The Zealot and the Emancipator

by H. W. Brands

  The work wasn’t finished. The work of freedom never would be. In Douglass’s audience this day were the most distinguished members of the United States government—the president, the chief justice, senators and representatives—as well as leaders of the African American community, which had funded a statue of Lincoln, standing by a slave at the moment of emancipation. It was the first memorial to Lincoln in the nation’s capital, and it hadn’t come without controversy. The broader turmoil of Reconstruction, too, reminded all present that the struggle never ceased. Yet Douglass asked his audience to recall what Lincoln had accomplished for the two races together. “While Abraham Lincoln saved for you a country, he delivered us from a bondage, according to Jefferson, one hour of which was worse than ages of the oppression your fathers rose in rebellion to oppose.” Without Lincoln’s first accomplishment, the second couldn’t have come. God worked in mysterious ways; Lincoln wasn’t perfect, but he was perfectly suited to his task. “Taking him for all in all, measuring the tremendous magnitude of the work before him, considering the necessary means to ends, and surveying the end from the beginning, infinite wisdom has seldom sent any man into the world better fitted for his mission than Abraham Lincoln.”

  Douglass closed with a comment to his black audience. They knew full well that the struggle for freedom continued, for they suffered slights every day. But they could take collective pride in what they now saw before them. “When now it shall be said that the colored man is soulless, that he has no appreciation of benefits or benefactors; when the foul reproach of ingratitude is hurled at us, and it is attempted to scourge us beyond the range of human brotherhood, we may calmly point to the monument we have this day erected to the memory of Abraham Lincoln.”

  John Brown dedicated himself to the struggle against slavery, which in the mid-1850s (the time of this photograph) was being waged by arms in Kansas.

  Abraham Lincoln chose a different path: elective politics. A former Illinois state legislator and a one-term Whig member of Congress, Lincoln joined the new, antislavery Republican party in the 1850s in hopes of winning higher office.

  This farm at North Elba in upstate New York was John Brown’s home base.

  Mary Brown learned to get along without her husband, who was absent more often than not. To her fell responsibility for raising the children, including these two.

  While politics was Lincoln’s ambition, his law practice kept a roof—in particular the roof of this Springfield house—over the heads of his family.

  Mary Todd Lincoln had expected great things from her husband when they were wed; her ambitions for Lincoln amplified his own.

  Frederick Douglass escaped from slavery in Maryland and became a powerful advocate of abolition—and an associate of John Brown’s.

  William Lloyd Garrison published The Liberator, the most prominent of the abolitionist journals.

  Henry Ward Beecher preached abolition as part of his celebrated Brooklyn ministry.

  Horace Greeley edited the New York Tribune and fancied himself a Republican kingmaker.

  Philanthropist and reformer Gerrit Smith quietly funded John Brown’s antislavery operations.

  John Brown’s participation in the murder of several proslavery settlers in Kansas in 1856 made him a wanted man, and life on the run took a toll on his health and appearance.

  Dred Scott sued for his freedom from slavery; he lost, but the decisionof the Supreme Court in the 1857 case proved a gift to Lincoln.

  Roger Taney’s troubled soul sought relief in the Dred Scott case, but the chief justice’s opinion threw the nation into turmoil.

  Democrat Stephen Douglas reopened the slavery debate in the 1850s and thereby afforded Abraham Lincoln a reentry into politics.

  Although Lincoln lost his race for the Senate in 1858, his performance in debates against Stephen Douglas won him national recognition.

  Brown’s audacious raid on the federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry, Virginia, was launched in October 1859 from this rented farm across the Potomac River.

  The raid misfired, leaving Brown and his men holed up in this engine house, where Brown and the other raiders not killed were captured.

  The Southern press painted Brown as a tool of Satan, who in this image seems to smile his approval at Brown’s bloody deeds.

  In the North, Brown’s bold stroke against slavery was viewed more favorably. Following his conviction and hanging, he was treated as a martyr by abolitionists.

  Amid the deepening division over slavery, Lincoln won the presidential election of 1860. Here he is being inaugurated.

  Eleven Southern states, claiming fear for the future of slavery, and standing on their state’s rights interpretation of the Constitution, seceded after Lincoln’s election. Lincoln refused to let them go, and the cares of the ensuing Civil War aged him prematurely.

  Although dead, John Brown was not forgotten. Union soldiers marched into battle singing “John Brown’s body lies a-mouldering in the grave; his soul is marching on” (to the tune identified in this magazine illustration as “Glory Hallelujah”).

  Lincoln initially treated slavery and the defense of the Union as separate issues. But the war blurred the distinction, and he finally concluded that they could not be kept apart: that liberty and Union were inseparable. Here he reads a preliminary version of the Emancipation Proclamation to his cabinet.

  Yet Lincoln didn’t want to publish the proclamation until the Union won an important battlefield victory, lest emancipation be interpreted as an act of despair. That victory came at Antietam in September 1862.

