Ohio History Journal

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

JOHN BROWN                                25

whether there was any connection between those activities and the

abolitionist movement or the newly formed Republican party.¹ For

this purpose a senate investigating committee was set up.² The

questioning of John Brown, which had started in the engine-house

at Harper's Ferry scarcely seven hours after a contingent of marines

had crushed the assault, was all pointed toward extracting from him

the names of the men and the movements which were behind the

attack.3

It was Congressman Clement L. Vallandigham of Ohio, later

the notorious Copperhead, who suggested that Brown had been af-

fected by the atmosphere in which he lived. The Western Reserve

of Ohio was known far and wide as an abolition center with more

Underground Railroad stations than any comparably sized area in

the country; it was a seat of defiance of the Fugitive Slave Act

and a site of Free Soil activity which contributed to the downfall

of the Whig party and the beginnings of the Republican party. It

was the stamping ground of such militant abolitionists as Charles

Backus Storrs, Elizur Wright, Congressman Joshua Reed Giddings,

and Senator Ben Wade.

Vallandigham stated it succinctly in a letter to the Cincinnati

Enquirer: "Learning that he [Brown] had lived in Ohio for fifty

years, I prosecuted my inquiries to ascertain what connection his

conspiracy might have had with the Oberlin rescue trials then pend-

ing and the insurrectionary movement at that time made in the

Western Reserve to organize forcible resistance to the Fugitive

Slave Act."⁴ Vallandigham was referring to the mass trial of 37

Oberlin businessmen and Oberlin College professors, who had been

arrested under the provisions of the Fugitive Slave Act for forcing

a planter's agent from Kentucky to give up a Negro he was taking

1 Senator Mason of Virginia felt that the conspiracy got its chief support from

the New England abolitionist movement. Congressional Globe, 36 cong., 1 sess., 141.

Senator Iverson of Georgia declared that the Republican party could not disclaim

sympathy for Brown since the party's intention was "to break down the institution

of slavery by fair means or foul." Ibid., 15. On the same theme Senator Ben Wade of

Ohio (Republican) said he knew that "for the basest political purposes, that great

and overshadowing political party to which I belong has been charged with complicity

in this affair." Ibid., 141.

2 On December 5, 1859, Senator Mason moved that "a committee be appointed

to inquire into the facts attending the late invasion and seizure of the armory and

arsenal of the United States at Harper's Ferry in Virginia." The real point of the

Mason motion lay in his charge that the committee must ascertain "whether such

invasion was made under cover of any organization interested to subvert the govern-

ment of any of the states of the United States." Ibid., 15.

3 New York Herald, October 21, 1859.

4 Cincinnati Enquirer, October 22, 1859.

26     OHIO ARCHAEOLOGICAL AND HISTORICAL QUARTERLY

back to the South. They had hidden the Negro for three days in the

attic of the home of an Oberlin theology professor and then shipped

him on to safety. This was but one incident in a series of violent

interferences with the enforcement of the Fugitive Slave Act, hence

Vallandigham's use of the word "insurrectionary."

When Vallandigham    attempted to connect Brown with the

Oberlin rescuers it was not entirely a shot in the dark, for Brown

had sat in on their trial in Cleveland in March 1859, and one mem-

ber of his band, the Negro John Anthony Copeland, had been re-

cruited from the ranks of the rescuers. A few weeks after Brown

left Cleveland, with the trial still in process, his right-hand man,

John Henri Kagi, tried to arrange a jail break for the defendants.5

Nor was Vallandigham too far wide of the mark in trying to

connect John Brown's plans with the "insurrectionary" atmosphere

of the Reserve, which had arisen because of the Fugitive Slave Act.

So widespread was the resentment against the act that "not a fugitive

was seized in Northern Ohio for the past eight years," the Cleveland

Leader declared September 10, 1858. No doubt this was the atmos-

phere which made it possible for John Brown, the nation's arch-of-

fender against the Fugitive Slave Act, to walk the streets of Cleve-

land unmolested for ten days in March 1859 while the streets were

placarded with posters offering a total of $3,250 in reward for his

seizure.⁶ Yet Brown, at that time arranging the sale of two horses

and a mule he had "liberated" in a raid against Missouri slave

owners, moved with complete equanimity through the streets of

Cleveland, passing the United States Marshal's office every day, so

cool that it struck Artemus Ward, then associate editor of the

Cleveland Plain Dealer, "that he could make his jolly fortune by

letting himself out as an Ice Cream Freezer."⁷ Everyone in Cleve-

land knew Brown was wanted for his activities in Kansas with the

Free State forces and for his slave-liberating forays into Missouri.

Still no one came forward to claim the reward, and the Leader

gave him free space in the editor's columns. Groups gathered daily

at the City Hotel stables where he was auctioning off his high-

principled mounts ("They are southern animals with northern

5 Richard J. Hinton, John Brown and His Men (New York, 1894), 237.

6 J. W. Schuckers, "Old John Brown," in Cleveland Leader, April 29, 1894.

7 Cleveland Plain Dealer, March 22, 1859.

JOHN BROWN                        27

principles," he said. "Once pro-slavery, they are now out and out

abolitionists".).8

The disinclination of Cleveland authorities to bring the law

down on his head did not fail to have its effect, as Vallandigham

had surmised. In his confession, John Cook (Brown's look-out at

Harper's Ferry) stated that his chief and the whole company had

derived aid and comfort from the failure of the Cleveland marshal

to arrest Brown and that "this was all that was needed to give

courage to the wavering ones in the practicability of the plan

and its ultimate success."9

In further attempts to link Brown to the belligerent antislavery

movement of northern Ohio, Vallandigham sought specifically to

involve former Congressman Joshua Giddings, for 21 years the

leader of the house forces opposed to slavery. After questioning

Brown as to whether he had been present at the Cleveland Anti-

Fugitive Slave Law Convention, which more than 10,000 people

attended, Vallandigham asked specifically whether Giddings had

advance knowledge of the plan for Harper's Ferry. Brown was

non-committal, whereupon Vallandigham turned abruptly to the

old man's wounded companion, Captain Aaron Stevens, and asked

him how far he had lived from Jefferson, Ohio, Giddings' residence.

Before Stevens could reply, Brown quickly instructed his fellow

prisoner: "Be very cautious, Stevens, about an answer to that: it

might commit some friend. I would not answer it at all."¹⁰

John Brown's restraint in revealing details of his activity in and

about Giddings' district and his fear that others in the northern

Ohio antislavery movement might be involved, suggests that he was

not entirely the one-man movement his biographers have indicated.

