The often repeated statement that Brown came to Kansas "to fight," and not "to settle" after the manner of other immigrants, is further discredited in this history.
Before the Mason Committee, in January, 1860, Mr. Wm. F. Arny, who knew Brown to have been a non-resistant, testified that he had conversed with him in Kansas, in 1858; and that he, on that occasion, asked him "how he reconciled his opinions then, with the peace principles which he held when he knew him in Virginia twenty years before. To this Brown replied, that the 'aggressions of slavery, the murders and robbery perpetrated upon himself and members of his family, the lawlessness by Atchison and others in 1855 and from that time down to the Marais-des-Cygnes, convinced him that peace was but an empty word.'"[97]
Before the same committee Mr. Augustus Wattles testified:[98]
Captain Brown told me that he had no idea of fighting until he heard the Missourians, during the winter he was there, make arrangements to come over into the Territory to vote. He said to me that he had not come to Kansas to settle himself, having left his family at North Elba, but that he had come to assist his sons in their settlement and to defend them, if necessary, in a peaceable exercise of their political rights.
Writing to his wife February 1, 1856, Brown said:
The idea of again visiting those of my dear family at North Elba is so calculated to unman me, that I seldom allow my thoughts to dwell upon it.
This language bears the interpretation that he had located with the other members of his family in Kansas, and that a return to North Elba would be in the nature of a visit.
Brown told Mr. Arney that it was his intention, originally, to settle in Kansas. In his testimony before the Mason Committee, he said: "He (Brown) then referred to the fact that he had sent his sons into the Territory of Kansas in 1853 or 1854 with a lot of blooded cattle and other stock with the intention of settling."[99] There is presumptive evidence too, that he did "settle" in Kansas and that he did take a claim; also that it was "jumped." In a letter to Brown dated June 24. 1857, the late Wm. A. Phillips wrote as follows:[100] "Your old claim I believe, has been jumped. If you do not desire to contest it, let me suggest that you make a new settlement at some good point of which you will be the head. Lay off a town and take claims around it."
Among the real conditions of poverty described by Brown in his letters of October 13th and 14th, and with but "sixty cents" in his pocket, it is irrational to assume that he was free to move "where he pleased" or that he was "free to devote every thought," or any of his thoughts, for that matter, to this "battling" business. He was not "emancipated from the counter and the harrow," and from his natural obligation to continue to provide for the dependent wife and children, who were suffering the acute privations of poverty in a miserable home. The letters quoted are evidence of the domestic character of the thoughts which occupied his mind, and of his deep solicitude for the wants of his family. They are earnest letters, written about the pressing affairs of his domestic life, by a man of more than ordinary experience. He dismisses any reference to the subject of the "driving force of a mighty and unselfish purpose," with the moderate and sensible opinion, that the "prospect of Kansas becoming a Free state is brightening every day."
November 2, 1855, Brown wrote a long and interesting letter to his wife about affairs in their Kansas home, concluding with this very conservative and peaceful statement: "I feel more and more confident that slavery will soon die out here,—and to God be the praise."[101] The letter is as follows: