John Brown (Chamberlin)/Chapter 2
What made John Brown an abolitionist, and when and why did his abolitionism take its strenuous, militant, and peculiar form? The psychology of his apostleship is a strange and interesting study. He was never in the current of the anti-slavery movement. Though we shall see that he regarded himself, and that his family regarded him, as devoted in a special way to negro emancipation, there is no documentary evidence, no proof from the man's own letters or written memoranda or acts, that the movement "took hold of him" at all actively before his fiftieth year. That he was deeply sympathetic with the enslaved blacks all his life is perfectly incontestable, and that he felt himself especially devoted to the cause of their liberation as far back as 1837 we know on the testimony of his wife and children.
For that matter he was born an abolitionist. His father had been one before him. The motive-spring of John Brown's abolitionism was touched in the year 1790, when the Rev. Samuel Hopkins, of Rhode Island, a man whose opposition to negro slavery was practical and well known, and who was one of the earliest of the abolitionists, visited the Rev. Jeremiah Hallock at Canton, Connecticut. Young Owen Brown (John Brown's father), then nineteen years old, lived with Hallock, probably as a sort of privileged helper, and heard Hopkins talk against negro slavery, "denouncing it as a great sin." Hopkins was a man of native power. He made a life convert of young Owen Brown, who afterward taught his own children abolitionism at his knee. There had been a chance for the development in the boy John Brown of the bent which gave rise to the touching incident so vividly related in his own autobiographical letter to young Harry Stearns, already referred to, written in 1857: "During the war with England [1812–1815] a circumstance occurred that in the end made him a most determined abolitionist, and led him to declare, or swear, eternal war with slavery. He was staying for a short time with a very gentlemanly landlord, since a United States marshal, who held a slave boy near his own age,—very active, intelligent and good feeling,—and to whom John was under obligations for numerous little acts of kindness. The master made a great pet of John,—brought him to table with his first company and Mends, called their attention to every little smart thing he said or did, and to the fact of his being more than a hundred miles from home with a company of cattle alone; while the negro boy (who was fully, if not more than his equal) was badly clothed, poorly fed and lodged in cold weather, and beaten before his eyes with iron shovels or anything that came first to hand. This brought John to reflect on the wretched, hopeless condition of fatherless and motherless slave children; for such children have neither fathers nor mothers to protect and provide for them. He sometimes would raise the question, Is God their father?"
John Brown, Jr., born in 1821, says that his own earliest recollection is of his father sheltering runaway slaves. While he was postmaster at Randolph, Pennsylvania, John Brown made his house a refuge for such runaways, and in a letter to his brother Frederick, in 1834, he unfolded a scheme for procuring the adoption in Northern families of "negro boys or youth," who were to be brought up as the children of these families were, and educated with them. "Christian slaveholders were to be prevailed upon, if possible, to release slave boys for this purpose." Failing such means, Brown said, "We have all agreed to submit to considerable privation to buy one." 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.
After Brown returned to Ohio to live, he was a member of the Congregational church at Franklin. He had a respectable negro man and woman working for him. They sat at his table, and on Sunday he took the pair into his pew. The preacher and congregation angrily objected to this. Brown left the church on account of it; and though he was all his life a devout Calvinist, conducting family worship daily and sometimes "exhorting" in public, he never belonged to another church. This certainly shows that at this period there was no want of earnestness in his devotion to the blacks.
In 1837 there occurred the episode which first indicated Brown's intention to attack slavery vî et armis. His children have testified that in that year he assembled them one day at family prayer, swore them all to work with him for the emancipation of the slaves, and, kneeling on the floor, invoked the blessing of God on the undertaking. There is no reason to believe that either Brown or his children forgot this compact. He seems never to have reminded his sons of it, nor to have been under the necessity of doing so. His children were not religious in the way he was religious. They were, for the most part, inclined to free thought; and their disinclination to make a profession of religion gave him great sorrow. He never, in his letters, ceased to implore them to do so. They did not in the least depend for the seconding of their devotion to him in this anti-slavery work upon the invocation of a kind of religious ceremony. They were quite ready to give up their lives at the inspiration of their own sense of duty and their strong personal loyalty and devotion to their father.
After this solemn pledge, Brown went on with his wool business and his farming, travelled almost incessantly between East and West, and set down in his little memorandum book many recipes for curing diseases of sheep, and some wise saws, but never a word applicable to the cause of the blacks. He sent home scores of letters, many of which have been preserved carefully; and in them there is much connected with his business and with the fanning and stock-raising operations at home, and much about religion and morality. But until a much later date there is nothing in them about the slaves. He went to Boston in 1838, but is not known to have visited any of the abolitionists, though from his Virginia prison, years afterward, he wrote: "I once set myself to oppose a mob in Boston where she [Lucretia Mott] was. The meeting was, I think, in Marlborough street Church." The Marlborough chapel was burned in May, 1838. His note-book contains seven Boston business addresses, and memoranda of business undertakings. There is no reason to suppose that he ever took or read the Liberator, and in all that he ever wrote I discover but a single reference to any one of the great abolitionist leaders of New England.
He had in him, in business matters, a bit of native Yankee craft. A letter of admonition to his son John when this young man went into the business of buying wool warns him against all the dishonest wiles of the sellers of wool, and coaches him in some of the careful tactics of the buyers.
I have mentioned his trip to Europe in 1849. While he was there, he did some highly unsuccessful wool business, as we have seen, wrote home to his son something about the live-stock, the mutton, the architecture and habits of the English, but had never a word to say about the English friends of the blacks and their work. He made a hasty trip to the Continent, and there, as he afterward told Mr. Sanborn, made some study of military matters, and visited some of Napoleon's battlefields. He "had followed the military career of Napoleon with great interest,"—that is evident from all his children's account of his reading,—and he even ventured to criticise Bonaparte in some points. 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. But he certainly never had practical knowledge of any other form of warfare than the guerilla campaigning which he practised in Kansas.