A study of the northern Ohio antislavery movement and Brown's

connections with it indicates that he must have been influenced by

his neighbors' allegiance to the same cause, however deep-rooted

his own private war with slavery. Perhaps the Ohio atmosphere

led him to overestimate national antislavery sentiment, thus en-

couraging him to think along the lines of his proposed provisional

government. On another point which has puzzled his biographers

-his expectation that the southern Negro would rise and flock to his

8 Schuckers, loc. cit.

9 Cleveland Leader, November 28, 1859.

10 James Redpath, The Public Life of Captain John Brown (London, 1861), 201.

28     OHIO ARCHAEOLOGICAL AND HISTORICAL QUARTERLY

banners-the answer may again be found in the militant character

of the Negro on the Western Reserve. Examined in the light of his

environment, Brown becomes less of a religious monomaniac and

more of an extreme product of the same ideational climate which

produced such individuals as Storrs, Giddings, and Wade and such

events as the conflict between Western Reserve College and Oberlin

College on the slavery issue and the expulsion of the militantly

antislavery Western Reserve Synod from the fold of the Presby-

terian Church.

II

Hudson, Ohio, where John Brown grew up, was called a "rabid

abolition town" by the county historian and sheriff of Akron, Sam-

uel A. Lane. Sheriff Lane knew John Brown well, having once

arrested him and four of his sons after they had barricaded them-

selves in their farmhouse and resisted foreclosure with doubled-

barreled shotguns. Graphic evidence of the sheriff's testimony was

a signpost erected just outside Hudson. The sign displayed the

figure of a young Negro grinning broadly and pointing toward the

town; underneath were the words, "Dis de road to Hudson." First

erected as a joke in the mid-1830's, it became a matter of local

pride and remained standing for many years.l1

Regional historians of the last century agree as to the general

antislavery character of the Western Reserve. The most sweeping

of them all, Alfred Matthews, claimed that northern Ohio "was the

most detested piece of abolition territory in the whole United

States." He added that the territory had more stations of the Under-

ground Railroad than any area of similar size in the United States.12

Levi Coffin, president of the Underground Railroad, spoke warmly

of the region as "good anti-slavery neighborhood."¹³ Walter Buell

said of the upper part of Ohio that "the anti-slavery spirit was

stronger there than in any other territory of equal extent in the

United States," adding that "Southerners were wont to sneer at it

as a state separate and distinct from the rest of Ohio."¹⁴ In its

centennial history of Cleveland the Cleveland World talked of the

city's reputation as a "hotbed of abolition," and remarked that

11 Samuel A. Lane, Fifty Years and Over of Akron (Akron, 1892), 828-829.

12 Alfred Matthews, Ohio and Her Western Reserve (New York, 1902), 175.

13 Levi Coffin, Reminiscences of Levi Coffin (Cincinnati, 1876), 581.

14 Walter R. Buell, Joshua Giddings: A Sketch (Cleveland, 1882), 16.

JOHN BROWN                           29

"after 1841 no slave was ever returned to bondage from the city of

Cleveland."l5 Nevin O. Winter, historian of the neighboring Toledo

area, said of the Reserve: "It is difficult, if not impossible, to find

a record of a slave being returned to his master in the entire

section.^"16  The abolitionism of the Reserve brought condemnation

from the South, as expressed by the Richmond (Virginia) Republi-

can in 1848 when it said of the inhabitants of the Western Reserve:

"A more hyprocritical, canting, whining, totally depraved and

utterly irredeemable set of rascals never walked the face of the

earth."17

Early antislavery controversy in upper Ohio was centered about

the question of colonization or emancipation. This was the discus-

sion raging in small towns like Hudson when John Brown grew to

young manhood. Some partisans of the issue were already sure

of their stand. State Senator Ephraim Brown, who represented the

district where the Brown family voted, wrote to his cousin in

Mississippi in the early 1830's: "I not only believe as you do that

there would be much to be feared from the blacks in the west

country in the case of war, but should rejoice to have them rise

upon their oppressors and, if possible, make themselves free."18

The advocates of the gradualist and the immediatist solutions

locked in verbal combat at meetings of the American Anti-Slavery

Society, a substantial branch of which was to be found in almost

every little town of upper Ohio19 at a time when not one was known

in New England.20 In 1839 the American Anti-Slavery Society held

its convention in Cleveland, most of the delegates coming from the

Ohio district.21

John Brown never sympathized with the "pure discussion" ap-

proach to the slavery evil. Throughout his life he maintained an

aloofness toward the Garrisonian brand of abolition with its doc-

trine of nonresistance. He was attracted to another phase of anti-

slavery activity, the Underground Railroad.     Several lines ran

15 Cleveland World, pub., History of Cleveland (Cleveland, 1896), 80-88.

l6 Nevin O. Winter, A History of Northwest Ohio (Chicago and New York,

1917), 275.

17 Quoted in Ashtabula Sentinel, November 18, 1848.

18 George Clary Wing, Early Years on the Western Reserve; with Extracts from

Letters of Ephraim Brown and Family (Cleveland, 1916), 25.

19 Cincinnati Philanthropist, February 19, 1836.

20 Vernon L. Pairington, Main Currents in American Thought (New York, 1927),

II, 341.

21 Edward C. Reilly, Early Slave Controversy on the Western Reserve (unpublished

Ph. D. thesis, Western Reserve University, 1940), 192.

30     OHIO ARCHAEOLOGICAL AND HISTORICAL QUARTERLY

through the Western Reserve, and John Brown and his father, Owen,

were both conductors. Every house in which they lived had a

concealed room in the barn or the family residence where a run-

away slave could be hidden. Any point on Lake Erie was a con-

venient point of departure for Canada, and there were numerous

captains of steamers and schooners, well known to antislavery

people, who would take a Negro passenger across the lake. As

time passed, it was said that in the northern part of the state the

pursuer was obliged to move with nearly as much circumspection

as the fugitive himself.²2 Announcements of activity on the Under-

ground Railroad appeared regularly in the journals of the day.23

John Brown had left his father's home in Hudson about the

time the elder Brown was becoming involved in the emancipationist

struggle within Western Reserve College. From one of John's letters

it is clear that he was kept informed of the controversy which upset

the entire Hudson community and received national publicity. In

1825, the year he took his young family to Pennsylvania for a ten-

year stay, his father was named one of a three-man committee to

make arrangements for erecting a college building at Hudson.24

Owen Brown worked on the project with enthusiasm and became a

member of the board of trustees and a close friend of the college's

first president, Charles Backus Storrs. Under Storrs, Western Re-

serve College quickly attained a nationwide reputation as a ramp-

antly abolitionist school. It admitted Negroes and permitted free

discussion of the slavery question in the classroom and the local

press which won it the approbation of Garrison's Liberator. Storrs

inserted an editorial in the Hudson Observer and Telegraph25--the

college owned a half of this paper-advocating immediate emanci-

pation. At once two members of the faculty, Professors Beriah

Green and Elizur Wright, were converted to emancipation. The

trustees who were colonizationists, with the exception of Owen

Brown, balked at outright emancipation. Following Storrs's stand a

22 James Fairchild, The Underground Railroad (Western Reserve Historical So-

ciety, Tract No. 87, 1895), 106.

