Brown intended to create the "Provisional Army" in the enemy's country; hence, it was essential for him to commence the undertaking by striking the most crushing blow that it was possible for him to deliver. The success of the movement depended upon his ability to strike a blow so terrible that the survivors of the carnage, dazed and paralyzed by the horrors of the existing conditions, would be incapable of organizing and sending any opposing force to attack him. Therefore the assassinations—the destruction of the persons who, otherwise, would pursue. That was the central feature of the movement, the base of the scheme, the blow which he intended to strike. It was the only blow which he could strike; the only weapon that he could use of which any one stood in awe. The blow which he would have to strike if he would win, was the blow which he had told his Eastern friends he could strike: a blow that would shake the slave system to its foundation—the blow which he had promised Gerrit Smith he would strike, and doubtless, told him how he intended to strike it.
To the men from the Pottawatomie, a massacre was simply a means to an end. Brown and his sons harbored no feelings of animosity toward the Doyles, the Shermans, and Wilkinson; but they knew that these men would not give up to them, peaceably, the property which they coveted, therefore they murdered them and took their horses. They knew that the owners of slaves and lands in the Southern States would not, peaceably, relinquish their ownership of this property; therefore they planned to incite the slaves to kill their masters while they slept—and having thus emancipated the slaves, confiscate the estates of the slave-holders, and put the assassins and themselves in possession of them. This massacre, the most horrible that was ever seriously contemplated in the brain of man, was to be executed under the pretense that it was an humanitarian measure. In the name of humanity, they proposed to undertake the midnight assassination of millions of men, women, and children, and to contend for justification for their actions. The word, with Brown, was a convenience, or an interchangeable term. A definition of it, in the sense in which he used the word, is found in his personal understanding, or interpretation rather, of its co-relation, "The Golden Rule." He is quoted by Sanborn and others as having stated "more than once": "I believe in the Golden Rule and the Declaration of Independence. I think that both mean the same thing; and it is better that a whole generation should pass off the face of the earth—men, women and children—by a violent death than that one jot of either should fail in this country. I mean exactly so, sir."[420]
The possibility that the blacks in the South might attempt to gain their freedom by a general massacre of the whites, was a condition co-existent with their enslavement. After 1831 that possibility became a fixed impending probability; and the question of means to prevent the inevitable cataclysm of blood, was a matter of constant concern in the economy of the Southern States; with the result that various preventive measures were adopted to discourage the possibility of attempts, by the slaves, to organize for such undertakings, or to fit themselves, by education or otherwise, to promote such organizations.
In the philosophy of John Brown, what Nat Turner had done in a section of Southampton County, Virginia, could, if properly promoted, be done in any other section or locality; and, if in any locality, then in every locality, or throughout the whole South. Therefore, an insurrection by the slaves, having for its object the overthrow of the existing State governments of the South, was a venture, from his point of view, which might be undertaken with reasonable prospects for success; the ultimate result depending largely upon his ability to organize the slaves effectively for revolt; to equip them for the initial uprising, and thereafter to capably direct the movement.
No disaster that ever befell our country, war not excepted, was in any respect comparable with the horrors which would be incidental to a slave insurrection; yet our people lived during more than half a century in the shadow of that menace. They lived in a state of continual apprehension that it, the most stupendous of conceivable calamities, might at any time overwhelm them.
For years patrols had ridden the roads and men had watched of night lest the negroes turn upon their masters. It was, an ever present fear. That the Abolitionists wished the slaves to rise and kill their masters in their beds was a belief widely held in the South and often publicly expressed, and no happening that could be imagined contained a greater possibility of horror and bloodshed.[421]
It has been said, and there is great force in the statement, that the "Underground Railroad," instead of working hardship and great loss to slave-holders, was, in reality "the safety-valve to the institution." It was the sluice for the overflow of the dangerous class—the able and discontented. The Underground was organized at the close of the eighteenth century, and had on its rolls more than 30,000 "employees." It carried away from the South, probably 75,000 slaves of the value of more than $30,000,000. The slaves who thus sought and obtained their liberty, taking the risk of arrest and punishment in their attempts to gain it, were the ablest and the most influential among them. Had they remained in slavery, these men would have further developed and become leaders among the slaves, and would have organized them and led them into insurrection. "Had they remained, the direful scenes of San Domingo would have been enacted, and the hot, vengeful breath of massacre would have swept the South as a tornado and blanched the cheek of the civilized world."[422]
Brown knew about the hot vengeful breath which had swept the white population from the fair face of San Domingo. And he was familiar with the attempts which had been made to relight its fires in this country, and to start the tornado of death. He was familiar with what his predecessors in the insurrection business had done, and with what they had tried to do. He knew, too, or thought he knew, why they had failed. Naturally he sought to avoid the mistakes which they had committed, and to safeguard his operations by improving upon their methods. The seizure of Harper's Ferry was not a "Foray into Virginia," as Mr. Sanborn chooses to call it: neither was it a "Raid" as Mr. Villard, with conspicuous persistence, seeks to make it appear to have been; nor was it either an "attack" upon the town or a "blow" or any other specious form of movement. Brown selected the place and "occupied" it as the base for his military operations, because he intended to use the generous supplies of war material, which were then in store there, for the equipment of the army that he planned to organize. The occupation was to be permanent. It was a stratagem of his campaign, an incident in his main design.
By the logic of the assassinations, Brown believed he would secure immunity from an immediate, or counter assault. Instead of being compelled to defend his position against attack by the militia, and by companies of armed citizens, which might be improvised for the occasion, he contemplated spending the first "few weeks" of the campaign in comparative security; publishing, far and wide, the proclamation of the Provisional Government, with its lure for adventurers in civil and military life; debauching the citizenship of the country and the soldiery of the Union. He also contemplated having leisure to attend such diplomatic functions as might be incidental to the situation, including negotiations with foreign nations, and the problems of "Foreign intervention," Northern conventions, etc.[423]
Forbes's letter of May 14, 1858, heretofore quoted, discloses Brown's theory of the invasion: it deals with the facts of Brown's secret movement then pending in the untried future. These two men had agreed upon an invasion of the South under cover of an "insurrection." The opinion Forbes gave Dr. Howe therein is a dissenting one, for personal reasons, from his agreement with Brown. In the revised opinion, Forbes stated his belief that the insurrection would fail; that it would be "either a flash in the pan, or it would leap beyond his control or any control," and after having spent its force in a riot of blood would be stamped out. Brown thought otherwise; he was "sure of a response," and believed that he could safeguard against "a flash in the pan." With the question of "losing control" of the insurrection he was not concerned; that was a bridge which he would cross when he came to it. Under his control, a whole generation was to pass off the face of the earth by a violent death, and nothing much could occur in excess of that if the insurrection did happen to get beyond it. The hurricane of horrors which he proposed to unloose, could not sweep too far for his purposes; he would have it spread to every Southern State, and in the language of Jeremiah Goldsmith Anderson, "make this land of liberty and equality shake to the center."[424]