Old John Brown, the man whose soul is marching on Part 1

Old John Brown.

by Walter Hawkins.

PREFACE

This book is for busy people who have not the time to read at large upon the subject. Those who would adequately master all the bearings of the story here briefly told must read American history, for which facilities are rapidly increasing. As to John Brown himself, his friend F. B. Sanborn's LIFE AND LETTERS is a mine of wealth. To its pages the present writer is greatly indebted, and he commends them to others.

W. H.

Kilburn, May 1913.

CHAPTER I

WHY WE WRITE OUR STORY

There are few who have not a dim notion of John Brown as a name bound up with the stirring events of the United States in the period which preceded the Civil War and the emanc.i.p.ation of the slave. Many English readers, however, do not get beyond the limits of the famous couplet,

John Brown's body lies mouldering in the grave, But his soul is marching on.

That statement is authentic in both its clauses, but it is interesting to learn what he did with the body before it commenced a dissolution which seems to have been regarded as worth recording. Carlyle says in his grimly humorous way of the gruesome elevation of the head of one of his patriotic heroes on Temple Bar, 'It didn't matter: he had quite done with it.' And we might say the same of the body which was hanged at Charlestown in 1859. In his devoutly fatalistic way John Brown had presented his body a living sacrifice to the cause of human freedom, and had at last slowly reached the settled opinion that it was worth more to the cause dead than alive. Such a soul, so masterful in its treatment of the body, was likely to march on without it. And it did in the years that followed, This Abolitionist raider, with a rashness often sublime in its devotion, precipitated the national crisis which issued in the Civil War and Emanc.i.p.ation.

There are lives of brave men which set us thinking for the most part of human power and skill: we watch bold initiators of some wise policy carrying their enterprise through with indomitable courage and in-exhaustible patience, and we are lost in admiration of the hero.

But there are other brave lives which leave us thinking more of unseen forces which impelled them than of their own splendid qualities. They never seem masters of destiny, but its intrepid servants. They shape events while they hardly know how or why; they seem to be rather driven by fate than to be seeking fame or power. They go out like Abraham, 'not knowing whither they go,' only that, like him, they have heard a call. Sometimes they sorely tax the loyalty of their admirers with their eccentricities and their defiance of the conventions of their age. Wisdom is only justified of these, her strange children, in the next generation. Prominent among such lives is that of John Brown.

The conscience of the Northern States on the question of slavery needed but some strong irritant to arouse it to vigorous action, and, the hanging of John Brown sufficed.

The inst.i.tution of slavery became both ridiculous and hateful to mult.i.tudes because so good a man must be done to death to preserve it.

The verdict of Victor Hugo, 'What the South slew last December was not John Brown, but slavery,' found an echo in many minds. And when the long, fierce conflict, through which Emanc.i.p.ation came, was begun, the quaint lines,

John Brown's body lies mouldering in the grave, But his soul is marching on,

became one of the mightiest of the battle-songs which urged the Federal hosts to victory. His name kindled the flame of that pa.s.sion for freedom which made the cause of the North triumphant, and there was awe mingled with the love they bore his memory. Perhaps no man had been oftener called with plausible reason a fool; but those who knew the single-hearted devotion to a great cause of this ready victim of the gallows came reverently to think of him as 'G.o.d's fool.' When they sang 'John Brown died that the slave might be free' they were singing more than a record of John Brown's generous motive; it was a record of one of G.o.d's strange counsels. 'For G.o.d chose the foolish things of the world that He might put to shame the things that are strong, and the base things of the world, and the things that are despised, did G.o.d choose, yea, and the things that are not, that He might bring to nought the things that are, that no flesh should glory before G.o.d.' Verily, then, it might seem worth while to set the story of John Brown in such a plain, brief form as to make it available for busy folk who have no time to read longer accounts of him. If it sets some thinking of the ways of G.o.d rather than admiring John Brown, that will be just what he would have ardently wished who desired always that G.o.d should be magnified in his body, whether in the fighting which he never loved and never shirked, or the hanging which he often foresaw and never feared.

