John Brown: American Saint
November 25, 2007
Andrea Abbott

I can’t imagine what it would be like to be a slave. I can’t begin to imagine, even what it would be like to be a slave who is comparatively well treated. It is, I think, impossible to really feel what it would have been like to live without any sense of control over my own life, never to feel I could make a decision or a plan, never knowing whether those I love would be taken from me, knowing that I could be hurt or killed and there would be no one I could turn to for justice. Could I even keep any sense of myself as a person at all? It would seem that continuing to see myself as human might be a great act of rebellion in itself. I also can’t imagine what it would be like to live in a society which regarded slavery as normal. Whether I was for slavery, or against slavery, I would see it as part of life, not as something beyond possibility. It would have been as normal as TV, the Internet, credit cards.

Recently, at a book discussion group, after we had read a few books about the 1850’s, the women said they hoped they would have had the courage to be part of the Underground Railroad. Then, after a short pause, they said they hoped they would have been Abolitionists, then, after another pause, one said timidly, I hope I would have treated my slaves well. That was the most honest appraisal of how most of us go through our world. We accept the world into which we are born and, if we see some wrong in it, we may go about trying to reform some part of it, but we very seldom wish to walk away from the accepted dimensions of our society. We find reasons why the wrongs are not so wrong; we consider both sides of the question; we want to effect change without rocking to boat too much. We understand, without a word being said, the need for the delicate balance between ideal and practicality necessary to keep our world ticking along. The word “radical”, is from the word “root” for a reason. The idea of digging up everything to the root and starting afresh is not something many people want to do, and for good reason, but it is equally true that the failure to act can create forces that will level the world we have tried carefully to preserve. That why there arise, or are sent, people who are so inflamed by injustice, so driven by a need to bring an end to tyranny, that they will act, whatever the consequences. It is as if they feel injustice as an assault on their person and are fighting for their lives. They are rare, and they bring out the most ambivalent feelings in most of us. Saints or madmen, the line can be very thin. On the one hand, we admire saints, on the other hand we are appalled by them. I think John Brown could qualify, on both counts, as an American saint.

This summer I went with Arnie and a friend of mind to North Elba, near Lake Placid, to see John Brown’s grave and farm. I had been there before, but not for many years. The farm is in a small valley, lonely, isolated, quiet, a place in which nature, the great hills which surround the little farmhouse, is the driving force and people’s actions count for little. This was not a place where John Brown lived for much of his life. He saw it as a refuge for his family, the place where he settled his second wife and youngest daughters, It was a base he used occasionally between the campaigns he and his sons and sons-in-law and the rest of the group he gathered to him waged against slavery. He hoped it would be the place he would return to when slavery was ended. He chose this remote area, a place where he had no ties, because it was remote and he thought it would be a place of safety. He also chose to settle there because it was near a settlement of freed slaves, a temporary Utopian community that did not survive the harsh winters and short growing season of the Adirondacks, but a community which provided him and his family with neighbors who would share their passion for bringing about freedom.

. He was born in 1800, the year in which Gabriel Prosser started a slave riot which terrified the South. In the same year, Denmark Vesey, who was later to lead another slave rebellion, purchased his freedom and Nat Turner, who also led a slave rebellion, was born. Despite slaves who risked everything to free themselves and their fellow slaves, many people wanted to believe the myth of happy slaves, better in that condition than they would have been in freedom, hoped to find justification for slavery in the Bible, or simply ignored the “peculiar institution”. Of course the entire system rested on the conviction that Africans were not fully human.

Abolitionists were considered dangerous or perhaps even crazy by many, as reformers have and continue to be seen. However, most were far from a threat to anyone. They were, for the most part, people from the middle or working class, often Quakers who opposed violence. They hoped to end slavery through moral persuasion. Arrayed against this gentle army was the economic force of slavery which had grown in importance during Brown’s lifetime. A slave could cost as much as $1500, making slavery a huge investment. The number of slaves had quadrupled and the invention of the cotton gin had made growing cotton one of the most lucrative activities in America and slaveholders its most powerful political block. Eleven of the first sixteen U.S. presidents were slaveholders. Perhaps we should imagine a few well-intentioned people opposing the oil-industry today.

