John Brown (Chamberlin)/Chapter 5
George Luther Stearns, a merchant of Boston, resident in the town of Medford close by,—a man of wealth and character and fine spirit,—was the mainspring of John Brown's campaign in Kansas and afterward in Virginia, though he seldom knew, and never took pains to find out, exactly what Brown was doing with his money. There were at work in New England, with their direction centred in Boston, two committees which had much to do with making Kansas a free State,—the Kansas committee of Massachusetts and the New England Emigrant Aid Company. Nominally, their chief work was to colonize men in Kansas who could be depended on to vote against slavery. Towns were established there, and their settlers furnished with arms by these and other Kansas committees. Influential in the work were Mr. Stearns, Dr. Samuel G. Howe, Dr. Samuel Cabot, Jr., Eli Thayer, and Frank B. Sanborn. Mr. Sanborn was a young man, just out of college, of marked energy, individuality, earnestness and ability, then as now. Brown liked him well, visited him, wrote to him, made use of his abilities in raising money, and finally tried to get him to join him in the Virginia raid. The "friends of Kansas" in Massachusetts bought two hundred Sharpe's rifles and sent them to Brown in Iowa, intending them for use in Kansas. They never went further than an Iowa town named Tabor, where for a time Brown had his headquarters when he was not "operating" in Kansas. We shall see what became of them.
John Brown came to Boston in December, 1856,—the very year of the Pottawatomie killings,—and was hospitably received by some of the most radical of the Anti-slavery men, and especially by Stearns and Sanborn. His object, as he announced it to these two, and as Sanborn reports it, was to raise money with which to arm and equip a hundred mounted men for defence and reprisal in Kansas. He gave it to be understood, however, that he wished to be at liberty to use the arms and money in his own way. He succeeded in getting a good deal of money. Mr. Stearns gave Brown agood deal of cash, and, first and last, undoubtedly paid him several thousand dollars. Brown had his family at North Elba to support, and naturally expected that, inasmuch as he was giving all his time and much of the time of two or three minor sons to the work, his family should have some support firom the committees. His wife and young children certainly had no more at any time than the bare necessaries of life. Brown was now Captain John Brown, and a person of such wide reputation that, when he went about on the Kansas business, he found it convenient to travel under an assumed name; and his favorite "alias" was "Nelson Hawkins." He made a speech under his own name—for in Massachusetts he could safely be John Brown—before a committee of the Massachusetts legislature and a large audience, urging a State appropriation in support of the Kansas committee's work. It was refused; but his appeal certainly helped him in his work, and his reception by the legislative committee gave him standing.
Brown visited his family at North Elba in the early spring of 1857, went to Connecticut, made speeches and collected money, got the granite tombstone of his grandfather, Captain John Brown, there and sent it to North Elba to be set up and inscribed with his son Frederick's name, and, eventually, with his own. At Collinsville, in Connecticut, he contracted for the manufacture of a thousand pikes or spears, saying that they were intended for use in Kansas. The manufacturer exacted pay for the work as he went along; and the pikes were a long time in preparing. When at last they were finished, they went to Harper's Ferry, not to Kansas. They were a likely weapon for negroes on Southern plantations, who knew little about firearms: for ranging frontiersmen on the Kansas plains they were the last sort of weapon that any one would think of. There seems little doubt that Brown's explanation to the Connecticut manufacturer was a subterfuge, and that he intended the pikes for a negro insurrection somewhere. The fact that he paid for them slowly, keeping them hanging, so to speak, a long time, does not indicate that he really intended them for use in Kansas. He found money to pay for them before he needed them in Virginia. He could not prevent the shipment of the two hundred Sharpe's rifies of the Kansas Aid committee as far west as Iowa, but there is fair ground for presumption that he never intended that they should go any further.
Beating up and down the East in this money-getting work, Brown did another thing that proved he had a new plan, and also, perhaps, showed the influence of his reading of the Life of Oliver Cromwell. Somewhat like Cromwell, he developed military tastes and took up a fighting career late in life, without a military training. When it had become desirable for Cromwell to have something of a soldier's education, he had found an adventurer of Dutch extraction, John Dalbier by name, who had seen much service abroad, and made use of him as a military "coach." In New York Brown met an Englishman,—so he is called, at any rate, though the name betrays Scottish extraction,—named Hugh Forbes, who was said to have been with Garibaldi and to have done good fighting in the European revolutionary attempts of 1848. Brown seems to have been greatly taken with Forbes, and to have recognized in him his John Dalbier. He made an arrangement with him to instruct him and his "young men" in the military art, at some chosen place, for one hundred dollars a month, advancing him six hundred dollars.
Meantime the political war in Kansas had become lively again, and Brown was implored by several of the leaders to come back to the Territory. He wrote them encouragingly, but was busy accumulating supplies and munitions, and getting them to Tabor and Springdale, Iowa, where he actually assembled "his young men," as he called the devoted band of followers who went with him to Virginia. "Jim" Lane, the military commander of the Free State forces in the Territory, had made Brown a general, and, addressing him as such, begged him to come on with his guns. Brown replied from Tabor that his health would not permit,—which seems very strange (if he had really intended to go) in a man who had resolutely lived an outlaw's life in Kansas while extremely ill with fever, and had then [shown no hesitation about risking his health at every turn. The fact was that he did not wish to put the two hundred precious Sharpe's rifles, which Lane knew he had, and was eagerly trying to get, into the hands of Kansas bushwhackers. He knew that; if he did, he would never get them back again. Nor did he propose to reveal the plan for the Virginia raid to the Kansas people.