23 For a typical advertisement, see the Painesville Telegraph for August 25, 1859:

"The U. G. R. R.-The travel on this line is constant and increasing. Last Monday

night some $6000 or $7000 worth of passengers passed on the Underground track

not a thousand miles from these parts."

24 Frederick Waite, Western Reserve University: The Hudson Era (Cleveland,

1942), 44.

25 July 7, 1832.

JOHN BROWN                         31

bitter controversy took place in the pages of the Hudson paper.26

Elizur Wright expressed the emancipationist position and became a

favorite of the Liberator staff, which invited him to Boston for a

week of speechmaking. The local trustees, excepting Owen Brown,

became alarmed, and began cancelling their subscriptions, with-

drawing their sons, and demanding the return of the lands they

had deeded to the college. The quarrel spread to the student body

with colonizationist students refusing to attend the lectures of aboli-

tionist professors. Some of the students started touring the towns

of upper Ohio making antislavery speeches. Then the trustees

announced "with deep regret" that they saw "a spirit of self-suffi-

ciency, pertness and disrespect . . . prevails to a fearful extent

among the youth of the college."27

The trustees, Owen Brown again dissenting, acted to restrain

the students from  making speeches off the campus.    Professor

Wright resigned, not neglecting one parting shot when he brought a

Negro barber on the commencement stage reserved for faculty and

trustees. A few weeks later Professor Storrs died from tuberculosis

aggravated by his three-hour speech at an outdoor abolitionist

meeting, an occasion dramatized in the poem of John Greenleaf

Whittier. A new president, carefully investigated for his leanings

on the slavery issue, was installed, and Western Reserve began to

accept fewer Negroes as students. Thereafter, the faculty ceased to

take sides on the question.

It was at this time that Owen Brown, disgusted with the change

of policy, quit the board of trustees and shifted his support to the

newly founded manual arts institute at nearby Oberlin.28 Oberlin,

with its abolitionist principles, its doctrine of perfectionism, and its

determination to seek a charter as a college, became a strong rival

of Western Reserve College in the 1830's and 1840's.29

Shortly after his father's shift of allegiance to Oberlin, John

Brown returned to Hudson. There can be no doubt of the fact

that he was informed of his father's quarrel with Western Reserve,

for in September 1834, at the peak of the conflict, he wrote his

brother Frederick that he did not believe "Hudson, with all its con-

26 Hudson Observer & Telegraph, July 12, September 6, September 13, 1832,

January 17, 1833.

27 Waite, op. cit., 98-102.

28 Ibid., 45.

29 Ibid., 166-170.

JOHN BROWN                        33

Akron. At first he was fairly successful. In 1836 he owned four

farms and one hundred acres of other lands. He also held a one-

twentieth interest in a town site through which a canal linking the

Ohio Canal and the Ohio River below Pittsburgh was supposed to

be cut. The promise of boom profits to Brown and the nineteen

other gentlemen who held allotments in the projected town was

rudely smashed when one of Brown's partners, General Simon

Perkins of Akron, arranged to have the canal cut through his sec-

tion of Akron.34 The panic of 1837 followed, and John Brown, the

bank director and gentleman farmer, became by 1842 John Brown,

the bankrupt and defendant in 21 lawsuits. From then on he lived

precariously as a sheep-raiser, a race-horse breeder, and a wool

merchant.

Struggling to provide for his large and ever increasing family,

John Brown was not active in the organized antislavery movement,

which his direct-actionist spirit disapproved of as weak and com-

promising. His daughter has indicated that the plans for Harper's

Ferry matured during the years following his financial debacle; he

utilized a business trip to London to cross the channel and observe

the battlefield at Waterloo as part of the plan that was growing in

his head. He also attempted to continue his favorite project of aid-

ing and teaching freed Negroes at North Elba, New York, where his

friend Gerrit Smith had provided the grounds for a Negro colony.

Around him his neighbors on the Reserve had transferred the

slavery issue to the realm of politics. This resulted in a situation

where by 1842 the young Whigs, "almost to a man," had gone into

the Liberty party, the first national antislavery party.35 This situa-

tion, unique in the nation, was traceable in large measure to one

man, Congressman Joshua Giddings of the sixteenth district, which

comprised the three largest counties in the Reserve. Giddings was

the man Vallandigham was later to be so eager to link with John

Brown. Giddings served in congress for a total of 21 years, succeed-

ing the aged John Quincy Adams as chief congressional foe of the

slave power. He was slighted by his own party, the Whigs, and a

hostile state legislature gerrymandered his district in order to de-

feat him. In Washington he was a social outcast because of his

34 Lane, op. cit., 834.

35 Buell, op. cit., 14.

34     OHIO ARCHAEOLOGICAL AND HISTORICAL QUARTERLY

outspoken views. Nevertheless his northern Ohio constituents re-

peatedly returned him to office, and he apparently used his position

to persuade them to more extreme views, for he frequently presented

petitions from citizens' meetings in support of his attitude on slavery

in general or on the annexation of Texas and the Mexican War.36

The real test as to whether Giddings represented the attitude of

his northern Ohio constituents came in 1842, when he was forced

to resign from the house after a vote of censure. This came about

after Giddings had defended Negro slaves who had mutinied on

board a brig sailing from Virginia to New Orleans. The slaves

had then taken the vessel into the free waters of British Nassau.

Daniel Webster demanded that Great Britain hand over the muti-

neers as "the recognized property of citizens of the United States."

Giddings countered by offering a resolution to the effect that when

the slaves left the jurisdiction of Virginia and embarked on the

high seas, they left behind them also the laws of Virginia and all

attempts to reenslave them were unwarranted by the constitution and

would be incompatible with national honor.

