Read Midnight Rising: John Brown and the Raid That Sparked the Civil War Hardcover – Bargain Price Online

Authors: Tony Horwitz

Tags: #John Brown, #Abolition, #Civil War Period (1850-1877)

Midnight Rising: John Brown and the Raid That Sparked the Civil War Hardcover – Bargain Price (4 page)

BOOK: Midnight Rising: John Brown and the Raid That Sparked the Civil War Hardcover – Bargain Price
3.59Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads
Over the course of this decades-long struggle, Brown drew inspiration from a number of Old Testament figures. But the one he returned to most often was Gideon. Called on by God to save Israel from the wicked Midianites, Gideon gathered a small force and crept up on his enemy’s vast camp in the dark. Then he blew his trumpet and so did his men, raising their torches and crying, “The sword of the Lord, and of Gideon!” The Midianites “ran, and cried, and fled,” until their leaders were hunted down and slain.
The story of Gideon embodied Brown’s belief that a righteous band, boldly led, could bring divine wrath upon the wicked of the land. With God as his protector, he needed only a small tribe, beginning with the four family members he inducted by his hearth in the late 1830s.
 
 
BROWN’S INITIATION OF HIS wife and sons, however, coincided with a collapse in his worldly affairs. He’d moved back to Ohio in 1835, during a property boom in the Western Reserve that was fueled by easy credit and the many transportation projects under way in the rapidly expanding
nation. Brown began speculating on land along a proposed canal route, borrowing money and subdividing lots and then borrowing again and buying more property.
This scheme collapsed when the canal company abruptly changed its plans. “I do think it is best to sell all out if we can at any thing like a fair rate,” Brown wrote his long-suffering business partner, Seth Thompson, who wanted to cut their losses as prices spiraled down, “but I think the time unfavourable. If we have been crazy getting in, do try & let exercise a sound mind about the maner of getting out.”
Brown’s judgment proved disastrous: six months later, the economy crashed. During the “Panic of 1837,” almost half the nation’s banks closed, credit evaporated, and the United States entered its first economic depression. Brown, already in trouble, was now buried in debts and lawsuits.
“The prospect is rather dark,” he finally conceded to Thompson in 1839, when he could no longer pay his taxes. “I feel rather more depressed than usual.” Brown returned to tanning, cattle driving, and surveying—even breeding race horses to climb out of debt. But by 1840 he was “flat down” and unable to afford so much as postage.
Things got worse. Brown refused to vacate a piece of land to which he’d lost title. Instead, he armed his sons with muskets and holed up in a cabin on the property until he and two of his boys were arrested and briefly jailed. A year later, in 1842, an Ohio court declared Brown bankrupt and listed the household “necessaries” his family was allowed to keep for its survival. This meager inventory included “2 Earthen Crocks Broke,” “3 Bags old,” 20 pounds of lard, 11 Bibles, “8 Womens and childrens aprons,” and a tin pail valued at 6 cents.
