JOHN BROWN IN OHIO
An Interview with Charles S. S.
Griffing
edited by Louis FILLER
Assistant Professor of American
Civilization, Antioch College
John Brown's Ohio years merit continued
study. In view of
the fact that a serious shadow has been
cast over his intentions and
activities in Kansas by a formidable
historian,1 it is evident that the
Ohio period may be crucial in any
ultimate evaluation of Brown's
role and personality. Mary Land's
article, "John Brown's Ohio
Environment," in the January 1948
issue of this Quarterly consti-
tutes a supplement to Charles B.
Galbreath's work in the field, which,
however, she does not appear to have
used.2 Unfortunately, John
Brown's precise relationship to the
undoubtedly strong antislavery
forces in Ohio, and his reputation, if
any, with his antislavery
neighbors independent of his exploits
in Kansas and at Harper's
Ferry, still remain largely circumstantial and have yet to be
firmly
established.
There is need for a clearer
understanding than some students
seem to manifest of the seriousness of
the charges against Brown.
It is often granted that Brown was
guilty of "cold-blooded murder"
at Potawatomie; but the edge of this
accusation is as often blunted
by emphasis upon Brown as a
"fanatic"-that is, as one over-
whelmed by the urgency of his crusade.
The sense of both the
Warren and Malin analyses is to impugn
Brown's sincerity and
thereby the integrity of his actions.3
1 James C. Malin, John Brown and the
Legend of Fifty-six (Philadelphia, 1942).
See also Robert P. Warren, John
Brown; the Making of a Martyr (New York, 1930),
in which the psychological approach is
maintained to Brown's detriment.
2 Charles B. Galbreath "John
Brown" and "Anti-slavery Movement in Columbi-
ana County," Ohio State
Archaeological and Historical Quarterly, XXX (1921), 184-289;
355-396. A variety of other material
connecting John Brown to antislavery in Ohio
makes this volume of particular value;
the reference to it made further on in the
present writing does not exhaust its
pertinent contents. Miss Land's article, though
involving original research, is not
always careful with respect to details. Thus, she
repeats the story that Missouri offered
a reward of $3,000 for Brown's capture, a
story which seems to have been
decisively refuted by Floyd C. Shoemaker. See his
"John Brown's Missouri Raid," Missouri
Historical Review, XXVI (1931-32) 78-82.
3 The Malin analysis is particularly
long and exhaustive, and there is reason to
fear that not all students who are
presumed to have an acquaintance with it have
trudged its weary road to the end. A
brief summary of its method and conclusions with
respect to Brown may be found in Malin, Essays
on Historiography (Lawrence, Kans.,
1946), 153 et seq.
213
214
OHIO ARCHAEOLOGICAL AND HISTORICAL
QUARTERLY
The opinions of respectable personages
in relation to Brown
must be carefully weighed. The
difficulty with Thoreau's plea for
his "character,"4 for
instance, is that Thoreau did not know enough
about Brown to discuss him with
authority. He assumed that Brown
was what Brown seemed; but his actual
acquaintance with Brown
was meagre, to say the least. The same
is true of other distinguished
witnesses to Brown's uprightness and
disinterestedness in behalf
of the Negro and antislavery. A witness,
therefore, who could
speak from personal knowledge of Brown
but from a position which
relieved him of a need for supporting or
defending Brown, could
throw important light on a significant
question.
Charles S. S. Griffing is such a
witness. He can today probably
be best identified as the husband of
Josephine S. Griffing, feminist,
abolitionist, and founder of the
Freedman's Bureau, whose own
career has received inadequate
attention.5 It cannot be denied,
however, that Griffing was himself an
ardent antislavery worker and
temperance advocate and with his wife
fought the good fight in
Ohio, as an associate of Marius R.
Robinson, and elsewhere.6 That
he was a temperance fanatic can be
readily conceded, his views not
being markedly different in kind from
those of other reformers of
his type.7 His honesty in the ordinary sense,
however, seems
evident; his was the rectitude usually
associated with the anti-
slavery "apostles." In point
of fact, his memories of John Brown,
which have been culled from the Griffing
Scrapbooks deposited in
the Manuscript Division of the Columbia
University Library, and
which appeared in the Cincinnati
Enquirer, June 18, 1879, agree
very well with the known facts of John
Brown's Ohio years. There
are relatively trifling errors which can
be ascribed to the defects of
memory or to error on the part of the
interviewer "Caliban." But
it is significant that Griffing speaks
for active Ohio abolitionists,
who had special reason for
distinguishing between active and in-
4 Henry
D. Thoreau, Writings (Riverside ed., 10 vols., Cambridge, 1894), X, 234.
5 The sketch of her career in the Dictionary
of American Biography is based upon
scanty passages in Elizabeth Cady
Stanton and others, History of Woman Suffrage (3
vols., Rochester, 1881-87) and several
other works, as well as family information.
