These things which I alone know—of the death of Lyman Epps and of the brutal massacre down by the Pottawatomie and the turbulent, bloody events that followed, of the climactic raid on Harpers Ferry and the martyrdom of my father and the cold execution of my brothers and our comrades—these things, when I have finished telling them, will not alter history. They will not revise the received truth. That truth is shaped strictly by the needs of those who wish to receive it. No, when I have said them, the things that I alone know will release from purgatory the souls of all those men whom I so dearly loved and who went to their deaths believing that they held their fates in their own hands and that they had chosen in the fight against slavery to slay other men and to die for it.
When I kept silence, my bones waxed old through my roaring all the day long. But I am no longer silent. I am saying that those men did not so choose. I chose for them. Their fates were in my hands alone.
There is much, of course, that I am leaving out of my account, much that need not be told here by me. Most of what happened back then occurred in full public view, anyhow, and is known to the world; it needs no corrective from me: I’m not writing a history of those years or a biography of my father. I leave those high tasks to you and the professor. I have neither the mind nor the training for them, nor the inclination. As for the wider events across the nation and in Washington during those years, when the slaveholding South like a gigantic serpent slowly wrapped the rest of the Republic in its suffocating coils: I leave to others the obligation to set straight that record; and for the most part they have already done so, the journalists, the historians and biographers, the memoirists, and so on. The fact that nearly all of us then engaged in the war against slavery believed in the late ’50s that the war was all but lost, that much today, if little noted by the world, is nonetheless collected and recorded there. I needn’t recount these highly visible public events, although I do wish you to know how, over time, they made us believe that our entire government and even our nation’s destiny itself had been stolen from us, as if we had been invaded and all but conquered by a foreign, tyrannical power.
We were enraged by this, to be sure, and howled at it, but when the slavery-loving, Negro-hating mobs gathered legitimacy in Washington and in the Southern press, when the Border Ruffians were portrayed as legitimate settlers and the overseers of human chattel as statesmen, when our leaders, like Senators Douglas and Webster, sold us out for a handful of silver coins and our heroes, like Senator Sumner, were clubbed down in the Capitol building itself, our rage turned suddenly to cold desperation. We who early on had been merely anti-slavery activists and who, slowly over the years in defense of our own rights of protest, had evolved, almost unbeknownst to ourselves, into guerilla fighters and militiamen—we now became terrorists. And having become terrorists, we found ourselves almost overnight made emblematic to those remaining white activists who mostly sat in their parlors or at their desks grieving over the loss of their nation. We inspired them, and they encouraged us. And so we waged their war for them. Unwilling to do more to regain their nation than write a poem or a cheque to help arm, clothe, and feed us, they were often objects of scorn and derision to us, although we were, of course, grateful for their poems and monies and used both to solicit still more monies and, with our purses thus fattened, purchased more Sharps rifles, more horses and supplies, more of the terrorizing broadswords and pikes.
Ah, but you know all this. You are an educated woman, who has sat for years at the foot of a wise and learned historian, a man whom I know also by reputation as the illustrious grandson of William Lloyd Garrison. The grandsire, of course, I was myself, through Father, personally acquainted with, and his nobility of purpose and great personal courage I hope I have not impugned in these pages. It’s just that, in the heat of battle and in the face of imminent death, I habitually bore towards Mr. Garrison and most of the other white abolitionists my father’s long-held resentment and impatience. And even today, these many years after, it still rankles that, whilst I and my family and our comrades were laying about in Kansas with our broadswords, bloodying ourselves and our enemies and putting at ultimate risk our lives and our immortal souls, Mr. Garrison, Mr. Emerson, Mr. Whittier, and all those other good men and women back in Boston and Concord and New York were adjusting their sleeves so as not to spot their starched cuffs.
