by H. W. Brands
Blair wasn’t sure whether to take Brown seriously. “I replied, without much consideration, that I would make him five hundred of them for a dollar and a quarter a piece; or if he wanted a thousand of them, I thought they might be made for a dollar a piece,” he said. But he couldn’t commit himself until he looked further into the matter.
This was good enough for Brown. “He simply remarked that he would want them made,” Blair said.
Blair still wasn’t sure Brown was serious. “I thought no more about it until a few days afterwards,” he said. “I did not really suppose he meant it.”
Brown soon showed he did mean it. He asked Blair to fabricate a sample. Blair obliged, and Brown asked for a slight alteration that made the weapons easier to ship. Then Brown said he wanted a thousand.
Blair now had another reservation. He wondered whether Brown had the money to pay for the work. “Mr. Brown,” he said, “I am a laboring man, and, if I engage in this contract with you, I shall want to know how I am going to get my pay.”
“That is all right,” Brown answered. “It is just that you should, and I will make it perfectly secure to you. I will give you one half the money, that is $500, within ten days; I will pay you the balance within thirty days, and give you ninety days to complete the contract.”
Brown drew up the contract, and he and Blair signed it. Money proved a bit tighter than Brown had expected; for the first installment he was able to give Blair only $350. With this Blair purchased materials: wooden handles and iron for the blades. He set one of his men to forging the blades. Two weeks later Blair received another $200 from Brown, and the work proceeded.
But the promised balance—now of $450—did not appear within the thirty days specified. Instead Blair got a note from Brown saying, “If you do not hurry out but 500 of those articles it may, perhaps, be as well, until you hear again.” Blair wasn’t especially concerned. Other customers had been slow in paying. In any case, the handles for the weapons required seasoning before attachment to the blades, lest they shrink and come loose. Blair continued the work on the blades and let the handles dry.
During the following months, however, he neither heard from Brown nor received more money. Blair decided that business was business. “I stopped the thing right where it was, determining that I would not run any risk in the matter. I just laid it aside, and there it lay, the work in an unfinished state, the handles stored away in the store-house, the steel which I had purchased stored away in boxes, the few blades which I had forged laid away.”
* * *
—
BROWN’S TRAVELS WERE complicated by the need to avoid arrest. “One of U.S. Hounds is on my track, and I have kept myself hid for a few days to let the track grow cold,” he informed a friend. Fortunately for Brown, photography hardly existed, and no likeness of him circulated. As a result, using false names—Nelson Hawkins, Ian Smith—and care, he eluded his pursuers.
Illness also slowed him. Malaria was endemic to the Mississippi and Ohio valleys, and its “fever and ague” prostrated Brown for weeks at a stretch. Sometimes it affected his mental acuity. “I am much confused in mind, and cannot remember what I wish to write,” he told his wife in one letter.
Between ill health and the calm that had settled over Kansas, Brown accomplished little for many months. He traveled about the Midwest to raise money, visiting Cleveland, Chicago, Milwaukee and other cities and towns where abolitionists congregated. He spent several weeks in Tabor, Iowa, regaining his strength and gathering loyalists around him. Most of the free-state men who had stood beside him in Kansas were Kansans; having kept Kansas out of slavery’s grasp, they considered their work done. Brown now needed men who would follow him into the South.
As cold weather settled upon Iowa in the late autumn of 1857, making campaigning or even drilling difficult or impossible, Brown headed east once more.
“I am (praised be God!) once more in York State,” he wrote to his wife from Rochester in January 1858. “Whether I shall be permitted to visit you or not this winter or spring, I cannot now say; but it is some relief of mind to feel that I am again so near you. Possibly, if I cannot go to see you, I may be able to devise some way for some one or more of you to meet me somewhere. The anxiety I feel to see my wife and children once more I am unable to describe.” Yet duty called, and he hoped they could join him in committing to the higher cause. “Courage, courage, courage!—the great work of my life (the unseen Hand that ‘guided me, and who has indeed holden my right hand, may hold it still,’ though I have not known him at all as I ought) I may yet see accomplished (God helping), and be permitted to return, and ‘rest at evening.’ ”
But home was hazardous for a man on the run. The authorities didn’t know where Brown was, but they knew where he lived, and they kept a lookout for a man of his description in the vicinity of North Elba. He cautioned Mary against anything that might tip them off. “Do not noise it about that I am in these parts,” he said, “and direct to N. Hawkins, care of Frederick Douglass, Rochester, N.Y.”
Brown touched on a topic sensitive in the family. He had been trying to persuade his son-in-law Henry Thompson, who had been with him at Pottawatomie, to rejoin the company. Thompson had returned home, evidently having had enough of bloodshed. “O my daughter Ruth!” Brown wrote to Thompson’s wife. “Could any plan be devised whereby you let Henry ‘go to school’ (as you expressed it in your letter to him while in Kansas), I would rather now have him ‘for another term’ than to have a hundred average scholars.” Brown said he was sure some way could be devised whereby Ruth and her children could be supported while Henry was in the field. Yet he didn’t want to push too hard. “God forbid me to flatter you into trouble!” he said to Ruth. “I did not do it before. My dear child, could you face such music if, on a full explanation, Henry could be satisfied that his family might be safe?” Brown acknowledged what he had put Ruth’s mother through. “I would make a similar inquiry of my own dear wife; but I have kept her tumbling here and there over a stormy and tempestuous sea for so many years that I cannot ask her such a question.”
