On this episode of Our American Stories, to Southerners, he was a dangerous villain. To many Northerners, a fanatic. But to himself, he was an instrument of God, sent to end slavery. Bestselling author David S. Reynolds (John Brown, Abolitionist) tells the powerful story of the man who helped ignite the Civil War and laid the groundwork for the Civil Rights Movement.
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Speaker 1 (00:15):
This is Lee Habib and this is Our American Stories,
the show where America is the star and the American people.
To search for the Our American Stories podcast, go to
the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Up next, the story of one of America's most divisive figures,
(00:35):
both of his time and perhaps hours due to the
methods he employed to aid in the destruction of slavery,
or of course talking about John Brown. Here to tell
the story is David S. Reynolds, author of John Brown Abolitionist.
Let's get into the story.
Speaker 2 (00:54):
I don't agree with John Brown and what you did.
Speaker 3 (00:57):
There a legal cars America, our.
Speaker 4 (01:00):
Order to fall. John Brown was a horse thief from Kansas.
He stirred up trouble out there in the Kansas Nebraska
horse and all he did, and he wasn't in the majority.
A majority of people maybe have the right to change
the law, but a majority of twenty one does not.
A slave was property. No man in this society today
has a right to go into my house to steal
(01:20):
my television set, to break my windows. No man in
the nineteenth century had a right to go and steal
another person's property.
Speaker 5 (01:27):
That's exactly what Brown kided to do. What Brown stood
for was wrong.
Speaker 6 (01:31):
He was morally wrong. He killed the slavery's wrong.
Speaker 7 (01:35):
I mean, we all know that, how can you do
anything else but to pull a John Brown?
Speaker 6 (01:39):
How can you do anything.
Speaker 7 (01:40):
Else indcredibly realizing maybe that you're sinning or that you're
doing something wrong. Four million people, human beings, not numbers,
not dates, not backs and figures, not words, but human beings.
Speaker 3 (01:51):
He served to be free.
Speaker 6 (01:56):
John Brown can be best explained by the one man's
freedom fighter is another person's terrorist. I prefer to see
him as kind of a good terrorist. John Brown was
(02:17):
born in eighteen hundred in Torrington, Connecticut, and his father
and mother were Calvinistic Congregationalists. Religion was very important to
John Brown. His father had heard a sermon by the
anti slavery Calvinist Samuel Hopkins in Connecticut, and this kind
of anti slavery Calvinism was passed down to John Brown.
Speaker 3 (02:40):
My father was so strong in his beliefs that abolition
was the answer, not repatriation, that at a point in
my life he actually split the church over that issue
and went off and formed a whole other church called
the Free congregational church and took half the congregation with him.
Speaker 6 (02:58):
He didn't attack and church in the ordinary sense. He
did attentions sometimes. He lived for a while in Pennsylvania,
and in Pennsylvania he went to a church that they
allowed black people in the church, but the black people
had to sit way in the back. For example, in
the winter time, they got frozen back there, there was
away from any heat or anything. So he got up
(03:20):
and went into the back of the church and said,
please take my seat. He told the African Americans, please
take my own seat. So he was actually dismissed from
that congregation. But his main thing was reading the Bible,
learning the Bible.
Speaker 3 (03:36):
Though I only had a very small formal education, I
had worked very hard to educate myself. I read voraciously.
I had memorized the entire Bible when I was very
small ten years.
Speaker 6 (03:46):
Old, and at one point he thought of becoming a minister.
That didn't work out. He decided to in a sense,
be a practical minister by applying what he viewed as
Christianity to enslaved people. His father ran a tannery, and
at age twelve, he was sent on a cattle drive
(04:11):
alone by his father over the countryside.
Speaker 3 (04:13):
Sent me to Detroit. That's almost two hundred miles from
where we lived, with one hundred cows and a contract
with the US Army. Now remember this is the War
of eighteen twelve. I made that distance by myself through
pretty much an untracked wilderness, kept it all together, bartered
with the men at the end, sold the cattle, got
my money, and for a time I lived with a
(04:35):
man there in Detroit hate a young boy about my
age who was black. He was a slave, And one day,
for reasons and never quite understood, I have never and
I hope I never do understand, the boy did something
wrong and the man picked up a shovel and beat
him about to hit so severely that his eyes and
(04:56):
his ears blind.
Speaker 6 (04:58):
The boy was driven out with a shovel, and John
Brown was invited indoors to sit at the table with
the white family. John Brown said, that's when I devoted
my entire life to abolitionism. The injustice of that scene
just never never left him.
Speaker 3 (05:17):
I was outraged. I could not believe a human being
could treat someone on such slim grounds so poorly. I
swore at that moment that I would be the eternal
enemy of slavery and put an end to this evil.
Speaker 5 (05:33):
By the time he was eighteen, John Brown had personally
led one slave to freedom and defiantly declared in public,
did all runaways who came knocking at his dog would
be welcome. Brown became a radical abolitionist.
Speaker 6 (05:55):
Frederick Douglass said, my commitment to enslaved people was like
a candle to John Brown's shining sun. I could live
for the slave. John Brown died a slave. John Brown
felt that the Calvinist idea of predestination applied to him.
He felt chosen really by God to wipe out slavery.
(06:18):
That was his mission, that was the main driving thing.
Was like slavery was, as John Brown viewed, it, a
war against an entire race of people. And he was
very inspired by the Calvinist leader of the English Revolution
of the sixteen forties, Oliver Cromwell, the Puritan warrior. Cromwell
(06:40):
himself fought for freedom, but the freedom from tyrannical oppression
by King Charles. He didn't really concern himself with enslaved people.
But John Brown kept the biography of Oliver Cromwell right
next to his Bible on his shelf, and he became
known as the Oliver Cromwell of abolitionism, The Fighter. The Fighter.
(07:03):
John Brown's inspiration from religion was in a sense unique
because he was the first person to first Christian to
take up arms consistently against slavery before the Civil War.
Speaker 1 (07:19):
And you've been listening to David S. Reynolds, author of
John Brown Abolitionist. You're also hearing some readings from John
Brown by Doug Dobbs. The story of John Brown continues
here on Our American Stories. Liehbib here the host of
Our American Stories. Every day on this show, we're bringing
inspiring stories from across this great country, stories from our
(07:41):
big cities and small towns. But we truly can't do
the show without you. Our stories are free to listen to,
but they're not free to make. If you love what
you hear, go to Ouramericanstories dot com and click the
donate button. Give a little, give a lot. Go to
Alamerican Stories dot com and give. And we returned to
(08:10):
Our American Stories and the story of Abolitionist John Brown
with author David S. Reynolds. When we last left off,
John Brown had witnessed a slave a child beat over
the head by a shovel and decided to dedicate his
life to a mission he saw as truly holy, the
destruction of slavery. Let's return to the story.
Speaker 6 (08:39):
He went on to become a farmer and a tanner.
He was married and had well a total of twenty children.
The average family had about nine kids. I mean twenty
was still very very large. Seven With his first wife,
she died in childbirth.
Speaker 3 (08:54):
I married in eighteen twenty to a young lady named
Diane Lusk June twenty first a June. It was a
great time. We had a good life together and soon
babies bakean to arrive. Our very first we named John Junior.
We lived from place to place as work came, and
sometimes things didn't go so well.
Speaker 6 (09:13):
And he didn't know how to keep books, so he
barely kind of struggled to get by.
