Authors: Tony Horwitz
Tags: #John Brown, #Abolition, #Civil War Period (1850-1877)
Midnight Rising: John Brown and the Raid That Sparked the Civil War Hardcover – Bargain Price (3 page)
But this clout—economic as well as political—depended on continual expansion. The South needed new lands to plant and new states to boost representation, to keep pace with the industrializing and more populous North. This inevitably sowed conflict as the nation spread west. With the settling of each new territory a contentious question arose: would it be slave or free?
The first serious strife flared in 1819, when Missouri sought statehood. Missouri had been settled mainly by Southerners; its admission to the Union would carry slavery well north and west of its existing boundaries and upset the numerical balance between slave and free states. After lengthy debate, Congress finessed the crisis by admitting Maine along with Missouri and by drawing a line across the continent, forbidding any further slavery north of the 36° 30’ parallel. This deal—the Missouri Compromise of 1820—formed the basis for a three-decade détente over slavery’s spread.
But Thomas Jefferson, then in his late seventies, immediately sensed the danger inherent in the agreement. In demarcating a border between slave and free, the compromise underscored the country’s fault line and fixed the nation into two camps. “This momentous question, like a fire bell in the night, awakened and filled me with terror,” Jefferson wrote of
the debate over Missouri and slavery. “I considered it at once as the knell of the Union. It is hushed indeed for the moment, but this is a reprieve only, not a final sentence.”
the debate over Missouri and slavery. “I considered it at once as the knell of the Union. It is hushed indeed for the moment, but this is a reprieve only, not a final sentence.”
IN HIS AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL LETTER to young Henry Stearns, John Brown said he felt the first stirrings of his “
Eternal war
with Slavery” at age twelve, when he saw a slave boy beaten with iron shovels. “This brought John to reflect on the wretched, hopeless condition, of Fatherless & Motherless slave children,” he wrote. Brown, who was also motherless and subject to childhood beatings, may have identified with the slave boy. But his burning hatred of racial oppression had another source. Like so much else in his life, it reflected the influence of his father.
Eternal war
with Slavery” at age twelve, when he saw a slave boy beaten with iron shovels. “This brought John to reflect on the wretched, hopeless condition, of Fatherless & Motherless slave children,” he wrote. Brown, who was also motherless and subject to childhood beatings, may have identified with the slave boy. But his burning hatred of racial oppression had another source. Like so much else in his life, it reflected the influence of his father.
In most respects, Owen Brown’s religious faith harked back to his Puritan forebears, who believed they had a covenant with God to make America a moral beacon to the world. In the eighteenth century, Calvinist ministers began speaking of slavery as a threat to this special relationship—a breach of divine law that would bring down God’s wrath upon the land. Owen was strongly affected by this preaching, and like many other New England emigrants, he carried his antislavery convictions to the Western Reserve.
He also displayed an unusual tolerance toward the native inhabitants of Ohio. “Some Persons seamed disposed to quarel with the Indians but I never was,” he wrote. Nor did he proselytize, or damn natives as heathens, as Puritans of old would have done. Instead, he traded meal for fish and game; he also built a log shelter to protect local Indians from an enemy tribe. Young John “used to hang about” Indians as much as he could—the beginnings of a lifelong sympathy for natives that stood in stark contrast to the prevailing hostility of white Americans.
As Owen Brown established himself in Ohio, he and his neighbors helped fugitive slaves, making the town of Hudson a well-traveled stop on the Underground Railroad. John followed suit, aiding runaways who came to the log cabin he shared with a brother while he was still a bachelor. He continued to aid fugitive slaves after his marriage, but he had a great deal else to occupy him.
During the first four years of their union, Brown and his wife had
three sons. Like his father before him, Brown pioneered new territory, taking his wife and toddlers to a sparsely settled section of northwestern Pennsylvania. He cleared land, built a tannery, raised stock, and, like Owen, became a civic leader, founding a school and church and serving as the area’s first postmaster. “An inspired paternal ruler” was how one of his neighbors described him, “controlling and providing for the circle of which he was the head.”
three sons. Like his father before him, Brown pioneered new territory, taking his wife and toddlers to a sparsely settled section of northwestern Pennsylvania. He cleared land, built a tannery, raised stock, and, like Owen, became a civic leader, founding a school and church and serving as the area’s first postmaster. “An inspired paternal ruler” was how one of his neighbors described him, “controlling and providing for the circle of which he was the head.”
