Joseph Edgar Chamberlin

“ I esteem the occasion of this jubilee to be the proud discovery that the black race can contend with the white; that, in the great anthem which we call history, a piece of many parts and vast compass, after playing a long time a very low and subdued accompaniment, they perceive the time arrived when they can strike in with effect and take a master's part in the music. The civility of the world has reached that pitch that their more than moral genius is becoming indispensable, and the quality of this race is to be honored for itself. ”

“ There was a good deal of pretence of law, and a good deal of invocation of the "sacred authority of the United States," on the part of the Pro-slavery authorities in Missouri and Kansas at this time, but no real law. The lives of Brown and his sons were threatened by men who were perfectly capable of taking them. A Pro-slavery grand jury "indicted" the Free State Hotel at Lawrence, which the abolitionists had turned into a sort of fortress, and sent a posse, under a "United States deputy marshal, to destroy it. ”

“ Brown took the slaves, and also certain property belonging to the estate, including horses and wagons. He had a theory that this property was made by the labor of the negroes, and rightfully belonged to them. At any rate, they were entitled to means of conveyance. Then he went on to another plantation, seized five more slaves and more of the "negroes' property," and captured two white men. The other party, under Brown's man, Stephens, did not do so well. A white man was killed while resisting the liberation of a negro, and the party got but one slave. ”

“ Brown had written to his son John, when the boys were talking of going: "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; but I feel committed to operate in another part of the field." Just what he meant by this last reference can only be guessed. Sanborn believes that he was already thinking of Virginia; and Sanborn knew the man well at that time, and has gone more deeply into his life than any other writer. ”

“ When I strike, the bees will begin to swarm; and I shall want you to help hive them." Douglass refused. Turning to the plantation negro, Shields Green, who was a runaway slave whom he had harbored, Douglass said, "Well, Green, what have you decided to do?" and the black man answered, "I b'lieve I'll go wid de ole man!" At Harper's Ferry, Green refused to take advantage of an opportunity to escape, and went back and died like a hero with Brown. This man's willing sacrifice of his life was one of many smaller heroic tragedies which were absorbed in the greater one. ”

“ Neither maize nor wheat will thrive there. The lands are rough and sterile. No place more unfit for the colonization of the soft and unenterprising blacks could have been found. But Smith's scheme instantly attracted Brown's sympathy. Loving these hills so much, they also drew him to them of their own force. The shepherd of other days, homesick for the hills and the soil, saw in Smith's scheme a chance to do good to the negroes, while he himself returned to the life he loved best. ”

“ To present a picture of the man, separating him as much as possible from the controversies and hatreds which commonly rise up at the mention of his name, and to tell the story of his life plainly, without inquiry into the effect of his work, or any further estimate and comparison, would be quite enough to attempt in a biography of John Brown of Osawatomie as brief as this one must be. ”

“ The man looked at Brown, standing there armed to the teeth, tall, with terrible eye. No one in Kansas believed that the old man would allow himself to be taken alive. "I—I see no one that I have a warrant against," the civil officer said. If this were a scene in a play, one can imagine the silence, and then the applause.
So Colonel Sumner, who could hardly do less, or more, compelled Brown to release his prisoners, and ordered him to disband his own party, but did not undertake to disarm one of them. ”

“ In this letter he wrote, "If the young blacks of our country could once become enlightened, it would most assuredly operate on slavery like firing powder confined in a rock." All this was very peaceful. Brown was evidently reflecting on Nat Turner's poor insurrection in 1831, and the numerous other attempts up to that time, all of which had failed for the want of adherence on the part of the blacks themselves to the movements stirred up in their behalf. Very evidently, he saw that the time had not yet come to attack slavery by force,—that the negroes themselves must be prepared for it. ”

“ Brown had acquired, undoubtedly deriving the idea in the first instance from the Bible story of Gideon's sifting of his five-and-twenty thousand men down to three hundred, a view greatly in favor of small and extremely mobile bodies of men. He had made as close study as his opportunities permitted of the art of intrenching such small bodies of men and fortifying their positions. ”

