Learning and Other Essays

by John Jay Chapman

And again in 1853: “Now every element in my nature rises up indignantly at the thought of our principles being bartered for considerations of a personal and selfish nature; and all my feelings bid me do what my reason forbids—that is, make open war, cause a clean split, appeal to the Conscience Whigs who formed the nucleus of our party, and march out of the ranks with a banner of our own.” He makes moan throughout six years over this coalition. As late as 1857 he still grinds his teeth. “Not even Sumner’s election was worth the price paid by the coalition.”

This is all admirable; but it is not enough. Had Howe understood reform politics as he understood philanthropy, had he had an early training in reform politics, he would have taken a sledge-hammer and battered the coalition in public. If the matter had occurred in philanthropy, Howe would have cleared the air. If, for instance, Dr. Howe had returned from Europe and found Charles Sumner giving Laura Bridgman dogmatic religious instruction, he would have stopped it; yes, even if he had been obliged to placard the town against the Sumner. But in politics he was helpless. As to the Whigs, he says: “I have done what I could, for where else can I go? Under what organization can I fight in this terrible emergency?”

Alas, there is no banner for a man like Howe to fight under. He must weave his own banner. For his own philanthropic work, Dr. Howe had done this; but he could not do it for politics. The anti-slavery problems came to him on top of his multitudinous activities. He was already superhumanly active, but he was a man incapable of refusing work which was offered to him. He took on the abolition duties in addition to his regular work. His health broke down almost immediately; but there was no leisure for him to attend to his health. His solution of all problems was by work, work, work. He was not, it must be remembered, of a thoughtful nature. His thinking was usually done for him by the energy of his temperament, which handed him a list of agenda each morning and at night sent him to the slumbers of fatigue. Thus there was no very distinct philosophy underlying his course of action in regard to slavery—no historic point of view, or reasoned theory, no illumination.

It is very terrible to see Howe making journeys to Kansas at a time when he should have been in bed with a sick-nurse beside him. Pegasus at the plow is good; but this was not exactly the right plow for Howe. The sight is a sublime one, all the same. The old buccaneer retains an instinctive belief in force. “Force is not yet eliminated from the means employed by God, bloodshed is necessary, bloodshed will come. But when, but how?—Under what circumstances may we resort to it?” This is the burden of many letters. In the meantime he and his vigilance committee were getting into deeper water all the time with the fugitive slave law, and with the still fiercer Kansas-Nebraska problems, until finally matters were brought to a crisis by John Brown’s raid, of which I must say a few words here.

It is wrong to compare John Brown with Joan of Arc, as is so often done. John Brown’s name is stained with massacre. He is a spirit of a far lower heaven than Joan of Arc. And yet he is to be classified under Joan of Arc; because he is an example of the symbolism inherent in human nature and in human society. Everyone understands both Joan of Arc and John Brown, but nobody can explain them. It takes an epoch, it takes the whole of a society, it takes a national and religious birthpang to produce either Joan of Arc or John Brown. Everyone living at the time takes some part in the episode; and thereafter, the story remains as a symbol, an epitome of the national and religious idea, which was born through the crisis. John Brown and his raid are an epitome, a popular summary of the history of the United States between the Missouri Compromise and the Gettysburg celebration. Not a child has been born in the country since his death to whom John Brown does not symbolize the thing that happened to the heart and brain of the American people between 1820 and 1865. He is as big as a myth, and the story of him is an immortal legend—perhaps the only one in our history.

The relation which the anti-slavery people bore to the John Brown episode is that of a chorus: they hailed the coming of the Lord. It is also that of a client: they backed him with money and arms. They are the link between the myth and the fact. They lived inside the swirl of rhapsody which was bearing Brown across the horizon. The progress of righteous-minded law-breaking, which began as soon as Garrison had explained the iniquity of the Federal Constitution, was very rapid after the passage of the fugitive slave law in 1850. To help fugitive slaves escape was a good training for those who were to supply anti-slavery swords and guns to the private war in Kansas. Criticism stands dumb before this situation: no man can tell what he himself would have done under the circumstances. The anti-slavery scholars and saints regarded themselves as the representatives of law and order in fomenting this carnage; and perhaps they were.

