IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF OUR “COUSINS” …
ABOLITIONIST “FREEDOM FIGHTER” OR “TERRORIST”?
John Brown (1800 – 1859)
— Bradley Rymph
John Brown was born May 9, 1800, in
Torrington, Connecticut. He was a great-greatgreat-great-great-grandson of immigrant
ancestors Matthew and Priscilla (Grey) Grant
and a great-great-great-great-grandson of
immigrant ancestor Michael Humphreys and
his wife Priscilla (Grant) Humphreys.
Visits to John Brown Memorial Sites:
Harper’s Ferry, West Virginia:
July 28, 1995 (with José Baquiran, Albert and Edna
Mae Rymph)
August 13, 2011
Charles Town, West Virginia:
August 2, 2014
Text © 2010‒2014 by Bradley B. Rymph
Brown grew up to become a radical
abolitionist who practiced armed
insurrection in the campaign to abolish
slavery in the United States. He led the
Pottawatomie Massacre in 1856 in Bleeding
Kansas and made his name in the
unsuccessful raid at Harpers Ferry in 1859.
In the mid-1850s, Brown rose to national
fame for his strident anti-slavery activism. In
1855, he learned from his adult sons living in
the Kansas territory that pro-slavery forces
there were militant and that anti-slavery
families, such as his sons’, were unprepared
to deal with any attacks. Brown left his home
in New York state and headed west to Kansas.
“IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF OUR ANCESTORS …” HOME PAGE: http://www.bradleyrymph.com
John Brown, daguerreotype,
c. 1856
Illustration, page 1:
“Tragic Prelude,”
mural of John Brown
by John Steuart Curry
in Kansas State
Capitol building
En route, he made several stops to collect
funds and weapons, including participating in
an anti-slavery convention that took place in
June 1855 in Albany, New York.
With the free settlers in Kansas, Brown was
optimistic that they could bring Kansas into
the union as a slavery-free state. However, as
spring arrived in 1856, the pro-slavery
activists began an initiative to ensure that
Kansas would enter the Union as a slave state.
Brown also learned that pro-slavery forces
had marked his own family for attack, as well
as the identities of pro-slavery neighbors who
were supporting these actions. Rather than
wait and become victims, on May 24, 1856,
Brown and his colleagues acted proactively
and seized five pro-slavery settlers from their
cabins on Pottawatomie Creek and then
hacked them to death. While Brown claimed
that he did not participate in the killings, he
also said that he approved of them.
In response, a group of pro-slavery
Missourians crossed into Kansas. They seized
two of Brown’s sons, destroyed the family
homestead, and participated in the Sack of
Lawrence. The pre-Civil War hostility known
as “Bloody Kansas” had begun.
HOW WE’RE RELATED: John Brown
◄◄◄◄◄
▼
▼
Samuel Humphrey
(5/17/1686 – 1759)
=
=
Samuel Humphrey
(5/15/1656 – 6/15/1736)
Mary Buell Mills
(12/8/1662 – 1730)
▼
Mary Tuller
(11/27/1692 – c. 1714)
▼
Abel Humphrey
(3/13/1713-14 – ?)
=
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Jonathan Humphrey
(12/2/1608 – 6/14/1749)
=
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Mercy (Mary) Ruggles
(11/6/1697 – 1761)
=
=
Sarah Garrett
(1/22/1723 – 11/8/1821)
▼
=
=
Jemima Warner
(? – ?)
Oliver Humphrey
(9/13/1720 – 10/30/1792)
▼
Ozias Humphrey
(1753 – 12/22/1826)
▼
=
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Mary Parsons
(c. 1756 – 2/12/1809)
=
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Clarissa Barber
(1780 – 3/18/1805)
Owen Brown
(2/16/1771 – 5/8/1856)
?▼?
▼
Gideon Mills
(10/27/1749 – 3/16/1812)
=
=
?▼?
