Brown represented a stab at slavery beyond mortality. All of the Secret Six saw Brown as the purest of Puritans. Higginson said that Brown reminded him of Cromwell or a “high-minded, unselfish, belated Covenanter; a man whom Sir Walter Scott might have drawn.” Julia Ward Howe, Howe’s wife, described Brown as “a Puritan of the Puritans, forceful, concentrated, and self-contained.” Four of the Secret Six had been close to Sumner, aiding his rise to the Senate, and Higginson a rapt admirer. Sumner’s near death snapped a bond to practical politics. Their friendships with him focused on his difficult effort to regain his health and composure. His removal from the day-to-day political saga sent them reeling in another direction. In Brown they found an idol for revenge. The Secret Six had become a sect bound with religious intensity that Brown’s crackpot scheme was the eschatological culmination of the Puritan City on a Hill, the American Revolution and the struggle for emancipation. With the precise accounting of a State Street banker, Stearns, the “Treasurer of the Enterprise,” kept track of every penny. They called it “the wool business.”
On May 8, 1858, Brown held a convention in Chatham, Canada, of thirty-four black men who he believed would recruit the soldiers for his revolutionary army. None of the invited white abolitionists nor any of the Secret Six attended. He explained his plan for the insurgency in his opening address. He told the convention “all the free negroes in the Northern States would immediately flock to his standard,” “all the slaves in the Southern States would do the same,” and so would “many of the free negroes in Canada.” He would be so “successful” that some Southern states would recognize his organization and agree to emancipation. He read his Provisional Constitution, which would govern his occupied territory. Brown was elected commander-in-chief and various followers elected secretary of state and secretary of the treasury and so on. To his disappointment, the black leaders at the convention failed to recruit anyone for his operation. Only one man present, a free black from Pennsylvania, Osborne Perry Anderson, a printer by trade, working in Chatham, went along with Brown.
Even while Brown recited his Provisional Constitution to the delegates of the Chatham convention, Hugh Forbes wandered around Washington knocking on doors. Senator Wilson, alarmed at what he heard, sent Dr. Howe a letter on May 9, not knowing of the Secret Six but of his previous relationship with Brown. “I write to you to say that you had better talk with some few of our friends who contributed money to aid old Brown to organize and arm some force in Kansas for defence, about the policy of getting those arms out of his hands & putting them in the hands of some reliable men in that Territory. If they should be used for other purposes, as rumor says they may be, it might be of disadvantage to the men who were induced to contribute to that very foolish movement. If it can be done, get the arms out of his control and keep clear of him at least for the present.” Howe wrote back, “No countenance has been given to Brown for any operation outside of Kansas by the Kansas Committee.” It was a duplicitous answer. The Kansas Committee had not given Brown approval, but the Secret Six had.
Sanborn was already frantically writing Higginson to warn him of Forbes’s sudden entrance onto the scene. Brown had not told the Secret Six about Forbes, though he had told Forbes about them. Fearful of Forbes’s disclosures, Brown grew a flowing white beard and adopted the pseudonym of “Nelson Hawkins.” “H.F. is Hugh Forbes,” Sanborn wrote Higginson on May 7, “an Italieo English hothead whom N.H. [Brown] last year in an evil hour admitted to his councils . . . he is now at Washington where he can do great harm.” Howe, who received three “ill-natured and spiteful” letters from Forbes, burned them. Higginson wrote Parker that he was opposed to postponement of Brown’s attack. “I regard as any postponement as simply abandoning the project.” Parker replied, “If you knew all we do about ‘Col.’ F. you would think differently.” Sanborn wrote Higginson that “the opinion of P.H. & S. [Parker, Howe, and Smith]—and G.S. [George Stearns]—who are such large stockholders, will prevent them raising money now.” Smith wrote Sanborn a letter, which he forwarded to Higginson, “I never was convinced of the wisdom of this scheme. But as things now stand, it seems to me it would be madness to attempt to execute it.” On May 14, Stearns sent Senator Wilson’s cautionary letter to Howe on to Brown, ordering him, “You will recollect that you have the custody of the arms alluded to, to be used for the defence of Kansas, as agent of the Massachusetts State Kansas Aid Committee. In consequence of the information thus communicated to me [by Dr. Howe and Senator Wilson], it becomes my duty to warn you not to use them for any other purpose, and to hold them subject to my order as chairman of said committee.”
