1858 (51 page)

During those years, Brown traveled back and forth between his sons’ farms in Kansas, his family home in North Elba, New York, and cities in New England where he became friendly with leading abolitionists. He pleaded with them for money to continue his crusade against slavery, just as he had begged other abolitionists, such as Frederick Douglass, for funds. Finally, he convinced a group of six prominent public figures in New England—Julia Howe, Gerrit Smith, Thomas Higginson, George Stearns, Theodore Parker, and F. B. Sanborn—to form a secret committee to raise money for his crusade and a slave insurrection in the South that he planned to organize.

Brown often wrote them from Kansas of his need for funds, always exaggerating his situation in order to obtain money. He was never discreet about pleading for contributions from the “Secret Six,” as they were called. He wrote in the summer of 1858, as an example, that “a constant fear of new troubles seems to prevail on both sides of the line and on both sides of the companies of armed men. Any little affair may open the quarrel afresh… We shall soon be in
great want
of a small amount in a draft or drafts on New York to feed us. We cannot work for wages and provisions are not easily obtained on the frontier.”
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He was often manipulative, asking for far more money than he needed, complaining when he received less than he requested, and threatening to make the financial support of his backers public.

The members of the “Secret Six” believed in Brown’s cause, but worried about his means. They had given him money to buy arms in the Kansas wars, but how much further would he go? The six saw in him a man bold enough to take public risks in the war against slavery, but they also saw him as a man who might become too bold. They were not certain that the slaves of the South would rise up to free themselves either, as Brown promised. They were fearful, too, that if they did the slaves might turn against their former owners and families and produce unwanted bloodshed.
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Brown did not tell the Secret Six, or most, about his planned raid on Harper’s Ferry, a federal arsenal in Virginia, but he did hint at it to Frederick Douglass, reminding him that “money and men, arms and ammunition, food and clothing were needed…not easily obtained.”
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According to Martin Delaney, a black freedman who was one of his devoted followers, Brown had an alternate plan to send all of the slaves who fled the plantations to Kansas, where Brown planned to establish the Subterranean Passway, a final terminal for all of the Underground Railroads. The slaves would live in and be protected in a large fort Brown would build in the territory. The fort “would defy all the artillery that would be brought to bear against it,” said Delaney. In time, Brown was going to establish an independent territory within Kansas, like an Indian nation, where the slaves would live. Delaney said Brown had spent much time on the state-within-a-state plan. He noted, “The whole matter had been well considered.”

The amounts of money Brown raised were meager. His grand scheme, Brown told all, required a lot of money. These $50 contributions would help cover expenses, but not much else. He was usually disappointed in the amounts raised for him. In August of 1857, as an example, he expected $1,000 from supporters in Hartford, Connecticut, and another $7,000 from abolitionists in New Haven, Connecticut. All he received was $260 from Hartford and a paltry $25 from New Haven. He called the flimsy donations “disappointments.”
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Abolitionists in Massachusetts conducted a subscription drive for Brown’s wife and the remaining children that lived with her back East while Brown was in Kansas. “Family of Capt. John Brown of Osawatomie, have no means of support, owing to the oppression to which he has been subjected in Kansas Territory. It is proposed to put them [his wife and five children] in possession of the means of supporting themselves as far as is possible for persons in their situation, etc.,” read one donor letter, with fifteen names written at the bottom and pledges of $1,000 for the Brown family.
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They purchased a farm in North Elba, in central New York, for the Brown family. One of them, F. B. Sanborn, wrote to the subscribers of Brown’s wife and daughters, who would live there, “[They] are hardworking, self-denying, devoted women, fully sensible of the greatness of the struggle in which Capt. Brown is engaged, and willing to bear their part in it. I can assure the subscribers to the fund, that money was never better bestowed than in aiding these excellent women to maintain themselves.”
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Brown always used religion to convince prospective contributors to give him money for his mission. The Second Great Awakening was sweeping the nation at that time; ministers in the North and the evangelical preachers who rode the circuit and brought the word of God to small villages in the Northeast and frontier towns on the prairies. They told congregations that it was not enough to simply go to church in order to find God. One had to be moral to find the Lord and to be moral one had to hate slavery. Brown and his men thought ministers were very effective. “[It] has its advantages,” wrote John Kagi, one of his lieutenants. “Under its influence, people who are commonly barely unfavorable to slavery under religious excitement in meetings speak boldly against it.”
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Brown ran ads in numerous newspapers to solicit funds for his nebulous operations. They all began: “To the Friends of Freedom.” The ads told readers that his funds had been drained by his war in Kansas and he needed to replenish them, “anxious to continue his efforts, is induced to make this earnest appeal to the friends of freedom through the United States in the firm belief that his call will not go unheeded. I ask all lovers of liberty and human rights, both male and female, to hold up my hands by contributions of penury aid, either as counties, cities, towns, villages, societies, churches, or individuals…”
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With the money he obtained, whenever he was able to raise it, he purchased clothing and provisions for himself and his “army,” that never consisted of more than fifteen men. The contributions were used to buy weapons, too, but his arsenal was never impressive and the men were never well equipped. Just as they relied upon supporters of “the cause” for cash to cover their expenses, they relied on those in the antislavery movement to supply them with guns. Weapons were expensive and there never seemed to be money to purchase enough of them, or to buy quality arms. Consequently, they operated as a hand-me-down army. In one letter lamenting his arsenal, Brown told a friend that he had “70 to 75 damaged U.S. army rifles” and “some powder,” plus a field piece with “a damaged gun carriage.” For his personal use, someone had sent him an old gun and a pair of pistols, all used, and four guns someone had manufactured as “an experiment,” Brown noted.
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People either loved or hated John Brown; there was no middle ground. He was seen as an enlightened prophet or a dangerous madman.

