1 of 5

By age 55, John Brown had engaged in more than twenty business ventures, such as tanning, land speculating, and sheep herding. Most of them failed, some ending in bankruptcy, two in crime.
Yet this unstable personality would become a feared monomaniac (in the South) and legendary martyr (in the North). His actions would pour kerosene on the smoldering debate over slavery; soon the nation would be engulfed in the inferno.
Born in Connecticut in 1800, Brown passed his boyhood in Hudson, Ohio. John was raised by a devout Calvinist and abolitionist father and a mother afflicted with mental illness. At age 18, he intended to become a Congregational minister. He instead became a wanderer and business failure. He married twice and fathered twenty children; a few were judged insane.
Throughout his life, Brown was an abolitionist. His barn in Pennsylvania was a station on the Underground Railroad. He lived for a time in a black community in New York. During an Ohio church service, following a sermon on slavery, he stood in the sanctuary and declared, “Here, before God and in the presence of these witnesses, I consecrate my life to the destruction of slavery.”
But he was well past 50 before the idea of freeing slaves possessed him. He became convinced that nothing but bloodshed would free the nation from its sin of slavery. God was leading him to battle.
In August 1855, Brown set out for Kansas in a one-horse wagon filled with guns and ammunition. In Kansas in the 1850s, two parties fought for possession of the new territory’s government; the winner would determine whether slavery would be accepted in Kansas. Conditions bordered on civil war.
Soon after arriving, Brown led a retaliatory party against pro-slavery forces “to cause a restraining fear,” as he put it. His forces murdered five pro-slavery settlers in Pottawatomie, Kansas, hacking them to pieces with sabers.
Brown’s final plan, based on visions he’d had years earlier, was to seize a stronghold in the mountains of Maryland or Virginia, where he would gather slaves and arm them. This would touch off a slave uprising, he felt, and slavery would collapse.
From a hideout in the Maryland hills, Brown recruited twenty-one men and collected weapons. On October 16, 1859, he led his little army across the Potomac River to seize the government arsenal at Harper’s Ferry, Virginia. (Ironically, the first person killed in his attack was a free black man.) By morning, he and his men were in possession of the armory and the bridges leading to the ferry. A few bewildered slaves were induced or compelled to join him. But for some reason, he didn’t head for the mountains as planned.
Within a day a company of U.S. marines under the command of Col. Robert E. Lee arrived and assaulted the building. Brown fought with amazing coolness and courage—at one point over the body of his dying son—but finally he was overpowered. He lost two sons in the battle.
Brown was sentenced to death and was hanged on December 2, a month and half after the assault. To the end he maintained, “I believe that to have interfered … in behalf of His [God’s] despised poor, was not wrong, but right.”
Some derided Brown as a common assassin. Mrs. Jefferson Davis called him “a pestilent, forceful man” urged on by “insane prejudice.” But many in the North hailed him as a noble martyr. Louisa May Alcott, the author of Little Women, noted in her diary “the execution of Saint John the Just.”

next page... |  1 of 5

share this page

RSS Feed   RSS Help