A Disease in the Public Mind (35 page)

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Elsewhere in the nation, John Brown, that personification of a Puritan, if not a Pilgrim father (the Pilgrims were gentle, peace-loving souls—almost total opposites of the fierce, violent Puritans), was pursuing an ever more grandiose desire to attack and destroy slavery. Kansas had become pacified by Mississippi-born John A. Geary, a tough-minded territorial governor handpicked by President Pierce. Geary had disbanded armies on both sides and ordered guerilla troublemakers to leave the state. Brown had spent his final months in Kansas hiding out in the brush as a wanted man. Roaming squads of U.S. cavalry had a warrant for his arrest for the Pottawatomie murders.

Brown and his sons sensed their militant style was welcomed by neither side and prepared to depart. As a farewell gesture, they launched a raid into Missouri. They liberated eleven slaves, shot dead a slave owner who tried to resist them, stole horses and other property, and headed for Canada. With an effrontery that testified to the influence of the abolitionist campaign against The Slave Power, they travelled in daylight and Brown paused to give a speech in Cleveland, Ohio. They were confident that they were surrounded by Southern-hating allies who would manhandle any federal marshal foolish enough to pursue them.
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Returning from Canada to Tabor, Iowa, a town with a strong antislavery majority, Brown decided it was time to go east and tap into some of the money and guns that various emigrant aid societies had been sending to Kansas. He was especially stirred by news that an old friend, New York millionaire Gerrit Smith, had pledged ten thousand dollars to raise a thousand men to make sure Kansas became a free state.

Smith had rescued Brown and his family from destitution after the multiple failures of his business career. He had offered them land in New Elba, north of Lake Placid, where the millionaire had founded a colony for
indigent free blacks. Smith had inherited a fortune from his father, a partner of John Jacob Astor. The son devoted himself to a bewildering range of good causes and good works. At various times he was in favor of colonization, then of abolitionism, and he had been a vice president of the American Peace Society.

Timbucto, as blacks called the New Elba colony, was a disastrous geographical choice for African Americans. After living for generations in warm climates, they were physically and mentally unprepared to endure northern New York's brutally cold winters. They were even more unready to master the art and science of raising crops in the relatively unfertile soil. Nor were any of them adept at building houses. Within a year or two, most of the farms were abandoned. The Browns stayed, largely because they had no place else to go.

Smith evinced no interest in giving Brown a slice of his ten-thousand-dollar pledge, so the Captain headed for Boston, where the Massachusetts Kansas Committee reportedly was rolling in dollars. He found the committee operating from a small cluttered office in a garret peopled only by twenty-six-year-old Franklin Sanborn, the volunteer secretary. Nevertheless, Brown's hopes rose when Sanborn recognized him as “Brown of Osawatomie”—the title antislavery journalists in Kansas had given him.

Brown was soon convinced that God had led him to Sanborn. The young Harvard graduate ran a college preparatory school in Concord and knew all the famous names of that community—Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Bronson Alcott. Sanborn listened with growing excitement as Brown told him that he needed twenty thousand dollars to buy guns and supplies for a hundred men to renew the armed struggle for Kansas. The territory was not by any means safe from the grasp of The Slave Power.

Revealing an unexpected ability to sell himself, Brown described his exploits in Kansas in heroic terms. In the “battle” of Black Jack, he and his followers had captured at gunpoint a squad of Missouri raiders. He omitted mentioning that a troop of U.S. cavalry had forced them to surrender the prisoners shortly afterward. He made his role sound even more heroic in his description of the struggle to defend the state's antislavery headquarters
at Osawatomie. In fact, the abolitionists had been routed and the town burned.

Captain Brown did not say a word about the killings on Pottawatomie Creek. When Sanborn mentioned a rumor of murders there, Brown assured him he had had nothing to do with such a ghastly crime. Soon Sanborn was seeing Brown as “of the unmixed Puritan breed”—the sort of hero who had fought and won the American Revolution. George Washington and other Americans south of New England were missing in this view of the history of 1776.

