All the Powers of Earth

by Sidney Blumenthal

  Privately, James Henry Hammond reflected on the untimely death of his former aide-de-camp to his friend, William Gilmore Simms, a leading Southern literary figure, editor of the Southern Quarterly Review, and a poet, historian, and novelist, the author recently of an anti-Tom piece of fiction featuring a benign slaveholder to counter Uncle Tom’s Cabin. The Southern Quarterly Review had published a glorifying piece eulogizing Brooks as “a brave soldier, patriot and statesman.” “He dies just at his culminating point,” Hammond wrote Simms. “The decadence to you and I was clear, but not to the world while his family and many friends have every reason to believe that higher and perhaps the highest honors were in store for him. For him, for them, in every way he is removed at [a] happy moment. . . . This happens to few. He must have found favour with the Deity for it to happen at all. Moreover, it is a proof that his achievement was a true mission which I never thought before. What then? God is with us to use . . . brute force!”

  Later that year, just before Christmas, on December 21 and 22, in an auction, Brooks’s eighty slaves were all sold to the highest bidders: “Israel” for $1,130; “Calvin,” $885; “Henry,” $615; “Martha,” $1,200; “Amelia,” “Hannah,” and “Sophie,” $750; and children, “Little Harriett,” $900; “Green,” $400; and “Fox,” $170. The dissolution of the Brooks estate was a posthumous confirmation of Sumner’s critique. Families were broken up, women likely sold as sexual slaves, and children wrenched from their mothers.

  In Edgefield’s Willowbrook Cemetery a fourteen-foot-tall marble obelisk was erected to mark Brooks’s grave, decorated with a Palmetto tree, symbol of South Carolina, and a laurel wreath of honor beneath which was carved his epitaph: “Ever Able, Manly, Just and Heroic.”

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  EXTERMINATING ANGEL

  “(Weird John Brown), / The meteor of the war.”

  HERMAN MELVILLE, THE PORTENT

  Two days after the sack of Lawrence, on May 23, James Blood, treasurer of the New England Emigrant Aid Society in Kansas, was traveling back to the beleaguered town when he encountered a group of eight men headed toward Pottawatomie Creek. “As we approached each other, I could see the gleam of the sun’s rays reflected from the moving gun-barrels of the party, in a wagon,” he recalled. “Halt!” shouted a man he recognized, and Blood called out his name: “John Brown!” Blood noticed that the wagon was loaded with rifles, revolvers, knives, and broadswords. Brown had given Blood one of those swords during the fall of 1855. Brown was the only one of the group to speak. The rest remained deferentially silent. “I noticed that while we were in conversation the boys watched every look and gesture of the old man—keeping their guns in their hands ready for instant action.” Brown’s “manner was wild and frenzied, and the whole party watched with excited eagerness every word and motion of the old man.” He gave a sketchy account of what had happened in Lawrence in which his rage was directed at the free state leadership. “He seemed very indignant that there had been no resistance; that Lawrence was not defended, and denounced the member of the committee and leading Free State men as cowards, or worse.” As Blood was about to continue his trek to Lawrence, Brown “requested me not to mention the fact that I had met them, as they were on a secret expedition, and did not want any one to know that they were in that neighborhood.”

  John Brown, 1857

  Earlier that day, Brown had assembled three of his sons and four followers to a “council” to reveal his plan. “The general purport of our intentions—some radical retaliatory measure—some killing—was well understood by the whole camp,” recalled Salmon Brown, one of his sons. “You never heard such cheering as they gave us when we started out.” John Brown held in his hand a list of names of proslavery men “who were to be killed.” “This was on the crest of the wave of enthusiasm.” One member of the group, however, urged “caution.” “Caution, caution, sir,” replied John Brown. “I am eternally tired of hearing that word caution. It is nothing but the word of cowardice.” As they started out, they met a rider, who pulled a news story from his boot about the assault on Sumner. “At that blow the men went crazy—crazy. It seemed to be the finishing, decisive touch.”

