This information caused great excitement and fear among the men of our company and a feeling arose against John and myself that led the men all to desert us.[150]
If Jason Brown, "whose hatred of blood-letting had deprived him of his fathers confidence," when violent deeds were under way,[151] "had devoted" himself to sharpening the cutlasses in John's camp May 23d, as stated by Mr. Villard,[152] he would have known that "blood-letting" was to ensue; and the news that blood had been shed, would not have come to him as a shock—"'the worst shock' that ever came to him in his life."[153] Nor would he have "tremblingly" demanded of his father on the night of the 25th: "Did you have anything to do with the killing of those men on the Pottawatomie?" For he would not only have known that there were to be killings, and who were to be killed, but he would have been a party to them, and to the robbery. He would have known all about what was to happen. But to his eternal credit let it be said that his father and brothers had not taken him into their confidence in this matter. Townsley, in his confession, said nothing about the calling for volunteers, and the grinding of sabres, although it is probable that his connection with Brown's scheme began on May 23d, as he stated.
There were suspicious circumstances which tended to incriminate the Brown party; but the facts that the horses which were stolen had been run out of the country, while the Browns remained in the neighborhood, and did not have the murdered men's horses in their possession, were potent in allaying these suspicions, and gave them an opportunity to deny their guilt. But if the sensational scenes of calling for volunteers for a hostile purpose, and the sharpening of their sabres had actually occurred, they would have had no possible defense. This evidence would have connected them directly with the crime, and it would have been published immediately upon the return of the resentful Pottawatomie Rifles to their homes at Osawatomie and on the Pottawatomie. Whereas the resolutions adopted at the mass-meeting of citizens at Osawatomie May 27th, refer to "midnight assassins unknown;" and on May 31st, Mr. James H. Carruth wrote to the Watertown (New York) Reformer:
... It was murder nevertheless and the Free-State men here co-operate with the pro-slavery men in endeavoring to arrest the murderers.
In his statement of the facts as to the happenings on the Pottawatomie, Mr. Villard makes one sole reference to the robberies that happened. It is, that when Owen Brown had been denounced by his uncle, the Rev. Mr. Adair of Osawatomie, on the 26th, as a "vile murderer," and was refused admission to his home, that "he rode away on one of the murdered men's horses." Except for this and another incidental reference to theft, the reader of Fifty Years After would not be informed that any robbery had been committed; and even this statement is artfully written. It is incorrect and misleading. It conceals a thread in this history which would, if exposed, unmask the selfishness that prompted this crime: Owen Brown rode away on one of the "fast Kentucky horses" which John Brown received in exchange for the "murdered men's horses."
Mr. Villard assumes that Brown's motives for committing the murders herein, and stealing these horses, were unselfish; a grace that should logically apply to the swaggering, swearing infidels whom he directed. In a summary of his conclusions he says:[154]
Fired with indignation at the wrongs he witnessed on every hand, impelled by the Covenanter's spirit that made him so strange a figure in the nineteenth century, and believing fully that there should be an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth, he killed his men in the conscientious belief that he was a faithful servant of Kansas and of the Lord. He killed not to kill, but to free; not to make wives widows and children fatherless, but to attack on its own ground the hideous institution of human slavery, against which his whole life was a protest. He pictured himself a modern crusader as much empowered to remove the unbeliever as any armoured searcher after the Grail. It was to his mind a righteous and necessary act; if he concealed his part in it and always took refuge in half-truth that his own hands were not stained, that was as near to a compromise for the sake of policy as this rigid, self-denying Roundhead ever came. Naturally a tender-hearted man, he directed a particularly shocking crime without remorse, because the men killed typified to him the slave-drivers who counted their victims by the hundreds. It was to him a necessary carrying into Africa of the war in which he firmly desired himself engaged. And always it must not be forgotten that his motives were wholly unselfish, and that his aims were none other than the freeing of a race. With his ardent, masterful temperament, he needed no counsel from a Lane or a Robinson to make him ready to strike a blow, or to tell him that the time for it had come. The smoke of burning Lawrence was more than sufficient.
From the point of view of ethics, John Brown's crime on the Pottawatomie cannot be successfully palliated or excused. It must ever remain a complete indictment of his judgment and wisdom; a dark blot upon his memory; a proof that, however self-controlled, he had neither true respect for the laws nor for human life, nor a knowledge that two wrongs never make a right. Call him a Cromwellian trooper with the Old Testament view of the way of treating one's enemies, as did James Freeman Clarke, if you please; it is nevertheless true that Brown lived in the nineteenth century and was properly called upon to conform to its standard of morals and right living.
For John Brown no pleas can be made that will enable him to escape coming before the bar of historical judgment. There his wealth of self-sacrifice, and the nobility of his aims, do not avail to prevent a complete condemnation of his bloody crime at Pottawatomie, or a just penalty for his taking human life without warrant or authority. If he deserves to live in history, it is not because of his cruel, gruesome, reprehensible acts on the Pottawatomie, but despite them.
Conceptions of the distinguishing traits in Brown's character are widely divergent; a divergence not attributable to a "blind prejudice." Those who knew him best did not have the exalted opinions of the nobility of his aims, or of the sublimity of his humanity, that inspired his eulogists and biographers. Prominent among the dissenters was John Brown himself. As late as March 31, 1857, he did not personally understand that what he had been doing in Kansas was either sentimental, patriotic, or romantic. It had not occurred to him that he had been impelled by the covenanters spirit, or that he was a crusader, either ancient or modern. On that date, replying to a letter that he had received from his wife, in which she informed him that "his sons were now inclined to give up war and remain at North Elba," he said:[155]