1858 (55 page)

That night Pinkerton, his son at his side, put the slaves remaining at his house in a wagon and drove as noiselessly as they could throughout Chicago, picking up Brown, his men, and the rest of the slaves. Pinkerton took them to the railroad station, where they boarded a boxcar he had rented for them—unnoticed—and headed east toward Detroit. Before departing, Brown shook Pinkerton’s hand warmly and thanked him for his help.

“Look well upon that man,” Pinkerton said to his son as Brown boarded the train. “He is greater than Napoleon and as great as George Washington.”
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The train took the slaves to a pier in Detroit where they boarded a ferry and crossed the Detroit River into Canada—and freedom. Their exhausted rescuer, John Brown, did not go with them. He bade the raiders farewell and watched the ferry slide out of its slip into the river and then left them. He turned south, toward Ohio, determined to sneak past jail guards to visit the Oberlin abolitionists.
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Brown was very proud of his fellow raiders, who had suffered greatly with him for “the cause.” He praised them whenever he could for helping him “to further the cause of freedom in the U.S. and in all the world.” He wrote of one volunteer, “He has contributed the entire service of two strong minor sons for two years and of himself for more than three years; during which time they have all endured great hardships, exposure of health and other privations… two [other] sons were made prisoners and subjected to most barbarous treatment. Two were severely wounded and one murdered.”
⁷²¹

All of his men shared the zealousness of their leader and all were certain that their risky efforts would save Kansas from the slavers. Brown always pledged that, no matter how strong the opposition, “We will not give up the ship. Kansas, watered with the tears of the blood of our children, shall yet be free.”
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They might have been proud, too, that following the Christmas raid, President Buchanan offered a reward of $250 for Brown, and that the governor of Missouri, far more eager for his apprehension, posted a hefty reward of $3,000.

The remarkable raid and eleven-hundred-mile flight to Canada in winter, that had taken eighty-eight days, produced many benefits for John Brown. It won him extensive and mostly positive press coverage in the Northern states and Canada and convinced his “Secret Six” contributors that Brown’s fantastic crusade to abolish slavery just might succeed. They were all moved by the eleven-hundred-mile trek, his ability to protect his raiders and the runaways, and the rather lenient reaction of law enforcement toward him as he moved through snow and rainstorms across the plains to Canada. Gerrit Smith gushed over the raid. He wrote, “I was once doubtful in my own mind as to Captain Brown’s course; I now approve of it heartily.” Wendell Phillips, who publicly applauded the slave rescue, said that Brown was “the impersonator of God’s law.”
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Many in the public, too, were impressed and considered Brown a hero. A reporter in the
Boston Post
, a moderate Republican newspaper, wrote a line after Harper’s Ferry that could have been applied to the Missouri raid. “John Brown may be a lunatic, but if he is, then one-quarter of the people of Massachusetts are madmen.”
⁷²⁴

Abolitionists, important ones, were now finally convinced that he was the man to free those in bondage. Frederick Douglass wrote, “He had shown boundless energy and skill in dealing with the enemies of liberty in Kansas. With men so few, and means so small, and odds against him so great, no captain ever surpassed him. He went into the border of Missouri and liberated a dozen slaves in a single night and, in spite of slave laws and marshals, he brought these people through a half dozen states and landed them safely in Canada.”
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John Brown was always proud of the Missouri raid and saw it as part of his religious mission. In a letter to his cousin, Rev. Luther Humphreys, before he was executed in 1859, the abolitionist defended his efforts to abolish slavery. He wrote the minister that the Almighty would not condemn him for his violent raids, but welcome him to heaven. “I humbly trust that no part [of my life] has been spent to better purpose. I would not say this boastingly but thanks be unto God who giveth us the victory through infinite grace. I have enjoyed much of life as it is, and have been remarkably prosperous, having early learned to regard the welfare and prosperity of others as my own.”

After the raid, and the Harper Ferry’s attack later, he expressed those same unremorseful sentiments about his devotion to the antislavery cause to many others, including his children.
⁷²⁶
He wrote, “As I trust my life has not been entirely thrown away, so I also humbly trust that my death shall not be in vain. God can make it to be of a thousand times more value…[for] his own cause than all the miserable service [at best] that I have rendered it during my life.”
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He insisted later, too, that the violence that often occurred during his activities was not in his plans. “I intended certainly to have made a clean thing of that matter [free slaves], as I did last winter, when I went into Missouri and there took slaves without the snapping of a gun on either side, moved them through the country, and finally left them in Canada. I intended [in the future] to do the same thing, on a larger scale…I never did intend murder, or treason, or the destruction of property, or to excite or incite slaves to rebellion, or to make insurrection. I believe that to have interfered as I have done—as I have always freely admitted I have done—in behalf of his despised poor, was not wrong, but right.”