Speaker 3 (09:18):
There were many financial panics back in those days, and
the economy went up and down, sometimes very unpredictably, and
I got caught in many a situation where I borrowed
way too much money. I made very bad decisions sometimes
about business and got caught and I eventually into bankruptcy
at some points.
Speaker 6 (09:36):
They also had a lot of childhood illnesses. He lost
four kids within one month of an illness that no
longer exists because of a vaccine. Another child was killed
when a boiling pot of water scalded her to death.
They lost several others as well, so only eight of
his kids outlived him eight of his twenty.
Speaker 3 (10:04):
By eighteen fifty, living in Springfield, Massachusetts. It was in
that year that the United States Congress and its infinite wisdom,
passed the Fugitive Slave Act. Oh My, the states of
the North, which had outlawed slavery, saw their laws run amok,
run roughshot over, and the slave catchers from the South
(10:26):
could come into the North and drag people off with impunity.
On the barest of pretexts. They could accuse someone of
being a slave, perhaps even though they had never been one.
Dark days. Indeed, there were many who lived in Springfield
who were of the African persuasion, who were in great
fear of themselves being drug off in the night.
Speaker 6 (10:51):
And most abolishnists in the North at the time were
peace people. They wanted to use persuasion and words to
enforce the immorality and injustice of slavery and so forth,
which was very admirable but slavery was, as John Brown
viewed it, a war against an entire race of people,
(11:15):
an ongoing war, even though he didn't particularly like war himself.
Speaker 3 (11:20):
I formed the League of Gileadites. There is danger by
oneself alone, but there is strength in numbers, and so
I taught them to gather together and protect one another.
And I gave them knives, and I showed them how
to use them, and I said, if someone comes to
take you off, don't go. It flourished. I had many
(11:42):
friends in the black community who were dear to me
as my own children and my own family, and I
would do anything for them, and they would have done
anything for me.
Speaker 6 (11:50):
He actually shocked a lot of white people because of
his closeness to African Americans, not only to the fugitive
slaves and he lived among them, but also to leaders
like Frederick Douglass, whom.
Speaker 3 (12:02):
I deeply respected, though I disagree with him on many issues.
We battled back and forth over the issue of the
use of violence and the defensive freedom. Frederick argued that
should we go the route of violence, it would probably
not go well for us and might not even achieve
our goal. I argued back that we had to that
there were left with fewer and fewer options as time
(12:24):
went on. Harriet Tubman I knew the general. She called
me the captain. I called her the General. She was
an amazing woman. Such vision, such strength of character, such determination,
such a woman. When it comes later on to my
raid on Harper's Ferry, I argued with Frederick Douglas, but
Harriet Tubman was my ally. She's going to come with us,
(12:47):
alas she grew ill and was not able to come.
Speaker 6 (12:51):
Frederick Douglass becomes the first person to whom John Brown
reveals his plan for liberating his slave people in the
South by making a raid in Virginia to try to
emancipate and sleep people know. So Frederick Douglass remains close
to him, and he stays in Douglas's house in Rochester
several times, and in one of his visits writes the
(13:12):
new Constitution of the United States. He wrote what he
called the provisional Constitution because he thought the current constitution
avoided the whole slavery issue. So John Brown writes this
provisional Constitution, which begins with the idea of abolishing slavery.
Slavery has to be abolished. He also rewrote the Declaration
of Independence. I mean, it takes a lot of moxie
to do that. And he imagined forming a colony of
(13:35):
African Americans in which these documents held sway. And when
he was visited where he lived among mainly fugitive slaves
that had escaped in the North, he really shocked a
visitor who came to his house that not only were
African Americans at the dinner table sitting right close to
(13:56):
John Brown and his family, but also Brown would trusted
them this, you know, mister Smith or or mister that
in the same respectful way that he addressed everybody else
at the table. Was shocked by that.
Speaker 3 (14:10):
Here's a man who had been committed to the abolitionist cause,
had written about it extensively, had a wonderful philosophical defense
for why slavery should end and why abolitionism was a
good thing. Who was stunned that I would treat people
as equals. He didn't understand me. I didn't understand him.
Speaker 5 (14:30):
Most white people at the time, abolitionists included, believed that
black people were inferior. In fact, many white Northerners advocated
abolition only as a means of getting blacks out of
the country entirely. John Brown genuinely believed that all men
were created equal.
Speaker 3 (14:54):
We had many setbacks through those eighteen fifties. The Fugitive
Slave Act in eighteen fifty, the Kansas Nebraska Act, which
turned Kansas into a battleground. In eighteen fifty four, the
border Ruffians came over from Missouri by the hundreds, by
the thousands in fraudulent elections the fall of that year.
And they would stand there and they would say, this
foot of ground one square foot around me, I claim
(15:16):
this as my territory, and that gives me the right
to vote. And then they would go in and vote,
all heavily earned, all with the stink of evil about them.
Speaker 6 (15:23):
The cinema, all the political crisis of the eighteen fifties,
in a sense begins with the Mexican War in the
eighteen forties, because what happens is that America takes over
these vast territories California, New Mexico, Arizona. But at the
time they were just territories, and the question is was
slavery going to be allowed to expand into these territories
(15:48):
or not. Then came the Kansas Nebraska Act, of eighteen
fifty four, which said that the Western territories could decide
for themselves whether or not they wanted slavery. This was
absolute anathema to the North, because suddenly you had the
prospect of all these Western states coming to the Union
(16:10):
allowing slavery. Then each of them would have representation in Congress.
Therefore they would overwhelm the American government, which would now
become totally pro slavery. The situation looked very, very dismal
from the northern standpoint, and that's why you had the
rise of the anti slavery movement and the Republican Party,
(16:31):
which at the time was anti slavery, that arose around
this kind of anti slavery feeling, as did John Brown.
Speaker 3 (16:39):
As the decade war on the dread Scott decision comes
down in eighteen fifty seven, saying that a black man's
not even a person. He is no more than cattle.
He is a thing to be owned. It was so
disgusting the insult of Charles Center, the United States Senator
cained on the Florida the United States Center by Congressman.
(17:01):
And how does the South react? It sends Preston Brooks
to Congressman Moore Knes hit him again. Was there no righteousness?
Was there no justice?
Speaker 6 (17:15):
John Brown took action.
Speaker 3 (17:19):
I gathered my resources. Mister Beecher down in New York
City was most accommodating to send me some of his bibles.
We packed them up Sharp's rifles and labeled them Beacher's Bibles.
And off we went to Kansas.
Speaker 1 (17:36):
And you've been listening to author David Reynolds tell the
story of abolitionist John Brown. What a story you're hearing. Indeed,
how is faith and his religious zeal drove him? And
when we come back, what happens next? Here on our
American stories? And we returned to our American stories and
(18:11):
the story of abolitionist John Brown with author David S. Reynolds.
Also with us playing the role of John Brown is
Doug Dobbs, a former ap history teacher. When we last
left off, John Brown and his family had left for
Kansas amid bleeding Kansas, a dark time when pro slavery
settlers and their abolitionist counterparts fought for the future of
(18:34):
the state. Let's return to the story.
Speaker 5 (18:40):
In eighteen fifty five, Brown went to Kansas with money
and guns given to him by secret supporters in the east.
This was the time of Bleeding Kansas, the frontier territory
where pro slavery and anti slavery settlers fought their own
civil war six years before the rest of the nation.
Speaker 6 (19:03):
Kansas was hanging in the balance between slavery and freedom.
