From the breaking out of the difficulties in Kansas. Four of my sons had gone there to settle and they wanted me to go.[503]
Also, Brown stated over his signature, in March, 1859, that it was "since 1855" that it had been his judgment that the way to successfully oppose slavery "would be to meddle directly with the peculiar institution."[504] That he had the subject under consideration prior to 1845 is expressly discredited by Brown, in his autobiography, in the statement that he was "averse to military affairs"; that he refused to "train or drill; but paid fines & got along like a Quaker until his age finally cleared him of military duty."[505]
The record of Brown's life, prior to 1857, is barren of any contemporaneous expression by him or by any member of his family which even remotely suggests the possibility that he might have contemplated attempting a forcible assault against slavery. If his mind had been preoccupied with a desire of such overshadowing importance the fact would have shone in the letters which he wrote to his children January 23, and August 6, 1852, relating to the conduct of their lives.[506] There is much, however, in this history which discredits the assumption that he gave the subject any consideration whatever. A man whose life was a "burning" devotion to an ambition so heroic as to become the "David of the Goliath of Slavery,"[507] ought to have shown some personal interest in the matter; he should not have left it wholly to his panegyrists. It appears however that the peaceful "tanner and shepherd" was so unconscious of having any object in life worth living for that he "felt," during this time, "a strong and steady desire to die";[508] a condition of mind wholly inconsistent with heroism or with one "burning" to bear arms, or with a "man of war emerging from the chrysalis of peace."[509] The assumptions upon which Mr. Villard relies for the relevancy of his question are gratuitous. The chapter is a scholarly example, put forth by a scholar, of the art of making "much ado about nothing."
It would be proper to say that the conquest of the Southern States was the greatest or principal undertaking in Brown's career, and that it was in 1857 that he first planned to attempt it. His capture of Pate's horses and mules at Black Jack in June; and the days which he spent in stealing cattle, at and around Osawatomie, during the last days of August, 1856; and his plundering in Missouri and Kansas in 1858, may be called meddling with slavery; though grafting upon the anti-slavery sentiment of the time, would more accurately describe the relation, if any, of his operations to slavery.
There was this difference between Nat Turner and John Brown: the negro was a religious fanatic; he was sincere and consistent. Falsehood, deception, greed, selfishness, are not attributes of fanaticism, but they are characteristic of Brown's life. The sincerity of his "death-bed" professions of godliness, and of sympathy for the men in bondage, is discredited by the actions of a lifetime as conspicuous for its turpitude as it was barren of virtues. Neither charitable deed, nor manifestation of a benevolent, or of a patriotic spirit, appears, even incidentally, along the lines of his life, to break the monotone of selfishness that distinguishes it. In public affairs he took no part worthy of consideration.
Mr. Gill gave up a view of his natural or unassumed personality that is consistently discreditable, and Brown's correspondence is a confirmation of that estimate. It teaches the lesson that he administered his deportment to suit the circumstances of the occasion existing at the time; and that it covered the entire range of the various phases of human intercourse; from that of a coarse, brutal vulgarity, to the saintliness of his latest metamorphosis; from the use of language so distinctly vulgar and obscene, as to be, in the opinion of the writer, unprintable,[510] to the crafty assumptions of godliness contained in his letter to the innocent Quakeress.[511]
Brown was crafty in the sublimest degree of the art. His craftiness was a distinction. It will be difficult to find in our literature a more interesting example of the refinements of the art than the piece which he set for Mrs. Stearns: his "Old Brown's Farewell: to the Plymouth Rocks; Bunker Hill Monuments; Charter Oaks; and Uncle Toms Cabbins." In the setting, and in the dramatic execution of the play, he exhibited the perfection of the actor. The paper was not drawn for Mr. Parker to read to his congregation. Brown was not "casting his pearls before swine." It was for Mrs. Stearns personally that the paper was written; it was her heart that he intended to touch, and her generous emotions that he intended to prey upon. How successfully he played the part she has related.[512]
Of Brown, it may be truthfully said that within the limits of his resources, he did nothing in a small way, nor did he move with a faint heart. With him, there was neither halting nor trifling in action. He was consistently an adventurer. His theology scorned all creeds. Without capital he was a plunger among speculators. The deception which he practiced upon the New England Woolen Company netted him a fortune little below the average of that period. In the commission business he was an acrobat, rather than a merchant: his operations were a series of feats in commercial gymnastics. Chafing because of the restrictions of an extreme poverty that kept him "like a toad under a harrow," he determined to burst the bands of his environment, and there was a massacre in the valley of the Pottawatomie out of which he rode with a herd of horses. And he would have ridden away from Black Jack with Pate's horses and mules, if Pate had not deceived him, and led him to believe that he held his sons—John and Jason—prisoners, as hostages. A guerrilla leader for six days, he drove two hundred and fifty head of cattle into his camp at Osawatomie, and in 1858, as a Kansas raider, he dwarfed the operations of James Montgomery. In the East, as a crafty imposter and grafter, he secured $30,000 in cash and plunder, and attempted a coup upon the Legislatures of Massachusetts and New York for $200,000 more. And then, within one year from the date of the outburst of his determination to be freed from poverty, he indulged hopes of a successful conquest: hopes of riches and of fame. An habitual cruelty in his domestic life, which is more than hinted at by his friend and confidant, George R. Gill, nerved his hand to execute the ferocious butchery of his neighbors on the Pottawatomie, and steeled his heart to incite the slaves at Harper's Ferry to emulate the example of Southampton. His attempt at revolution was not the result of a previous conviction and consecration to duty and to the cause of humanity, but of a growth—the indulgence and development of an abnormal passion for speculation: the culmination downward of his speculative and criminal instincts. Closing a commercial sas indulging the reasonable hope that in the new country he would find opportunity to improve his condition. In the horses owned by the Shermans, and by other well-to-do neighbors, he saw, and grasped, the opportunity—a desperate one—to make a "coup to restore his fortunes." Out of that plunge in robbery and murder came the leader of a gang of horse thieves—the chrysalis of the guerrilla captain of Osawatomie.
Driven out of the Territory by the establishment of order, the crafty marauder raided the East as the militant defender of Kansas. In the practice of his impositions there, he met and established confidential relations with men who plotted against the life of the nation; men who planned how to provoke a revolution; how best to "split the Union";[513] men who wished "success to every slave insurrection." From this atmosphere, pregnant with the sentiment of disloyalty to the Union, Brown derived the inspiration which encouraged him to plan to do what his mentors had not the courage to undertake. Out of his negotiations with them came money; munitions of war; Hugh Forbes, the revolutionist; mutual planning for a revolution, and a dream of empire.