Bound for Canaan (59 page)

The stunning presumption of the letter was not lost on Loguen. He wrote back: “You are a woman; but had you a woman's heart you could never have insulted a brother by telling him you sold his only remaining brother and sister, because he put himself beyond your power to convert him into money. Now you have the unutterable meanness to ask me to return and be your miserable chattel, or in lieu thereof send you $1,000 to enable you to redeem the
land
, but not to redeem my poor brother and sister!” He added defiantly, “If you or any other speculator on my body and rights, wish to know how I regard my rights, they need but come here and lay their hands on me to enslave me.”

Loguen knew that slave catchers, if they dared, might come for him any time. But they never did. The nation went to war instead. Before that happened, however, Loguen would have a role to play in the last great drama of the antebellum era.

3

At fifty-five, John Brown was still, in the words of Frederick Douglass, “lean, strong, and sinewy, built for times of trouble and fitted to grapple with the flintiest hardships.” In Kansas, he finally found reality violent enough to fit the cosmic battle between Good and Evil he had always carried in his head. His first taste of warfare came in December 1855, when a proslavery force of two thousand men menaced the Free State town of Lawrence, fifty miles north of the Browns' cabins at Osawatomie. The Browns and their neighbors raced to Lawrence's defense, arriving there in a wagon that bristled like a lethal porcupine with rifles, pikes, and bayonets. Brown was commissioned a captain on the spot, and appointed to command a company of twenty men, his first military commission. From the first moment, he savored the power that weapons and leadership conferred. Although the anticipated attack never materialized, Brown had discovered that men would follow him, and fight for him. In the months and years to come, some would see in him an “imperial egotism.” To others, he would reveal a charisma that would draw to him both hard men and naive ones, mesmerized by his towering certainties, and trusting that his icy, sword-sharp gaze truly saw the will of God.

Still, until the spring of 1856, John Brown was not much different from many other scripture-quoting abolitionists in Kansas. Despite the incendiary rhetoric in the air, only six Free Staters had so far been killed. Then, in May, proslavery raiders attacked Lawrence. Brown and a party of his men were on their way to the town's defense when they learned that it had surrendered without even a fight, and had afterward been subjected to an orgy of burning and looting. Almost simultaneously, Brown was informed by a messenger that Charles Sumner of Massachusetts, the most outspoken abolitionist in the United States Senate, had been beaten senseless on the floor of the chamber by a cane-wielding congressman from South Carolina. The news from Lawrence and Washington left Brown “frenzied” at the North's seeming impotence in the face of Southern power. He “went crazy—
crazy
,” his son Salmon later recalled. “Something must be done to show these barbarians that we, too, have rights,” Brown told his followers. Advised to act with caution, he retorted, “Caution, cau
tion, sir. I am eternally tired of hearing the word caution. It is nothing but the word of cowardice.”

Revenge for Lawrence and for the attack on Sumner was on Brown's mind on the night of May 23 as he swept with an armed party that included four of his sons through an isolated settlement on Pottawatomie Creek, thirty miles from Osawatomie. They dragged five men out of their cabins and hacked them to death with cutlasses embossed with the American eagle. The victims were all notorious proslavery men, and had advocated attacks against the Free Staters, but none was guilty of killing anyone. The horrific nature of the murders disgusted even abolitionists. Two of Brown's sons who had not participated in the raid were so distraught that they suffered nervous breakdowns. Brown was unrepentant. “God is my judge,” he laconically replied when asked to account for his actions. “We were justified under the circumstances.”

The murders ignited a reign of terror. Proslavery “border ruffians” raided Free Staters' homesteads. Abolitionists fought back. Federal troops scoured the prairie in search of Brown and his band. Hamlets were left desolate, farms abandoned. Osawatomie was burned to the ground. Brown's son Frederick, who had participated in the massacre, was shot dead by a proslavery man. Brown himself was almost caught in September, when a troop of dragoons rode up to the cabin where he was hiding, and stayed for refreshment. He lay hidden in the loft, with a revolver in each hand, watching through cracks in the floorboards as his host fed melons to the soldiers. Although he survived many brushes with the enemy, Brown seemed to sense his own fate. He told his son Jason, the quietest of all the Browns, a farmer who dreamed more of raising fruit trees than of vengeance, “I have only a short time to live—only one death to die, and I will die fighting for this cause.”

