Part 1 (1/2)

Old John Brown

by Walter Hawkins

PREFACE

This book is for busy people who have not the tie upon the subject Those ould adequately s of the story here briefly told must read A As to John Brown himself, his friend F B Sanborn's LIFE AND LETTERS is a reatly indebted, and he commends them to others

W H

Kilburn, May 1913

CHAPTER I

WHY WE WRITE OUR STORY

There are feho have not a di events of the United States in the period which preceded the Civil War and the elish readers, however, do not get beyond the limits of the fa in the grave, But his soul ison

That state to learn what he did with the body before it coarded as worth recording Carlyle says in his griruesome elevation of the head of one of his patriotic heroes on Temple Bar, 'It didn't ht say the saed at Charlestown in 1859 In his devoutly fatalistic way John Brown had presented his body a living sacrifice to the cause of human freedom, and had at last slowly reached the settled opinion that it orth more to the cause dead than alive Such a soul, so masterful in its treatment of the body, was likely to march on without it And it did in the years that followed, This Abolitionist raider, with a rashness often sublime in its devotion, precipitated the national crisis which issued in the Civil War and Emancipation

There are lives of bravefor the most part of human power and skill: atch bold initiators of soh with indoe and in-exhaustible patience, and we are lost in admiration of the hero

But there are other brave lives which leave us thinking more of unseen forces which impelled them than of their own splendid qualities They never seem masters of destiny, but its intrepid servants They shape events while they hardly knohy; they see fa whither they go,' only that, like him, they have heard a call Sometimes they sorely tax the loyalty of their admirers with their eccentricities and their defiance of the conventions of their age Wisdoe children, in the next generation Pro such lives is that of John Brown

The conscience of the Northern States on the question of slavery needed but soorous action, and, the hanging of John Brown sufficed

The institution of slavery becaood a man must be done to death to preserve it

The verdict of Victor Hugo, 'What the South slew last December was not John Brown, but slavery,' found an echo in h which Eun, the quaint lines,

John Brown's body lieson,

becaed the Federal hosts to victory His name kindled the flame of that passion for freedom which led with the love they bore his memory Perhaps no man had been oftener called with plausible reason a fool; but those who knew the single-hearted devotion to a great cause of this ready victiallows came reverently to think of hi 'John Brown died that the slaveenerous e counsels 'For God chose the foolish things of the world that He , and the base things of the world, and the things that are despised, did God choose, yea, and the things that are not, that He s that are, that no flesh should glory before God' Verily, then, it ht seem worth while to set the story of John Brown in such a plain, brief form as to er accounts of hi of the ways of God rather than ad John Brown, that will be just what he would have ardently wished who desired always that God should bewhich he never loved and never shi+rked, or the hanging which he often foresaw and never feared

CHAPTER II

CHILDHOOD AND THE VOW

The birth of John Brown is recorded in the following laconic style by his father in a little autobiography he wrote for his children in the closing days of his life 'In 1800, May 8, John was born one hundred years after his great-grandfather; nothing else very uncoton, Connecticut, whence they shortly removed to Ohio, then the haunt of the Red Indian

They were of the pioneer far class, which has supplied so reat honour in their pedigree was that they descended fro carpenter who belonged to that faht say, indeed, that the story of John Brown flows fros on the Aust a Dutch vessel diseo of imported slaves--twenty of them; and that day Slavery struck deep root in the new land And in November of that sao of brave freemen, dropped anchor in Cape Cod Bay The strea and the streaenerous in its passion for liberty, that flowed unienerations of sturdy ancestors--these are the streams destined to meet turbulently and to supply us with our story

Owen Brown, the father of John, thus testifies to his own fidelity to the tradition of liberty 'I am an Abolitionist I knoe are not loved by hbour lent o out into the field with him, and he used to carry me on his back, and I fell in love with him'