Ozias Humphrey
(c. 1779 – 11/18/1805)
▼
Ira Walter
(11/18/1798 – 3/10/1873)
= Mary (“Polly”) Humphrey
(c. 1803 – 8/31/1851)
=
Isaac E. Heath
(9/4/1832 – 5/18/1912)
= Caroline Amelia Walter
= (10/20/1830 – 12/31/1899)
▼
▼
Horace Lorenzo (“Wren”) Heath
(4/14/1858 – 4/26/1944)
=
Harriet Myers
= (4/22/1858 – 7/20/1930)
▼
Cornelius (“Neal H.”) Heath
(4/8/1891 – 1/28/1979)
=
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Ethel Catherine Bradley
(7/14/1891 – 7/22/1973)
▼
Albert James Rymph
(living)
=
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Edna Mae Heath
(living)
=
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José Verzosa Baquiran III
(living)
▼
Bradley Budd Rymph
(living)
Ruth Humphrey
(7/28/1751 – 11/1/1822)
John Brown
(5/9/1800 – 12/2/1859)
Ruth Mills
=
= (1/26/1772 – 12/13/1808)
=
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Dianthe Lusk
(1/12/1801 – 8/10/1832)
John Brown was my presumed fourth cousin,
four times removed, through my mother, Edna
Mae Heath, based on family genealogical
charts passed on to my mother by her sister, the
late Wilma Heath. Unfortunately, one of the
links in the genealogical chain — registering
Mary (“Polly”) Humphrey as the daughter of
Ozias and Mary (Parsons) Humphrey — is not
consistent with published Humphrey family
genealogical records, which caused me to
question whether this commonly offered
ancestral chain was correct. My own theory
(which I cannot prove) is that Mary Humphrey
was instead the daughter of Ozias and Mary
(Parsons) Humphrey’s son, Ozias, Jr., and his
wife, Clarissa (Barber) Humphrey. This alternate
theory would make John Brown my fourth
cousin, five times removed. (For more about the
reasoning behind my theory, see the box
“A Genealogy Family Mystery Resolved?” in
the separate profile “First Settler of Burke,
Vermont: Lemuel Walter.”)
In August 1856, a company of more than 300
Missourians entered Kansas intent on
destroying the Free State settlements in the
town of Osawatomie. Although they were
outnumbered by more than 7 to 1, Brown
and his forces killed at least 20 of the
Missourians and wounded at least 40 more.
Brown’s men were defeated, and Missourians
did plunder and burn Osawatomie, but
Brown’s military shrewdness made him a
hero to many Northern abolitionists.
By November 1856, Brown had returned to
the East. He spent the next two years
traveling New England raising funds for his
cause.
In June 1859, Brown, his sons, and other men
in their party began the move south toward
Harpers Ferry, which was then part of the
state of Virginia. They arrived in Harpers
Ferry on July 3, 1859. Brown rented a
farmhouse in nearby Maryland to await the
arrival of his recruits, who never materialized
in the numbers he had expected. Brown’s
plan for attacking Harpers Ferry had called for
4,500 men. In the end, he had only 21 men
— 16 white and 5 black, (three of whom
were free blacks, one freed slave, and one
fugitive slave). Twelve of them had been with
Brown in Kansas raids.
As described in Wikipedia’s biographical
profile of Brown:
On October 16, 1859, Brown (leaving
three men behind as a rear guard) led
18 men in an attack on the Harpers
Ferry Armory. He had received 200
Beecher's Bibles — breechloading .52
caliber Sharps rifles — and pikes from
northern abolitionist societies in
preparation for the raid [see profile of
Henry Ward Beecher]. The armory was
a large complex of buildings that
contained 100,000 muskets and rifles,
which Brown planned to seize and use
to arm local slaves. They would then
head south, drawing off more and
more slaves from plantations, and
fighting only in self-defense. As
Frederick Douglass and Brown's family
testified, his strategy was essentially to
deplete Virginia of its slaves, causing
the institution to collapse in one
county after another, until the
movement spread into the South,
essentially wreaking havoc on the
economic viability of the pro-slavery
states. Thus, while violence was
essential to self-defense and
advancement of the movement,
Brown's hope was to limit and
minimize bloodshed, not ignite a slave
insurrection as many have charged.
From the Southern point of view, of
course, any effort to arm the enslaved
was perceived as a definitive threat.
Initially, the raid went well, and they
met no resistance entering the town.
They cut the telegraph wires and easily
captured the armory, which was being
defended by a single watchman. They
next rounded up hostages from nearby
farms, including Colonel Lewis
Washington, great-grandnephew of
George Washington. They also spread
the news to the local slaves that their
liberation was at hand. Things started
to go wrong when an eastbound
Baltimore & Ohio train approached the
town. The train's baggage master tried
to warn the passengers. Brown's men
yelled for him to halt and then opened
John Brown’s Fort,
Harpers Ferry,
West Virginia
fire. The baggage master, Hayward
Shepherd, became the first casualty of
John Brown's war against slavery.
Ironically, Shepherd was a free black
man. Two of the hostages' slaves also
died in the raid. For some reason, after
the shooting of Shepherd, Brown
allowed the train to continue on its
way….
News of the raid reached Baltimore
early that morning and then on to
Washington by late morning.