This circle quickly grew to include three more children. Brown, raised by disciplinarians, became one himself, hewing to the Calvinist belief in the depravity of human nature. His firstborn, John junior, was required to keep a ledger listing his sins and detailing the punishment due each: “unfaithfulness at work” earned three lashes; “disobeying mother” brought eight. The second born, Jason, had a vivid dream about petting a baby raccoon that was “as kind as a kitten,” and described the encounter as if it had really happened. He was three or four at the time, and his father thrashed him for telling a “wicked lie.” Five-year-old Ruth muddied her shoes while gathering pussy willows and then fibbed about how she’d gotten wet. Her father “switched me with the willow that had caused my sin,” she recalled.
Corporal punishment was common at the time, but Brown dispensed the rod with especial vigor. He was determined to root out sin, not only in his offspring but also in himself and others. When he was a young man, this compulsion to punish wrongs was primarily manifest in small acts of moral policing. Brown apprehended two men he encountered on the road who were stealing apples, and smashed a neighbor’s whiskey jug after taking a few sips and deciding the liquor had dangerous powers.
Despite his severity, Brown was beloved by his children, who also recalled his many acts of tenderness. He sang hymns to them at bedtime, recited maxims from Aesop and Benjamin Franklin (“Diligence is the mother of good luck”), cared for his “little folks” when they were ill, and was gentle with animals: he warmed frozen lambs in the family washtub.
Brown nursed his wife as well. Dianthe came from a family with a history of mental illness, and not long after her marriage she began to exhibit signs of what relatives called “strangeness.” She also faltered physically, suffering from “a difficulty about her heart,” Brown wrote.
Though the nature of her affliction isn’t clear, it probably wasn’t helped by bearing six children in nine years, one of whom, a son, died at
the age of four. A year after his death, Dianthe went into labor a seventh time; the child, another boy, was stillborn and had to be extracted “with instruments,” Brown wrote. After three days of “great bodily pain & distress,” Dianthe also died, at the age of thirty-one. Brown buried her beside their unnamed son, beneath a tombstone bearing Dianthe’s final words: “Farewell Earth.”
the age of four. A year after his death, Dianthe went into labor a seventh time; the child, another boy, was stillborn and had to be extracted “with instruments,” Brown wrote. After three days of “great bodily pain & distress,” Dianthe also died, at the age of thirty-one. Brown buried her beside their unnamed son, beneath a tombstone bearing Dianthe’s final words: “Farewell Earth.”
THIS LOSS, WHICH ECHOED his mother’s death in childbirth, appears to have sent Brown into shock. “I have been growing numb for a good while,” he wrote a business partner. He also complained of vague physical symptoms. “Getting more & more unfit for any thing.”
Brown and his five children—the youngest was not yet two—briefly moved in with another family. Upon returning to his own home, he hired a housekeeper, whose sixteen-year-old sister, Mary Day, often came along to help. Several months later, Brown proposed to Mary by letter. They married in July 1833, less than a year after Dianthe’s death.
A tall, sturdy teenager of modest education, Mary was half her husband’s age and only four years older than his eldest child. She would bear him thirteen more children and endure great economic hardship. Brown was a tireless worker and skilled at diverse trades: tanning, surveying, farming, cattle breeding, sheepherding. He won prizes for his fine wool, published articles about livestock (“Remedy for Bots or Grubs, in the heads of Sheep”), and filled a pocket diary with practical tips, such as rules for measuring hay in a barn and a farm lady’s advice on making butter. (“In summer add plenty of cold water to the milk before churning. The slower the churning the better.”)
But Brown’s diligence and work ethic were repeatedly undone by his inability to manage money. This was a leitmotif of his earliest surviving letters, mostly to a partner in his tanning and cattle business. “I am running low for cash again,” Brown wrote Seth Thompson in 1828. “I was unable to raise any cash towards the bank debt,” he wrote in 1832. Then, later that year: “Unable to send you money as I intended.” And in 1834, again: “I have been uterly unable to raise any money for you as yet.” In these and many other letters, Brown expressed regret for his financial
straits—and blamed them on forces beyond his control: the weather, ill health, the monetary policies of President Andrew Jackson.
straits—and blamed them on forces beyond his control: the weather, ill health, the monetary policies of President Andrew Jackson.
Brown may also have been distracted by his budding concern for affairs other than business. It was in the early 1830s that he first wrote of his determination to help slaves. He also showed signs of a truculent and nonconformist spirit. Brown joined the Freemasons but quickly fell out with the secret society amid accusations that Masons had murdered one of their critics in New York. Far from being cowed by the controversy, Brown openly proclaimed his opposition to the group and circulated the published statement of a Mason who claimed that he’d been selected to cut the throat of a “brother” who revealed the order’s secrets.