I hear you protest, and I apologize; I concede: it was not the fault of those good men that we risked our lives and butchered the men and boys down on the Pottawatomie and in the ensuing several years raised homicidal havoc across the Kansas plain and even into Missouri itself, or that later we marched into martyrdom in Virginia; these things we did, not because others did not, but because we ourselves almost alone could not bear to see the war against slavery come to an end there. Out there on the old California trail, we understood what no one else in the country could have known, not in Boston or New York or Washington or even in the capitals of the South. We were on the battlefront, and that night in May of ’56, with the news of the abject sack and surrender of the town of Lawrence to the Border Ruffians still drumming in our ears and barely hours later the sudden arrival of word of the near assassination of Senator Sumner in Washington, we believed that the war was all but over and done with. On that night, we saw Satan settle comfortably into his seat and commence to gather his slaveholding minions in to serve and honor him.
Though it’s not my intention here to explain or excuse our acts, mine or Father’s or those of any who followed us, I do want you to understand that we were desperate men. And of all of us, I suppose I was the most desperate. We were made so, me especially, by three inescapable realities: our position on the ground out there in Kansas; the clarity of Father’s understanding of the true nature and scale of the war against slavery; and our principles. We could not be where we were, know what we knew, uphold what we honored—and do other than we did. And joining us were other men for whom these same three circumstances applied as well: not many, a dozen, twenty, usually one at a time and on occasion arriving in groups of three or four, but enough of them quickly came forward and joined our band, especially after Pottawatomie, that we were before long no longer a small, guerilla force made up only of Old Brown and his sons but an actual, insurrectionary army that was well-armed and was growing rapidly in size and fearsomeness.
Sometimes as many as fifty men, sometimes as few as ten, we stayed on horseback day and night almost continuously and, all that summer and into the next year, conducted swift, daring, terroristic raids against the Border Ruffians and their supporters amongst the settlers, moving our encampment every few days from one tree-shrouded river-bottom to another. We burnt down the cabins and barns of the enemy and liberated their property, their horses and cattle and supplies and weapons, and although some men, even amongst our allies, called it looting or simple horse-stealing, for us it was merely a necessary and legal continuation of our war policy, for it weakened our enemy on the field and frightened him everywhere, whilst us it strengthened and our allies it encouraged.
During this period, dozens of journalists came out from the East by way of St. Louis, Leavenworth, and Lawrence, or down from Iowa to Topeka, and entered thence into the war region of southeastern Kansas. The more intrepid among them, like Mr. Redpath and Mr. Hinton, would eventually make their way to the marshes and ravines and the cottonwood groves along the Marais des Cygnes and the Pottawatomie or out onto the high, grassy plains of the old Ottawa Reserve, where they would find and follow our band for a few days or a week until, exhausted by the pace of our steady marches and raiding and by Father’s night-long monologues and preachments, they would head back to Lawrence or Topeka and dispatch back to the East vivid accounts of Old Brown’s indefatigable and brilliant campaign against the pro-slavery forces. Soon they had made him a heroic figure out of some old romance, like a legendary Scottish Highlands chieftain leading his doughty clansmen against the British invader, and by summer’s end his name was on the lips of nearly every
American, North and South. To all, he had become a figure perfectly expressive of the antislavery principle.
And naturally, as his fame spread across the nation, brave, reckless, principled young men itching for battle began to join our ranks. You know the names and reputations of many of the best of them, I’m sure, for they were later with us at Harpers Ferry and entered history there: the fierce, intelligent, and well-spoken John Kagi; and the kindly, black-eyed giant, Aaron Stevens; and poor John Cook, who was a genial man but dangerously indiscreet; and Charlie Tidd from Maine, a man with a terrible temper but withal an almost feminine sweetness; and Jeremiah Anderson, the guilty grandson of Virginia slaveholders; and young Will Leeman, barely seventeen when he first showed up at our camp: these men and numerous others whose names and fates you know were with us, but also over time a hundred more, who were just as steadfast and brave and who remain nameless, they were with us, too, and sometimes fell in battle and ended in unmarked graves or beneath humble, forgotten, untended wooden plaques in an overgrown Kansas field or back yard—farmers, carpenters, and clerks, they all, in their churches and meeting houses in Ohio and New York and New England, heard about Old Brown and his men or they read about us in their newspapers, and they dropped their hoes and spades or put aside their pens and eye-shades and, like the Minutemen of their grandfathers’ generation, picked up their rifles and made their way west and south to Kansas, where they got passed along, one to the other, by our growing number of supporters and allies, until they finally one morning walked through the trees into our camp and presented themselves to the lean, leathery old man seated by the fire going over his maps, the legendary John Brown himself.
