USA > Connecticut > Litchfield County > Torrington > History of Torrington, Connecticut, from its first settlement in 1737, with biographies and genealogies > Part 38
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GENTLEMEN : You will greatly oblige a humble friend by allowing the use of your columns while I briefly state two parallels, in my poor way.
Not one year ago eleven quiet citizens of this neighborhood, viz: William Robertson, William Colpetzer, Amos Hall, Austin Hall, John Campbell, Asa Snyder, Thomas Stilwell, William Hairgrove, Asa Hairgrove, Patrick Ross, and B. L. Reed, were gathered up from their work and their homes by an armed force under one Hamilton, and without trial or opportunity to speak in
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their own defense, were formed into line, and all but one shot - five killed and five wounded. One fell unharmed, pretending to be dead. All were left for dead. The only crime charged against them was that of being free state men. Now, I inquire what action has ever, since the occurrence in May last, been taken by either the president of the United States, the governor of Mis- souri, the governor of Kansas, or any of their tools, or by any pro-slavery or administration man, to ferret out and punish the perpetrators of this crime ?
Now for the other parallel. On Sunday, December 19, a negro man called Jim came over to the Osage settlement, from Missouri, and stated that he together with his wife, two children, and another negro man, was to be sold within a day or two, and begged for help to get away. On Monday (the fol- lowing) night, two small companies were made up to go to Missouri and forci- bly liberate the five slaves, together with other slaves. One of these companies I assumed to direct. We proceeded to the place, surrounded the buildings, liberated the slaves, and also took certain property supposed to belong to the estate.
We however learned before leaving, that a portion of the articles we had taken belonged to a man living on the plantation as a tenant, and who was sup- posed to have no interest in the estate. We promptly returned to him all we had taken. We then went to another plantation, where we found five more slaves, took some property and two white men. We moved all slowly away into the territory for some distance, and then sent the white men back, telling them to follow us as soon as they chose to do so. The other company freed one female slave, took some property, and, as I am informed, killed one white man (the master), who fought against the liberation.
Now for a comparison. Eleven persons are forcibly restored to their natu- ral and inalienable rights, with but one man killed, and all 'hell is stirred from beneath.' It is currently reported that the governor of Missouri has made a requisition upon the governor of Kansas for the delivery of all such as were concerned in the last-named 'dreadful outrage.' The marshal of Kansas is said to be collecting a posse of Missouri (not Kansas) men at West Point, in Missouri, a little town about ten miles distant, to 'enforce the laws.' All pro- slavery, conservative, free state, and doughface men, and administration tools, are filled with holy horror.
Consider the two cases, and the action of the Administration party.
Respectfully yours, JOHN BROWN.
On the 4th of March, 1859, I wrote to a friend thus : " Brown was at Tabor (Iowa) on the 19th February, with his stock in fine condition, as he says in a letter to G. Smith. He also says he is ready with some new men to set his mill in operation, and seems to be coming east for that purpose. Mr. Smith proposes to raise one thousand dollars for him, and to contribute one hundred dollars him- self. I think a larger sum ought to be raised, but can we raise so much as this ? Brown says he thinks any one of us who talked with him might raise the sum if we should set about it ; perhaps this is so, but I doubt. As a reward for what he has done, perhaps money
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might be raised for him. At any rate he means to do the work, and I expect to hear of him in New York within a few weeks. Dr. Howe thinks J. F. and some others, not of our party, would help the project if they knew of it."