No matter how they viewed him, all agreed that Brown was uncompromising, his opinions unshakable. He saw the government of the United States as unwilling to end slavery, an institution that he said violated the laws of God. He believed that peaceful means outside the government and courts had failed to do so and he did not have any faith that people opposed to slavery could, or would, abolish the institution. In his mind, therefore, only violence could end slavery, and since eliminating slavery was not only a proper course, but a course condoned by God, any violence was not only acceptable, but necessary.
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After he died, many referred to him as a larger-than-life, messianic savior of the blacks and the moral leader of an army determined to free the oppressed wherever they found them. Editor William Cullen Bryant of New York wrote that “history will record his name among those of its martyrs and heroes.” Wendell Phillips wrote that, “Heroes of other days died for their own rights…John Brown died for a race in whose blood he had no share.” Unitarian minister and abolitionist leader Rev. Theodore Parker of Boston called him “a saint.” Henry David Thoreau of Massachusetts said he was a “crucified hero, an angel of light.”
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Those who did not observe him from faraway New England but knew him personally during the Kansas wars agreed. James Emery met Brown in 1855, at the start of the bloody skirmishes there. “John Brown was a prophet of that early day, but he who associated with him daily did not know it… Brown found actual fighting to be done out here to save free soil from lapsing back and coming under the curse of a [slave] system that was abhorrent to his very soul,” Emery wrote years later.
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Southerners, though, considered him a lunatic and madman who was determined to use violent means to end slavery and incite a black insurrection in which thousands of Southerners would be murdered.

Wrote Southerner Randolph Abbott Shotwell, “He was a rabid fanatic, naturally narrow-minded, and vindictive in his prejudices and fevered to furious hatred of the Southerners by the fruits of his own rashness and folly. It is probable he lacked from birth the balance of mind necessary to weight questions involving the control of his own likes and dislikes, and there was nothing in his early education, amid the bigotry-breeding atmosphere of a backwoods abolition village, to broaden his views, or restore his mental equipoise. Men of his turn are easily self-deluded into believing themselves special agents commissioned by Providence for ‘a glorious work,’ and having set out with this idea are apt, like a ship with a twisted rudder, to go wider and wider from the direct course as they advance until they are finally shipwrecked.”
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John Brown wanted to attack and seize the federal arsenal at Harper’s Ferry, Virginia, on the southern side of the Potomac River west of Washington, DC. Brown had targeted the area for over a year. He was certain that such a foray on a federal installation would rouse slaves throughout the South to insurrection and create havoc across the United States. Millions of slaves would rise up, throw off their chains and flee to freedom in the North. In December of 1857, when he and his band of nine volunteers were together at a snow-bound camp in Iowa, Brown told them that “our ultimate destination is Virginia.” His followers were surprised and angry. They had dreamed of liberating Kansas, not Virginia, and argued with the old man, irritating him.

Two months later, in February 1858, while he was staying with Frederick Douglass in Rochester, New York, Brown again told people that he was formulating plans for some grand event, but he was not specific. In the autumn of 1858, in Kansas, he wrote F. B. Sanborn, one of his fund-raisers, “I am most anxious about [the mission] and want you to name the earliest possible date when you can have your matters [funds] gathered up.” He told his top confidante, John Kagi, that he wanted to attack Virginia soon, that “the hour is at hand.” He wrote friends Wendell Phillips and Richard Hinton that time was running out and he wanted his mission to Virginia to begin with as much speed as possible. He dismissed Hinton’s worry that he would never have enough men or arms, telling him that “a few men in the right and knowing they are right, can overturn a king.”
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He wrote his wife from Rochester, “Courage, courage, courage! The great work of my life…I may yet see accomplished [God helping], and be permitted to return and ‘rest at evening.’” He wrote the abolitionists who had been his financial and emotional backers, that he had “by far the most important undertaking of my whole life.”
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A raid on Harper’s Ferry, or any other slave-related assault, was not a spur-of-the moment decision. The idea of a violent raid to encourage the slaves into armed insurrection was already in the planning stages in the summer of 1858, when Brown outlined it to members of an antislavery convention in Chatham, Canada, without naming a target. A Chatham gun shop owner who thought the idea sheer folly vividly remembered Brown’s determination to conduct organized raids. “We were discussing how the plans might fail. I think I had the floor at the time, and was telling the members how soon the slave power would surround them in their strongholds in the mountains… His general plan was to fortify some places in the mountains and call the slaves to his colors. I said to him that I was afraid he might be disappointed in the slaves,” the merchant told a reporter years later. “I told him how utterly hopeless these plans would be if he persisted in making an attack with the few men at his command…ready to sacrifice their lives for the salvation of black men. While I was speaking, he was walking to and from, his hands behind, as was his custom when thinking of this, his favorite subject. He stopped suddenly and bringing down his hand with great force exclaimed, ‘Did not my master, Jesus Christ, come down from heaven and sacrifice himself upon the altar for the salvation of the race? And should I, a worm, not worthy to crawl under His feet, refuse to sacrifice myself ?’”
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