CHAPTER II

CHILDHOOD AND THE VOW

The birth of John Brown is recorded in the following laconic style by his father in a little autobiography he wrote for his children in the closing days of his life. 'In 1800, May 8, John was born one hundred years after his great-grandfather; nothing else very uncommon.' In the year mentioned the family were living at Torrington, Connecticut, whence they shortly removed to Ohio, then the haunt of the Red Indian.

They were of the pioneer farming cla.s.s, which has supplied so many of the shapers of American history. The one great honour in their pedigree was that they descended from a man of the MAYFLOWER--Peter Brown, a working carpenter who belonged to that famous ship's company.

We might say, indeed, that the story of John Brown flows from the events of 1620, the year of the MAYFLOWER. Two landings on the American coast that year were destined to be memorable. In August a Dutch vessel disembarked the first cargo of imported slaves--twenty of them; and that day Slavery struck deep root in the new land. And in November of that same year the MAYFLOWER, with her very different cargo of brave freemen, dropped anchor in Cape Cod Bay. The stream of ill results from that first landing and the stream of Puritan blood, generous in its pa.s.sion for liberty, that flowed unimpoverished from Peter Brown through generations of st.u.r.dy ancestors--these are the streams destined to meet turbulently and to supply us with our story.

Owen Brown, the father of John, thus testifies to his own fidelity to the tradition of liberty. 'I am an Abolitionist. I know we are not loved by many. I wish to tell how I became one. Our neighbour lent my mother a slave for a few days. I used to go out into the field with him, and he used to carry me on his back, and I fell in love with him.'

There we have the clue to the history of the household of the Browns for the next two generations. They FELL IN LOVE With the despised negro, and this glorious trait pa.s.sed like an heritage from generation to generation.

There is a letter extant which supplies us with the best information on John Brown's own boyhood. It was written for a lad in a wealthy home where he stayed in later days, who had asked him many questions about his experiences in early life. He humorously calls it a 'short story of a certain boy of my acquaintance I will call John.' A few extracts will reveal his character in the forming. Here, for instance, you may trace the conscientiousness (often morbid) which was so marked a feature in his later days. 'I cannot tell you of anything in the first four years of John's life worth mentioning save that at that early age he was tempted by three large bra.s.s pins belonging to a girl who lived in the family, and stole them. In this he was detected by his mother; and after having a full day to think of the wrong, received from her a thorough whipping.' He adds, 'I must not neglect to tell you of a very foolish and bad habit to which John was somewhat addicted. I mean, telling lies, generally to screen himself from blame or from punishment. He could not well endure to be reproached, and now I think had he been oftener encouraged to be entirely frank, by MAKING FRANKNESS A KIND OF ATONEMENT for some of his faults, he would not have had to struggle so long with this mean habit.'

A story is told of John's schooldays which is an amusing and quite characteristic instance of his ethical eccentricities. For a short time he and his younger brother Salmon were at a school together, and Salmon was guilty of some offence which was condoned by the master.

John had serious concern for the effect this might have upon his brother's morals, and he sought the lenient teacher and informed him that the fault was much deprecated by their father at home, and he was sure castigation there would have been inevitable. He therefore desired it should be duly inflicted, as otherwise he should feel compelled to act as his father's proxy. Finding discipline was still lax, he proceeded with paternal solemnity to administer it himself.

His brother acknowledged that this was done with reluctant fidelity!

Truly the moral instincts of the family were worthy of their Puritan ancestry.