The Eastern Anti-slavery folk were also egging Brown on to go to Kansas and "give them some backbone." They were as yet in the dark as to his schemes. These Eastern people had agreed to pay Gerrit Smith one thousand dollars for the farm which Brown's family occupied in the Adirondacks: they did give it at last, but the money came very slowly. It seems extraordinary at this distance that Smith, a rich man, who certainly spent a great deal of money in the Anti-slavery cause, and who gave Brown three hundred dollars in cash at about this time, should have been willing to take money nominally from Brown for his rocky acres.
On his way to the West from Ohio, Brown wrote a strange and pathetic letter to his wife and children. "If I should never return," he said, "it is my particular request that no other monument be used to keep me in remembrance than the same plain one that records the death of my grandfather and son; and that a short story, like those already on it, be told of John Brown, the fifth, under that of grandfather." This refers to the tombstone of his grandfather, which he had removed from Connecticut to North Elba. The request tells the story of his pride in his Puritan lineage. It betrays his own strong feeling that he was going to do something which might make his name famous, and that this something was in a high degree hazardous. "I think I have several good reasons for this," he went on in his letter. "I would be glad that my posterity should not only remember their parentage, but also the cause they labored in. I do not expect to leave these parts under four or five days, and will try to write again before I go off. I am much confused in mind, and cannot remember what I wish to write." A long letter which Brown wrote from Iowa to F. B. Sanborn shows that his heart was very heavy at this time. His family were practically unprovided for, ill-lodged, poorly fed, and his young children not at school. He felt strongly that he had parted from them forever. Yet something drove him on irresistibly: no pressure could have made him turn back. He was, moreover, out of conceit with all the leading influences then working against slavery. The abolitionists, he said, "would never effect anything by their milk-and-water principles," and the Republican party was of no account, since it was opposed to "meddling with slavery" in the States where it existed. For his part, he lived to meddle with it wherever it was. Peace, he said, was but an empty word. He was certainly now preparing to make war.
In September, 1857, he had assembled in Iowa his little company of young men for military instruction under the adventurer Forbes. These young men had for the most part served with him in Kansas: a few were new recruits. They were a chosen lot, of energy and fierce principle, but trusting Brown completely and going unquestioningly where he bade them. Several of them afterward died with him at Harper's Ferry. One of their best was John Henry Kagi, or Keagy, a native of Ohio, of Swiss extraction, a tall young fellow of twenty-three, with the air of a divinity student, but an agnostic in his religious views, as were most of the company. Kagi had been a teacher and a newspaper correspondent. Another was John Edwin Cook, a young Connecticut Yankee who had studied at Yale, but did not graduate; a talkative, very captivating fellow, who wrote poor verses and caused Brown some uneasiness by his tendency to prattle. Another was Edwin Coppoc, Quaker-bred, a jolly, brown-eyed youth, but quiet in his ways and the essence of devotion to Brown. Of very much such material as this the whole party was made. The men were inclined to revolutionary radicalism; they were fall of "views," and were a perpetual debating society wherever they went. Brown, the only old man in the group, unlike them in his foundation motive and his manner of life, dominated them completely, and knew that, with all their prattling, they would die for him. Richard Realf, the poet, and Richard J. Hinton, a journalist, both Englishmen, were for a time in Brown's band. He designed nearly every one of them to be the captain of a black legion, when he should have the blacks raised in rebellion against their masters. His drill-master Forbes had deserted him; and he replaced him with Aaron Dwight Stephens, one of his Kansas fighters, who had been a soldier in the United States army. This man proved true, to the grave.
Cook declares that Brown had told him that the ultimate destination of the expedition was Virginia. Without the knowledge or consent of Mr. Stearns or the other Massachusetts aiders and abettors of his plans, Brown shipped the Sharpe's rifles and revolvers, which had been given him for "work in Kansas," and also other stores, such as blankets and clothing, back to Conneaut, Ohio, on their way to Virginia. No doubt he knew that Mr. Stearns preferred that he should carry out his own plans without consulting and involving him. Perhaps he did not care what any one thought about it. He communicated his plans gradually to his best trusted "young men." Edwin Coppoc said at Harper's Ferry, "The whole company was opposed to making the first demonstration at Harper's Ferry; but Captain Brown would have his way, and we had to obey orders." Everything seemed going well. Brown intended to strike in April or May, 1868. He went East, visited Frederick Douglass in February, 1868, and sketched quite fully the Virginia plot to him. He had to beg more money from his Massachusetts supporters. He did not disclose his plans to them at this time, only saying that "railroad business," by which, of course, he meant liberating slaves, "on a somewhat extended scale," was his object. Meantime his enemies supposed that he was hiding in Kansas.