Warding off an attack by two southern members, one carrying a

bowie knife, Giddings became the subject of a vote of censure.

Northerners disavowed him also, Caleb Cushing holding his resolu-

tion "an approximation to a treasonable view of the subject." After

the vote of censure had been passed, Giddings resigned and returned

to Ohio, where he was received "not as a punished wrong-doer but

as a champion who had maintained his cause in the lists against a

multitude of oppressors."³⁷ At every town through which he passed

-Cleveland, Painesville, Ashtabula, Jefferson, Chardon-he was

met with an ovation. Resolutions were passed by various societies

throughout his district expressing approval of his stand. After a

special election called by the governor he was returned to congress

with a handsome majority.

Although he was involved in 21 lawsuits and threatened with

bankruptcy, John Brown could not have remained impervious to

this event. Indeed, in a letter to Giddings written during the heat

36 In February 1842, Giddings presented a petition from citizens of Ashtabula

praying for an amicable division of the Union, separating free from slave states. Buell,

op. cit., 78. In 1844 and 1845 anti-Texas meetings held at Warren, Vienna, and

Jefferson objected to the expanding of southern economic interests at the expense of

the "free citizens of the North." Reilly, op. cit., 152.

37 Buell, op. cit., 124.

JOHN BROWN                        35

of the Kansas campaign, he stated that he was presuming upon

"long acquaintance with your public life."³⁸

Giddings' break with the Whig party precipitated a similar

break among his constituents, and the Western Reserve became out-

standing as an early citadel of the Liberty and Free Soil parties

when they were only splinter groups on the national scene. In 1842

the Reserve began to turn away from its former idol, Henry Clay,

to the tune of the popular campaign song,

Clear the track for Emancipation!

Cars cannot run on a Clay Foundation.39

When Giddings made his formal departure from the Whig party,

announcing that he was going to support Van Buren, eastern poli-

ticians were thrown into a panic. Speakers, including Seward, were

rushed into the territory and vast quantities of Horace Greeley's

speeches were distributed, but in spite of these efforts Van Buren

swept northern Ohio, winning more votes than the two other candi-

dates combined. The following year, 1849, the northern Ohio con-

tingent in the state legislature stampeded that body into naming an

ex-Liberty party man, Salmon P. Chase, as United States Senator.40

Giddings and his Jefferson law partner, Ben Wade, who had

been elected to the United States Senate, were instrumental in that

movement whose purpose was the fusing of the various antislavery

political groups-Liberty, Free Soil, dissident Whig, and Democrat

-into a new, all-embracing party against slavery. But it was

Joseph Medill, then the youthful editor of the Cleveland Leader,

who called dissatisfied Clevelanders of the various political faiths

into his office in 1854 and suggested the name Republican for the

new party.41 Medill and Wade remained pillars of the Republican

party, and at the outset Giddings was very useful to the new

political movement, but by 1860 his intransigence on the slavery is-

sue caused him to be cold-shouldered at the convention, and he was

refused a place on the resolutions committee.42

38 Villard, op. cit., 131.

39 William C. Cochran, The Western Reserve and the Fugitive Slave Law (West-

ern Reserve Historical Society, Collections, Publication 101, Cleveland, 1920), 83.

40 Reilly, op. cit., 371-373.

41 Wayne Andrews, Battle for Chicago (New York, 1946), 49.

42 Buell, op. cit., 208.

36      OHIO ARCHAEOLOGICAL AND HISTORICAL QUARTERLY

IV

In 1850 the antislavery campaign in the Western Reserve

shifted its focus from politics back to the field of direct action, an

orientation which appealed to John Brown. It was the campaign

against the fugitive slave law which gave the area its reputation as a

"hotbed of abolition." The "insurrectionary" decade on the Re-

serve coincided, too, with the most intense years of John Brown's

life, the years of the Kansas fighting, of Pottawatomie and Osawa-

tomie, of fund-raising tours which sent him back and forth through

upper Ohio, and, finally, of the planning for Harper's Ferry.

Northern Ohio made voluble protests against the fugitive slave

law from the beginning. The first step was a round of protest meet-

ings addressed by various politicians of the district, at which the

new law was excoriated and application made of the doctrine of a

"higher law" than the constitution.⁴³ The second measure of opposi-

tion was the more forceful one of placing obstacles in the way of

the United States marshal enforcing the law. On November 8, 1850,

Senator Ben Wade told a Mahoning County audience that "accept-

ance of the office of Commissioner or Marshal under the Act by any

person claiming the privilege of American citizenship and brother-

hood with men, will, as it deservedly should, brand him as a traitor

to humanity."⁴⁴ Apparently this admonition was not without effect,

for eight years later the Cleveland Leader asserted that "during the

Marshalship of Mr. Jones and Mr. Fitch not a fugitive was seized

in northern Ohio.^"45

During the decade 1850-60, the Negro population of the

Western Reserve showed a 100 per cent increase, eloquent testimony

to the complaint of a southern slave catcher, who declared, "Never

see so many niggers and abolitionists in one place in my life! . . .

Might as well try to hunt the devil there as hunt a nigger."⁴⁶ The

usual procedure in evading the marshal and the owner's agent was

for a number of citizens to gather together and heckle the agent,

43 Cochran, op. cit., 97-98. A meeting at Cleveland on October 1, 1850, passed

a resolution which declared that "regarding some portion of the Fugitive Law as un-

constitutional, and the whole of it as oppressive, unjust, and unrighteous, we deem it

the duty of EVERY GOOD CITIZEN to denounce, oppose and RESIST, by all proper

means, the execution of said law." Cleveland Leader, April 14, 1850.

44 Cleveland Leader, November 8, 1850.

45 Ibid., September 10, 1858.

46 Cochran, op. cit., 121.

JOHN BROWN                               37

examining his papers to see if they were in order, frequently insist-

ing upon a trip back to the courthouse to check the procedure.

