And so Douglass first heard of John Brown, in whose plans he would be involved for many years to come.
Upon the establishment of Oberlin College in 1839, Gerrit Smith had given the school a large tract of land in Virginia. The small group in Ohio hardly knew what to do with his gift until, in 1840, young John Brown, son of one of the Oberlin trustees, wrote proposing to survey the lands for a nominal price if he could buy some of it himself and establish his family there.
“He said,” continued Smith, “that he planned to set up there a school for both the Negroes and poor whites of the region.”
Titles to the Virginia lands were not clear because squatters were in possession, and the Oberlin trustees welcomed Brown’s plan. Thus John Brown first saw Virginia and looked over the rich and heavy lands which roll westward to the misty Blue Ridge. The Oberlin lands lay about two hundred miles west of Harper’s Ferry in the foothills and along the valley of the Ohio.
“He wrote that he liked the country as well as he had expected and its inhabitants even better,” Smith chuckled.
By the summer of 1840 the job was done, and Brown had picked out his ground. It was good hill land on the right branch of a valuable spring, with a growth of good timber and a sugar orchard. In August the Oberlin trustees voted “that the Prudential Committee be authorized to perfect negotiations and convey by deed to Brother John Brown of Hudson, one thousand acres of our Virginia land on the conditions suggested in the correspondence which has already transpired between him and the Committee.”[11]
“But then”—Gerrit Smith’s voice took on new urgency—“all negotiations stopped. The panic overthrew everybody’s calculations. Brown’s wool business collapsed, and two years later he was bankrupt. He had endorsed notes for a friend, and they sent him to jail. Then he entered into partnership with a man named Perkins, with a view to carrying on the sheep business extensively. Perkins was to furnish all the feed and shelter for wintering, and Brown was to take care of the flock.” Smith was silent for a few minutes, puffing on his pipe. “I think he loved being a shepherd. Anyway, during those long, solitary days and nights he developed a plan for furnishing cheap wool direct to consumers.
“He has a large store now in Springfield, Massachusetts. They say his bales are firm, round, hard and true, almost as if they had been turned out in a lathe. But the New England manufacturers are boycotting him. He’s not playing according to the rules and he’s being squeezed out. The truth of the matter is that John Brown has his own set of rules. He says he has a mission to perform.” There was another long silence. Then Gerrit Smith spoke and his voice was sad. “I wish I had it in my power to give him that tract of land protected by the Blue Ridge Mountains. I think that land lies at the core of all his planning.”
Gerrit Smith was right. John Brown had a plan. One thing alone reconciled him to his Springfield sojourn and that was the Negroes whom he met there. He had met black men singly here and there before. He was consumed with an intense hatred of slavery, and in Springfield he found a group of Negroes working manfully for full freedom. It was a small body without conspicuous leadership. On that account it more nearly approximated the great mass of their enslaved race. Brown sought them in home, in church and on the street; he hired them in his business. While Garrison and Douglass were touring Ohio, John Brown was saying to his black porter and friend, “Come early in the morning so that we’ll have time to talk.”
And so before the store was swept or the windows wiped, they carefully reviewed their plans for the “Subterranean Pass Way.”