There were, of course, some young men of a quarrelsome and wasting nature who joined us and stayed awhile as regulars in our Army of the North, as Father sometimes called his force, men who were taints and whose reckless, violent behavior caused many amongst the antislavery residents of Lawrence and Topeka and even back East privately to condemn our work, despite the continuous hosannas in the press. These were fellows who could not keep the pledge they made against the use of alcohol and tobacco or would not subject their wills to Father’s and would have been more at home in the bands of marauding Border Ruffians or brawling with each other in the saloons and muddy alleyways of the shabby border towns along the Missouri River. They did not last long with us. If Father or I found one of them drunk or if, on his or my command, a man did not at once rise from his blankets and mount up with the others at midnight and ride out in the cold rain to make a dawn raid on a pro-slaver’s farmstead twenty miles away on Ottawa Creek, Father was fiercely adamant and had me drive the man from camp like a dog.
I spoke for Father in all matters, except when he chose to speak for himself, which occasions were rare and made all the more impressive by their rarity. Even my brothers Salmon and Fred and Oliver and my brother-in-law Henry Thompson addressed Father through me, and it was through me that he spoke back to them and to the other men. To the journalists, of course, he spoke for himself, for no one, certainly not I, was as articulate and clear and poetical as he when it came to defining and justifying his grand strategy. With his actions in Kansas, Father wished to inspire a similar set of actions by other men all along the thousand-mile border between the North and the South, from Maryland to Missouri: by his and our example, he wished to make warriors of abolitionists and freedmen, and insurrectionists of slaves.
Your researches must have made known to you by now that after the night of the Pottawatomie Massacre, as it quickly came to be called, my elder brothers, John and Jason, were no longer with us. They were not purged from our band by Father, however; they took themselves from it. And it was just as well for them and for us, for they were not cold enough.
When, on that morning in May, we had finally washed all the blood from our hands and faces and had cleaned our broadswords in the waters of the Pottawatomie, we then came somberly, silently away from Dutch Sherman’s place, ascending from the dark, gloomy river-bottom in the wagon and on horseback along the winding, northerly trail to the grassy plateau above. Swaths of ground-fog hovered over the trees in the distance, where the Marais des Cygnes meandered eastward towards the town of Osawatomie, and the tall grasses glistened in the morning sunlight. We came over into the open, newly green meadows and leafy copses outside the settlement and after a while arrived at the crossroads where John and Jason and the Osawatomie Rifles still lay encamped, waiting for instructions from their superiors in Lawrence.
The men of John’s outfit were mostly young fellows, husbands and sons, Osawatomie homesteaders mustered abruptly into a militia company to defend and protect their homes against the Missouri marauders. Thus they could not have joined us in our work anyhow and still retained their commission under Colonel Lane and Mr. Robinson. It was not that Father had mistrusted them, especially John and Jason; it was merely that he respected their charge and mission and knew its difference from ours.
Our arrival at their encampment that morning, however, was met with grim silence by them, which puzzled us. They were mostly standing together near their low, smoky breakfast fire, and as we drew near, they watched us and said nothing and did not even raise a hand in greeting. It was as if we were a painting of six travelers, three on horseback and three in a wagon, being hung on a wall in a museum, and they were a group of silent, thoughtful observers standing ready to examine it. I remember, as we neared the fire and dismounted, that it was Jason who first separated himself from the men and came forward, while John looked on woefully, and the others merely gazed coolly in our direction as if from a great distance.
