The Zealot and the Emancipator Read online

  ALSO BY H. W. BRANDS

  The Reckless Decade

  T.R.

  The First American

  The Age of Gold

  Lone Star Nation

  Andrew Jackson

  Traitor to His Class

  American Colossus

  The Murder of Jim Fisk for the Love of Josie Mansfield

  The Heartbreak of Aaron Burr

  The Man Who Saved the Union

  Reagan

  The General vs. the President

  Heirs of the Founders

  Copyright © 2020 by H. W. Brands

  All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Doubleday, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York, and distributed in Canada by Penguin Random House Canada Limited, Toronto.

  www.doubleday.com

  DOUBLEDAY and the portrayal of an anchor with a dolphin are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.

  Portraits of Frederick Douglass courtesy of the Art Institute of Chicago and the National Portrait Gallery. “To Colored Men!” broadside courtesy of the National Archives. All other images courtesy of the Library of Congress.

  Cover paintings: John Brown by Ole Peter Hansen Balling, 1872. Courtesy of the National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution; Abraham Lincoln by G.P.A. Healy © White House Collection/White House Historical Association

  Cover design by Michael J. Windsor

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Brands, H. W., author.

  Title: The zealot and the emancipator : John Brown, Abraham Lincoln and the struggle for American freedom / H. W. Brands.

  Description: First edition. | New York : Doubleday, [2020] | Includes bibliographical references and index.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2019036370 (print) | LCCN 2019036371 (ebook) | ISBN 9780385544009 (hardcover) | ISBN 9780385544016 (ebook)

  Subjects: LCSH: Brown, John, 1800–1859. | Lincoln, Abraham, 1809–1865. |

  Abolitionists—United States—Biography. | Presidents—United

  States—Biography. | Antislavery movements—United States—History—19th century. | Harpers Ferry (W. Va.)—History—John Brown’s Raid, 1859. |

  United States—History—Civil War, 1861–1865—Causes. | United States—History—19th century.

  Classification: LCC E451 .B795 2020 (print) | LCC E451 (ebook) | DDC 326/.80922 [B]—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/​2019036370

  LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/​2019036371

  Ebook ISBN 9780385544016

  ep_prh_5.6.0_c0_r0

  Contents

  Prologue

  PART I

  Pottawatomie

  PART II

  Springfield

  PART III

  Harpers Ferry

  PART IV

  The Telegraph Office

  Illustrations

  Acknowledgments

  Sources

  Notes

  Prologue

  THE PRISONER RAISED himself on his elbow and picked up his pen. The effort stabbed his side and stole his breath. “My Dear Wife, and Children Every One,” he wrote. “I suppose you have learned before this by the newspapers that two weeks ago today we were fighting for our lives at Harpers Ferry.”

  John Brown shifted and tried to get comfortable. The wounds to his head had begun to heal, though they still looked a fright. But the gash in his side caused him searing pain. If he lay quietly and breathed softly, he could almost forget the saber thrust that had nearly killed him, yet the slightest shifting brought the bloody moment back. In all his life he had never spent so much time immobile. He supposed being in jail had its blessings.

  That he was in jail and not in a grave was a minor miracle. John Brown believed in miracles. He believed in the God of the Old Testament, the author of miraculous sea partings and towering pillars of fire. The God of the New Testament, of quotidian wonders like multiplying loaves and fishes, he found less compelling. John Brown believed that God spoke to men. He believed God had spoken to him. God had commanded him to make war on the great wickedness of his country: slavery. John Brown had heeded the call and traveled to Kansas, where he had fought the agents of the slave power. He had come to Virginia to advance the struggle.

  And now, in the waning autumn of 1859, he lay on a cot in a cell in Charles Town, the county seat for Harpers Ferry. He hadn’t told his wife his plans; better she not know the risks he was taking. She would have heard eventually. Yet after what had happened, he assumed she had learned the news from the papers. She might not know she had lost two sons. In any case she should hear it from him. “During the fight Watson was mortally wounded,” he wrote. “Oliver killed.”

  The pain of the writing compelled him to stop every few sentences. He would add more later.

  * * *

  —

  ABRAHAM LINCOLN SHUDDERED on reading the news of John Brown’s crime. From his law office in Springfield, Illinois, Lincoln had been plotting his return to public office. A decade had passed since his single term in Congress had ended, taking with it, apparently, his hopes of becoming someone important. He had talent; he knew he had talent. His mind was as sharp as the next man’s, and sharper than that of anyone he knew with as little education as he had received. He could talk; he could amuse friends and persuade juries. He was a good lawyer, the best in Springfield—though he realized this wasn’t saying a lot. A man of slighter ambition would have been content with how far he had come from the backwoods of his birth.

  Or maybe it wasn’t ambition per se. Perhaps the need to do something more, to win the praise of those around him, was his manner of fighting the melancholy that recurrently settled upon him and caused him to question whether life was worth living.