The national elections that autumn solved nothing. Although the Republicans made a strong showing in their first presidential contest, receiving an impressive 33 percent of the vote in a three-way contest, the election was won by yet another doughface Democrat, Pennsylvanian James Buchanan, a man who made a pious virtue of complacency and invoked maintenance of the status quo as a lofty ideal. A Northern man only in terms of geography, he was a lifelong defender of Southern interests. As far back as the 1820s, as a freshman congressman, he had declared that if
Southerners were ever to be threatened by a slave rebellion he would be among the first “to bundle on my knapsack” and march “in defense of their cause.” In his inaugural address, he now proclaimed his enthusiasm for popular sovereignty in Kansas. “[E]verything of a practical nature has been decided,” he blandly assured the nation. “No other question remains for adjustment, because all agree that under the Constitution slavery in the States is beyond the reach of any human power except that of respective States themselves wherein it exists…Most happy will it be for the country when the public mind shall be diverted from this question to others of more pressing and practical importance.”

Like his predecessor, Franklin Pierce, Buchanan uncritically embraced the proslavery territorial government of Kansas, based at Lecompton, and dismissed the rival Free State administration at Topeka as “revolutionary.” When elections for the territorial legislature were held in October 1857, thousands of Missourians crossed the border to vote illegally, in the most nakedly fraudulent grab for power in American history. In one county, in which only eleven cabins had been erected, 1,828 votes were recorded. In another county, proslavery forces packed the poll lists with names taken verbatim from an old New York City directory. Elsewhere, abolitionists were physically kept from entering the polls by pro-slavery toughs. Laws enacted by the legislators barred abolitionists from holding office or from serving on juries, and imposed a term of imprisonment for not less than five years on anyone who denied the existence of slavery in Kansas, opposed the right to own slaves, or circulated abolitionist literature. Abolitionists were understandably outraged. In New York, Gerrit Smith denounced the new laws as “the most diabolical and infamous statutes” ever enacted, and pledged more aid to the Free State forces. (He would eventually donate to the cause more than sixteen thousand dollars, the equivalent of four hundred and fifty thousand dollars in present-day terms.)

Meanwhile, a grandiose plan was fermenting in the fertile imagination of John Brown, who had continued to evade punishment for the Pottawatomie massacre. “Railroad Business on a somewhat extended scale is the identical object for which I am trying to get means,” he confided to a friend. To his old vision of a “Subterranean Pass Way” that would run the length of the Appalachian chain, he now added the concept of a militarized enclave based in the mountains, which would provide a permanent
haven for fugitives from all over the Deep South, and thus bring the entire institution of slavery to its knees. Having eluded his enemies for months on the open prairies of Kansas, he believed that it would be even easier to defy them in the forested fastnesses of the Blue Ridge Mountains. Only “a few resolute men” would be needed at first. Once they had established a chain of defensible positions, recruits could be sent down as they were needed.

In January 1858 Brown left Kansas to seek backing for his plan. His itinerary was a Cook's tour of the leading underground figures in the East. He spent three weeks with Frederick Douglass, in Rochester, where he wrote a forty-eight-article constitution for a “Provisional Government,” including a unicameral legislature, president and vice-president, supreme court, a commander-in-chief, all to serve without pay. He told Douglass that his first objective was the capture of the Virginia town of Harpers Ferry, at the confluence of the Potomac and Shenandoah rivers, with its important federal armory and rifle works, which would provide weapons for the thousands of slaves he expected to flock to his cause.

From Rochester, Brown moved on to Gerrit Smith's mansion at Peterboro, where he was introduced to the well-connected abolitionist and educator Franklin Sanborn, for whom Brown enthusiastically sketched plans for his mountain redoubts on a scrap of paper. (Sanborn cautiously labeled the designs “woolen machinery.”) Sanborn and Brown then traveled to Boston, where Brown won the support of four more prominent radical abolitionists who had already lent their support to the Free State cause in Kansas, and now agreed to organize financing for Brown's southern strategy.
*

After Boston, Brown moved on to Philadelphia to recruit William Still. Then, after a brief visit to his family at North Elba, he journeyed to Syracuse, where he had the ardent support of Jermain Loguen, whose defiant oratory echoed Brown's own. Loguen's part in the plan, like
Douglass's, would be to recruit the battalions of black volunteers Brown wanted for his Appalachian army. He also hoped that either Douglass or Loguen would agree to serve as president of his provisional government. Brown and Loguen continued on to St. Catharines, in Canada, where they sought out Harriet Tubman. At her house, Brown told a gathering of her friends that the Day of Judgment was at hand, that it was time for “God's wrath to descend,” and that he was the divine instrument ordained to deliver it.

