Authors: Bruce Chadwick
There was no mistaking Brown’s hatred of slavery in Chatham. In the Preamble of the new land’s Provisional Constitution and Ordinances for the people of the United States, he wrote, “Slavery…is none other than the most barbaric, unprovoked, and unjustifiable war of one portion of citizens upon another.”
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Some friends of Brown said the idea of a violent raid into a slave territory or state was in the back of Brown’s mind for decades. Wrote Governor John Andrews of Massachusetts, “If I am rightly informed, he has cherished this scheme of liberating the slaves in Virginia for more than thirty years and laid his plans when he was a land surveyor in [Virginia].” Frederick Douglass remembered that in 1847 Brown had outlined his Allegheny slave empire to him. F. B. Sanborn said Brown wrote him of a general Southern invasion in December of 1839.
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Brown could not raise enough money and men, or procure enough weapons, for that Harper’s Ferry assault, or any other attack in the spring of 1858, though. Wrote Luke Parsons, one of the men who rode with him, “Brown failed to find the money to carry on our plans so the [Harper’s Ferry] raid was declared off for one year. Brown took three of the men back with him to Kansas.”
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Kansas was relatively quiet in the spring of 1858 as most of the residents put down their guns to argue politics over the Lecompton Constitution. Brown made his reentry “with the utmost quiet,” he said, and moved about Kansas under one of the several assumed names he used, such as Shubel Morgan. It was so quiet, in fact, that in the middle of October 1858, Brown thought about going back to New York, writing his wife that “I can now see no good reason why I should not be located nearer home.”
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Illness may have caused him to return to his wife and family. His health had deteriorated during the past year. Throughout the autumn of 1858 he suffered from what he called an “ague” of some kind that caused trembling in his body. One week before Christmas, he wrote his wife that he felt a bit better. “My health is improving but still I get a ‘shake’ pretty often.”
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He did not tell his wife that there was yet another bounty on his head, $500, for a non-violent November 13 raid with guerilla leader James Montgomery on the tiny community of Paris, Kansas, where Montgomery had been indicted for destroying ballot boxes in January elections there. The raiders wanted to confiscate the indictment document, but could not find it.
Locals were angrier at Brown than the governor. They saw the New Yorker as an outside agitator who had become a thorn in their side. Two weeks later, a sheriff and a posse of volunteers set a trap to capture Brown and Montgomery, but Brown was not with Montgomery and the latter’s men fought off a poorly planned attack. As a result, Kansans’ fear of the guerillas increased.
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In December 1858, Brown was told by Montgomery that he was planning to attack Fort Scott, ninety miles south of Kansas City, and rescue a Free-State man who was incarcerated there. Brown told Montgomery that his thinking was too limited, that they should burn the entire fort and all of its buildings; the total destruction of the fort was necessary to send both Kansans and Missourians a message. A shocked Montgomery disagreed. Brown sulked and had little to do with the raid on the fort, in which the captured man was freed but a pro-slaver who had once nearly slain Brown’s disciple Kagi with a shotgun blast, was killed.
A few days later, by sheer luck, Brown’s lieutenant, black freedman George Gill, met a mulatto from Missouri, Jim Daniels, who complained to him that his wife and children and another slave were going to be sold, their families broken up, by their owner, Harvey Hicklan. Daniels was desperate for help. Brown thought the man’s plight offered a wonderful chance for a raid to liberate slaves and strike a blow for freedom. He was convinced that such a raid, and an eleven-hundred-mile exodus to free Canada, would garner substantial press attention. Despite the risks, such a raid would show the world what kind of man he was. “It is in times of difficulty that men show what they are. It is at such times that men mark themselves,” he always said.
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George Gill, the black freedman, agreed. He wrote, “I am sure that Brown, in his mind, was just waiting for something to turn up; or, in his way of thinking, was expecting or hoping that ‘God would provide him a basis of action.’ When this came, he hailed it as heaven sent.”
For Brown, it was an opportunity he could not ignore; he had always preached to his disciples that “God had created him to be the deliverer of the slaves, the same as Moses had delivered the children of Israel.”