Brown’s plight wasn’t unusual: more than forty thousand Americans filed for bankruptcy under a new law enacted after the 1837 panic. But for a man who hated to “abandon anything he fixed his purpose upon,” failure of this magnitude was especially galling. He’d fallen far short of his own exacting standards and had borrowed heavily from friends and family, including his beloved father, who lost his farm after underwriting one of John’s loans. Brown also badly damaged his reputation by paying off land debts with money he’d been given to buy wool.
His letters from this period were self-lacerating. In one, he signed himself “Unworthily yours.” In another, he asked his wife’s forgiveness
for his “many faults & foibles,” and later addressed her as “the sharer of my poverty, trials, discredit, & sore afflictions.”
A year after the bankruptcy, Brown’s family was struck by an even greater catastrophe. Severe dysentery, possibly caused by cholera, swept the large household. Charles Brown, a “swift and strong” six-year-old, was the first to die. Soon after, on three consecutive days, three of his siblings perished. The oldest was nine-year-old Sarah.
“She seemed to have no idea of recovering from the first,” Brown wrote, “nor did she ever express the least desire that she might.” Ill himself, he buried Sarah and the others in a single grave. “They were all children towards whom perhaps we might have felt a little partial,” he wrote his eldest son, John Brown, Jr., who was away at school, “but they all now lie in a little row together.”
In the early 1800s, roughly a third of Americans died before reaching adulthood. Early death was so common that parents recycled their children’s names; the Browns, having lost a Sarah, Frederick, and Ellen, named three newborns Sarah, Frederick, and Ellen. Of the twenty children Brown fathered, nine died before the age of ten, among them a baby girl accidentally scalded to death by an older sister.
Brown, though all too familiar with early death, had always taken losses exceptionally hard, beginning with his prolonged childhood mourning of pets and even of a marble. Burying four of his young flock in the fall of 1843 plunged him into a profound depression. It was “a calamity from which father never fully recovered,” John junior wrote. The family’s impoverishment, which had necessitated moving to a crowded and possibly unsanitary log house, may have deepened the wound. “I felt for a number of years,” Brown later wrote in a letter to a young abolitionist, “a steady, strong desire: to
die.
”
But in the same letter, he expressed his undying commitment to the destruction of slavery. “Certainly the cause is enough
to live for
,” Brown wrote, and he was “now rather anxious to live for
a few
years more.” He knew he would “endure
hardness
,” as he had throughout his life. “But I expect to effect a mighty conquest, even though it be like the last victory of Samson.”
A Warlike Spirit
 