Jason glanced over the horses and saddles we had taken from Mr. Wilkinson, then abruptly took Father’s hand in his and led him a short ways off. I followed, while the other boys stayed in an isolated knot by the wagon.
Jason said to Father, “Did you have anything to do with that killing over to Dutch Henry’s Crossing?”
Father looked surprised by the question. “What’ve you heard?”
“A few hours ago, just after sunup, one of the boys from over there rode through, all distraught and weeping in a panic,” he said. “We got out of him that his father and two brothers and some other men had been savagely murdered. He said they’d all been chopped down by swords and cut horribly. It was an uncalled-for, wicked act!” he pronounced. Then he looked down at the broadsword I wore on my belt and was briefly silent. “The lad was pretty confused,” he went on, turning back to Father. “But he claimed it was the Browns that did it. He was clear on that. Then he rode on to Osawatomie. To raise the alarm.”
We were all three silent then. At last, Jason said, “Did you do it, Father?”
“I slew no one,” Father declared. “But I do approve of it.”
“I’ll go the route for you, Father, if you’re innocent. But if you did this, you know I can’t defend you. It’s a despicable act. I must know where you and the boys have been all night.”
Father said simply, “No, Jason, you don’t.”
Jason looked at me then. “Do you know who did this?”
I hardened my face and showed him its side. “Yes, I do. But I shan’t tell you.”
His voice lowered almost to a whisper, Jason said, “This is mad.” Then, harshly, he shouted towards the wagon, “Fred, come over here!”
Fred obeyed and came forward and stood beside me with his head hung low, and at once he said to Jason, “I didn’t do it, but I can’t tell you who did. When I came to see what manner of work it was, I couldn’t do it, Jason!” Tears were streaming down his face.
“You realize that now we’re all going to suffer!” Jason said to Father. “Do you realize that?”
“No, you’re wrong” said Father. “Those men were the enemies of the Lord, and they deserved to die, no matter who did it. For without the shedding of blood, there is no remission of sins. I will tell you this much, son: I myself killed no one. But if the slavers think I killed their kith and kin, that’s fine by me.
All the better. Now they will know our extremity. Now they will know what they’re up against,” he said.
But Jason was no longer listening. He had stepped unsteadily away a few paces, and he turned and, nearly staggering, walked off from us and the men of the militia.
The sight of him, shocked and clearly appalled, pointedly separating himself from Father and me and Fred and making his way along a zig-zag path over the rise and down the ravine towards the river, told the others that the boy’s dawn account had been true, and it seemed to release the men. At once, they busied themselves with breaking camp and bridling and saddling their horses. A few seconds later, John was left standing alone by the fire—a captain overthrown and abandoned.
He looked first at us and then at his men, then back at us again, as if torn and dismayed by the choice that had been forced upon him. Finally, he called out to his men, who were mostly already on horseback by now and were clearly prepared to depart: “Wait up! Hold up a minute! This business isn’t settled yet. You fellows are still under my command.”
Henry Williams, a storekeeper in Osawatomie, a big-shouldered man with a dark, rubbishy beard, said, “No, we’re electing us a new captain, John. We ain’t riding under no Brown.” The others nodded and murmured agreement, and Mr. Williams turned in his saddle and said to them, “Who d’ you boys want for a captain? Any nominations?”
One of them said, “You’d do fine, Henry.”
Another man, a tall, raw-boned man in a canvas duster, said, “My vote’s for Williams. He’s got sense. And he’s got family and his store to protect. He ain’t going to do anything so stupid as killing off folks at random,” and he glared first at Father and me and then directly at John.
John said, “I’ve got family.”
“Yes;” the man said, “so you do,” and he turned his horse and rode out from the camp, onto the crossing.
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