual unknown who had arrived in Kansas the previous year was leaving it as “Captain Brown of Osawatomie,” a hero to abolitionists and slavery’s great scourge. Brown’s name now carried weight and he intended to make the most of it.
“You need not be anxious about me if I am some time on the road,” Brown wrote his wife upon reaching Iowa, “as I have to stop at several places; & go some out of my way; having left partly on business expecting to return if the troubles continue in Kansas.”
By “business,” Brown no longer meant wool selling or any of the other trades he’d pursued. His new vocation was guerrilla warfare, and to wage it he needed men, money, and weapons. This mission would keep him in constant motion for the next three years, as he shuttled from Kansas to New England to Canada and points between, preparing his crusade “into Africa.”
Brown made one of his first stops in northern Ohio, where his father, Owen, had died that May, a few weeks before his family’s bloody rampage on the Pottawatomie. Though Brown hadn’t learned of his father’s death until after the massacre, Owen had written in late March that he felt “death was at the dore” and asked his family to pray for his salvation, signing his last letter, “Your unfaithful Parent.” In one of his final letters to his father, Brown expressed the hope that Owen would live “to witness the triumph of that cause you have laboured to promote.” Owen’s impending death may have hardened Brown’s resolve to strike a blow against slavery, and at the same time freed him to take up arms—a measure his father disapproved of, except in defense.
From Ohio, Brown continued east, in full freedom-fighter persona. He carried props from his frontier combat, including a bowie knife taken from the proslavery leader he’d defeated at Black Jack and a chain his foes had used to shackle his eldest son. He’d embarked on an “errand from the territory,” Brown wrote in his speaking notes, “to enable me to continue my efforts in the cause of Freedom.”
He also carried a letter of introduction to a young man who would prove critical to his mission. At twenty-five, Franklin Sanborn was already one of the best-connected abolitionists in New England, a recent Harvard graduate who was as smooth as Brown was rough. Darkly handsome, fluent in Greek and Latin, Sanborn had married his sickly teenaged love on her deathbed. This Byronic mien both masked and served his keen ambition. Sanborn made an art of attaching himself to famous men; Ralph Waldo Emerson invited him to run a school in Concord, the citadel of Transcendentalism. Sanborn’s pupils included Emerson’s children, a son of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s, and the brothers of Henry James.
In addition, Sanborn served as secretary of the Massachusetts State Kansas Committee, among the most prominent groups that had sprung up to aid the free-state cause. It was in this capacity that he met Brown in early 1857. Sanborn immediately grasped the rough-hewn warrior’s potential—an insight he would brag of for the rest of his long life. “There is a divining quality in youth and in genius which lets them behold in simple men more than the callous veteran may discern,” Sanborn wrote of his first interview with Brown. “He had a purpose, knew what it was, and meant to achieve it.”
So did Sanborn. The idealistic young striver became Brown’s speaking agent and social liaison, providing entrée to the upper reaches of New England society. Over time, he would also become one of Brown’s closest confidants and co-conspirators—and, later, his devoted hagiographer.
Franklin Sanborn in the 1850s
Brown had been living rough for eighteen months; now, under Sanborn’s management, he spent the first half of 1857 touring the lecture halls and salons of the antislavery establishment. He spoke to the National Kansas Committee at the Astor House in New York; to Massachusetts legislators at the State House in Boston (where Sanborn introduced him as the Miles Standish of Kansas); and to Transcendentalists at the town hall in Concord, where he dined at the homes of Emerson and Henry David Thoreau.
“He did not overstate anything, but spoke within bounds,” Thoreau wrote of Brown, “paring away his speech, like an experienced soldier, keeping a reserve of force and meaning.” Brown’s “pent-up fire” also struck Thoreau’s neighbor, the writer and philosopher Bronson Alcott. He noted Brown’s set lips, “suppressed yet metallic” voice, and strong watchful air, “the countenance and frame charged with power throughout.” If Brown appeared potent yet contained, Alcott was not: “I think him about the manliest man I have ever seen.”
Brown in late 1856, shortly before his eastern tour
Brown’s austerity of speech and manner and his unbending faith in himself and his mission evoked frequent comparisons to the Puritan warrior Oliver Cromwell. Brown’s rigidly erect bearing and weather-beaten face added to the impression, as did his deacon-fighter attire: high-collared white shirt, brown broadcloth suit, gray military-style cape.