Following the Missouri raid and the years of strife in Kansas, he predicted that the United States would be drenched “with the blood of millions in this slave country whose rights are disregarded by wicked, cruel and unjust enactments… So let it be done!” And later added, “I am now quite certain that the crimes of this guilty land will never be purged away but with blood.”
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Brown was certain that the raid, while controversial at the time, would earn him a place in history. He wrote his wife, “Already dear friends at a distance with kindest sympathy are cheering me with the assurance that posterity at last will do me justice.”
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The Christmas 1858 Missouri raid, added to Brown’s previous years of violence in Kansas, naturally angered Southerners. They always accused Brown of being a homicidal maniac, and not a political agitator. Wrote one, “John Brown is an outstanding character in American history as a brutal, heartless, willful murderer. He committed willful and brutal murder in Kansas and, with malice aforethought, intended to see the Negroes of Virginia murder in endless numbers helpless women and innocent children.”
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The editor of the
Wheeling
(now
West Virginia
)
Intelligencer
wrote of Brown’s later raid at Harper’s Ferry with the same contempt he felt toward his Missouri raid. “The idea of anything save a madhouse lunatic ever expecting to organize a widespread insurrection at the head of a raw, impoverished band of fifteen or twenty white men and five or ten Negroes on a public thoroughfare, easily accessible by telegraph and railroad to important and powerful military aid, is too wild and foolish for rational belief.”
⁷³¹
The Southerners’ outrage was not directed just at Brown, but at the entire North. Southern leaders lumped Brown with all the Underground Railroad operators in the Northern states and all of the antislavery political leaders.

John Brown’s actions were harshly criticized by many Northerners, too. The editor of
Harper’s Weekly
magazine wrote after his death, “The South imagines that the Northern people sympathize with John Brown, and regard him as a martyr. It is a monstrous fallacy. The bulk of the Northern people have no sympathy whatever with John Brown. They regard him a man who broke his country’s laws willfully, who caused the death of innocent men…this is the view taken by the great conservative body of the Northern people, including most of the merchants, farmers, mechanics, and citizens generally.”
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President Buchanan agreed. He had put a bounty on Brown’s head and condemned all of Brown’s activities, accusing him of being insane. He wrote, “John Brown was a man violent, lawless, and fanatical. Amid the troubles in Kansas he had distinguished himself, both by word and deed, for boldness and cruelty.” The president also said that Brown’s raids persuaded Southerners that they were just the precursors of larger raids to come and that fear of continued assaults panicked them.
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He reasoned that if slavery-hating Americans did this much for the rescue of eleven slaves in Missouri, imagine what kind of help they would extend to him on a larger, much more ambitious raid? In dozens—hundreds—of raids and in his drive to free all of the slaves in chains throughout the United States?

Perhaps William Allen White, the twentieth-century editor of the
Kansas City Star
, best described Brown’s historical legacy when he wrote, “Every great movement needs an agitator. Every leader of spiritual ideals needs a John the Baptist.”
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Chapter Seventeen

A happy President James Buchanan told the nation in his year-end message of 1858 that the slavery crisis that had divided America for years appeared to be over. “When we compare the condition of the country at the present day with what it was one year ago, we have much reason for gratitude to that Almighty Providence which has never failed to interpose for our relief at the most critical periods of our history. Much has been done, I am happy to say, towards the accomplishment of this object [defusing the slavery issue] during the last [year].”
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President Buchanan finished the turbulent year of 1858 in as much denial as he had begun it on that sunny, cold New Year’s Day reception at the White House. He continued to ignore the slavery controversy at the end of the year just as he had ignored it during the previous eleven months. Midway through 1858, in July, he told William Reed with great confidence that the end of the Lecompton debate meant the end of the slavery debate. “The Kansas question as a national question is now at an end.”
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The president had put the slavery issue behind him and was optimistic about his many new ventures to conquer or purchase enormous parcels of land for America, whether in Mexico, Central America, South America, or Cuba. He was so determined to forget slavery and champion his imperialistic policies that he devoted most of his annual message to foreign affairs.

The year 1859 would be just as successful as 1858 had been, the president believed. He would work hard to strengthen the Democratic Party in the upcoming fall elections and turn back the Republicans in the 1860

contests, making certain, though, that his Democratic successor as president was anyone but Stephen Douglas. The Republicans would surely nominate the abolitionist rabble-rouser that he detested, William Seward, but the end of the Kansas controversy, the continuing success of the
Dred Scott
decision, the public anger at violent agitators such as John Brown, and Democratic strength in the solid South would deny the White House to the “black Republican” Seward. The reversal of the Republican tide in 1860 would crush the new party, he thought, and he firmly believed all the eager Republicans who had been defeated in 1858, such as Abraham Lincoln of Illinois, would drift out of politics, never to be heard from again.

Buchanan had aged noticeably in his first two years in office. Richard Cobden, a British reformer who knew him in London in the early 1850s, visited him at the White House in 1859. He “found him looking much older and apparently out of spirits, and not so happy as when I knew him in London. Having attained the highest object of his worldly ambition, he is disappointed with the result.”
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Buchanan never wavered in his defense of the South’s constitutional right to sustain slavery, insisting on the eve of the Civil War in 1861 that it was right and proper in the Southern states. In the last days of his life, he told those who surrounded his deathbed that his policies as president, which created so much havoc and eventually resulted in a Civil War, were correct.