What was happening was very corrupt ruffians from Missouri, a
neighboring state, would go across the border and terrorize the
polling booths, take over the polling booths, and they elected
a fraudulent pro slavery government to try to make it
(19:23):
a slavery state. This pro slavery government was actually supported
by the President, Franklin Pierce. And again, if Kansas goes
to slavery, they could be like Domino's and all the
western territories the future states could have tumbled into the
pro slavery camp and the cause would be lost. So
(19:44):
John Brown goes there with several of his sons and
family members, and he says, I'm going to fight if
necessary to the death.
Speaker 3 (19:54):
And we worked and we built, and we built some cabins,
and we got that through that winter, and it was
an awful time. In the summer of the next year,
By then I had had formed a militia to defend ourselves,
and I was given word that the town of Lawrence,
north of US was under threat from a Missouri militia.
(20:15):
We raced north as fast as we could. We got
there too late. Lawrence had been sacked, the town burned.
The printing press is destroyed. Lawrence an abolition, The stronghold,
a place where free soil men could lift their heads
and do business and feel safe, had been destroyed. They
(20:35):
deliberately set fire to the Union Hotel downtown. It was
an awful time. I was beside myself. I couldn't believe
that people could do this to one another.
Speaker 6 (20:45):
He was totally enraged. He also heard over the telegraph
that Charles Sumner, an anti slavery senator, had been pummeled
virtually to death on the Senate floor by a pro
slavery with a gold headed heavy keene, and they'd left
for dead. John bow Is just totally appalled by this
(21:09):
violent activity, said, Okay, at the time has come, I'm
just going to have to do something more here. And
he literally has several battles with weapons, with guns, with pistols,
horses and so forth, And in most of these battles
he's greatly outnumbered, but he becomes a kind of terror.
Even though he's outnumbered, he usually wins. He scatters the
(21:31):
enemy and he charges, almost like Oliver Cromwell, who during
the English Civil War was off and outnumbered by the
Royalist troops against him, but he's just charged right at
them and dispersed them. And it became kind of a
very feared figure, and very unusual because abolitionists were known
to be peaceful men, pacifists and using gentle persuasion. But
(21:56):
he was under direct threat. The pro Slavery Party not
only had killed many more people than the Anti Slavery
Party had in Kansas, they had made a direct threat
on the whole Brown family. They said, we're going to
wipe out the Brows. So at midnight on May twenty six,
(22:18):
in eighteen fifty six.
Speaker 3 (22:19):
I went down to Potawatamie Creek where a man and
mister Doyle had made threats against my life to my face,
not knowing who I was. I had gone through his
camp under disguise and he had told me that yes,
he was going to come and kill me and my son's,
that my line could be wiped out. I say that's
too much, it's just too much. And so we went
(22:41):
down there in the night of May twenty fourth, and
we dragged him from his bed, and we drug his
sons out under the field and we killed him. Now,
I didn't do it, but I was there, and I
gave my consent. Awful thing, but we had no choice.
(23:03):
We had to strike back. We had to strike fear
into the hearts of these Ruffians. We had to let
them know we would not be victims forever. They could
not ride roughshot over us. We had to stand up
for freedom. We had to stand up.
Speaker 6 (23:19):
He has them hacked to death with swords. It created chaos,
these murders, and the whole court system didn't know how
to handle it. And eventually a few years later, Kansas
would be admitted as a free state, in part because
the very chaos that John Brown created.
Speaker 3 (23:39):
We danced back and forth with those fellows around Kansas
for a while, and then things began to settle down.
I decided to lay low for a while, came back east.
Then about Christmas time eighteen fifty eight, I went back
to Kansas. I had decided what I needed to do.
I've been having this plan for a long time. We
were pulling people out through the underground railroad, the ones
(24:00):
and twos and threes and fours, and there was no
way we were going to end the slavery. There was
no way to end this institution. We were just we're
just draining little bits and pieces here and there. So
I decided that experiment on a small scale. So I
took my militia and we went over into Vernon County, Missouri,
and we attacked two places over there, two farms. We
pulled out eleven people, eleven slaves, took some horses, took
(24:23):
a few other things. We figured they'd earned them, they
deserved them, liberated them, you might say. And we headed
back into Kansas and went to ground and we hid.
And while we're hiding there, between Christmas and New Year's
by eleven who had escaped, became twelve. When of was pregnant,
she gave birth pleasure Heart. From there, we worked our
(24:44):
way up north, back over through Illinois, back to Ohio.
Eventually we got up into Detroit and I put them
on the ferry across the river into Solment, cross into
Canada to freedom. They were freak, no man's property anymore.
I said to myself, that's what we're gonna do.
Speaker 6 (25:06):
He became a kind of symbol of anti slavery activism
that then culminates in his raid on Harper's Ferry, Virginia
in eighteen fifty nine.
Speaker 3 (25:16):
So that summer I began to ling in the plans
in earnest I rented some property down in southern Maryland,
right across the river from Harper's Ferry, and I watched
the warehouse where my rifles were stored. They were marked
mining equipment by this point, and I was posing as
mister Isaac Smith, a mining prospector, and so I could
travel just about anywhere and look at just about anything
(25:37):
with a prospect of maybe a mind being on their
property and generating great wealth. Everybody was glad to see me,
and so I looked, and I poked, and I wandered,
and I went all over the place, and I made
contact with people, and we set up a plane. We
were gonna take a group of people across the river
in Harper's Ferry, and we're going to steal a bunch
of rifles, and we're gonna get up in the mountains
just south of there. We're gonna build some redoubts, some
(25:58):
forts up on top of the hill there, and we're
gonna send out folks down onto the plantations in the
Lowland and say come, come away, be free. We weren't
going to do by tens, not even by twenties four hundreds.
We were going to get thousands to come out, and
thousands beyond that, and we were going to run them
up the ridge all the way to Canada. My aim
(26:21):
was nothing less than to crash the entire economy of
the South. They had as much money wrapped up in
their slaves as the North did in their factories. If
I could get their factories to run away, all their
bills would come do at the bank, all those loans,
all those mortgages, and they'd have nobody to work the
fields and nobody to pick their cotton, and those bills
would come due. I could bring down the whole system,
(26:44):
crash the whole thing. It was a prize too big
to ignore.
Speaker 1 (26:54):
And you're listening to David Reynolds tell one heck of
his story about abolitionist John Brown, and you're hearing tremendous
readings by Doug Dobbs, a former ap history teacher. When
we return more of the remarkable story the life of
abolitionist John Brown here on our American stories, and we
(27:37):
return to our American stories and the final portion of
our story of abolitionist John Brown with author David S. Reynolds.
When we last left off, John Brown had decided to
put his grand plan in action, a massive slaver vault
that would start at the US arsenal in Harper's Ferry, Virginia.
Let's get back to the story.
Speaker 5 (28:00):
John Brown and his tiny band of raiders twenty two
and all took up arms against slavery here at Harper's
Ferry in eighteen fifty nine. At that time in the
Slave States, we had four million people held in perpetual
bondage by less than half a million slave honors, with
powerful political and legal protection.
Speaker 3 (28:25):
The time King October sixteenth, eighteen fifty nine, and I
gathered our men, I mean went down the road, and
we cut the telegraph wires, and we went into Harper's Ferry.