Ruth considered Brown’s plea. “Dear father, you have asked me rather of a hard question,” she replied. “I want to answer you wisely, but I hardly know how. I cannot bear the thought of Henry leaving me again; yet I know I am selfish.” It wasn’t the danger so much as the separation she feared, she said. In fact she volunteered to join Henry with Brown’s company. “Would my going be of any service to him or you? I should be very glad to be with him, if it would not be more expense than what we could do. I say we; could I not do something for the cause?”
Brown might have been willing to say yes. But Thompson would not. Ruth relayed his response to Brown: “Tell father that I think he places too high an estimate on my qualifications.” And Thompson stayed home.
* * *
—
BROWN KEPT MOVING. “I am here with our good friends Gerrit Smith and wife, who, I am most happy to tell you, are ready to go in for a share in the whole trade,” Brown wrote from Peterboro, New York, to his son John. The wealthy Smith was Brown’s most consistent sponsor, and Brown was pleased for the continued support. He added, “I have still need of all the help I can possibly get, but am greatly encouraged in asking for it.”
To stimulate help, Brown shared more about what the “whole trade” entailed. Frank Sanborn traveled to Peterboro to see Brown; he joined Brown, Gerrit Smith and one of Sanborn’s college friends, Edwin Morton, who happened to be a tutor to Smith’s children, at Smith’s large house. “Here, in the long winter evening that followed, Brown unfolded for the first time to me his plans for a campaign somewhere in slave territory east of the Alleghenies,” Sanborn recalled. “It was an amazing proposition—desperate in its character, wholly inadequate in its provision of means, and of most uncertain result. Such as it was, Brown had set his heart on it as the shortest way to restore our slave-cursed repu
blic to the principles of the Declaration of Independence; and he was ready to die in its execution.”
Sanborn and the others were skeptical and asked for specifics, not least because Brown was once more seeking money. “He laid before us in detail his methods of organization and fortification; of settlement in the South, if that were possible, and of retreat through the North, if necessary; and his theory of the way in which such an invasion would be received in the country at large.”
Brown said he wanted candid responses to his plan. Yet when he heard them, he wasn’t moved. “We listened until after midnight, proposing objections and raising difficulties,” Sanborn recounted. “But nothing could shake the purpose of the old Puritan. Every difficulty had been foreseen and provided against in some manner; the grand difficulty of all—the manifest hopelessness of undertaking anything so vast with such slender means—was met with the text of Scripture: ‘If God be for us, who can be against us?’ ”
Brown said preparations were well along. He needed but eight hundred dollars, although a thousand would be better. “With that he would open his campaign in the spring, and he had no doubt that the enterprise ‘would pay,’ ” Sanborn related.
Once more Sanborn and the others cited the difficulties Brown would face. “But no argument could prevail against his fixed purpose; he was determined to make the attempt, with many or with few, and he left us only the alternatives of betrayal, desertion or support.”
The group adjourned for the evening and met again the next day. “The discussion was renewed, and, as usually happened when he had time enough, Captain Brown began to prevail over the objections,” Sanborn wrote. “We saw we must either stand by him or leave him to dash himself alone against the fortress he was determined to assault. To withhold aid would only delay, not prevent him.”
That afternoon Sanborn met separately with Gerrit Smith. The two walked across the snowy hills of Smith’s estate, discussing Brown’s project. Smith agreed with Sanborn that they had no choice. “You see how it is,” Smith said. “Our dear old friend has made up his mind to this course, and cannot be turned from it. We cannot give him up to die alone; we must support him.” Smith said he would raise money for Brown in New York; Sanborn must do the same in Massachusetts. “I see no other way.”
Sanborn nodded. “I had come to the same conclusion, and by the same process of reasoning,” he said. He added, “It was done far more from our regard for the man than from hopes of immediate success.”
Sanborn returned to Boston. A letter from Brown followed him. “My dear Friend,” Brown wrote. “Mr. Morton has taken the liberty of saying to me that you felt half inclined to make a common cause with me. I greatly rejoice at this; for I believe when you come to look at the ample field I labor in, and the rich harvest which not only this entire country but the whole world during the present and future generations may reap from its successful cultivation, you will feel that you are out of your element until you find you are in it, an entire unit. What an inconceivable amount of good you might so effect by your counsel, your example, your encouragement, your natural and acquired ability for active service! And then, how very little we can possibly lose! Certainly the cause is enough to live for, if not to —— for.”
Brown reflected on his own case. “I have only had this one opportunity, in a life of nearly sixty years; and could I be continued ten times as long again, I might not again have another equal opportunity. God has honored but comparatively a very small part of mankind with any possible chance for such mighty and soul-satisfying rewards.” Brown anticipated success, even if it came at a cost. “I expect nothing but to endure hardness, but I expect to effect a mighty conquest, even though it be like the last victory of Samson. I felt for a number of years, in earlier life, a steady, strong desire to die; but since I saw any prospect of becoming a ‘reaper’ in the great harvest, I have not only felt quite willing to live, but have enjoyed life much, and am now rather anxious to live for a few years more.”