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His men believed that too, and would follow him anywhere. In Brown, they not only had a true believer in the antislavery cause, but a forceful leader with a resolute attitude. He got things done. Brown’s near-dictatorial personality was evident to his children as they grew up. One of his sons described him as “a King against whom there is no rising up.” Brown agreed, telling his son that he “habitually expected to succeed.”
He was completely devoted to his cause. All who knew him, friends and foes, acknowledged that he pursued his goal of eradicating slavery with remarkable vigilance. Brown’s soul “will be the inspiration of all men in the present and distant future who may revolt against tyranny and oppression,” wrote Charles Robinson later. “He is the pure idealist, with no by-end of his own,” added writer Ralph Waldo Emerson.
He dismissed any fears of his men that they would be captured, telling them that “the angel of the Lord will camp ’round me.”
Brown was determined. Abolitionist Gerrit Smith wrote that once “our old friend has made up his mind, [he] cannot be turned from it.” He possessed a steely will that always seemed to prevail in discussions with his raiders and supporters. “His arguments seemed to convince all…his appeals touched all and his will impressed all,” wrote Frederick Douglass, who added that Brown had a mystical aura about him. “I never felt myself under a stronger religious influence than while in John Brown’s house.”
And there was no doubt of his willingness to use violence to achieve his means, frequently telling supporters and anyone who would listen by the winter of 1858 that “I am more than ever of the opinion that we must settle this question [slavery] in the old Anglo-Saxon way—by the sword.”
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Brown should have realized the consequences of any raid in Missouri, though. The news that John Brown was back had infuriated Missourians. He wrote his son John Jr., “Having [me] on a conspicuous place and in full view for miles around in Missouri produced a ferment there which you can better imagine than I can describe. Which of the passions most predominated, fear or rage, I do not pretend to say.”
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Late on the chilly night of December 20, just a few days before Christmas 1858, Brown and five men in his ten-man raider party rode into Missouri and attacked the farm of Harvey Hicklan. Hicklan was awakened by the sound of the hooves of a half-dozen horses in front of his tiny farmhouse on the prairie. Just as he walked into the main room from his small bedroom, the front door of the house flew open and there in front of him was the notorious abolitionist, John Brown. The intruder cut quite a dramatic figure as he stood in front of Hicklan, his long white beard flowing over his shirt, his rifle pointed directly at him.
Brown told Hicklan why he was there. “We have come after your Negroes and their property. Will you surrender or fight?” Hicklan, who feared for the safety of his family, did not resist and permitted Brown and his men to ride off with his six slaves.
Captain Brown sent five other men to the nearby farm of John Larue to liberate four slaves there. The Brown raiders confiscated the farmers’ wagons and horses as well, plus clothing, bedding, food supplies, a pair of boots, and a shotgun and left just before dawn. He also took with him Larue and a friend as hostages with the suddenly free, and very nervous, slaves. The men with Brown could not resist the opportunity to loot the homes. “They ransacked the house in search of money and I suppose they would have taken it if they had found it,” said Hicklan. Gill admitted that “watches and other articles were being taken; some of our number proved to be mere adventurers, ready to take from friend or foe as opportunity offered.”
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A third group of Brown’s men, led by Aaron Stevens, surprised David Cruise at his farmhouse in their rescue of a female slave there. Stevens saw Cruise move and assumed he was going for a weapon. A nervous Stevens fired at the farmer, killing him.
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The slaying of the much-respected Cruise turned the raid from just a rescue into an act that inflamed Kansans, Missourians, and Southerners and once again propelled John Brown into the national spotlight.
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Newspapers in both Kansas and Missouri were appalled at the rescue, the death of Cruise, and the kidnapping of Larue and his friend. The Harrisonville (Missouri) Democrat said the raiders were murderers and begged authorities to do “something to protect our people.” The editor of the Wyandotte City Western Argus wrote that Brown “will have a heavy account to settle some day—for surely a terrible retribution will come to them sooner or later.”