Brown arrived in Boston on May 30, where, after conferring with his secret board of directors, he agreed to postpone his revolution “till next winter or spring,” according to Higginson. Brown “considered delay very discouraging,” disparaged the other members of the Secret Six to Higginson—“they were not men of action”—called Stearns “a timid man,” and said of him and Parker “he did not think abounded in courage.”
Brown’s expedition was on ice, his backers skittish and his followers behaving like a herd of scattering cats. He remained anxious about Hugh Forbes’s influence with his donors and dispatched one of his aides on a mission to counter him. Richard Realf, twenty-four years old, had been dubbed secretary of state of Brown’s Provisional Government at Chatham possibly because he was English. The precocious author of a volume of high-flown poetry entitled Guesses at the Beautiful, he had an affair with Lady Anne Isabella Noel Byron, fell swiftly into her disfavor, and found himself singing for shillings on street corners until he emigrated to New York, soon seeking adventure in Kansas with John Brown’s unmerry band. After Forbes had forced the delay of the insurrection, Brown read aloud Realf Senator Wilson’s letter to Howe and sent him to New York, to “somehow or other procure an introduction to Forbes; and he being an Englishman and I being an Englishman, he thought we might presently establish mutual good relations; that by ingratiating myself into his esteem, I might ultimately be able to possess myself, acting for Brown, of that obnoxious correspondence held by Forbes, written by Brown to him, in which Brown had developed his plans.” However implausible this scam was to pry the damaging letters from Forbes, it was more conceivable than invading Virginia. But Realf never saw Forbes. He went to Boston bearing a letter of cognizance from Brown to gain the trust of the Secret Six. He told them he would go to England to raise “at least $2,000” for Brown’s undertaking. “I was a protege of Lady Noel Byron, Charles Kingsley [a famous Anglican priest, novelist, and friend of Charles Darwin], and others of the aristocracy and literati,” he said. On “my simple word,” they gave him $250 for his voyage. Realf disappeared for nearly a year in England, claiming to visit his parents and explore conversion to Catholicism, to return via New Orleans and never contacting Brown again. It’s possible he collected funds in England, but Brown never saw a penny if there was one. “I was not collecting money for them in England, or that if I did, they did not get it; which, so far as implicating me is concerned, amounts to about the same thing,” he later testified. (The peripatetic poet missed Harpers Ferry but turned up bravely carrying the flag of the 88th Illinois infantry in the charge down Missionary Ridge at Chattanooga, writing copy for the Pittsburgh Commercial newspaper, and winding up a down-and-out suicide in San Francisco.)
Brown resurfaced at a hotel in Lawrence, Kansas, on June 25, wearing his full beard as a kind of mask. “Yet many persons who had previously known him did not penetrate his patriarchal disguise,” wrote James Redpath, the journalist, who was there. Brown referred to himself as “the old Abolitionist ‘mit de’ white beard on,” his only known self-deprecating joke. Low on funds, he played with the idea of writing a best-selling book of his adventures in Kansas. He had warmed up with a lecture at Chatham advertised: “Horrors Perpetrated . . . by the Missouri Border Ruffians & Pro-Slavers from the South . . . PILLAGE—INCENDIARISM—BASE OUTRAGES &C &C.” The book would be styled along the
lines of one of his favorite biographies, Joel Tyler Headley’s The Life of Oliver Cromwell, a stirring defense of the Puritan revolutionary published in 1848. Ironically, the most moving scene in Headley’s Cromwell was his scene of Charles I’s composure and dignity at his execution. But Brown never wrote a sentence. His mind was concentrated on his own revolution to begin at Harpers Ferry. When Richard Hinton, the journalist, visited, his aide-de-camp, John Henry Kagi, revealed “the glory of the grand ideas.” Hinton told him the plan was suicidal. But Brown argued, “Nat Turner with fifty men held a portion of Virginia for several weeks.” Of course, Nat Turner was captured and executed.
For months, Brown suffered from “ague” and was listless and even crankier. He repeatedly wrote the Secret Six for money. “Do let me hear from you at this point,” he wrote in July. “It now looks as though but little business can be accomplished until we get our mill into operation,” he wrote in September, using the wool business cover story. He attempted to interject himself into some passing trouble involving the indictment of a free state militia leader, but his offer of militant support was rejected. He scorned the free state movement, which was on the verge of success. “Abortion!—yes, that’s the word,” he said about the entire effort. He talked about “answering the call of the Lord,” and told Hinton, “The hour is very near at hand, and all who are willing to act should be ready.” But the Secret Six would not send him funds until the following spring.