Although naturally self-conscious and shy, his precociousness in boyhood, bringing him into a.s.sociation, as it did, with much older folk, bred a somewhat arrogant manner. The rule he exercised over younger members of the family also made him somewhat domineering, a fault which he diligently sought to correct in later life. At fifteen he had become a miniature man of business and was driving cattle on long journeys with all the confidence of mid-age. The letter from which we have already quoted has one or two more pa.s.sages which may enlighten us as to his rearing. Still writing in the third person, he says, 'John had been taught from earliest childhood to fear G.o.d and keep His commandments, and though quite sceptical he had always by turns felt much doubt as to his future well being. He became to some extent a convert to Christianity, and ever after a firm believer in the divine authenticity of the Bible. With this book he became very familiar, and possessed a most unusual memory of its entire contents.'

Here are hints as to his early pursuits: 'After getting to Ohio in 1805, he was for some time rather afraid of the Indians and their rifles, but this soon wore off, and he used to hang about them quite as much as was consistent with good manners and learned a trifle of their talk. His father learned to dress deer-skins, and at six years old John was installed a young Buck-skin. He was, perhaps, rather observing, as he ever after remembered the entire process of deer-skin dressing, so that he could at any time dress his own leather, such as squirrel, rac.o.o.n, cat, wolf, and dog skins, and also learned to make whiplashes, which brought him some change at times, and was of considerable service in many ways. He did not become much of a scholar. He would always choose to stay at home and work hard rather than be sent to school, and during the warm season might generally be seen barefooted and bareheaded, with buck-skin breeches suspended often with one leather strap over his shoulder, but sometimes with two. To be sent off through the wilderness alone to very considerable distances was particularly his delight; in this he was often indulged, so that by the time he was twelve years old he was sent off more than a hundred miles with companies of cattle. He followed up with tenacity whatever he set about so long as it answered his general purpose, and thence he rarely failed in some good degree to effect the things he undertook.'

'From fifteen years and upward he felt a good deal of anxiety to learn, but could only read and study a little, both for want of time and on account of inflammation of the eyes. He managed by the help of books, however, to make himself tolerably well acquainted with common arithmetic and surveying, which he practised more or less after he was twenty years old.' 'John began early in life to discover a great liking to fine cattle, horses, sheep, and swine; and as soon as circ.u.mstances would enable him, he began to be a practical shepherd--it being a calling for which, in early life, he had a kind of enthusiastic longing, together with the idea that as a business it bade fair to afford him the means of CARRYING OUT HIS GREATEST OR PRINc.i.p.aL OBJECT.'

Here we touch the keynote of this life of manifold outward occupations, but of one consuming desire. That PRINc.i.p.aL OBJECT filled his horizon even in childhood. He loved to tell how, like his father before him, he fell captive to the slave's dumb plea and pledged his whole strength to the chivalrous task of breaking his fetters. It happened on this wise. In those long journeys he was allowed to take, he was the 'business guest' of a slave-owner, who was pleased with his resourcefulness at such an age. He was the object of curious attention, and was treated as 'company' at table. On the estate was a young negro just his own age, and as intelligent as he. Young John struck up an acquaintance with him, and could not fail to contrast the fashion in which he himself was pampered with the way the young darkie was coa.r.s.ely treated with scant fare and ill-housing. His frequent thrashings seemed to bruise young John's spirit as much as they did his flesh. They were not always administered with the orthodox whip, but with a shovel or anything else that came first to hand. Young John pondered long upon this contrast, and tells us how the iniquity of slavery was borne in upon his young heart, and he was drawn to this little coloured playmate, who had neither father nor mother known to him. The Bible was the final court of appeal in the Brown family, and the verdict of that court was that they two--the slave and the guest--were brothers, so henceforth the instinct of fraternal loyalty drew young John to 'swear eternal war with slavery.' That vow, never recanted or forgotten, became the text of his life. It interprets all his vagaries and reconciles what else were hopeless inconsistencies. It was a devout obsession which made him a wanderer all his days, and in the end carried him to prison and to death. To a child a great call had come, and a child's voice had replied, 'Speak, Lord, Thy servant heareth.' And ears and heart tingled at messages that seemed to come from the Unseen.