Following up this last suggestion, I sounded several anti-slavery men of wealth and influence in the spring of 1859, and did obtain some subscriptions from persons who were willing to give to a brave man forcibly interfering with slavery, without inquiring very closely what he would do next. But on the other hand I found that Brown's manly action in Missouri had made some of our friends more shy of him. When he reached Boston in May, he was invited to dine one Saturday at the Bird Club, and there for the first time met Senator Wilson, afterwards vice-president, who has thus described the inter- view : " The last of May, 1859, I met John Brown at the Parker House in Boston, There were a dozen persons present ; Brown came in with somebody, and was introduced to quite a number of gentlemen there. I was introduced to him, and he, I think, did not recollect my name. I stepped aside. In a moment, after speaking to somebody else, he came up again, and said to me that he did not understand my name when it was mentioned. He then said, in a very calm but firm tone, 'I understand you do not approve of my course ;' referring, as I supposed, to his going into Missouri and getting slaves and running them off. It was said with a great deal of firmness of manner, and it was the first salutation after speaking to me. I said I did not ; I believed it to be a very great injury to the anti-slavery cause ; that I regarded every illegal act, and every im- prudent act, as being against it. I said that, if this action had been a year or two before, it might have been followed by the invasion of Kansas by a large number of excited people on the border, and a great many lives might have been lost. He said he thought differ- ently, believed he had acted right, and that it would have a good in- fluence." If Brown had known Senator Wilson as well as he did that Kansas friend who reproved him for the same cause, he would have gone further, and given the senator the same answer ; " Brown called in to see me, in going out of Kansas in 1859, and I censured him for going into Missouri and getting those slaves. He said, 'I considered the matter well ; you will have no more attacks from Mis- souri. I shall now leave Kansas ; probably you will never see me again. I consider it my duty to draw the scene of the excitement to some other part of the country.'" In this aim he certainly succeeded.
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Even Dr. Howe who had been concerned in the Greek revolution, the French revolution of July, 1830, and the Polish revolution of 1831, was distressed, on his return from Cuba in the spring of 1859, to find that Brown had actually been taking the property of slave- holders with which to give their escaping slaves an outfit, and for a time withdrew his support from the veteran, who chafed greatly at this unexpected rebuff. I have an impression that Dr. Howe, on his way home from Cuba (whither he accompanied Theodore Parker in February, 1858), had journeyed through the Carolinas, and had there accepted the splendid hospitality of Wade Hampton and other rich planters ; and that it shocked him to think he might have been instrumental in giving up to fire and pillage the noble mansions where he had been entertained. If so, it was a generous relutance which held him back from heartily entering again into John Brown's plans ; nor did he after 1858 so completely support them as before, although he never withdrew from the secret committee, and continued to give money to the enterprise. Parker never returned to Boston, but died in Florence May, 1860. He contributed nothing after 1858, nor did Higginson give so much, or interest himself so warmly in the enterprise after its first postponement.
All this would have made it more difficult, during 1859, to raise the money which Brown needed, had it not been for the munificence of Mr. Stearns, who, at each emergency, came forward with his in- dispensable gifts. After placing about twelve hundred dollars in Brown's hands in the spring and summer of 1859, he still continued to aid him in one way and another, until almost the day of the out- break, which was delayed by the slowness of Brown's own move- ments during the spring and summer of 1859. I find this in one of my letters, dated "Concord, June 4, 1859 :" " Brown has set out on his expedition, having got some eight hundred dollars from all sources except from Mr. Stearns, and from him the balance of two thousand dollars ; Mr. S- being a man who, ' having put his hand to the plow, turneth not back.' Brown left Boston for Springfield and New York on Wednesday morning at 8 : 30, and Mr. Stearns has probably gone to New York to-day to make final arrangements for him. Brown means to be on the ground as soon as he can, per- haps so as to begin by the 4th of July. He could not say where he should be for a few weeks, but letters are addressed to him, under cover to his son John, Jr., at West Andover, Ohio. This point is not far from where Brown will begin, and his son will communicate
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with him. Two of his sons will go with him. He is desirous of getting some one to go to Canada and collect recruits for him among the fugitives, with Harriet Tubman or alone, as the case may be." This letter shows I had then no thought that the attack would be made at Harper's Ferry, nor had Mr. Stearns, to whom I was then in the habit of talking or writing about the matter every few days. I have no doubt he knew as much as I did about the general plan. On the 18th of August, Brown sent me word from Chambersburg that he was again delayed for want of money, and must have three hundred dollars, which I undertook to raise for him. On the 4th of September I had sent him two hundred dollars, of which Dr. Howe gave fifty and Gerrit Smith a hundred ; on the 14th of September, I had all but thirty-five dollars of the remaining hundred, Colonel Higginson having sent me twenty dollars. I think the balance was paid by Mr. Stearns. On the 6th of October - ten days before the attack was made - I wrote to Higginson, " The three hundred dollars desired has been made up and received. Four or five men will be on the ground next week, from these regions and elsewhere." These facts were all known to Mr. Stearns, who within a fortnight of the outbreak was in consultation with Mr. Lewis Hayden, and other colored men of Boston, about forwarding recruits to Brown. I think he paid some of the expenses of recruits, but am not certain.