6 For material relating to their joint
careers, see the Griffing Scrapbooks, Manu-
script Division, Columbia University
Library. In 1854, Griffing was involved in the
Salem Rescue, described in Galbreath,
"Anti-slavery Movement in Columbiana County,"
380 et seq.
7 See his Christianity Not a
Temperance Religion. Jesus of Nazareth Did Not
Institute the Eucharist, Nor Make Wine
at a Wedding Feast. A New Departure by the
Church Necessary and Practical. As
Maintained in an Address by C. S. S. Griffing, at
Columbus, Ohio, July 26th, 1876 (Columbus, 1879).
JOHN BROWN IN OHIO 215
active, sincere and
insincere, antislavery
partisans. Moreover,
Griffing lacked family or other personal
ties with Brown, such as
prejudiced Professor James C. Malin
against other witnesses to
Brown's antislavery fervor in Ohio.
Griffing's testimony respecting
John Brown's antislavery proclivities,
therefore, becomes a sub-
stantial part of the Ohio record:
JOHN BROWN'S MEN
An Old Associate of Theirs in the
Anti-Slavery Movement
Relates Some New Facts About Them.
Special Correspondence of the
Enquirer
COLUMBUS, June 17, 1879.
I lately met one of the old band of Ohio
Liberators, or Liberty men,
as they preferred to call themselves-the
men who, twenty-five or thirty years
ago, helped to manage the underground
railroad between slavery and freedom,
or, geographically speaking, between
Kentucky and Virginia soil and Canada.
This gentleman was Mr. Charles S. S.
Griffing, now of Pittsburg, formerly,
however, of Columbiana County. I had
known him for many years, but
either his modesty or my stupidity had
never brought out the fact that he
was an historical character in having
been one of the small band of original
Abolitionist [sic] who fought
slavery on the husting as far back as 1844
when Birney was a candidate for the
Presidency against Henry Clay on the
anti-slavery principle. He is an
intelligent man of sixty, perhaps, and the
way having been once opened to
reminiscence he becomes one of the most
interesting talkers I ever met. He
fought the anti-slavery battles of those
days along with Parker Pillsbury,
William Lloyd Garrison, John and Oliver
Brown, Sojourner Truth, and a score of
others whose names are not lost
from history.
THE PIONEERS OF THE MOVEMENT
"Ours was a little band in those
days," said Mr. Griffing, "but we stuck
well together, and kept fighting for the
right as we viewed it. And we had
the satisfaction of seeing it triumph in
the end."
"Did you know John Brown
personally?"
"Very well. He was one of our band
long before he went to Kansas,
and while he was living out there he
often came back to the Reserve. I re-
member one time he came back with a
horse8 that he had 'taken' he called it,
though stolen others would have said,
from a pro-slavery man in Missoury.
That horse was sold at auction on the
street in Cleveland. There was no
attempt to keep secret how he got it. It
was perfectly understood that
the money he got for it was to help old
John in his fight then against the
Border Ruffians in Kansas."
8 Should be "horses." The
incident occurred in the spring of 1859.
216
OHIO ARCHAEOLOGICAL AND HISTORICAL QUARTERLY
"What is your estimate of Old John
Brown?"
"He was as brave a man as ever drew
breath. He was eccentric, but
not crazy. He had a consuming idea in
life, and that was to free the black
man. He had no other aim. When we used
to campaign through the Reserve,
we had two kinds of men-men of words and
men of action. Parker Pills-
bury was a man of words; no man who ever
lived could speak more bitterly
of the cause of slavery or eloquently of
freedom than he. John Brown was
a man of action; no one would brave
greater perils or incur more risks to
lead a black man from slavery to freedom
than he. I've seen him come in
at night with [a] gang of five or six
blacks that he had piloted all the way
from the river, hide them away in the
stables maybe, or the garret, and if
anybody was following he would keep them
stowed away for weeks. He
would appear on the streets without
saying a word to any one about it. But
let any slaveholder discover the whereabouts
of his charges and attempt to
take them back, and he would fight like
a lion.
JOHN BROWN'S PLAN OF CAMPAIGN
"What of his military
abilities?"
"I think he hadn't much of military
ability. He had seen the rough
and tumble of pioneer life and knew what
it was to fight from every point.
But still he didn't know anything of the
science of war. He got a lot of
pikes made down at Troy, New York. Of
what account could they be to
him? Pikes are a weapon of a former
generation, and a darky would be
just as formidable with a pitchfork in
his hand as a pike. But still his cam-
paign is not so chimerical as many
people think. You see, he was was [sic]
forced to make his move on Harper's
Ferry a week sooner than he had
intended to. He hadn't fixed up his arrangement
with the blacks yet and
he was driven like a rat into a hole
there at Harper's Ferry. His original
plan was to move with his force down the
Blue Ridge, giving the slaves
their freedom as he went along, and
adding the men to his little army. He
intended to make a track South about
thirty miles wide, running right
through to salt water; then with that to
start from, he would move both east
and west, gathering in the slaves, but
killing none of the whites unless he
had to."