Hearing that a slave and his family at a farm in Missouri were to be sold to a Texas slave owner, Brown “hailed it as heaven-sent,” and announced he would “carry the war into Africa.” His raiding party hit several farms in Vernon County, Missouri, on the night of December 20, captured eleven slaves, took horses, mules, oxen, saddles, bedding, wagons, bacon, looted personal belongings, held two whites as prisoners, and killed a man. He sent the slaves along lines of the Underground Railroad to Canada. Missouri’s governor put a $3,000 price on Brown’s head. President Buchanan set a reward for $250. Brown’s action aroused near unanimous condemnation from the free state forces. James Lane, leader of one of the free state militias, volunteered to arrest him. Charles Robinson, the free state governor, turned against him. George A. Crawford, founder of the free state town of Fort Scott, sought out Brown. “I protested to the Captain against this violence,” he wrote Eli Thayer, creator of the Emigrant Aid Society in Massachusetts. “We were settlers, he was not. He could strike a blow and leave.” Crawford explained to Brown “the facts that we were at peace with Missouri; that our Legislature was then in the hands of the Free-State men . . . even in disturbed counties . . . we were in a majority. . . . I think the conversation made an impression on him, for he soon after went to his self-sacrifice at Harper’s Ferry.” William Hutchinson, a reporter for the New York Times, recalled a sleepless and excited Brown holding forth all night about “my work, my great duty, my mission.”
Brown slipped into Lawrence to sell his stolen goods including watches. He summoned William A. Phillips, a correspondent for the New York Tribune and free state activist, to his hotel room, with the message “he was going away, and might never see me again.” Brown despised politics and politicians of whatever stripe. The truce in Kansas that brought politics to the forefront closed the space for violent bands of men. But Brown saw a wider field for his operations. “And now,” Brown told Phillips, “we have reached a point where nothing but war can settle the question.” According to Phillips, he talked about the possibility of secession if a Republican was elected president, though Brown rarely offered commentary on politics except to disdain it. “All this has a strangely prophetic look to me now; then it simply appeared incredible, or the dream and vagary of a man who had allowed one idea to carry him away.” Phillips doubted that war was inevitable. “Our best people do not understand the danger,” replied Brown. “They are besotted. They have compromised so long that they think principles of right and wrong have no more any power on this earth.”
He launched into the history of Spartacus and his slave revolt against Rome. Phillips pointed out that Spartacus and his soldiers were “warlike people” and even then “crushed” by the Roman legions. “You have not studied them right,” said Brown. He insisted that the slaves of the South would rise in a spirit of ferocious vengeance like Spartacus’s followers. With the example of Spartacus before him, Brown would avoid his fate. Instead of “wasting his time in Italy until his enemies could swoop on him, [he] should have struck at Rome; or, if not strong enough for that, he should have escaped to the wild northern provinces, and there have organized an army to overthrow Rome.” Phillips told him, “I feared he would lead the young men with him into some desperate enterprise, where they would be imprisoned and disgraced.” Brown replied, “when your household gods are broken, as mine have been, you will see all this more clearly.” Determined to wear the crown of the gladiator chief, Brown would ignore the tactical lesson he claimed to have learned from Spartacus.
Brown’s fixation on the crucified warrior assigned the noblest motive to his suicidal impulse. “Certainly the cause is enough to live for, if not to—for,” he had written Sanborn on February 24 from Peterboro, where he disclosed his plot. Brown left blank a space for the obvious missing word “die,” which emphasized it like the name of God as something holy. “I have only had this one opportunity, in a life of nearly sixty years; and could I be continued ten times as long again, I might not again have another equal opportunity. . . . I expect nothing but to ‘endure hardness’; but I expect to effect a mighty conquest, even though it be like the last victory of Samson.” Samson, who brought down the temple on himself, died like Spartacus in his cause. After invoking the biblical suicide, Brown confessed his attraction to death. “I felt for a number of years, in earlier life, a steady, strong desire to die; but since I saw any prospect of becoming a ‘reaper’ in the great harvest, I have not only felt quite willing to live, but have enjoyed life much; and am now rather anxious to live for a few years more.” Now he could trace his rendezvous on a map to a destination if not a destiny.
