USA > Connecticut > Litchfield County > Torrington > History of Torrington, Connecticut, from its first settlement in 1737, with biographies and genealogies > Part 35
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After this fitting speech, which reminds one of John Stark at Bun- ker Hill and Bennington, Brown sent his small force to the few forts and breastworks about the town, and ordered all the men who had the far-shooting Sharpe's rifle - then a new weapon - to go out upon the prairie, half a mile south of the town, where by this time the invading horsemen could be seen, two miles off. After a halt for reconnoitering purposes, the enemy made an advance upon Brown's left, and came within half a mile of his advance guard, just as the sun was setting. Under cover of the dusk some of them came nearer, but the discharge of a few Sharpe's rifles, and the approach of a brass twelve pounder cannon, which Brown ordered up to support his riflemen, caused the enemy to turn their horses and retreat, with- out any further attempt to take the town. Captain Brown's own modest account of this affair, in which he saved Lawrence from de- struction, is as follows :
" I know well that on or about the 14th of September, 1856, a large force of Missourians and other ruffians, said by Gov. Geary to be two thousand seven hundred in number, invaded the territory, burned Franklin, and while the smoke of that place was going up behind them, they, on the same day, made their appearance in full view of, and within about a mile of Lawrence ; and I know of no reason why they did not attack that place, except that about one hun- dred free state men volunteered to go out, and did go out on the open plain before the town, and give them the offer of a fight ; which, after getting scat- tering shots from our men, they declined, and retreated back towards Franklin. I saw that whole thing. The government troops at this time were at Lecomp- ton, a distance of twelve miles only from Lawrence, with Gov. Geary ; and yet, notwithstanding runners had been despatched to advise him, in good time, of the setting out and approach of the enemy (who had to march some forty miles to reach Lawrence), he did not, on that memorable occasion, get a single soldier on the ground until the enemy had retreated to Franklin, and been gone for more than five hours. This is the way he saved Lawrence."
I A small town five miles southeast of Lawrence.
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Being asked who commanded the Lawrence men, Brown at first evaded the question, as if he did not understand it ; when asked a second time, he replied, "No one - that he had himself been re- quested to take command, but refused, and only acted as their adviser." It was by his advice, however, that the town was saved. When that was achieved, its deliverer was hunted out of Kansas by the very troops of the federal government which had neglected to prevent the Missouri invasion. He left Lawrence for northern Kansas before the 20th of September, traveling with his four sons, and with a fugitive slave whom he picked up on the way. The old hero was sick, as he often was, and travelled slowly ; appearing to be a land surveyor on a journey. He had a light wagon in which he rode, with his surveyor's instruments ostentatiously in sight ; a cow was tied behind the wagon, and inside, covered up in a blanket, was the fugitive slave. Sometimes he pitched his camp at night near the dragoons who were ordered to arrest him, but who little suspected that the formidable fighter was so near them in the guise of a feeble old man. At Plymouth, not far from the Nebraska border, Mr. Redpath, in one of his journey's through the territory, found him lying ill in a log hut, while his four sons were camped near by. A few hours after, the dragoons, hearing he was so near them, came up to arrest him, but he had crossed the border into Nebraska, and was out of their reach. He went forward till he came to Tabor in Iowa, not far northeast of Nebraska City, and there remained among friends for two or three weeks, in Octo- ber and November. In the latter month he reached Chicago, and made himself known to the National Kansas Committee, which then had head quarters in that city. Afterwards he traveled eastward, to Ohio, to Peterboro, N. Y., where he visited his friend Gerrit Smith, to Albany and Springfield, and finally to Boston, where I first saw him in the early part of January, 1857.