Brandishing the captured bowie knife strapped just above his boot, or loading a revolver as he warned of federal marshals on his trail, Brown also introduced a frisson to the genteel parlors of New England. “I should hate to spoil these carpets,” he told one Boston hostess, “but you know I cannot be taken alive.”
Another hostess was struck by his “moral magnetism” and ability to stir the conscience of wealthy abolitionists. Upon hearing of his sacrifi
ces and devotion to the cause, Mary Stearns wrote, “it suddenly seemed mean and unworthy—not to say wicked—to be living in luxury while such a man was struggling for a few thousands to carry out his cherished plan.”
BUT LARGER AUDIENCES WEREN’T always so impressed. Brown’s public speaking voice tended to be flat and nasal. And the notes he carried on his 1857 lecture tour amounted to a rambling, self-pitying recitation of his deeds and losses in Kansas. “John Brown, a flame of fire in action, was dull in speech,” wrote a minister who heard him in Worcester.
Brown was also vague about his intentions. He said he wanted to equip and train a hundred “Minute Men” to repel Border Ruffians and defend free-state Kansas. But beyond that he revealed little. “I do not expose my plans,” he said, when asked whether the weapons he solicited might be used beyond Kansas’s borders. “I will not be interrogated; if you wish to give me anything I want you to give it freely. I have no other purpose but to serve the cause of liberty.”
Brown’s pitch, delivered dozens of times in 1857, brought modest returns, mostly small contributions or pledges of cash, clothing, and other supplies. But the Massachusetts Kansas Committee, of which Sanborn was secretary, gave Brown custody of the two hundred Sharps rifles and ammunition it had stored in Iowa. And the committee chairman, George Luther Stearns—husband of the admiring Mary—paid from his own pocket for two hundred revolvers, additionally pledging thousands of dollars to the Kansas fight.
Brown also tapped his wealthy backers for aid to his beleaguered family. “I have no other income for their support,” he wrote one donor, assuring him that the money would be carefully spent, “my Wife being a good economist, & a real old fashioned business woman. She has gone through the Two past winters in our open cold house: unfinished outside; & not plastered.”
This was true, and Mary wasn’t at all pleased about it. Though rarely expressed, her discontent was evident in the apologetic tone of Brown’s letters to her from the time he’d first set off for Kansas: “I fully sympathize with you in all the hardships … . You may be assured you are not alone in having trials to meet … those here are not altogether in Paradise; while you have to stay in that miserable Frosty region … . I think much too of your kind of Widowed state.” Upon returning east, Brown had spent only a few days in North Elba before establishing a home away from home at the Massasoit Hotel in Springfield, owned by abolitionist admirers. While there, in March 1857, he received a bracing letter from Mary: their sons, she informed him, had resolved “to learn, & practice war no more.”
Brown’s reply was defensive. Of “the boys” and war, he wrote, “it was not at my solicitation that they engaged in it at the first.” But he admitted having “wholly forgotten” how much he’d borrowed from one of his sons, and sent him a bank draft for thirty dollars, all he could spare. A few days later, he also made a gesture of atonement toward his youngest child, two-year-old Ellen, giving her a Bible inscribed “in remembrance of her father (of whose care and attentions she was deprived in her infancy), he being absent in the territory of Kansas.”
Before returning to the field, he attended to another family matter. On a speaking trip to his native Connecticut, he found the grave of his Revolutionary namesake, Captain John Brown, and arranged to have the headstone shipped to North Elba. “I prize it very highly,” he wrote Mary, asking that the granite be “inscribed in memory of our poor Fredk, who sleeps in Kansas.”
The gravestone was still on his mind weeks later, as he headed west to resume his war on slavery. “If I should never return,” he wrote Mary, “it is my particular request that no other monument be used to keep me in remembrance than the same plain old one that records the death of my Grandfather & Son & that a short story like those already on it be told of John Brown.” He wanted this inscription so his descendants “should not only remember their parentage, but also the cause they labored in.”
AS IT HAPPENED, NOT all Brown’s sons had resolved to “practice war no more.” Six of them had fought in Kansas, along with a son-in-law. Of these, one was dead, two wounded, and two badly shaken by the experience. But one of Brown’s sons, thirty-two-year-old Owen, chose to return west with his father in the summer of 1857. A quirky bachelor who signed his rare letters “OX”—which a friend joked was short for “Oxentricity”—he was partly crippled in his right arm and hand from a boyhood accident. Though he often bickered with his domineering father, Owen was nonetheless a reliable aide-de-camp. Above all, he was extremely loyal and discreet, traits that Brown particularly prized.
