John Brown (Du Bois)/Chapter 4

by W. E. B. Du Bois

 

Chapter IV

The shepherd of the sheep

"And there were in the same country shepherds abiding in the field, keeping watch over their flock by night.

"And, lo, the angel of the Lord came upon them, and the glory of the Lord shone round about them; and they were sore afraid."

The vastest physical fact in the life of John Brown was the Alleghany Mountains—that beautiful mass of hill and crag which guards the sombre majesty of the Maine coast, crumples the rivers of the rocky soil of New England, and rolls and leaps down through busy Pennsylvania to the misty peaks of Carolina and the red foothills of Georgia. In the Alleghanies John Brown was all but born; their forests were his boyhood wonderland; in their villages he married his wives and begot his clan. On the sides of the Alleghanies he tended his sheep and dreamed his terrible dream. It was the mystic, awful voice of the mountains that lured him to liberty, death and martyrdom within their wildest fastness, and in their bosom he sleeps his last sleep.

So, too, in the development of the United States from the War of 1812 to the Civil War, it was the Alleghanies that formed the industrial centre of the land and lured young men to their waters and mines, valleys and factories, as they lured John Brown. His life from 1805 to 1854 was almost wholly spent on the western slope of the Alleghanies in a small area of Ohio and Pennsylvania, beginning eighty miles north of Pittsburg and ending twenty-five miles southeast of Cleveland. Here in a half-dozen small towns, but chiefly in Hudson, O., he worked in his young manhood to support his growing family. From 1819 to 1825, he was a tanner at Hudson. Then he moved seventy miles westward toward the crests of the Alleghanies in Pennsylvania, where he set up his tannery again and became a man of importance in the town. John Quincy Adams made him postmaster, the village school was held at his log house and the new feverish prosperity of the post-bellum period began to stir him as it stirred this whole western world. Indeed, the economic history of the land from the War of 1812 to the Civil War covers a period of extraordinary developments—so much so that no man's life which fell in these years may be written without knowledge of and allowance for the battling of gigantic social forces and welding of material, out of which the present United States was designed.

Three phases roughly mark these days: First, the slough of despond following the war, when England forced her goods upon us at nominal prices to kill the new-sprung infant industries; secondly, the new protection from the competition of foreign goods from 1816 to 1857, rising high in the prohibitory schedules of 1828, and falling to the lower duties of the forties and the free trade of the fifties, and stimulating irregularly and spasmodically but tremendously the cotton, woolen and iron manufactories; and finally, the three whirlwinds of 1819, 1837–1839, and 1857, marking frightful maladjustments in the mushroom growth of our industrial life.

John Brown, coming to full industrial manhood in the buoyant prosperity of 1825, soon began to sense the new spirit. Alter ten years' work in Pennsylvania, be again removed westward, nearer the projected transportation lines between East and West. He began to invest his surplus in land along the new canal routes, became a director in one of the rapidly multiplying banks and was currently rated to be worth $20,000 in 1835. But his prosperity, like that of his neighbors, and indeed, of the whole country, was partly fictitious, and built on a fast expanding credit which was far outstretching the rapid industrial development. Jackson's blind tinkering with banking precipitated the crisis. The storm broke in 1837. Over six hundred banks failed, ten thousand employees were thrown out of work, money disappeared and juices went down to a specie level. John Brown, his tannery and his land speculations, were sucked into the maelstrom.

The overthrow was no ordinary blow to a man of thirty-seven with eight children, who had already trod the ways of spiritual doubt and unrest. For three or four years he seemed to flounder almost hopelessly, certainly with no settled plan or outlook. He bred race-horses till his conscience troubled him; he farmed and did some surveying; he inquired into the commission business in various lines, and still did some tanning. Then gradually he began to find himself. He was a lover of animals. In 1839 he took a drove of cattle to Connecticut and wrote to his wife: "I have felt distressed to get my business done and return ever since I left home, but know of no way consistent with duty but to make thorough work of it while there is any hope. Things now look more favorable than they have but I may still be disappointed."^[1] His diary shows that he priced certain farms for sale, but especially did he inquire carefully into sheep-raising and its details, and eventually bought a flock of sheep, which he drove home to Ohio. This marked the beginning of a new occupation, that of shepherd, "being a calling for which in early life he had a kind of enthusiastic longing." He began sheep-farming near Hudson, keeping his own and a rich merchant's sheep and also buying wool on commission.

