by H. W. Brands
The investigators asked where Brown expected to acquire assistance. Who were to be his soldiers?
“The negroes were to constitute the soldiers,” Realf said. “John Brown expected that all the free negroes in the Northern states would immediately flock to his standard. He expected that all the slaves in the Southern states would do the same. He believed, too, that as many of the free negroes in Canada as could accompany him, would do so.”
What would happen to the slaveholders?
“The slaveholders were to be taken as hostages, if they refused to let their slaves go. It is a mistake to suppose that they were to be killed; they were not to be. They were to be held as hostages for the safe treatment of any prisoners of John Brown’s who might fall into the hands of hostile parties.”
And the non-slaveholders?
“All the non-slaveholders were to be protected. Those who would not join the organization of John Brown, but who would not oppose it, were to be protected; but those who did oppose it, were to be treated as the slaveholders themselves.”
Did Brown say anything else?
“John Brown said that he believed a successful incursion could be made; that it could be successfully maintained; that the several slave states could be forced (from the position in which they found themselves) to recognize the freedom of those who had been slaves within the respective limits of those states.”
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WITH THIS AS a preface, John Brown presented to the group a document he called a “Provisional Constitution and Ordinances for the People of the United States.” They scratched their heads but kept silent as he read the preamble: “Whereas slavery, throughout its entire existence in the United States, is none other than a most barbarous, unprovoked, and unjustifiable war of one portion of its citizens upon another portion—the only conditions of which are perpetual imprisonment and hopeless servitude or absolute extermination—in utter disregard and violation of those eternal and self-evident truths set forth in our Declaration of Independence; therefore we, citizens of the United States, and the oppressed people who, by a recent decision of the Supreme Court, are declared to have no rights which the white man is bound to respect, together with all other people degraded by the laws thereof, do, for the time being, ordain and establish for ourselves the following Provisional Constitution and Ordinances, the better to protect our persons, property, lives, and liberties, and to govern our actions.”
Brown didn’t explain what territory the proposed government would claim, or what the government’s relations to the existing federal and state governments would be. Instead he proceeded to the constitution’s first article, which endorsed a radical form of equality. “All persons of mature age, whether proscribed, oppressed, and enslaved citizens, or of the proscribed and oppressed races of the United States, who shall agree to sustain and enforce the Provisional Constitution and Ordinances of this organization, together with all minor children of such persons, shall be held to be fully entitled to protection under the same.”
Subsequent articles proclaimed three branches for the provisional government. The legislative branch would consist of a single house “composed of not less than five nor more than ten members.” Brown was starting small. The executive branch would be headed by a president and a vice president. The judicial branch would consist of a supreme court manned by a chief justice and four associate justices, and of five circuit courts, one for each of the justices. The justices would be elected rather than appointed.
There was much more, to the sum of forty-eight articles. Brown’s charter was designed for a war government, as indicated by article 32, which mandated a “fair and impartial trial” for any captured prisoner; and article 37, which decreed the death penalty for deserters, spies and saboteurs. Article 33 declared that slaveholders who voluntarily released their slaves should be “treated as friends, and not merely as persons neutral.” Articles 40 through 44 forbade swearing, drunkenness, quarreling and fornication; ordered capital punishment for rape; authorized a bureau for repairing broken families; enjoined respect for the Sabbath; encouraged the open carrying of firearms by women as well as men; and banned the concealed carrying of weapons. Article 46 asserted, unconvincingly, the loyalty of Brown and his followers to the existing governments in the United States: “The foregoing articles shall not be construed so as in any way to encourage the overthrow of any state government, or of the general government of the United States, and look to no dissolution of the Union, but simply to amendment and repeal. And our flag shall be the same that our fathers fought under in the Revolution.”
Not until this article was there any objection from the gathered group, who realized that they were the delegates to Brown’s constitutional convention. The first forty-five articles were adopted unanimously and without discussion. The loyalty article rubbed one delegate the wrong way, and he moved to strike it out. But the motion failed to win a second, and the article was swiftly adopted, as were the remaining two, unanimously.
The constitution having been adopted, Brown was named commander in chief of the provisional regime’s armed forces.
The group adjourned, with most still wondering what they had done.
26
BROWN HIT the road once more. From western Canada he traveled east, always seeking money. He met with six of his supporters who had formed a secret committee to fund his activities—Gerrit Smith, Frank Sanborn, Theodore Parker, Samuel Howe, George Stearns and Thomas Higginson. Smith supplied another endorsement, a new donation and a fresh disclaimer. “I have great faith in the wisdom, integrity, and bravery of Captain Brown,” Smith wrote to Sanborn. “For several years I have frequently given him money toward sustaining him in his contests with the slave-power. Whenever he shall embark in another of these contests I shall again stand ready to help him; and I will begin with giving him a hundred dollars. I do not wish to know Captain Brown’s plans; I hope he will keep them to himself.”