In late June 1857, the two men left Ohio in a mule-drawn wagon and headed for the Iowa town of Tabor, close to the Kansas line. This was to be Brown’s base, where he would collect his weapons and train volunteers. But his plans went awry almost from the start. By the time he and Owen arrived, in early August, having eaten little but soda crackers and herring for weeks, they were down to just $25. Despite months of fund-raising, Brown was returning to the field little better off than he’d been upon leaving it a year before.
In part, this penury was beyond his control. He’d concluded his eastern tour just as the worst financial panic in twenty years hit the nation, and much of the money pledged to him was never paid. But Brown’s chronic inability to manage funds also dogged him. Upon raising several thousand dollars, he’d immediately succumbed to the grandiosity and poor judgment that doomed his earlier career as a land developer and wool trader.
Among the Connecticut admirers to whom Brown had showed off his fearsome bowie knife in March 1857 was a skilled forge master, Charles Blair. Brown wondered whether the long two-edged blade could be affixed to a six-foot shaft. This Cromwellian pike, he announced, would be the perfect defensive weapon “for the settlers of Kansas to keep in their log cabins.”
Never one for half measures, Brown promptly contracted with Blair to make a thousand of the spears. He also arranged for his teenaged son Oliver to work in Blair’s shop. But after paying an initial $550 and receiving samples, Brown failed to come up with the balance due. Blair kept the money he’d been paid and stopped work on the “Kansas butter knifes,” as Oliver coyly called them. Brown, who rarely gave up on his own ideas, was to revive the pike project at a later date, for use in a different theater.
He undertook a much costlier folly soon after his Connecticut visit. In New York City, he met Hugh Forbes, a British fencing teacher and soldier of fortune who had served with the Italian revolutionary Giuseppe Garibaldi. The flamboyant “colonel,” as Forbes styled himself, struck Brown as the perfect drillmaster for the volunteer force he planned to train. He hired Forbes and advanced him six months’ pay, part of it as compensation for a manual on guerrilla tactics the colonel promised to deliver.
Months later, Brown was still waiting for the manual, and for Forbes to come train his Minute Men. “I furnished that money in the full expectation of having your personal assistance this present time,” Brown wrote, in a vain effort to recover his payment. Very belatedly, Forbes finished the manual and made an appearance in Iowa—but by then, Brown was too broke to pay him any more. The disgruntled and erratic mercenary would soon decamp, taking with him a great deal of damaging information about Brown’s secret plans.
In any event, there was no one for Forbes to train, apart from Brown and Owen; other volunteers had yet to materialize. This was, in large part, because Kansas had changed during the year Brown was away. A new territorial governor had succeeded in calming the violence, and the continuing influx of northern settlers was shifting the balance of power toward the free-state camp. As a result, there was no longer a clear need for the defense force Brown had proposed. This, in turn, eroded his persistent efforts to drum up financial support back East. “It is not easy to raise money for your operations,” Franklin Sanborn wrote, “so long as there is peace.”
By the late summer of 1857, Brown could no longer afford his board in Iowa. He had ample guns, but still lacked knapsacks, saddlebags, and other equipment needed to outfit his phantom
army. The inaction and delay had also sapped Brown’s customary drive and sense of direction. “How to act now,” he wrote his brother-in-law in Kansas. “I do not know.”
This paralysis didn’t last long. Throughout his life, Brown searched for clues to his destiny, the path he must follow “to answer the end of my being.” Everything had meaning, a hidden divine purpose—even his Iowa funk in the summer of 1857. He had believed that his God-given mission led back to Kansas. But if that was not so, then it must be time to put in motion his much more ambitious plan.
“In immediate want of from Five Hundred to One Thousand Dollars for secret service & no questions asked,” he wrote one of his eastern patrons late that summer. Brown had always been inclined to the clandestine, but secrecy now became his watchword. He had recently adopted the first of several aliases, “Nelson Hawkins,” the name of a family friend in Ohio. Writing to Sanborn, Brown reported that Hugh Forbes had arrived and opened a “small school.” Baffled, Sanborn replied: “Do you mean a children’s school, or a school for drilling?”
Brown also became ever more evasive about his movements and intentions. In November 1857, he finally returned to Kansas, but only briefly and mysteriously. He quietly convened a small group of veteran fighters around a campfire on the prairie, seeking to enlist them for a strike against slavery. “If you want hard fighting you’ll get plenty of it,” he said, offering few other details.
