All the Powers of Earth

by Sidney Blumenthal

  On a speaking tour through New England in 1847, Douglass went out of his way to come to dinner at Brown’s plain house. Brown confided that “he had long had a plan to accomplish” the end of slavery. He unfurled a map of the United States and drew his finger down the length of the Allegheny Mountains stretching from Virginia to Pennsylvania, his Subterranean Pass Way, and declared that God had created the Alleghenies for his plan: “They were placed here for the emancipation of the negro race.”

  He explained that he would train twenty-five armed men, post them in teams of five stationed twenty-five miles apart, to conduct raids on plantations to “induce the slaves to join them.” The value of the slaves would fall and slavery itself would naturally collapse. Brown dismissed Douglass’s question about surviving being hunted down by asserting that he would “whip them,” and added “but even if the worst came he could but be killed.” A few months later, in the February 11, 1848, issue of Douglass’s newspaper, The North Star, he wrote the first account of Brown, who, “though a white gentleman, is in sympathy a black man, and as deeply interested in our cause, as though his own soul have been pierced with the iron of slavery.”

  Douglass claimed from that moment his faith in the old nonviolent abolitionism began to ebb.

  From this night spent with John Brown in Springfield, Mass., 1847, while I continued to write and speak against slavery, I became all the same less hopeful of its peaceful abolition. My utterances became more and more tinged by the color of this man’s strong impressions. Speaking at an anti-slavery convention in Salem, Ohio, I expressed this apprehension that slavery could only be destroyed by bloodshed, when I was suddenly and sharply interrupted by my good old friend Sojourner Truth [the fugitive slave, abolitionist, and feminist] with the question, “Frederick, is God dead?” “No,” I answered, “and because God is not dead slavery can only end in blood.” My quaint old sister was of the Garrison school of non-resistants, and was shocked at my sanguinary doctrine, but she too became an advocate of the sword, when the war for the maintenance of the Union was declared.

  But that was later, and it was the Union army that wielded the sword. Brown was advocating guerrilla warfare even against federal troops sent against him.

  Through Douglass, Brown met Willis Hodges and Thomas Van Rensselaer, who edited a small black journal in New York City named The Ram’s Horn. (Douglass was listed on the masthead as an assistant editor.) In 1848, Brown wrote an article that appeared in the journal but with no byline and in the guise of a confession from a rueful black man, “like others of my colored brethren.” “Sambo’s Mistakes” was a sermonizing censure of the low and superficial habits of free blacks. “Sambo” had “spent my whole life devouring silly novels and other miserable trash . . . acquiring a taste for nonsense and low wit . . . bought expensive gay clothing . . . Finger rings . . . Nuts, Candy,” rather than practicing “self-denial” and “resisting” the “brutal aggressions” of “Southern Slavocrats.”

  Nearly broke and scrambling to salvage his foundering wool business, Brown wandered in April 1848 to Peterboro in upstate New York to the doorstep of one of the wealthiest men in the country. Gerrit Smith was the heir to the fortune of the partner of John Jacob Astor and had greatly expanded it to project himself as a philanthropist, devoted to temperance, feminism, pacifism, prison reform, the American Bible Society—and chief funder of the abolitionist cause. Smith decided to give 120,000 acres of land in remote North Elba, New York, high in the Adirondacks, for a utopian colony of free blacks and fugitive slaves. Hypochondriac, impulsive and neurotic, he was at once a perfectionist Garrisonian who disdained politics in principle and the main donor to the Liberty Party—a contradiction that did not bother him—and drifted into ever more radical breakaway factions that repeatedly nominated him as their presidential candidate. Brown pledged to Smith that he would teach the “mostly inexperienced” black settlers of North Elba how to operate as farmers and “be a kind of father to them.” Smith gave him a grant of land, and Brown ventured to the place in the Adirondacks, “where every thing you see reminds one of Omnipotence,” he wrote.