“ Brown's methods were frankly those of the guerilla. He liberated many slaves, and, as the phrase went in Kansas, incidentally converted many Pro-slavery horses and cattle to Free State principles. At this time a Pro-slavery federal governor, Geary, was vainly trying to reduce the constantly increasing Free State population to submission. Finally, the Missourians and other Southerners raised a force of twenty-seven hundred men for a last attack on the Anti-slavery stronghold, Lawrence. They were resisted by the Free State men in force. ”

“ He could not prevent the shipment of the two hundred Sharpe's rifies of the Kansas Aid committee as far west as Iowa, but there is fair ground for presumption that he never intended that they should go any further.
Beating up and down the East in this money-getting work, Brown did another thing that proved he had a new plan, and also, perhaps, showed the influence of his reading of the Life of Oliver Cromwell. Somewhat like Cromwell, he developed military tastes and took up a fighting career late in life, without a military training. ”

“ Brown, who had set up his headquarters at the armory, received these Virginians in a very courtly manner, and conducted them to a fire. Stephens had brought from Washington's house a sword which Frederick the Great of Prussia had sent as a gift to General George Washington, and which Lewis Washington had inherited. Brown took this sword, and carried it proudly until he was himself made a prisoner. Colonel Washington was much impressed by Brown's manner, and had no doubt at all that the wearer of his ancestral sword was in command of a large force. ”

“ The Emigrant Aid Company of New England were sending settlers into Kansas with the object of outnumbering and outvoting the Pro-slavery settlers. They also sent rifles out to help their settlers make some headway against the Missourians, who did not come as settlers, but rode across the line into the territory to vote fraudulently, to shoot and rob, and to ride back to the security of their homes in a slave State. Brown bestirred himself promptly against these invaders, and in December, 1855, was made captain of a band organized to resist a Missourians' raid on the Free State town of Lawrence. ”

“ They were a likely weapon for negroes on Southern plantations, who knew little about firearms: for ranging frontiersmen on the Kansas plains they were the last sort of weapon that any one would think of. There seems little doubt that Brown's explanation to the Connecticut manufacturer was a subterfuge, and that he intended the pikes for a negro insurrection somewhere. The fact that he paid for them slowly, keeping them hanging, so to speak, a long time, does not indicate that he really intended them for use in Kansas. He found money to pay for them before he needed them in Virginia. ”

“ Every man's duty for at least twenty-four hours had been carefully assigned him. Three men—Owen Brown, Merriam, and Barclay Coppoc, were ordered to remain at the house and guard the arms. All the rest were to proceed, as soon as it was dark, silently to Harper's Ferry, their weapons kept out of sight. Two men were to step aside before the bridge over the Potomac was reached, and tear down the telegraph wire. Two men were to seize and hold the ferry watchman, and two others to remain on guard on the Potomac bridge and two on the Shenandoah bridge until morning. ”

“ You had better aim at their legs than at their heads. In either case, be sure of the hind sights of your guns. It is from neglect of this that I myself have so many times escaped; for, if all the bullets that have been aimed at me had hit, I should have been as full of holes as a riddle. ”

“ A man who is at once meditative, intense, and fond of reading as Brown was, and yet uneducated in the liberal sense, is made by his books. What books did Brown read! Dana found that he had many in his Adirondack cabin. ”

“ Floyd, Secretary of War, warning him, in so many words, that "Old John Brown, late of Kansas," had a party ready with which he was about to "pass down through Pennsylvania and Maryland and enter Virginia at Harper's Ferry, with the purpose of liberating and arming slaves." It was, on the whole, a very accurate betrayal of the whole scheme. There have been various conjectures as to the way in which this information got out. The identity of the man who sought to betray the secret is now pretty well known. It does not matter who he was. ”

“ That he aspired to do for the blacks what Gideon did for the children of Israel does not prove that he was actuated by personal ambition. It indicates the stirring of a sentiment in him which was something like personal ambition; yet, if he really had a dream of earthly fame and greatness, he suppressed it, and acted as if he had no such dream. In a great measure he separated himself from men, and carried on his work alone. ”

