John Brown
© Boston Athenaeum
John Brown was born in 1800 to deeply religious Owen and Ruth Brown. As a teenager, Brown
witnessed his friend, an enslaved boy, be beaten severely. This event and his father’s fierce
opposition to slavery influenced his passion for ending slavery in America. During the 1840s,
Brown began to appeal more directly to black antislavery activists and share his ideas about
the failures of “moral suasion.” Through his activities, he became acquainted with Frederick
Douglass, George De Baptiste, William Lambert, William Webb and William C. Monroe. Brown
gained notoriety in 1855 and 1856 for his role in the “Bleeding Kansas” border wars. He is
most remembered for his raid on Harper’s Ferry on October 16, 1859.
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Perhaps no legendary American figure captures the complex relationship between race,
religion, and antislavery activism in antebellum U.S. history more than John Brown.
Brown was born in 1800 to parents Owen, a Congregationalist, and Ruth, a woman who
came from a “distinguished family of Congregationalists and Presbyterians” (Oates 6).
Informed by the millennial currents of the Second Great Awakening as well the Calvinist
belief that sinners could not be saved unless God rendered it so, Owen and Ruth taught
their children the importance of studying salvation through personal piety and theological
study. One theologian that Owen was particularly fond of was Jonathan Edwards, the
itinerant preacher from Connecticut who raised the hackles of slave owners in the 1730s
and 1740s when he reminded his congregation of the coming end of “miserable slavery”
both “spiritual” and “civil” (DeCaro 29-30, Edwards 136). After receiving an abolitionist
pamphlet in 1790 that cited Edwards, Owen felt compelled to denounce slavery as a “great
sin” and resolved to remain “anti-slavery” for the rest of his life (DeCaro 23). Brown was
probably influenced by his father’s sentiments about slavery, although he later wrote that
his decision to commit his life to abolition began after he witnessed his employer severely
beat a slave in front of him (Oates 12). He had befriended an enslaved boy while working as
a cattle driver as a teenager; the disturbing image of his friend being struck with a shovel
would remain with him until his execution in 1859 (Villard 4). Whether John Brown
understood the event as a sign from God at the time is unclear. Yet, as an adult, Brown
maintained that his infamous attack on the Harpers Ferry armory was shepherded by the
Lord.
Although his family moved to Hudson in the Connecticut Western Reserve (now Ohio) in
1805, John Brown did not join the Congregational Church of Hudson until 1816. Soon after,
Brown moved to Plainfield, Massachusetts, where he studied to be a minister under the
guidance of Moses Hallock until he ran out of funds (Oates 12-13). This was the first of
many professional failures for Brown; later, he would struggle as both a tanner and as a
wool merchant. Family trauma, too, seemed to follow Brown as he moved between Ohio
and the northeast. His son Frederick I died in 1831, shortly after he had moved his family to
New Richmond, Pennsylvania, and his wife Dianthe died in 1832. Soon after marrying his
second wife, Mary Ann Day, Brown visited his father in Ohio where he came across a copy
of William Lloyd Garrison’s Liberator and the message of immediate abolition (Oates 30).
After returning to New Richmond, Brown wrote to his brother informing him that he
wanted to adopt or buy an enslaved boy and “give him a good education, learn him what we
can about the history of the world, about business…and above all, try to teach him the fear
of God” (reprinted in Oates 32). Brown’s plan suggested the degree to which he was
beginning to see himself as prophet of sorts for black self-determination: by starting a
school for black people in free states, “the young blacks of the country could once become
enlightened” and “the people of the slaveholding States would find themselves
constitutionally driven to set about the work of emancipation immediately” (reprinted in
Oates 32). In short, Brown’s belief that he
knew how to lead black people to salvation informed his perspective on antislavery
agitation and abolition well before he planned the attack on Harpers Ferry.
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Brown gained notoriety in 1855 and 1856 for his role in the “Bleeding Kansas” border
wars. President Franklin Pierce signed the Kansas-Nebraska Act into law on May 30, 1854.
The law established the new states of Kansas and Nebraska and permitted settlers, through
popular sovereignty, to decide whether or not slavery would be legal in the new states. In
Ohio and the Northeast, emigrant aid societies worked to recruit settlers in an effort to
settle as many anti-slavery colonists as possible in Kansas in hopes to curb the expansion of
slavery westward. Settlers from Missouri—where slavery was legal—also flocked to the
new state, where land was relatively cheap. Many pro-slavery Missourians believed that if
Kansas became a “free state,” enslaved men and women would cross the border and find
sanctuary in the new state (Oates 82-84). Against the backdrop of these rising sectional
tensions, five of Brown’s sons moved to Kansas in the fall of 1854 to drive cattle. John
Brown followed them and was residing in Kansas by the spring of 1855. Contemporary
Charles Robinson asserted that Brown was less concerned with obtaining land than he was
with making sure Kansas became a free state (Quarles 31, Oates 84-86).
