John Brown has been embraced by the left in this country since he first won notoriety in Kansas during the 1850s. Even more so, in many ways, 1859 is the birth of the modern U.S. left as Harper’s Ferry forced the question of slavery and impelled the best of the workers movement to take up the cause. Michael Gold’s influential biography was the first ‘modern’ telling of the John Brown story. Originally serialized in the Daily Worker in 1924 and printed in this pamphlet shortly after. This is its first online transcription. Gold re-introduced Brown to the generation of the Russian Revolution. Over a decade later, and in different political circumstances, Gold would co-pen the ‘Battle Hymn,’ a W.P.A.-produced play about Brown that later made it to Broadway. Whatever its history faults (much research has been done since), Gold’s book remains a valuable marker in our understanding of John Brown, who will ever remain an inspiration to the oppressed in their freedom struggle. Because of the length this will be presented in three parts. In this section: Growth of an Abolitionist, The Situation in Kansas, Border Ruffians Hold an Election, The Sack of Lawrence, The Liberty Guards, After Pottawotomie, Part one, part three.

‘The Life of John Brown’ Part Two by Michael Gold. Haldeman-Julius Company, Girard, 1924.

THE GROWTH OF AN ABOLITIONIST

For though John Brown had always been an abolitionist, though he had learned from his father, and from his own experiences to hate slavery and its manifold brutalities, it was not until his thirty-fifth year that John Brown showed any more active hatred of it than did hundreds of Ohio farmers around him. Like them, he aided when he could, in the work of the Underground Railroad. Thousands of free Negroes and white abolitionists were engaged in this work of passing fugitive slaves from the South up over the Canadian line, where they were being restored to manhood under the flag of monarchism.

But John Brown, in 1834, began thinking that education of the Negroes might be an important way toward the solution of their problems. He formed plans of starting a school for them. He and his family at this time, though his wool-business was going comfortably, lived in extreme frugality, for they had agreed to save all they could toward the establishment of some such school. For years John Brown dreamed of such ventures as these; and he read all the journals of the small abolitionist groups, and met many of the leaders. He always spoke against slavery in churches or political meetings where he happened to be; and he made friends with many Negroes, and showed a deep interest in all their problems. But not yet had he formed any of those belligerent plans that later were his whole life. He still believed that abolition might be effected by education and peaceful agitation.

Events were piling up too rapidly against such a view, however. The South grew more aggressive every day. The slave system seemed to carry everything before it. It had broken the agreement of 1820 by extending slavery above the Mason and Dixon line into Missouri. It had forced the war against Mexico, and had carved out huge new tracts for slavery. It dominated the government of the United States. All of the Presidents were pro-slavery, or they could not hope for office. Congress was pro-slavery, and the Senate, too.

And it was not only in the South that the life of an abolitionist was worth little more than a pinch of snuff. The slavery venom had crept into the North, for powerful economic reasons. The Northern merchants and manufacturers made their profits by selling machinery, and the goods made by machinery, to the agricultural, cotton-raising South. And the South threatened to secede from the union, or at the least, to force a low tariff on imports, and buy its goods in Europe, if the abolitionists were not curbed.

There were not many of these abolitionists; but they were outspoken, intense, and made themselves heard at all costs. They paid a heavy price for this courage. They were persecuted, tarred and feathered, and in many cases lynched by the Northern mobs.

Then the Southern slave system seemed to have reached a triumphant climax in two events: the first, the passing of the Fugitive Slave Law, in 1851, and the other, the battle over the admission of Kansas as free soil or slave territory.

The fugitive slave law incensed John Brown to fury, as it did every other abolitionist. It was a federal law forced by the South which forced the state officials of every Northern state, however much they might hate slavery, to join in the hunt for runaway slaves and their helpers.

A United States sloop was sent to bring back a slave who had fled to Boston. The abolitionists tried to rescue him, but were foiled, with two men killed, Scenes such as these marked, everywhere in the North, the enforcement of the law. Abolitionists were arrested in com- munities where everyone of their neighbors was also anti-slavery, Slaves, who had been freemen for years and years in the North, were captured and dragged back to bondage by government officials.

