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Austin, TX
Apr 2000
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Just an educated guess -- from Enclyclopedia Americana online. Echoes of Spartacus, anyone? 
Brown, John
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Brown, John (18001859), American abolitionist who took direct action to free slaves by force. He was convicted of treason, conspiracy, and murder following his raid on Harpers Ferry, Va. (now W. Va.), Oct. 1618, 1859, and was executed on December 2. The most controversial of the abolitionists, Brown was regarded by some as a martyr and by others as a common assassin. Still others questioned his sanity.
Brown's name often is linked in the public mind with that of William Lloyd Garrison, as an extremist. Unlike Brown, however, Garrison was a pacifist. Northern resistance to slavery found leaders with radically different methods.
Early Life and Career
Brown was born in Torrington, Conn., on May 9, 1800. His later defenders took pride in his colonial New England and Revolutionary ancestry. His father, Owen Brown, a farmer, was an early abolitionist who, in 1798, himself was accused of forcibly freeing slaves claimed by a Virginia clergyman in Connecticut. When John was four years old, the family moved to Hudson, Ohio. There the boy became a farmer and tanner, working chiefly for his father, and also learned surveying. He showed no interest in military exploits and later paid fines rather than serve in the militia.
In 1820 Brown married Dianthe Lusk, a widow, by whom he had seven children. She suffered mental illness, as had Brown's own mother and several maternal relatives. This history of mental instability was later used to call into doubt the sanity of Brown and his militant sons. Dianthe died in 1832. Within a year Brown married Mary Ann Day, who bore him 13 children. She survived him by 25 years.
As a businessman, Brown had ambitious plans. In 1825 he moved to Randolph (now New Richmond), Pa., where he prospered as a farmer and was well respected. Ten years later he returned to Ohio and became involved in numerous speculative ventures, including sheep raising, wool dealing, and racehorse breeding. These undertakings left him painfully bankrupt. In 1849 his business took him to Europe, where he tried unsuccessfully to negotiate a sale of wool.
Brown's doubtful use of money lent him for other purposes has been given as evidence that he was an irresponsible businessman who turned to the abolitionist movement to justify his practical failures. Although he was untrustworthy with funds, however, his intentions seem to have been sincere and were so recognized by his creditors. His religious devoutness was lifelong, as was his opposition to slavery. His properties in Pennsylvania included a concealed room for hiding fugitive slaves, and witnesses in Ohio attested to the consistency of his antislavery stand.
Warrior and Conspirator
In 1849 Brown moved his family to North Elba, N.Y., an African American community established on land donated by an antislavery philanthropist, Gerrit Smith. Here the author Richard Henry Dana came upon the then-unknown Brown during a walking trip and described him as a "kind of king" among the blacks in the area. Dana found him to be a striking figure, with a "marked countenance and a natural dignity of manner."
In 1851 Brown was back in Ohio, still struggling with his financial troubles. But in Springfield, Mass., the same year, he gave time to helping African Americans organize a "League of Gileadites" to aid fugitive slaves.
Brown had long pondered ways to attack slavery directly. A surveying trip in 1840 took him to western Virginia, where he may have considered colonizing blacks. In 1847 he confided to Frederick Douglass, the abolitionist, that he planned to free the slaves by force. Brown's vague plans were crystallized by passage, in 1854, of the Kansas-Nebraska Act, which opened that territory to settlers. The struggle between proslavery and antislavery (free-soilers) forces there drew national attention. Five of Brown's sons moved to Kansas, and, after raising money for weapons at antislavery meetings, Brown located himself near Osawatomie, Kansas, in October 1855. He soon became known as "Osawatomie Brown."
Clashes between Free-Soilers and "Border Ruffians"as the proslavery partisans were calledwere climaxed on May 2021, 1856, by a raid by proslavery forces on the free-soil settlement of Lawrence. This and other events may have contributed to Brown's decision to descend on Pottawatomie, a proslavery center, with four sons and two associates. There, on May 24, without certain cause, Brown's party killed five men, including a 20-year-old youth.
