by H. W. Brands
Brown could be better at dreaming than at doing. He and his wife never adopted a black child, and he never started a school. His wanderlust recurred, and he led the family back to Ohio, but to the hamlet of Franklin Mills rather than Hudson. Something about Brown kept him at a distance from neighbors. He wasn’t unfriendly, in any overt way, but he formed no deep attachments. He would stay in one place for a time and then, without obvious reason or explanation, up stakes and move on. He moved in no consistent direction. Many in his day trended west, following the advancing frontier. But Brown moved east as often as west. His family, of course, went with him, and they learned to ask no questions. The model might have been one of the nomadic tribes of the Old Testament.
He shifted from herding cattle to tending sheep, which he hoped would bring him greater returns. He was vigilant and sensitive to the animals’ needs, and his flocks grew. He had less luck with people. In the mid-1830s loose credit caused land prices to bubble, and Brown joined the speculation. A financial crisis in 1837 burst the bubble, catching many of the speculators short. Brown found himself deeply in debt. John Brown Jr. recalled the lesson his father learned from the experience, a lesson he shared with his son. “Instead of being thoroughly imbued with the doctrine of pay as you go,” Brown said, “I started out in life with the idea that nothing could be done without capital, and that a poor man must use his credit and borrow; and this pernicious notion has been the rock on which I, as well as many others, have split. The practical effect of this false doctrine has been to keep me like a toad under a harrow most of my business life.” Another son, Jason, later remarked, “It is a Brown trait to be migratory, sanguine about what they think they can do; to speculate; to go into debt; and to make a good many failures.”
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BROWN’S BANKRUPTCY FORCED a move back to Hudson, where his father still lived. And it was in Hudson where he discovered his life’s mission. When Brown had left the town, slavery was an important issue in American politics but not one that dominated everything else. During the 1830s it achieved that dubious distinction. Two events triggered the change. In 1831 a slave called Nat Turner led a rebellion in southern Virginia that killed dozens of whites before being bloodily suppressed. The episode reminded Southern slaveholders that they sat atop a keg of powder. At any time other slaves might mimic Nat Turner and burst out murderously against their masters. The possibility of revolt had long inhabited the nightmares of slaveholders; now it filled their waking hours.
The second event was the decision of the British government to end slavery in the British empire. Abolition had already come to other countries: France and its empire, most of the New World republics that broke free from Spain. But Britain’s decision to end slavery had a special effect on Americans, for Britain had introduced slavery to America in colonial days, and its law and practices were most akin to those in America. If the British could abolish slavery, thought both the friends and the foes of slavery in the United States, so could Americans.
Abolitionism became a growing force in American politics. William Lloyd Garrison founded The Liberator, a Boston paper that even its subscribers often judged intemperate in its treatment of slavery and slaveholders. Other papers appeared in other cities, including St. Louis, where Elijah Lovejoy denounced slavery with growing vehemence. It took courage to do so, for while New England abolitionists like Garrison were surrounded by people of similar views, Lovejoy operated in enemy territory—Missouri being a slave state. Lovejoy alienated his neighbors, some of whom were apologists for slavery, others who simply thought his agitation would harm the businesses and prospects of them all. Lovejoy’s enemies smashed his printing presses repeatedly, eventually driving him across the Mississippi to Alton, in the free state of Illinois, where he launched a new abolitionist paper.
The move didn’t save him. In November 1837 a crowd of slavery defenders attacked the building that housed Lovejoy’s press. This time he fought back, opening fire on the attackers. In the exchange that followed, he was killed.
The news reached Hudson a short while later. The abolitionists in town could speak of nothing else. The excited discussion spilled over into the Thursday prayer meeting at the Congregational church Brown attended. He sat in the back of the room saying little but listening much. Finally, as the meeting drew to a close, he stood up. He raised his right hand, and in a determined tone that stuck in the memory of those present, declared, “Here, before God, in the presence of these witnesses, from this time I consecrate my life to the destruction of slavery.”
