CHAPTER V.
PREPARATIONS FOR THE CONFLICT.
ALL this unwearied industry of John Brown in pioneer life, in the pursuit of wealth, in the establishment of his children, in the formation of acquaintance, and the maintenance of his family, was but preparatory, in his thought and in fact, to the fore-ordained and chosen task of his life,—the overthrow of American slavery. During the English war of 1812 he began to reflect, he says, "on the wretched, hopeless condition of fatherless and motherless slave children, sometimes raising the question, 'Is God their Father?' When this was answered in the Old Testament way, the boy in his teens declared and swore 'eternal war with slavery.'" He did not hasten forward towards the achievement of what he had undertaken, until the fulness of time had come, and he had furnished himself with such military and general knowledge as he deemed requisite. He kept it steadily before him for forty years, educated himself and his children for it, and made it as much a part of his household discipline as were his prayers at morning and evening. Emerson, indeed, in his speech at Salem in 1859, a month before Brown's death, fixes a much earlier date as the beginning of his enterprise against slavery in Virginia. "It was not a piece of spite or revenge,—a plot of two years or of twenty years,—but the keeping of an oath made to heaven and earth forty-seven years before. Forty-seven years at least,—though I incline to accept his own account of the matter at Charlestown, which makes the date a little older, when he said, 'This was all settled millions of years before the world was made.'" Mrs. Brown told me in 1860 that she had known his design and been pledged to aid it for more than twenty years; and John Brown himself had said in 1857, early in my acquaintance
