1858 (50 page)

The president ended 1858 the way that he began it, completely blind to the slavery issue that threatened to destroy the United States. He had ignored the abolitionists in all of the Northern states all year and now, at the very end of 1858, he would ignore the most dangerous abolitionist of all, John Brown, the fearless Kansas raider. Brown would return to the public eye once again in the waning days of the year in an audacious raid that would startle the entire nation.

Chapter Sixteen

John Brown, who had spouted verses from the Bible to anyone who would listen to him during his three years in Kansas, looked like a biblical figure by 1858. The abolitionist was a broad-shouldered man, six feet tall, 150 pounds in weight. He had a taut, strong body from years of labor as a farmer and tanner, and a face whose skin had deep seams, like tiny rivers, and all the wrinkles of a fifty-eight-year-old man. None of that impressed those who met Brown in the winter of 1858, though. What struck them was the foot-long, thick, white, Moses-like beard that he sported, his thatch of wavy white hair and his animated, bright sky blue eyes that seemed to flash in the night. He looked like “an Apostle,” wrote one man when he met him.
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The striking features of his face were memorable. Frederick Douglass, who permitted him to board with him for several weeks in 1858, wrote, “His face…revealed a strong, square mouth, supported by a broad and prominent chin. His eyes were full of light and fire. When on the street, he moved with a long, spring racehorse step, absorbed by his own reflections, neither seeking or shunning observation.”
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It was his dramatic physical appearance that drew the attention of all and that helped to make him a legend in the bloody wars between proslavery and antislavery militias and guerrilla bands that by 1858 had torn all of Kansas apart.

Those in his family described him as a kind and gentle man, a tough but fair parent who always inquired about their well-being in letters home when he was away or on the run from posses. His eldest son, John Jr., always rankled when he read descriptions of his father as a “cross and tyrannical” parent that appeared in books or journals. “While he was not exceptionally demonstrative in his affectional nature, and usually had an appearance of earnestness, not many I ever knew had deeper or warmer sympathies, and the children not only of his own family but the children of others always found a warm place in his heart,” he said.
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His son Salmon remembered his father fondly and never forgot the family breakfasts when he was home. The family would finish eating and then Brown would read verses from the Bible to his children. Their mother would read, and then each child would read verses and sometimes entire chapters. Sometimes Brown, standing, read the Ten Commandments and a Catechism to his children. Those who knew him well later added that he often read poetry to them and maintained a fine sense of humor.
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His children also recalled that antislavery discussions figured prominently at meals. John Brown Jr. said that when he was eighteen he and several other teenage children were with Brown when he asked them who among them would join their father “to break the jaws of the wicked…” He asked each child in succession, “Are you Mary? Jason? Owen? John?” All answered yes and he told them to kneel with him.

Wrote John Jr., “After prayer, he asked us to raise our right hands and he then administered to us an oath, the exact terms of which I cannot recall, but in substance it bound us to secrecy and devotion to the purpose of fighting slavery, by force and arms, to the extent of our ability.”
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That hatred of slavery and a desire to end it with arms was the trademark of Brown’s entire life. He was the son of Owen Brown, a religious fanatic and antislavery advocate who ran a tannery in Hudson, Ohio. Following the death of his mother, Brown was greatly influenced by his father, who read the Bible to Brown and his siblings daily. John Brown was the father of twenty children by two wives. He was involved in his own tannery, in Pennsylvania, and then a succession of small businesses in several states. None were very successful. By 1854, at the age of fifty-four, he was financially destitute and living with his family on land given him by philanthropist and abolitionist leader Gerrit Smith in North Elba, New York. He resided there in a oneand-a-half story wood frame home surrounded by a white fence with a large barn at the rear.

Religious from childhood, Brown became a moral zealot as he aged. He was “a man of intense earnestness in all things,” one of his sons said.
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In his mid-thirties, Brown tried to start a school for black children and by 1839 was routinely denouncing slavery to anyone who would listen. In 1847, he first hatched a plan, never realized, to create an empire in the Allegheny Mountains for runaway slaves who would then, in raids, free slaves from Southern plantations. He said the mountain range that ran from New York south to Virginia, was “country admirably adapted in which to carry on guerrilla warfare.”
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His life took a dramatic turn in 1855. Six of his sons had moved to the Kansas territory and its wind-swept plains where they would become farmers. The Kansas-Nebraska Act of the previous year had permitted residents of those territories to decide whether or not they desired slavery and this legislation had caused political turbulence that turned violent when proslavery supporters in neighboring Missouri began to stage raids on Kansas’s antislavery residents. The Missourians also stuffed ballot boxes with illegal votes to swing elections to proslavery candidates in territorial campaigns.