“I have aroused such a feeling towards me,” Brown wrote his father in 1830, “as leads me for the present to avoid going about the streets at evening & alone.” Brown knew his father would approve of his defiance, if not of the other measure he took. Owen was a committed pacifist; his son, a warrior at heart, acquired his first gun.
I Consecrate My Life
I
n 1831, a decade after Missouri entered the Union, Jefferson’s “fire bell in the night” rang again—this time in Southampton County, Virginia, close to where the first Africans had been sold to Jamestown colonists in 1619. Late one August night, a preacher named Nat Turner led a small band of fellow slaves from farm to farm, slaughtering whites. Other slaves joined in, and Turner’s force killed about sixty people before militiamen quelled the uprising. Enraged whites then went on a rampage of their own, murdering hundreds of blacks and sticking their severed heads on roadside signposts as a warning.
n 1831, a decade after Missouri entered the Union, Jefferson’s “fire bell in the night” rang again—this time in Southampton County, Virginia, close to where the first Africans had been sold to Jamestown colonists in 1619. Late one August night, a preacher named Nat Turner led a small band of fellow slaves from farm to farm, slaughtering whites. Other slaves joined in, and Turner’s force killed about sixty people before militiamen quelled the uprising. Enraged whites then went on a rampage of their own, murdering hundreds of blacks and sticking their severed heads on roadside signposts as a warning.
Turner hid in the woods for two months before being captured. In prison, a lawyer recorded his chillingly eloquent confession. At an early age, Turner said, he “was ordained for some great purpose in the hands of the Almighty.” Signs and visions gradually revealed what he considered his God-given mission: “I should arise and prepare myself, and slay my enemies with their own weapons.”
Turner and his followers had done precisely that, using axes, fence rails, and captured arms to murder any whites they found, including women, schoolchildren, a baby sleeping in its cradle, and a man “who was to me a kind master,” Turner said. He claimed to have had no design apart from killing. As his guiding “Spirit” had told him, “the time was fast approaching when the first should be last and the last should be first.” At his trial, Turner pleaded not guilty, “saying to his counsel that
he did not feel so.” Six days later, he was hanged and dismembered, his body parts distributed to family of the victims.
he did not feel so.” Six days later, he was hanged and dismembered, his body parts distributed to family of the victims.
Illustration in an 1831 pamphlet on the Nat Turner Rebellion
Though Turner failed to win any slaves their freedom, he stirred the deepest fear of southern whites: that blacks might at any moment rise up and slaughter them in their beds. This terror was particularly acute in plantation counties where slaves greatly outnumbered whites. That Turner was devout, and that his owners had treated him comparatively well, only made matters worse, for it upset the paternalistic fantasy that slaves were too docile and contented to revolt.
Turner’s uprising also galvanized the newborn abolitionist movement, led by the fiery Boston editor William Lloyd Garrison. Previously, antislavery efforts in the United States had centered on the gradual emancipation of blacks and their “colonization” in Africa or the Caribbean. Jefferson and, later, Abraham Lincoln were among the adherents of this
program, which was based on the belief that blacks could never live as equals to whites.
program, which was based on the belief that blacks could never live as equals to whites.
Garrison, by contrast, sought the immediate abolition of slavery and the extension of full rights to black Americans. He signaled his urgent, uncompromising stance in the inaugural issue of his abolitionist weekly,
The Liberator,
published just eight months before Turner’s revolt. “Tell a man whose house is on fire to give a moderate alarm,” he wrote. “I will not equivocate—I will not excuse—I will not retreat a single inch—AND I WILL BE HEARD.”
The Liberator,
published just eight months before Turner’s revolt. “Tell a man whose house is on fire to give a moderate alarm,” he wrote. “I will not equivocate—I will not excuse—I will not retreat a single inch—AND I WILL BE HEARD.”
There is no evidence that
The Liberator
reached or influenced Nat Turner. But in the wake of his uprising, white Southerners targeted the paper as part of a brutal crackdown on slaves and on anyone or anything that might feed their discontent. Southern states stepped up slave patrols and tightened slave codes; they barred blacks from learning to read or write, from preaching, from gathering in groups without white oversight. Southern officials also indicted Garrison, offering large rewards for his capture or, indeed, the apprehension of anyone distributing
The
Liberator,
which Virginia’s governor claimed was published “with the express intention of inciting the slaves.”