Brown made a quick visit to North Elba, where he saw his wife and the children there, and looped west through Ohio and Illinois, finally reaching Kansas in late June. “We were at supper that day at a hotel in Lawrence,” wrote James Redpath, the journalist who had visited Brown’s camp on Ottawa Creek, “when a stately old man, with a flowing white beard, entered the room and took a seat at the public table. I immediately recognized in the stranger John Brown. Yet many persons who had previously known him did not penetrate his patriarchal disguise.”
The disguise extended to his name, which he had changed once more, to Shubel Morgan. A recent uptick in violence in Kansas caused Brown to think there might be more fighting there. He wasn’t averse to the possibility. Difficulties dogged his plans for an attack on the South. An erstwhile member of Brown’s entourage, Hugh Forbes, unhappy with Brown’s leadership, had been spreading tales in Washington of what Brown had in mind. Brown’s backers took fright and determined to rein him in. “It seems to me that under these circumstances Brown must go no further, and so I write him,” said Gerrit Smith to Frank Sanborn. “I never was convinced of the wisdom of his scheme. But as things now stand, it seems to me it would be madness to attempt to execute it.”
Letters, even from such a previously unquestioning supporter as Gerrit Smith, might not have stopped Brown from marching south. But Brown depended more than ever on the money of Smith and others, without which he couldn’t go forward. Beyond money were weapons. The Kansas committees of Sanborn and his associates had purchased rifles and sent them west, intending that the guns be used in the self-defense of free-state settlers in Kansas. The rifles had not been intended for a war against one of the slave states. Moreover, while cash was hard to trace, guns left a trail of purchase and shipment, and that trail led back to those who had paid for them. Members of the committees now demanded that the weapons be kept out of the hands of Brown, who had been relying on them for his Southern campaign.
A
recurrence of malaria additionally muddled Brown’s plans. “Have been down with the ague since last date”—two weeks earlier—“and had no safe way of getting off my letter,” he wrote to Frank Sanborn in August. “I had lain every night without shelter, suffering from cold rains and heavy dews, together with the oppressive heat of the days.” A month later he hadn’t fully recovered. “I am still very weak, and write with great labor,” he informed his wife, in a letter unsigned lest it fall into the hands of the authorities.
He lay low in Kansas through the autumn. “My health is some improved since I wrote you last, but I still get a shake now and then,” he said in December. Yet he hadn’t lost sight of what he now took to be his true mission. “Am still preparing for my other journey.”
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THE INACTIVITY WORE on him. He determined to strike a blow for freedom, even if smaller than the insurrectionary war he envisioned. A fugitive slave from Missouri approached Brown and asked for help. He, his wife and children, and another slave were to be sold down the river; could Brown help him?
Brown could and did, as he explained in a letter he sent to Horace Greeley, who published it in the New York Tribune. “Two small companies were made up to go to Missouri and forcibly liberate the five slaves, together with other slaves,” Brown wrote. “We proceeded to the place, surrounded the buildings, liberated the slaves, and also took certain property supposed to belong to the estate.” The slaves informed them that some of the property belonged not to the master but to a tenant on the plantation. “We promptly returned to him all we had taken,” Brown said. “We then went to another plantation, where we found five more slaves, some property and two white men. We moved all slowly away into the Territory”—Kansas—“for some distance, and then sent the white men back.”
Having rescued the slaves, Brown intended to guide them to permanent freedom in Canada. The task was daunting. Neither Brown nor the fugitives were dressed for the prairie winter. Frostbite afflicted the bare feet of the fugitives and the hands and ears of all the group. Kansas sheriffs and federal troops were on the lookout for the runaways and their abettors. To the charge of slave-stealing was added that of murder, for one of the members of the second company that went out with Brown had killed a man who resisted the liberation. The Underground Railroad extended into Kansas at this time, affording safe houses for Brown and his party, but between the houses, on the open road, they were conspicuous and vulnerable.
Yet Brown was intrepid, and his example inspired other antislavery men to join him for parts of the journey. One of them described a scrape with the law. “A short distance from our road was Muddy Creek, where the marshal, supposing our party must pass that way, stationed himself on the opposite side of the creek, with eighty armed men, for he had made careful preparations, knowing that it was no joke to attack old Brown. Captain Brown had with him only twenty-three white men, all told. He placed them in double file, in front of the emigrant wagons, and said, ‘Now go straight at ’em, boys! They’ll be sure to run.’ In obedience to this order, we marched towards the creek, but scarcely had the foremost entered the water when the valiant marshal mounted his horse and rode off in haste. His men followed as fast as possible, but they were not all so lucky as he was in untying their horses from the stumps and bushes. The scene was ridiculous beyond description; some horses were hastily mounted by two men. One man grabbed tight hold of the tail of a horse, trying to leap on from behind, while the rider was putting the spurs into his sides; so he went flying through the air, his feet touching the ground now and then.” Several of Brown’s men were mounted; he ordered them to give chase. They returned with four prisoners and five horses. The latter were put to use for transport; the former were held as hostages. Brown lectured the hostages on the evils of slavery; when the party had passed the most dangerous stretch of that part of the journey, he released them, without their horses, to walk home.