  He had been making progress. His old political party, the Whigs, had gone to pieces amid the strife that was tearing the country apart. He had leaped from the wreck to a new party, the Republicans. He had traveled around Illinois speaking to Republican meetings large and small. He had locked horns with the Republicans’ chief tormentor, Senator Stephen Douglas. He had carefully positioned himself among the Republicans on their defining issue: slavery. Not for Lincoln the uncompromising ultraism of those who demanded immediate abolition, or the moral absolutism of those who held that a “higher law” than the Constitution must govern the country on the slave question. No, Lincoln embraced the Constitution, fervently yet moderately, arguing that though it allowed the exclusion of slavery from the federal territories, it protected slavery in the states that chose to preserve it.

  But now this. Lincoln knew that John Brown’s assault on Harpers Ferry would be blamed on all Republicans. “Black Republicans,” they were called by their opponents, for the darkness imputed to their motives and their solicitude for the welfare of black slaves. John Brown lent credence to the slur. He committed murder and treason, and tried to start a war of black slaves against white masters. And he did so, apparently, as part of a broad conspiracy against the South.

  Lincoln wondered if Brown’s extreme act had rendered moderation untenable. The South was closing ranks more tightly than ever against any challenge to its peculiar institution. Meanwhile many Northerners were making a hero of Brown, praising him for striking the blow against slavery their consciences told them they should have made.

  Lincoln looked at the walls of his office. In the past few years he had been able to see beyond them. He had managed to push back the melancholy as he returned to political life. Now this. The walls cl
osed in. The melancholy settled upon him once more. Lincoln’s mother had taught him not to swear, but in his heart he was tempted to curse John Brown.

  PART I

  Pottawatomie

  1

  HOW DOES a good man challenge a great evil? How can a man of God confront the work of Satan?

  John Brown remembered when he realized this was the fundamental issue of his life. He was sitting in a crowded church in Hudson, Ohio. He was surrounded by neighbors, but also by strangers who had come to the town to protest the killing of Elijah Lovejoy, an abolitionist preacher and publisher. Few in the assembly knew Lovejoy, and the shooting had occurred hundreds of miles away, in Illinois. But Hudson was a hotbed of abolitionism, and many that day could imagine that what had befallen Lovejoy might claim them. They gathered to praise him, to reassure themselves and to rededicate themselves to the cause of ridding their country of slavery.

  John Brown was familiar to many in the group. Some had known him as a child. His father had moved the family from Connecticut, where John was born, to Ohio—“then a wilderness filled with wild beasts & Indians,” he remembered many years later. “He was called on by turns to assist a boy five years older (who had been adopted by his Father & Mother) & learned to think he could accomplish smart things in driving the cows; & riding the horses,” he wrote, speaking of himself in the third person. “Sometimes he met with rattle snakes which were very large; & which some of the company generally managed to kill.”

  His new home was a wonder. “After getting to Ohio in 1805 he was for some time rather afraid of the Indians, & of their rifles; but this soon wore off: & he used to hang about them quite as much as was consistent with good manners; & learned a trifle of their talk.” His father took up the tanning trade and taught his son the craft. Before long the boy was an expert. “He could at any time dress his own leather such as squirrel, raccoon, cat, wolf or dog skins; and also learned to make whip lashes: which brought him some change at times; & was of considerable service in many ways.” Itchy feet that would mark his whole life appeared early. “At six years old John began to be quite a rambler in the wild new country finding birds and squirrels and sometimes a wild turkey’s nest.”

  The narrator John Brown was telling his story to the son of a friend. The lad had inquired of Brown’s biography, and Brown obliged. He included episodes of which he was not proud. “I must not neglect to tell you of a very bad & foolish habit to which John was somewhat addicted. I mean telling lies; generally to screen himself from blame; or from punishment. He could not well endure to be reproached; & I now think had he been oftener encouraged to be entirely frank, by making frankness a kind of atonement for some of his faults; he would not have been so often guilty in after life of this fault; nor have been obliged to struggle so long with so mean a habit.” The struggle, he feared, wasn’t over.

  Struggle of another sort was less blameworthy. “John was never quarrelsome; but was excessively fond of the hardest & roughest kind of plays; & could never get enough of them. Indeed when for a short time he was sometimes sent to school the opportunity it afforded to wrestle, & snow ball & run & jump & knock off old seedy wool hats, offered to him almost the only compensation for the confinement & restraints of school.” This attitude made an indifferent scholar. “He would always choose to stay at home & work hard rather than be sent to school.”

  He discovered a knack for self-reliance. “To be sent off through the wilderness alone to very considerable distances was particularly his delight; & in this he was often indulged so that by the time he was twelve years old he was sent off more than a hundred miles with companies of cattle; & he would have thought his character much injured had he been obliged to be helped in any such job.”

  At eight he lost his mother to what in those days was the most dangerous of maternal activities: childbearing. His father quickly remarried. John could find no fault in his stepmother, yet neither could he get close. “He never adopted her in feeling, but continued to pine after his own Mother for years.” From the distance of half a century, he reflected, “This operated very unfavorably upon him; as he was both naturally fond of females &, withal, extremely diffident; & deprived him of a suitable connecting link between the different sexes; the want of which might under some circumstances, have proved his ruin.”