He soon came on to Gerrit Smith's house at Peterboro, New York; and to that place on Feb. 22, 1858, F. B. Sanborn and Thomas Wentworth Higginson went, at Brown's urgent invitation. There, to Gerrit Smith, to Higginson, to Sanborn, and to Smith's secretary, Edwin Morton, Brown unfolded a scheme for a raid in Virginia. He read a long "constitution" which he had drawn up for the government he was to establish. It was a wordy, boyish document, and seems to have special reference and adaptation to the negro character. It somewhat paradoxically asserted devotion to the Constitution and flag of the United States. Brown, for that matter, thought of his war as one against the slaveholders, not against the government. He wanted eight hundred dollars to begin the work of his revolution with!
Brown's hearers were thunder-struck, and used every argument they could think of against the scheme. Hour after hour they talked and contended, Brown answering volubly every objection. "But it is utterly hopeless to undertake so vast a work with such slender means," they exclaimed; and Brown answered, "If God be for us, who can be against us?" In his mind this was answer enough. Besides, he already had his men and his munitions; and they were on their way. The work had begun. He would not give it up.
"You see how it is," said Gerrit Smith: "our dear old friend has made up his mind to this course, and cannot be-tumed from it. We cannot give him up to die alone; we must support him. I will raise so many hundred dollars for him: you must lay the case before your friends in Massachusetts, and perhaps they will do the same. I see no other way."
There was no other way. It was John Brown's rebellion. The moneyed abolitionists had only to ratify his decision. In connection with this enforced ratification; Mr. Sanborn patly quotes Edwin Coppoc's remark to the authorities at Harper's Ferry: "Ah, gentlemen, you don't know Captain Brown: when he wants a man to do a thing, he does it." Brown knew his die was cast. He did not go to North Elba for two months, but visited Boston (whence he carried five hundred dollars in gold), New York and Philadelphia, turning various stones to forward his plans. He wrote to his daughter Euth, imploring her to let her husband, Henry Thompson, who had fought with him in Kansas, join him again; and though Thompson, who had already been wounded in Kansas, did not go with him once more, his two brothers did. Brown wrote to Sanborn for copies of Plutarch's Lives, Irving's "Life of Washington," the "best Life of Napoleon, and other similar books," together with maps and statistics of Southern States, for his "young men" to read.
Having made a brief visit to his family, Brown went to Chatham, in Canada West, to organize a conspiracy among the negroes from the United States who had taken refuge there,—a band of men influential among their race. There, in May, he held a secret convention. Twelve of his young men were with him, and there was a small attendance of trusted colored men. Brown's constitution, which he had read at Gerrit Smith's, was submitted to the meeting, and adopted. Brown made a strong speech, declaring his plan in a general way, but sajring nothing about Harper's Ferry. In fact, one of the members of the convention has declared that he supposed the "work" was to be done in Kansas. Yet to some at least Brown seems to have made it clear that, when his blow for the negroes had been struck, they would come "to the mountains" to join him, and that there he proposed to operate, making the chain of the Appalachians his base. By flocking to his standard; the blacks would enable him to harass the plantations on either side of the range; and he believed that he could establish impregnable positions in the mountains. He expected that the rising would become general through the Southern States; and; when it had become so, he would organize the freed blacks under his provisional constitution.
Brown was made commander-in-chief under this constitution, John Henry Kagi Secretary of War, Richard Realf Secretary of State, Owen Brown Treasurer, and George B. Gill Secretary of the Treasury. All of these were white; but two colored men were made "members of Congress." The whole organization was the absurdest boys' play, unless we are to consider it a part of Brown's plan to impress the negroes with high-sounding proceedings of apparent great importance. But Brown was capable of magnificent boyishness on occasion. I am inclined to regard all this as a part of it rather than as a more or less insincere device to dazzle the negroes.
Brown intended to start for Virginia very soon. His own plans were matured. But meantime a great scare had been caused among the Eastern abolitionists by the threat of Hugh Forbes, Brown's late drill-master, to denounce the whole conspiracy to the government if he were not paid certain sums of money. Claiming that Brown had not paid him all he agreed, he conveyed this threat in letters to Senators Wilson and Sumner and other Republicans who were not in the secret. They went to Sanborn and Stearns, and there was wide consternation. Several thought that the whole plan would have to be given up. As a matter of fact, it was put off on this account for fully a year. Brown was not greatly worried,—certainly not at all alarmed. He used some craft to stay Forbes's hand. He went to Boston, and Stearns induced him not to proceed for a time. It was thought best that Brown should go back to Kansas, apparently to resume his regular work there, but with the real object of confusing Forbes. Meantime Forbes somehow "disappeared," as Hinton, who was one of Brown's men, expresses it, "wholly from our vision." Yet he wrote a communication to the New York Herald in October, 1859, and was later somewhat vaguely reported as fighting with Garibaldi again in Italy. It is dear that he never really betrayed the conspiracy to the government. Brown was asked by Stearns to take back to Kansas the arms and munitions that he had collected, but he did not. He went there at the end of June, 1858, empty-handed and with much relutance, feeling that he was giving up large game for smaller.