25
RICHARD REALF WAS an Englishman of precocious literary talents, a poet published before he turned twenty. “I had been a protégé of Lady Noel Byron, widow of Lord Byron,” he later said to investigators probing his connection to John Brown. “I had disagreed with Lady Noel Byron, on account of some private matters, which it is not necessary to explain here, but which rendered me desirous of finding some other place in which to dwell. Moreover, my instincts were democratic and republican, or, at least, anti-monarchical. Therefore I came to America.”
Americans weren’t interested in Realf’s poetry, so he started writing for newspapers. The story of the day was the struggle for Kansas, and to Kansas he went. “I was residing in the city of Lawrence, Kansas, as a correspondent of the Illinois State Gazette, edited by Messrs. Bailhace & Baker,” Realf continued. “I had been, and was, a radical abolitionist.” John Brown, then in Tabor, Iowa, apparently read some of Realf’s pieces and decided he might be useful. Brown sent one of his men, John Cook, to Lawrence to invite Realf to come to Tabor. Realf, curious, accepted the invitation.
The investigators asked Realf if Brown explained the purpose of the invitation.
“He stated that he purposed to make an incursion into the Southern states, somewhere in the mountainous region of the Blue Ridge and the Alleghenies,” Realf replied.
What was the aim of the incursion?
“To liberate the slaves.”
Did Brown explain how this was to be accomplished?
“Not at that time.”
Did Realf enter into any agreement with Brown?
“Yes, sir.”
Of what nature?
“I agreed to accompany him.”
The investigators asked Realf what happened after this first meeting.
“From Tabor, where I myself first met John Brown and the majority of the persons forming the white part of his company in Virginia, we passed across the state of Iowa, until we reached Cedar county, in that state. We started in December, 1857. It was about the end of December, 1857, or the beginning of January, 1858, when we reached Cedar county, the journey thus consuming about a month of time. We stopped at a village called Springdale, in that county, where in a settlement principally composed of Quakers, we remained.”
At Springdale, Realf and the others practiced at being soldiers. Brown soon left to travel east in search of funds to support them. He was absent for three months, returning in April 1858. Brown announced that the company was going to Canada. They made an odd group, some dozen men, mostly young but one much older, traveling for no reason they could reveal to those they encountered. Odder still was that they included a black man, Richard Richardson. And stranger yet, for that era, was that Richardson was treated just like the others.
One of the investigators queried Realf on this point. “Was Brown’s intercourse with the negro of a character to show that he treated him as an equal and an associate?”
“It certainly was,” Realf said. “To prove it, I will simply state that, having to wait twelve hours at Chicago, in order to make railroad connection from Chicago to Detroit, and to Canada, we necessarily had to breakfast and dine. We went into one of the hotels in order to breakfast. We took this colored man, Richardson, to table with us. The keeper of the hotel explained to us that it could not be allowed. We did not eat our breakfast. We went to another hotel, where we could take a colored man with us and sit down to breakfast.”
“Where you could enjoy your rights, I suppose?”
“Yes, sir.”
From Detroit the group crossed into Canada, halting at the town of Chatham. By this time the Underground Railroad had transported thousands of fugitive slaves to freedom in Canada, and among them Brown and his party were most welcome. They lodged at a hotel operated by a black man. From this hotel Brown discreetly circulated news of a convention to be held in Chatham for an important purpose.
Only when the small group had gathered did they learn what that purpose was. “John Brown, on rising, stated that for twenty or thirty years the idea had possessed him like a passion of giving liberty to the slaves,” Realf recounted. “John Brown stated, moreover, that he had not been indebted to anyone for the suggestion of this plan; that it arose spontaneously in his own mind; that through a series of from twenty to thirty years it had gradually formed and developed itself into shape and plan. He stated that he had read all the books upon insurrectionary warfare which he could lay his hands upon—the Roman warfare; the successful opposition of the Spanish chieftains during the period when Spain was a Roman province; how with ten thousand men divided and subdivided into small companies, acting simultaneously, yet separately, they withstood the whole consolidated power of the Roman empire through a number of years.” Brown described other insurrections, including that by slaves in Haiti against their white masters. “From all these things he had drawn the conclusion, believing, as he stated there he did believe, and as we all (if I may judge from myself) believed, that upon the first intimation of a plan formed for the liberation of the slaves, they would immediately rise all over the Southern states. He supposed that they would come into the mountains to join him, where he purposed to work, and that by flocking to his standard they would enable him (by making the line of mountains which cuts diagonally through Maryland and Virginia down through the Southern states into Tennessee and Alabama, the base of his operations) to act upon the plantations on the plains lying on each side of that range of mountains, and that we should be able to establish ourselves in the fastnesses, and if any hostile action (as would be) were taken against us, either by the militia of the separate states, or by the armies of the United States, we purposed to defeat first the militia, and next, if it were possible, the troops of the United States, and then organize the freed blacks.”