Sanborn introduced Brown to other men who believed in armed resistance to The Slave Power. Theodore Parker was a minister whose views on Christianity and antislavery were so radical that he was barred from every church in Boston and preached to a congregation at the city's Music Hall. Samuel Gridley Howe was a medical reformer who had launched a note-worthy school for the deaf and blind. In his youth he had gone to Europe to help the Greeks win their independence from the tyrannical Turks. He and Parker headed a “vigilance committee” to protect escaped slaves from federal marshals. The two persuaded the Kansas Committee to give Brown two hundred Sharps rifles that they had shipped to Tabor, Iowa, to renew the war for Kansas.

Sanborn introduced Brown to George Luther Stearns, a wealthy businessman who had raised almost $80,000 for the Kansas Committee. Stearns was so impressed with Brown's fictitious version of his exploits in Kansas that he paid $1,300 for two hundred pistols from the Massachusetts Arms Company. Stearns and his wife gave a reception for the Kansas free soil fighter at their plush suburban mansion. In the course of the evening, Brown met William Lloyd Garrison, who told him that he disapproved of his policy of violent resistance to slavery. The two men exchanged conflicting quotes from the Bible; otherwise Brown concealed his contempt for all-talk-and-no-action Garrisonians.

Franklin Sanborn persuaded his Unitarian minister friend, Thomas Wentworth Higginson, to hurry from Worcester to meet Brown. Higginson was a direct-action man on a par with the Kansas hero. He had already been
dismissed by one congregation for his violent antislavery rhetoric. Although he vowed to help his cash-short fellow crusader, no money was forthcoming.

By now John Brown was growing more than a little frustrated by this lack of follow-through from most of his Boston well-wishers. Nevertheless, he allowed Sanborn to escort him to Concord, where he met Henry Thoreau at the house of his parents. The two men conversed over dinner and Thoreau declared he had “much confidence in the man—he would do right.” The following night Brown visited the Emersons and then spoke in the Concord Town Hall to a large turnout.

Brown denounced slavery, its defenders, and the U.S. government, but he insisted he was no lover of violence. The necessity for it was clearly the will of God. The Bible and the Declaration of Independence were the two most important documents in world history, and it was “better for a whole generation of men women and children should pass away by violent death than that a word of either be violated in this country.” The applause for this macabre nonsense was fervent but donations were few. Emerson gave only a few dollars, Thoreau “a trifle.”

This pattern persisted in almost every Massachusetts town in which Brown spoke. He seldom raised more than seventy or eighty dollars. Then came a flash of bad news from his son Jason, who was waiting for him in Iowa. A deputy U.S. marshal was on his way to Massachusetts with a warrant for his arrest for the Pottawatomie murders. Brown went into hiding in the home of Thomas B. Russell, an abolitionist who was a judge of the state's supreme court. Brooding about his lack of cash, Brown barricaded himself in a third-floor bedroom and declared he would fight any and all U.S. marshals to the death. He frightened Mrs. Russell by brandishing a long bowie knife and several pistols.

At the Russell dinner table, consuming generous portions of well-cooked beef and fowl, Brown talked about the vile food he had been forced to eat while hiding out in Kansas— “joints and toes of creatures that surely no human being ever tasted,” Mrs. Russell recalled. He took pleasure in making his affluent hosts uncomfortable. Finally he read aloud to the shocked Russells a diatribe he intended to distribute all over Boston:

Old Browns Farewell: to the Plymouth Rocks, Bunker Hill Monuments, Charter Oaks and Uncle Toms Cabbins . . . He leaves the [New England] States with a
DEEP FEELING OF SADNESS
: that after having exhausted
his own small means
: and with his family and his
BRAVE MEN
: suffered nakedness, hunger, cold, sickness (and some of them imprisonment, with the most barbarous cruel treatment:
wounds and death . . .
after all this to sustain a cause for which every citizen of this “Glorious Republic” is under equal moral obligation to do: for the neglect of which he will be held accountable by God . . . he cannot secure, amidst all the wealth, luxury and extravagance of this ‘Heaven exalted' people; even the necessary supplies of the common soldier.
HOW ARE THE MIGHTY FALLEN
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Brown sent copies of this rant to George Stearns and Theodore Parker. Mrs. Stearns became almost hysterical and urged her husband to bankrupt himself if necessary to get Brown the money he needed. Stearns pledged seven thousand dollars for “the defense of Kansas,” which Brown was free to use as he saw fit. But no actual cash materialized.

