A Disease in the Public Mind

by Thomas Fleming

  “Look at me, Masr. Am prime rice planter; sho you won’t find a better man den me . . . Do carpenter work too, a little. I be good servent, Masr. Molly, my wife, too . . . Fus rate rice hand. Mos’ as good as me. Stan’ out, Molly, let the gen’lemu see.”

  Molly stepped out and her husband praised her. “Good arm, dat, mas’r. She do a heap of work mo. Let good Mas’er see your teeth. All reg’lar.” He ordered his seven-year-old son, Israel, to step out and “show the gen’lman how spry you be.”

  Next he displayed his three-year-old daughter, Vandy. “Make prime girl by and by. Better buy us, Mas’er. We fus’rate bargain.”

  The story closed with the reporter’s acid words, “The benevolent gentleman . . . bought someone else.”

  Along with stories that had the ring of probable truth in them, such as this one, the Tribune subscribed totally to the myth of The Slave Power: It pictured southern plantations as nothing less than “Negro harems.” It claimed there was scarcely one southern president who “has failed to leave . . . mulatto children.” Southerners regularly hired blacks from slave owners “for purposes of prostitution.” In a typical southern city, every night “ebony hued divinities” strolled to “the office of a colonel on one street, a doctor in another, a lawyer in another.” Such obsessive dissipation redoubled the average Southerners scorn of daily labor. The South had fewer religious people and fewer churches than the North. In every conceivable way, the region was a thousand years behind the North in respect to civilization. It was a barrier to America’s progress in every imaginable way, morally, economically, politically.4

  Soon it became dangerous to read the Tribune publicly in the South. The Herald, on the other hand, was read everywhere below the Mason-Dixon Line. A reporter for the Springfield Republican, one of the many lesser papers that followed the Tribune’s Slave Power lead, claimed to be amused by the way the Herald was “devoured at its earliest arrival here . . . and what is worse, to see the simplicity of these southern fellows, who seem to pin their whole faith in it.”

  • • •

  In this atmosphere, the Republicans held their first national convention in Philadelphia. They bypassed Abraham Lincoln and a far more outspoken antislavery politician, Senator William Seward of New York. The party nominated John C. Fremont, an army officer who had won fame as an explorer of the West and had been a leader in the conquest of California during the War with Mexico. He was married to the daughter of former senator Thomas Hart Benton of Missouri, one of the chief proponents of Manifest Destiny. The choice underscored the new party’s uneasiness about the abolitionists in their ranks. They wanted a standard-bearer who had little or no connection to these unpopular radicals.

  The Democrats met a few weeks later and declined to renominate Franklin Pierce for a second term—the first time a sitting president suffered such a humiliation. They also declined to support Senator Stephen A. Douglas. The after-shocks of the Kansas-Nebraska Act had decimated northern Democrats in the 1854 congressional elections. The nominee was James Buchanan, who had been ambassador to Britain since 1853, leaving him unstained, in theory, by the sectional hatred raging in Kansas.

  The election went to Buchanan, who polled 1,838,569 votes. The political unknown Fremont won 1,345, 264 ballots, almost all from nonslaveholding states. Ex-President Millard Fillmore, backed by remnants of the Know-Nothings and Whigs, won 874,354—evidence that a hefty portion of the electorate was confused and uncertain about the direction in which the United States should move. Buchanan was the first president since 1828 to win an election without carrying a majority of free states along with the slave states.

  As the possibility of a purely sectional party explicitly hostile to slavery acquired flesh in the North, not a few politicians in many parts of the South began talking disunion. There were panicky rumors of slave insurrections. Whites feared that blacks who could read the newspapers or who overheard their worried masters’ conversations at dinner tables would see the possibility of freedom on the horizon and grow rebellious. Thomas Jefferson’s nightmare was still alive in the southern public mind.5

  • • •

  On December 2, 1856, a month after Buchanan’s election, lame duck President Franklin Pierce sent his last message to Congress. It featured a furious attack on the agitators who had ruined his first and now only term—the abolitionists. He saw the presidential election as a repudiation of their doctrines, and he characterized them as people who threatened the “liberty, peace and greatness of the Republic” by organizing “mere geographical parties” and “marshalling in hostile array the different sections of the country.” He declared “schemes of this nature” could not be popular in any part of America if they were not “disguised” and encouraged “by an excited state of the public mind.”