 
 
I
n the 1840s, as Brown battled bankruptcy and depression, his eldest son became enamored of phrenology. This pseudoscience held that character could be read in the contours of the skull. John junior’s father tended to be skeptical of the era’s many heterodox notions, abolitionism excepted. But he consented to a “reading” by Orson Fowler, a well-known phrenologist.
Fowler may have been coached by John Brown, Jr., or he may have gleaned insight from the words and manner of his subject. In any event, his notes on Brown were for the most part astute. “You have a pretty good opinion of yourself—would rather lead than be led,” Fowler wrote. “You like to have your own way, and to think and act for yourself … are positive in your likes and dislikes, ‘go the whole figure or nothing’ & want others to do the same.” He added: “You like to do business on a large scale, and can make money better than save it.”
Fowler wrote this in early 1847, as Brown embarked on a new and ambitious venture. A few years before, he had formed a partnership with a wealthy Akron man, to raise sheep and sell fine wool. Brown was a skilled shepherd and the partnership initially prospered. But as Fowler noted, Brown liked to think big and was very certain of his judgment. Others who knew him described this as “fixedness.”
In this instance, Brown became fixed on the notion that textile
manufacturers were fleecing wool producers. He prevailed on his partner to establish a depot in Springfield, Massachusetts, where Brown could buy and grade wool and sell it at a better price while collecting a broker’s commission.
He may have been right that producers were exploited. But fixedness was a trait ill suited to the wildly fluctuating wool market of the late 1840s. When prices plunged, Brown refused to sell. Wool and unpaid bills quickly piled up at the Springfield depot. Brown also gave signs of a growing ambivalence about the enterprise in which he was engaged. This was fed in part by his father’s lifelong admonitions against vanity and materialism.
“I sometimes have dreadful reflections about having fled to go down to Tarshish,” Brown wrote his father. Tarshish was the trade port that Jonah set sail for in an attempt to escape God’s will. En route he was swallowed by a whale, then released to do the Lord’s bidding as a preacher to unbelievers.
But if Springfield tested (and found wanting) Brown’s acumen and dedication as a businessman, it proved an excellent place to pursue the true mission he believed he had from God. The city had a large population of free blacks, many of them fugitives from slavery, and it was a regular stop on the abolitionist circuit. Among those who visited Springfield was Frederick Douglass, the escaped slave, orator, and writer who had become, alongside William Lloyd Garrison, the most prominent abolitionist in the country.
Brown met Douglass in the winter of 1847–48 and invited him to his home, which the visitor described as extremely humble, with furnishings that “would have satisfied a Spartan.” Douglass also gave a vivid description of Brown as he appeared in his late forties. Standing about five foot ten, he was “lean, strong, and sinewy,” and “straight and symmetrical as a mountain pine.” He had a prominent chin, coarse dark hair, and eyes “full of light and fire.” The earliest surviving portrait of Brown, a studio daguerreotype, dates to the period of Douglass’s visit. Brown’s thin lips are pressed firmly together, forming a slash across his angular face. His deep-set eyes are piercing and hooded, his brow furrowed, his nose long and sharp. Dark, bristly hair crowns his forehead.
Brown’s pose is equally striking. His right hand is raised in oath, as if
pledging allegiance to a secret fraternity. His left hand clutches a banner that bore the letters “S.P.W.” This stood for Subterranean Pass Way, shorthand for the radical scheme Brown had devised for slaves’ liberation.
John Brown ca. 1847, daguerreotype by Augustus Washington
He shared this nascent plan with Frederick Douglass after their dinner in Springfield. Brown pointed to a map of the Allegheny Mountains, which run diagonally from Pennsylvania into Maryland and Virginia and deep into the South. Filled with natural forts and caves, these mountains, Brown said, had been placed by God “for the emancipation of the negro race.” He planned to use the Alleghenies as a base for guerrillas, who would make lightning raids on the farm valleys below and “induce slaves to join them.” As the insurgent army grew, it “would run off the slaves in large numbers,” sending them north along the mountain chain to freedom.
Brown’s main objective, he told Douglass, was to undermine slavery by “rendering such property insecure.” He also believed his mission would focus national attention on slavery, as had happened after Nat Turner’s revolt in 1831. The two men debated the scheme until three in the
morning. Brown sought the black abolitionist’s support; Douglass doubted the plan’s feasibility. But he came away deeply impressed by the wool merchant’s sincerity and commitment.
Douglass had begun his own abolitionist career as a protégé of Garrison’s. But by the late 1840s, he’d come to question whether pacifism and moral suasion were sufficient tools for slaves’ liberation. He also bristled at the prejudice and condescension displayed by many white abolitionists. Brown seemed remarkably free of this.
“Though a white gentleman,” Douglass wrote in his abolitionist weekly, the
North Star,
soon after his Springfield visit, Brown “is in sympathy, a black man, and as deeply interested in our cause, as though his own soul had been pierced with the iron of slavery.”
 
