The Zealot and the Emancipator

by H. W. Brands

  Even so, Black Jack marked a turn in the struggle for Kansas. The violence to this point had been unorganized; Black Jack was the initial engagement of organized forces, one for slavery and the other against. In time some would call it the first battle of the Civil War.

  14

  AUGUST BONDI, an Austrian immigrant who, like many immigrants, found slavery simultaneously puzzling and appalling, was one of those who served with John Brown. He hadn’t expected to take up arms against slavery, but he fell under Brown’s spell. “He exhibited at all times the most affectionate care for each of us,” Bondi later said of Brown. The men of Brown’s company were often on short rations, chiefly pan bread and molasses, washed down with water drawn from Ottawa Creek, which ran near a camp they occupied during this period. “Nevertheless we kept in excellent spirits; we considered ourselves as one family, allied to one another by the consciousness that it was our duty to undergo all these privations to further the good cause; had determined to share any danger with one another, that victory or death might find us together.”

  Brown did the cooking, simple as it was. He said the blessing before each meal. “He was an orthodox Christian,” Bondi recalled, adding, “Some of his sons were free-thinkers, regarding which he remarked that he had tried to give his children a good education, and now they were old enough to choose for themselves.”

  Brown lectured his men on the code of conduct for their cause. “Time and again he entreated us never to follow the example of the border ruffians, who took a delight in destruction; never to burn houses or fences, so often done by the enemy.” As to killing: “Repeatedly he admonished us not to take human life except when absolutely necessary.”

  Bondi seems not to have asked the obvious question: Had it been necessary to kill the five men on Pottawatomie Creek? Rather, like the others drawn by Brown’s stern charisma, he was willing to accept Brown’s verdict on who should live and who die.

  Bondi never before or after felt such kinship and purpose. “We were united as a band of brothers by the love and affection towards the man who with tender words and wise counsel, in the depths of the wilderness of Ottawa Creek, prepared a handful of young men for the work of laying the foundation of a free commonwealth.”

  * * *

  —

  JAMES REDPATH DIDN’T join John Brown’s band of fighters; he carried a pen rather than a rifle. Yet he too felt Brown’s magnetism. Redpath was another immigrant, from England, and he wrote for Horace Greeley’s staunchly antislavery New York Tribune. He read about Brown after the Pottawatomie killings, and he went to investigate.

  He rode slowly through a forested stretch along Ottawa Creek. He heard a rustling at one side of the trail. “Suddenly, thirty paces before me, I saw a wild-looking man, of fine proportions, with half-a-dozen pistols of various sizes stuck in his belt, and a large Arkansas bowie-knife prominent among them,” Redpath recorded. “His head was uncovered; his hair was uncombed; his face had not been shaved for many months. We were similarly dressed—with red-topped boots worn over the pantaloons, a coarse blue shirt, and a pistol belt. This was the usual fashion of the times.”

  The wild man shouted at Redpath. “Hullo! You’re in our camp,” he said.

  Redpath had learned American ways since coming to Kansas. He drew his Colt revolver and cocked it. “Halt! Or I’ll fire!” he warned.

  The man stopped. He looked closely at Redpath. He declared that he had seen him before, at Lawrence. He introduced himself as Frederick Brown, son of John Brown. He was carrying a pail and had come to the creek to fetch water. Satisfying himself that Redpath was no threat, he agreed to lead the reporter to Brown.

  Redpath holstered his weapon and prepared to follow. Fred Brown plunged ahead. “He talked wildly, as he walked before me, turning round every minute, as he spoke of the then recent affair of Pottawatomie,” Redpath wrote. “His family, he said, had been accused of it; he denied it indignantly, with the wild air of a maniac.” Fred worked himself into such a frenzy that Redpath had to say he would listen no more until he met John Brown. Fred shrugged and walked on. Redpath could tell they were nearing the camp by the challenges given them by gruff men standing sentry. Finally the trees parted.