As John Brown, in the autumn of 1856, passed northward through Kansas, Nebraska and Iowa, retreating slowly and painfully out of the land he had so stoutly defended, he left behind him the recent grave of one of his six sons, murdered at Osawatomie. Another son had been a prisoner and a maniac, driven wild by his hardships ; a third son was shockingly wounded, and so was Henry Thompson, the husband of his beloved eldest daughter, Ruth. His whole family had been stripped of their little property, and the father himself was destitute. So scanty was his wardrobe that he wore at Osawatomie on the 30th of August the same garments that he had almost worn
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out in the fight of Black Jack on the 2d of June. He had been waging war at his own cost and risk ; and though the anti-slavery men of the north had given money by the hundred thousand dollars, to aid the Kansas farmers in their fight with slavery, scarcely a dollar of this had reached the man who could best have used it. But he had made himself known to his countrymen for what he was, and began to draw to him that admiration and love which has now become his portion forever. Afflictions, though neither light, nor for a moment, were working out for him, as the Apostle promises, "a far more ex- ceeding and eternal weight of glory." Of this he had himself some intimation, vouchsafed him, doubtless, by that Infinite Wisdom, which has ordered and foreordained all that eternity can bring to pass. " After brother John's return from Kansas," said Jeremiah Brown, " he called on me in Ohio, and I urged him to go home to his family and attend to his private affairs; saying that I feared his course would prove his own destruction, and that of his boys. He replied that he was sorry I did not sympathize with him ; that he knew he was in the line of his duty, and must pursue it, though it should destroy him and his family ; that he was satisfied he was a chosen instrument in the hands of God to war against slavery." This faith had sustained him in Kansas, and it was to sustain him in his more perilous work hereafter.
When John Brown first called on me in Boston, in January 1857, bringing a letter of introduction from my brother-in-law, Mr. George Walker of Springfield, he was in his 57th year, and, though touched with age and its infirmities, was still vigorous and active, and of an aspect which would have made him distinguished anywhere among men who know how to recognize courage and greatness of mind. At that time he was close shaven, and no flowing beard, as in later years, softened the force of his firm, wide mouth and his positive chin. That beard, long and gray, which nearly all his portraits now show, and by which he will be recognized hereafter, added a picturesque finish to a face that was in all its features severe and masculine, yet with a latent tenderness in them. His eyes were a piercing blue-gray. not very large, looking out from under brows
" Of dauntless courage and considerate pride."
His hair was dark brown sprinkled with gray, short and bristling, and shooting back from a forehead of middle height and breadth ; his nose was aquiline, his ears were large, his frame angular, his voice deep and metallic, his walk positive and intrepid, though somewhat slow. His manner was modest, and in a large company even diffident ; he was by
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no means fluent of speech, but his words were always to the point, and his observations original, direct, and shrewd. His mien was serious and patient rather than cheerful ; it betokened the "sad wise valor" which Herbert praises ; but, though earnest and almost anxious, it was never depressed. In short, he was then, to the eye of insight, what he afterwards seemed to the world, a brave and resolved man, con- scious of a work laid upon him, and confident that he should ac- complish it. His figure was tall, slender and commanding, his bearing military, and his garb showed a singular blending of the soldier and the deacon. He had laid aside in Chicago the torn and faded sum- mer garments which he wore throughout his campaigns, and I saw him at one of those rare periods in his life when his clothes were new. He wore a complete suit of brown broadcloth or kerseymere, cut in the fashion of a dozen years before, and giving him the air of a re- spectable deacon in a rural parish. But instead of a collar he had on a high stock of patent leather, such as soldiers used to wear, a gray military overcoat with a cape, similar to that afterwards worn in the Confederate army, and a fur cap. He was, in fact, a Puritan soldier, such as were common enough in Cromwell's day, but have not often been seen since. Yet his heart was averse to bloodshed, gentle, ten- der and devout.
It was my privilege, and for a young man of twenty-six certainly an undeserved good fortune, to make Captain Brown acquainted with famous men who then allowed me the honor of their friendship. I took him to the hospitable home of Theodore Parker, in Exeter place Boston, where he met William Lloyd Garrison and Wendell Phillips ; I introduced him to that chivalrous man, the late Dr. Howe ; and a few months later I brought him to Concord and made him acquainted with Emerson, Thoreau and Alcott. Upon all these men he made a profound impression, which several of them have since declared to the world, when his fame seemed to need the voice of a friend, and before the echoes of his renown silenced the murmurs that the act of a hero so often awakens. I find among my papers a letter of Dr. Howe's sent me from New York early in 1859, when Howe and Theodore Parker were about sailing on that voyage from which only one of them returned. It was intended to introduce Brown to our friend Mr. John M. Forbes, but, for some accidental reason was never so used, and has never been published. Here it is :
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" NEW YORK, Feb. 5, '59.