The abolitionists became more fiery in their desperation. Many of them, like Garrison, began preaching that the North set up a government of its own: “No Union With Slave-holders!” was the slogan,

And the Kansas affair heaped coal on this fire. Under the Missouri Compromise, both North and South had agreed to restrict slavery within the states already burdened with it; they had agreed also, that the citizens of a new territory could decide whether or not they wanted slavery or freedom, and could vote their choice when the territory was admitted to the union. In other words, both sides would keep their hands off new territory; and the federal government would not interfere.

Kansas was such a territory; it was being rapidly settled, and in a few years was to come up for admission as a state.

And what was happening was that the South was flooding this territory with spurious settlers; idle, whiskey-drinking ruffians armed with shotguns and revolvers, who were intimidating the Northern settlers who had come, and were stealing the elections from them, by force of arms.

The South was openly breaking its agreement with the north; it was openly declaring its intent to make Kansas another addition to the slave states.

To the abolitionists in the North this seemed like the last straw. The South was at its flood-tide of domination; it controlled every- thing in the American union; and now it was moving forward to make its domination permanent by any means; even by the means of murder and intimidation.

Reports of assassinations, whippings, and the burning down of Northern settlers’ cabins came every week from Kansas. The abolitionists began raising emigrant companies of Northerners who would go to Kansas to vote for freedom, even though the South sent its cannon against them.

The Brown family had by now moved to North Elba, New York, a little Adirondack colony of fugitive Negroes who had settled on the lands owned by Gerrit Smith, a wealthy and sincere abolitionist, John Brown had been of much practical service to the Negroes there; but he and his sons, like every other foe of slavery, were deeply shaken by the events in Kansas.

It seemed horrible to everyone, that after twenty years of bitter agitation, slavery was not waning, but was stronger than ever-in- deed, was threatening to swallow up even the North.

Strong men were needed in Kansas; and so John Brown’s sons went there. They were men of peace; they went there as bona fide settlers, to take up claims, and to cast their vote, when the time came, for freedom. But in two months they were writing letters to North Elba asking their father to send them all the rifles he could collect.

“We have seen some of the curses of slavery, and they are many,” wrote one of the sons in the very first letter home. “The boys have all their feelings worked up, and are ready to fight. Send us arms; we need them more than we do bread.”

John Brown collected the arms; and what was more, he delivered them with his own hands. He wound up his business affairs, left his strong, patient wife in charge of the North Elba farm, and went to join his sons in Kansas. The curtain was now rising in the first act of the universal drama called John Brown. The man of God, the tender friend of little slave children, and old, tortured slave mammies, the man of the plough and the counter, the patriarch and citizen was at last ready to become Captain John Brown of Osawotamie; John Brown, the outlaw, the warrior, the soldier of freedom.

At the mere mention of his name Border Ruffians and swashbuckling adherents of slavery were soon to tremble and even fly, as though a devil were behind. And he was bowed with cares and rapidly turning gray; and he had never handled firearms; and he was at the age when other men begin to talk of retiring from business and life, when they long for peace and reflection, in some quiet country scene, away from the world and its problems.

He was fifty-five years old,

THE SITUATION IN KANSAS

As John Brown left for Kansas, he turned to his wife and the remaining members of his family and said: “If it is so painful for us to part with the hope of meeting again, how must it be with the poor slaves, who have no hope?”

John Brown was always sanguine in his ventures; but the events before him would have tried the hope of a superman; they were to be bloody, exacting, terrible. It was what he needed, however, for John Brown went to Kansas with a greater project in his mind, the attack on Virginia and the South, and Kansas was to be for him the rough, harsh school in which he could train himself for that supreme effort.

With his youngest son, Oliver, then about eighteen years old, and a son-in-law, Henry Thompson, John Brown left Chicago in August. The party had a heavily loaded wagon drawn by a “nice, stout young horse,” that was stricken with distemper when they reached Missouri, and could barely drag himself along. Their progress was therefore slow; a scant seven or eight miles a day. But it gave them an opportunity to see and hear things in Missouri, then fiercely pro-slavery, and the reservoir from which were drawn most of the Border Ruffins who were raiding Kansas, and trying to force it into the phalanx of slavery states.