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During the first week of January, 1859, a Kansas correspondent of the influential
St. Louis Missouri-Democrat
evoked the repulsion felt by many in both Kansas and Missouri by the Osawatomie raid, and the murder, in one of his stories. He called the raid and killing “of a nature so revolting that the mind grows dizzy with horror, and involuntarily inquires whether or not we are not relapsing into the barbarism of the middle ages. It is not probable that the killing of Cruise was premeditated, but finding himself attacked by robbers, he resisted, as remorselessly by the fiend who had attacked him. I have yet to see the first Free-State man of position in or around Osawatomie who does not condemn in the strongest terms any going into Missouri or committing depredations.”
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The wagon Brown and his tiny army traveled in, and in which they transported the freed slaves, was one of the old Conestogas. Designed for long trips on the plains and used by those who traveled to the prairies with their families to start new lives, the wagons were slow moving, lumbering, and contained dozens of chains that hung from its sides to hold things that caused much noise as they banged against the wooden sides of the vehicle. That cold night, Brown led the large party of raiders and refugees, and their wagon, out of Missouri and thirty-five miles back into Kansas to a cabin near Osawatomie Creek, arriving at nightfall on Christmas Eve.
The raiders rode with their freed slaves and two captives toward the farm of Augustus Wattles, near Mound City, Kansas, constantly looking back over their shoulders to see if they were being followed by a posse. On the way, Brown surely told the captured farmers the same thing he told all of the proslavery Kansans and Missourians he captured or encountered in the territorial wars, alternately warning them to stay away from the free farmers of the area and threatening them.
“We wish no harm to you or your companions. Stay at home. Let us alone and we shall be friends,” was his usual line of warning.
He often threatened captives, only to let them go. “I am the enemy of all evildoers. You came here to make this a slave state. You are fighting against liberty, which our revolutionary fathers fought to establish, when all men should be free and equal…you are a traitor to liberty and your country. You deserve to be hanged to the nearest tree.”
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The raiders hoped to hide the slaves at the home of the Rev. Samuel Adair, who lived near Osawatomie Creek and who had harbored two of Brown’s sons following the Pottawatomie massacre of 1856. The compact wagon train of fugitives and raiders arrived at the minister’s home on Christmas Eve. At first he was uncertain whether or not he should cooperate because of the heated climate in the territory.
Adair wrote, “The fugitive slave law was still in force. I realized in some measure the responsibility of receiving them, consulted my wife, calling her attention to our responsibility, but would do as she said. She considered the subject for a few moments, then said: ‘I cannot turn them away.’ By this time, the team was in the road in front of the house. All were taken round to the backyard, and the colored people were brought into the back kitchen and kept there that night…”
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Even though they were happy to help, the Adairs did not want to house the freed blacks permanently. They suggested a vacant cabin nearby, owned by Charles Severn, a fellow abolitionist, on the banks of the Osawatomie. Severn had moved to Kansas a year before and was traveling. It was a small, nondescript home that had not been lived in for some time and might make a perfect hideout. The Adairs, and other friends in the area, would supply the refugees with food and clothing and protect them.
A man named Ambrose who lived near the Osawatomie was sound asleep when he heard a hard knocking on the front door of his cabin that night. Fearful of still more proslavery militants in the area, Ambrose did not open the door, but shouted through it to discover who was there.
“Samuel Mack,” said the visitor.
Ambrose let Mack, the local justice of the peace, into the cabin and shut the door. Mack informed him that John Brown and his men were harboring eleven slaves they had freed in Severn’s cabin, which could be seen from Ambrose’s farmhouse. The primitive cabin was constructed out of unhewn hickory poles and did not have a door, window or a wooden floor. It was in the middle of a wide, flat plain and could be observed for miles by anyone. Mack was there to alert Ambrose so he would not visit the cabin, attracting unwanted attention. “There were some men living in the neighborhood whom the old antislavery guard could not trust and a visit…might lead to the discovery of the fugitives,” Ambrose said.
Next, Mack rode to the home of Ambrose’s father-in-law, William Felton, who lived a half mile southwest of the cabin, and alerted him, too. Felton and his family were happy to help protect the fugitives. Ambrose said later, “They were all well pleased, and entered heartily into the business of assisting to provide for them during their stay, for they hated slavery with a holy hatred.”