The Zealot and the Emancipator

by H. W. Brands

  Gladstone had traversed several free states on the way to Missouri, and he perceived the difference in the cultures of North and South as reflected in the character of their inhabitants. That difference was magnified in Kansas, where free-state men and slave-state men lived within a few miles of each other. “Nowhere in America, probably, is the contrast between the Northern and the Southern man exhibited in so marked a manner as in Kansas,” he wrote. “He who would see the difference between comfort and discomfort, between neatness and disorder, cleanliness and filth, between farming the land and letting the land farm itself, between trade and stagnation, stirring activity and reigning sloth, between a wide-spread intelligence and an almost universal ignorance, between general progress and an incapacity for all improvement or advancement, has commonly only to cross the border line which separates a free from a slave state. But he who would see these broad contrasts in a single view, the evidences of well-directed enterprise and intelligent energy mixed up with the ugly features of back-going and barbarity, should seek out Kansas, and make its strange varieties of inhabitants his study.”

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  THOMAS GLADSTONE DIDN’T meet John Brown, but he might have met Brown’s sons in Kansas had he known where to look. Five of the boys—grown men, in fact—had gone to Kansas in the early wave of emigrants. “During the years 1853 and 1854 most of the leading Northern newspapers were not only full of glowing accounts of the extraordinary fertility, healthfulness, and beauty of the Territory of Kansas, then newly opened for settlement, but of urgent appeals to all lovers of freedom who desired homes in a new region to go there as settlers, and by their votes save Kansas from the curse of slavery,” John Brown Jr. recalled three decades later. John Brown Jr., Jason Brown, Owen Brown, Frederick Brown and Salmon Brown decided to leave Ohio for Kansas.

  The boys had shown no greater ability than their father in the business of life; their accumulated property consisted chiefly of eleven head of cattle and three horses. Yet several of the cattle were a valuable breed, and so they took care to get them to Kansas safely. Owen, Frederick and Salmon bought steamer passage for themselves and the stock along the Great Lakes to Chicago. After wintering in Illinois, the three drove the animals overland to Kansas.

  John Jr. and Jason, with their families, took a more direct route. They steamed down the Ohio River to the Mississippi, and up the Mississippi to St. Louis. In St. Louis they purchased two tents and some tools. They boarded another steamboat and ascended the Missouri River to Kansas City. The vessel was crowded with emigrants, mostly Southerners. “That they were from the South was plainly indicated by their language and dress; while their drinking, profanity, and display of revolvers and bowie-knives—openly worn as an essential part of their make-up—clearly showed the class to which they belonged, and that their mission was to aid in establishing slavery in Kansas,” John recalled.

  He wondered what he and the others had gotten themselves into. “A box of fruit trees and grape vines which my brother Jason had brought from Ohio, our plough, and the few agricultural implements we had on the deck of that steamer looked lonesome; for these were all we could see which were adapted to the occupations of peace. Then for the first time arose in our minds the query: Must the fertile prairies of Kansas, through a struggle at arms, be first secured to freedom before free men can sow and reap? If so, how poorly we were prepared for such work will be seen when I say that, for arms, five of us brothers had only two small squirrel rifles and one revolver.”

  The question lingered. As it did, a more pressing matter intruded. The scourge of westward emigration was cholera, which afflicted the choke points of travel where the surge of people overwhelmed the sanitation facilities. One of Jason Brown’s sons contracted the disease at St. Louis; within hours of his first symptoms he was dead. Jason and John and the other family members buried the child by the riverside, at a hamlet called Waverly, where the boat had tied up for repairs.