  Under the shelter of America’s liberty, some individuals were “pretending to seek only to prevent the spread of the institution of slavery,” Pierce continued. In reality they were “inflamed with the desire to change the domestic institutions of existing states.” To accomplish this, they were devoting themselves to “the odious task . . . of calumniating with indiscriminate invective not only the citizens of the particular states with whose laws they find fault, but all others of their fellow citizens throughout the country who do not participate with them in their assaults upon the Constitution.”

  The abolitionists’ object, Pierce insisted, was nothing less than “revolutionary.” They knew their attempt to change the relative condition of the white and the black races in the slave holding states could only be accomplished “through burning cities and ravaged fields and slaughtered populations . . . all that is most terrible in [a] civil and servile war.”6

  • • •

  Like most statements of outgoing presidents, this warning was largely ignored. One of the few readers who found it significant was far away from Washington, DC, on the plains of Texas. After three years as West Point’s superintendent, Lieutenant Colonel Robert E. Lee had become second in command of a cavalry regiment, responsible for keeping peace between Indians and settlers in the wild country north of San Antonio. He missed his family at “dear Arlington.” As Christmas 1856 approached, he wrote a wistful letter to his wife. “Though absent, my heart will be in the midst of you.”

  Colonel Lee welcomed James Buchanan’s election as president. “I hope he will be able to extinguish fanaticism north and south, cultivate love for the country and the Union, and restore harmony between the different sections,” he wrote. Not long after he mailed this letter, a package of newspapers arrived from his wife. In one of them was a copy of President Pierce’s message to Congress. Lee was stirred by his former commander in chief’s words. In another letter to his wife, he said the warning of a possible “Civil & Servile” war was “truthfully and faithfully expressed.”

  Lee was no believer in slavery as a positive good. “In this enlightened age, there are few . . . but what will acknowledge that slavery as an institution is a moral & political evil in any country.” But he thought the blacks were “immeasurably better off here than in Africa, morally, socially and physically.” The Colonel admitted he did not expect slavery to disappear soon. “How long their subjugation may be necessary is known and ordered by a wise Merciful Providence . . . Although the Abolitionist must know this & must see he has neither the right or power of operating except by moral means and suasion. . . . If he means well to the slave, he must not create angry feelings in the Master. . . . Still I fear he will persevere in his evil course. Is it not strange that the descendants of those pilgrim fathers who crossed the Atlantic to preserve their own freedom, have always proved themselves intolerant of the spiritual liberty of others?”7

  • • •

  Elsewhere in the nation, John Brown, that personification of a Puritan, if not a Pilgrim father (the Pilgrims were gentle, peace-loving souls—almost total opposites of the fierce, violent Puritans), was pursuing an ever more grandiose desire to attack and destroy slavery. Kansas had become
pacified by Mississippi-born John A. Geary, a tough-minded territorial governor handpicked by President Pierce. Geary had disbanded armies on both sides and ordered guerilla troublemakers to leave the state. Brown had spent his final months in Kansas hiding out in the brush as a wanted man. Roaming squads of U.S. cavalry had a warrant for his arrest for the Pottawatomie murders.

  Brown and his sons sensed their militant style was welcomed by neither side and prepared to depart. As a farewell gesture, they launched a raid into Missouri. They liberated eleven slaves, shot dead a slave owner who tried to resist them, stole horses and other property, and headed for Canada. With an effrontery that testified to the influence of the abolitionist campaign against The Slave Power, they travelled in daylight and Brown paused to give a speech in Cleveland, Ohio. They were confident that they were surrounded by Southern-hating allies who would manhandle any federal marshal foolish enough to pursue them.8

  Returning from Canada to Tabor, Iowa, a town with a strong antislavery majority, Brown decided it was time to go east and tap into some of the money and guns that various emigrant aid societies had been sending to Kansas. He was especially stirred by news that an old friend, New York millionaire Gerrit Smith, had pledged ten thousand dollars to raise a thousand men to make sure Kansas became a free state.