  The Emancipation Proclamation, formalized on January 1, 1863, was accompanied by a call to the freedmen to join the Union army and help guarantee their liberty.

  The war went slowly, even after emancipation, and Lincoln expected to lose his 1864 race for reelection. But a sudden turn of the military tide reversed the political mood, and Lincoln won comfortably. Here the crowd gathers for his second inauguration.

  Frederick Douglass had been impatient, even furious, at Lincoln’s slowness on slavery during the first part of the war. But by the time of Lincoln’s second inauguration, which Douglass attended as an elder statesman of abolition, they were friends and allies.

  Also in the inauguration crowd was John Wilkes Booth, an actor and angry Confederate sympathizer. Booth cast himself as Brutus to Lincoln’s Julius Caesar.

  Booth assassinated Lincoln in April 1865. The martyred president now sits on the National Mall.

  John Brown, an earlier casualty in the struggle for freedom, lies at North Elba.

  Acknowledgments

  I have learned about the Civil War era from every author and editor whose works on the subject I have read since high school. The most pertinent of them for this book are identified in the source notes. But to all I am indebted.

  Kris Puopolo and Bill Thomas at Doubleday kept nudging me to sharpen the focus; if anything is still blurry, it’s not their fault. Ingrid Sterner continues to be a model copy editor.

  My colleagues at the University of Texas at Austin are a generous repository of historical knowledge. My students pose a constant challenge to my storytelling skills: if I can hold their interest, I might be onto something. They can’t get enough of John Brown.

  Sources

  The present book is based primarily on the words—written, spoken and remembered—of John Brown and Abraham Lincoln.

  The best collection on Brown is The Life and Letters of John Brown, edited by Franklin Benjamin Sanborn (1885). A useful complement is “ ‘His Soul Goes Marching On’: The Life and Legacy of John Brown,” West Virginia Archives and History, wvculture.org.

  The outstanding Lincoln collection i
s The Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln, edited by Roy P. Basler et al. (1953–1955). The Abraham Lincoln Papers at the Library of Congress contain additional documents. Lincoln’s presidential papers form part of the Papers of the Presidents, American Presidency Project, presidency.ucsb.edu.

  Biographies of John Brown are numerous. The most useful for present purposes, balancing proximity to the subject and his times against historical perspective, is Oswald Garrison Villard, John Brown (1910).

  Biographies of Lincoln are legion; several are cited in the notes. One worth particular mention is Michael Burlingame, Abraham Lincoln: A Life (2013), which is but a portion of a much larger manuscript the author has generously made available through the Lincoln Studies Center at Knox College, knox.edu.

  Frederick Douglass plays an important role in the story of Brown and Lincoln. His Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass (1845) made him famous; his Life and Times of Frederick Douglass (1881) told what happened later. The finest biography of Douglass is David W. Blight, Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom (2018).

  Books on the period of the Civil War are too numerous to identify here even in the most summary manner. Yet two that deal especially with the central theme of the present work are Stephen B. Oates, Our Fiery Trial: Abraham Lincoln, John Brown, and the Civil War Era (1979), and Eric Foner, The Fiery Trial: Abraham Lincoln and American Slavery (2010).

  Notes

  Prologue

  “My Dear Wife”: John Brown to Mary Brown, Oct. 31 and Nov. 3, 1859, in The Life and Letters of John Brown, comp. and ed. Franklin Benjamin Sanborn (1885), 579–80. This collection will be cited below as Life and Letters.

  PART I · POTTAWATOMIE

  Chapter 1

  “then a wilderness”: Brown to Henry Stearns, July 15, 1857, in Life and Letters, 12–17.

  “The trouble is”: Oswald Garrison Villard, John Brown (1910), 20, 58.

  “I have been trying to devise”: Brown to Frederick Brown, Nov. 21, 1834, in Life and Letters, 40–41.

  “Instead of being”: John Brown Jr. in Life and Letters, 88.

  “It is a Brown trait”: Villard, John Brown, 28.

  “Here, before God”: Recollection by Edward Brown in Northwestern Congregationist, Oct. 21, 1892, reprinted in Nation, Feb. 12, 1914.

  Chapter 2

  “Thomas, the youngest son”: Lincoln recollections for campaign biography, ca. June 1860, in The Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln, ed. Roy P. Basler et al. (1953), 4:61–62. This collection will be cited as Collected Works.

  “Oh, now, Sarah”: Manuscript of Michael Burlingame, “Abraham Lincoln: A Life,” vol. 1, chap. 1, p. 14, at Lincoln Studies Center, Knox College, knox.edu. Portions of this lengthy manuscript were published as Abraham Lincoln: A Life (2013). This source will be identified as “Burlingame MS.”

  “A. now thinks that the aggregate”: Lincoln recollections, ca. June 1860, in Collected Works, 4:62.

  “I used to be a slave”: Eric Foner, The Fiery Trial: Abraham Lincoln and American Slavery (2010), 36.

  “When he was nineteen”: Lincoln recollections, ca. June 1860, in Collected Works, 4:63.