Speaker 5 (28:39):
A band of raiders, white and black, stole into the
sleeping town of Harper's Ferry, Virginia. They called themselves the
Provisional Army of the United States and took their orders
from their commander in chief, John Brown. They overpowered the
guard and took control of the United States Armory and
Arsenal and Call Rifle Works about a half mile up
(29:02):
the road. The raiders secured the two bridges into town,
freed slaves from surrounding farms and plantations, took hostages, cut
the telegraph lines, and for just a few hours found
themselves with tighten their alive.
Speaker 3 (29:21):
The shots sprung out the local militia. We hunkered down
in the firehouse. Eventually the marine showed up.
Speaker 6 (29:28):
John Brown could have escaped if he had gone earlier,
but he kept waiting for more and more enslaved people
to come. He delayed too long, He stalled. Maybe at
one point he said, well, I'll just be a murdyer
for the cause. Who knows. But he delayed. He got trapped, surrounded,
and then Robert E. Lee was brought out from Washington
and sent Jeb Stewart. Both of them would become later Confederates.
Speaker 3 (29:51):
He came to the door that firehouse and said will
you surrendered? And I said, no, sir, I will not,
and he stepped away from the door. That's the last
I saw him. He gave a signal. The Marines came.
They busted in the door and a lieutenant came through
the door wearing a dress sword didn't even have time
to get his real saber, and he came at me
(30:13):
with that sword, and of all things, that sword hit
my belt buckle and it bent double and snapped in half.
I thought, Lord save me, and he didn't. But then
he began to beat me about the head with the
sword in the hilt, and that was the end of that.
I lost consciousness came to We were all captured, and
it had all gone south. It was all a mess.
Speaker 6 (30:35):
John Brow was dragged out and people thought he was
bleeding together. He was bleeding very severely, but he answered
questions for two hours that he was taken to jail.
Then when he was brought to court, he was still
so severely wounded that he had to be carried in
every day on a stretcher.
Speaker 3 (30:51):
And after a while there, I was in grave despair
that awful things would come from this to hurt people
I loved. But eventually God showed me that this was
indeed the best path, and I got to speak my
peace in court, and I got to call slavery for
what it was in a Virginia court room in Thomas
(31:12):
Jefferson's backyard, I advocated for the freedom of those who
had been enslaved.
Speaker 5 (31:17):
He was weak from his wounds and attended most of
the trial in a cot, but he spoke so eloquently
for his cause that one commentator observed it was slavery
on trial, not John Brown. His defense lawyers tried for
an insanity plea, but he would have none of it,
nor would Virginia Governor Henry A.
Speaker 2 (31:36):
Whys they are mistaken who take him for a madman.
Speaker 8 (31:41):
He is cool, collected, and indomitable.
Speaker 2 (31:45):
He inspired me with great trust in his integrity as
a man of truth and intelligence.
Speaker 6 (31:52):
It's a great irony of history that, as Henry David
Threaux said in his speech on John Brown, John Brown
has one higher praise among Southerners than among Northerners. The
Northerners say, oh, he was kind of a madman. It's
kind of wild and everything. The Southerners, it's not that
they agreed with John Brock. They hated what John Brown
(32:13):
stood for, but there was this kind of code of
honor in the South, this idea of you know, sticking
by your guns and really fighting for and also kind
of remaining cool and calm. And the people that captured
John Brown. The Southerners and who witnessed him up close,
said he was the coolest person that we've ever seen
(32:34):
in danger. I mean, he had been wounded pretty severely
when they were captured him. But he lay there for
two or three hours on the ground. He was bleeding,
interrogated by Southerners, and they kept on try to rile
him and everything. And they said, well, why did you
come here? Said, I just came here to emancipate enslave people,
that's all. Who sent you here? And he said, nobody
sent me here. He didn't want to expose his backers.
(32:56):
He has the secret six of backers of the North.
But he didn't betray me, just says, I came of
my own volition, and I feel I was directed by
God and by my own morality to try to free people.
And so he went on and on booth by the way,
tried to be the nee John Brown. But in reverse
he was a complete white supremacist. He thought John Brown
(33:18):
was the grandest man of the century. Why because John
Brown was incredibly brave on his on the scaffold.
Speaker 2 (33:26):
John Brown, you have been found guilty of murder, conspiracy,
and treason, and I hereby sentence you on December two,
in the year of Our Lord eighteen hundred and fifty nine,
to be taken from yourself to a public place, and
that you be hanged until you are dead, and may
(33:48):
God have mercy on your soul.
Speaker 6 (33:57):
On the last day of his life, John Brown woke up.
He actually slept very well in prison. Some people in
prison would get totally depressed and loose sleep, because you know,
I'm sleeping fine. My conscience is clear.
Speaker 8 (34:10):
I am awaiting the hour of my public murder with
great composure of mind, cheerfulness, feeling the strong assurance that
in no other way possible could I be used to
so much advantage to seal my testimony for God and humanity.
With my blood will do vastly more toward advancing the
(34:34):
cause I have earnestly endeavored to promote than all I
have done in my life before.
Speaker 6 (34:46):
So he woke up filled out as well. And then
when we walked out of the jail, there's a huge
legend even to this day that he bent down and
kissed an enslaved woman who was carrying a baby. Happened.
It could have happened because he did say I would
rather walk to the gallows with an enslaved woman than
with the greatest clergyman on earth. However, what did happen
(35:10):
is that he did leave to his jailer a little
note that the jailer read later, and it said, I
John Brown am now convinced that slavery will only be
abolished after very much bloodshed. This nation will have to
be purged in blood. Two years later the Civil War
(35:32):
began and it would cost at least six hundred and
twenty thousand lives. Some people have upped that number to
seven hundred and fifty thousand, but a real blood dot.
Then it was taken to the gallows, taken on a cart.
He had to sit on his pine coffin. There was
a big worry, concern that there was going to be
an attempt to rescue him. Indeed, there were rescue forces
(35:56):
being sent, so Robert E. Lee and the later famous
Stonewall Jackson. There were several later famous Confederate people who
helped to organize a very heavy guard of horses and
armed people around the gallows to prevent any attempt to escape.
But John Brown at that point didn't even want to
be captured. He you know, he knew he was going
(36:18):
to be a martyr. He was the first up the
stairs to the gallows, and he turned to his jailer
and he said, I want to thank you for your services.
This was his southern jailer, you know. And then he
walked to the middle of the platform and he said,
just don't keep me waiting forever here, okay, for like
(36:39):
fifteen or twenty minutes or something. As it turned out,
he had to wait because the troops were scrambling to
get into place. But finally the gallows drops and he
takes a few minutes to die. He quivers a lot
in his legs. But Emerson simply said, John Brown makes
the gallows was as glorious as the cross his peers
(37:04):
to exists.
Speaker 5 (37:08):
It is not accurate to suggest that John Brown's raid
was the direct and specific cause of the Civil War.
It is, however, proper to note that the evocative image
of John Brown's body became the standard under which thousands
upon thousands of men and boys marched off to do
(37:28):
battle in their own land.
Speaker 6 (37:33):
So that's why, in essentially at the column serve a
good terrorist. It seems to me, would I recommend his
militant use of violence? No, And I think that a
lot of people miss misinterpret him in that way, but
I would defend his use of language and his devotion
(37:53):
to principle.