  John Brown had followed five of his sons to Kansas, but unlike them he did not go as a settler. He went, according to James Redpath, the correspondent for the New York Tribune, who became Brown’s promoter and biographer, “to oppose by the sword the armed propagandists of slavery; for a believer in the Bible to emulate the examples of Moses, Joshua, and Gideon, and obey the solemn utterances of the Most High God.”

  Brown heard the voice of God, the Lord spoke through him, to serve God’s will, and God guided his hand. God had preordained his plans. He burned with the unforgiving evangelical fire of New Light Calvinism inspired by the Great Awakening and bent himself in devotion to an angry God, whose divine retribution for sin he would mete out himself. “John Brown is almost the only radical abolitionist I have ever known who was not more or less radical in religious matters also,” wrote Thomas Wentworth Higginson, the Boston abolitionist who would become one of his most ardent supporters. “His theology was Puritan, like his practice; and accustomed as we now are to see Puritan doctrines and Puritan virtues separately exhibited, it seems quite strange to behold them combined in one person again.”

  Brown was an abolitionist who despised other abolitionists, especially William Lloyd Garrison and his followers, who were pacifists, believers in moral suasion, and modeled their nonviolent actions on the Prince of Peace, Christ the Lamb of God. Brown meant to fight to the death in a holy war against sin. He would not attempt to convince any sinner to abandon their sin, but to punish them. They must bear the full weight of God’s wrathful judgment for which he was the agent on earth. He would beat it out, shoot it, or stab it. Just as surely that they must pay the wages of sin, he must be their executioner. Thy will be done.

  Brown viewed antislavery politics with at least as much contempt as he did Garrisonian abolitionism. Indeed, he rejected politics in all its forms. To him, they reflected nothing but deadly sins: weakness, faintheartedness, and cravenness. He scorned the building of coalitions of diverse forces for a common objective as not only appeasement with evil but also an evil in itself. Politics was a place of sin and all who practiced it sinful. “He despised the class with all the energy of his earnest and determined nature,” wrote John Edwin Cook, one of his followers, who was hanged at Harpers Ferry. “It is asserted that he was a member of the Republican Party; but he despised the Republican Party. . . . He was an abolitionist of the ultra school. He had as little sympathy with Garrison as Seward. . . . That the people would be deceived, that the Republicans would become as conservative of slavery as the Democrats themselves, he sincerely believed. . . . He could ‘see no use in this talking,’ he said. ‘Talk is a national institution; but it does no good for the slave.’ He thought it an excuse very well adapted for weak men with tender consciences. . . . He believed in human brotherhood and in the God of Battles.”

  Just as Brown had no use for political parties or politicians, he disparaged discussion and debate. He was disgusted with compromises, treaties, and the rule of law, which set limits on his visions. He embraced violence as both a means and an end, the only way for the country to atone for slavery, break its bonds, and restore “manhood” to the slave. Frederick Douglass, in their first meeting in 1847, was struck by Brown’s fierce insistence on the necessity of violence. “He denounced slavery in look and language fierce and bitter, thought that slaveholders had forfeited their right to live, that the slaves had the right to gain their liberty in any way they could, did not believe that moral suasion would ever liberate the slave, or that political action would abolish the system. . . . He was not averse to the shedding of blood, and thought the practice of carrying arms would be a good one for the colored people to adopt, as it would give them a sense of their manhood.” Brown was already at war, he told Douglass. “Slavery was a state of war, and the slave had a right to anything neces
sary to his freedom.” Brown studied the leaders of slave revolts—Spartacus of ancient Rome and Nat Turner of Virginia, Cinqué of the slave ship Amistad and Toussaint L’Ouverture of Haiti, and the biographies of Cromwell and Napoleon. He prepared himself for years to assume his godly destiny as the military commander of a black army.

  As much as Brown pored over the lives of insurrectionists and generals for lessons, he drew his inspiration from the Book of Hebrews, which he frequently quoted, in particular Hebrews 9:22: “Indeed, under the law almost everything is purified with blood, and without the shedding of blood there is no forgiveness of sins.” Violence was not a tactic, but divine anointment like holy oil. This sanguinary book of the New Testament also seemed to offer a scriptural understanding for the American Revolution in 9:18: “Therefore not even the first covenant was inaugurated without blood.” It describes Moses sprinkling the law and the people with blood as an act of sanctification in 9:20: “This is the blood of the covenant that God commanded for you.” Christ’s purification of the world demands his earthly death, according to Hebrews 9:26: “But as it is, he has appeared once for all at the end of the ages to put away sin by the sacrifice of himself.”