In the following months, Brown (now called "Captain" John Brown) led guerrilla actions against armed proslavery bands. He became well known to Eastern friends of the free-soil cause. In early 1857 he visited the Boston area and met such notables as Dr. Samuel Gridley Howe, Thomas W. Higginson, Theodore Parker, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Henry David Thoreau; all were impressed by his bearing and purposefulness.
Brown also met a British adventurer, Hugh Forbes, who he expected would help him train troops for his broad program of insurrection. Although Brown visited numerous African American and white communities, he found remarkably few persons willing to join him in military action.
In the late 1850's Brown began planning a major venture into slave territory. But his trips through the East and to black communities in Canada, seeking trained followers and arms, brought him little closer to his goal. Early in May 1858 he held a "convention" in Chatham, Ontario, Canada. It was meagerly attended, but it designated him "commander in chief" of the army of a "provisional" government to seize power from slaveholders. Rumors of his planssome spread by Forbes, who had broken with Browncaused some influential supporters to become alarmed and withdraw.
Brown returned to Kansas under the name of Shubel Morgan and sought again to intervene in the Border War. His most spectacular feat took place in late 1858, when he made a raid into Missouri that resulted in the death of one slaveholder and the freeing of slaves. This action was impressive mainly because of the large amount of cooperation that Brown, an open rebel, received during his 1,000-mile (1,600-km) trek to Canada with his freed charges.
Harpers Ferry
In the summer of 1859 Brown rented a farmhouse in Maryland and prepared to cross the Potomac River to capture the U.S. arsenal at Harpers Ferry, Va., up the river from Washington, D.C. On October 16 he and a band of 13 whites and 5 blacks seized the town. A number of persons, including a free black, died in the action. Brown had expected slaves to join his group as the "army of emancipation" moved farther into slave-holding territory, but this hope did not materialize. He permitted news of the raid to get out, and he unaccountably delayed fleeing.
Local militia cut off all escape routes, and by the night of October 17, federal troops under the command of Col. Robert E. Lee and Lt. J. E. B. Stuart were at the scene. Brown refused to surrender, and on the following morning the troops assaulted the fire engine house in which the rebels had holed themselves up. Two of Brown's sons died in the fighting, and he himself was seriously wounded. In all, 10 raiders and 7 federal marines were killed. On October 19, Brown was taken to prison at Charles Town, Va. (now W.Va.). There he was tried on October 2731 and convicted. He was hanged on December 2. Brown was buried on his farm at North Elba, N.Y., near Lake Placid.
Although Northerners generally sympathized with Brown's motives, many of them sought a peaceful settlement of the slavery issue and were eager to help prove him insane. But Gov. Henry A. Wise of Virginia, and the South as a whole, insisted on regarding the prisoner as sane. Brown's dignified deportment in prison and at his trial moved the North emotionally.
Place in History
Abraham Lincoln, in his Cooper Union Address (Feb. 27, 1860), sought to minimize Brown's significance, treating him as a monomaniac whose attempt "ends in little else than his own execution." Emerson, on the other hand, thought that his death would "make the gallows as glorious as the cross." The abolitionist and orator Wendell Phillips believed history would date Virginia's emancipation of African Americans from Harpers Ferry. Once the Civil War began, Northern troops and civilians sang the folk song: "John Brown's body lies a-mouldering in the grave, But his soul is marching on."
Louis Filler
Antioch College
Bibliography
Filler, Louis, The Crusade Against Slavery, 18301860 (Harper 1960).
Filler, Louis, The Rise and Fall of Slavery in America (J. S. Ozer 1981).
Graham, Lorenz. John Brown: A Cry for Freedom (Crowell 1980).
Milan, J. C., John Brown and the Legend of Fifty-Six (1942: reprint, Haskell 1970).
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17-05-2000 05:21
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