  Brown called the North Elba colony of about 150 black families “Timbuctoo,” as though it were an African Shangri-La. But the reality of “Timbuctoo” did not match the dream. The ground was rocky and poor for farming. Suffering under primitive conditions, the settlement failed to thrive and began to dissolve by 1855. He moved there in 1849, but kept traveling back and forth to Springfield—and to other points. The burden of his family’s survival largely rested on his wife and children. While he encouraged Willis Hodges of The Ram’s Horn to migrate, he was a mostly absentee patriarch of his black paradise. His assertion of leadership, based on absolute certitude, rectitude, and high enthusiasm, was in the service of an ill-conceived and badly executed plan. Brown’s involvement in “Timbuctoo” was of a piece with virtually all of his past and future enterprises.

  Back in Springfield in 1851, he found the black community in an anxious state after the passage of federal Fugitive Slave Act. With forty-four black men, he organized a League of Gileadites for armed resistance against any slave catchers who might descend on the town. Brown wrote its manifesto, taking his inspiration from the biblical story of Gideon and his loyal band who slew the Midianites, as recounted in the Book of Judges: “Whosoever if fearful or afraid, let him return and part early from Mount Gilead.” According to Brown’s “Words of Advice,” “all traitors must die,” and if any black were arrested the Gileadites should attack at once. “Let the first blow be the signal for all to engage; and when engaged do not do your work by halves, but make clean work with your enemies.” He added, “. . . and be hanged, if you must, but tell no tales out of school.”

  When Senator Charles Sumner spoke in Springfield sometime in the early 1850s, he met with John Brown and the assembled Gildeadites in the back of the shoe store owned by one of its members, Rufus Elmer. “Mr. Brown,” said Sumner, “slavery is doomed; but not in your day or in mine.” Brown raised his hand high and lowered it as though in judgment, declaring, “I hope to God to die in the cause.”

  By May 7, 1855, five of John Brown’s sons settled in Kansas near Osawatomie in a place they called Brown’s Station. Brown did not intend to join them, but instead had his own plans. “If you or any of my family are disposed to go to Kansas or Nebraska, with a view to help defeat Satan and his legions in that direction, I have not a word to say,” he wrote John Jr., “but I feel committed to operate in another part of the field.” He had already decided to strike at Harpers Ferry to establish the base for his Subterranean Pass Way. Several weeks later, on May 24, John Jr. replied that they needed weapons. “Now we want you to get for us these arms. We need them more than we do bread. Would not Gerrit Smith or some, furnish the money.” Drawn to combat Brown decided to go to Kansas.

  As the nascent Republican Party was organizing to oppose the extension of slavery, Douglass, Gerrit Smith, and others gathered at a convention in late June 1855 at Syracuse, near Smith’s estate, to form a small party called the Radical Political Abolitionists to prepare to run its own presidential ticket. It opposed the Republican position as compromised, instead demanding immediate and complete abolition by direct action if necessary. John Brown spoke from the platform to appeal for funds for weapons to take to Kansas. “Without the shedding of blood there is no remission,” he declared. A debate broke out. Lewis Tappan objected. A prominent abolitionist from a family of prominent abolitionists and donor to the movement, Tappan was the founder of the Mercantile Agency, a Wall Street credit rating firm that became Dun & Bradstreet, and refused to encourage violence. Douglass, however, upheld Brown. Influenced by Brown’s fervor, Smith, the onetime pacifist, had also come around to his militant view. He would publish an article in 1856 proclaiming: “Hitherto, I have opposed the bloody abolition of slavery. But now, when it begins to march its conquering bands into the Free states, I and ten thousand other peace men are not only ready to have it repulsed with violen
ce, but pursued even unto death, with violence.” Smith gave Brown $60, and he went westward.