“ The abolitionists, he said, "would never effect anything by their milk-and-water principles," and the Republican party was of no account, since it was opposed to "meddling with slavery" in the States where it existed. For his part, he lived to meddle with it wherever it was. Peace, he said, was but an empty word. He was certainly now preparing to make war. ”

“ He himself walked over the bridge with the conductor of the train, to satisfy him that it was safe; for the man suspected a trap. The train sped on, to Brown's ruin.
The morning dawned with Brown in full possession of the town. Many of the citizens had not been awakened at all. Captain Dangerfield, the clerk of the armory, came to his office to begin his day's work without any knowledge of what had happened, and fell into: the hands of the raiders. He thought they were crazy men. Brown's men, reinforced by a few negroes from Washington's plantation, were busy making prisoners. ”

“ The work had begun. He would not give it up.
"You see how it is," said Gerrit Smith: "our dear old friend has made up his mind to this course, and cannot be-tumed from it. We cannot give him up to die alone; we must support him. I will raise so many hundred dollars for him: you must lay the case before your friends in Massachusetts, and perhaps they will do the same. I see no other way."
There was no other way. It was John Brown's rebellion. The moneyed abolitionists had only to ratify his decision. ”

“ An officer of marines would have been more likely to carry a sword than a sabre; but it happened that Lieutenant Green did carry a sabre. Brown seems to have watched the blade that fell upon his head and face.
The Virginians were anxious to know whether his intention was to free the slaves there or to carry them off; and he declared that it was his intention to set them free, not to carry them off. "But to set them free would sacrifice the life of every man in this community," he was told by one ”

“ Brown himself went to Kansas in September, 1855, travelling in a wagon beyond the Mississippi. He wrote picturesque accounts of the journey to his wife and children at North Elba. I note this natural touch in one letter by the way: "We fare very well on crackers, herring, boiled eggs, prairie chicken, tea, and sometimes a little milk. Have three chickens now cooking for our breakfast We shoot enough of them on the wing as we go along to supply us with fresh meat. Oliver succeeds in bringing them down quite as well as any of us." ”

“ Douglass's defection was, in a way, a prophecy of the failure of the negro race to support Brown; but Brown himself was of the type of men who would accept an isolated act like Shields Green's heroic devotion as a favorable omen, disregarding the more significant act of the other. John Brown's own sons disapproved the blow at Harper's Ferry. He confessed to his son Owen that he felt profound discouragement at this opposition, and said to his men, "As you are opposed to the plan of attacking here, I will resign: we will choose another leader, and I will faithfully obey." ”

“ The Free State leaders repudiated and condemned it, but before long admitted that it was putting backbone into their people. Terror was certainly struck into the Pro-slavery ranks. It soon became perfectly well known that Brown was the author of the deed. The Missourians waited until he and his sons were all absent in the direction of Lawrence, and swooped down on their houses, burning them to the ground. The federal military authorities also bestirred themselves; and John, Jr., and Jason were taken prisoners by them, and kept in chains for some time. ”

“ Often during the affair in the engine-house, when his men would want to fire upon some one who might be seen passing, Brown would stop them, saying, 'Don't shoot: that man is unarmed.'" Brown took sufficiently good care of his prisoners so that none of them were hurt. ”

“ With this force we threw them into confusion for about fifteen or twenty minutes, during which time we killed or wounded from seventy to eighty of the enemy—as they say—and then we escaped as well as we could, with one killed while escaping, two or three wounded, and as many more missing. Four or five Free State men were butchered during the day in all. Jason fought bravely by my side during the fight, and escaped with me, he being unhurt. ”

“ I can look back to our log cabin at the centre of Richfield, with supper of porridge and Johnny-cake, as a place of far more interest to me than the Massasoit of Springfield."
This leads me to the reflection that Brown, in the matter of abstemiousness, was somewhat idealized by Emerson and Thoreau, who met him when he was at the stage of his highest exaltation in the anti-slavery work and fresh from the fields and camps of Kansas. All they said of him was true, I have no doubt; yet it was hardly true of his whole life. Brown always lived very plainly ”