This industry in the United States had at that time passed through many vicissitudes. The change from household to factory economy and the introduction of effective machinery had been slow, and one of the chief drawbacks was ever the small quantity of good wool. Consequently our chief supply came from England until the embargo and war cut off that supply and stimulated domestic manufacture. Between 1810 and 1815 the value of the manufacture increased five-fold, but after the war, when England sent goods over here below price, Americans rightly clamored for tariff protection. This they got, but their advantage was nearly upset by the wool farmers who also got protection on the commodity, although less on low than on better qualities; and it was the low grades that America produced. From 1816 to 1832 the tariff wall against wool and woolens rose steadily until it reached almost prohibitive figures, save on the cheapest kind. In this way the wool manufacture had by 1828 recovered its war-time prosperity; by 1840 the mills were sending out twenty and a half million dollars' worth of goods yearly, and nearly fifty millions by 1860 despite the fact that meanwhile the tariff wall was weakening. Thus by 1841 when John Brown turned his attention to sheep-fanning, there was a large and growing demand for wool, especially of the better grades, and by the abolition of the English tariff in 1824, there was even a chance of invading England.

Because, then, of his natural liking for the work, and the growing prosperity of the wool trade, John Brown chose this line of employment. But not for this alone. His spirit was longing for air and space. He wanted to think and read; time was flying and his life as yet had been little but a mean struggle for bread and that, too, only partially successful. Already he had had a vision of vast service. Already he had broached the matter to friends and family, and at the age of thirty-nine he entered his new life distinctly and clearly with "the idea that as a business it bid fair to afford him the means of carrying out his greatest or principal object."^[2]

His first idea was to save enough from the wreck of his fortune to buy and stock a large sheep farm, and in accordance with his already forming plans as to Negro emancipation, he wanted this farm in or near the South. A chance seemed opening when through his father, a trustee of Oberlin College, he learned of the Virginia lands lately given that institution by Gerrit Smith, whom Brown came to know better. Oberlin College was dear to John Brown's heart, for it had almost from the beginning taken a strong anti-slavery stand. The titles to the Virginia land, however, were clouded by the fact of many squatters being in possession, which gave ample prospects of costly lawsuits. Brown wrote the trustees early in 1840, proposing to survey the lands for a nominal price, provided he could be allowed to buy on reasonable terms and establish his family there. He also spoke of school facilities which he proposed for Negroes as well as whites, according to a long cherished plan. The college records in April, 1840, say: "Communication from Brother John Brown of Hudson was presented and read by the secretary, containing a proposition to visit, survey and make the necessary investigation respecting boundaries, etc., of those lands, for one dollar per day and a moderate allowance for necessary expenses; said paper frankly expressing also his design of viewing the lands as a preliminary step to locating his family upon them, should the opening prove a favorable one; whereupon, voted that said proposition be acceded to, and that a commission and needful outfit be furnished by the secretary and treasurer."^[3] The treasurer sent John Brown fifty dollars and wrote his father, as a trustee of Oberlin, commending the son's purpose and hoping "for a favorable issue both for him and the institution." He added, "Should he succeed in clearing up titles without difficulty or lawsuits, it would be easy, as it appears to me, to make provision for religious and school privileges and by proper efforts with the blessing of God, soon see that wilderness bud and blossom as the rose."^[4]

Thus John Brown first saw Virginia and looked upon the rich and heavy land which rolls westward to the misty Blue Ridge. That he visited Harper's Ferry on this trip is doubtful but possible. The lands of Oberlin, however, lay two hundred miles westward in the foothills and along the valley of the Ohio. He wrote home from Ripley, Va., in April (for he had gone immediately): "I like the country as well as I expected, and its inhabitants rather better; and I have seen the spot where if it be the will of Providence, I hope one day to live with my family. . . . Were the inhabitants as resolute and industrious as the Northern people and did they understand how to manage as well, they would become rich."^[5]