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In his private journal, Ralph Waldo Emerson expressed awe and near-worship of John Brown after meeting him in Concord. It was fresh evidence of the way the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 and its enforcement in Massachusetts had tilted The Sage of Concord toward abolitionist extremism. The federal government was “treason,” Emerson now declared, and for a while preached that California's vigilante justice was the best solution to the uproars created by attempts to capture runaway slaves. With every man armed with a knife and revolver, “perfect peace reigned” he claimed, betraying a total ignorance of the Golden State.
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John Brown's religion of violence was even more appealing. Emerson saw him as part of nature's law. He spoke of Brown as a sheep herder from Ohio, ignoring the fact that he had failed in this venture, as he had in all his other forays into earning a living. The Sage saw Brown as a man with a unique gift
for making friends with his horse or his mule. He was equally friendly with the deer that wandered onto his Ohio farm. “He stands for Truth,” Emerson said. “And Truth & Nature help him . . . irresistibly.”

Henry David Thoreau had also been transformed by the Fugitive Slave Act. After the runaway Anthony Burns had been returned to Virginia, Thoreau publicly burned copies of the Act and the Constitution. “My thoughts are murder to the State and involuntarily go plotting against her,” Thoreau said. This was several dozen steps beyond the anti–tax-paying civil disobedience he had preached during his opposition to the Mexican War.

The more the two Concord philosophers discussed John Brown, the more convinced they became that he was a reincarnation of Oliver Cromwell. Even the New Englanders of 1776 had repudiated this infamous tyrant. After he defeated the royal army in the British civil war of the seventeenth century, Cromwell had beheaded King Charles I, dismissed Parliament, and ruled as a dictator for three decades. Cromwell was the bogeyman that New Englanders and others summoned when George Washington began acquiring an outsize reputation as the leader of the Revolution.

There was also the matter of Cromwell's bloodsoaked invasion of Ireland, during which he slaughtered whole populations of towns that resisted his army. Like John Brown, Cromwell claimed that the murders had God's approval. Henry Thoreau was soon saying that Brown's denunciations of slavery were “like the speeches of Cromwell.” Brown's Kansas soldiers, including the murderers of the unarmed men on Pottawatomie Creek, were “a perfect Cromwellian troop.” Franklin Sanborn and others who were part of the Concord world echoed this bizarre canonization.
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When John Brown reached Tabor, Iowa, in August 1857, he had only $25 in his pocket. He was expecting to find most if not all of the $7,000 that George Stearns had promised him available to help him muster another troop of Cromwellian followers. Instead the local agent for the Massachusetts Kansas Committee gave him $110 and said he had no idea where or when more money was likely to appear.

The nation had been struck by a financial panic. The stock market had plunged and banks were collapsing. Thousands of men were marching in northern cities with banners reading: “Hunger is a Sharp Thorn” and “We Want Work.” An oblivious Brown fired infuriated letters at Stearns and other Boston backers, claiming he needed $1,000 immediately for “secret service and no questions asked.”
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Events in Kansas made this demand seem dubious or worse to Stearns, who was struggling to avert bankruptcy. Another Southern-born territorial governor, appointed by President Buchanan, was continuing the evenhanded policies of his predecessor. Fighting between proslavery and antislavery settlers had dwindled to the vanishing point. Elections to a territorial legislature were held, and free-state voters won overwhelmingly. Peace of sorts seemed to dawn on the military front, though Kansas would soon provide more political shocks.

John Brown had lost interest in this minor war. As his depression caused by the failure of his fundraising campaign lessened, his manic faith in his destiny resumed its grip on his unstable mind. Over the next year and a half, Brown would reveal to Stearns, Sanborn, and four other Boston backers a far more ambitious plan. With their help he would assault The Slave Power in the proud state where it had been spawned—Virginia.