Within several months of arriving in Kansas, Brown began to organize and arm antislavery
settlers in order to defend their settlements from pro-slavery colonists. In early December
of 1855, Brown, his sons, and a small band of armed settlers who called themselves the
“Liberty Guard” marched upon a pro-slavery settlement on the Wakarusa River near
Lawrence, Kansas, driving the Missourians away without violence (Quarles 33). The peace
was short-lived. In May, Brown and his paramilitary force led a violent raid on a proslavery settlement at Pottawatomie Creek. He ordered his followers to capture five men
while they slept in their cabins and to assassinate them in front of their families. Brown
believed that the aggression of proslavery in Kansas settlers justified a violent response
that was sanctioned by God’s will. In a letter sent to his family six weeks before the assault,
Brown noted that foothold of the Missourians “shall slide in due time,” a direct reference to
the famous millennial Jonathan Edwards sermon “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God”
(Quarles 34). On August 30, 1856, Brown got the news that his son Frederick II had been
killed by a pro-slavery attack at Osawatomie. In response, Brown led a group of
approximately thirty-five men who attacked the pro-slavery forces there, earning him the
nickname “Old Osawatomie Brown” (Quarles 35).
Brown had already been involved in antislavery activism well before he decided to engage
in armed conflict in Kansas. During the 1840s, Brown began to appeal more directly to
black antislavery activists and share his ideas about the failures of “moral suasion.” In
1847, after moving his family to Springfield, Massachusetts, Brown met with Frederick
Douglass, who would occasionally print Brown’s treatises in his papers (Quarles 32).
Douglass would later write that Brown revealed his plans to start a guerilla war in the
mountains of Virginia during a meeting at Brown’s home in Springfield, although his plan
only seemed vague at the time (Du Bois 106). Two years later, Brown moved his family to
North Elba, a community in upstate New York that was started in part as a haven for
African Americans by abolitionist Gerrit Smith. After the passage of the Fugitive Slave Act of
1850 and the Kansas-Nebraska Act, Brown used the crisis in Kansas to raise funds and
arms for his secret Virginia plan while telling potential donors that it was for the Kansas
fight. Although he was unsure of Brown’s approach to immediate abolition, Douglass
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supported Brown’s outreach to leading black abolitionists and reformers, including William
Still and Stephen Smith in Philadelphia.
Late in 1857, Brown stayed with Douglass in Rochester and sent letters to John Jones and
Henry O. Wagoner in Chicago, Henry Highland Garnet in New York, and Martin Delany
(who had recently left Rochester for Chatham, Ontario). Brown advised them to address
letters to a pseudonym—“Nelson Hawkins”—and have them mailed in care of Douglass and
other antislavery supporters (Quarles 39, DuBois 248). Brown also crafted the “Provisional
Constitution and Ordinances for the People of the United States” during his stay with
Douglass, which was eventually revealed at the Chatham Convention in May 1858. Written
partly in response to the Dred Scott decision, the “Provisional Constitution” outlined fortyeight articles that established an alternative government for “the oppressed people who, by
a recent decision of the Supreme Court, are declared to have no rights which the white man
is bound to respect.”
After his makeshift Missouri train rescue and his meeting with Frederick Douglass, George
De Baptiste, William Lambert, William Webb, and William C. Monroe in Detroit, Brown
seemed convinced that the time to strike at the heart of the slave states was at hand. After
traveling east, Brown and three of his sons arrived at Harpers Ferry on July 3, 1859,
surveyed the scene, and then rented a ramshackle farmhouse on the Maryland side of the
Potomac River. Soon after, thirteen additional young white men and five men of color came
to the house and began training for the attack (Oates 288). Despite efforts to keep the plot a
secret, rumors circulated that Brown was plotting the insurrection; David J. Gue, a Quaker
living in Iowa, sent an anonymous letter to the Secretary of War John B. Floyd warning of a
potential attack. John Copeland and Lewis Leary, two of the five men of color who
participated in the raid, arrived at the not-so-secret hideout on October 15 after hearing
about the plot in Oberlin, Ohio. Brown decided that these were signs that the revolt should
begin and informed his men of the plans to seize the armory that day (Oates 287). The
attack began late on the night of October 16, 1859.
The arsenal at Harpers Ferry was one of two federal armories in the nation; the other was
in Springfield, Massachusetts, near Brown’s former home. On October 17, less than fortyeight hours after the assault began, President Buchanan sent Robert E. Lee, then a colonel
in the U.S. Calvary, to suppress the rebellion. Ten of Brown’s men, including two of his sons,
were dead. Four men, including the free man Osborne Perry Anderson, escaped. Brown and
six other men were captured—all of them were sentenced to die by the noose. Brown died
on December 2, 1859. He wrote hundreds of letters during his trial, leaving behind some of
the best insight into his enigmatic life. Just before he met his fate at the gallows, Brown
penned his last words and handed them to the jail guard: “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
now think vainly flattered myself that without very much bloodshed it might be done”
(reprinted in Quarles 124).
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Works Cited & Further Reading
DeCaro, Louis A. "Fire from the Midst of You": A Religious Life of John Brown. New
New York University Press, 2002.
York:
Du Bois, W.E.B. John Brown. Philadelphia: G. W. Jacobs & Company, 1909.
Hinton, Richard J. John Brown and His Men: With Some Account of the Roads They Traveled
to Reach Harper's Ferry. Rev. ed. New York: Funk & Wagnalls, 1894.
Oates, Stephen B. Our Fiery Trial : Abraham Lincoln, John Brown, and the Civil War Era.
Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1979.
"Provisional Constitution and Ordinances for the People of the United States Written by
John Brown, 1858," U.S. National Archives and Records Administration,
http://research.archives.gov/description/3819337.
Quarles, Benjamin. Allies for Freedom & Blacks on John Brown. New York: Da Capo
2001.
Press,
Villard, Oswald Garrison. John Brown, 1800-1859: A Biography Fifty Years After.
Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1910.
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