“My husband always believed,” said his wife in after years, “that he was to be an instrument in the hands of Providence, and I believed it too.... Many a night he had lain awake and prayed concerning it.”[[66]]
It began to dawn upon him that he had sinned in the selfish pursuit of petty ends: that he must be about his Father’s business of giving the death-blow to that “sum of all villanies—slavery.” He had erred in making his great work a side object—a secondary thing; it must be his first and only duty, and let God attend to the nurture of his family. As his conception of his own relation to slavery thus broadened and deepened, so too did his plan of attacking the system become clearer and more definite and he spent hours discussing the matter. In Springfield, “he used to talk much on the subject, and had the reputation of being quite ultra. His bookkeeper tells me that he and his eldest son used to discuss slavery by the hour in his counting-room, and he used to say that it was right for slaves to kill their masters and escape, and thought slaveholders were guilty of a very great wickedness.”[[67]]
He studied the census returns and the distribution of the Negroes and made maps of fugitive slave routes with roads, plantations, and supplies. He learned of Isaac, Denmark Vesey, Nat Turner and the Cumberland region insurrections in South Carolina, Virginia, and Tennessee; he knew of the organized resistance to slave-catchers in Pennsylvania, and the history of Hayti and Jamaica.
It needed, as he soon saw, something more radical than schools and moral suasion; so deep-seated and radical a disease demanded “Action! Action!” He welcomed his new and long-loved calling of shepherd because of the leisure it gave him to study out his great moral problem. He sought and gained the acquaintance of Negro leaders like Garnet, Loguen, Gloucester and McCune Smith. As his sheep business broadened, he traveled about and probably at this time first saw Harper’s Ferry—the mighty pass where Potomac and Shenandoah, hurling aside the mountain masses, rush to their singular wedding.
Thus the distraction of the Springfield wool business came to John Brown almost in the guise of a temptation to be shunned. For a moment about 1845 he looked again on the lure of wealth and dreamed how useful it would be to what was now his great life object. But only for a moment, for when he realized the price he must pay—the time, the chicanery, the petty detail—he turned from it in disgust. It was at this time that he studied the history of insurrection and became familiar with the Abolition movement; as early as 1846 his Harper’s Ferry project began to form itself more or less clearly in his mind.
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 all his life, but now he met a group. It was not one of the principal Negro groups of the day—they were in Philadelphia and New York, Cincinnati and Boston, and in Canada, working largely alone with only imperfect intercommunication, but working manfully and effectively for emancipation and full freedom. The Springfield group was a smaller body without conspicuous leadership, and on that account more nearly approximated the great mass of their enslaved race. He sought them in home and church and out on the street, and he hired them in his business. He came to them on a plane of perfect equality—they sat at his table and he at theirs. He neither descended upon them from above nor wallowed with their lowest, and the result was that as Redpath says, “Captain Brown had a higher notion of the capacity of the Negro race than most white men. I have often heard him dwell on this subject, and mention instances of their fitness to take care of themselves, saying, in his quaint way, that ‘they behaved so much like “folks” that he almost thought they were so.’ He thought that perhaps a forcible separation of the connection between master and slave was necessary to educate the blacks for self-government; but this he threw out as a suggestion merely.”[[68]]
Nor did this appreciation of the finer qualities and capacity of the Negroes blind him to their imperfections. He found them “intensely human,” but with their human frailties weakened by slavery and caste; and with perfect faith in their ability to rise above their faults, he criticized and inspired them. In his quaint essay on “Sambo’s Mistakes,” putting himself in the black man’s place, he enumerates his errors: His failure to improve his time in good reading; his waste of money in indulgent luxuries and societies and consequent lack of capital; his servile occupations; his talkativeness and inaptitude for organization; his sectarian bias. In part of his arraignment, which will bear thoughtful reading to-day by black men as well as white, he makes his Sambo say:
“Another trifling error of my life has been, that I have always expected to secure the favor of the whites by tamely submitting to every species of indignity, contempt, and wrong, instead of nobly resisting their brutal aggressions from principle, and taking my place as a man, and assuming the responsibilities of a man, a citizen, a husband, a father, a brother, a neighbor, a friend,—as God requires of every one (if his neighbor will allow him to do it); but I find that I get, for all my submission, about the same reward that the Southern slaveocrats render to the dough-faced statesmen of the North, for being bribed and browbeat and fooled and cheated, as Whigs and Democrats love to be, and think themselves highly honored if they may be allowed to lick up the spittle of a Southerner. I say to get the reward. But I am uncommon quick-sighted; I can see in a minute where I missed it.”[[69]]
No one knew better than John Brown how slavery had contributed to these faults: for how many slaves could read anything, or when had they been taught the use of money or the A. B. C. of organization? Not in condemnation but in faith was this excellent paper written and delicately worded as from one who has learned his own faults and will not repeat those of others.
Not only did John Brown thus criticize, but he led these black folk. As early as 1846 he revealed something of his final plans to Thomas Thomas, his black porter and friend, with whom he once was photographed in mutual friendly embrace, holding the sign “S. P. W.”—“Subterranean Pass Way” of slaves to freedom.