Our record as Unitarian-Universalists is mixed. One of those slave-owning presidents was Jefferson, whom we claim. While many northern ministers such as Emerson and Theodore Parker preached against slavery, were stalwarts in the abolitionist cause, and some, such as Samuel May, took direct action, southern Unitarians and Universalists supported it and bitterly resented the action of their northern counterparts. William Emery Channing, the most famous Unitarian minister in Boston, was initially timid about attacking slavery since the wealthy cotton merchants sat in his congregation. Samuel May converted Channing to an abolitionist position and he then became a fiery agitator against slavery, so much so that he almost lost his church. It is hard to see outside the norms of one’s time and place.

But John Brown did. Unlike other abolitionists, he seemed to feel the weight of slavery almost as if he himself were a slave. His parents were poor farmers whose fathers had fought in the Revolutionary War. They moved from Connecticut to Ohio when he was young, part of the large migration west and most of John’s life was rootless, filled with starts and stops, various schemes for bettering his large family’s life. At different times he was a farmer, shepherd, wool merchant, but did not do well at any venture for very long. He was in debt all his life.

His parents were both deeply religious and abolitionists and he was influenced by his parent’s views but these were sharpened by seeing a slave boy, who had become his friend while he was on a cattle driving trip to the South, beaten by his owner. The boy’s helplessness and his own inability to stop the beating haunted him all his life. However, he remained only

peripherally involved until he was thirty-seven. Then, at a meeting to memorialize the death of a printer killed for publishing ant-slavery pamphlets, John got up and publicly dedicated his life to abolishing slavery.

Many people were at that meeting. Many people had made public declarations against what they saw as the most despicable institution in the U.S. The difference was that John Brown had little use for talk and great zeal for action. For the rest of his life, even as his personal fortunes took various turns, the one thread throughout the years would be his involvement in direct activity to end slavery.

The other aspect of his life that made him different from many abolitionists was that he truly saw slaves and free African Americans as his equals. Many others were anxious to end slavery but had a range of ambivalent feelings about the people who suffered under it. Many were in agreement with Abraham Lincoln, who wanted them sent back to Africa. John Brown reacted to this discrimination with as much anger as he did toward slavery. He was often angry, often impatient with people whose views were more partial, more timid, who were not driven by as fierce a determination as he was. He couldn’t stand any form of hypocrisy, any form of compromise with an evil system. He tried the patience of many, from Gerrit Smith to Frederick Douglass, with his insistence on action, but he never spared himself. He also did not spare his family.

He felt compelled to go to Kansas, to assist the anti-slave settlers there who were trying to keep Kansas a free state, while others, backed by President Buchanan and federal troops, were trying to make slave-holding legal there. He knew what he was facing, and at that time he was a man in his mid-fifties, quite an age by the standards of his time. Some of his sons and sons-in-law went with him, since his whole family had pledged themselves to the anti-slavery cause. There, they lived as guerrilla fighters, enduring constant danger and physical hardships. Two of his sons were captured in a raid and suffered torture. One of his sons was shot dead. His wife and daughters sacrificed, as women did from time immemorial, by trying to keep a small farm going in a cold and rugged land.

Was his family really as committed as he was to this cause? Would they have rather lived as others did, untouched by this issue, which could so easily not have been their fight? We don’t know. Nothing seems to contradict the view that they were equally dedicated to the cause and to him. His wife’s letters to him are loving, as are his to her. The children report how loving he was to them all, how he took care of them and their mother in illness, sang and read the Bible to them when he was there. But he wasn’t often there. He juggled the demands of his wool trading and the demands of the cause and both took him far from home, often.