Speaker 1 (37:54):
And a terrific job on the production, editing and storytelling
by Iron Monty Montgomery. The special thanks to David Reynolds,
author of John Brown Abolitionist and My Goodness, what a
way to end the peace? John Brown predicting that the
nation will have to be purged in blood. The story
of John Brown, the Oliver Cromwell of abolition. Here on
our American Stories
This is Lee Habib and this is Our American Stories,
the show where America is the star and the American people.
To search for the Our American Stories podcast, go to
the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Up next, the story of one of America's most divisive figures,
(00:35):
both of his time and perhaps hours due to the
methods he employed to aid in the destruction of slavery,
or of course talking about John Brown. Here to tell
the story is David S. Reynolds, author of John Brown Abolitionist.
Let's get into the story.
Speaker 2 (00:54):
I don't agree with John Brown and what you did.
Speaker 3 (00:57):
There a legal cars America, our.
Speaker 4 (01:00):
Order to fall. John Brown was a horse thief from Kansas.
He stirred up trouble out there in the Kansas Nebraska
horse and all he did, and he wasn't in the majority.
A majority of people maybe have the right to change
the law, but a majority of twenty one does not.
A slave was property. No man in this society today
has a right to go into my house to steal
(01:20):
my television set, to break my windows. No man in
the nineteenth century had a right to go and steal
another person's property.
Speaker 5 (01:27):
That's exactly what Brown kided to do. What Brown stood
for was wrong.
Speaker 6 (01:31):
He was morally wrong. He killed the slavery's wrong.
Speaker 7 (01:35):
I mean, we all know that, how can you do
anything else but to pull a John Brown?
Speaker 6 (01:39):
How can you do anything.
Speaker 7 (01:40):
Else indcredibly realizing maybe that you're sinning or that you're
doing something wrong. Four million people, human beings, not numbers,
not dates, not backs and figures, not words, but human beings.
Speaker 3 (01:51):
He served to be free.
Speaker 6 (01:56):
John Brown can be best explained by the one man's
freedom fighter is another person's terrorist. I prefer to see
him as kind of a good terrorist. John Brown was
(02:17):
born in eighteen hundred in Torrington, Connecticut, and his father
and mother were Calvinistic Congregationalists. Religion was very important to
John Brown. His father had heard a sermon by the
anti slavery Calvinist Samuel Hopkins in Connecticut, and this kind
of anti slavery Calvinism was passed down to John Brown.
Speaker 3 (02:40):
My father was so strong in his beliefs that abolition
was the answer, not repatriation, that at a point in
my life he actually split the church over that issue
and went off and formed a whole other church called
the Free congregational church and took half the congregation with him.
Speaker 6 (02:58):
He didn't attack and church in the ordinary sense. He
did attentions sometimes. He lived for a while in Pennsylvania,
and in Pennsylvania he went to a church that they
allowed black people in the church, but the black people
had to sit way in the back. For example, in
the winter time, they got frozen back there, there was
away from any heat or anything. So he got up
(03:20):
and went into the back of the church and said,
please take my seat. He told the African Americans, please
take my own seat. So he was actually dismissed from
that congregation. But his main thing was reading the Bible,
learning the Bible.
Speaker 3 (03:36):
Though I only had a very small formal education, I
had worked very hard to educate myself. I read voraciously.
I had memorized the entire Bible when I was very
small ten years.
Speaker 6 (03:46):
Old, and at one point he thought of becoming a minister.
That didn't work out. He decided to in a sense,
be a practical minister by applying what he viewed as
Christianity to enslaved people. His father ran a tannery, and
at age twelve, he was sent on a cattle drive
(04:11):
alone by his father over the countryside.
Speaker 3 (04:13):
Sent me to Detroit. That's almost two hundred miles from
where we lived, with one hundred cows and a contract
with the US Army. Now remember this is the War
of eighteen twelve. I made that distance by myself through
pretty much an untracked wilderness, kept it all together, bartered
with the men at the end, sold the cattle, got
my money, and for a time I lived with a
(04:35):
man there in Detroit hate a young boy about my
age who was black. He was a slave, And one day,
for reasons and never quite understood, I have never and
I hope I never do understand, the boy did something
wrong and the man picked up a shovel and beat
him about to hit so severely that his eyes and
(04:56):
his ears blind.
Speaker 6 (04:58):
The boy was driven out with a shovel, and John
Brown was invited indoors to sit at the table with
the white family. John Brown said, that's when I devoted
my entire life to abolitionism. The injustice of that scene
just never never left him.
Speaker 3 (05:17):
I was outraged. I could not believe a human being
could treat someone on such slim grounds so poorly. I
swore at that moment that I would be the eternal
enemy of slavery and put an end to this evil.
Speaker 5 (05:33):
By the time he was eighteen, John Brown had personally
led one slave to freedom and defiantly declared in public,
did all runaways who came knocking at his dog would
be welcome. Brown became a radical abolitionist.
Speaker 6 (05:55):
Frederick Douglass said, my commitment to enslaved people was like
a candle to John Brown's shining sun. I could live
for the slave. John Brown died a slave. John Brown
felt that the Calvinist idea of predestination applied to him.
He felt chosen really by God to wipe out slavery.
(06:18):
That was his mission, that was the main driving thing.
Was like slavery was, as John Brown viewed, it, a
war against an entire race of people. And he was
very inspired by the Calvinist leader of the English Revolution
of the sixteen forties, Oliver Cromwell, the Puritan warrior. Cromwell
(06:40):
himself fought for freedom, but the freedom from tyrannical oppression
by King Charles. He didn't really concern himself with enslaved people.
But John Brown kept the biography of Oliver Cromwell right
next to his Bible on his shelf, and he became
known as the Oliver Cromwell of abolitionism, The Fighter. The Fighter.
(07:03):
John Brown's inspiration from religion was in a sense unique
because he was the first person to first Christian to
take up arms consistently against slavery before the Civil War.
Speaker 1 (07:19):
And you've been listening to David S. Reynolds, author of
John Brown Abolitionist. You're also hearing some readings from John
Brown by Doug Dobbs. The story of John Brown continues
here on Our American Stories. Liehbib here the host of
Our American Stories. Every day on this show, we're bringing
inspiring stories from across this great country, stories from our
(07:41):
big cities and small towns. But we truly can't do
the show without you. Our stories are free to listen to,
but they're not free to make. If you love what
you hear, go to Ouramericanstories dot com and click the
donate button. Give a little, give a lot. Go to
Alamerican Stories dot com and give. And we returned to
(08:10):
Our American Stories and the story of Abolitionist John Brown
with author David S. Reynolds. When we last left off,
John Brown had witnessed a slave a child beat over
the head by a shovel and decided to dedicate his
life to a mission he saw as truly holy, the
destruction of slavery. Let's return to the story.
Speaker 6 (08:39):
He went on to become a farmer and a tanner.
He was married and had well a total of twenty children.
The average family had about nine kids. I mean twenty
was still very very large. Seven With his first wife,
she died in childbirth.
Speaker 3 (08:54):
I married in eighteen twenty to a young lady named
Diane Lusk June twenty first a June. It was a
great time. We had a good life together and soon
babies bakean to arrive. Our very first we named John Junior.
We lived from place to place as work came, and
sometimes things didn't go so well.
Speaker 6 (09:13):
And he didn't know how to keep books, so he
barely kind of struggled to get by.
Speaker 3 (09:18):
There were many financial panics back in those days, and
the economy went up and down, sometimes very unpredictably, and
I got caught in many a situation where I borrowed
way too much money. I made very bad decisions sometimes
about business and got caught and I eventually into bankruptcy
at some points.