But the mind of John Brown took one more stride, and imagined a holy war to be begun through a slave insurrection. Nobody could have stopped Brown: he was wound up: he was going to do the thing. He naturally came to his Eastern partisans for support, and of course obtained a different degree of support from each individual to whom his horrifying scheme was disclosed. The people who would listen sifted themselves down by natural law to half a dozen, and among this half-dozen was Dr. Howe. Brown moved about under assumed names, and his accomplices corresponded in cryptic language, raising money and arms. The natural power and goodness of the man cast a spell over many who met him. It was more than a spell, it was the presence and shadow of martyrdom. And it fell upon the imagination of enthusiasts who had spent years of their lives in romantic, sacrificial law-breaking. More than this: John Brown was the living embodiment of an idea with which the anti-slavery mind was always darkly battling—the idea of atonement, of vicarious suffering. Howe and his associates somehow felt that they would be untrue to themselves—false to God—if they did not help John Brown, even if he were going to do something that would not bear the telling. John Brown thus fulfilled the dreams of the abolitionists; he was their man. He portended bloodshed—salvation through bloodshed. It was to come. Brown himself hardly knew his own significance or he would have demanded personal service, not money, from his patrons. Suppose John Brown had said to Gerrit Smith, and to Sanborn and Howe and Higginson and Stearns: “I do not want your money, but come with me. And if you will not come now, yet next year you will come—and the year after—you, and your sons by the thousand. You will follow me and you will not return, as I shall not return.”

Brown did not say this, but the truth of it was in the sky already, and when the raid occurred at Harper’s Ferry men shuddered not only with horror, but with awe. The raid took place. It took place, not in Kansas, a long way off, but within a few miles of Washington. Innocent men were killed. No one could tell whether a slave insurrection was to follow. A wave of panic swept across the South, and of something not unlike panic across the North. The keynote was struck. There was no doubt about that, anywhere. The conspirators, that is to say Brown’s secret committee, fled to Canada, with the exception of Gerrit Smith who went into an asylum—and of Higginson who went about his business as usual. They burnt their papers and look legal advice as to the law concerning conspiracy and armed rebellion. Dr. Howe, under the belief that his doing so would somehow shield Brown, published a card disclaiming knowledge and complicity in the raid.

It is interesting to note the various reasons which moved the conspirators to flight, at least to contrast the reasons which they afterward gave for their several sudden disappearances. Sanborn ran away because he feared that if the conspirators were arrested, their personal insignificance might damage the cause. It seemed to him “very important that the really small extent of any movement should be concealed and its reach and character exaggerated.” But Howe published his disclaimer for the very opposite reason. He wished that the smallness of extent and reach of the movement should be thoroughly well exposed to the public. This, he thought, would “rather help Brown than otherwise, because if he were shown to be an isolated individual acting for himself and not the agent of others, the affair would be less formidable and the desire for vengeance less strong.” Perhaps anyone implicated in a terrible crime is apt to discover some reason why his own temporary disappearance will serve the cause of righteousness. At any rate, it is too much to expect the humor of the situation to appear very strongly in the correspondence of the secret committee. Dr. Howe afterward went to Washington to testify in the investigation which followed, partly, no doubt, that he might rectify the impression created by his card, which had led people to believe that he knew less of Brown’s plans than was the case.

This momentary concern for their own safety a little tarnishes the heroic glamor that hangs about the conspirators, and which in another age would have been quickly restored by their execution. But they were really safe. All that the South had hoped for was to implicate the leaders of the Republican party in the raid, and in this it failed. The panic which seized all the conspirators except Higginson was a natural reaction in men who were dominated by another man’s idea, sustained above themselves by another man’s will and thought. They believed they understood; but they did not understand. When the climax came—a climax proper to that will and thought—they were thrown to the ground. They forsook him and fled. This does not mean that when their own hour shall come these same men will not die cheerfully at the stake or on the cross.