By now, Tubman was a celebrity within the underground. She had made eight trips to the South, and brought out some fifty fugitives, including her parents, who although free had been in danger of imminent arrest because of her father's involvement in the underground. Brown recognized in her a kindred spirit, whose physical courage, boldness, and skill at traveling unnoticed through the South would be invaluable. He took to referring to her as “General Tubman,” and wrote to his son John Brown Jr.: “He is the most of a man, naturally, that I have ever met.” Tubman, for her part, embraced Brown as one of the few whites she had ever met who understood, as blacks always had, that antislavery work was not just moral uplift but part of a war in which combatants had to be prepared to die.

On May 8, at a secret convention in Chatham, in Canada West, Brown proclaimed the establishment of his provisional government, based on the constitution that he had written at the Douglass home. Of the forty-six men present, the only whites were thirteen of Brown's followers from Kansas. Among the more prominent blacks were Mary Ann Shadd's brother Isaac, publisher of the
Provincial Freeman
, and two leaders of the Detroit underground, William Lambert and Reverend William Monroe, who chaired the convention. However, Tubman, Douglass, and Loguen were all notably absent, a portent, perhaps, that they had second thoughts about Brown's ambitions. None of them ever disowned him. But they may have concluded that if his plan failed they were certain to be arrested, and the Underground Railroad possibly wrecked, as its lines, methods, and membership were revealed. The delegates adopted the constitution that Brown had written with little debate, and unanimously elected Reverend Monroe the provisional government's temporary president, and Brown its commander in chief. Brown left Chatham with the hope that hundreds, if not thousands, of Canadian blacks would eventually join his expedition.
Only one did, Osborne P. Anderson, a printer who worked for the
Provincial Freeman
, and had been elected a member of Brown's provisional congress.

Brown wanted to invade Virginia that summer. But hints of his strategy had leaked out. To draw attention away from his real intentions, he returned to Kansas, where he lay low for the next six months. When he left Kansas in December 1858, his departure was spectacular. A Missouri slave named Jim Daniels had contacted him, and asked for help in liberating the members of his family, who were about to be sold. It was an opportunity to carry out precisely the kind of raid into slave territory that Brown had in mind, on a vaster scale, for Virginia. Brown led a detachment of men ten miles into Missouri to the plantation where Daniels lived. They collected the five members of Daniels's family, and five more slaves from another plantation nearby. A second detachment freed a slave at a third farm, and killed her owner. For the next month, the fugitives were hidden in a cabin across the state line in Kansas. In late January 1859 Brown and the twelve fugitives (a baby having been born in the interim, and christened “John Brown”), set off northward toward Nebraska with the fugitives in an ox-drawn wagon and an armed guard of fifteen abolitionists, dodging proslavery guerrillas, marshals' posses, and at one point fending off a much larger force of United States troops, taking several of them prisoner. One of them later complained that although none of the prisoners had been otherwise mistreated, “It did go a little against the grain to eat with and be guarded by ‘damned niggers.'” Near Nebraska City, when thawing ice halted their flight at the Missouri River, Brown's men cut down trees and flung logs from the shore to firmer ice, and dragged their wagons across by hand, just hours ahead of their pursuers. They traveled east along an established underground route through Iowa, via Tabor and Grinnell, where they were welcomed by Josiah Grinnell, the founder of the college that bears his name. Grinnell personally reserved a boxcar for Brown's party at the nearest railhead, to carry them directly to Chicago, which they reached on March 10. Two days later they arrived in Detroit, where, presumably with the assistance of the local underground, they were taken to the wharf and ferried across the Detroit River to Windsor. As he watched them embark, Brown recalled a passage of Scripture: “Lord, now lettest thy servant depart in peace, for my eyes have seen thy salva
tion.” They had covered almost fifteen hundred miles in eighty-two days, proof to scoffers, Brown felt sure, that he was capable of making the Subterranean Pass Way a reality.