  They encountered Missouri’s generic hostility toward free-state emigrants. “True to his spirit of hatred of Northern people,” John recalled, “our captain, without warning to us on shore, cast off his lines and left us to make our way by stage to Kansas City, to which place we had already paid our fare by boat. Before we reached there, however, we became very hungry, and endeavored to buy food at various farm houses on the way; but the occupants, judging from our speech that we were not from the South, always denied us, saying, ‘We have nothing for you.’ ”

  Finally they reached their destination. “Arrived in Kansas, her lovely prairies and wooded streams seemed to us indeed like a haven of rest,” John recounted. “Here in prospect we saw our cattle increased to hundreds and possibly to thousands, fields of corn, orchards, and vineyards.” They set to work clearing the land, plowing the fields and sowing their crops. They lived in the tents, planning to put up houses before winter. They suffered the fever and chills of malaria. Their hay molded from summer’s damp. Other settlers’ cattle got into their corn. But such trials were the lot of farmers, and the Brown brothers took them in stride.

  The political chicanery of Kansas was a different matter. The younger Browns witnessed the fraudulent first election of the territory. “There was no disguise, no pretense of legality, no regard for decency,” John recalled. The ruffians, emboldened by the ballot coup, threatened bodily harm against any who challenged their dominance or questioned the slave future of Kansas.

  John recalled his response and the ensuing result. “I wrote to our father, whose home was in North Elba, N.Y., asking him to procure and send to us, if he could, arms and ammunition, so that we could be better prepared to defend ourselves and our neighbors. He soon obtained them; but instead of sending, he came on with them himself, accompanied by my brother-in-law Henry Thompson, and my brother Oliver.”

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  JOHN BROWN HADN’T intended to join his sons in Kansas. “If you or any of my family are disposed to go to Kansas or Nebraska, with a view to help defeat Satan and his legions in that direction, I have not a word to say,” he wrote to John before the latter set out. “But I feel committed to operate in another part of the field.” That other part of the field was the colony in North Elba, where Mary and the younger children remained. Perhaps Mary declared she’d had enough of moving; in any event there was no talk that she and the little ones would go to Kansas. Brown naturally felt obliged to see to their welfare, and his resources were insufficient to support them in New York while he launched a new venture in Kansas.

  But when he heard of the violence in Kansas and received John’s plea for arms, he couldn’t resist. The battle for freedom was being joined in the West, and he couldn’t sit aside. He attended an antislavery convention in Syracuse, where he circulated John’s letters. “John’s two letters were introduced, and read with such effect by Gerrit Smith as to draw tears from numerous eyes in the great collection of people present,” he wrote to Mary. And not only tears: “I received today donations amounting to a little over sixty dollars—twenty from Gerrit Smith, five from an old British officer; others giving smaller sums with such earnest and affectionate expressions of their good wishes as did me more good than money even.”

  Yet the money was what made possible his decision to go to Kansas himself. Brown sold several cows and gave the money to Mary, and using the money from Smith and the others, he bought a case of rifles and some provisions, and with son Oliver headed for Kansas. He reported to Mary on the trek. “I am writing in our tent about twenty miles west of the Mississippi, to let you know that we are all in good health and how we get along,” he said. “We had some delay at Chicago on account of our freight not getting on as we expected; while there we bought a stout young horse that proves to be a very good one, but he has been unable to travel fast for several days from having taken the distemper.” Brown hoped the animal would recover, for they couldn’t manage without him. “Our load is h
eavy, so that we have to walk most of the time; indeed, all the time the last day.” They ate like travelers. “We fare very well on crackers, herring, boiled eggs, prairie chicken, tea, and sometimes a little milk. Have three chickens now cooking for our breakfast. We shoot enough of them on the wing as we go along to supply us with fresh meat. Oliver succeeds in bringing them down quite as well as any of us.”

  Passing through Missouri, Brown discovered in himself an aptitude for deception. The ruffians of the state were on the lookout for emigrants like Brown, especially ones transporting weapons. Brown passed himself off as a surveyor, and Oliver as his assistant. When they approached a group of men who looked as though they might cause trouble, Brown would get out his instruments and pretend to be running a line. Surveyors were welcome in the border regions, because they signified progress toward perfecting land titles. Brown would chat up the locals and continue on by. He and Oliver weren’t stopped, and their baggage wasn’t searched.