  Brown’s self-flagellation, self-sacrifice, and self-disciplined denial of ordinary pleasure, which repelled him as a lure into depravity, steeled him for his task. “He stooped somewhat as he walked; was rather narrow-shouldered,” John Edwin Cook described him. “Went looking on the ground almost all the time, with his head bent forward apparently in study or thought. Walked rather rapidly, and very energetically. His features were very sharp, nose prominent, eyes were black or very dark grey. His hair was quite light, and he wore it rather long about the time of the skirmish at Lawrence. He wore a coarse, homespun kind of clothing, and was usually very unpresuming in his appearance and dress. He seemed to be rather taciturn in his habits, and was a sort of meteoric character, appearing very unexpectedly now at one place, and then at another, so that it could never be known where he was to be found. His appearances and disappearances were always sudden, and in a decided manner. He seemed to be ever on the alert.”

  John Brown presented himself in a direct line of descent from one of the Pilgrims on the Mayflower, although the Peter Brown of the Mayflower was probably not his ancestor and he likely was descended from another Peter Brown to whom his family tree can be traced. While it was never in dispute that he was a Puritan of Puritans, he claimed a myth from the very creation. The original Captain John Brown, his grandfather, a soldier of the Revolution, of the Connecticut 18th Regiment, of the Continental Army, died of cholera when his son Owen was five years old. Raised in abject poverty, carted off to various relatives, Owen was swept up in a religious revival that stamped him an orthodox Calvinist. Taken in by the Reverend Jeremiah Hallock, he was daily instructed about sin and salvation, and introduced to the antislavery writings of Jonathan Edwards the Younger, a Congregationalist minister, president of Union College, and one of the early abolitionists. Edwards, son of the most influential Calvinist Puritan theologian, who was a slaveholder, prefaced his 1791 sermon, “The Injustice and Impolicy of the Slave Trade,” with a citation from the Gospel of Matthew of the Golden Rule, which John Brown would cite to justify all his actions: “Therefore all things whatsoever you would, that men should do to you, do ye even so to them; for this is the law and the prophets.” Owen paid close attention to the trial of a fugitive slave that a Connecticut jury refused to return to his Southern master. After his marriage, he moved to Hudson, Ohio, in the Western Reserve settled by New Englanders, became a tanner, a conductor for the Underground Railroad, and a trustee of the biracial Oberlin College, founded in Hudson.

  John Brown, born in 1800 in Torrington, Connecticut, was imbued with his father’s Calvinism and abolitionism, one and the same. His mother died when he was eight years old, and his father remarried. On a cattle drive with his father he observed with horror a slave boy his own age beaten with a shovel. John Brown hoped to train as a minister at Amherst College, but the family’s money ran out. He became a surveyor, married, and was soon the father of seven children, two of whom died, hid fugitive slaves, and moved to New Richmond, Pennsylvania, where he set up a tannery. His wife died, he married a seventeen-year-old, who cared for his children and bore him thirteen more. Sixteen of them would die, from illness, malnutrition, or bullets, before his death. He whipped them for their sinfulness as his father had whipped him. He beat them with a wooden stick for a host of infractions, from daydreaming (three lashes) to disobeying their mother (eight lashes). In the middle of administering one such punishment, Brown reversed roles, demanding that his son instead beat him until his back bled. “Harder; harder, harder!” He took on his children’s sins as his own, refusing to distinguish between them and himself in tribute to God’s harsh will.

  In 1839, he staged a secret ceremony of oath taking, conducted by a traveling black preacher named Fayette and witnessed by his three sons and wife, in which he “vowed that only by blood atonement could slavery be ended,” according to one of his later stalwarts, Richard J. Hinton, to whom he confided the story. “It was then that he declared his purpose to live and to be with those in bonds, as if bound with them, even unto the bitter and bloody end.”