2
ABRAHAM LINCOLN HAD no such epiphany and made no such declaration. Lincoln lacked Brown’s unquestioning religious faith. Yet he confronted the same question Brown did: What was the moral man’s obligation when faced with an immoral institution like slavery?
Lincoln knew slavery from his earliest days, as Brown did not. Lincoln was born in the slave state of Kentucky; his neighbors in Hardin County included hundreds of slaves. The Lincoln family owned no slaves, not least because Thomas Lincoln couldn’t well afford them. Lincoln in later years spoke little about his father; what he said did the older man justice but no kindness. Recounting his ancestry, Lincoln arrived at his grandparents and their children. “Thomas, the youngest son, and father of the present subject, by the early death of his father, and very narrow circumstances of his mother, even in childhood was a wandering laboring boy, and grew up literally without education,” Lincoln said. “He never did more in the way of writing than to bunglingly sign his own name.”
Thomas Lincoln opposed slavery, partly for what it did to the slaves but also for what it cost non-slaveholding whites like himself. As visitors to the South often remarked, slavery demeaned manual labor, discouraging poor whites from improving their lot through their own toil. Thomas and Nancy Lincoln joined a sect that shared their antipathy toward slavery; when Lincoln was seven, his father moved the family across the Ohio River to free-state Indiana. “This removal was partly on account of slavery, but chiefly on account of the difficulty in land titles in Kentucky,” Lincoln explained.
The region of Indiana Thomas selected was a wilderness. “He settled in an unbroken forest, and the clearing away of surplus wood was the great task ahead,” Lincoln said. “A.”—Lincoln himself—“though very young, was large of his age, and had an axe put into his hands at once; and from that till within his twenty-third year, he was almost constantly handling that most useful instrument—less, of course, in plowing and harvesting seasons.” The family were hunters and gatherers, as well as farmers. The son was no Daniel Boone. “A. took an early start as a hunter, which was never much improved afterwards. A few days before the completion of his eighth year, in the absence of his father, a flock of wild turkeys approached the new log-cabin, and A., with a rifle gun, standing inside, shot through a crack, and killed one of them. He has never since pulled a trigger on any larger game.”
Lincoln didn’t like his father, though they shared certain traits. Neighbors commented that Lincoln acquired his storytelling skills from the older man. Lincoln’s mother died when he was nine; Thomas remarried. A story recalled from his father had his second wife asking him whether he liked her or his first wife better. “Oh, now, Sarah,” Thomas responded, in a style and tone any of Lincoln’s adult acquaintances would have recognized. “That reminds me of old John Hardin down in Kentucky who had a fine looking pair of horses, and a neighbor coming in one day and looking at them said, ‘John, which horse do you like best?’ John replied, ‘I can’t tell. One of them kicks and the other bites and I don’t know which is worst.’ ”
But Thomas detected energy and ambition in his son that reflected unfavorably on his own. He ridiculed Lincoln’s efforts to improve himself; illiterate, he denied his son the chance at an education. “A. now thinks that the aggregate of all his schooling did not amount to one year,” Lincoln recalled. “He was never in a college or academy as a stu
dent; and never inside of a college or academy building till since he had a law-license. What he has in the way of education, he has picked up. After he was twenty-three, and had separated from his father, he studied English grammar, imperfectly of course, but so as to speak and write as well as he now does. He studied and nearly mastered the six books of Euclid, since he was a member of Congress. He regrets his want of education, and does what he can to supply the want.”
Thomas didn’t beat his son, at least not beyond the norm of parents at the time. Perhaps Lincoln’s size and strength protected him; in any event Lincoln didn’t mention physical blows. Except for one that came from a different source: “In his tenth year he was kicked by a horse, and apparently killed for a time.” Yet he survived, well enough for his father to hire him out to neighbors, with the pay going to Thomas. The scheme was not unlike the hiring out of slaves, and Lincoln himself saw and felt the similarity. “I used to be a slave,” he later said of that period.