  Smith had rescued Brown and his family from destitution after the multiple failures of his business career. He had offered them land in New Elba, north of Lake Placid, where the millionaire had founded a colony for indigent free blacks. Smith had inherited a fortune from his father, a partner of John Jacob Astor. The son devoted himself to a bewildering range of good causes and good works. At various times he was in favor of colonization, then of abolitionism, and he had been a vice president of the American Peace Society.

  Timbucto, as blacks called the New Elba colony, was a disastrous geographical choice for African Americans. After living for generations in warm climates, they were physically and mentally unprepared to endure northern New York’s brutally cold winters. They were even more unready to master the art and science of raising crops in the relatively unfertile soil. Nor were any of them adept at building houses. Within a year or two, most of the farms were abandoned. The Browns stayed, largely because they had no place else to go.

  Smith evinced no interest in giving Brown a slice of his ten-thousand-dollar pledge, so the Captain headed for Boston, where the Massachusetts Kansas Committee reportedly was rolling in dollars. He found the committee operating from a small cluttered office in a garret peopled only by twenty-six-year-old Franklin Sanborn, the volunteer secretary. Nevertheless, Brown’s hopes rose when Sanborn recognized him as “Brown of Osawatomie”—the title antislavery journalists in Kansas had given him.

  Brown was soon convinced that God had led him to Sanborn. The young Harvard graduate ran a college preparatory school in Concord and knew all the famous names of that community—Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Bronson Alcott. Sanborn listened with growing excitement as Brown told him that he needed twenty thousand dollars to buy guns and supplies for a hundred men to renew the armed struggle for Kansas. The territory was not by any means safe from the grasp of The Slave Power.

  Revealing an unexpected ability to sell himself, Brown described his exploits in Kansas in heroic terms. In the “battle” of Black Jack, he and his followers had captured at gunpoint a squad of Missouri raiders. He omitted mentioning that a troop of U.S. cavalry had forced them to surrender the prisoners shortly afterward. He made his role sound even more heroic in his description of the struggle to defend the state’s antislavery headquarters at Osawatomie. In fact, the abolitionists had been routed and the town burned.

  Captain Brown did not say a word about the killings on Pottawatomie Creek. When Sanborn mentioned a rumor of murders there, Brown assured him he had had nothing to do with such a ghastly crime. Soon Sanborn was seeing Brown as “of the unmixed Puritan breed”—the sort of hero who had fought and won the American Revolution. George Washington and other Americans south of New England were missing in this view of the history of 1776.

  Sanborn introduced Brown to other men who believed in armed resistance to The Slave Power. Theodore Parker was a minister whose views on Christianity and antislavery were so radical that he was barred from every church in Boston and preached to a congregation at the city’s Music Hall. Samuel Gridley Howe was a medical reformer who had launched a note-worthy school for the deaf and blind. In his youth he had gone to Europe to help the Greeks win their independence from the tyrannical Turks. He and Parker headed a “vigilance committee” to protect escaped slaves from federal marshals. The two persuaded the Kansas Committee to give Brown two hundred Sharps rifles that they had shipped to Tabor, Iowa, to renew the war for Kansas.

  Sanborn introduced Brown to George Luther Stearns, a wealthy businessman who had raised almost $80,000 for the Kansas Committee. Stearns was so impressed with Brown’s fictitious version of his exploits in Kansas that he paid $1,300 for two hundred pistols from the Massachusetts Arms Company. Stearns and his wife gave a reception for the Kansas free soil fighter at their plush suburban mansion. In the course of the evening, Brown met William Lloyd Garrison, who told him that he disapproved of his policy of violent resistance to slavery. The two men exchanged conflicting quotes from the Bible; otherwise Brown concealed his contempt for all-talk-and-no-action Garrisonians.