 
BROWN GAVE FURTHER EVIDENCE of this sympathy in 1848, when he sought the support of Gerrit Smith, one of the most exceptional, eccentric, and philanthropic men of his day. Born into the landed gentry of upstate New York, Smith profitably managed his family’s estates while cycling through the many reform movements of the early 1800s, including temperance, women’s rights, vegetarianism, and sexual “purity” (a creed advocated by Sylvester Graham, who claimed his coarse-grained crackers curbed lust and masturbation).
But Smith’s abiding passion was abolitionism. He helped found the antislavery Liberty Party and ran as its presidential candidate in 1848 (receiving 0.1 percent of the vote). The small town his family founded in New York was so strongly abolitionist that a black visitor wrote Frederick Douglass, “There are yet two places where slaveholders cannot come, Heaven and Peterboro.”
Smith also had a prior tie to Brown’s family. Years before, the New Yorker had donated twenty thousand acres of his holdings in western Virginia to Oberlin, the radical new college in Ohio of which Owen Brown was a trustee. Owen arranged for his then destitute son to survey the land, and it was during this trip that Brown first visited the Allegheny Mountains.
Smith had since undertaken a utopian project: he granted free blacks thousands of acres in upstate New York, so they could farm and own
enough property to qualify for the vote. But the land was poor and remote; the few blacks who settled in an Adirondacks colony called Timbucto struggled from the first.
Gerrit Smith
Brown had a solution, which he proposed to Smith upon visiting the magnate’s Peterboro mansion in 1848. He would move to upstate New York himself and help black pioneers survey, farm, and raise stock. “I can think of no place where I think I would sooner go,” he wrote his father, “than to live with those poor despised Africans to try, & encourage them; & show them a little as far as I am capable.”
Smith was impressed by the idealistic wool merchant and deeded him 244 acres at $1 an acre. In the spring of 1849, Brown settled near Lake Placid, in the village of North Elba. That June, Richard Henry Dana, the author of
Two Years Before the Mast,
was hiking in the Adirondacks when he stumbled on “a log-house and half-cleared farm”—the Browns’ temporary home. Dana joined the family of nine for dinner. Two black neighbors were also at the table. Brown “called the negroes by their
surnames, with the prefixes of Mr. and Mrs.,” Dana observed. “It was plain they had not been so treated or spoken to often before.”
The 1850 census listed a twenty-three-year-old black laborer from Florida, a fugitive slave, living with the Browns. Many black farm families dwelled close by. Brown’s oldest daughter, Ruth—“a bonny, buxom young woman,” Dana wrote, “with fair skin and red hair”—married a white neighbor, Henry Thompson, who would later join his father-in-law’s abolitionist crusade, as would two of his brothers.
But Brown himself rarely stayed in North Elba for long. Soon after moving his family to upstate New York, he undertook a desperate scheme to wind up his wool business in Springfield. Rather than sell to domestic buyers at low prices, he shipped tons of his firm’s finest wool to Great Britain, convinced he could break the American cartel.
Yet again, Brown’s business instincts proved poor. British buyers scorned the American wool, forcing him to ship most of it back home, at great expense, for sale at ruinously low prices. His already troubled business collapsed, and Brown found himself mired in debt and lawsuits, just as he’d been a decade before. He would spend much of the next five years shuttling from court to court, contesting legal claims that “
if lost
will leave me
nice and flat
.”
Meanwhile, Mary Brown had been left overseeing a cash-strapped household, in a land so harsh that snow still lay in the fields in late May. Since the loss of four children in 1843, Brown’s wife had given birth to three more; two of them died as infants. Her frequently absent husband acknowledged the hardships she endured in an unusually tender letter in 1847, noting his “follies,” “the verry considerable difference in our age,” and the fact that “I sometimes chide you severely.” The toll was evident to Richard Dana when he visited the Browns’ Adirondack home; he described Mary, then just thirty-three, as “rather an invalid.”
Later that summer, as Brown sailed for Britain, Mary decided “she must do something, at once, or she would not live but a little while,” John junior wrote his father overseas. Leaving her stepdaughter Ruth in charge of her young children, Mary left North Elba for a “Water-Cure Infirmary” in Northampton, Massachusetts, where she was diagnosed as suffering from a nervous disorder and “a Scrofulous humour seated in her glands.”
Mary Brown with daughters Annie and Sarah, ca. 1851
Mary wrote John junior complaining that his father “never believed there was any dissease about me,” and had left her very little money. To extend her treatment (“plunge, douche, drenches, and spray baths”) she pleaded with her stepson: “If you can send me twenty or twenty five dollars I should like it.” Mary also mentioned a lecture by Lucy Stone, an abolitionist and suffragist. “I went to hear for the first time that I ever heard a Woman speak,” she wrote, and she “liked her very well.”
BOOK: Midnight Rising: John Brown and the Raid That Sparked the Civil War Hardcover – Bargain Price
3.59Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

Other books

Hero by Night by Sara Jane Stone
The Orphan by Peter Lerangis
I Am David by Anne Holm
Unveiling The Sky by Jeannine Allison
The Color of Paradox by A.M. Dellamonica
Bridesmaids by Jane Costello
Lauren Oliver - Delirium by Lauren Oliver
World Made by Hand by James Howard Kunstler