The political situation deteriorated so quickly and so badly that by the time Brown arrived in 1855, the territory had two separate legislatures. Neither agreed with the other about anything. John Brown, distressed at the Kansas troubles that he read about with great regularity in the newspapers, and fearful for his sons’ safety, loaded a wooden farm wagon with pistols and rifles, well-concealed under a canvas, and drove to Kansas to defend his family. When a neighbor asked where he was going with the heavy wagon, he looked directly at him and said, “I am going to Kansas to make it a free state.”
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In Kansas, he was soon named the “captain” of an ad hoc militia company that was created to fight off the Missouri raiders. The troop was activated in the winter of 1855 when over a thousand Missourians arrived outside of the town of Lawrence, Kansas, intent on skirmishing with another thousand of Free-State defenders there. Brown’s troop saw no action, though, because the territorial governor talked both sides out of a confrontation. A few months later, in the spring of 1856, Missouri raiders were back and this time attacked Lawrence. Eight hundred angry, armed Missourians rode into the town, left undefended by its residents for fear of legal reprisals. They fired on the Free-State Hotel with a small cannon, leveling much of it, wrecked the offices of the town’s two newspapers, smashing their presses, tossing their type into a nearby river, and ripping up paper stock. They destroyed the home of the Free-Soil governor. The men, shouting and threatening any townspeople who tried to get in their way, ransacked private residences and stores, setting many on fire. Brown and his militia, on their way to Lawrence upon hearing the news, arrived too late to do anything except watch smoke rise from the charred buildings.
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The venom toward the Missouri raiders had been building in John Brown for months. The earlier murders of five Free-Soil men had gone unsolved. Proslavery settlers from Pottawatomie Creek had burned down the store of a Free-State man and now ruffians from Missouri, urged on by their fiery U.S. senator, David Atchison, had sacked Lawrence. The U.S. government did nothing to stop the Missouri proslavery assaults, Brown lamented, and neither did the territorial government of Kansas. If Kansas’s law enforcement agencies would not avenge these illegal atrocities, John Brown would.

Gathering four of his sons, Brown staged a nighttime raid on the proslavery residents of the village of Pottawatomie. Five of the men were dragged from their homes and butchered with broadswords; their horses were stolen. The vicious, highly publicized attack was justified by Brown as necessary retaliation, but the proslavery settlers and their allies, and all the residents of the Southern states, saw it as murder. They gained revenge a few days later by burning down the community of Osawatomie, where Brown lived. The Pottawatomie massacre was the first bloody chapter in John Brown’s war on slavery wherever he found it; there would be more.

Throughout the next two years, Brown and his sons rode with militia units in Kansas to fight the “border ruffians” who invaded the territory from Missouri; his son Frederick was killed in the wars. Their engagements were sometimes mere skirmishes and sometimes deadly. He also rode with the territory’s leading guerilla commander, James Montgomery. Throughout those years, Brown vociferously defended his violent tactics, branding his victims as evil people. He explained to critics that he “had never killed an innocent man” and later told a crowd in Cleveland of his career in Kansas and Missouri that “he had never lifted a finger towards any whom he did not know was a violent persecutor of the Free-State men.”
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Charles Robinson, who appointed him a captain when he arrived, noted his “timely action against the invaders of our rights and the murderers of our citizens” and said that “history will pay homage to your heroism with the cause of God and humanity.”

A Quaker in Kansas dismissed Brown’s savage attack at Pottawatomie, too, and said that he “was a good man and he will be remembered for good in time long hence to come.”
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Brown’s guerrillas frightened Missourians and Kansans alike. One farmer in Kansas complained to territorial governor John Geary that Brown and his men plundered arms and pleaded with him for protection. He wrote the governor, “John Brown and his company, who were still marching through the country taking everything that they could get that they could make money out of…driving everybody back that did not suit their purposes and destroying crops.”
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