Brown’s company crossed out of Kansas in early February. “I am once more in Iowa through the great mercy of God,” he wrote to Mary. “Those with me and other friends are well.” Yet his Iowa friends at Tabor weren’t so friendly now. The Taborites had been willing to support Brown’s struggle against slavery when it took place in Kansas, but when Brown brought the struggle to Iowa, in the form of the fugitives, their fervor cooled. “While we sympathize with the oppressed and will do all that we conscientiously can to help them in their efforts for freedom,” a resolution approved by their church meeting explained, “nevertheless we have no sympathy with those who go to slave states to entice away slaves and take property or life.”
Brown got the hint and departed. Other communities were more welcoming. At Grinnell, named for Josiah Grinnell, Iowa’s leading abolitionist, the reception couldn’t have been more supportive. Brown, still irked at Tabor’s standoffishness, sent back to that town a summary of what Grinnell had done for the cause: “1st. Whole party and teams kept for two days free of cost. 2d. Sundry articles of clothing given to captives. 3d. Bread, meat, cakes, pies, etc. prepared for our journey.” There was more, including twenty-six dollars in cash and congratulations and encouragement on the work in hand.
Yet hurdles remained. Brown’s reputation struck terror into the hearts of some who might have opposed him, as it had frightened the posse he scattered at Muddy Creek. But it seemed to embolden others, who thought that by capturing or killing him they could win a reputation of their own. One story related afterward told of an intemperate pro-slavery fellow haranguing a crowd about what he would do to that murdering, man-stealing abolitionist Brown if he ever laid eyes on him. He would shoot him on the spot, he vowed.
A bearded gentleman in the back of the crowd responded in a mild voice. “My friend, you talk very brave,” he said. “And as you will never have a better opportunity to shoot Old Brown than right here and now, you can have a chance.” He produced two revolvers from under his coat and offered one to the brave orator, telling him to fire at will.
The boaster grew pale as he realized who the man was. He turned his back and stalked away, leaving Brown to re-holster the pistols.
The journey from eastern Iowa to Chicago went more swiftly, courtesy of a railroad agent who let them ride in an empty boxcar. The agent pretended not to notice, and in fact refused payment lest he and the railroad be found complicit. “We might be held for the value of every one of those niggers,” he said.
The penultimate leg of the flight, from Chicago to Detroit, was also by train, this time paid for with funds Brown gathered on the way. The journey concluded for the fugitives with a ferry ride to Windsor, Canada. Their number had grown from eleven to twelve when one of the women gave birth on the journey. In Canada they were safe, for British law governed Canada, and the British, once having been the great slave traders of the Atlantic world, had become arch abolitionists.
John Brown took satisfaction in the accomplishment. His career as a liberator had begun.
27
THE FLIGHT to Canada with the fugitives enhanced Brown’s mystique. He once more visited the Boston area, again seeking money. Bronson Alcott heard him address a group in Concord. “He tells his story with surpassing simplicity and sense, impressing us all deeply by his courage and religious earnestness,” the old transcendentalist wrote in his diary. “Our best people listen to his words—Emerson, Thoreau, Judge Hoar, my wife; and some of them contribute something in aid of his plans without asking particulars, such confidence does he inspire in his integrity and abilities.” Alcott read between the lines of Brown’s words. “The Captain leaves us much in the dark concerning his destination and designs for the coming months. Yet he does not conceal his hatred of slavery, nor his readiness to strike a blow for freedom at the proper moment. I infer it is his intention to run off as many slaves as he can, and so render that property insecure to the master. I think him equal to anything he dares—the man to do the deed, if it must be done, and with the martyr
’s temper and purpose.”
Brown certainly looked the part. “He is of imposing appearance, personally,” Alcott wrote: “tall, with square shoulders and standing; eyes of deep gray, and couchant, as if ready to spring at the least rustling, dauntless yet kindly; his hair shooting backward from low down on his forehead; nose trenchant and Romanesque; set lips, his voice suppressed yet metallic, suggesting deep reserves; decided mouth; the countenance and frame charged with power throughout. Since here last he has added a flowing beard, which gives the soldierly air and the port of an apostle. Though sixty years old, he is agile and alert, and ready for any audacity, in any crisis. I think him about the manliest man I have ever seen.”
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WHEN FREDERICK DOUGLASS SAW John Brown, he too realized something had changed. But it wasn’t just the beard—and it wasn’t, Douglass thought, for the better. “From the time of my visit to him in Springfield, Mass., in 1847, our relations were friendly and confidential,” Douglass wrote of Brown. “I never passed through Springfield without calling on him, and he never came to Rochester without calling on me. He often stopped over night with me, when we talked over the feasibility of his plan for destroying the value of slave property, and the motive for holding slaves in the border states.” Brown’s plan, as Douglass remembered it, had been to establish a chain of safe spots in the mountains that ran from Virginia to Canada. Small squadrons of fighters would defend the safe places and the slaves who would, on Brown’s encouragement, run away to them. Via the safe refuges the slaves would be transported to freedom, though some—many, Brown hoped—would choose to join his small army and help wage the struggle.