  “I shall not soon forget the scene that here opened to my view,” Redpath recounted. “Near the edge of the creek a dozen horses were tied, all ready saddled for a ride for life, or a hunt after Southern invaders. A dozen rifles and sabers were stacked against the trees. In an open space, amid the shady and lofty woods, there was a great blazing fire with a pot on it; a woman, bare-headed, with an honest, sun-burnt face, was picking blackberries from the bushes; three or four armed men were lying on red and blue blankets on the grass; and two fine-looking youths were standing, leaning on their arms, on guard, nearby.” One of the young men was Salmon Brown, then nineteen.

  His father was busy. “Old Brown himself stood near the fire, with his shirt-sleeves rolled up and a large piece of pork in his hand,” Redpath wrote. “He was cooking a pig. He was poorly clad, and his toes protruded from his boots. The old man received me with great cordiality.” The others in the camp gathered around their leader and this stranger. “But it was for a moment only, for the Captain”—John Brown—“ordered them to renew their work.” Before Redpath could ask the question at the top of his reporter’s list, Brown preempted him. “He respectfully but firmly forbade conversation on the Pottawatomie affair.”

  Redpath didn’t insist. He decided to observe camp life instead. “No manner of profane language was permitted,” he noted. “No man of immoral character was allowed to stay, except as a prisoner of war.” John Brown imposed—or conveyed—a kind of theocracy. “He made prayers in which all the company united, every morning and evening; and no food was ever tasted by his men until the Divine blessing had been asked on it. After every meal, thanks were returned to the Bountiful Giver. Often, I was told, the old man would retire to the densest solitudes, to wrestle with his God in secret prayer. One of his company subsequently informed me that, after these retirings, he would say that the Lord had directed him in visions what to do; that, for himself, he did not love warfare, but peace—only acting in obedience to the will of the Lord, and fighting God’s battles for his children’s sake.”

  Brown himself articulated his criteria for choosing followers. “I would rather have the small-pox, yellow fever and cholera all together in my camp than a man without principles,” he told Redpath. “It is a mistake, sir, that our people make when they think that bullies are the best fighters, or that they are the men fit to oppose these Southerners. Give me men of good principles, God-fearing men, men who respect themselves; and with a dozen of them, I will oppose any hundred.”

  Redpath came away from the camp mightily impressed. “Never before had I met such a band of men,” he said. “They were not earnest, but earnestness incarnate.” Harking back to the English army of Oliver Cromwell, Redpath declared, “I had seen, for the first time, the spirit of the Ironsides armed and encamped.” He added another thought, or rather prediction: “I had seen the predestined leader of the second, and holier American revolution.”

  * * *

  —

  WILLIAM PHILLIPS ENCOUNTERED John Brown later that summer. Brown spent the month of June tending to his wounded men, recruiting more fighters and dodging arrest by the territorial authorities. But by early July the camp life was chafing his activist spirit, and he decided to return to action. A free-state counterpart to the pro-slavery Lecompton legislature was scheduled to meet in Topeka; toward Topeka he directed his band.

  At Lawrence, on the way, he met Phillips, another of Horace Greeley’s reporters. The meeting served the purposes of both men. Phillips got an interview with the most notorious of the antislavery partisans; Brown had the opportunity to tell his story for national circulation. Brown didn’t admit anything about the Pottawatomie killings, and Phillips didn’t push him. Nor did Brow
n share what his future intentions were, not least because he didn’t know. But otherwise he opened to Phillips in a way he had to no others.

  “During the day he stayed with me in Lawrence I had my first good opportunity to judge the old man’s character,” Phillips recorded. “I had seen him in his camp, had seen him in the field, and he was always an enigma, a strange compound of enthusiasm and cold, methodic stolidity—a volcano beneath a mountain of snow.” Phillips inquired of Brown’s background and learned of Brown’s peripatetic lifestyle. Brown delivered his opinions on military tactics. “He criticized all the arms then in use, and showed me a fine specimen of repeating-rifle which had long-range sights, and, he said, would carry eight hundred yards; but, he added, the way to fight was to press to close quarters.”