CHAPTER III

THE LONG WAITING-TIME

For over thirty years did this man both 'hope and quietly wait for the salvation of the Lord' to come for the slaves of his land. The interval is full of interest for those who care to watch the development of a life-purpose. Only for three, or four years was he destined to figure in the eyes of the world. Those years, as we shall hereafter see, were crowded with events; but for a generation he felt an abiding conviction of impending destiny.

There is something fateful about the constant indications of this spirit of readiness. His commercial pursuits were multifarious, but none of them was greatly successful. At Hudson, Ohio, till 1825, and afterwards at Richmond, Pennsylvania, he was tanner, land-surveyor, and part of the time postmaster. He became skilful at his father's business of tanning, but is a typical Yankee in the facility with which he turns his hand to anything.

From 1835 to 1839 he was at Franklin, Ohio, where we find him adding to his former occupations the breeding of horses, and also dabbling in land speculation, with the result that he became bankrupt. But when he failed in business he set to work to pay his debts in full. His death found him still striving to achieve that end. He was regarded as whimsical and stubborn, yet through years of struggle, endeavour, and even failure he was known as trusty and honourable.

From 1841 to 1846 he lived at Richfield, Ohio, where he took to shepherding and wool-dealing, which he continued in 1849 at Springfield, Ma.s.sachusetts. He seems to have developed much capacity for wool-testing. When he came to England with a cargo of wool, some English dealers sought to practise a fraudulent joke upon his quick fingers. They stripped a poodle of the best of his fleece and handed it to the oracular Yankee with the inquiry, 'What would you do with that wool?' But there was wisdom in him down to the finger-ends, for he rolled it there, and in a moment handed it back with the confounding retort, 'Gentlemen, if you have any machinery in England for working up dog's hair I would advise you to put this into it.'

Had he known how to sell wool as well as he knew how to test it; had he known how to sell his sheep as well as he knew hundreds of sheep faces apart, and like a diviner could interpret their inarticulate language; had he been as apt upon the market as he was upon the farm, he might have made money. As it was, there was never more than enough for the wants of a severely plain household life.

But this business record was (and herefrom its frequent misfortune may have largely proceeded) in no wise the history of John Brown. We must catch, if we can, indications of the unfolding of his soul, and of the inward preparation for what he felt was his divine destiny; and these may best be gathered as we watch the simple home life of the family.

At an early age, while residing at Hudson, Ohio, he married his first wife, Dianthe Lusk; and though he was but twenty years of age, his was no rash choice. A description by one who had been brought up with her may be fitly quoted: 'Plain but attractive, because of a quiet amiable disposition, sang beautifully, almost always sacred music; she had a place in the wood not far from the house where she used to go alone to pray.' John Brown, servant as he already accounted himself of the Invisible Powers, is drawn to one who thus communes with the Unseen.

She will have sympathy with his moral aims and a source of strength when he may be absent from her in pursuit of them. The sketch proceeds, 'She was pleasant but not funny; she never said what she did not mean.' Here, truly, was the wife for a man in dead earnest and who could keep a boyish oath even unto death. For twelve years she proved a good comrade, and of the seven children of this marriage five survived, from whom testimonies concerning the domestic life are forthcoming.

The wife who succeeded her (Mary Ann Day) seems to have been no less a help-meet in his enterprises. Thirteen children, many of whom died young, were the off-spring of this second marriage, so that in a hereditary sense the soul of John Brown may be said to have marched on.

He infected all his children with his pa.s.sionate love of liberty. Many are his cares for their spiritual welfare. Some of them sorely tried his patience by their aloofness from the Christian conventions that were dear to him; he yearns over their souls as he fears their experience of the inner working of grace is not as his own, but they swerved not in their allegiance to the cause of the slave. Let us avail ourselves of some of their memories of their remarkable father.