  He was twelve when America went to war with Britain—the second time, in 1812. His father provisioned the army with beef and enlisted young John to herd and drive the cattle to the camps. He became a pacifist as a result. “The effect of what he saw during the war was to so far disgust him with military affairs that he would neither train, or drill; but paid fines; & got along like a Quaker until his age finally has cleared him of military duty.”

  The experience changed him in another way. “He was staying for a short time with a very gentlemanly landlord since a United States marshal who held a slave boy near his own age very active, intelligent, and good feeling; & to whom John was under considerable obligation for numerous little acts of kindness. The Master made a great pet of John: brought him to table with his first company; & friends; called their attention to every little smart thing he said or did, & to the fact of his being more than a hundred miles from home with a company of cattle alone; while the negro boy (who was fully if not more than his equal) was badly clothed, poorly fed; & lodged in cold weather; & beaten before his eyes with iron shovels or any other thing that came first to hand. This brought John to reflect on the wretched, hopeless condition, of Fatherless & Motherless slave children: for such children have neither Fathers or Mothers to protect & provide for them. He sometimes would raise the question is God their Father?”

  He continued to reflect as he grew older. The boy became a young man who was sober and spottily educated. “He never attempted to dance in his life; nor did he ever learn to know one of a pack of cards from another. He learned nothing of grammar; nor did he get at school so much knowledge of common arithmetic as the four ground rules.” He sprouted rapidly in his mid-teens. “He became very strong & large of his age & ambitious to perform the full labour of a man; at almost any kind of hard work.”

  He was shy around those his own age, preferring the company of his elders. “This was so much the case; & secured for him so many little notices from those he esteemed; that his vanity was very much fed by it: & he came forward to manhood quite full of self-conceit; & self-confident; notwithstanding his extreme bashfulness.” His siblings noticed; a younger brother called him “a king against whom there is no rising up.” The narrator John Brown acknowledged the fault. “The habit so early formed of being obeyed rendered him in after life too much disposed to speak in an imperious or dictating way.”

  * * *

  —

  HE MARRIED at twenty to a woman as sober as he. They had seven children in a dozen years; she died just after the birth of the last. Two of the children themselves died young, but the others were strong and hearty. John Brown was a stern father, hoping to keep his children from falling into the bad habits he had learned at their age. The neighbors recalled the severity of the punishments he administered. One of his sons, Jason, remembered having a dream so vivid he thought it was real. He told his father, who said it was only a dream. When Jason insisted that it was true, his father thrashed him for lying. The boys were confused as to what was expected of them. Another son, Watson, later told his father, “The trouble is, you want your boys to be brave as tigers, and still afraid of you.” A visitor to the homestead remarked that John Brown looked like an eagle. “Yes,” said Watson, “or some other carnivorous bird.”

  Five years into the marriage Brown decreed that the family would move. The tanning business he operated in Hudson was thriving, and he had just built a new house for his growing family, but the itch was on him, and neither his wife, Dianthe, nor any of the children dared object. They landed in Richmond, in western Pennsylvania, where he channeled his restless energy and abundant strength int
o clearing twenty-five acres and building a new tannery. He became a model citizen of the district and in time its postmaster.

  Richmond was where Dianthe died and John remarried. His second wife, Mary, was half his age, poor and unschooled. Her father was happy to marry her off. If she was daunted by the prospect of taking on Brown and his five children, she kept quiet about it. She did what was expected of her, minding the home and bearing children, lots of them. She had thirteen children in all, making a total of twenty for John Brown. Seven of Mary’s children died early.

  Yet they considered taking in more. The sympathy he had discovered for slaves at twelve was emerging slowly and uncertainly. “I have been trying to devise some means whereby I might do something in a practical way for my poor fellow-men who are in bondage,” Brown wrote to his brother in 1834. “And having fully consulted my wife and my three boys”—the ones still at home—“we have agreed to get at least one negro boy or youth and bring him up as we do our own—viz., give him a good English education, learn him what we can about the history of the world, about business, about general subjects, and, above all, try to teach him the fear of God. We think of three ways to obtain one: First, to try to get some Christian slaveholder to release one to us. Second, to get a free one if no one will let us have one that is a slave. Third, if that does not succeed, we have all agreed to submit to considerable privation in order to buy one. This we are now using means in order to effect, in the confident expectation that God is about to bring them all out of the house of bondage.”

  The adoption of one black child was just the start. “I have for years been trying to devise some way to get a school a-going here for blacks,” he told his brother. “I do think such advantages ought to be afforded the young blacks, whether they are all to be immediately set free or not. Perhaps we might, under God, in that way do more towards breaking their yoke effectually than in any other. If the young blacks of our country could once become enlightened, it would most assuredly operate on slavery like firing powder confined in rock, and all slaveholders know it well. Witness their heaven-daring laws against teaching blacks. If once the Christians in the free states would set to work in earnest teaching the blacks, the people of the slaveholding states would find themselves constitutionally driven to set about the work of emancipation immediately.”