John Brown (Chamberlin)/Chapter 1
John Brown was born at Torrington, Connecticut on the ninth day of May, 1800, in a poor wooden house among the round Appalachian hills which the man loved, in a peculiar way, to the day of his death. His father, a tanner and shoemaker, had lived in that house and township but a year when John Brown was born; but in the country within the little circle made by Windsor, Canton, Norfolk, Litchfield, and Torrington, the father and all the folk had been born and bred, and their fathers before them. It was all a part of the same land of round hills and winding valleys, inhabited by the same hard-working and fiercely thinking people.
Mr. W. E. Forster sums up well enough the story of Brown's ancestry when he says that he "was of the best blood in America." Some careful genealogists have thrown a little doubt upon his descent, as assumed by himself and by everybody else who has written about him, from Peter Brown, the carpenter, who came over in the Mayflower. I see no good reason to doubt this descent; but it makes little difference whether his blood came down from this man or not. He was at least descended, like nearly all the people in his part of Connecticut, from the remarkable colony who settled Windsor, Connecticut, and who were in every way quite equal to the Mayflower group. They were an intensely pious and devoted band, carefully chosen, man by man and woman by woman, "especially that their efforts might bring the Indians to the knowledge of the gospel." Apostles every one of them, on their way over in the ship Mary and John they "had preaching and expounding the word of God every day for ten weeks together." They went on foot through the pathless forest from Dorchester, Massachusetts, to Windsor. They were five weeks on the way, and winter closed in on them before their stuff and provisions could come up the Connecticut by boats; and then they starved and shivered and prayed and preached. Their sufferings are a part of the story of John Brown. These early apostles and martyrs were compressed into him.
His grandfather was Captain John Brown of the Revolutionary army, who died in the service in 1775. This grandfather's wife, Hannah Owen, was of Welsh descent. Our John Brown's father was Owen Brown, born in Canton, Connecticut, in 1771. His mother was Ruth Mills, of Dutch descent; but these mothers, as well as the fathers, were bred in the Yankee hills, and their blood was well mixed with that of the Puritan Yankees. John Brown, even with his dash of Dutch and Welsh blood, was a Yankee of the Yankees.
Brown's mother, Ruth Mills, was a godly, sane woman, without a story. His father, Owen Brown, emigrated in 1805 to Ohio, and there became a trustee of Oberlin College. Hudson, the place where he settled, in the Western Reserve, was then in the midst of a wild country. There young John Brown went to school to herdsmen and Indians, learning of the herdsmen such mastery of their trade that he drove great herds of cattle long distances alone at an early age, and of the Indians the arts of shooting and riding and dressing skins. He did not learn here to hate the Indians, as other frontiersmen did, but learned instead to love them; and years afterward on the frontiers of Kansas they paid back his love with kind services. In his little Autobiography, sent in 1857 to young Harry Stearns of Medford, and written, throughout in the third person, there is a note which shows that sensibility was born in him: "When John was in his Sixth year, a poor Indian boy gave him a Yellow Marble, the first he had ever seen. This he thought a great deal of, and kept it a good while; but at last he lost it beyond recovery. It took years to heal the wound, and I think he cried at times about it."
He had a rough time in this "University of the West," as Thoreau called his early life. He was dressed in buckskin and fars, and spent long days in the woods, with only cattle or sheep for his companions. He tells us that he was for a time "quite skeptical," but the Bible triumphed over all the other books that he was able to read; and he tells, too, of having the "free use of a good library." He "joined the church" (Orthodox Congregational) at Hudson, Ohio, in 1816, and never wavered in his Puritan belief. He was, he tells us, "naturally fond of females" as a boy, yet "diffident in their company." We have evidence that in his mature life women were always strongly drawn to him, but in no sentimental way. His life was unmarked by the faintest suggestion of an irregular attachment.
He had next to no schooling. He went at the age of about sixteen to his birthplace in Connecticut, and it was then proposed to educate him for the ministry. He attended for a time the school of the Rev. Moses Hallock at Plainfield, Massachusetts, a school famous for turning out preachers and missionaries, and studied also at the Morris Academy in Connecticut. But his training here was soon cut short by inflammation of the eyes, and he went back to Ohio and the tannery. With this schooling, and, no doubt, with much reading of old books and the Bible, he picked up an admirable epistolary style, clean cut and expressive, often eloquent, showing thought about words and fine discrimination in the use of them. His spelling was somewhat erratic, but, barring a too free use of capitals and peculiar punctuation, he could have written a sermon or leading article that would pass muster exceedingly well at the present day. He learned the tanner's and currier's trades, and was foreman in his father's tannery. He picked up, too, the surveyor's art, and became proficient in this, so that his surveys have stood the test of later scrutiny. But the real love of his heart was for the calling of the shepherd. Early in his life, he says, he had an "enthusiastic longing" for it; and in his later life he returned to it as often as he could. His casual memoranda indicated that he thought more about sheep than he did about anything else. Joined with this love was the kindred passion, which never left him, for fine cattle and horses.