  Phillips discovered that he and Brown were traveling in the same direction; Brown asked him to wait until nightfall so that they could travel together. Brown didn’t want to be on the road in daylight. Night came, and the company marched for several hours through the dark before Brown called a halt to eat and rest. The summer air had cooled; the grass was wet with dew. Brown offered Phillips a part of his own ration. “I was not at all hungry, and if I had been I doubt if I could have eaten it,” Phillips recalled. “It was dry beef, which was not so bad; but the bread had been made from corn bruised between stones and then rolled in balls and cooked in the coal and ashes of the camp fire. These ashes served for saleratus”—a leaven.

  Brown, observing Phillips’s fastidiousness, said, “I am afraid you will hardly be able to eat a soldier’s harsh fare.”

  Phillips acknowledged that he wasn’t cut out for a soldier. (He later changed his mind, serving in the Union army during the Civil War and rising to the rank of colonel.)

  The simple meal over, Brown and Phillips prepared to rest. “We placed our two saddles together, so that our heads lay only a few feet apart,” Phillips recounted. “He spread his blanket on the wet grass, and, when we lay together upon it, mine was spread over us.” The other men slept for the three hours Brown allotted them; Brown and Phillips talked. Or, rather, Brown did the talking, with Phillips simply prompting him from time to time. “I soon found that he was a very thorough astronomer, and he enlightened me on a good many matters in the starry firmament above us. He pointed out the different constellations and their movements. ‘Now,’ he said, ‘it is midnight,’ and he pointed to the finger marks of his great clock in the sky.”

  The two sides of Brown that Phillips had detected during the day grew more pronounced at night. “In his ordinary moods the man seemed so rigid, stern, and unimpressible when I first knew him that I never thought a poetic and impulsive nature lay behind that cold exterior,” Phillips wrote. “The whispering of the wind on the prairie was full of voices to him, and the stars as they shone in the firmament of God seemed to inspire him.”

  Brown contrasted the stars with humans. “How admirable is the symmetry of the heavens, how grand and beautiful,” he said. “Everything moves in sublime harmony in the government of God. Not so with us poor creatures. If one star is more brilliant than the others, it is continually shooting in some erratic way into space.”

  Brown turned to politics. “He discussed and criticized both parties in Kansas. Of the pro-slavery men he spoke in bitterness. He said that slavery besotted everything, and made men more brutal and coarse. Nor did the free-state men escape his sharp censure. He said that we had many noble and true men, but that we had too many broken-down politicians from the older states. These men, he said, would rather pass resolutions than act, and they criticized all who did real work. A professional politician, he went on, you never could trust, for even if he had convictions, he was always ready to sacrifice his principles for his advantage.”

  Brown reflected on the institutions of American life. “He thought society ought to be organized on a less selfish basis; for while material interests gained something by the deification of pure selfishness, men and women lost much by it. He said that all great reforms, like the Christian religion, were based on broad, generous, self-sacrificing principles. He condemned the sale of land as chattel, and thought that there was an infinite number of wrongs to right before society would be what it should be, but that in our country slavery was the ‘sum of villainies,’ and its abolition the first essential work. If the American people did not take courage and end it speedily, human freedom and republican liberty would soon be empty names in these United States.”

  * * *

  —

  TO HELP GIVE SUBSTANCE to his vision of a free America, Brown sharpened the discipline of his followers. He crafted a covenant for his men to sign, creating the “Kansas Regulars” and designating himself as their commander. “We severally pledge our word and our sacred honor to said Commander, and to each other,” they promised. They would fight “for the maintenance of the rights and liberties of the Free-State Citizens of Kansas.” They would be good and faithful soldiers. “We will observe and maintain a strict and thorough military discipline at all times.”

  Some thirty men took the pledge during August; from this time John Brown was commonly referred to as Captain Brown. He shortly found occasion to lead the Kansas Regulars into battle. He learned that a large pro-slavery force was marching in the direction of Osawatomie, a free-state stronghold. Their appearance and boasts declared that they intended to sack the town, as their comrades had sacked Lawrence three months earlier. Brown, whose frustration at being too slow to defend Lawrence had helped trigger the Pottawatomie murders, determined to prevent another such outrage.