Meanwhile the fugitive had been notified and hidden in a cellar or

spirited on to a lake vessel.47 Frequently both the master's agent

and the federal deputy were threatened with physical violence.48

In the midst of all this activity news of the Kansas-Nebraska

Act came to the Reserve, and many Ohioans set out to "squat" in

Kansas, among them sons of John Brown, Owen, Salmon, Frederick,

Jason, and John, Jr. Not long after, their father joined them, and

people on the Reserve were surprised less than a year later to learn

that the quiet farmer who had won prizes for his sheep at the Sum-

mit County Fair had become Oswatomie Brown, chief of the Free

State guerilla forces. The following year, in the spring of 1857,

John Brown made a fund-raising trip through the northern Ohio

counties on behalf of the Free State forces. Nowhere were collec-

tions of money, food, and ammunition more substantial than in

Akron, Cleveland, and the surrounding towns.⁴⁹ "A committee ap-

pointed to canvass the village on behalf of the good cause," wrote

the sheriff of Akron, "gathered in rifles, shotguns, revolvers, pistols,

swords, butcher-knives, powder, lead, etc., with considerable con-

tributions of money-while it was more than hinted that cases of

arms of a former independent military company and several pack-

ages of state arms-stored in the upper part of the jail mysteriously

disappeared about the same time.^"50 On the same trip the mayor of

Akron presented John Brown with a broadsword, a relic of past

military campaigns."51

Impressed by the response of his neighbors, John Brown re-

peatedly returned to the northern Ohio region as an arms cache and

rendezvous for his men. While the Kansas fighting continued, he

stored arms in Tabor, Iowa, a settlement founded by Oberlin men

47 Fairchild, The Underground Railroad, 103.

48 In Akron in 1854 a crowd gathered at the railway station, where a popular

Negro barber was being returned South; it grew so threatening that the marshal with-

drew, and the agent released the Negro and himself left town. Lane, op. cit., 580-582.

In Painesville, in April 1859, a crowd gave United States Marshal Johnson and a

Kentucky agent twenty minutes to leave town. Cochran, op. cit., 120. In Hudson

the same year the fire bell, which was the signal that a "slave catcher" had entered

the town, rang out in the middle of commencement exercises; the students precipitately

left the hall and forcibly took away the fugitive. Cochran, op. cit., 121. In Cleveland

in 1861 women threw red pepper in the eyes of a deputy marshal who was trying to

take a young mulatto woman to the station to be returned South. Orth, op. cit., 296.

49 Villard, op. cit., 86.

50 Lane, op. cit., 589.

51 Lucius V. Bierce, Reminiscences (Akron, 1898), 74.

36     OHIO ARCHAEOLOGICAL AND HISTORICAL QUARTERLY

and women.52 After the Chatham Convention in 1858, at which

plans were drawn for the provisional government he expected to

create in the South, he brought his men to Cleveland. They lived in

the city for five months before moving on to Ashtabula County,

where Giddings lived, and where they were kept under cover by

sympathizers of the cause, including Giddings' son.53 Meanwhile

John Brown had returned to Kansas where he reappeared as a

guerilla chief under the name of Shubel Morgan, testing out his

plans for Harper's Ferry by leading raiding parties into the pro-

slavery Missouri area. In the last of these raids he freed a number

of Negroes and "liberated" some horses, taking both to Chicago.

He now had a price on his head for his Kansas activities. Pres-

ident James Buchanan offered $250 for his seizure, and the governor

of Kansas $3,000-so read the posters on Cleveland's Public Square

when John Brown returned to his native country for the last time.

He brought with him nine of his men but dispersed them and sent

them on to Ashtabula County while he and his aide, John Henri

Kagi, remained in Cleveland, staying at the City Hotel and putting

up for auction the Missouri horses.54

Brown and Kagi found the city in an uproar over the "Oberlin

Rescue" cases, which Vallandigham was later to connect with

Brown. This was the most dramatic of what the Copperhead

congressman termed the "insurrectionary" attacks on the Fugitive

Slave Act.55 On September 12, 1858, an Oberlin Negro named

John Price had been seized by two agents of a Kentucky planter.

Spontaneously a crowd had formed-the Oberlin banker, several

professors from the college, a Sunday school superintendent, and a

number of students and village merchants. There seems to have

been no leader. The crowd, numbering fifty or sixty, followed the

agents to the nearby town of Wellington and surrounded a hotel

where Price was being held. A parleying committee was sent up to

talk to the agents; a scuffle was started in the adjoining room, where

students had stationed themselves, and in the melee one of the stu-

dents managed to reach through a pipehole and knock the agent

52 Villard, op. cit., 268.

53 E. C. Lampson, "The Black String Bands," in Cleveland Plain Dealer, Octo-

ber 8, 1899.

54 Schuckers, loc. cit.

55 Cochran, op. cit., 118-157. See also Fairchild, The Underground Railroad for

a participant's account.

JOHN BROWN                                  39

down. The Negro was spirited away to the attic of the home of a

professor of theology at Oberlin, and there hidden until the excite-

ment blew over.

As a result 37 men were indicted under the provisions of the

Fugitive Slave Act and their trial begun in Cleveland in January

1859. Popular opinion reacted vigorously in favor of the rescuers.

Protest meetings were held.56 State politicians vied with each other

in supporting the rescuers and in reiterating the time-honored senti-

ment of the Reserve on the slavery issue.57 The indicted men were

installed in the Cleveland jail and during John Brown's stay were

repeatedly visited by delegations from the outlying towns of the

Reserve. On one occasion 2,000 persons came in from Lorain,

twenty miles away, and marched around the jail.⁵⁸ Brown and Kagi

both attended the trial, Kagi serving as correspondent for the New

York Tribune and the Cleveland Leader.          Brown left in a few days,

but Kagi stayed on, turning in dispatches somewhat different from

those of the Plain Dealer's Artemus Ward, who saw that the whole

Oberlin affair had begun because "some of the defendants are Ne-

groes and some are not. Those that are not are apparently sorry

that they ain't."59    On May 24 Kagi was present at a mass conven-

tion of opponents of the Fugitive Slave Act held on Cleveland

Public Square with Giddings presiding and Governor Salmon Chase

present to counsel moderation. Attendance, "at the lowest esti-

mate," was set at 10,000 to 12,000.60 The meeting was held next to

56 Typical was the meeting held at Alliance on May 2, 1859, where the towns-

people gathered to decry federal intervention and pledge "our lives, our fortunes and

our sacred honor, if required . . . to sustain the honor of the state unsullied."

Cochran, op. cit., 171. The Free Will Baptists held a meeting at Geauga Lake on

May 31, 1859, resolving that "the Fugitive Slave Law [is] . . . unconstitutional, Anti-

Christian and unjust, and therefore without any moral obligation upon the people of the

United States." An Erie County mass meeting found the rescuers were "charged with

no other crime than making a practical application of the Golden Rule."  Cleveland

Leader, May 20, 31, 1859.