"When did you see John Brown last
before his execution?"
"He was out in Ashtabula County. I
think it was in April or May of
that year, 1858 [1859]; then he was up
in Portage County some time in the
summer. That was the last time I saw him
alive."
"Did you know others of his band?"
"Yes, several of them. I knew
Realf, who was their Secretary of State,
as he was called. I knew the Coppic9
brothers, both of them. One escaped,
but the other was hanged, and after he
was hanged we brought his body
back to Columbiana County, where they
had lived, and buried it at Salem.
9 The interviewer consistently
misspelled "Coppoc."
JOHN BROWN IN OHIO 217
Never have I seen, before or since, a
funeral where there was such a crowd
or so much feeling. His grave is marked
by a monument now."10
JOHN BROWN'S FAMILY
"Did you know other members of the
Brown family, Mr. Griffing? I
have been told that all of them were
extraordinary characters?"
"Yes, I knew them well. His son
John, who now lives at Put-in-Bay,
is much like his father in resolution
and taciturnity. Own [sic] Brown, the
one who used to be on Jay Cooke's
Island, was wounded and taken prisoner
in the Kansas troubles. He had to endure
a great deal of suffering, and I
expect it injured him somewhat. But
there was a brother of old John-
that was Oliver- who was a strange
character."
"Was he an Abolitionist, too?"
"Oh, yes. They were all Liberty
men. Oliver was the most original,
perhaps, of them all. He used to live up
in Geauga County. He burned a
pulpit there once, I very well
remember."
"How was that?"11
"Well, it was in the country there,
and at the time we were making
our anti-slavery fight. Oliver had got a
big farm and on one corner of it
a little church had been built for
neighborhood worship. It was really on
his land as no deed had ever been made
transferring it to the little congre-
gation who worshiped there. The church
people were not disposed to share
it with us Abolitionists on equal terms,
though it was built with the under-
standing that it should be for joint
use. One Sunday afternoon we had ar-
ranged to have an anti-slavery meeting
there, and when we arrived we found
the preacher holding forth. Oliver Brown
didn't like this, and asked the
preacher to vacate, but he wouldn't do
it. Then we went out in the yard and
held our meeting, and soon had most of
the congregation with us. The
preacher announced that he would preach
again next Sunday, but Oliver
determined he shouldn't. So during the
week he run a fence around it, a
rail fence, not very high, but still
high enough to turn stock. Sunday
morning he was the first man to get in
the church. He took with him a
basketful of bowlders and two or three
good clubs and prepared to hold
the fort. About ten o'clock the
congregation began to arrive in their wagons
and buggies. When they saw that fence
they commenced to get mad, and
it wasn't five minutes before it was
swept away. But when they got to the
door it was locked. Going around to the
window they saw Oliver in there,
with hymn-book in hand, marching up and
down the aisle singing: "Far
from my Thoughts Vain World
Begone." They called to him to let them
10 The interviewer here interjected a
reminiscence by someone else respecting
Barclay Coppoc, who escaped, which does not bear on the
subject and appears ob-
viously apocryphal. The paragraph is
therefore not reproduced here.
11 The incident is substantiated in a
letter by John Brown, Jr., to Frank B.
Sanborn, dated January 8, 1884, which is
in the possession of Mr. Boyd B. Stutler,
an authority on John Brown. The present
writer wishes to acknowledge the courtesy
of Mr. Stutler in sending him a copy of
this letter, as well as in providing stimulating
suggestions and ideas.
218
OHIO ARCHAEOLOGICAL AND HISTORICAL QUARTERLY
in but he took no notice of them. Then
they commenced to batter away at
the door, when he with a loud voice
warned them to leave him alone, that
he was worshiping in his own house and
his own way and would not be
disturbed. Still they tried to get in,
but he pointed to his armament of
clubs and stone, and they stopped for
the time. In the afternoon, however,
they got into the church, and that made Oliver
so mad he vowed he would
burn the pulpit 'with fire and
brim-stone.' The next day, toward sunset, I
came along there, and sure enough he had
loosened the pulpit from the
floor and dragged it out in the yard,
and was just about to set fire to it.
Several of the neighbors had gathered
there, but none of them were willing
to have a difficulty with Oliver, and he
set it on fire. While it was burning,
a little old man who felt wrought up by
it brought out the pulpit Bible and
asked him why he didn't burn it as well.
'If you want to burn your Bible,
neighbor, just throw it in there,'
replied Oliver; 'but I won't do it, because
I have nothing against the Bible. If it
will give you any comfort, just
throw it on.' After he had burned the
pulpit we had no more trouble about
getting the use of the church. They had
preaching there and we had our
anti-slavery meetings, but there was no
conflict afterward."
I could go on with many more anecdotes of the Brown family, as told
by Mr. Griffing, but space will not
permit at this time.
CALIBAN