John Brown
1800-1859
Abolitionists, Preacher, Entrepreneur and founder of
The League of Gileadites
On October the 16th 1859 John Brown and approximately two dozen comrades seized the armory at Harpers Ferry in West Virginia, hoping to use its massive arsenal in the struggle to forcibly end slavery. He was captured and brought to trial at nearby Charles Town, Brown was found guilty of treason. One month before his execution, john brown addressed a courtroom in Charlestown, West Virginia, defending himself in his actions at Harper’s Ferry. Henry David Thoreau, although he did not favor violence, praised John Brown. When the verdict of death came in for him Ralph Waldo said: “ He will make gallows holy as the cross.”
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Frederick Douglass said, “I could live for the slave; John Brown could die for him.”
Ralph Waldo Emerson said after Brown was sentenced to hang that he “will make the gallows glorious like the Cross.”
John Brown was born May 9, 1800, in Torrington, Connecticut. He was the fourth of the eight children of Owen Brown (February 16, 1771 – May 8, 1856) and Ruth Mills (January 25, 1772 – December 9, 1808) and grandson of Capt. John Brown (1728–1776). In 1805, the family moved to Hudson, Ohio, where Owen Brown opened a tannery. Brown’s father became a supporter of the Oberlin Institute (original name of Oberlin College) in its early stage, although he was ultimately critical of the school’s “Perfectionist” leanings, especially renowned in the preaching and teaching of Charles Finney and Asa Mahan. Brown withdrew his membership from the Congregational church in the 1840s and never officially joined another church, but both he and his father Owen were fairly conventional evangelicals for the period with its focus on the pursuit of personal righteousness. Brown’s personal religion is fairly well documented in the papers of the Rev Clarence Gee, a Brown family expert, now held in the Hudson [Ohio] Library and Historical Society.
Brown’s father had as an apprentice Jesse R. Grant, father of future general and U.S. President Ulysses S. Grant. At the age of 16, John Brown left his family and went to Plainfield, Massachusetts, where he enrolled in a preparatory program. Shortly afterward, he transferred to the Morris Academy in Litchfield, Connecticut. He hoped to become a Congregationalist minister, but money ran out and he suffered from eye inflammations, which forced him to give up the academy and return to Ohio. In Hudson, he worked briefly at his father’s tannery before opening a successful tannery of his own outside of town with his adopted brother.
In 1820, Brown married Dianthe Lusk. Their first child, John Jr, was born 13 months later. In 1825, Brown and his family moved to New Richmond, Pennsylvania, where he bought 200 acres (81 hectares) of land. He cleared an eighth of it and built a cabin, a barn, and a tannery. The John Brown Tannery Site was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1978. Within a year, the tannery employed 15 men. Brown also made money raising cattle and surveying. He helped to establish a post office and a school. During this period, Brown operated an interstate business involving cattle and leather production along with a kinsman, Seth Thompson, from eastern Ohio.
In 1831, one of his sons died. Brown fell ill, and his businesses began to suffer, leaving him in terrible debt. In the summer of 1832, shortly after the death of a newborn son, his wife Dianthe died. On June 14, 1833, Brown married 16-year-old Mary Ann Day (April 15, 1817 – May 1, 1884), originally of Washington County, New York. They eventually had 13 children, in addition to the seven children from his previous marriage.
In 1836, Brown moved his family to Franklin Mills, Ohio (now known as Kent). There he borrowed money to buy land in the area, building and operating a tannery along the Cuyahoga River in partnership with Zenas Kent. He suffered great financial losses in the economic crisis of 1839, which struck the western states more severely than had the Panic of 1837.
In 1837, in response to the murder of Elijah P. Lovejoy, Brown publicly vowed: “Here, before God, in the presence of these witnesses, from this time, I consecrate my life to the destruction of slavery!” Brown was declared bankrupt by a federal court on September 28, 1842. In 1843, four of his children died of dysentery. Brown eventually moved into a home with his family across the street from the Perkins Stone Mansion located on Perkins Hill. The John Brown House (Akron, Ohio) still stands and is owned and operated by The Summit County Historical Society of Akron, Ohio.
in 1844, the city’s African-American abolitionists had founded the Sanford Street “Free Church” – now known as St. John’s Congregational Church – which went on to become one of the United States’ most prominent platforms for abolitionist speeches. From 1846 until he left Springfield in 1850, John Brown was a parishioner at the Free Church, where he witnessed abolitionist lectures by FREDERICK DOUGLASS and SOJOURNER TRUTH. Indeed, during Brown’s time in Springfield, he became deeply involved in transforming the city into a major center of abolitionism, and one of the safest and most significant stops on the UNDERGROUND RAILROAD. John Brown’s Bible is still on display at St. John’s Congregational Church in Springfield, which to this day remains one of the Northeast’s most prominent black churches.
In 1847, after speaking at the “Free Church,” the famed African-American abolitionist Frederick Douglass spent a night speaking with John Brown, after which he wrote, “From this night spent with John Brown in Springfield, Mass. 1847 while I continued to write and speak against slavery, I became, all the same, less hopeful for its peaceful abolition. My utterances became more and more tinged by the color of this man’s strong impressions.”
