Ohio History Journal

  • 1
  •  
  • 2
  •  
  • 3
  •  
  • 4
  •  
  • 5
  •  
  • 6
  •  
  • 7
  •  
  • 8
  •  
  • 9
  •  
  • 10
  •  
  • 11
  •  
  • 12
  •  
  • 13
  •  
  • 14
  •  
  • 15
  •  
  • 16
  •  
  • 17
  •  
  • 18
  •  
  • 19
  •  
  • 20
  •  
  • 21
  •  
  • 22
  •  
  • 23
  •  
  • 24
  •  

JOHN BROWN'S OHIO ENVIRONMENT

JOHN BROWN'S OHIO ENVIRONMENT

by MARY LAND

Graduate Student, Western Reserve University

The stormy years John Brown spent in Kansas and the insur-

rection at Harper's Ferry have all but obscured the 38 years of his

life spent in northern Ohio. In 1805, when he was five years old,

he was brought from Connecticut to Hudson, Ohio, a small town

near Akron. He continued to live in the vicinity of Akron, except

for a decade in Pennsylvania, two years in Springfield, Massa-

chusetts, and two years at North Elba, New York, until he left

for Kansas in 1856, four years before his death by hanging.

In spite of the years spent in Ohio, John Brown's biographers

have given that period a cursory treatment, preferring to devote

their best energies to the Pottawatomie episode in Kansas or to the

attack on the arsenal and his trial and execution. Not all this disre-

gard can be attributed to the greater excitement of the last four

years of his life. Part of it springs from the tendency to approach

Brown purely as a problem in psychology, a mystic who, in the

words of his brother-in-law, believed himself "raised up by God to

break the jaws of the wicked." The emphasis, therefore, has been

upon the inner man lifted out of the context of his surroundings.

Whether he is regarded as saint, folk hero, "belated Covenanter,"

murderer, or neurotic, the environmental factor in shaping his out-

look on the slavery question has been indicated but slightly. His

ideas are treated as the projections of his own personal loathing of

slavery, unrelated to the organized antislavery movement of the

North. His plans, such as the project for a provisional government

for the South after victory at Harper's Ferry, are dismissed as the

figments of a disordered mind. He was, we are told, a religious

monomaniac on the slavery question who paid little heed to what

the rest of the North was thinking on that subject.

Contemporary accounts do not bear out the assumption that

Brown's case was divorced from the general antislavery movement.

Those investigating Brown's activities were intent upon discovering

24