Speaker 6 (09:36):
They also had a lot of childhood illnesses. He lost
four kids within one month of an illness that no
longer exists because of a vaccine. Another child was killed
when a boiling pot of water scalded her to death.
They lost several others as well, so only eight of
his kids outlived him eight of his twenty.
Speaker 3 (10:04):
By eighteen fifty, living in Springfield, Massachusetts. It was in
that year that the United States Congress and its infinite wisdom,
passed the Fugitive Slave Act. Oh My, the states of
the North, which had outlawed slavery, saw their laws run amok,
run roughshot over, and the slave catchers from the South
(10:26):
could come into the North and drag people off with impunity.
On the barest of pretexts. They could accuse someone of
being a slave, perhaps even though they had never been one.
Dark days. Indeed, there were many who lived in Springfield
who were of the African persuasion, who were in great
fear of themselves being drug off in the night.
Speaker 6 (10:51):
And most abolishnists in the North at the time were
peace people. They wanted to use persuasion and words to
enforce the immorality and injustice of slavery and so forth,
which was very admirable but slavery was, as John Brown
viewed it, a war against an entire race of people,
(11:15):
an ongoing war, even though he didn't particularly like war himself.
Speaker 3 (11:20):
I formed the League of Gileadites. There is danger by
oneself alone, but there is strength in numbers, and so
I taught them to gather together and protect one another.
And I gave them knives, and I showed them how
to use them, and I said, if someone comes to
take you off, don't go. It flourished. I had many
(11:42):
friends in the black community who were dear to me
as my own children and my own family, and I
would do anything for them, and they would have done
anything for me.
Speaker 6 (11:50):
He actually shocked a lot of white people because of
his closeness to African Americans, not only to the fugitive
slaves and he lived among them, but also to leaders
like Frederick Douglass, whom.
Speaker 3 (12:02):
I deeply respected, though I disagree with him on many issues.
We battled back and forth over the issue of the
use of violence and the defensive freedom. Frederick argued that
should we go the route of violence, it would probably
not go well for us and might not even achieve
our goal. I argued back that we had to that
there were left with fewer and fewer options as time
(12:24):
went on. Harriet Tubman I knew the general. She called
me the captain. I called her the General. She was
an amazing woman. Such vision, such strength of character, such determination,
such a woman. When it comes later on to my
raid on Harper's Ferry, I argued with Frederick Douglas, but
Harriet Tubman was my ally. She's going to come with us,
(12:47):
alas she grew ill and was not able to come.
Speaker 6 (12:51):
Frederick Douglass becomes the first person to whom John Brown
reveals his plan for liberating his slave people in the
South by making a raid in Virginia to try to
emancipate and sleep people know. So Frederick Douglass remains close
to him, and he stays in Douglas's house in Rochester
several times, and in one of his visits writes the
(13:12):
new Constitution of the United States. He wrote what he
called the provisional Constitution because he thought the current constitution
avoided the whole slavery issue. So John Brown writes this
provisional Constitution, which begins with the idea of abolishing slavery.
Slavery has to be abolished. He also rewrote the Declaration
of Independence. I mean, it takes a lot of moxie
to do that. And he imagined forming a colony of
(13:35):
African Americans in which these documents held sway. And when
he was visited where he lived among mainly fugitive slaves
that had escaped in the North, he really shocked a
visitor who came to his house that not only were
African Americans at the dinner table sitting right close to
(13:56):
John Brown and his family, but also Brown would trusted
them this, you know, mister Smith or or mister that
in the same respectful way that he addressed everybody else
at the table. Was shocked by that.
Speaker 3 (14:10):
Here's a man who had been committed to the abolitionist cause,
had written about it extensively, had a wonderful philosophical defense
for why slavery should end and why abolitionism was a
good thing. Who was stunned that I would treat people
as equals. He didn't understand me. I didn't understand him.
Speaker 5 (14:30):
Most white people at the time, abolitionists included, believed that
black people were inferior. In fact, many white Northerners advocated
abolition only as a means of getting blacks out of
the country entirely. John Brown genuinely believed that all men
were created equal.
Speaker 3 (14:54):
We had many setbacks through those eighteen fifties. The Fugitive
Slave Act in eighteen fifty, the Kansas Nebraska Act, which
turned Kansas into a battleground. In eighteen fifty four, the
border Ruffians came over from Missouri by the hundreds, by
the thousands in fraudulent elections the fall of that year.
And they would stand there and they would say, this
foot of ground one square foot around me, I claim
(15:16):
this as my territory, and that gives me the right
to vote. And then they would go in and vote,
all heavily earned, all with the stink of evil about them.
Speaker 6 (15:23):
The cinema, all the political crisis of the eighteen fifties,
in a sense begins with the Mexican War in the
eighteen forties, because what happens is that America takes over
these vast territories California, New Mexico, Arizona. But at the
time they were just territories, and the question is was
slavery going to be allowed to expand into these territories
(15:48):
or not. Then came the Kansas Nebraska Act, of eighteen
fifty four, which said that the Western territories could decide
for themselves whether or not they wanted slavery. This was
absolute anathema to the North, because suddenly you had the
prospect of all these Western states coming to the Union
(16:10):
allowing slavery. Then each of them would have representation in Congress.
Therefore they would overwhelm the American government, which would now
become totally pro slavery. The situation looked very, very dismal
from the northern standpoint, and that's why you had the
rise of the anti slavery movement and the Republican Party,
(16:31):
which at the time was anti slavery, that arose around
this kind of anti slavery feeling, as did John Brown.
Speaker 3 (16:39):
As the decade war on the dread Scott decision comes
down in eighteen fifty seven, saying that a black man's
not even a person. He is no more than cattle.
He is a thing to be owned. It was so
disgusting the insult of Charles Center, the United States Senator
cained on the Florida the United States Center by Congressman.
(17:01):
And how does the South react? It sends Preston Brooks
to Congressman Moore Knes hit him again. Was there no righteousness?
Was there no justice?
Speaker 6 (17:15):
John Brown took action.
Speaker 3 (17:19):
I gathered my resources. Mister Beecher down in New York
City was most accommodating to send me some of his bibles.
We packed them up Sharp's rifles and labeled them Beacher's Bibles.
And off we went to Kansas.
Speaker 1 (17:36):
And you've been listening to author David Reynolds tell the
story of abolitionist John Brown. What a story you're hearing. Indeed,
how is faith and his religious zeal drove him? And
when we come back, what happens next? Here on our
American stories? And we returned to our American stories and
(18:11):
the story of abolitionist John Brown with author David S. Reynolds.
Also with us playing the role of John Brown is
Doug Dobbs, a former ap history teacher. When we last
left off, John Brown and his family had left for
Kansas amid bleeding Kansas, a dark time when pro slavery
settlers and their abolitionist counterparts fought for the future of
(18:34):
the state. Let's return to the story.
Speaker 5 (18:40):
In eighteen fifty five, Brown went to Kansas with money
and guns given to him by secret supporters in the east.
This was the time of Bleeding Kansas, the frontier territory
where pro slavery and anti slavery settlers fought their own
civil war six years before the rest of the nation.
Speaker 6 (19:03):
Kansas was hanging in the balance between slavery and freedom.