By the summer of 1840 his work was accomplished with apparent success. He had about selected his dwelling-place, having "found on the right branch of Big Battle a valuable spring, good stone-coal, and excellent bottoms, good timber, sugar orchard, good hill land and beautiful situation for dwelling— all right. Course of this branch at the forks is south twenty-one degrees west from a beautiful white oak on which I marked my initials, 23d April."^[6]

The Oberlin trustees in August, "voted, that the Prudential Committee be authorized to perfect negotiations and convey by deed to Brother John Brown of Hudson, one thousand acres of our Virginia land on the conditions suggested in the correspondence which has already transpired between him and the committee."^[7]

Here, however, negotiations stopped, for the renewal of the panic in 1839 overthrew all business calculations until 1842 and later, and forced John Brown to take refuge in formal bankruptcy in 1842. This step, his son says, was wholly "owing to his purchase of land on credit—including the Haymaker farm at Franklin, which he bought in connection with Seth Thompson, of Hartford, Trumbull County, Ohio, and his individual purchase of three rather large adjoining farms in Hudson. When he bought those farms, the rise in value of his place in Franklin was such that good judges estimated his property worth fully twenty thousand dollars. He was then thought to be a man of excellent business judgment and was chosen one of the directors of a bank at Cayahoga Falls."^[8] Probably after the crash of 1837, Brown hoped to extricate enough to buy land in Virginia and move there, but things went from bad to worse. Through endorsing a note for a friend, one of his best pieces of farm property was attached, put up at auction and bought by a neighbor. Brown, on legal advice, sought to retain possession, but was arrested and placed in the Akron jail. The property was lost. Legal bankruptcy followed in October, 1842, but Brown would not take the full advantage of it. He gave the New England Woolen Company of Rockville, Conn., a note declaring that "whereas I, John Brown, on or about the 15th day of June, a. d. 1839, received of the New England Company (through their agent, George Kellogg, Esq.) the sum of twenty-eight hundred dollars for the purchase of wool for said company, and imprudently pledged the same for my own benefit and could not redeem it; and whereas I have been legally discharged from my obligations by the laws of the United States—I hereby agree (in consideration of the great kindness and tenderness of said company toward me in my calamity, and more particularly of the moral obligation I am under to render to all their due) to pay the same and the interest thereon from time to time as divine Providence shall enable me to do."^[9]

He wrote Mr. Kellogg at the same time: "I am sorry to say that in consequence of the unforeseen expense of getting the discharge, the loss of an ox, and the destitute condition in which a new surrender of my effects has placed me, with my numerous family, I fear this year must pass without my effecting in the way of payment what I have encouraged you to expect."^[10] He was still paying this debt when he died and left fifty dollars toward it in his will.

It was a labyrinth of disaster in which the soul of John Brown was well-nigh choked and lost. We hear him now and then gasping for breath: "I have been careful and troubled with so much serving that I have in a great measure neglected the one thing needful, and pretty much stopped all correspondence with heaven."^[11] He goes on to tell his son: "My worldly business has borne heavily and still does; but we progress some, have our sheep sheared, and have done something at our haying. Have our tanning business going on in about the same proportion—that is, we are pretty fairly behind in business and feel that I must nearly or quite give up one or the other of the branches for want of regular troops on whom to depend."^[12] He again tells his son: "I would send you some money, but I have not yet received a dollar from any source since you left. I should not be so dry of funds, could I but overtake my work;"^[13] and then follows the teeth-gritting word of a man whose grip is slipping: "But all is well; all is well."^[14]