  Brown’s company beat the slavery men to Osawatomie and awaited their arrival. Soon enough the slavery partisans came within rifle range, and in a first encounter Fred Brown was shot and killed. The loss of his son steeled John Brown’s resolve but unnerved some of his men, as did the revelation that they were badly outnumbered. Brown ignored their fear and summoned them to battle. “Men, come on!” he shouted, rushing in the direction of the enemy.

  They took up positions from which they could snipe at the attackers, and for a time held them at bay. But as the slavery side realized how few Brown’s men were, their commander ordered a charge. Brown’s fighters had never faced a charge, and they didn’t wait to face this one. They scattered into the woods, leaving Osawatomie undefended.

  The attackers had to decide between pursuing Brown’s band and completing the job they had set for themselves. They chose the latter, deeming Brown’s company too insignificant to bother chasing. Their commander later said that the battle at Osawatomie was no battle at all but “merely the driving out of a flock of quail.” He also claimed, “We killed about thirty of them, among the number, certain, a son of Old Brown, and almost certain Brown himself.” To this exaggeration he added an exculpation: “The boys would burn the town to the ground. I could not help it.”

  John Brown, having been forced to retreat after his fleeing men, looked back upon the burning town. Jason Brown recalled tears rolling down his father’s face. “God sees it,” John Brown said. “I have only a short time to live—only one death to die, and I will die fighting for this cause. There will be no more peace in this land until slavery is done for. I will give them something else to do than to extend slave territory. I will carry the war into Africa.”

  PART II

  Springfield

  15

  ABRAHAM LINCOLN WOULD have known what Brown meant, had he heard what Brown said about carrying the war to Africa. But Lincoln had battles of his own that season. He was campaigning for president—not for himself, but for John C. Frémont, the Republican standard-bearer. Frémont was dashingly handsome, with the exotic looks of his French-Canadian father; adventurously accomplished, as the leader of military explorations of the Far West; accidentally rich, after being swindled into an apparently worthless California tract that turned out to sit atop the Mother Lode of the gold rush; and politically connected, to Missouri senato
r Thomas Hart Benton, his father-in-law. Yet no one gave the Republican nominee much chance in his party’s first try at the presidency. The South was solidly against him and every other Republican. The Democrats nominated James Buchanan, a Pennsylvanian whose sympathies ran southward.

  The wild card in the race was Millard Fillmore, the former president, who received the nomination of the American party—the Know-Nothings. As Lincoln took up the cudgels for Frémont, he wielded them especially against Fillmore, who had even less chance of victory than Frémont but stole anti-Buchanan votes. “I understand you are a Fillmore man,” Lincoln wrote to a Springfield neighbor. “If, as between Fremont and Buchanan, you really prefer the election of Buchanan, then burn this without reading a line further. But if you would like to defeat Buchanan, and his gang, allow me a word with you. Does anyone pretend that Fillmore can carry the vote of this state? I have not heard a single man pretend so. Every vote taken from Fremont and given to Fillmore is just so much in favor of Buchanan. The Buchanan men see this; and hence their great anxiety in favor of the Fillmore movement. They know where the shoe pinches. They now greatly prefer having a man of your character go for Fillmore than for Buchanan, because they expect several to go with you, who would go for Fremont if you were to go directly for Buchanan.”

  Where Fillmore dodged the slavery issue, Lincoln bored in on it. “The question of slavery, at the present day, should be not only the greatest question, but very nearly the sole question,” he declared in one of his many speeches for the Republican ticket. “The question is simply this: Shall slavery be spread into the new territories, or not? This is the naked question.” The Democrats were trying to confuse things, Lincoln said. “Our adversaries charge Fremont with being an abolitionist. When pressed to show proof, they frankly confess that they can show no such thing. They then run off upon the assertion that his supporters are abolitionists.” Lincoln didn’t deny that abolitionists favored Frémont over Buchanan and Fillmore. But that didn’t make abolitionists out of all Republicans, or even very many of them.