  On arrival in Kansas they joined Brown’s other sons on the Osawatomie River. The challenges of frontier life were in full view there. “We found our folks in a most uncomfortable situation, with no houses to shelter one of them, no hay or corn fodder of any account secured, shivering over their little fires, all exposed to the dreadful cutting winds, morning and evening and stormy days,” Brown wrote to Mary. The exposure had taken its toll. “Fever and ague and chill-fever seem to be very general.” His coming hadn’t much improved the lot of the Brown colony. “We had, between us all, sixty cents in cash when we arrived.”

  Yet in another respect, things looked promising. “Last Tuesday was an election day with Free-State men in Kansas, and hearing that there was a prospect of difficulty we all turned out most thoroughly armed,” Brown informed Mary. “But no enemy appeared, nor have I heard of any disturbance in any part of the Territory. Indeed, I believe Missouri is fast becoming discouraged about making Kansas a slave state, and I think the prospect of its becoming free is brightening every day.”

  8

  WHILE THE Kansas-Nebraska Act propelled John Brown to Kansas, it pulled Abraham Lincoln back to politics. Stephen Douglas had seemed untouchable in Illinois after his handling of the Compromise of 1850; the majority Democrats in the Illinois legislature resoundingly reelected him to the Senate in 1852. Perhaps some head-turning effect of his popularity contributed to his audacity in overturning the Missouri Compromise in the Nebraska law, as the Kansas-Nebraska measure was often called. In any case, the controversy surrounding that decision gave Lincoln an opening to return to the political lists. As he recalled of himself for his biographer, “The repeal of the Missouri compromise aroused him as he had never been before.”

  William Herndon watched the stirring. Lincoln had exited his first law partnership, and then a second, before creating a third partnership, with Herndon, almost a decade his junior. Herndon had seen Lincoln retreat into the law; now he watched him regain the political spirit. “A live issue was presented to him,” Herndon remarked about the Kansas-Nebraska law. “No one realized this sooner than he. In the office discussions he grew bolder in his utterances. He insisted that the social and political difference between slavery and freedom was becoming more marked; that one must overcome the other; and that postponing the struggle between them would only make it the more deadly in the end.” Herndon remembered Lincoln saying, “The day of compromise has passed. These two great ideas have been kept apart only by the most artful means. They are like two wild beasts in sight of each other, but chained and held apart. Someday these deadly antagonists will one or the other break their bonds, and then the question will be settled.” In another conversation Lincoln said of property in slaves, “It is the most glittering, ostentatious, and displaying property in the world, and now, if a young man goes courting”—in the South—“the only inquiry is how many negroes he or his lady-love owns. The love for slave property is swallowing up every other mercenary possession. Slavery is a great and crying injustice, an enormous national crime.”

  But Lincoln didn’t run for office again, not yet. Instead he campaigned for Whig candidates around Illinois, which meant taking on Douglas, who was campaigning for Democratic candidates. At first in editorials in Whig newspapers, then in speeches delivered at a distance from Douglas, Lincoln assailed the repeal of the Missouri Compromise. Douglas ignored him, but Lincoln persisted, and eventually the two began speaking from the same platform. Political speeches in those days were high entertainment, especially away from Springfield, which heard speeches all the time. In October 1854, Douglas and Lincoln shared a stage in Peoria.

  Douglas went first, as befitted the distinguished senator and the person making the positive argument for the new regime. Douglas attempted a filibuster against Lincoln, continuing so long that his listeners grew tired and hungry for their supper.

  Lincoln listened patiently until his turn finally came. “It is now several minutes past five, and Judge Douglas has spoken over three hours,” he observed to the crowd. “If you hear me at all, I wish you to hear me through. It will take me as long as it has taken him.” He suggested a break to eat. Then they could regather. Lincoln added that he had agreed that Douglas should have the last word. “I suspected if it were understood that the Judge was entirely done, you Democrats would leave and not hear me,” he explained, a slight smile on his face. “But by giving him the close, I felt confident you would stay for the fun of hearing him skin me.”