What was happening was very corrupt ruffians from Missouri, a
neighboring state, would go across the border and terrorize the
polling booths, take over the polling booths, and they elected
a fraudulent pro slavery government to try to make it
(19:23):
a slavery state. This pro slavery government was actually supported
by the President, Franklin Pierce. And again, if Kansas goes
to slavery, they could be like Domino's and all the
western territories the future states could have tumbled into the
pro slavery camp and the cause would be lost. So
(19:44):
John Brown goes there with several of his sons and
family members, and he says, I'm going to fight if
necessary to the death.
Speaker 3 (19:54):
And we worked and we built, and we built some cabins,
and we got that through that winter, and it was
an awful time. In the summer of the next year,
By then I had had formed a militia to defend ourselves,
and I was given word that the town of Lawrence,
north of US was under threat from a Missouri militia.
(20:15):
We raced north as fast as we could. We got
there too late. Lawrence had been sacked, the town burned.
The printing press is destroyed. Lawrence an abolition, The stronghold,
a place where free soil men could lift their heads
and do business and feel safe, had been destroyed. They
(20:35):
deliberately set fire to the Union Hotel downtown. It was
an awful time. I was beside myself. I couldn't believe
that people could do this to one another.
Speaker 6 (20:45):
He was totally enraged. He also heard over the telegraph
that Charles Sumner, an anti slavery senator, had been pummeled
virtually to death on the Senate floor by a pro
slavery with a gold headed heavy keene, and they'd left
for dead. John bow Is just totally appalled by this
(21:09):
violent activity, said, Okay, at the time has come, I'm
just going to have to do something more here. And
he literally has several battles with weapons, with guns, with pistols,
horses and so forth, And in most of these battles
he's greatly outnumbered, but he becomes a kind of terror.
Even though he's outnumbered, he usually wins. He scatters the
(21:31):
enemy and he charges, almost like Oliver Cromwell, who during
the English Civil War was off and outnumbered by the
Royalist troops against him, but he's just charged right at
them and dispersed them. And it became kind of a
very feared figure, and very unusual because abolitionists were known
to be peaceful men, pacifists and using gentle persuasion. But
(21:56):
he was under direct threat. The pro Slavery Party not
only had killed many more people than the Anti Slavery
Party had in Kansas, they had made a direct threat
on the whole Brown family. They said, we're going to
wipe out the Brows. So at midnight on May twenty six,
(22:18):
in eighteen fifty six.
Speaker 3 (22:19):
I went down to Potawatamie Creek where a man and
mister Doyle had made threats against my life to my face,
not knowing who I was. I had gone through his
camp under disguise and he had told me that yes,
he was going to come and kill me and my son's,
that my line could be wiped out. I say that's
too much, it's just too much. And so we went
(22:41):
down there in the night of May twenty fourth, and
we dragged him from his bed, and we drug his
sons out under the field and we killed him. Now,
I didn't do it, but I was there, and I
gave my consent. Awful thing, but we had no choice.
(23:03):
We had to strike back. We had to strike fear
into the hearts of these Ruffians. We had to let
them know we would not be victims forever. They could
not ride roughshot over us. We had to stand up
for freedom. We had to stand up.
Speaker 6 (23:19):
He has them hacked to death with swords. It created chaos,
these murders, and the whole court system didn't know how
to handle it. And eventually a few years later, Kansas
would be admitted as a free state, in part because
the very chaos that John Brown created.
Speaker 3 (23:39):
We danced back and forth with those fellows around Kansas
for a while, and then things began to settle down.
I decided to lay low for a while, came back east.
Then about Christmas time eighteen fifty eight, I went back
to Kansas. I had decided what I needed to do.
I've been having this plan for a long time. We
were pulling people out through the underground railroad, the ones
(24:00):
and twos and threes and fours, and there was no
way we were going to end the slavery. There was
no way to end this institution. We were just we're
just draining little bits and pieces here and there. So
I decided that experiment on a small scale. So I
took my militia and we went over into Vernon County, Missouri,
and we attacked two places over there, two farms. We
pulled out eleven people, eleven slaves, took some horses, took
(24:23):
a few other things. We figured they'd earned them, they
deserved them, liberated them, you might say. And we headed
back into Kansas and went to ground and we hid.
And while we're hiding there, between Christmas and New Year's
by eleven who had escaped, became twelve. When of was pregnant,
she gave birth pleasure Heart. From there, we worked our
(24:44):
way up north, back over through Illinois, back to Ohio.
Eventually we got up into Detroit and I put them
on the ferry across the river into Solment, cross into
Canada to freedom. They were freak, no man's property anymore.
I said to myself, that's what we're gonna do.
Speaker 6 (25:06):
He became a kind of symbol of anti slavery activism
that then culminates in his raid on Harper's Ferry, Virginia
in eighteen fifty nine.
Speaker 3 (25:16):
So that summer I began to ling in the plans
in earnest I rented some property down in southern Maryland,
right across the river from Harper's Ferry, and I watched
the warehouse where my rifles were stored. They were marked
mining equipment by this point, and I was posing as
mister Isaac Smith, a mining prospector, and so I could
travel just about anywhere and look at just about anything
(25:37):
with a prospect of maybe a mind being on their
property and generating great wealth. Everybody was glad to see me,
and so I looked, and I poked, and I wandered,
and I went all over the place, and I made
contact with people, and we set up a plane. We
were gonna take a group of people across the river
in Harper's Ferry, and we're going to steal a bunch
of rifles, and we're gonna get up in the mountains
just south of there. We're gonna build some redoubts, some
(25:58):
forts up on top of the hill there, and we're
gonna send out folks down onto the plantations in the
Lowland and say come, come away, be free. We weren't
going to do by tens, not even by twenties four hundreds.
We were going to get thousands to come out, and
thousands beyond that, and we were going to run them
up the ridge all the way to Canada. My aim
(26:21):
was nothing less than to crash the entire economy of
the South. They had as much money wrapped up in
their slaves as the North did in their factories. If
I could get their factories to run away, all their
bills would come do at the bank, all those loans,
all those mortgages, and they'd have nobody to work the
fields and nobody to pick their cotton, and those bills
would come due. I could bring down the whole system,
(26:44):
crash the whole thing. It was a prize too big
to ignore.
Speaker 1 (26:54):
And you're listening to David Reynolds tell one heck of
his story about abolitionist John Brown, and you're hearing tremendous
readings by Doug Dobbs, a former ap history teacher. When
we return more of the remarkable story the life of
abolitionist John Brown here on our American stories, and we
(27:37):
return to our American stories and the final portion of
our story of abolitionist John Brown with author David S. Reynolds.
When we last left off, John Brown had decided to
put his grand plan in action, a massive slaver vault
that would start at the US arsenal in Harper's Ferry, Virginia.
Let's get back to the story.
Speaker 5 (28:00):
John Brown and his tiny band of raiders twenty two
and all took up arms against slavery here at Harper's
Ferry in eighteen fifty nine. At that time in the
Slave States, we had four million people held in perpetual
bondage by less than half a million slave honors, with
powerful political and legal protection.
Speaker 3 (28:25):
The time King October sixteenth, eighteen fifty nine, and I
gathered our men, I mean went down the road, and
we cut the telegraph wires, and we went into Harper's Ferry.
Speaker 5 (28:39):
A band of raiders, white and black, stole into the
sleeping town of Harper's Ferry, Virginia. They called themselves the
Provisional Army of the United States and took their orders
from their commander in chief, John Brown. They overpowered the
guard and took control of the United States Armory and
Arsenal and Call Rifle Works about a half mile up
(29:02):
the road. The raiders secured the two bridges into town,
freed slaves from surrounding farms and plantations, took hostages, cut
the telegraph lines, and for just a few hours found
themselves with tighten their alive.