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THE GREAT ADVENTURE of Lincoln’s youth was a river journey. “When he was nineteen, still residing in Indiana, he made his first trip upon a flat-boat to New-Orleans. He was a hired hand merely; and he and a son of the owner, without other assistance, made the trip. The nature of part of the cargo-load, as it was called, made it necessary for them to linger and trade along the Sugar Coast”—the stretch of the Mississippi where sugarcane enriched the planters—“and one night they were attacked by seven negroes with intent to kill and rob them. They were hurt some in the melee, but succeeded in driving the negroes from the boat, and then cut cable, weighed anchor and left.”
The journey proceeded less eventfully for Lincoln and his partner. On this and a subsequent journey Lincoln visited New Orleans, where for the first time he witnessed the buying and selling of slaves on a commercial scale. Slave markets cast the institution of slavery in the harshest light, revealing the essential inhumanity of a system that allowed men, women and children to be bought and sold like cattle. Implausible accounts have Lincoln vowing, after witnessing the sale of a young woman—invariably described as “comely”—to deliver a blow against slavery one day. More likely the experience simply confirmed the distaste he already felt.
Thomas Lincoln moved the family again, when Lincoln was twenty-one. Their new residence was in Illinois, on the Sangamon River where the forest met the prairie. “Here they built a log-cabin, into which they removed, and made sufficient of rails to fence ten acres of ground, fenced and broke the ground, and raised a crop of sown corn upon it the same year,” Lincoln recalled.
He tried his hand as a clerk in a store and mill at New Salem, Illinois. The business languished but Lincoln made friends. When the Black Hawk War broke out in 1832—resulting from a dispute over lands taken from the Sauk and other Indians—Lincoln enlisted. “A. joined a volunteer company, and to his own surprise, was elected captain of it. He says he has not since had any success in life which gave him so much satisfaction. He went the campaign, served near three months, met the ordinary hardships of such an expedition, but was in no battle.”
Lincoln’s success inspired him to try his hand at politics. “Returning from the campaign, and encouraged by his great popularity among his immediate neighbors, he, the same year, ran for the Legislature and was beaten—his own precinct, however, casting its votes 277 for and 7 against him.”
The bug had bit. He tried again and was elected. A lawyer named John Stuart, of Springfield, was elected that same season, and during the campaign he had been impressed by Lincoln. He encouraged him to take up law. Lincoln heeded the suggestion. “He borrowed books of Stuart, took them home with him, and went at it in good earnest. He studied with nobody.” During sessions of the legislature he put aside the books, but resumed his study at the sessions’ end. In 1836 he satisfied the state’s examiners that he was qualified to practice, and received his law license.
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HE FELL in love. Ann Rutledge was four years younger than Lincoln and the daughter of the man who owned New Salem’s inn, where Lincoln sometimes ate and slept. Ann drew the attention of visitors, including one man to whom she became engaged. But he departed on a long trip, and in his absence she struck up a friendship with Lincoln. The longer her fiancé stayed away, the better she liked Lincoln. Lincoln became thoroughly enamored of her. In time they agreed that if Ann could get out of her existing engagement, they would be married.
Then she was stricken ill, probably with typhoid fever. Her fiancé was nowhere in sight, and so it was Lincoln who sat by her bed. But not for long: Ann faded quickly and died.
Lincoln was crushed. He was generally awkward around women, but something in Ann Rutledge had calmed him and brought out his best. He never forgot her. Years later Lincoln received a visit from a friend from the New Salem days. The friend asked Lincoln if he had indeed loved Ann Rutledge, as people around the town recalled. “It is true; true indeed I did,” Lincoln replied, according to the friend’s recollection. “I loved the woman dearly and soundly. She was a handsome girl, would have made a good loving wife.” Wistfully, Lincoln added, “I did honestly and truly love the girl and think often—often—of her now.”