In the meantime, local farmers,
shopkeepers, and militia pinned down
the raiders in the armory by firing from
the heights behind the town. Some of
the local men were shot by Brown's
men. At noon, a company of militia
seized the bridge, blocking the only
escape route. Brown then moved his
prisoners and remaining raiders into
the engine house, a small brick
building at the entrance to the armory.
He had the doors and windows barred
and loopholes were cut through the
brick walls. The surrounding forces
barraged the engine house, and the
men inside fired back with occasional
fury. Brown sent his son Watson and
another supporter out under a white
flag, but the angry crowd shot them.
Intermittent shooting then broke out,
and Brown's son Oliver was wounded.
His son begged his father to kill him
and end his suffering, but Brown said
“If you must die, die like a man.” A few
minutes later he was dead. The
exchanges lasted throughout the day.
By the morning of October 18 the
engine house, later known as John
Brown's Fort, was surrounded by a
company of U.S. Marines under the
command of Colonel Robert E. Lee of
the United States Army. A young Army
lieutenant, J.E.B. Stuart, approached
under a white flag and told the raiders
that their lives would be spared if they
surrendered. Brown refused, saying,
“No, I prefer to die here.” Stuart then
Top left: Wagon in which John Brown
was carried to Charles Town's gallows
to be hung. While being transported
in the wagon, he sat on his coffin.
(Exhibit in collection of Jefferson
County Museum, Charles Town,
West Virginia)
Center left: John Brown-related
artifacts on display at Jefferson
County Museum, Charles Town,
including trunk owned by Brown,
two pikes made by Brown for use by
slaves in their uprising, desk in Charles
Town jail when Brown was a prisoner
there (and on which he is believed to
have written his final letters), door
from jail at time Brown was a prisoner
there, and pine table in Jefferson
County Court House at time of
Brown’s trial.
Bottom left: Jefferson County Court
House, Charles Town, West Virginia,
in which John Brown was tried and
convicted for treason, conspiracy,
and murder.
Bottom right: Historical
marker, commemorating
the site where John Brown
was hung after his
conviction for treason,
conspiracy, and murder.
gave a signal. The Marines used sledge
hammers and a make-shift batteringram to break down the engine room
door. Lieutenant Israel Greene
cornered Brown and struck him several
times, wounding his head. In three
minutes Brown and the survivors were
captives. Altogether Brown's men
killed four people, and wounded nine.
Ten of Brown's men were killed
(including his sons Watson and Oliver).
Five of Brown's men escaped (including
his son Owen), and seven were
captured along with Brown.
Brown and the others captured were held in
the office of the armory. Brown and his men
were put on trial in Charles Town, seven miles
west of Harpers Ferry. The trial began
October 27. Brown was charged with
murdering four whites and a black, with
conspiring with slaves to rebel, and with
treason against Virginia.
After a trial that lasted one week, the jury
deliberated for 45 minutes. On November 2,
the Charles Town jury found Brown guilty on
all three counts. Brown was sentenced to be
hanged in public on December 2.
Wikipedia’s biographical profile describes the
events of Brown’s final day:
On the morning of December 2, Brown
read his Bible and wrote a final letter
to his wife, which included his will. At
11:00 he was escorted from the county
jail through a crowd of 2,000 soldiers a
few blocks away to a small field where
the gallows were. Among the soldiers
in the crowd were future Confederate
general Stonewall Jackson and John
Wilkes Booth, who borrowed a militia
uniform to gain admission to the
execution. The poet Walt Whitman, in
“Year of Meteors,” claims to have
viewed the execution.
Brown was accompanied by the sheriff
and his assistants, but no minister
since he had consistently rejected the
ministrations of pro-slavery clergy.
Since the region was in the grips of
virtual hysteria, most northerners,
including journalists, were run out of
town, and it is unlikely any anti-slavery
clergyman would have been safe, even
if one were to have sought to visit
Brown. Likely drawing strength from
correspondence from northern clergy,
he elected to receive no religious
services in the jail or at the scaffold. He
was hanged at 11:15 a.m. and
pronounced dead at 11:50 a.m., and
his body was placed in a wooden coffin
with the noose still around his neck.
On the day of his death he wrote “I,
John Brown, am now quite certain that
the crimes of this guilty land will never
be purged away but with blood. I had,
as I now think, vainly flattered myself
that without very much bloodshed it
might be done.”
TO LEARN MORE
West Virginia Archives and History. “John
Brown and the Harpers Ferry
Road.” (http://www.wvculture.org/History/
jnobrown.html)
Wikipedia. “John Brown
(abolitionist).” (http://en.wikipedia.org/
wiki/John_Brown_(abolitionist))
2014-08-03