“Where is the promise of His coming? For since the fathers fell asleep, all things continue as they were from the beginning of the creation.”
In 1819 a tall, sedate, dignified young man named John Brown was entered among the students of the Rev. Moses Hallock at Plainfield, Mass., where men were prepared for Amherst College. He was beginning his years of wandering—spiritual searching for the way of life, physical wandering in the wilderness where he must earn his living. In after years he wrote to a boy:
“I wish you to have some definite plan. Many seem to have none; others never stick to any that they do form. This was not the case with John. He followed up with great tenacity whatever he set about as long as it answered his general purpose; hence he rarely failed in some degree to effect the things he undertook. This was so much the case that he habitually expected to succeed in his undertakings.”[[4]] In this case he expected to get an education and he came to his task equipped with that rare mixture of homely thrift and idealism which characterized his whole life. His father could do little to help him, for the war was followed by the “hard times” which are the necessary fruit of fighting. As the father wrote: “Money became scarce, property fell and that which I thought well bought would not bring its cost. I had made three or four large purchases, in which I was a heavy loser.”
It was therefore as a poor boy ready to work his way that John started out at Plainfield. The son of the principal tells how “he brought with him a piece of sole leather about a foot square, which he had himself tanned for seven years, to resole his boots. He had also a piece of sheepskin which he had tanned, and of which he cut some strips about an eighth of an inch wide, for other students to pull upon. Father took one string, and winding it around his finger said with a triumphant turn of the eye and mouth, ‘I shall snap it.’ The very marked, yet kind immovableness of the young man’s face on seeing father’s defeat, father’s own look, and the position of the people and the things in the old kitchen somehow gave me a fixed recollection of this little incident.”[[5]]
But all his thrift and planning here were doomed to disappointment. He was, one may well believe, no brilliant student, and his only chance of success lay in long and steady application. This he was prepared to make when inflammation of the eyes set in, of so grave a type that all hopes of long study must be given up. Several times before he had attempted regular study, but for the most part these excursions to New England schools had been but tentative flashes on a background of hard work in his father’s Hudson tannery: “From fifteen to twenty years of age he spent most of his time working at the tanner’s and currier’s trade;” and yet, naturally, ever looking here and there in the world to find his place. And that place, he came gradually to decide in his quiet firm way, was to be an important one. He felt he could do things; he grew used to guiding and commanding men. He kept his own lonely home and was both foreman and cook in the tannery. His “close attention to business and success in its management, together with the way he got along with a company of men and boys, made him quite a favorite with the serious and more intelligent portion of older persons. This was so much the case and secured for him so many little notices from those he esteemed, that his vanity was very much fed by it, and he came forward to manhood quite full of self-conceit and self-confidence, notwithstanding his extreme bashfulness. The habit so early formed of being obeyed rendered him in after life too much disposed to speak in an imperious or dictating way.”[[6]] Thus he spoke of himself, but others saw only that peculiar consciousness of strength and quiet self-confidence, which characterized him later on.
Just how far his failure to get a college training was a disappointment to John Brown one is not able to say with certainty. It looks, however, as if his attempts at higher training were rather the obedient following of the conventional path, by a spirit which would never have found in those fields congenial pasture. One suspects that the final decision that college was impossible came to this strong free spirit with a certain sense of relief—a relief marred only by the perplexity of knowing what ought to be the path for his feet, if the traditional way to accomplishment and distinction was closed.
That he meant to be not simply a tanner was disclosed in all his doing and thinking. He undertook to study by himself, mastering common arithmetic and becoming in time an expert surveyor. He “early in life began to discover a great liking to fine cattle, horses, sheep, and swine.” Meantime, however, the practical economic sense of his day and occupation pointed first of all to marriage, as his father, who had had three wives and sixteen or more children, was at pains to impress upon him. Nor was John Brown himself disinclined. He was as he quaintly says, “naturally fond of females, and withal extremely diffident.” One can easily imagine the deep disappointment of this grave young man in his first unfortunate love affair, when he felt With many another unloved heart, this old world through, “a steady, strong desire to die.”
But youth is stronger even than first love, and the widow who came to keep house for him had a grown daughter, a homely, good-hearted and simple-minded country lass; the natural result was that John Brown was married at the age of twenty to Dianthe Lusk, whom he describes as “a remarkably plain, but neat, industrious and economical girl, of excellent character, earnest piety and practical common sense.”[[7]]
Then ensued a period of life which puzzles the casual onlooker with its seemingly aimless changing character, its wandering restlessness, its planless wavering. He was now a land surveyor, now a tanner and now a lumber dealer; a postmaster, a wool-grower, a stock-raiser, a shepherd, and a farmer. He lived at Hudson, at Franklin and at Richfield in Ohio; in Pennsylvania, New York, and Massachusetts. And yet in all this wavering and wandering, there were certain great currents of growth, purpose and action. First of all he became the father of a family: in the eleven years from 1821 to 1832, seven children were born—six sons and one girl. The patriarchal ideal of family life handed down by his fathers, strengthened by his own saturation in Hebrew poetry, and by his own bent, grew up in his home.
His eldest son and daughter tell many little incidents illustrating his family government: “Our house, on a lane which connects two main roads, was built under father’s direction in 1824, and still stands much as he built it with the garden and orchard around it which he laid out. In the rear of the house was then a wood, now gone, on a knoll leading down to the brook which supplied the tan-pits.”[[8]]