Brown’s raid into Missouri thrilled the Secret Six. “Do you hear the news from Kansas? Our dear John Brown is . . . pursing the policy which he intended to pursue elsewhere,” declared Gerrit Smith. On February 1 Brown left Kansas for good, headed east. The funds began to flow again. Howe wrote John Murray Forbes, one of the wealthiest men in Boston, his fortune made in the China trade, introducing him to Brown. “He is of the stuff of which martyrs are made,” Howe wrote. Brown stopped at Peterboro in New York to see Smith on April 11 and arrived in Concord, Massachusetts, to speak at the Town Hall on May 8 before an audience of Emerson, Thoreau, and Bronson Alcott, who recalled that Brown’s new beard “gives to the soldierly air the port of an apostle. . . . I think him about the manliest man I have ever seen—the type and synonym of the Just.”
He came to Boston on May 9. He met alone with Howe, who objected to his kidnapping of whites and stealing personal property. Brown rejected his plea. Howe sent him to J.M. Forbes (no relation to Hugh Forbes), who invited him to tea at his Milton estate. Brown struck him as having “a little touch of insanity” and treated “almost with scorn” any belief in electoral politics. Still, perhaps out of respect for Howe, whose charity for the blind he funded, he pledged $100.
Brown strangely appeared at the meeting of the power brokers of the Massachusetts Republican Party. Someone, probably Stearns, likely on June 1, brought him to the regular lunch at the Parker House hotel of the Bird Club, a convivial yet serious-minded gathering of the politicians, lawyers, industrialists, and journalists to discuss Republican electoral campaigns, the latest political news, and how to advance their agenda within the state legislature and the U.S. Congress. Henry Wilson recognized Brown at once despite the foliage of his newly grown beard and acknowledged him as the menace that Hugh Forbes had identified. “I understand you do not approve of my course,” Brown said to him. “I understand from some of my friends here you have spoken in co
ndemnation of it.” Wilson’s recollection was that he was referring either to his letter to Howe about Hugh Forbes’s revelations or “his going into Missouri and getting slaves and running them off.” Wilson told him, “I believed it to be a very great injury to the anti-slavery cause; that I regarded every illegal act, and every imprudent act, as being against it.” Brown said “he thought differently, and he believed he had acted right, and that it would have a good influence, or words to that effect.”
That night Brown had dinner with Stearns and possibly one or two others at the Parker House. He fell into a reverie about himself as Moses leading his people out of bondage but not reaching the Promised Land. He handed Stearns the gift of a bowie knife which he had stolen from one of his victims at Pottawatomie, William “Dutch Bill” Sherman, before slitting his throat and cutting off his hand. “I think it probable that we may never meet again in this world,” said Brown, “and I want to give to you in token of my gratitude an article which may have, at a future time, some little historic value.” He falsely explained it was a “spoil of war” he had picked up in a clash at Black Jack. Stearns was clearly touched. Brown left Boston on June 4 with $800 from a variety of sources and $2,000 from Stearns.
On about July 12, Brown bought a small farm for his base of operations five miles outside Harpers Ferry. He took a new alias, Isaac Smith. Slowly the members of his party trickled in, until there were twenty-one including five black men, three of his sons, one of his daughters, and one of the men’s wives. Upstairs he stored 198 Sharps rifles, 200 revolvers, and 950 pikes; downstairs, they cooked, ate, and slept on the floor. Brown referred to his activity as “mining operations.” He dictated “A Declaration of Liberty,” dated—4th, 1859. “When in the course of human events, it becomes necessary, for an Oppressed People to Rise,” it began. On it went quoting the Declaration of Independence on the equality of men, the consent of the governed, and the right of revolution. “Clanish Oppressors; who wickedly violate this sacred principle; oppressing their fellow Men, Will bring upon themselvs that certain & fearful retribution, which is the Natural, and Necessary penalty of evil Doing. . . . The history of Slavery in the United States, is a history of injustice & Cruelties inflicted upon the Slave in every conceivable way, & in barbarity not surpassed by the most Savage Tribes. It is the embodiment of all that is Evil, and ruinous to a Nation; and subversive of all Good.” Against “the People” were arrayed “Our President & other Leeches . . . swarms of Blood Suckers, & Moths.” He concluded, quoting Jefferson from his 1781 Notes on the State of Virginia on slavery: “ ‘I tremble for my Country, when I reflect; that God is Just; And that his Justice; will not sleep forever.’ Nature is mourning for its Murdered, and Afflicted Children. Hung be the Heavens in Scarlet.”
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