" DEAR SIR :
If you would like to hear an honest, brave, keen and veteran backwoods- man disclose some plans for delivering our lands from the curse of slavery, the bearer will do so.
I think I know him well ; he is of the Puritan militant order. He is an enthusiast, yet cool, keen and cautious He has a martyr's spirit. He will ask nothing of you but the pledge that you keep to yourself what he may say. Faithfully yours,
John M. Forbes, Esq.
S. G. HOWE."
"He will ask nothing of you, but the pledge that you keep to your- self what he may say." This was, in fact, the attitude of John Brown towards his friends after he returned to the eastern states from his first Kansas campaign, but should they be moved by what he said to give him money, or to enlist in his company, for perpetual and active warfare upon slavery, he welcomed the recruit and ex- pressed his thanks to the contributor. In 1857, when I first saw him, although his Virginia plans were already formed, and had been for many years, he said nothing of them, but talked of Missouri and Kansas. His immediate purpose was to raise a troop of horse, a hundred men, who might retaliate upon Missouri slave-holders for the raids they had been making into Kansas.
In 1859, when Dr. Howe wrote to Mr. Forbes, Brown had dis- closed to a few of us, his Virginia scheme, in all its main features, though not with full details. But the Missouri plan and the Vir- ginia plan were at heart the same, their object being to make slave holding unsafe, and to give the slave a chance to fight for his free- dom under rigid discipline, and not in the wild tumult of an insur- rection. This very policy of John Brown's was adopted in 1861 by Gen. Fremont, in 1862 by Abraham Lincoln, and in 1863-4, by Secretary Stanton, after pressure from Gov. Andrew of Massachu- setts and other earnest men in all parts of the north. It was the policy that finally overcame the rebellion, and put an end to the long civil war. John Brown led the way in this policy, and the great heart of the people, wiser in its impulses than the statesmen in their coun- cils, early responded to the appeal that John Brown had made. Nothing else than this made the name and fate of Brown the watch- word and rallying song of our armies. Hardly had the civil war begun in good earnest, when a regiment of Massachusetts soldiers with a son of Daniel Webster at their head, came marching up State street (where, ten years before, fugitive slaves were dragged
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back to bondage, under the flag of the United States), startling the echoes of Boston with the new song :
John Brown's body lies mouldering in the grave, John Brown's body lies mouldering in the grave, John Brown's body lies mouldering in the grave, But his soul's marching on.
Glory, glory, hallelujah ! Glory, glory, hallelujah ! Glory, glory, hallelujah ! His soul's marching on.
John Brown's knapsack is strapped upon his back, And his soul's marching on.
He's gone to be a soldier in the army of the Lord, His soul is marching on."
The words were wild and rude, nobody knew whence they came, nor from what pious soul the devout, militant melody first sounded forth; but there they were, the rough, earnest words, the martial air, wedded in one strain of popular music and sung by a million voices. It was the requiem and the resurrection hymn of a hero, sounding from the roused heart of the people, as the forest murmur rises when mountain winds stir the branches of oak and pine on a thousand hill- tops of New England.
But I am anticipating the course of history, just as my brave old friend did. His special errand to me, in 1857, and to the Massa- chusetts Kansas committee, of which I was then secretary, was to provide at once for the defence of Kansas by carrying the war into the enemy's country. During the month of January, and indeed, in a few days after he reached Boston, he formed the acquaintance of the men there whom he wished to consult, of Mr. George L. Stearns, Dr. Cabot, Theodore Parker, Amos A. Lawrence, Judge Russell, Dr. Howe, Mr. Garrison, and all who were then conspicuous in maintain- ing the cause of the Kansas pioneers. His desire was to obtain control of some two hundred Sharpe's rifles, belonging to the Massachusetts committee, with which to arm a force of a hundred men for the pur- pose of defending Kansas and making excursions, if necessary into Missouri and other slave states. Keeping his Virginia plan in mind, he yet did not communicate it to any person in Massachusetts for more than a year; only taking pains to say that with the arms, money, and clothing that he might get for his company, he should act on his own responsibility, without taking orders from any com-
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mittee. With this understanding, and having great confidence in him, the Massachusetts committee, on the 8th of January, 1857, gave him an order for taking possession of the two hundred rifles, with their belongings, then stored at Tabor, in the southwestern part of Iowa. This order did not authorize him to make any use of the arms, though it appropriated five hundred dollars for his expenses in getting possession of them ; and it was not until April 11, three months later, that a vote was passed allowing Captain Brown to sell a hun- dred of the rifles to free state inhabitants of Kansas. At the same time another sum of five hundred dollars was voted him, to be used " for the relief of persons in Kansas." The arms thus placed at his disposal were a part of those afterwards carried by him to Harper's Ferry, and, as the true nature of the transaction by which they came, honestly, into his possession for use in Virginia, has never been well understood, it may here be explained.
