John Brown, Radical Abolitionist

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, both of his time and perhaps hours, due to the methods he employed to aid in the destruction of slavery. We're 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. I don't agree with John Brown and what he did. There was a legal course in America for him to follow. John Brown was a horse thief from Kansas.

He stirred up trouble out there in the Kansas-Nebraska wars and all he did, and he wasn't in the majority, majority of people maybe have the right to change the law, but a majority of 21 does not. A slave was property. No man in this society today has a right to go into my house to steal my television set, to break my windows. No man in the 19th century had a right to go and steal another person's property. That's exactly what Brown intended to do. What Brown stood for was wrong. He was morally wrong. He killed. Slavery's wrong. I mean, we all know that. How can you do anything else but to pull a John Brown?

How can you do anything else debradably, realizing maybe that you're sinning or that you're doing something wrong? Four million people, human beings, not numbers, not dates, not facts and figures, not words, but human beings, they deserve to be free. John Brown can be best explained by the adage, one man's freedom fighter is another person's terrorist.

I prefer to see him as kind of a good terrorist. John Brown was born in 1800 in Torrington, Connecticut, and his father and mother were Calvinistic congregationalists. Religion was very important to John Brown. His father headed, 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.

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. He didn't attend church in the ordinary sense. He did attend church 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 wintertime, they get frozen back there.

It was away from any heat or anything. So he got up 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. 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, 10 years 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 12, he was sent on a cattle drive alone by his father over the countryside. Sent me to Detroit. That's almost 200 miles from where we lived with 100 cows and a contract with the U.S. Army.

Now remember, this is the War of 1812. 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 man there in Detroit. Hated a young boy about my age who was black. He was a slave. And one day, for reasons I never quite understood, I have never understood, and I hope I never do understand, the boy did something wrong. And the man picked up a shovel and beat him about the head so severely that his eyes and his ears bled.

The boy was driven outside 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. 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. By the time he was 18, John Brown had personally led one slave to freedom and defiantly declared in public that all runaways who came knocking at his door would be welcome. Brown became a radical abolitionist. 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. That was his mission.

That was the main driving thing in his life. 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 1640s, Oliver Cromwell, the Puritan warrior. Cromwell 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. John Brown's inspiration from religion was in a sense unique because he was the first person, the first Christian to take up arms consistently against slavery before the Civil War. And you've been listening to David S. Reynolds, author of John Brown and the 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. Lee Habib 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 big cities and small towns. But we truly can't do this 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.com and click the donate button. Give a little, give a lot.

Go to OurAmericanStories.com and give. And we return to 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 had decided to dedicate his life to a mission he saw as truly holy, the destruction of slavery.

Let's return to the story. He went on to become a farmer and a tanner. He was married and had, well, a total of 20 children. The average family had about nine kids.

I mean, 20 was still very, very large. Seven with his first wife, she died in childbirth. I married in 1820 to a young lady named Diane Thulusk, June 21st, a June wedding. It was a great time. We had a good life together, and soon babies began to arrive.

Our very first, we named John Jr. We lived from place to place as work came, and sometimes things didn't go so well. He didn't know how to keep books, so he barely kind of struggled to get by. 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 had borrowed way too much money.

I made very bad decisions sometimes about business and got caught, and I went eventually into bankruptcy at some points. 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 20. By 1850, I'm living in Springfield, Massachusetts. It was in that year that the United States Congress, in its infinite wisdom, passed the Fugitive Slave Act.

Oh my. The states of the north, which had outlawed slavery, saw their laws run amok, or run roughshod over, and the slave catchers from the south could come into the north and drag people off with impunity. On the barrister 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. And most abolitionists 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, an ongoing war, even though he didn't particularly like war himself. I formed the Lig 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 friends in the black community who were dear to me as my own children and my own family.

I would do anything for them, and they would have done anything for me. 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 I deeply respected, though I disagree with him on many issues. We battled back and forth over the issue of the use of violence in the defense of 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 we were left with fewer and fewer options as time went on. Harriet Tubman, I knew, the general. She called me the captain. I called her the general. She was an amazing woman. Such a vision, such strength of character, such determination, such a woman. When it comes later on to my raid on Harpers Ferry, I argued with Frederick Douglass, but Harriet Tubman was my ally. She was going to come with us.

Alas, she grew ill and was not able to come. Frederick Douglass becomes the first person to whom John Brown reveals his plan for liberating enslaved people in the South by making a raid, perhaps in Virginia, to try to emancipate enslaved people. So Frederick Douglass remains close to him and he stays in Douglass's house in Rochester several times and in one of his visits writes the new constitution of the United States. He wrote what he called a 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 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 John Brown and his family, but also Brown would address them this, you know, Mr. Smith or Mr.

This or Mr. That in the same respectful way that he addressed everybody else at the table. He was shocked by that. 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. Most white people of 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.