  Franklin Sanborn persuaded his Unitarian minister friend, Thomas Wentworth Higginson, to hurry from Worcester to meet Brown. Higginson was a direct-action man on a par with the Kansas hero. He had already been dismissed by one congregation for his violent antislavery rhetoric. Although he vowed to help his cash-short fellow crusader, no money was forthcoming.

  By now John Brown was growing more than a little frustrated by this lack of follow-through from most of his Boston well-wishers. Nevertheless, he allowed Sanborn to escort him to Concord, where he met Henry Thoreau at the house of his parents. The two men conversed over dinner and Thoreau declared he had “much confidence in the man—he would do right.” The following night Brown visited the Emersons and then spoke in the Concord Town Hall to a large turnout.

  Brown denounced slavery, its defenders, and the U.S. government, but he insisted he was no lover of violence. The necessity for it was clearly the will of God. The Bible and the Declaration of Independence were the two most important documents in world history, and it was “better for a whole generation of men women and children should pass away by violent death than that a word of either be violated in this country.” The applause for this macabre nonsense was fervent but donations were few. Emerson gave only a few dollars, Thoreau “a trifle.”

  This pattern persisted in almost every Massachusetts town in which Brown spoke. He seldom raised more than seventy or eighty dollars. Then came a flash of bad news from his son Jason, who was waiting for him in Iowa. A deputy U.S. marshal was on his way to Massachusetts with a warrant for his arrest for the Pottawatomie murders. Brown went into hiding in the home of Thomas B. Russell, an abolitionist who was a judge of the state’s supreme court. Brooding about his lack of cash, Brown barricaded himself in a third-floor bedroom and declared he would fight any and all U.S. marshals to the death. He frightened Mrs. Russell by brandishing a long bowie knife and several pistols.

  At the Russell dinner table, consuming generous portions of well-cooked beef and fowl, Brown talked about the vile food he had been forced to eat while hiding out in Kansas— “joints and toes of creatures that surely no human being ever tasted,” Mrs. Russell recalled. He took pleasure in making his affluent hosts uncomfortable. Finally he read aloud to the shocked Russells a diatribe he intended to distribute all over Boston:

  Old Browns Farewell: to the Plymouth Rocks, Bunker Hill Monuments, Charter Oaks and Uncle Toms Cabbins . . . He leaves the [New England] States with a DEEP FEELING OF SADNESS: that after having exhausted his own small means: and with his family and his BRAVE MEN: suffered nakedness, hunger, cold, sickness (and some of them im
prisonment, with the most barbarous cruel treatment: wounds and death . . . after all this to sustain a cause for which every citizen of this “Glorious Republic” is under equal moral obligation to do: for the neglect of which he will be held accountable by God . . . he cannot secure, amidst all the wealth, luxury and extravagance of this ‘Heaven exalted’ people; even the necessary supplies of the common soldier. HOW ARE THE MIGHTY FALLEN.

  Brown sent copies of this rant to George Stearns and Theodore Parker. Mrs. Stearns became almost hysterical and urged her husband to bankrupt himself if necessary to get Brown the money he needed. Stearns pledged seven thousand dollars for “the defense of Kansas,” which Brown was free to use as he saw fit. But no actual cash materialized.

  • • •

  In his private journal, Ralph Waldo Emerson expressed awe and near-worship of John Brown after meeting him in Concord. It was fresh evidence of the way the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 and its enforcement in Massachusetts had tilted The Sage of Concord toward abolitionist extremism. The federal government was “treason,” Emerson now declared, and for a while preached that California’s vigilante justice was the best solution to the uproars created by attempts to capture runaway slaves. With every man armed with a knife and revolver, “perfect peace reigned” he claimed, betraying a total ignorance of the Golden State.9

  John Brown’s religion of violence was even more appealing. Emerson saw him as part of nature’s law. He spoke of Brown as a sheep herder from Ohio, ignoring the fact that he had failed in this venture, as he had in all his other forays into earning a living. The Sage saw Brown as a man with a unique gift for making friends with his horse or his mule. He was equally friendly with the deer that wandered onto his Ohio farm. “He stands for Truth,” Emerson said. “And Truth & Nature help him . . . irresistibly.”