How early the house became a city of refuge for the runaway negro we learn from the eldest son, who tells us he can just recollect a timid knock at the door of the log cabin where they lived. A fugitive slave and his wife were there, for they had heard that there were a couple residing in the house who loved the negro and would lend him a rescuing hand. They were speedily made to know they were welcome, and the negress, relieved of her last fear, takes young John in a motherly fashion upon her knee and kisses him. He almost instinctively scampers off to rub the black from his face. Returning, he watches his mother giving them supper. Presently father's extraordinarily quick ear detects the sound of horsehoofs half a mile away; weapons are thrust into the hands of the terrified pair, and they are taken out to the woody swamps behind the house to lie in hiding. Father then returns, only to discover that it is a false alarm, whereupon he sallies forth to bring them into shelter and warmth once more, and tells the a.s.sembled family on their arrival how he had difficulty in the dark in recognizing the hiding-place and really discovered them at length by hearing the beating of their frightened hearts. No wonder. Quick as any faculty he had was that of hearing a slave's heart beat. Had it not been for that keen instinct there would have been no tale to tell of John Brown.

The daughter says her earliest memory is of her father's great arms about her as he sang to her his favourite hymn:

Blow ye the trumpet, blow The gladly solemn sound: Let all the nations know To earth's remotest bound.

The year of Jubilee is come, Return, ye ransomed sinners, home.

Then, ceasing, he would tell her with heart br.i.m.m.i.n.g with tenderness of poor little black children who were slaves. What were slaves? she wanted to know. And he was ready enough to tell her of those who were riven from father and mother and sold for base coin, whom in some States it was illegal to teach their A B C, but quite lawful to flog; and then the daughter would be asked, by way of application to his moving discourse, if she would like some of them to come some time and share her home and food.

Thus continually to that rising family there was unfolded the horror of the slavery system. That horror had faded in the minds of many in the Northern States whose ancestry had held freedom dear; while in the Southern States, for the most part, the possession of your fellow creatures as if they were so much farm stock had become too familiar a feature of common life to evoke any conscientious misgiving, much less shame. The enormous additions to the cotton trade had made slave labour increasingly gainful, and the capital invested in this living property was immense. Careful rearing of slaves for the market as well as their purchase brought wealth to many, and fierce was the resentment when any one publicly criticized the inst.i.tution. There was by no means an absence of humane regard far the wellbeing of the negroes; a kind of patriarchal tenderness towards them was distinctly 'good form.' But there was the deadly fact that they were human goods and chattels, with no civil rights worth mentioning--for laws in their defence were practically worthless, seeing they could not appear as witnesses in the court. Public whipping-houses were provided for the expeditious correction of the refractory, and a mere suspicion of intent to escape was legal justification for the use of the branding-irons upon their flesh. If they did contrive to escape there were dogs bred on purpose to hunt them down. If the slave resisted his master's will he might be slain, and the law would not graze the master's head. Domestic security he had none, for wife might be wrenched from husband or child from mother according to the state of the market. And, strangest of all to our ears, the pulpits of the South extolled slavery as appointed of Heaven, and solemnly quoting the prophecy that Ham should be the servant of his brethren, the pulpiteer would ask who would dare to resist the will of G.o.d Most High? Not content to hold their views tenaciously, the slave-holders and their followers dealt out threatenings and slaughter to all who by lip or pen opposed them. The household of Brown pondered all this invasion of the great natural right of freedom, and with one accord pined for the opportunity of checking, or, it might be, ending it.

It is on record how they were taught to repeat their father's vow. It was in 1839, when they were living at Franklin, Ohio, that he called them around him, and on bended knee declared the secret mission with which, he believed, High Heaven had charged him--to labour by word or sword, by any means opportunity might offer, for the overthrow of slavery, which he believed to be the very citadel of evil in America.

'Swear, children, swear,' said he; and from that little group in the log house there went up an appeal for a blessing upon their oath--an oath which they could truly protest was likely to bring nought to them but peril, disaster, and, perchance, death, but which they were well a.s.sured must bring glory to Eternal G.o.d. And so their oath was registered in heaven.