He loosed a civil war. Everything that came after was only powder for the hungry cannon. Freedom is a hard-bought thing! John Brown knew. He already knew on that terrible night when he rode down with his sons into “the shadows of the Swamp of the Swan—that long, low-winding and somber stream fringed everywhere with woods and dark with bloody memory. Forty-eight hours they lingered there, and then of a pale May morning rode up to the world again. Behind them lay five twisted, red and mangled corpses. Behind them rose the stifled wailing of widows and little children. Behind them the fearful driver gazed and shuddered. But before them rode a man, tall, dark, grim-faced and awful. His hands were red and his name was John Brown. Such was the cost of freedom.”[17]
John Brown became a hunted outlaw.
They burned his house, destroyed everything he and his sons had garnered. But he had only begun his war upon the slavers. Out of the night he came, time after time, and always he left death behind.
“He’s mad! Mad!” they said, but pro-slavery men began to leave Kansas.
“Da freedom’s comin’!” Black men lifted their hands in silent ecstasy. They slipped across the borders and looked for John Brown. Tabor, a tiny prairie Iowa town of thirty homesteads, became the most important Underground Railroad station on the western frontier. For here John Brown set up camp, and began to organize for his “march.” Strength had come up in the old man, charging his whole being with power.
“We should not have given him money!” the folks back East were saying.
Douglass, moving back and forth from Rochester to Boston—to New York, Syracuse and Cleveland—grew thin and haggard. He had stood like a bulwark of strength, even when the Supreme Court had handed down its Dred Scott decision. People found clarion words in the North Star.
“The Supreme Court of the United States is not the only power in this world,” Douglass wrote. “We, the Abolitionists and colored people, should meet this decision, unlooked for and monstrous as it appears, in a cheerful spirit. This very attempt to blot out forever the hopes of an enslaved people may be one necessary link in the chain of events preparatory to the complete overthrow of the whole slave system.”
Months passed, and all he heard from Kansas were the awful reports of John Brown’s riding abroad. He could not argue the right or wrong of this thing. Condemnation of John Brown left him cold. But was John Brown destroying all they had built up? This was war! Was John Brown’s way the only way? They had lost the election. The new party’s fine words fell back upon them like chilling drops of rain. Then out in Kansas the Governor declared the state free! There was peace in Kansas.