John Brown probably never saw a slave auction, portrayed here in an illustration from the 1852 edition of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin, but his horror and hatred of slavery made its destruction the “greatest or principle object” of his life.
When John was 8 years old his mother died, and for awhile he believed that he would never recover from so “complete & permanent” a loss. His father remarried, but John never accepted his stepmother emotionally and “continued to pine after his own Mother for years.”
An indifferent student, and “not ... much of a schollar” anyway, John quit school and went to work at his father’s tannery. Owen Brown, who had been a tanner and a shoemaker before moving to Hudson, had already taught his son the art of dressing leather from “Squirel, Raccoon, Cat, Wolf, or Dog Skins,” and John soon displayed remarkable ability in the trade. When the War of 1812 broke out, Owen contracted to supply beef to the American forces in Michigan. He gave John the task of rounding up wild steers and other cattle in the woods and then driving them, all by himself, to army posts more than 100 miles away. Contact with the soldiers and their profanity and lack of discipline so disgusted young Brown that he later resolved to pay fines rather than take part in the militia drills required of all Hudson males of a certain age.
It was during the war, or so Brown later claimed, that he first came to understand what his father meant about the evil of slavery. He had just completed one of his cattle drives and was staying with a “very gentlemanly landlord” who owned a slave about the same age as John. The Negro boy was “badly clothed, poorly fed ... & beaten before his eyes with Iron Shovels or any other thing that came first to hand.” Outraged by this, John returned home “a most determined Abolitionist” swearing “Eternal war with Slavery.”
John Brown had not yet grown his famous beard when this picture was taken in Kansas in 1856. Though 3 years away from the deed that would make his name immortal, he had already begun his private war against slavery.
Mary Ann Day, Brown’s loyal and self-sacrificing second wife, stoically endured her husband’s constant wanderings in business and anti-slavery activities. She is shown here about 1851 with two of their daughters, Annie and Sarah.
In 1816 John joined the Congregational Church in Hudson and soon developed a strong interest in becoming a minister. For a while he attended a divinity school in Plainfield, Mass., then transferred to another school in Litchfield, Conn. At that time Litchfield was a center of abolitionist sentiment; it was also the birthplace of Harriet Beecher Stowe, whose book Uncle Tom’s Cabin, published in 1852, would stir passions North and South, win international support for the anti-slavery cause, and help to bring on civil war in 1861. How much of Litchfield’s abolitionist atmosphere young Brown absorbed is not known. A shortage of funds and an inflammation of the eyes forced him to return to Ohio in the summer of 1817. His dream of becoming a minister was forever shattered, but he never lost his religious fervor.
When he was 20 years old, “led by his own inclination & prompted also by his Father,” Brown married Dianthe Lusk, a “remarkably plain” and pious girl a year younger than himself. She died 12 years later, in August 1832, following the birth of their seventh child. Brown remarried within a year, and fathered 13 children by his second wife, Mary Ann Day. In a never-ending struggle to feed and clothe his growing family, Brown drifted through Ohio, Pennsylvania, New York, Connecticut, and Massachusetts plying many trades. He worked at tanning, surveying, and farming; at times he was shepherd, cattleman, wool merchant, and postmaster; for a while he bred race horses and speculated in real estate. Uniformly unsuccessful in these ventures, Brown’s debts mounted, and he was barely able to keep his large family from starvation.