CHAPTER V THE JOHN BROWN RAID (1858-1859) HE civil war in Kansas was ending, and the THE territory was certain to be one of the free states which, by the admission of Minnesota and Oregon, now numbered eighteen as against fifteen. slave states-Delaware and Maryland were not dependent on slavery, and four others, Virginia, Kentucky, Tennessee, and Missouri, had large areas where the slaves were so few that there was no positive and insistent pro-slavery feeling. There was still a wide-spread and powerful Union sentiment throughout all parts of the South, except in South Carolina, though even there it was far from unknown. The Whig party, which had been the stronghold of Unionist feeling, had now as a party disappeared, its following in the South finding refuge in the ephemeral organization known as "Americans" or "Know-Nothings," and many of the northern Whigs drifting to the new Republican party, a name which to the South, unfortunately and incorrectly, was the synonym of abolitionist. New England was now solidly Republican; New York elected a Republican governor in 1858, and Pennsylvania in 1859 for the first time left the Democratic ranks. Ohio, Indiana, Michigan, Wisconsin, Iowa, and Minnesota were Republican. Maryland elected a "Know-Nothing" governor, Hicks, in 1858. Houston left the Senate to become governor of Texas. Quitman, who for seven years had been a firebrand, had died in July, 1858. Alexander H. Stephens was no longer in Congress. Leaving Washington, March 5, 1859, he stood at the stern of the boat gazing at the Capitol. A friend remarked, "I suppose you are thinking of coming back to these halls as a senator." Stephens replied: "No, I never expect to see Washington again, unless I am brought here as a prisoner of war," a prophecy which was to be fulfilled.1 October 17, 1859, the country was startled by the news of the seizure, the previous night, of the United States arsenal at Harper's Ferry, and the domination of the village by a small body of men led by John Brown, whose name was already known throughout the Union by a series of bloody exploits in Kansas, ending in the summer of 1858 with a raid into Missouri to free some slaves. Born at Torrington, Connecticut, in 1800, reared in the Western Reserve in northern Ohio, in his father's occupation as a tanner; married at twenty years 1 Johnston and Browne, Stephens, 348. 2 Smith, Parties and Slavery (Am. Nation, XVIII.), chap. xi. and again at thirty-three; the father of twenty children, thirteen of them by his second wife; by turns tanner, farmer, land surveyor, wool dealer, cattle drover, sheep raiser, a migrant for years between Ohio and Massachusetts, and always unsuccessful in his affairs, he finally, after a ruinous visit to Europe in 1849 to sell wool, settled his family, but not himself, on a small farm in the Adirondacks, at North Elba, Essex County, New York. It was in this region that Gerrit Smith, a large-hearted philanthropist, had given farms to a considerable number of colored people, though a region where Indiancorn would not ripen and stock had to be fed six months in the year was wholly unfitted by climate and production to the negro race. It was among these that Brown established himself somewhat as an adviser and helper, and no doubt also because he obtained a home for his family under favorable conditions. Brown himself states that he became an abolitionist during the War of 1812, through witnessing the maltreatment of a colored boy, a slave.1 It is not surprising, with his intensity of character, that as early as 1839 he had decided upon some such course as was taken in 1859. He seems to have kept this steadily in view and to have looked upon his whole family as instruments in the cause." Coming of Puritan stock, he inherited the intense 1 Sanborn, John Brown, 12-17. 2 Sanborn, in Atlantic Monthly, XXXV., 21 (January, 1875). religiosity associated with the Puritan character and a firm faith in the Bible, of which he was a constant reader and quoter; he was a religious man and a kindly one, as religion and kindliness presented themselves to such a soul, which, when fired with an idea, recked little of the law and morality which lay across his way. Six of Brown's seven living sons and a son-inlaw migrated to Kansas in 1855. The wretched conflict, which was the forerunner of the greater war later, caused Brown to find the true métier for which nature had fitted him-that of the partisan leader. Whatever other dark and savage deeds were done in the dark period, none, it must be said in the truth of history, was more savage and more ruthless than the murders (for it can be called nothing else) at Pottawatomie during the night of May 24, 1856, when five men were taken at midnight from their beds and their heads split open by a heavy, old-style navy cutlass, but one shot being fired. Even Sanborn, the intimate associate of Stearns and Higginson on the Boston Kansas committee, and Brown's biographer and ardent admirer, can find no better excuse for this outrage than that Brown "knew what few could believe that slavery must perish in blood; and though a peaceful man, he had no scruples about shedding blood in so good a cause . . . we who praise Grant for those military movements which caused the bloody death of thousands, are so inconsistent as to denounce Brown for the death of these five men in Kansas." 1 The savagery of Kansas conditions roused the fighting instincts of the man, and he reverted to views expressed to Frederick Douglass as early as 1847 regarding a scheme of an Appalachian stronghold: "To take at first about twenty-five picked men and begin on a small scale; supply them with arms and ammunition, and post them in squads of five on a line of twenty-five miles, the most persuasive and judicious of whom shall go down to the fields from time to time, as opportunity offers, and induce the slaves to join them, seeking and selecting the most reckless and daring. Brown's three guerilla years in Kansas may be regarded as a preliminary study for his work of 1859. His organization of a corps of "Kansas Regulars in 1856 and the rules for their government are much in keeping with his later action. In January, 1857, Brown first came in contact with the Massachusetts Kansas committee, of which Mr. G. L. Stearns was chairman, and he received the custody of certain arms in western Iowa belonging to the committee and was furnished with a considerable sum of money to transport them. 'Sanborn, John Brown, 268. 2 Douglass, Life and Times (ed. of 1881), 280. Sanborn, in Atlantic Monthly, XXXV., 232. Later |