  “Here they built a log-cabin”: Ibid., 4:64–65.

  “It is true”: David Herbert Donald, Lincoln (1995), 55–58. Historians have debated the accuracy of the stories told about Lincoln and Ann Rutledge. Lincoln never mentioned her in letters, and no letters from her to him survive. But most Lincoln biographers, including Donald, grant the essence of the accounts.

  Chapter 3

  “We were worked in all weathers”: Frederick Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass (1849), 63–73.

  “I have often been asked”: Frederick Douglass, The Life and Times of Frederick Douglass (1882), 170.

  “In person he was lean”: Ibid., 237–40.

  Chapter 4

  “I do not think I can come”: Lincoln to Joshua Speed, July 4, 1842, in Collected Works, 1:289.

  “I had known Abraham Lincoln”: Jesse W. Weik, “Lincoln and the Matson Negroes,” Arena 17 (1897): 755–57.

  “The doctors say”: Burlingame MS., 1:6:547.

  “They believe that the institution”: Protest by Lincoln and Dan Stone, March 3, 1837, in Collected Works, 1:75.

  “It is sometimes called”: Charles Dickens, American Notes for General Circulation (1842), 1:282–85, 292–95.

  “All the house”: Lincoln to Mary Todd Lincoln, April 16, 1848, in Collected Works, 1:465.

  “The country bordering”: Lincoln recollections, ca. June 1860, in Collected Works, 4:66.

  “Let him answer”: Lincoln remarks in House of Representatives, Jan. 12, 1848, in Collected Works, 1:439.

  “There was not one”: Lincoln remarks in House of Representatives, Jan. 10, 1849, in Collected Works, 2:22.

  “Finding that I was abandoned”: Lincoln remarks, undated 1861, in Collected Works, 2:22n.

  “His profession had almost”: Lincoln recollections, ca. June 1860, in Collected Works, 4:67.

  Chapter 5

  “a covenant with death”: William Lloyd Garrison: The Story of His Life as Told by His Children (1894), 3:88.

  “Nothing so charms”: Brown, “Words of Advice,” Jan. 15, 1851, in Life and Letters, 124–26.

  Chapter 6

  “He ever was”: Lincoln eulogy of Henry Clay, July 6, 1852, in Collected Works, 2:130–32.

  “He was a man of low stature”: The Reminiscences of Carl Schurz (1907), 2:30–31.

  “I have determined”: Douglas speech in Senate, Dec. 23, 1851, in Congressional Globe, 32nd Cong., 1st sess., app., 68.

  “To the states of Missouri and Iowa”: Douglas to J. H. Crane et al., Dec. 17, 1853, in The Letters of Stephen A. Douglas, ed. Robert W. Johannsen (1961), 268–71.

  “I know it will raise”: Mrs. Archibald Dixon, History of Missouri Compromise and Slavery in American Politics (1903), 445.

  “The bill rests upon”: Douglas to editor of Concord (N.H.) State Capitol Reporter, Feb. 16, 1854, in Letters of Stephen A. Douglas, 284.

  “I could travel”: Robert W. Johannsen, Stephen A. Douglas (1997 ed.), 451.

  Chapter 7

  “The farm was a mere recent clearing”: Richard Henry Dana Jr., “How We Met John Brown,” Atlantic Monthly, July 1871, 6–7.

  “Before he came”: Life and Letters of John Brown, 103–4.

  “The people of Kansas”: David Atchison speech in Platte County, Mo., Nov. 6, 1854, Platte Argus, Nov. 6, 1854, in Daniel W. Wilder, The Annals of Kansas (1857), 40.

  “act to punish offences”: Annals of Kansas, 57.

  “I had just arrived”: Thomas H. Gladstone, Kansas; or, Squatter Life and Border Warfare in the Far West (1857), 38–39, 94–95.

  “During the years 1853 and 1854”: Life and Letters, 188–91.

  “If you or any”: John Brown to John Brown Jr., Aug. 21, 1854, in Life and Letters, 191.

  “John’s two letters”: John Brown to Mary Brown, June 28, 1855, in Life and Letters, 194.

  “I am writing”: John Brown to Mary Brown and children, Sept. 4, 1855, in Life and Letters, 199.

  “We found our folks”: John Brown to Mary Brown and children, Oct. 13–14, 1855, in Life and Letters, 200–201.

  Chapter 8

  “The repeal of the Missouri compromise”: Lincoln recollections, ca. June 1860, in Collected Works, 4:67.

  “A live issue was presented”: William H. Herndon and Jesse William Weik, Herndon’s Lincoln (1889), 2:366.

  “It is now several minutes”: Lincoln speech at Peoria, Oct. 16, 1854, in Collected Works, 2:247–83.

  “After the evening meal”: Horace White, The Life of Lyman Trumbull (1913), 40n.

  Chapter 9

  “I never saw him so dejected”: Burlingame MS.,
1:10:1150.

  “He was always calculating”: Herndon’s Lincoln, 2:375–76.