3
FREDERICK DOUGLASS WAS no less opposed to slavery than John Brown, and he was infinitely better informed on the subject. Douglass had been a slave in Maryland, where the temptation to escape was greater than for most slaves, because freedom was closer. A slave who slipped across the Mason-Dixon Line into Pennsylvania might make his way to Philadelphia, whose Quakers had been among the first groups in America to oppose slavery and who still provided shelter to fugitives from the South. Baltimore offered another escape point. The ships that sailed out of the harbor could hide stowaways, and the railroad that linked Maryland’s commercial capital to the North tempted hitchhikers.
Yet precisely because freedom was so near and tempting, Maryland’s slave owners watched their slaves closely. A slave who seemed tempted to flee might be sold to the Deep South, from which escape was all but impossible. Not least because it was so difficult, masters and overseers in the South were infamous for driving their slaves hard, often brutally. Many slaves from the upper South would rather die than be sold down the river, as the phrase went, referring to the Ohio and Mississippi.
Frederick Douglass was determined to escape all the same. He never knew the date of his birth—many slaves didn’t—but it was around 1818. Douglass was unusual among slaves in knowing how to read and write. Part of his instruction came from the wife of a man his master had lent him to; part he conjured on his own after the man objected to his wife’s instructing the boy. Literacy opened to him a world beyond the South, a world in which people with black skins need not be slaves. This revelation, which Southern slaveholders did their best to keep their slaves from discovering, made him start to reckon how he might become free.
The issue wasn’t constantly pressing. Sometimes those who commanded him were comparatively humane, within the limits of the slave system. But others were beastly. A man named Covey was merciless. “We were worked in all weathers,” Douglass recalled later. “It was never too hot or too cold; it could never rain, blow, hail, or snow, too hard for us to work in the field. Work, work, work, was scarcely more the order of the day than of the night. The longest days were too short for him, and the shortest nights too long for him. I was somewhat unmanageable when I first went there, but a few months of this discipline tamed me. Mr. Covey succeeded in breaking me. I was broken in body, soul, and spirit. My natural elasticity was crushed, my intellect languished, the disposition to read departed, the cheerful spark that lingered about my eye died; the dark night of slavery closed in upon me; and behold a man transformed into a brute!”
Yet a flicker of resistance remained in Douglass. Covey determined to beat it out of him. One day Douglass was in a stable, throwing hay down to the horses. “Mr. Covey entered the st
able with a long rope,” Douglass remembered. “And just as I was half out of the loft, he caught hold of my legs, and was about tying me. As soon as I found what he was up to, I gave a sudden spring, and as I did so, he holding to my legs, I was brought sprawling on the stable floor. Mr. Covey seemed now to think he had me, and could do what he pleased; but at this moment—from whence came the spirit I don’t know—I resolved to fight; and, suiting my action to the resolution, I seized Covey hard by the throat; and as I did so, I rose. He held on to me, and I to him. My resistance was so entirely unexpected that Covey seemed taken all aback.” Covey called to a slave hired from another master to help him subdue Douglass. The slave responded that he had been hired to work, not to fight. “He left Covey and myself to fight our own battle out. We were at it for nearly two hours. Covey at length let me go, puffing and blowing at a great rate, saying that if I had not resisted, he would not have whipped me half so much. The truth was, that he had not whipped me at all. I considered him as getting entirely the worst end of the bargain; for he had drawn no blood from me, but I had from him.”
The denouement astonished Douglass. “The whole six months afterwards, that I spent with Mr. Covey, he never laid the weight of his finger upon me in anger. He would occasionally say, he didn’t want to get hold of me again. ‘No,’ thought I, ‘you need not; for you will come off worse than you did before.’ ” Yet Covey could have brought the law against Douglass. “It was for a long time a matter of surprise to me why Mr. Covey did not immediately have me taken by the constable to the whipping-post, and there regularly whipped for the crime of raising my hand against a white man in defense of myself. And the only explanation I can now think of does not entirely satisfy me; but such as it is, I will give it. Mr. Covey enjoyed the most unbounded reputation for being a first-rate overseer and negro-breaker. It was of considerable importance to him. That reputation was at stake; and had he sent me—a boy about sixteen years old—to the public whipping-post, his reputation would have been lost; so, to save his reputation, he suffered me to go unpunished.”