Gradually matters began to mend. His tannery, perhaps never wholly abandoned, was started again and his wool interests increased. Early in 1844 "we seem to be overtaking our business in the tannery," he says, and "I have lately entered into a co-partnership with Simon Perkins, Jr., of Akron, with a view of carrying on the sheep business extensively. He is to furnish all the feed and shelter for wintering, as a set-off against our taking all the care of the flock. All other expenses we are to share equally, and to divide the property equally." John Brown and his family were to move to Akron and he says: "I think that is the most comfortable and the most favorable arrangement of my worldly concerns that I ever had and calculated to afford us more leisure for improvement by day and by night than any other. I do hope that God has enabled us to make it in merry to us, and not that He should send leanness into our souls. Our time will all be at our own command, except the care of the flock. We have nothing to do with providing for them in the winter, excepting harvesting rutabagas and potatoes. This I think will be considered no mean alliance for our family and I most earnestly hope they will have wisdom given to make the most of it. It is certainly endorsing the poor bankrupt and his family, three of whom were but recently in Akron jail in a manner quite unexpected, and proves that notwithstanding we have been a company of 'belted knights,' our industrious and steady endeavors to maintain our integrity and our character have not been wholly overlooked."^[15]

Indeed, the offer seemed to John Brown a flood of light: a beloved occupation with space and time to think, to study and to dream, to get acquainted with himself and the world after the long struggle for bread and butter and the deep disappointment of failure almost in sight of success. By July, 1844, Brown was reporting 560 lambs raised and 2,700 pounds of wool, for which he had been offered fifty-six cents a pound, showing it to be of high grade. He began closing up his tanning business. "The general aspect of our worldly affairs is favorable. Hope we do not entirely forget God,"^[16] he writes.

His daughter says: "As a shepherd, he showed the same watchful care over his sheep. I remember one spring a great many of his sheep had a disease called 'grub in the head,' and when the lambs came, the ewes would not own them. For two weeks he did not go to bed, but sat up or slept an hour or two at a time in his chair, and then would take a lantern, go out and catch the ewes, and hold them while the lambs sacked. He would very often bring in a little dead-looking lamb, and put it in warm water and rub it until it showed signs of life, and then wrap it in a warm blanket, feed it warm milk with a teaspoon, and work over it with such tenderness that in a few hours it would be capering around the room. One Monday morning I had just got my white clothes in a nice warm suds in the wash-tub, when he came in bringing a little dead-looking lamb. There seemed to be no sign of life about it. Said he, 'Take out your clothes quick, and let me put this lamb in the water.' I felt a little vexed to be hindered with my washing, and told him I didn't believe he could make it live; but in an hour or two he had it running around the room, and calling loudly for its mother. The next year he came from the barn and said to me, 'Ruth, that lamb I hindered you with when you were washing, I have just sold for one hundred dollars.' It was a pure-blooded Saxony lamb."^[17]

By 1845 wealth again seemed all but within the grasp of John Brown. The country was entering fully upon one of the most remarkable of many noteworthy periods of industrial expansion and the situation in the wool business was particularly favorable. The flock of Saxony sheep owned by Perkins and Brown was "said to be the finest and most perfect flock in the United States and worth about $20,000." The only apparent danger to the prosperity of the western wool-growers was the increasing power of the manufacturers and their desire for cheap wool. The tariff on woolen goods was lower than formerly, but until war-time, remained at about twenty to thirty per cent. ad valorem, which afforded sufficient protection. The tariff on cheap wool decreased until, in 1857, all wool costing less than twenty cents a pound came in free and in 1854 Canadian wool of all grades was admitted without duty. This meant practically free trade in wool. The manufacturers of hosiery and carpets increased and the demand for domestic wool was continually growing. There were, however, many difficulties in realizing just prices for domestic wool: it was bought up by the manufacturer's agents, dealing with isolated, untrained farmers and offering the lowest prices; it was bought in bulk ungraded and as wool differs enormously in quality and price, the lowest grade often set the price for all. No sooner did John Brown grasp the details of the wool business than he began to work out plans of amelioration. And he conceived of this amelioration not as measured simply in personal wealth. To him business was a philanthropy. We have not even to-day reached this idea, but, urged on by the Socialists, we are faintly perceiving it. Brown proposed nothing Quixotic or unpractical, but he did propose a more equitable distribution of the returns of the whole wool business between the producers of the raw material and the manufacturers. He proceeded first to arouse and organize the wool-growers. He traveled extensively among the farmers of Pennsylvania and Ohio. "I am out among the wool-growers, with a view to next summer's operations," he writes March 24, 1846; "our plan seems to meet with general favor." And then thinking of greater plans he adds: "Our unexampled success in minor affairs might be a lesson to us of what unity and perseverance might do in things of some importance."^[18] For what indeed were sheep as compared with men, and money weighed with liberty?