John Brown eventually had a large family – 20 children born, 12 who lived – and moved more than ten times trying to find work to support them. For a while he lived in Pennsylvania where he took part in the Underground Railroad, helping slaves to escape from the slave states of the South.
In 1850, the United States passed the notorious Fugitive Slave Act, a law that mandated that authorities in free states aid in the return of escaped slaves and imposed penalties on those who aided in their escape. In response to the Fugitive Slave Act, John Brown founded a militant group to prevent slaves’ capture – The League of Gileadites – in Springfield. In the Bible, Mount Gilead was the place where only the bravest of Israelites would gather together to face an invading enemy. Brown founded the League of Gileadites with these words, “Nothing so charms the American people as personal bravery. [Blacks] would have ten times the number [of white friends than] they now have were they but half as much in earnest to secure their dearest rights as they are to ape the follies and extravagances of their white neighbors and to indulge in the idle show, in ease, and in luxury.” On leaving Springfield in 1850, Brown instructed the League of Gileadites to act “quickly, quietly, and efficiently” to protect slaves that escaped to Springfield
John Brown in 1859 fed up with the sufferage of the blacks took Harpers Ferry where the government kept 150,000 guns. He hoped to gain arms for a slave uprising in western Virginia. The government sent the Marines, put him on trial and hanged him. He became a hero throughout the North.
He studied military history, particularly guerrilla warfare and the slave uprising of Toussaint L’Ouverture. Then he set about to lead a slave uprising of his own.
His idea was to create a new state in the mountains of Virginia where black slaves could flee and defend their freedom. The more blacks who joined him, the weaker the South would become.
In those mountains was Harpers Ferry. There the government kept 100,000 guns, more than enough for an army. Brown led a band of 22 armed men, both blacks and whites and took it – but then lost it two days later to the Marines under Robert E. Lee. Brown was badly wounded in the fighting but not killed.
Many said he was a madman, but to blacks and to millions of whites in the North he was a hero. Thoreau said he was as great as any hero of the American Revolution.
Victor Hugo warned:
Let America know and ponder on this: there is something more frightening than Cain killing Abel, and that is Washington killing Spartacus.
Brown was tried and a month later was hanged with four of his followers.
Photo Courtesy Massachusetts historical society
John Brown’s Last Speech
I have, may it please the Court, a few words to say.
In the first place, I deny everything but what I have all along admitted, the design on my part to free the slaves. I intended certainly to have made a clean thing of that matter, as I did last winter when I went into Missouri and there took slaves without the snapping of a gun on either side, moved them through the country, and finally left them in Canada. I designed to have done the same thing again, on a larger scale. That was all I intended. I never did intend murder, treason, or the destruction of property, or to excite or incite slaves to rebellion, or to make insurrection.
I have another objection, and that is, it is unjust that I should suffer such a penalty. Had I interfered in the manner which I admit, and which I admit has been fairly proved (for I admire the truthfulness and candor of the greater portion of the witnesses who have testified in this case), had I so interfered in behalf of the rich, the powerful, the intelligent, the so-called great, or in behalf of any of their friends, either father, mother, brother, sister, wife, or children, or any of that class, and suffered and sacrificed what I have in this interference, it would have been all right, and every man in this court would have deemed it an act worthy of reward rather than punishment.
This court acknowledges, as I suppose, the validity of the law of God. I see a book kissed here which I suppose to be the Bible, or at least the New Testament. That teaches me that all things whatsoever I would that men should do to me, I should do even so to them. It teaches me, further, to “remember them that are in bonds, as bound with them.” I endeavored to act up to that instruction. I say I am yet too young to understand that God is any respecter of persons. I believe that to have interfered as I have done as I have always freely admitted I have done in behalf of His despised poor was not wrong, but right. Now, if it is deemed necessary that I should forfeit my life for the furtherance of the ends of justice, and mingle my blood further with the blood of my children and with the blood of millions in this slave country whose rights are disregarded by wicked, cruel, and unjust enactments, I submit; so let it be done!
Let me say one word further.
I feel entirely satisfied with the treatment I received on my trial. Considering all the circumstances. it has been more generous than I expected. But I feel no consciousness of guilt. I have stated from the first what was my intention and what was not. I never had any design against the life of any person, nor any disposition to commit treason, or excite slaves to rebel, or make any general insurrection. I never encouraged any man to do so, but always discouraged any idea of that kind.
Let me say, also, a word in regard to the statements made by some of those connected with me. I hear it has been stated by some of them that I have induced them to join me. But the contrary is true. I do not say this to injure them, but as regretting their weakness. There is not one of them but joined me of his own accord, and the greater part of them at their own expense. A number of them I never saw, and never had a word of conversation with, till the day they came to me; and that was for the purpose I have stated.
Now I have done
His last words:
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.
After he was hanged church bells tolled across the North. In 16 months the civil war would start.