To the unthinking public, slavery had never seemed more secure, or more likely to continue for centuries, than in this very year 1859. But Brown and his friends believed that it could be overthrown; that it must be overthrown, and that speedily, else it would destroy the nation. Brown did not contemplate insurrection, but partisan war- fare, at first on a small scale, then more extensive. Yet he did not shrink from the extreme consequences of his position. A man of peace for more than fifty years of his life, he nevertheless understood that war had its uses, and that there were worse evils than warfare for a great principle. He more than once said to me, and doubtless said the same to others, " I believe in the Golden Rule and the De- claration of Independence ; I think they both mean the same thing ; and it is better that a whole generation should pass off the face of the earth - men, women and children -by a violent death, than that one jot of either should fail in this country. I mean exactly so sir." He also told me that " he had much considered the matter, and had about concluded that forcible separation of the connection between master and slave was necessary to fit the blacks for self-government."
49
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First a soldier, then a citizen, was his plan with the liberated slaves. " When they stand like men, the nation will respect them," he said ; "it is necessary to teach them this." He looked forward, no doubt, to years of conflict, in which the blacks, as in the later years of the civil war, would be formed into regiments and brigades and be drilled in the whole art of war, as were the black soldiers of Toussaint L'Ouverture and Dessalines, in Hayti. But in his more inspired moments he foresaw a speedier end to the combat which he began. Once he said, " A few men in the right, and knowing they are right, can overturn a mighty king. Fifty men, twenty men, in the Alleghanies, could break slavery to pieces in two years." Within less than three years from the day he crossed the Potomac with his twenty men, Abraham Lincoln had made his first proclamation of emancipation. Before six years had passed, every one of the four million slaves in our country was a free man.
THE VIRGINIA CAMPAIGN.
Until the troubles in Kansas in 1856-7, the world knew nothing of John Brown. After that time he was well known, though not always kept in mind, until his final adventure in Virginia, and the remarkable scenes at the close of his life fastened the attention of all men, and made his name as familiar to our countrymen and to foreign nations, as are those of Washington and Abraham Lincoln. And it was on the banks of Washington's own noble stream, the Potomac, and among regions familiar to the great Virginian, that this son of Connecticut achieved his highest renown. Robert Harper, an English carpenter from the neighborhood of Oxford, who gave his name to the romantic spot since known as " Harper's Ferry," was a contemporary of Washington, though somewhat older. It was then (in 1747), a part of Lord Fairfax's broad Virginia manor, be- tween the Potomac and the Rappahannock, in which Washington, at the request of his friend and patron Fairfax, first began work as a land surveyor. Without waiting for the formality of a survey, Robert Harper, who saw the advantages of the situation, determined to buy out the squatter's cabin and claim which then occupied the locality, paying fifty English guineas for such rights as could be possessed under squatter law. In the year 1748, while Washington was ex- ploring and surveying the Shenandoah valley, Harper went to Lord Fairfax's hunting lodge at Greenway Court (not far off), and obtained a patent for the lands he had purchased. Probably the first survey
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of this tract was made by Washington, who also is said to have selected the Ferry, in 1794, as the site of a national armory. The scenery of this region has been described by Jefferson in his Notes on Virginia, written shortly before the death of Robert Harper in 1782, and presenting the view as it shows itself from Jefferson's rock, above the present village of Harper's Ferry. " You stand, on a very high point of land ; on your right comes up the Shenandoah, having ranged along the foot of the mountain a hundred miles to find a vent ; on your left approaches the Potomac, in quest of a passage also. In the moment of their junction they rush together against the mountain, rend it asunder, and pass off to the sea. The scene is worth a voyage across the Atlantic. Yet here are people who have passed their lives within half a dozen miles, and have never been to survey these monuments of a war between rivers and moun- tains which must have shaken the earth itself to its centre."