57 Speaking at Jefferson, State Senator Darius Caldwell said: "Do we look upon

these men as criminals? No! . . . Which of you will not say with me, I would have

done it, and as God is my helper, I will do it whenever an opportunity presents

itself." State Representative Kellogg on March 7, 1859, declared the question was

one which reduced itself to "whether a few slave holders" were to be permitted to

"place the iron hand of despotism upon the necks of the free men and women of

Ohio, especially of this Thermoplyae [sic] of Freedom, the Western Reserve." Cochran,

op. cit., 175-176. Defying the courts on this issue, Senator Ben Wade told the

Ashtabula Sons of Liberty that "if the Supreme Court of Ohio does not grant the

Habeas Corpus, the people of the Western Reserve must grant it-sword in hand, if

need be." Cleveland Plain Dealer, January 13, 1859.

58 Cleveland Leader, January 13, 1859.

59 Cleveland Plain Dealer, April 4, 1859.

60 Cochran, op. cit., 187.

40      OHIO ARCHAEOLOGICAL AND HISTORICAL QUARTERLY

the jail, and the Oberlin prisoners in the jail yard addressed the

meeting from behind their wall.

Together with Charles Tidd, a fellow member of John Brown's

band, Kagi made the acquaintance of several of the rescuers, re-

cruiting into the band the young Oberlin Negro John Anthony

Copeland, and his uncle, Lewis Sheridan Leary, and influencing two

others, Samuel and Ralph Plumb, to contribute money so that Cope-

land and Leary might get to Harper's Ferry.⁶¹ As the trial wore on,

Kagi and Tidd laid plans for a jail-break. Their plan did not be-

come necessary, however, for in June a judge in adjoining Lorain

County devised a face-saving solution of the troublesome case. The

four prosecution witnesses (the Kentucky agents and their local

accomplices) were indicted on charges of having kidnapped John

Price. Agreements not to prosecute were exchanged, and both sets

of defendants released. Escorted by five brass bands, the Cleveland

Artillery Company, and the Oberlin Hook and Ladder Company,

the rescuers were conveyed back to Oberlin.⁶²

One factor emerged in the Oberlin trial which may have been

a partial cause of John Brown's overestimation of the militancy of

the southern Negro. This was the militancy of the Negro on the

Reserve.63 Several of the Oberlin rescuers were Negroes, men ap-

parently of impressive personalities. Copeland, who participated in

the assault on the arsenal at Harper's Ferry, was characterized by

the presiding judge at the treason trial as "the prisoner who im-

pressed me best-there was a dignity about him I could not help

liking."⁶⁴ Another of the Negro defendants in the rescue trial made

a plea so eloquent in the midst of the trial, which Brown attended,

as to move one of the spectators to cry out, "By --, I had rather be

the negur [sic] that spoke first than that gentleman that spoke last."65

During the same period Cleveland Negroes attacked and nearly

lynched a Cincinnati slave catcher.66 All these happenings may have

61 Cleveland Leader, November 1, 1859.

62 Cochran, op. cit., 197-203.

63 William C. Cochran, speaking of a conversation he heard as a small boy

between his father and a Negro blacksmith recalled that "I never heard any one state

the objections to the Fugitive Slave Law more clearly and more elquently than this

colored man, who 'had no rights a white man was bound to respect.' " Cochran,

op. cit., 125.

64 Villard, op. cit., 684.

65 Cleveland Leader, May 13, 1859. The man in question, Charles H. Langston,

many years later gave the dedicatory address at the unveiling of the John Brown

monument at Osawatomie, Kansas, James Malin, John Brown and the Legend of

Fifty-six (Philadelphia, 1942), 354.

66 Cleveland Leader, November 14, 1859.

JOHN BROWN                         41

caused John Brown to universalize the characteristics of the Negroes

he knew on the Reserve.

Leaving Cleveland, where, as Cook related, the failure of the

marshal to arrest him was a decisive factor in his plans, Brown

went to Ashtabula County. There, in the district which Joshua Gid-

dings, Ben Wade, and the father of William Dean Howells had

made the hottest abolition territory in the state, John Brown sta-

tioned his son, John Brown, Jr. Young Brown was to direct men

coming in from Kansas to the Anderson farm in Virginia, where his

father and the band of eighteen men drilled in preparation for

Harper's Ferry. Together with "Grosh" Giddings, the congress-

man's son, Brown Jr. formed the Ashtabula League of Freedom, an

abolition society.⁶⁷ The members of the society knew of the plan

for Harper's Ferry and were a little scornful later of the indecent

haste with which New England liberals (who also knew of the plan)

attempted to disavow Brown. Under John Brown, Jr.'s direction,

the arms for the attack on the arsenal were stored in a cabinet-

maker's shop beneath a protective covering of coffins; after his

father was settled at the Anderson farm, the arms were quietly

transferred to Chambersburg, Pennsylvania, where someone from

the farm picked them up.

V

After the fiasco at Harper's Ferry, John Brown's first step in

preparing for trial was to turn to northern Ohio for legal defense.