Speaker 3 (29:21):
The shots sprung out the local militia. We hunkered down
in the firehouse. Eventually the marine showed up.
Speaker 6 (29:28):
John Brown could have escaped if he had gone earlier,
but he kept waiting for more and more enslaved people
to come. He delayed too long, He stalled. Maybe at
one point he said, well, I'll just be a murdyer
for the cause. Who knows. But he delayed. He got trapped, surrounded,
and then Robert E. Lee was brought out from Washington
and sent Jeb Stewart. Both of them would become later Confederates.
Speaker 3 (29:51):
He came to the door that firehouse and said will
you surrendered? And I said, no, sir, I will not,
and he stepped away from the door. That's the last
I saw him. He gave a signal. The Marines came.
They busted in the door and a lieutenant came through
the door wearing a dress sword didn't even have time
to get his real saber, and he came at me
(30:13):
with that sword, and of all things, that sword hit
my belt buckle and it bent double and snapped in half.
I thought, Lord save me, and he didn't. But then
he began to beat me about the head with the
sword in the hilt, and that was the end of that.
I lost consciousness came to We were all captured, and
it had all gone south. It was all a mess.
Speaker 6 (30:35):
John Brow was dragged out and people thought he was
bleeding together. He was bleeding very severely, but he answered
questions for two hours that he was taken to jail.
Then when he was brought to court, he was still
so severely wounded that he had to be carried in
every day on a stretcher.
Speaker 3 (30:51):
And after a while there, I was in grave despair
that awful things would come from this to hurt people
I loved. But eventually God showed me that this was
indeed the best path, and I got to speak my
peace in court, and I got to call slavery for
what it was in a Virginia court room in Thomas
(31:12):
Jefferson's backyard, I advocated for the freedom of those who
had been enslaved.
Speaker 5 (31:17):
He was weak from his wounds and attended most of
the trial in a cot, but he spoke so eloquently
for his cause that one commentator observed it was slavery
on trial, not John Brown. His defense lawyers tried for
an insanity plea, but he would have none of it,
nor would Virginia Governor Henry A.
Speaker 2 (31:36):
Whys they are mistaken who take him for a madman.
Speaker 8 (31:41):
He is cool, collected, and indomitable.
Speaker 2 (31:45):
He inspired me with great trust in his integrity as
a man of truth and intelligence.
Speaker 6 (31:52):
It's a great irony of history that, as Henry David
Threaux said in his speech on John Brown, John Brown
has one higher praise among Southerners than among Northerners. The
Northerners say, oh, he was kind of a madman. It's
kind of wild and everything. The Southerners, it's not that
they agreed with John Brock. They hated what John Brown
(32:13):
stood for, but there was this kind of code of
honor in the South, this idea of you know, sticking
by your guns and really fighting for and also kind
of remaining cool and calm. And the people that captured
John Brown. The Southerners and who witnessed him up close,
said he was the coolest person that we've ever seen
(32:34):
in danger. I mean, he had been wounded pretty severely
when they were captured him. But he lay there for
two or three hours on the ground. He was bleeding,
interrogated by Southerners, and they kept on try to rile
him and everything. And they said, well, why did you
come here? Said, I just came here to emancipate enslave people,
that's all. Who sent you here? And he said, nobody
sent me here. He didn't want to expose his backers.
(32:56):
He has the secret six of backers of the North.
But he didn't betray me, just says, I came of
my own volition, and I feel I was directed by
God and by my own morality to try to free people.
And so he went on and on booth by the way,
tried to be the nee John Brown. But in reverse
he was a complete white supremacist. He thought John Brown
(33:18):
was the grandest man of the century. Why because John
Brown was incredibly brave on his on the scaffold.
Speaker 2 (33:26):
John Brown, you have been found guilty of murder, conspiracy,
and treason, and I hereby sentence you on December two,
in the year of Our Lord eighteen hundred and fifty nine,
to be taken from yourself to a public place, and
that you be hanged until you are dead, and may
(33:48):
God have mercy on your soul.
Speaker 6 (33:57):
On the last day of his life, John Brown woke up.
He actually slept very well in prison. Some people in
prison would get totally depressed and loose sleep, because you know,
I'm sleeping fine. My conscience is clear.
Speaker 8 (34:10):
I am awaiting the hour of my public murder with
great composure of mind, cheerfulness, feeling the strong assurance that
in no other way possible could I be used to
so much advantage to seal my testimony for God and humanity.
With my blood will do vastly more toward advancing the
(34:34):
cause I have earnestly endeavored to promote than all I
have done in my life before.
Speaker 6 (34:46):
So he woke up filled out as well. And then
when we walked out of the jail, there's a huge
legend even to this day that he bent down and
kissed an enslaved woman who was carrying a baby. Happened.
It could have happened because he did say I would
rather walk to the gallows with an enslaved woman than
with the greatest clergyman on earth. However, what did happen
(35:10):
is that he did leave to his jailer a little
note that the jailer read later, and it said, I
John Brown am now convinced that slavery will only be
abolished after very much bloodshed. This nation will have to
be purged in blood. Two years later the Civil War
(35:32):
began and it would cost at least six hundred and
twenty thousand lives. Some people have upped that number to
seven hundred and fifty thousand, but a real blood dot.
Then it was taken to the gallows, taken on a cart.
He had to sit on his pine coffin. There was
a big worry, concern that there was going to be
an attempt to rescue him. Indeed, there were rescue forces
(35:56):
being sent, so Robert E. Lee and the later famous
Stonewall Jackson. There were several later famous Confederate people who
helped to organize a very heavy guard of horses and
armed people around the gallows to prevent any attempt to escape.
But John Brown at that point didn't even want to
be captured. He you know, he knew he was going
(36:18):
to be a martyr. He was the first up the
stairs to the gallows, and he turned to his jailer
and he said, I want to thank you for your services.
This was his southern jailer, you know. And then he
walked to the middle of the platform and he said,
just don't keep me waiting forever here, okay, for like
(36:39):
fifteen or twenty minutes or something. As it turned out,
he had to wait because the troops were scrambling to
get into place. But finally the gallows drops and he
takes a few minutes to die. He quivers a lot
in his legs. But Emerson simply said, John Brown makes
the gallows was as glorious as the cross his peers
(37:04):
to exists.
Speaker 5 (37:08):
It is not accurate to suggest that John Brown's raid
was the direct and specific cause of the Civil War.
It is, however, proper to note that the evocative image
of John Brown's body became the standard under which thousands
upon thousands of men and boys marched off to do
(37:28):
battle in their own land.
Speaker 6 (37:33):
So that's why, in essentially at the column serve a
good terrorist. It seems to me, would I recommend his
militant use of violence? No, And I think that a
lot of people miss misinterpret him in that way, but
I would defend his use of language and his devotion
(37:53):
to principle.
Speaker 1 (37:54):
And a terrific job on the production, editing and storytelling
by Iron Monty Montgomery. The special thanks to David Reynolds,
author of John Brown Abolitionist and My Goodness, what a
way to end the peace? John Brown predicting that the
nation will have to be purged in blood. The story
of John Brown, the Oliver Cromwell of abolition. Here on
our American Stories
Host
Lee Habeeb
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