Around this junction of the two rivers, in the sixty years that followed the death of Washington, had grown up a village of three or four thousand inhabitants. On the northern side of the Potomac rise the Maryland Heights almost perpendicular to the river's bank, and some thirteen hundred feet above it. The Loudon Heights, across the Shenandoah, are lower, but both ridges overtop the hill between them, and make it untenable for an army, as was more than once demonstrated during the civil war. Yet this hill itself commands all below it, and makes the town indefensible against a force occupying that position. Therefore when John Brown, on the night of Sun- day, October 16, 1859, entered and captured Harper's Ferry, he placed himself in a trap where he was sure to be taken, unless he should quickly leave it. His purpose, beyond question, was to hold the village but a few hours, make such disposal as he should think best of the government armory and arsenal there, with its tens of thousands of muskets and rifles, get together the principal persons of the whole neighborhood to be detained as hostages, and then to move forward into the mountains of Virginia, keeping open such com- munication as he could, with the mountain region of Maryland and so with the northern states. His first mistake (and he made many in this choice of his point of attack and his method of warfare) was in crossing the Potomac at a place so near the cities of Washington and Baltimore, which are distant but sixty and eighty miles respect- ively from the bridge over which he marched his men. This bridge is used both by the Baltimore and Ohio rail road and by the travelers
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along the public highway ; and the only approach to it from the Maryland side is by a narrow road under the steep cliff, or by the rail road itself. On the Virginia side there are roads leading up from the Shenandoah valley, and both up and down the Potomac. Har- per's Ferry is indeed the Thermopyla of Virginia. Robert Lee, the Hector of the Southern Troy, came here with, soldiers of the national army to capture John Brown, in 1859 ; he came here again and re- peatedly as commander of the Southern armies, during the five years that followed. His soldiers and their opponents of the Union army canonaded, burnt, pillaged and abandoned the town, which has never recovered from the ruin of the war. The armory workshops are abandoned, both those beside the Potomac, where Brown fought and was captured, and those beside the Shenandoah, where his com- rade Kagi fought and was slain. The fine houses of the officers who directed the armory work before the war are turned over to the directors of a school for the colored people, young and old, almost the only thing that flourishes now at Harper's Ferry. The popula- tion of the two or three villages crowded together there is but little more than half what it was in 1859.
Brown's attention was turned toward Harper's Ferry and the Vir- ginia counties within easy reach, not only by the natural advantages of the place, and its historical associations with the heroes of Vir- ginia, but also by the number of slaves held there. In the village itself there were few, but in Jefferson county there were four thou- sand slaves and five hundred free blacks, while the white population was but ten thousand ; and within a range of thirty miles from the Ferry there were perhaps twenty thousand slaves, of whom four or five thousand were capable of bearing arms. Brown may well have supposed that out of this population he could obtain the few hundred recruits that he desired for the first operations of his Virginia cam- paign ; and could he have succeeded in fortifying himself in the Blue Ridge, as he proposed, it is quite possible he would have had these recruits. A colored clergyman, who heard him unfold his plan in 1858, at a secret meeting of colored people in one of the western cities, reports this version of what he then said : "I design to make a few midnight raids upon the plantations, in order to give those who are willing among the slaves an opportunity of joining us or escap- ing; and it matters little whether we begin with many or few. Hav- ing done this for two or three times, until the neighborhood becomes alarmed and the generality of the slaves encouraged, we will retire to
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the fastness of the mountains; and, ever and anon, strike unexpected though bloodless blows upon the Old Dominion ; in the mean time sending away those slaves who may desire to go to the North. We shall by this means conquer without bloodshed, awaken the slaves to the possibility of escape, and frighten the slaveholders into a desire to get rid of slavery." It was the possibility of success in such a plan, that so alarmed the slaveholders of the whole South, and caused Vallandigham of Ohio to say, as he did a few days after Brown's capture, " Certainly it was one of the best planned and best executed conspiracies that ever failed."