  Brown had by now begun his Pilgrim’s progress through his slough of despond. He failed at twenty businesses, moved seven times, and was usually not at his home, but constantly traveling. He failed with his tannery, failed as a real estate speculator, failed as a farmer, shepherd, cattle dealer, and wool merchant. He borrowed money from a bank cash box without informing the bankers and kited loans. He took out three mortgages on a single piece of property without informing the various lenders of his scheme. He failed in his efforts to repay his debts, declared bankruptcy, and his land, household goods, and tools were sold at auction. He squatted on land that was not his, threatened the rightful owner, was evicted, and briefly jailed. He was hounded by a trail of creditors. Four children died in 1843, on a rented subsistence farm, “a calamity from which father never fully recovered,” according to Salmon Brown. His partner in the wool business, Simon Perkins, said of him that he had “little judgment, always followed his own will, and lost much money.” When Brown traveled to Britain and Europe in 1849 to market wool his inferior product failed to sell or was sold off at low price and he lost the huge sum of $40,000. He entertained the notion of starting a winery, but spent much of 1851 and 1852 trying to fend off creditors. He rented two farms and lost the crops in a drought. He had no business sense, no entrepreneurial ability, and never grasped the most obvious elements of market economy. His inflexible, arbitrary, and impulsive temperament armored him from learning from experience. He took every setback as the fault of others and a trial imposed by God.

  The greater his adversity, the more he identified with the oppression of slaves. He sheltered runaway slaves, talked about adopting “at least one negro boy” as a member of his family and founding a school for blacks, which never materialized. He asked his daughter “if I would be willing to divide my food and clothes” with “some poor little black children.” Brown hoped to buy a slave in order to raise him, but he never made the attempt and had no funds in any case.

  He moved to Springfield, Massachusetts, in 1846, into a spare house in a working-class neighborhood, to be near the wool warehouse of Perkins & Brown. Springfield had an active antislavery society, which held its meetings in the First Congregational Church and involved a number of the town’s prominent citizens as well as its black community of several hundred people. The Hampden County Antislavery Society did more than give lectures denouncing slavery; it ran the Connecticut Valley Line of the Underground Railroad. Brown did not join the society or participate in the Underground Railroad, though he helped fugitives on his own. He befriended free blacks in the town, especially one man named Thomas Thomas, whom he employed as a porter. Thomas, according to one account, posed with Brown in a lost daguerreotype in which Brown has one hand on Thomas’s s
houlder and the other clutching a banner reading “S.P.W.,” letters for the Subterranean Pass Way, Brown’s early idea of an Underground Railroad run by a military force. A surviving photograph, the first of Brown, depicts him with one hand solemnly raised as if giving an oath and the other clutching a banner, likely inscribed “S.P.W.” Brown did not join the abolitionist First Congregational Church, but instead the Zion Methodist Church, or Free Church, the black church to which Thomas belonged, as its sole white parishioner and was invited to preach from its pulpit. (Thomas left Springfield, Massachusetts, in 1853 for Springfield, Illinois, where he frequently encountered Lincoln as a waiter in the hotel across from Lincoln’s law office.)

  Through his relationships in the black community, Brown sought out militant black leaders, mostly clergymen, and gained their confidence as a brother in spirit. On a business trip to upstate New York, he met two of the most important figures in the black abolitionist movement. The Reverend Jermain Wesley Loguen was a fugitive slave who became a pastor, educator, and activist in the Liberty Party in Syracuse, New York, where his house was a station in the Underground Railroad. (His daughter would marry Frederick Douglass’s son.) The Reverend Henry Highland Garnet, another escaped slave who had become a minister and member of the Liberty Party, presided at a church in Troy, New York. He broke with the pacifism of the Anti-Slavery Society in a speech in 1843 to the National Negro Convention at Buffalo, extolling Nat Turner and embracing armed struggle. “Let your motto be resistance! resistance! resistance!” Brown was familiar with the speech and attempted to publish it as a pamphlet. Both Loguen and Garnet discussed Brown with Frederick Douglass. “In speaking of him their voices would drop to a whisper, and what they said of him made me very eager to see and know him,” wrote Douglass.