The Liberator
reached or influenced Nat Turner. But in the wake of his uprising, white Southerners targeted the paper as part of a brutal crackdown on slaves and on anyone or anything that might feed their discontent. Southern states stepped up slave patrols and tightened slave codes; they barred blacks from learning to read or write, from preaching, from gathering in groups without white oversight. Southern officials also indicted Garrison, offering large rewards for his capture or, indeed, the apprehension of anyone distributing
The
Liberator,
which Virginia’s governor claimed was published “with the express intention of inciting the slaves.”
William Lloyd Garrison
This onslaught, in turn, fed Garrison fresh material for his crusade. In his view, the southern backlash gave evidence not only of slavery’s cruelty but of the threat the institution posed to freedom of speech and the entire nation’s liberty. Garrison sent salvo after salvo from
The Liberator,
each round prompting return fire from slavery’s newly energized defenders, who began to espouse a brazenly unapologetic doctrine.
The Liberator,
each round prompting return fire from slavery’s newly energized defenders, who began to espouse a brazenly unapologetic doctrine.
In earlier decades, Southerners had often spoken of slavery as a necessary evil, an uncomfortable inheritance from those who first brought Africans to the colonies. “I take higher ground,” John Calhoun told Congress in 1837. “Instead of an evil,” slavery was “a positive good.” It was rooted in the Bible and racial difference, which made whites the natural and rightful masters of “savage” Africans. Slaves were secure and well cared for, unlike wage laborers in northern mills; white Southerners were freed from drudgery and class conflict.
George Fitzhugh, of Virginia, later took Calhoun’s thesis to its logical extreme. In tracts such as
Cannibals All!,
he argued that if slavery was right, then the Founders themselves had been wrong. “All men are created equal” wasn’t a manifest truth; it was a self-evident lie.
Cannibals All!,
he argued that if slavery was right, then the Founders themselves had been wrong. “All men are created equal” wasn’t a manifest truth; it was a self-evident lie.
Ten days after Nat Turner’s revolt, William Lloyd Garrison had written in
The Liberator
: “The first step of the earthquake, which is ultimately to shake down the fabric of oppression, leaving not one stone upon another, has been made.” Garrison’s words were to prove prophetic, though perhaps not in the way he imagined. In and of itself, Turner’s revolt was a tremor. But it cracked open a rift between fundamentally opposed views of America’s destiny. With each fresh denunciation and demonization, the chasm widened, until North and South came to regard each other not just as distinct regions but as separate peoples.
The Liberator
: “The first step of the earthquake, which is ultimately to shake down the fabric of oppression, leaving not one stone upon another, has been made.” Garrison’s words were to prove prophetic, though perhaps not in the way he imagined. In and of itself, Turner’s revolt was a tremor. But it cracked open a rift between fundamentally opposed views of America’s destiny. With each fresh denunciation and demonization, the chasm widened, until North and South came to regard each other not just as distinct regions but as separate peoples.
THE 1831 REVOLT AND its aftermath also stirred John Brown, who soon began plotting his own work against slavery. Bred of the same New England stock as William Lloyd Garrison and born the same year as Nat Turner, Brown shared essential traits with both the austere Yankee editor
and the messianic slave preacher. In a sense, his antislavery career would trace an arc from one man to the other.
and the messianic slave preacher. In a sense, his antislavery career would trace an arc from one man to the other.
Brown’s father was an early subscriber to
The Liberator
and shared it with his son, who often visited Owen in Ohio and would soon move his family back there. Owen also became an early supporter of organized abolitionism, which effectively emerged as a movement in the United States with the founding of the American Anti-Slavery Society in 1833, under Garrison’s leadership.
The Liberator
and shared it with his son, who often visited Owen in Ohio and would soon move his family back there. Owen also became an early supporter of organized abolitionism, which effectively emerged as a movement in the United States with the founding of the American Anti-Slavery Society in 1833, under Garrison’s leadership.
The next year, Brown wrote his brother: “I have been trying to devise some means to do something in a practical way for my fellow-men who are in bondage.” This is the earliest surviving mention of slavery in Brown’s writing. He told his brother that he wanted to bring a black youth into his household, provide him an education, “and, above all, try to teach him the fear of God.” He also hoped to start a school for blacks. Education, he wrote, would free blacks’ minds and encourage Southerners to emancipate their slaves. “Perhaps we might, under God, in that way do more towards breaking their yoke effectually than in any other.”