Had Brown gone forward as he proposed, he might have secured a foothold for his operations, and it is possible that he could not only have made slavery insecure, and emancipation desirable, but grad- ually have extended forcible emancipation over a large part of the South. That this was a perilous undertaking, Brown and his men well knew, but they did not believe it hopeless. Thus young Jerry Anderson, who was killed by the side of his captain in the engine- house at Harper's Ferry, wrote to his brother in Iowa less than three weeks before the outhreak, in terms of great confidence.
" Our mining company will consist of between twenty five and thirty, well equipped with tools. You can tell Uncle Dan it will be impossible for me to visit him before next spring. If my life is spared, I will be tired of work by that time, and I shall visit my relatives and friends in Iowa, if I can get leave of absence. At present, I am bound by all that is honorable to continue in the course. We go in to win, at all hazards. So if you should hear of a failure, it will be after a desperate struggle, and loss of capital on both sides. But that is the last of our thoughts. Everything seems to work to our hands, and victory will surely perch upon our banner. The old man has had this operation in view for twenty years, and last winter" was just a hint and trial of what could be done. This is not a large place,2 but a precious one to Uncle Sam, as he has a great many tools here. I expect (when I start again travel- ing) to start at this place and go through the state of Virginia and on south, just as circumstances require ; mining and prospecting, and carrying the ore
with us. . . . . I suppose this is the last letter I shall write before there is something in the wind. Whether I will have a chance of sending letters then I do not know, but when I have an opportunity, I shall improve it. But if you don't get any from me, don't take it for granted that I am gone up till you know it to be so. I consider my life about as safe in one place as an- other."
This letter shows the smallness of the force with which Brown
I In Missouri, December 1858, whence he carried off a dozen slaves safely to Canada.
2 Harper's Ferry.
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intended to begin his work. He would gladly have raised a hundred men (or more) for his first operations, but he was quite ready to com- mence with thirty, hoping to increase their number by recruits from the freed slaves and accessions from the North, both white and black. He had several persons at the North engaged to enlist and forward recruits, the most active of these being his son, John Brown, Jr., then living at West Andover, Ohio. During the summer of 1859, John Brown, the younger, had visited Boston, and there made arrangements for receiving recruits from Massachusetts.
Only one of the six colored recruits from Massachusetts reached Harper's Ferry before the attack, and even he took no part in the fight. The others were delayed at home, from one cause or another, until the enterprise had failed. The same thing happened with rej gard to a few other recruits enlisted by John Brown, Jr., or under his direction, while a few persons, who had been counted on to join the expedition, at last refused or hesitated to do so. Had it been de- layed, as some of the party expected, until the following spring, it is possible that the number of men would have been increased to fifty ; but probably no more than fifty were at any time pledged to join in this particular expedition. Probably it would have been unsafe to trust more persons with the secret, which was so often on the point of being disclosed, yet never really became public. It would appear from a letter of John Brown, Jr., dated September 8, 1859, that he was not informed, until early in September, that the attack would be made in October. "I had supposed," he writes to Kagi, " that you would not think it best to commence opening the coal banks before spring, unless circumstances should make it imperative. However, I sup- pose the reasons are satisfactory to you."
The actual force with which Captain Brown undertook his Vir- ginia campaign consisted of twenty-three men, including himself ; but four of these never crossed the Potomac, nor had they all been mustered together on the Kennedy farm or elsewhere. Six of them were colored men, of whom three were fugitive slaves. In the fol- lowing list those who did not cross the river are marked with an as- terisk, and the names of the colored men are in italics. Of the whole number only one, Owen Brown, now survives. Ten of them were killed or died of their wounds in Virginia, seven were hanged, and six escaped. Six of the white men were members of the Brown family or connected with it by marriage, and five of these died in Virginia. The list is as follows :
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