  By the time Brown arrived at Osawatomie on October 6, 1855, the battle lines were already drawn. He had contempt for the free state government established at Topeka, which in order to bring a significant group of Democrats into the coalition had adopted a position forbidding free blacks in the territory, and he had loathing for its leaders. When the Border Ruffians besieged Lawrence in December Brown and four of his sons made their appearance in a wagon before the Free State Hotel to present themselves as warriors. “To each of their persons was strapped a short, heavy broadsword,” said an eyewitness. “Each was supplied with a goodly number of fire-arms and navy revolvers, and poles were standing endwise around the wagon box, with fixed bayonets pointing upwards. They looked really formidable, and were received with great eclat.” Free state governor Charles Robinson immediately gave Brown a title: captain of the Liberty Guards of the First Brigade of Kansas Volunteers. John Brown was now Captain John Brown. But several times the Committee on Public Safety stopped him from launching attacks “to draw a little blood,” and he refused to attend meetings to which he was invited. “Tell the General,” he replied, “that when he wants me to fight, to say so: but that is the only order I will ever obey.” On December 10, Robinson assembled the men before the hotel to announce he had negotiated a truce. Brown jumped on a piece of wood and “began to harangue the crowd,” and proclaimed, “Without the shedding of blood there is no remission,” according to George W. Brown, editor of the Herald of Freedom newspaper. John Brown “asked for volunteers to go under his command” to attack at once. None joined him. The committee at first wished to have him placed under arrest but instead sent an officer to calm him. “Leading the Captain away, the storm that he was inciting was soon at an end.” Brown was sulfurous in his rage against Robinson, “a perfect old woman,” “more talk than cider,” and at the free state leaders as “broken-down politicians.” “Peace was established, and Old Brown retired in disgust.”

  But after the free state leaders were charged with “treason,” Robinson was held captive and Lawrence was ransacked, there was no one with authority to order Captain John Brown to stand down. “Something is going to be done now,” he announced to his “council” of sons and four others, his own band of Gileadites to slay the Midianites. As his inspirational Book of Judges 6:27 said: “Then Gideon took ten men of his servants, and did as the Lord had said unto him; and so it was that he did it by night.”

  At ten at night on May 24, near Pottawatomie, Brown loudly knocked on the cabin door of James Doyle, a poor white settler. While he sided with the proslavery side he held no slaves. Brown identified himself and his several men as “the Northern Army.” At gunpoint he marched Doyle and two of his sons, William and Drury, into the woods. Mrs. Doyle heard two gunshots, moaning, and “wild whoops.” John Doyle, the sixteen-year-old surviving son, testified before a congressional committee: “I saw my other brother lying dead on the ground, about one hundred and fifty yards from the house, in the grass, near a ravine. His fingers were cut off; his head was cut open; there was a hole in his breast. William’s head was cut open, and a hole was in his jaw, as though it was made by a knife, and a hole was also in his side. My father was shot in the forehead and stabbed in the breast.”

  At midnight, Brown and his company came to the cabin of Allen Wilkinson, an elected member of the proslavery legislature who did not himself own slaves. Again, Brown presented the group as “the Northern Army,” and over the objections of Wilkinson’s ill wife dragged him away without allowing him to put on his boots. He was found with gashes on his head and the side of his body and his throat slit.

  At two in the morning, Brown went to the cabin of James Harris, likely mistaking it for the house of “Dutch” Henry Sherman, a German immigrant and well-known partisan of the proslavery cause but not a slave owner. Dutch Henry was not there, but his brother “Dutch” Bill happened to be present. They led him out of the house into the woods near a creek. Harris found his body in the morning. “Sherman’s skull was split open in two places,” he testified, “and some of his brains were washed out by the water; a large hole was cut in his breast, and his left hand was cut off, except a little piece of skin on one side.”

  Brown and his men washed their knives and swords of blood at daylight in Pottawatomie Creek, and returned to the camp of John Jr. and Jason Brown, two sons who had stayed behind. It was only a day later, but the news had traveled fast. “Hearing this, I was afraid it was true, and it was the most terrible shock that ever happened to my feelings in my life,” said Jason Brown. The next day he confronted his father. “Did you have any hand in the killing?” he asked. “I did not, but I stood by and saw it,” John Brown replied. “I did not ask further, for fear I should hear something I did not wish to hear.” Frederick Brown, another son who had been part of the group, piped up, “I could not feel as if it was right.” Another man who had been involved said “it was justifiable as a means of self-defense and the defense of others.” “What I said against it seemed to hurt father very much,” recalled Jason Brown, “but all he said was, ‘God is my judge—we were justified under the circumstances.’ ” Jason demanded of Frederick whether he knew who had committed the murders. “Yes I do, but I can’t tell you.” “Did you kill any of them with your own hands?” “No,” he said, crying as he spoke. “When I came to see what manner of work it was, I could not do it.” John Jr. was sleepless. “I feel that I am going insane,” he said.

