“Cry aloud, spare not, lift up thy voice like a trumpet, and shew my people their transgression, and the house of Jacob their sins.”
Just three hundred years before John Brown pledged his family to warfare against slavery, a black man stood on the plains of the Southwest looking toward Kansas. It was the Negro Steven, once slave of Dorantes, now leader and interpreter of the Fray Marcos explorers, and the first man of the Old World to look upon the great Southwest, if not upon Kansas itself. Whiter men have since ignored and ridiculed his work, sensualists have charged him with sensuality, lords of greed have called him greedy, and yet withal the plain truth remains: he led the expedition that foreran Coronado, reported back the truth of what he saw and then returned to lay down his life among the savages.[[84]]
The land he looked upon in those young years of the sixteenth century was big with the tragic fate of his people. Planted far to the eastward a century later, their dark faces traveled fast westward until slavery was secure in the valley of the Mississippi and in the lower Southwest. Then the slave barons looked behind them, and saw to their own dismay that there could be no backward step. The slavery of the new Cotton Kingdom in the nineteenth century must either die or conquer a nation—it could not hesitate or pause. It was an industrial system built on ignorance, force and the cotton plant. The slaves must be curbed with an iron hand. A moment of relaxation and lo! they would be rising either in revenge or ambition. And slavery had made revenge and ambition one. Such a system could not compete with intelligence, nor with individual freedom, nor with miscellaneous and care-demanding crops. It could not divide territory with these things;—to do so meant economic death and the sudden, perhaps revolutionary upheaval of a whole social system. This the South saw as it looked backward in the years from 1820 to 1840. Then its bolder vision pressed the gloom ahead, and dreamed a dazzling dream of empire. It saw the slave system triumphant in the great Southwest—in Mexico, in Central America and the islands of the sea. Its softer souls, timid with a fear prophetic of failure, still held halfheartedly back, but bolder leaders like Davis, Toombs and Floyd went relentlessly, ruthlessly on. Three steps they and their forerunners took in that great western wilderness, and other steps were planned. Three steps—that cost uncounted treasure in gold and blood: the first in 1820, when they set foot beyond the Mississippi into Missouri; the second and bolder when they set their seal on the spoils of raped Mexico and made it possible slave soil; and the third and boldest, when on the soil of Kansas they fought to enslave all territory of the Union.
That these steps would cost much the leaders knew, but they did not rightly reckon how much. They risked the upheaval of parties, the enmity of sections and the angry agitation of visionaries. If worse came to worst, they held the trump-card of disrupting the nation and founding a mighty slave aristocracy to stretch from the Ohio to Venezuela and from Cuba to Texas. One thing alone they did not count upon and that was armed force.
The three steps did raise tremendous opposition. The enslaving of Missouri gave birth to the early Abolitionists—the conscience of the nation awakened to find slavery not dead or dying but growing and aggressive; and in these days John Brown, typifying one phase of that terrible conscience, swore blood-feud with this “sum of all villanies.” Thus the first step cost.
The second step went some ways awry since California was lost to slavery, but a new law to catch runaways brought compensation and brought too redoubled cost, for it raised in opposition to the whole slave system not only Abolitionists, but Free Soilers—those who hated not slavery but slaves. This was a costlier move, for the sneers that checked philanthropy were powerless against democracy, and when the echoes of this step reached the ears of John Brown, he laid aside all and became the man of one idea, and that idea the extinction of slavery in the United States.
But it was the third step that was costliest—the step that sought to impose slavery by law and blood on free labor lands despite the lands’ wish. Of all the steps it was the wildest and most foolish, for it arrayed against slavery not only philanthropy and democracy, but all the world-old forces of plain justice. It compelled those who loved the right to meet law and force by force and lawlessness, and one man that led that lawless fight on the plains of Kansas and struck its bloodiest blow, was John Brown.
John Brown’s decision to go to Kansas was sudden. Unexpectedly the centre of the slavery battle had swung westward. A shrewd bidder for the presidency offered the South the unawaited bribe of Kansas territory for their votes and they eagerly sprang at the offer. Stephen Douglas drove the bill through Congress, and Kansas stood ready for its slave population. But not only for slaves—also for freemen as Eli Thayer quickly saw, and the representations of him and his associates aroused the sons of John Brown.
John Brown himself looked on with interest, but he had other plans. He wrote to his son John: “If you or any of my family are disposed to go to Kansas or Nebraska with a view to help defeat Satan and his legions in that direction, I have not a word to say; but I feel committed to operate in another part of the field. If I were not so committed, I would be on my way this fall.”[[85]]
John Brown’s plans were in the Alleghanies. At North Elba lay his northern stronghold, and at Harper’s Ferry lay the gates to the Great Black Way. Here he was convinced was the keystone of the slavery arch and here he must strike. So in former years Gabriel and Turner believed; so in after years others believed; but it was not till Grant floated down this path in a sea of blood that slavery finally fell.