In the winter of 1855-56 a large subscription was collected in Boston by Dr. Samuel Cabot and others, expressly for the purchase of arms for Kansas settlers. With this money a hundred Sharpe's rifles and some other arms were purchased by Dr. Cabot and for- warded to Kansas early in 1856. These, however, were no part of the arms of Captain Brown, which were purchased by the Massa- chusetts State Kansas Committee in the autumn of 1856, and for- warded, through the National Committee, having its head-quarters at Chicago, by the Iowa and Nebraska route to Kansas. The two hundred rifles never seem to have got farther than Tabor, where they ยท were lying when Captain Brown made his exit from Kansas by that route, in November. On reaching Chicago, soon after, he appears to have made application to Messrs. George W. Dole, J. D. Web- ster (afterwards General Webster, of General Grant's staff), and Henry B. Hurd, the Chicago members of the National Committee, for the custody of the rifles at Tabor. This application was not granted, perhaps because the committee distrusted Captain Brown, per- haps because they recognized the Massachusetts committee as owners of the arms. The Chicago committee did afterwards, however, lay claim to the control of these rifles ; and one reason for the Massa- chusetts vote of January 8, 1857, above alluded to, was to place them in the hands of a man who had shown his ability to protect whatever was in his custody. Before taking actual possession of them, Captain Brown attended a full meeting of the National Com- mittee at the Astor House in New York, January 22-25, 1857, for
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the purpose of securing an appropriation from that committee for his company of minute-men; and, in order to settle the question, which of the two committees controlled the rifles at Tabor, he made a re- quest for those arms as a part of the appropriation. This request was vehemently opposed by Mr. Hurd of Chicago, who expressed great anxiety lest Brown should make incursions into Missouri or other slave states. Mr. F. B. Sanborn, who represented Massachusetts at the Astor House meeting, as proxy for Drs. Cabot and Howe, supported the application of Captain Brown, which was viewed with favor by a majority of the meeting. As a final compromise, it was voted that the rifles at Tabor should be restored to the Massachusetts committee, to be disposed of as they should think best ; and that an appropriation of several thousand dollars, in money and clothing, should be made to Captain Brown's company by the National Com- mittee. This left the Massachusetts committee at liberty to use their own property as they saw fit, and they then gave Captain Brown undisputed possession of the arms, subject, however, to future votes of the Boston committee. In point of fact, though this was not known to the committee till a year later, the rifles were brought from Tabor to Ohio in the year 1857, and remained there till they were sent to Chambersburg by John Brown, Jr., in July, 1859, for use at Harper's Ferry. During the year 1857, the expen- ditures of the Massachusetts committee for the relief of the famine in Kansas were very large ; and, as advances of money were made by the chairman (Mr. George L. Stearns, a wealthy merchant of Bos- ton), much in excess of the current receipts, it was finally voted to give him, in reimbursement, most of the property and assets in the hands of the committee. Among these, of course, were the two hundred rifles, and it was with the consent of Mr. Stearns as owner, but without the consent of the committee, that Brown, in 1859, carried these rifles to Virginia.
