The Best of the Bureau/The_Best_of_the_Bureau_Bureau_Development_Inc._1992.iso/dp/0109/01095.txt

Text File | 1992-08-07 | 15KB | 244 lines

$Unique_ID{bob01095}
$Pretitle{}
$Title{John Brown's Raid
Chapter 1: The Road To Harpers Ferry}
$Subtitle{}
$Author{Various}
$Affiliation{U.S. Department Of The Interior}
$Subject{brown
kansas
john
slavery
states
years
new
school
stevens
war}
$Date{1973}
$Log{}
Title:       John Brown's Raid
Author:      Various
Affiliation: U.S. Department Of The Interior
Date:        1973

Chapter 1: The Road To Harpers Ferry

     This man who would electrify the Nation and bring it closer to civil war
by his audacious attack on slavery was born at Torrington, Conn., on May 9,
1800, the son of Owen and Ruth Mills Brown.  The Browns were a simple, frugal,
and hard-working family.  They had a deep and abiding interest in religion,
and from earliest childhood John Brown was taught the value of strong
religious habits.  He was required, along with his brothers and sisters, to
participate in daily Bible reading and prayer sessions. "Fear God & keep his
commandments" was his father's constant admonition.  It was also his father
who taught him to view the enslavement of Negroes as a sin against God.

     In 1805 the Browns, like many other families of the period, moved west to
Ohio.  There, in the little settlement of Hudson, about 25 miles south of
Cleveland, John grew to manhood.  He received little formal education; most of
what he learned came from what he afterwards called the "School of adversity."
He cared little for studies, preferring life in the open.  Consistently
choosing the "hardest & roughest" kinds of play because they afforded him
"almost the only compensation for the confinement & restraints of school," he
was extremely proud of his ability to "wrestle, & Snow ball, & run, & jump, a
knock off old seedy Wool hats."

     When John was 8 years old his mother died, and for awhile he believed
that he would never recover from so "complete & permanent" a loss.  His father
remarried, but John never accepted his stepmother emotionally and "continued
to pine after his own Mother for years."

     An indifferent student, and "not . . . much of a scholar" anyway, John
quit school and went to work at his father's tannery.  Owen Brown, who had
been a tanner and a shoemaker before moving to Hudson, had already taught his
son the art of dressing leather from "Squirel, Raccoon, Cat, Wolf, or Dog
Skins," and John soon displayed remarkable ability in the trade.  When the War
of 1812 broke out, Owen contracted to supply beef to the American forces in
Michigan.  He gave John the task of rounding up wild steers and other cattle
in the woods and then driving them, all by himself, to army posts more than
100 miles away.  Contact with the soldiers and their profanity and lack of
discipline so disgusted young Brown that he later resolved to pay fines rather
than take part in the militia drills required of all Hudson males of a certain
age.

     It was during the war, or so Brown later claimed, that he first came to
understand what his father meant about the evil of slavery.  He had just
completed one of his cattle drives and was staying with a "very gentlemanly
landlord" who owned a slave about the same age as John.  The Negro boy was
"badly clothed, poorly fed . . . & beaten before his eyes with Iron Shovels or
any other thing that came first to hand."  Outraged by this, John returned
home "a most determined Abolitionist" swearing "Eternal war with Slavery."

     In 1816 John joined the Congregational Church in Hudson and soon
developed a strong interest in becoming a minister.  For a while he attended a
divinity school in Plainfield, Mass., then transferred to another school in
Litchfield, Conn.  At that time Litchfield was a center of abolitionist
sentiment; it was also the birthplace of Harriet Beecher Stowe, whose book
Uncle Tom's Cabin, published in 1852, would stir passions North and South, win
international support for the anti-slavery cause, and help to bring on civil
war in 1861.  How much of Litchfield's abolitionist atmosphere young Brown
absorbed is not known.  A shortage of funds and an inflammation of the eyes
forced him to return to Ohio in the summer of 1817.  His dream of becoming a
minister was forever shattered, but he never lost his religious fervor.

     When he was 20 years old, "led by his own inclination & prompted also by
his Father," Brown married Dianthe Lusk, a "remarkably plain" and pious girl a
year younger than himself.  She died 12 years later, in August 1832, following
the birth of their seventh child.  Brown remarried within a year, and fathered
13 children by his second wife, Mary Ann Day.  In a never-ending struggle to
feed and clothe his growing family, Brown drifted through Ohio, Pennsylvania,
New York, Connecticut, and Massachusetts plying many trades.  He worked at
tanning, surveying, and farming; at times he was shepherd, cattleman, wool
merchant, and postmaster; for a while he bred race horses and speculated in
real estate.  Uniformly unsuccessful in these ventures, Brown's debts mounted,
and he was barely able to keep his large family from starvation.

     Despite his frequent business reversals and his strenuous and consuming
efforts to support his family, Brown never abandoned his intense desire to
free enslaved Negroes from bondage.  His first opportunity to strike a blow at
the institution he hated so much came in Kansas, where, following the passage
of the Kansas-Nebraska Act in 1854, pro-slavery "Border Ruffians" clashed
brutally with anti-slavery "Jayhawkers" over the extension of slavery to
Kansas and Nebraska Territories.

     Five of Brown's sons - Owen, Jason, Frederick, Salmon, and John, Jr.- had
emigrated to Kansas and joined the free-soil cause.  When they appealed to
their father for help in May 1855, Brown, another son Oliver, and son-in-law
Henry Thompson rushed to Kansas and plunged into the conflict with a fury.  As
captain of the "Liberty Guards," a quasi-militia company that he himself
formed, Brown shortly gained national notoriety as a bold and ruthless leader.

     For the next several years, murders, bushwhackings, lynchings, and
burnings were common occurrences, and the territory was aptly named "Bleeding
Kansas."  Atrocity matched atrocity.  When pro-slavery forces sacked and
burned the town of Lawrence in May 1856, Brown was outraged.  Proclaiming
himself an instrument of God's will, he, with four of his sons and three
others, deliberately and brutally murdered five pro-slavery men along the
banks of Pottawatomie Creek.  In the months that followed, Brown terrorized
the Missouri-Kansas border by a series of bloody guerrilla attacks that
brought him to the attention of the Nation's abolitionist faction.  In late
August 1856, about a month before he left Kansas, Brown and his men clashed
with pro-slavery Missourians at the small settlement of Osawatomie.  That
action earned him the nickname "Osawatomie" and cost him the life of his son
Frederick.  It also hardened his stand against slavery. "I have only a short
time to live - only one death to die," he said, "and I will die fighting for
this cause.  There will be no more peace in this land until slavery is done
for.  I will give them something else to do than to extend slave territory.  I
will carry this war into Africa."

     The attack on Harpers Ferry was the culmination of a plan Brown had
evolved many years before he went to Kansas.  By the early 1850's he had come
to believe that a location within the slave States should be selected where
raids on slave plantations could be easily carried out and the freed bondsmen
sent to safety in the North.  Convinced that mountains throughout history had
enabled the few to defend themselves against the many, he believed that even
against regular Army troops a small force operating from a mountain stronghold
could hold out indefinitely and provide sanctuary for freed slaves, who would
be supplied with arms to fight for their liberty.  Brown had decided, from
studying European fortifications and military operations, that somewhere along
the Allegheny Mountain