Significantly, in writing to his good friend Judge Daniel Tilden of

Cleveland, he cautioned, "Do not send an ultra-abolitionist."68

Hiram Griswold, a middle-of-the-roader and one of the attorneys

for the Oberlin rescuers, went to Charlestown, where he presented

a defense which was regarded by Brown's first biographer as

"erudite and ingenious," but founded on an "atrocious assumption

-that the statutes of the state were just."⁶⁹ Cleveland Congressman

Albert Riddle, a writer of Gothic novels and an abolition attorney,

regretted ever after that he had not undertaken the assignment.⁷⁰

When it became apparent that a conviction was inevitable, a

67 Lampson, loc. cit.

68 Redpath, op. cit., 245.

69 Ibid., 239.

70 Albert G. Riddle, Recollections of War Times (New York, 1895), 3.

42      OHIO ARCHAEOLOGICAL AND HISTORICAL QUARTERLY

number of residents of Hudson and Akron engaged in a last-ditch

effort to save Brown.71 Professor Matthew C. Read, a geology pro-

fessor at Western Reserve College, hit upon the idea of stressing a

fact that was common knowledge, i. e., the insanity in Brown's

family on his mother's side and also, irrelevantly, through his first

wife, Dianthe. Professor Read secured many affidavits from friends

and relatives of the Brown family; they were assembled by Chris-

topher P. Wolcott, an Akron abolitionist and the brother-in-law of

Lincoln's secretary of war. The affidavits dragged out many family

skeletons but were of no ultimate value as Brown refused to allow

their use. Governor Wise of Virginia declared that he believed the

prisoner to be eminently sane, thereby ruling out either admission of

the affidavits or examination by an alienist.⁷²

The hanging of John Brown caused profound repercussions in

upper Ohio. Bells were tolled, flags lowered to half mast, black-

bordered banners flung across main streets, as in Cleveland where

across Superior Street was hung a large streamer bearing John

Brown's words, "I cannot better serve the cause I love than to die

for it.^"73 In Akron, banks, business places, and the court of common

pleas were closed. Memorial services were held throughout all the

little towns of upper Ohio, according to the sheriff of Akron.74

Defiances were flung not only at the slave power but at the federal

government itself, which "had allowed Southern despotism to be-

come lusty upon conciliation and compromise."⁷⁵ "The irrepressible

conflict is upon us," 1,400 persons at the Cleveland memorial meet-

ing declared, "and it will never end until Freedom or slavery go to

the wall. In such a contest and under such dire necessity we say

'without fear and without reproach' let freedom stand and the

Union be dissolved."76

Along with the mourning went much talk of effecting a rescue

and a great deal of muttering against the Buchanan administration.77

This talk, gathering momentum as it traveled east, caused wild

71 Lane, op. cit., 592.

72 Villard, op. cit., 490, 507-509.

73 Orth, op. cit., 295.

74 Lane, op. cit., 591.

75 A tribute of Respect Commemorative of the Worth and Sacrifice of John Brown

of Osawatomie: It Being a Full Report of the Speeches Made and Resolutions Adopted

by the Citizens of Cleveland . . . on the Evening of the Day on Which John Brown

Was Sacrificed by the Commonwealth of Virginia (Cleveland, 1859), 16.

76 Ibid., 8.

77 See Cleveland Leader throughout the month of November 1859.

JOHN BROWN                         43

rumors to spread through Charlestown and Richmond to the effect

that efforts were going to be made to rescue John Brown. The center

of the conspiracy was invariably said to be the northern Ohio aboli-

tion country.78 So alarming did the atmosphere become that on the

day of the execution the United States marshal at Cleveland tele-

graphed to Virginia that 1,000 men were arming there for a march

on Washington.⁷⁹ Both the Virginia government and President

Buchanan's administration responded to these rumors. A corre-

spondent of the Cincinnati Commercial on his way to cover the

execution fell in with Baltimore police scouts who had been sent

"to explore the abolition counties of Ohio in search of military

organizations set up to effect a rescue."⁸⁰ The Cleveland Leader

reported having learned from its Washington correspondent that

President Buchanan had ordered the arrest of Mrs. Amanda

Sturtevant of Cleveland, who had been visited by John Brown on

his March trip.⁸¹ Shortly after that, Dr. Daniel Breed was arrested

in Cleveland on charges of using "seditious language in reference

to the acts of John Brown at Harper's Ferry."82

The names of Oberlin and Ashtabula, with their abolitionist

relationships, became symbols of fear and hatred to the authorities

in Virginia. Attempting to make the trip from Harper's Ferry to

Charlestown, Ohio Congressman Blake was turned back for his own

safety when train guards learned he came from Oberlin.83 When

Oberlin's Professor James Monroe attempted to reach Charlestown

to reclaim the body of John Anthony Copeland-whose parents,

being Negroes, could not travel into Virginia-he was forced to

state that he came from "Russia" in order to reach his destination.84

Much of the rescue talk revolved about Ashtabula County

where John Brown, Jr., and "Old War Horse" Giddings lived.

When John Brown's carpetbag was opened and letters to several

members of the Ashtabula League of Freedom were found therein,

the suspicion increased.85 Attempts were made to bring the Ashta-

78 Wing, op. cit., 26.

79 Villard, op. cit., 490, 507-509.

80 Murat Halstead, "The Execution of John Brown," in Ohio State Archaeological

and Historical Quarterly, XXX (1921), 290.

81 Cleveland Leader, November 3, 1859.

82 Ibid., November 23, 1859.

83 Robert Fletcher, "John Brown and Oberlin," in Oberlin Alumni Magazine,

February 1932, 2.

84 Ibid. "Russia" was the name of the township in which Oberlin was situated.

85 Lampson, loc. cit.

44     OHIO ARCHAEOLOGICAL AND HISTORICAL QUARTERLY

bula accomplices--especially John Brown, Jr., and the King broth-

ers, who had concealed the arms for the attack in their shop-before

the Mason investigating committee in the senate. Hearing of this,

a secret group was formed in Ashtabula a few days after John

Brown's capture.86 Led by John Brown, Jr., and "Grosh" Giddings,

and composed of members of the League of Freedom, the members

bound themselves by oath never to reveal any information they

might have relating to the raid. Immediately the group organized

itself to prevent the serving of subpoenas upon any of their mem-

bers. During the 46 days which intervened between the attack on

the arsenal and John Brown's hanging, watches were kept in and

around the county seat at Jefferson. Each sentry used a tin horn

to warn of the approach of federal officers. Members wore black

strings or black tapes in their lapels for identification and have

been known, in the memoirs of county antiquarians, as "The Black

String Bands."

