Forty Years of It

by Brand Whitlock

I am certain, however, that the incident as related is entirely authentic, for I have recently made inquiries and established it beyond a reasonable doubt, as the lawyers say, in all its details as here given. I say in all its details, save possibly as to that of my own corporeal presence on the scene, at the actual moment of the occurrence. Only the other day I asked a favorite aunt of mine, and she remembered the incident perfectly, and many another similar to it. “It was just like him,” she added, with a dubious, though tolerant fondness. But when, like the insistent, questioning child in one of Riley’s Hoosier poems, I asked her if I had been there, she said she could not remember.

But whether I was there in the flesh or not, or whether the whole reality of that scene, so poignant, and insistent, and indelible, with its denial of the grounds of authority, its challenge to the bases of society, its shock to the orthodox mind (like that of John Brand of Kentucky, a strict constructionist, who believed in the old Constitution, and even then, in slavery), remains in my memory as the result of one of those tricks of a mind that has always dramatized scenes for its own amusement, I was there in spirit, and, indeed, at many another scene in the life of Joseph Carter Brand, whose name my mother gave me as a good heritage. Whatever the bald and banal physical fact may have been, I was either present at the actual or in imagination at the described scene to such purpose that from it I derived an impression never to be erased from my mind.

It is not given to all of us to say with such particularity and emphasis, just what we learned from each person who has touched our existences and affected the trend of our lives, as it was given to Marcus Aurelius, for instance, so that one may say that from Rusticus one received this impression, or that from Apollonius one learned this and from Alexander the Platonic that; we must rather ascribe our little store of knowledge generally to the gods. But I am sure that no one was ever long with Joseph Carter Brand, or came to know him well, without learning that rarest and most beautiful of all the graces or of all the virtues—Pity.

He, too, had tears for all souls in trouble

Here, and in hell.

Perhaps it is not so much pity as sympathy that I mean, but whether it was pity or sympathy, it was that divine quality in man which enables him to imagine the sorrows of others, to understand what they feel, to suffer with them; in a word, the ability to put himself in the other fellow’s place—the hallmark, I believe, of true culture, far more than any degree or doctor’s hood could possibly be.

It may have been some such feeling as this for the negroes that led him, when a young man in Kentucky, to renounce a patrimony of slaves and come north. It was not, to be sure, a very large patrimony, for his father was a farmer in a rather small way in Bourbon County, and owned a few slaves, but whatever the motive, he refused to own human chattels and left Bourbon County, where his branch of the Brands had lived since their emigration from Virginia, to which colony, so long before, their original had come as a Jacobite exile from Forfarshire in Scotland.

My grandfather came north into Ohio and Champaign County, and he had not been there very long before he went back to Virginia and married Lavina Talbott, and when they went to live on the farm he called “Pretty Prairie,” he soon found himself deep in Ohio politics, as it seems the fate of most Ohioans to be, and continued in that element all his life. He had his political principles from Henry Clay,—he had been to Ashland and had known the family,—and he was elected as a Whig to the legislature in 1842 and to the State Senate of Ohio in 1854. There he learned to know and to admire Salmon P. Chase, then governor of Ohio, and it was not long until he was in the Abolitionist movement, and he got into it so deeply that nothing less than the Civil War could ever have got him out, for he was in open defiance, most of the time, to the Fugitive Slave Law.

One of the accomplishments in which he took pride, perhaps next to his ability as a horseman, was his skill with the rifle, acquired in Kentucky at the expense of squirrels in the tops of tall trees (he could snuff a candle with a rifle), and this ability he placed at the service of a negro named Ad White, who had run away from his master in the South, and was hidden in a corn-crib near Urbana when overtaken by United States marshals from Cincinnati. The negro was armed, and was defending himself, when my grandfather and his friend Ichabod Corwin, of a name tolerably well known in Ohio history, went to his assistance, and drove the marshals off by the hot fire of their rifles. The marshals retreated, and came up later with reinforcements, strong enough to overpower Judge Corwin and my grandfather, but the negro had escaped.

The scrape was an expensive one; there were proceedings against them in the United States court in Cincinnati, and they only got out of it years after when the Fugitive Slave Law was rapidly becoming no law, and Ad White could live near Urbana in peace during a long life, and be pointed out as an interesting relic of the great conflict.