John Brown's mother died when he was eight years old. His father soon remarried, but John always mourned his own mother. He matured early, and as a young man was described as of remarkably fine and noble appearance. As his father had done before him, he married young, at the age of twenty; and he is said to have had previously one disappointment in love. His wife, Dianthe Lusk, lived to the age of thirty, having, in eleven years, borne him seven children. She is said to have died in a demented state; and one or two of the children of this marriage apparently inherited from her a certain occasional mental weakness. Even in the early years of this marriage Brown followed Puritan and patriarchal ways,—conducting family worship, ruling his children firmly, instructing them at his knee, and singing hymns to them.
In 1825 Brown was made postmaster at Randolph, Pennsylvania, by President Jackson. He also established a tannery at that place, which he conducted evidently with some success. It was there that his first wife died, in 1832; and there that, a year afterward, he married Mary Anne Day, the faithful, devoted, wise and patient wife who survived him twenty-five years. She bore him thirteen children, seven of whom died very young.
The large surviving family of children of these two marriages, as well as other persons who knew him, have left abundant memories of his life and character. These represent him as headstrong, but humane and kind, possessing great tenderness and grave sweetness of manner, and exceedingly fond of his family. Though his children testify to his use of the rod on a few occasions, they affirm that he never applied it unjustly. He was fond of music and singing. Sanborn says that he "sang a good part," and tells of seeing him weeping at a performance of Schubert's "Serenade." He taught a singing-school for a time at North Elba. He is said to have been "rather dull in speech," though when he was much interested he spoke fluently enough, in a resonant and somewhat metallic voice. He distrusted utterly his powers as a public speaker, though late in life he made several very creditable addresses, and could engage in religious exhortation.
John Brown was a trifle less than six feet tall. He dressed neatly and plainly, in a somewhat rustic and sober rendering of the fashion of the time. The best description of his personal appearance is Bronson Alcott's, made when Brown was fifty-nine years old: "Nature obviously was deeply intent in the making of him. He is of imposing appearance, personally,—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. . . . I think him about the manliest man I have ever seen,—the type and synonym of the Just." Others described his eyes as "blue-gray," and Dana found him "dark-complexioned." Brown never wore the beard in which all the world now sees his face until his fifty-eighth year, when it helped him to a needed disguise in Kansas. One or two of his unbearded daguerreotypes make of him a grimmer, less intellectual Emerson. In the frontispiece of this book he is shown in the height of his wild period in Kansas, when fighting, exposure, and fever had rendered him somewhat haggard; but the picture brings us nearer to the soul of the man, it seems to me, than any other does.
Brown early began to shift about and show the wandering characteristics which afterward became so marked in him. In 1835 he went back to Ohio, took up the tanning business there, bought wool, raised fancy live-stock, including racehorses, speculated very indiscreetly in land, indorsed a note for a friend, failed disastrously, and in his bankruptcy attempted, in pursuance of a lawyer's advice, to hold a farm against which there was an attachment, and was arrested on a peace warrant and taken to Akron jail; but the key does not appear actually to have been turned on him. He had pledged for his own benefit some twenty-eight hundred dollars put in his hands by the New England Woollen Company for the purchase of wool; but this he made no secret of, and was not troubled on account of it by the company, which still trusted him. He was all the rest of his life—and more, for he left fifty dollars for the purpose in his will—in paying up this debt. His friends and business men in general went on trusting him with large amounts of money, which, in two or three cases, he found it hard to repay. In 1840 he went to Virginia—the portion of it on the Ohio River, now in West Virginia—to survey some lands belonging to Oberlin College, and fell completely in love with the country. From there he wrote to his family, "I have seen the spot where, if it be the will of Providence, I hope one day to live with my family." These Virginia hills exercised upon Brown a fascination which made it easier, no doubt, for him to associate with them his subsequent revolutionary schemes.
In 1844 he formed, with a substantial wool-grower and dealer, Simon Perkins, of Akron, Ohio, a partnership which continued for some years. Long after Brown's death, Perkins summed up his business qualifications thus: "He had little judgment, always followed his own will, and lost much money. I had no controversy with John Brown, for it would have done no good." Brown bought much wool, and had the care of the flocks of the firm. Perkins admits that he was an expert in grading wools. Indeed, as an instant and accurate classifier of fleeces, he seems to have won an almost national reputation in the trade.
In 1846 he was sent to live at Springfield, Massachusetts, as the agent of sheep farmers of northern Ohio, Pennsylvania, New York, and Virginia. He graded and sold their wool for them direct to the manufacturers of New England. He lived at Springfield, with certain absences, some five years, carrying on a considerable business, which he finally brought to disaster by refusing what seemed to him too small a price offered for a large consignment of wool from the Ohio growers, and taking the wool to England in order to get a larger. There he obtained, instead of a better figure, only half the price which had been offered him in New England. This bankrupted him again, and really ended his commercial career. The very same wool which he carried to England was bought to be shipped back to America, and was so shipped. It was one of the most picturesque failures of a bold stroke of business on record.
After this Brown removed with his family to North Elba, in the Adirondack mountains of northern New York, where he was interested in an experiment which Gerrit Smith, the rich abolitionist and philanthropist, was making in the settling of negroes on wild land.
North Elba continued to be the home of Brown's family until after his death, though he himself lived there very little. The wanderings of his apostolate, following his mercantile travels, had now begun. Thenceforth he farmed and shepherded here and there to supply his own and his family's immediate needs. There are indications, in his abounding correspondence, that he had sometimes dreamed, in the years before 1850, of making a fortune in business; but after that it is clear that he had quite another end in view.