Chief target of the United States marshal was John Brown, Jr.,

who spent most of the 46 days hiding in the Ashtabula Sentinel

office, the editor, the father of the novelist William Dean Howells,

being a member of the inner abolitionist circle. A few days after

the raid four of the seven men who had been able to escape from

Harper's Ferry came into Jefferson. There they were hidden by

friends of the Black Stringers. Apparently the Jefferson atmosphere

was such that they did not have to keep under cover, for on the day

Hazlett and Aaron Stevens were hanged, Owen Brown and Barclay

Coppoc spoke to a large crowd from the porch of the old court-

house at Jefferson. The crowd cheered loudly as they vowed

vengeance on the slave power.87

Attempts to link John Brown and Congressman Joshua Gid-

dings continued in the proceedings of the Mason committee. It

was unearthed that John Brown had written Giddings twice during

the Kansas campaign, asking for reassurance that the federal gov-

ernment would not stop the Free State forces from defending their

rights. Later Giddings had invited Brown to Jefferson, where he

spoke at the Congregational Church and had tea with the congress-

man and his wife. The friendship of the sons of the two men was

86 Ibid.

87 Ibid.

JOHN BROWN                        45

known. Queried by Vallandigham, Brown turned aside the question

of Giddings' foreknowledge of Harper's Ferry with the cryptic

statement that he would not answer, "because a denial of it I

would not make and to make any affirmation of it I should be a

great dunce."⁸⁸ Correspondingly, Giddings, in a speech in Phila-

delphia, denied knowledge of the plan for Harper's Ferry but

avowed his acquaintance and sympathy with Brown and declared

that the murder of Brown's son in Kansas by border ruffians had

impelled the old man to make the raid.89 The Mason committee at

first implicated Giddings in the raid, but, upon being threatened

with a libel suit, withdrew the charge, retaining in its report only

the ideological attack that Giddings' "higher law" doctrine had

encouraged Brown to commit his deed.90

John Brown did not become a martyr in the North (except

among the abolitionists and a few of the transcendentalists like

Emerson and Thoreau) until well after the Civil War had begun

and a folk hero became a necessity. Northern Democratic news-

papers such as the New York Herald damned him as an "abolition

monomaniac."⁹¹ Republican newspapers, in an effort to disassociate

themselves from the raid, found, as did Horace Greeley's Tribune,

that "the prisoners in fact have no defense."⁹² The Republican party

made desperate efforts to rid itself of any implication in the raid,

condemning Brown's activities in its 1860 convention. Even that

leading opponent of the slavery forces, Senator Ben Wade himself,

went to great pains to convince the senate that the numerous me-

morial meetings for Brown in his home territory were "in admira-

tion of the personal qualities of the man; not one single man of

them stands forth to justify his nefarious and unwarranted act."93

In the Western Reserve, on the other hand, the canonization

process set in immediately. Not only the abolitionists, but clergy-

men, businessmen, judges, the Akron city administration, and the

leading newspapers of Cleveland-the Leader-and of Akron-the

Beacon-saw by execution day that a new saint had arisen. Sermons

were preached in which John Brown was likened to a second John

88 New York Herald, October 21, 1859.

89 George W. Julian, The Life of Joshua R. Giddings (Chicago, 1892), 370.

90 Ibid., 371.

91 October 19, 1859.

92 October 25, 1859.

93 Congressional Globe, 36 cong., 1 sess., 142.

46     OHIO ARCHAEOLOGICAL AND HISTORICAL QUARTERLY

the Baptist, "whose daring honesty must constitute a halo of glory

around his gallows and his grave in the midst of this Janus-faced,

time-serving, go-between generation."⁹⁴ In Cleveland, in addition

to the funeral services at the various churches, there were three

memorial meetings, one for Brown, one for John Cook and the

Negro John Anthony Copeland, and one for Edward Coppoc, a

Quaker lad from Salem, Ohio, and Shields Green, a Negro. In

addition a special fund-raising meeting for the widows of the men

who died was held.⁹⁵ At the Brown meeting Judge Tilden and Judge

Spaulding spoke, together with Congressman Albert Riddle. All

agreed in evaluating Brown as a "red-visaged angel of retributive

wrath."⁹⁶ In Akron, Mayor Lucius Verus Bierce and Sheriff Samuel

Lane spoke in the same vein.⁹⁷ The Akron Beacon declared of John

Brown, "No braver or truer spirit lived."⁹⁸

Among the clergymen the martyrdom was noted immediately.

Reverend Luther Lee, speaking at the Chagrin Falls Congregational

Church, declared as follows: "John Brown differed from others in

that he alone dared to live up to the American idea of human rights

and liberty-John Brown was a hero and a Christian. Now he is a

martyr."⁹⁹ The Reverend James Thome, speaking at Hudson, where

many members of the Brown family still lived, said: "For our-

selves we see no sign of hallucination or infatuation in John Brown.

We esteem him as the Wise Man of our times."¹⁰⁰ In Cleveland the

Reverend A. Crooks made a scriptural analogy, reading from

Isaiah: "He that departeth from evil maketh himself a prey," and

deduced that John Brown was a prey of the slave power and the

snivelling national administration.101 And the Reverend J. C. White,

speaking at the Cleveland memorial meeting, blessed John Brown's

deed: "The great sinful system of American slavery will never be

overthrown by pacific means. 'Without the shedding of blood,'

there can be no remission of such a sin.^"102

94 Luther Lee, Dying to the Glory of God. A Sermon Preached on the Occasion

of the Execution of Captain John Brown, in the Congregational Church at Chagrin

falls, Ohio (Syracuse, 1860).

95 Cleveland Leader, December 19, 23, 27, 1859.

96 A Tribute of Respect, 35.

97 Lane, op. cit., 842.

98 Quoted in Malin, op. cit., 280.

99 Lee, op. cit., 3.

100 Oberlin Evangelist, December 8, 1859.

101 A Tribute of Respect, 39.

102 Ibid, 37.

JOHN BROWN                        47

While most northern Ohio newspapers reacted to the news of

Harper's Ferry in line with their general political allegiance, the

Leader, a Cleveland Republican party organ and the dominant

Cleveland newspaper for the rest of the century, departed consider-

ably from the position taken by the other Republican journals in

the country. The Leader's first reaction on October 19 was to insist

that "the correct version of Harper's Ferry will probably be that

Osawatomie Brown and his associates contemplated a considerable

stampede of slaves"-a larger version of the Missouri raids, the

Leader seemed to imply. It found that in the case of "Captain

Brown, well known to many in this region-a consuming hatred of

the exploitation of man by man had harried an old, brave but

misguided citizen into acts the whole country will deplore." From

its judgment of "misguided citizen" Brown, the Leader went on to

find, on November 3: "He [Brown] will be murdered. James

Buchanan, if justice had its due, would be placed in Captain

Brown's place and hung for the reason that he allowed the murder

of Captain Brown's children to go unpunished." Throughout

November the Leader kept up its attack on President Buchanan.

On December 1 it announced: "Tomorrow will be a day of terror

in Virginia"; and on execution day it rendered the final judgment:

"John Brown-a human sacrifice to slavery-on the lips of free

men, a name canonized."

VI

The object of this treatment has not been to render judgment

as to John Brown's character or to imply that he was not moved,

in many ways, by inner passions. It has merely been to suggest

that there was another side to his nature, an outward side, which

turned toward his family, his friends, even toward strangers in

that vast web of anger at chattel slavery which spread over certain

areas in the North. John Brown derived strength from these fellow

participants in a common hatred. Contemptuous as he was of the

Garrisonian circle, who, he thought, only "talked" opposition to

slavery, so proportionately must his direct-actionist soul have been

impressed by those Ohio farmers, students, theology professors,

churchgoers, and politicians, who did not hesitate to "knock down"

a "slave-catcher," threaten a federal marshal, or bring out a hook

and ladder company in honor of the local abolitionists.