It was a violent time and John Brown took violent measures against a system which had the force of law and the backing of troops and arms to defend it. He was an outlaw but the law he stepped outside was one which supported an institution of unparalleled evil. Others talked, and tried to find a way to compromise, and watched compromise turn into further evil. He acted. After he left Kansas, he led escaping slaves to Canada, then tried to persuade abolitionists to set up a system of forts through the Appalachian mountains where freed slaves could defend the area against slave hunters, providing places for more freed slaves to either join them or be transported to Canada. When he couldn’t get backing for this plan which seemed impractical, he inspired and led a small group of men to Harper’s Ferry, Virginia, where he had hopes of seizing the arsenal there and inspiring the slaves of the area to revolt. He did not see it as a suicide mission, but once he set in place his plan, he couldn’t stop it. Of course, we know the end. Most of his men, including two of his sons were killed. A few escaped, but the rest were captured. He was the first to be hung, wounded and lying on a stretcher for a trial that was only a formality. Though he begged her not to, fearing for her safety, his wife came from northern New York to be with him until he was hung. His jailers were won over by his gentleness and courage. Indeed, his sense of justice was with him even in battle. He often said he wanted no personal vengeance, even against those who shot his son in cold blood in Kansas. He kept insisting that he hated only slavery, not any person. When fighting in Harper’s Ferry, he kept his men from shooting any unarmed person, even as they were being fired on.

When sentenced he gave a speech which Emerson compared with the Gettysburg Address. “ …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…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…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…”

Both Frederick Douglass and Emerson said of him that he was unique in being faithful to his conscience, without any thought for his own gain.

We also know what came next. John Brown was hung on December 2, 1859, a day that was declared Marty’s Day in Boston. Throughout the north, men and women wore morning for him. Two years later the country erupted in the Civil War, the most devastating war we have ever experienced. At the end of the war, slavery was finally over. Did John Brown ultimately bring the long crisis to a head? Perhaps it would have happened another way. Perhaps the compromises would have been too fragile to stand. But many, including his eldest son, believed that he had set the match. His son said of his life that “…it went out in tragic gloom and apparent failure. But suddenly he seemed to be, as Thoreau said, ‘more alive than any man living.’ There was something like public remorse and shame that a great nation should have shirked its duty and allowed one old man to hurl himself to death against a national wrong.”

A national wrong…the validity of the law of God. John Brown was not the last man to hurl himself to death when all other avenues to justice seemed to close. We can all think of the many others who have walked that path, but they are a strange company. Do we think of them when we hear the news from Gaza? From Burma? Do we remember the Vietnamese monks aflame in the 60’s? Do we think of the Freedom Riders of the 50’s, most obviously John Brown’s children? Men and women now ‘hurl themselves at death at an alarming rate. Are they a different specie than John Brown or are they also his children? Would he find their sacrifice useless and vain, or would he understand the compulsion that drives it? Have we really closed all other doors to them? Are we given to understand the evils of our own time sufficiently to act to end them?

One of the reasons I wanted to talk about John Brown was our trip to his grave and farm this summer. When we got there a few people were walking around the grounds. One of them was an elderly African American man. I have heard African American men extol John Brown as the one white man who was willing to fight and die for slaves, while others merely talked. What sets John Brown apart from others was that he felt the tragedy of another group as if he was his own. People have commonly been willing to die for their own, their own family, their own country, their own ethnic group. But it is a rare individual who can see woe in a face different than his own.

John Brown’s life sets another problem for us. Evil and violence swirled around the institution of slavery. John Brown saw no way to end the violence done to others than to act with violence himself. Was there another way? The violence toward those in slavery before the raid, the violence that followed in the Civil War dwarfed John Brown’s raid like a match is dwarfed by a forest fire. Violence does beget violence; I could never advocate it as a solution, yet, sometimes we do not see violence against the weak and invisible.

Saints are not comfortable people. They have no small talk. Intent on the greater cause, they often miss the smaller suffering nearer to hand, even of those they love. They make us uncomfortable with our own human limitations, our daily living of our lives, our inability to respond as we would like to the evils we see around us. Though they are not comfortable people, nor do they make us comfortable, they are still necessary. We need the vision that goes outside the normal, the everyday. We need those who will stand on mountains, light the beacon fires.

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