The plan outlined by Brown before a convention of wool-growers involved the placing of a permanent selling agent in the East, the grading and warehousing of the wool, and a pooling of profits according to the quality of the fleece. The final result was that in 1846 Perkins and Brown sent out a circular, saying: "The undersigned, commission wool-merchants, wool-graders, and exporters, have completed arrangements for receiving wool of growers and holders, and for grading and selling the same for cash at its real value, when quality and condition are considered."^[19]

John Brown was put in special charge of this business while his son ran the sheep farm in Ohio. The idea underlying this movement was excellent and it was soon started successfully. John Brown went to live in Springfield with his family. In December, 1846, he writes: "We are getting along with our business slowly, but prudently, I trust, and as well as we could reasonably expect under all the circumstances; and so far as we can discover, we are in favor with this people, and also with the many we have had to do business with."^[20]

In two weeks during 1847 he has "turned about four thousand dollars' worth of wool into cash since I returned; shall probably make it up to seven thousand by the 16th."^[21]

Yet great as was this initial prosperity, the business eventually failed and was practically given up in 1851. Why? It was because of one of those strange economic paradoxes which bring great moral questions into the economic realm;—questions which we evaded yesterday and are trying to evade to-day, but which we must answer to-morrow. Here was a man doing what every one knew was for the best interests of a great industry,—grading and improving the quality of its raw material and systematizing its sale. His methods were absolutely honest, his technical knowledge was unsurpassed and his organization efficient. Yet a combination of manufacturers forced him out of business in a few months. Why? The ordinary answer of current business ethics would be that John Brown was unable to "corner" the wool market against the manufacturers. But this he never tried to do. Such a policy of financial free-booting never occurred to him, and he would have repelled it indignantly if it had. He wished to force neither buyer nor seller. He was offering worthy goods at a fair price and making a just return for them. That this system was best for the whole trade every one knew, yet it was weak. It was weak in the same sense that the merchants of the Middle Ages wore weak against the lawless onslaughts of robber barons. Any compact organization of manufacturers could force John Brown to take lower prices for his wool—that is, to allow the farmer a smaller proportion of the profit of the business of clothing human beings. In other words, well-organized industrial highwaymen could hold up the wool farmer and make him hand over some of his earnings. But John Brown knew, as did, indeed, the manufacturing gentlemen of the road that the farmers were getting only moderate returns. It was the millmen who made fortunes. Now it was possible to oppose the highwaymen's demand by counter organization like the Middle-Age Hanse. The difficulty here would be to bring all the threatened parties into an organization. They could be forced in by killing off or starving out the ignorant or recalcitrant. This is the modern business method. Its result is arraying two industrial armies in a battle whose victims are paupers and prostitutes, and whose victory comes by compromising, whereby a half-dozen millionaires are born to the philanthropic world.

On the other hand, to offer no opposition to organized economic aggression is to depend on the simple justice of your cause in an industrial world that recognizes no justice. It means industrial death and that was what it meant to John Brown. The Tariff of 1846 had cut the manufacturers' profits. The growing woolen trade would more than recoup them in a few years, but they "were not in business for their health"; that is, they recognized no higher moral law than money-making and therefore determined to keep present profits where they were, and add possible future profits to them. They continued their past efforts to force down the price of wool and got practical free trade in wool by 1854. Meantime local New England manufacturers began to boycott John Brown. They expected him to see his danger and lower his prices on the really fine grades he carried. He was obdurate. His prices were right and he thought justice counted in the wool business. The manufacturers objected. He was not playing according to the rules of the game. He was, as a fellow merchant complained, "no trader: he waited until his wools were graded and then fixed a price; if this suited the manufacturers they took the fleeces; if not, they bought elsewhere. . . . Yet he was a scrupulously honest and upright man—hard and inflexible, but everybody had just what belonged to him. Brown was in a position to make a fortune and a regular bred merchant would have done so."^[22]