John Brown remained in Boston and its vicinity during the greater part of January and February, 1857, and was there again in the early weeks of March and of April. On the 18th of February, as above mentioned, he made the speech, from which quotations have been cited, before a committee of the state legislature to urge that Massa- chusetts should vote an appropriation of money in aid of the emigrants from the state who had settled in Kansas. It was one of the few speeches made by him in Massachusetts that year, and was mainly read from his manuscript. In March he made his first visit to Con-
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cord, where he addressed a large audience in the Town Hall, and spoke without notes, in a very impressive and eloquent manner. Among his hearers were Mr. R. W. Emerson and Mr. Henry D. Thoreau, who had met him the preceding day, under circumstances that it may be interesting to mention, since both these gentlemen were his warm admirers, and took up his cause when he had but few champions among the scholars of Massachusetts. Mr. Thoreau's noble appeal in his behalf, given at Concord on Sunday evening, October 30, 1859, and repeated at the Tremont Temple in Boston, November Ist, was the earliest address in his praise to which the Massachusetts public listened, as it still is the best ; and it was soon followed by Mr. Emerson's famous mention of Brown in a Boston lecture as one who had " made the gallows glorious, like the cross," and by his speech at the Tremont Temple relief meeting, November 18, 1859, at which John A. Andrew presided.
The first occasion of John Brown's visit to Concord was to speak at the public meeting just mentioned, in March, 1857, which had 'been called at my request. On the day appointed, Brown went up from Boston at noon and dined with Mr. Thoreau, then a member of his father's family, and residing not far from the rail road station. The two idealists, both of them in revolt against the civil government then established in this country, because of its base subservience to slavery, found themselves friends from the beginning of their ac- quaintance. They sat after dinner, discussing the events of the border warfare in Kansas, and Brown's share in them, when, as it often happened, Mr. Emerson called at Mr. Thoreau's door on some errand to his friend. Thus the three men first met under the same roof, and found that they held the same opinion of what was upper- most in the mind of Brown. He did not reveal to them, either then or later, his Virginia plans ; but he declared frankly, as he always did, his purpose of attacking slavery, wherever it could be reached ; and this was the sentiment of his speech at the evening meeting, when he told the story of his Kansas life to the grandsons of the men who began the war of the Revolution at Concord bridge. He spoke of the murder of one of his seven sons, the imprisonment and insanity of another ; and as he shook before his audience the chain which his free-born son had worn, for no crime but for resisting slavery, his words rose to thrilling eloquence, and made a wonderful impression on his audience. From that time the Concord people were on his side, as they afterwards testified on several occasions. He was again
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in Concord for several days in April, 1857, and on this visit was the guest of Mr. Emerson for a day ; from whose house he drove across the country to Mr. Stearns's house at Medford, one pleasant Sunday morning in that April. The journals of Emerson, Thoreau, and, two years later, of their friend Bronson Alcott, will bear witness to the impression made by Captain Brown on these three founders of a school of thought and literature.
In the latter part of March, 1857, Captain Brown, in company with Martin F. Conway, afterwards a member of congress from Kansas, and myself, representing the Massachusetts committee, met by appointment at the Metropolitan Hotel in New York, and proceeded in company to Easton, Pennsylvania, where Mr. Andrew H. Reeder, a former governor of Kansas, was living, for the purpose of inducing him, if possible, to return to Kansas, and become the leader of the free state party there. The journey was undertaken at the request of the Massachusetts committee, of which both Brown and Conway had been agents. It resulted in nothing, for Governor Reeder was unwilling to leave his family and his occupations at Easton to engage again in the political contests of Kansas. Captain Brown had quite a different conception of his own duty to his family, as compared with his duty to the cause in which he had enlisted. Although he had been absent from home nearly two years, he re- frained from a visit to North Elba, where his family then were, until he had arranged all his military affairs in Boston, New York, and Connecticut ; and he finally reached his rough mountain home late in April. He found his daughter Ellen, whom he had left an infant in the cradle, old enough to hear him sing his favorite hymn, " Blow ye the trumpet, blow !" to the old tune of Lenox. " He sung all his own children to sleep with it," writes his daughter Anne, "and some of his grandchildren too. He seemed to be very partial to the first verse; I think that he applied it to himself. When he was at home (I think it was the first time he came from Kansas), he told Ellen that he had sung it to all the rest, and must to her too. She was afraid to go to him alone " (the poor child had forgotten her father in his two years' absence), " so father said that I must sit with her. He took Ellen on one knee and me on the other and sung it to us."
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