  After the Pottawatomie massacre John Brown and those involved offered many evasive and shifting stories about what happened. Those murdered were foul-mouthed bullies, part of a court intending to arrest him and his family, rape the women, or kill them. He was trying to prevent an even greater outrage. He was ending the conflict in the only way it could be ended. He claimed that he did not personally engage in the butchery. Another time, he told a story that Charles Robinson and James Lane had ordered him to commit the murders. “Captain Brown, did you kill those five men on the Pottawatomie, or did you not?” E.A. Coleman, a Kansan settler friendly with Brown, asked him. “I did not,” he replied, “but I do not pretend to say they were not killed by my order; and in doing so I believe I was doing God’s service.” Coleman’s wife said, “Then, Captain, you think that God uses you as an instrument in his hands to kill men.” Brown answered, “I think he has used me as an instrument to kill men; and if I live, I think he will use me as an instrument to kill a good many more.”

  John Brown was now an outlaw, indicted for murder and pursued by posses. Having failed as a revolutionary in a spasm of killing he now set out on a successful path as a self-dramatizing zealot following the higher law of God to justify his purifying violence. To the end he would respond to objections with a quotation from Romans 8:31: “If God is for us, who can be against us?”

  “War! War!” shrieked the headline of the Westport, Missouri, Border Times. Over the following months more than two hundred men died in a cycle of violence triggered by the Pottawatomie massacre. The proslavery settlers were not scared out of Kansas while the free state men were put on the defensive as the aggressors. Falsely identified as murderers, Jason Brown and John Brown, Jr., were taken as prisoners. Jason was threatened with lynching and John Jr. marched mercilessly in chains for sixty-five miles until they were finally released to federal troops. Jason returned to his house to discover it had been burned and his cattle stolen.

  John Brown went into hiding in woods and ravines. “Brown was a presence in Kansas and an active presence all through ’56,” recalled R.G. Elliott, editor of the Free State newspaper in Lawrence. “Yet it was his presence more than his activities, that made his power,—the idea of his being. He was a ghostly influence. . . . Yet after Pottawatomie he moved much in secret.” He emerged like a phantom to fight in a series of guerrilla warfare skirmishes. In some of these encounters, he joined free state companies in the field. Brown claimed a great victory i
n the Battle of Black Jack when he and other free state companies captured a proslavery force that was trying to arrest him, despite being ordered to release it by a federal officer.

  The romantic legend of Captain John Brown was already launched. John Redpath of the New York Tribune stumbled upon his camp in the woods where he discovered “Old Brown” and his “little band.” “He respectfully but firmly forbade conversation on the Pottawattomie affair,” Redpath wrote. “Never before had I met such a band of men. They were not earnest, but earnestness incarnate.” Brown impressed him as the personification of righteousness. “Often, I was told, the old man would retire to the densest solitudes, to wrestle with his God in secret prayer.” Redpath concluded he was at “a sacred spot,” and believed “that I had seen the predestined leader of the second and the holier American Revolution.” He enthusiastically enlisted as Brown’s chronicler and publicist. In his 1860 biography of the martyr, Redpath wrote of the Pottawatomie massacre, “John Brown did not know that these men were killed until the following day,” and that “he was twenty-five miles distant at the time.”

  The proslavery forces meanwhile elevated Brown into the commander of the free state men. “CIVIL WAR IS BEGUN!!!” ran the headline of the Squatter Sovereign. Brown, “the notorious assassin and robber,” was reported to be leading a murderous army. “The Abolitionists proclaim that ‘no quarter will be given. Every Pro-Slavery man must be exterminated.’ What will be your reply?” David Atchison and B.F. Stringfellow signed a call to arms to defend against Brown.

  The New York Times reported from the front lines that Brown had led the free state men and been slain at the Battle of Osawatomie on August 30 in which about four hundred proslavery men razed the settlement and killed Brown’s son Frederick. When John Brown appeared alive his reputation grew as death defying. He was now hailed as “Osawatomie Brown,” “Old Brown,” and Captain John Brown.