Thereupon the combination turned the screws a little closer. Brown's clerks were bribed, and other "competitive" methods resorted to. But Brown was inflexible and serene. The prospect of great wealth did not tempt but rather repelled him. Indeed this whole warehouse business, successful and important as it had hitherto been, was drawing him away from his plans of larger usefulness. It took his time and thought, and his surroundings more and more made it mere money-getting. The manufacturers were after dollars, of course; his clients were waiting simply for returns, and his partner was ever anxiously scanning the balance-sheet. This whole aspect of things more and more disquieted Brown. He therefore writes soberly in December, 1847:

"Our business seems to be going on middling well and will not probably be any the worse for the pinch in the money concerns. I trust that getting or losing money does not entirely engross our attention; but I am sensible that it quite occupies too large a share in it. To get a little property together to leave, as the world would have done, is really a low mark to be firing at through life.

"'A nobler toil may I sustain,
A nobler satisfaction gain.'"^[23]

The next year, however, came a severe money pressure, "one of the severest known for many years. The consequence to us has been, that some of those who have contracted for wool of us are as yet unable to pay for and take the wool as they agreed, and we are on that account unable to close our business."^[24] This brought a fall in the price and complaint on all sides: on the part of the wool-growers, because their profits were not continuing to rise; and from manufacturers who demurred more and more clamorously at the prices demanded by Brown.

He writes early in 1849: "We have been selling wool middling fast of late, on contract, at 1847 prices;" but he adds, scenting the coming storm: "We have in this part of the country the strongest proofs that the great majority have made gold their hope, their only hope."^[25]

Evidently a crisis was approaching. The boycott against the firm was more evident and the impatience of wool farmers growing. The latter kept calling for advances on their stored wool. If they had been willing to wait quietly, there was still a chance, for Perkins and Brown had undoubtedly the best in the American market and as good as the better English grades. But the growers were restive and in some cases poor. The result was shown in the balance-sheet of 1849. Brown had bought 130,000 pounds of wool and paid for it, including freight and commissions, $57,884.48. His sales had amounted to $49,902.67, leaving him $7,981.81 short, and 200,000 pounds of wool in the warehouse.^[26] Perkins afterward thought Brown was stubborn. It would have been easily possible for them to have betrayed the growers and accepted a lower price. Their commissions would have been larger, the manufacturers were friendly, and the sheepmen too scattered and poor to protest. Indeed, low prices and cash pleased them better than waiting. But John Brown conceived that a principle was at stake. He knew that his wool was worth even more than he asked. He knew that English wool of the same grade sold at good prices. Why not, then, he argued, take the wool to England and sell it, thus opening up a new market for a great American product? Then, too, he had other and, to him, better reasons for wishing to see Europe. He decided quickly and in August, 1849, he took his 200,000 pounds of wool to England. He had graded every bit himself, and packed it in new sacks: "The bales were firm, round, hard and true, almost as if they had been turned out in a lathe."^[27]

In this English venture John Brown showed one weakness of his character: he did not know or recognize the subtler twistings of human nature. He judged if ever from his own simple, clear standpoint and so had a sort of prophetic vision of the vaster and the eternal aspects of the human soul. But of its kinks and prejudices, its little selfishnesses and jealousies and dishonesties, he knew nothing. They always came to him as a sort of surprise, uncalculated for and but partially comprehended. He could fight the devil and his angels, and he did, but he could not cope with the million misbirths that hover between heaven and hell.

Thus to his surprise he found his calculations all at fault in England. His wool was good, his knowledge of the technique of sorting and grading unsurpassed and yet because Englishmen believed it was not possible to raise good wool in America, they obstinately refused to take the evidence of their own senses. They "seemed highly pleased"; they said that they "had never seen superior wools" and that they "would see me again" but they did not offer decent prices. Then, too, American woolen men had long arms and they were tipped with gold. They fingered busily across the seas about this prying Yankee, and English wool-growers responded very willingly, so that John Brown acknowledged mournfully late in September, "I have a great deal of stupid obstinate prejudice to contend with, as well as conflicting interests both in this country and from the United States."^[28] In the end the wool was sacrificed at prices fifty per cent. below its American value and some of it actually resold in America. The American woolen men chuckled audibly:

"A little incident occurred in 1850. Perkins and Brown's clip had come forward, and it was beautiful; the little compact Saxony fleeces were as nice as possible. Mr. Musgrave of the Northampton Woolen Mill, who was making shawls and broadcloths, wanted it, and offered Uncle John [Brown] sixty cents a pound for it. 'No, I am going to send it to London.' Musgrave, who was a Yorkshire man, advised Brown not to do it, for American wool would not sell in London,—not being thought good. He tried hard to buy it, but without avail. . . . Some little time after, long enough for the purpose, news came that it was sold in London, but the price was not stated. Musgrave came into my counting-room one forenoon all aglow, and said he wanted me to go with him,—he was going to have some fun. Then he went to the stairs and called Uncle John, and told him he wanted him to go over to the Hartford depot and see a lot of wool he had bought. So Uncle John put on his coat, and we started. When we arrived at the depot, and just as we were going into the freight-house, Musgrave says: 'Mr. Brune, I want you to tell me what you think of this lot of wull that stands me in just fifty-two cents a pund.' One glance at the bags was enough. Uncle John wheeled, and I can see him now as he 'put back' to the lofts, his brown coat-tails floating behind him, and the nervous strides fairly devouring the way. It was his own clip, for which Musgrave, some three months before, had offered him sixty cents a pound as it lay in the loft. It had been graded, new bagged, shipped by steamer to London, sold, and reshipped, and was in Springfield at eight cents in the pound less than Musgrave offered."^[29]

It was a great joke and it made American woolen men smile.

This English venture was a death-blow to the Perkins and Brown wool business. It was not entirely wound up until four years later, but in 1849 Brown removed his family from Springfield up to the silent forests of the farthest Adirondacks, where the great vision of his life unfolded itself. It was, however, not easy for him to extricate himself from the web wound about him. Two currents set for his complete undoing: the wool-growers whom he had over-advanced and who did not deliver the promised wool; and certain manufacturers to whom the firm had contracted to deliver this wool which they could not get. Claims and damages to the amount of $40,000 appeared and some of these got into court; while, on the other hand, the scattered and defaulting wool-growers were scarcely worth suing by the firm. Long drawn-out legal battles ensued, intensely distasteful to Brown's straightforward nature and seemingly endless. Collections and sales continued hard and slow and Perkins began to get restless. John Brown sighed for the older and simpler life of his young manhood with its love and dreams: "I can look back to our log cabin at the centre of Richfield with a supper of porridge and johnny cake as a place of far more interest to me than the Massasoit of Springfield."^[30] He says to his children on the Ohio sheep farm: "I am much pleased with the reflection that you are all three once more together, and all engaged in the same calling that the old patriarchs followed. I will say but one word more on that score, and that is taken from their history: 'See that ye fall not out by the way; and all will be exactly right in the end.' I should think matters were brightening a little in this direction in regard to our claims, but I have not yet been able to get any of them to a final issue. I think, too, that the prospect for the fine wool business rather improves. What burdens me most of all is the apprehension that Mr. Perkins expects of me in the way of bringing matters to a close, what no living man can possibly bring about in a short time and that he is getting out of patience and becoming distrustful."^[31]

Meantime Brown was racing from court to court in Boston, New York, Troy and elsewhere, seeking to settle up the business and know where he stood financially, and, above all, to keep peace with and do justice to his partner. Cases were now settled and now appealed and the progress was "miserably slow. My journeys back and forth this winter have been very tedious." Then, too, his mind was elsewhere. The nation was in turmoil and so was he. At the time Anthony Burns was arrested in Boston he was advising with his lawyers at Troy. Redpath says:

"The morning after the news of the Burns affair reached here, Brown went at his work immediately after breakfast; but in a few minutes started up from his chair, walked rapidly across the room several times, then suddenly turned to his counsel, and said, 'I am going to Boston.' 'Going to Boston!' said the astonished lawyer. 'Why do you want to go to Boston?' Old Brown continued walking vigorously, and replied, 'Anthony Burns must be released, or I will die in the attempt.' The counsel dropped his pen in consternation. Then he began to remonstrate; told him the suit had been in progress a long time, and a verdict just gained. It was appealed from, and that appeal must be answered in so many days, or the whole labor would be lost; and no one was sufficiently familiar with the whole case except himself. It took a long earnest talk with old Brown to persuade him to remain. His memory and acuteness in that long and tedious lawsuit—not yet ended, I am told—often astonished his counsel. While here he wore an entire suit of snuff-colored cloth, the coat of a decidedly Quakerish cut in collar and skirt. He wore no beard, and was a clean-shaven, scrupulously neat, well-dressed, quiet old gentleman. He was, however, notably resolute in all that he did."^[32]

He spent the time not taken up by his lawsuits at Akron, and in the manner of a patriarch of old, temporarily brought his family back to Ohio. "I wrote you last week that the family is on the road: the boys are driving on the cattle, and my wife and little girls are at Oneida depot waiting for me to go on with them."^[33] He returned to farming again with interest, taking prizes for his stock at state fairs and raising many sheep. He had 350 lambs in 1858 and Perkins is urging him to continue with him, but things changed and on January 25, 1854, he writes: "This world is not yet freed from real malice and envy. It appears to be well settled now that we go back to North Elba in the spring. I have had a good-natured talk with Mr. Perkins about going away and both families are now preparing to carry out that plan."^[34] His departure was delayed a year, but he was finally able to remove with a little surplus on hand.

Back then to the crests and forests of the Alleghanies came John Brown at the age of fifty-four. "A tall, gaunt, dark-complexioned man . . . a grave, serious man . . . with a marked countenance and a natural dignity of manner,—that dignity which is unconscious, and comes from a superior habit of mind."^[35]

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1. Letter to his wife, 1839, in Sanborn, p. 68.
2. Sanborn, p. 58
3. Records of Oberlin college, quoted in Sanborn, pp. 134–135.
4. Levi Burnell to Owen Brown, 1840, in Sanborn, p. 135.
5. Letter to his family, 1840, in Sanborn, p. 134.
6. MS. Diary, Boston Public Library. Vol. I. p. 65.
7. Records of the Board of Trustees, Oberlin College, Aug. 28, 1840, quoted in Sanborn, p. 135.
8. John Brown, Jr., in Sanborn, p. 87.
9. Agreement quoted in Sanborn, pp. 55–56.
10. Letter to George Kellogg, 1844, in Sanborn, p. 56.
11. Letter to John Brown, Jr., 1843, in Sanborn, p. 58.
12. Letter to John Brown, Jr., 1843, in Sanborn, pp. 58–59.
13. Ibid., p. 59.
14. Ibid., p. 59.
15. Letter to John Brown, Jr., 1844, in Sanborn, pp. 59–60.
16. Ibid., p. 61.
17. Ruth Brown in Sanborn, p. 95.
18. Letter to John Brown, Jr., 1846, in Sanborn, p. 62.
19. Circular issued in 1846, quoted in Sanborn, p. 63.
20. Letter to Owen Brown, 1846, in Sanborn, p. 22.
21. Letter to John Brown, Jr., 1847, in Sanborn, p. 143.
22. E. C. Leonard in Sanborn, p. 65.
23. Letter to Owen Brown, 1847, in Sanborn, pp. 23–24.
24. Letter to Owen Brown, 1949, in Sanborn, p. 25.
25. Ibid.
26. Memoranda by John Brown, in Sanborn, p. 65; Redpath, p. 56.
27. Sanborn, pp. 67–68.
28. Letter to John Brown, Jr., 1849, Sanborn, p. 73.
29. E. C. Leonard, in Sanborn, pp. 67–68.
30. Letter to his wife, 1850, in Sanborn, p. 107.
31. Letter to his children, 1850, in Sanborn, pp. 75–76.
32. Redpath, p. 58.
33. Letter to his son, in Sanborn, p. 145.
34. Letter to his children, 1854, in Sanborn, p. 155.
35. R. H. Dana, in the Atlantic Monthly, 1871.