These words seem mild for a man who would later take up arms, but they meshed closely with the abolitionism espoused in
The Liberator
. Garrison believed education, moral suasion, and Christian uplift would convince Americans, North and South, that slavery was a sin and a stain on the nation that must be expunged. Though vehement in word, Garrison was nonviolent in deed, a passionate “non-resistant.” He felt that violence, even in the cause of freedom, only recapitulated the sins of slave drivers. “I deny the right of any people to
fight
for liberty, and so far am a Quaker in principle.”
The Liberator
. Garrison believed education, moral suasion, and Christian uplift would convince Americans, North and South, that slavery was a sin and a stain on the nation that must be expunged. Though vehement in word, Garrison was nonviolent in deed, a passionate “non-resistant.” He felt that violence, even in the cause of freedom, only recapitulated the sins of slave drivers. “I deny the right of any people to
fight
for liberty, and so far am a Quaker in principle.”
Brown initially shared Garrison’s pacifism. As a boy, he’d been so disgusted by what he saw of soldiers during the War of 1812 that he later refused to drill with local militias and paid fines to avoid military service. Throughout his life, he felt a strong affinity with Quakers, admiring their plainness, independent spirit, and long-standing opposition to slavery.
Brown and Garrison were also alike in their moral absolutism. Both hated compromise and felt “all on fire” to root out sin. Typical was their embrace of temperance, minus the moderation that word implies. Brown smashed jugs and barrels of whiskey; Garrison campaigned for abstinence that was “Total with a capital Tee”—the origin of the word “teetotaler.”
But Brown’s beliefs would part ways with Garrison’s as conflict over slavery escalated from angry words and petitions to fists and clubs and guns. Garrison, heeding the New Testament admonition to “resist not evil,” believed in turning the other cheek. Brown, more of an Old Testament Christian, sought divine retribution. He also displayed a visceral loathing of behavior he judged craven. Nothing galvanized him more than bullying that went unanswered.
The first sign of Brown’s brewing militancy came in 1837, when a pro-slavery mob in Illinois killed an abolitionist editor, Elijah Lovejoy, and threw his printing press into the Mississippi. Garrison, who had narrowly escaped lynching two years before, disapproved of Lovejoy’s arming himself in self-defense. Brown, at a church meeting called to protest Lovejoy’s killing, lifted his right hand and declared: “Here before God, in the presence of these witnesses, from this time, I consecrate my life to the destruction of slavery.”
Brown’s father attended the same meeting and spoke in praise of Lovejoy. About this time, Owen also left his conservative church to join one affiliated with abolitionism. And he became an early trustee of Oberlin, a radical new college in Ohio that accepted blacks and women. One of Oberlin’s first female graduates was Florella Brown, Owen’s daughter by his second wife.
John Brown also broke with his church in the bold fashion that would become his hallmark. During a revival, he was angered to see the congregation’s few black worshippers confined to the back of the church; he escorted them forward to his own family’s pew and took their seats in back. Church deacons later reprimanded him.
Brown manifested his independence in another, more covert way. Abolitionists created scores of societies in the 1830s and 1840s, from national organizations to local knitting circles. Brown joined none of them. Instead, one night in the late 1830s, he gathered his wife and three teenaged sons by the fire and spoke of his determination to wage war on slavery. “He asked who of us were willing to make common cause with him in doing all in our power to ‘break the jaws of the wicked and pluck the spoil out of his teeth,’” his eldest son wrote. “Are you, Mary, John, Jason and Owen?” As each family member assented, Brown knelt in prayer and administered an oath, pledging them to secrecy and devotion to slavery’s defeat. He later
brought his younger children into this secret army, including a daughter who would accompany him to Virginia.
brought his younger children into this secret army, including a daughter who would accompany him to Virginia.
But as imposing as Brown could be as a father, he wasn’t a cult figure to his family. Nor did he command automatic obedience from his offspring. To the contrary, they often found amusement in his stern and ceaseless efforts to inculcate his beliefs. During the family’s twice-daily prayers, his son Salmon recalled, Brown would become “dead to the world and to the pranks of his unregenerate boys, who slyly prodded each other with pins and trampled upon each other’s toes to relieve the tension.”
None of Brown’s sons adopted their father’s orthodox faith, and several openly challenged it—an apostasy that vexed him tremendously. But all seven of his “unregenerate boys” who survived childhood would take up arms against slavery. They “held firmly to the idea that father was right,” Salmon recalled. “Where he had led we were glad to follow—and every one of us had the courage of his convictions.” Brown’s brothers, in-laws, and other kin would also lend support to his antislavery crusade. “There was a Brown family conspiracy,” his eldest son said, “to break the power of slavery.”
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