  The audience chuckled as they filed out. Most did indeed return to hear Lincoln make his case for the Missouri Compromise, lately repealed, and for the principle it represented. By this time defenders of the slave system lumped all opponents of any part of the system into a single category of abolitionism. Lincoln began by rejecting that taxonomy. “I wish to make and to keep the distinction between the existing institution, and the extension of it, so broad, and so clear that no honest man can misunderstand me, and no dishonest one successfully misrepresent me,” he said. He cited Thomas Jefferson as the archetype of those who understood the distinction. A Virginian and a slaveholder, Jefferson nonetheless inspired the ordinance of 1787 that declared the original Northwest Territory off-limits to slavery. Jefferson understood that liberty, not servitude, was what would make America great. The development of the region from Ohio to Wisconsin had proven him right. “It is now what Jefferson foresaw and intended—the happy home of teeming millions of free, white, prosperous people, and no slave amongst them,” Lincoln said.

  The Missouri Compromise had built on Jefferson’s vision, he continued. Lincoln wished that the entire Louisiana Purchase had been joined to the Union without slavery, but the institution already existed around New Orleans and again near St. Louis, and so it was allowed to continue there. But the largest part of the purchase was, like the old Northwest, preserved for freedom.

  The Compromise of 1850 had brought California into the Union as a free state and been silent on slavery in the rest of the lands taken from Mexico. Again, Lincoln—and the other supporters of the Wilmot Proviso—had wished for more. But politics was the art of compromise, and compromise there was. Yet little was lost to slavery, for all parties to the bargain tacitly agreed that the arid regions of New Mexico and Utah would never sustain slavery.

  The greatest feat of the Compromise of 1850 was that it effectively settled the question of slavery in the territories once and for all. This question had been the source of most of the friction between North and South since the founding of the republic; its settlement provided hope that the friction would ease and comity replace it.

  “But now new light breaks upon us,” Lincoln said sarcastically. “Now Congress declares this ought never to have been, and the like of it must never be again.” Douglas and the others who supported the Kansas-Nebraska Act couldn’t let the sleeping dog lie. They declared that the Missouri Compromise had contravened the liberty of slaveholders. “The sacred right of self-government is grossly violated by it!
” Lincoln jeered. “That perfect liberty they sigh for—the liberty of making slaves of other people—Jefferson never thought of; their own father never thought of; they never thought of themselves, a year ago.”

  Partisans of slavery often charged their opponents with moral smugness. The charge wasn’t always inaccurate. But Lincoln rejected it for himself and most in the North. “I have no prejudice against the Southern people,” he said. “They are just what we would be in their situation. If slavery did not now exist amongst them, they would not introduce it. If it did now exist amongst us, we should not instantly give it up.” Southerners frequently said that they hadn’t invented slavery; it had been bequeathed to them, and they were doing their best to manage the inheritance. Lincoln didn’t deny that this was a hard problem. “I surely will not blame them for not doing what I should not know how to do myself. If all earthly power were given me, I should not know what to do, as to the existing institution.”

  His first impulse, he said, would be to free all the slaves and send them to Liberia. But a moment’s reflection revealed the impracticality of this. Most of the slaves knew nothing of Africa, and Africa nothing of them. “If they were all landed there in a day, they would all perish in the next ten days,” Lincoln said. Nor were there ships to carry them to Africa. Perhaps in the long run, sending freed slaves to Africa would work, but not at once. Lincoln hoped it would work, for the alternatives were dismal. “Free them all and keep them among us as underlings? Is it quite certain that this benefits their condition?” Lincoln couldn’t say it would. “What next? Free them, and make them politically and socially our equals? My own feelings will not admit of this; and if mine would, we well know that those of the great mass of white people will not. Whether this feeling accords with justice and sound judgment is not the sole question, if indeed, it is any part of it. A universal feeling, whether well or ill-founded, cannot be safely disregarded. We cannot, then, make them equals.” Possibly some middle path would work, but only possibly. “It does seem to me that systems of gradual emancipation might be adopted,” Lincoln said. “But for their tardiness in this, I will not undertake to judge our brethren of the South.”