Companies of armed men were constantly passing and repassing on the route to Kansas, and they were continually boasting “of what deeds of patriotism and chivalry they had per-ormed there, and of the still more mighty deeds they were yet to do.” As Brown wrote home in a letter. “No man of them would blush when telling of their cruel treading down and terrifying of defenceless Free State men; seemed to take peculiar satisfaction in telling of the fine horses and mules they had killed in their numerous expeditions against the damned Abolitionists.”

John Brown was roused by all this; already he was changing from the peaceful patriarch to the fearless warrior in the field. One incident illustrates this. When the little party reached the Missouri River at Brunswick, Missouri, they sat themselves down to wait for the ferry. There came to them an old man, frankly Missourian, frankly inquisitive after the manner of the frontier. “Where are you going?” he asked. “To Kansas,” replied John Brown. “Where from?” asked the old man. “From New York,” answered John Brown.

“You won’t live to get there,” the old Missourian said, grimly.

“We are prepared,” John Brown answered, “not to die alone.” Before that spirit and that eagle eye the old Missourian quailed; he turned and left.

It was in October, after an arduous trip, that John Brown and his party reached the family settlement at Osawotamie. They arrived weary and all but destitute, with about sixty cents between them. And they found the settlement in great distress; all of the Browns, except the wife of John, Jr., were completely prostrated with fever and ague, gotten from the rough conditions. They were living in a tent exposed to the chill winds, and were shivering over little fires on the bare ground. All the food left was a small supply of milk from their cows, some corn and a few potatoes. It was an unusually cold winter that year; on October 26 John Brown saw the hardest freezing he had ever witnessed south of his bleak farm-house in the Adirondacks; and all the Kansas pioneers suffered in it as did the Browns.

Nobody in Kansas that first winter knew what comforts were While the Browns paid the penalty for living on low ground in a ravine and in tents, their bitter experience with sickness and hunger was not as bad as that of many other Northern families. Starvation and death looked in at many a door where parents lay helpless, while famished children crawled about the dirt floors crying for food, and shrieking with fear if any footstep approached, lest the comer be a Border Ruffian, (as the Southerners were called) instead of a friend. For pure misery and heart-breaking suffering these pioneer tales of Kansas are not surpassed by any in the whole history of the winning of the West.

But old John Brown was indomitable; he put new life and energy into his six sons; by November two shanties were well advanced, and the food problem had been lightened. They were getting into good shape for the winter, and preparing to take up their share in the settling of Kansas, when the hot breath of war scorched all these plans, as it did many another Northern settler’s.

There would be little time for growing corn for the Browns thereafter, or for the other settlers; the slavery question demanded an answer first.

One dread that had worried the Browns before leaving home proved unnecessary. It was their fear of the Indians. The Browns were terrified when the first big band of Sacs and Foxes in warpaint surrounded their tent, whooping and yelling, but they had the good sense to ground their arms, and the Indians did likewise. Thereafter both sides were great friends. John, Jr., went often to visit their old chief; once, when in the following summer, the Indians came to call again, they were “fought” with gifts of melons and green corn. “That,” said Jason Brown, “was the nicest party I ever saw.

John Brown, Jr., used to ask the old chief questions, as. “Why do you Sacs and Foxes not build houses and barns like the Ottawas and the Chippewas? Why do you not have schools and churches like the Delawares and Shawnees? Why do you have no preachers and teachers?” And the chief replied in a staccato which summed up wonderfully the bitter, century-long experience of his people: “We want no houses and barns. We want no schools and churches. We want no preachers and teachers. We bad enough now.”

No, the Indians were friends. The men really to be feared were not long in putting in their appearance. One night six or seven heavily-armed Missourians rode up to the door, and asked whether any stray cattle had been seen. The Browns replied in the negative; and then, as newcomers, they were asked, in the border slang, how they were “on the goose.”

“We are Free State,” was the answer, “and what is more, we are Abolitionists.”

The men rode away, but from that moment the Browns were marked for destruction. They did not shrink from danger, however. They nailed their flag to the mast; armed themselves, and plunged into the thick of all the political battles then raging. In a short time their settlement was to become known as a center of fearless, and if necessary, violent resistance to all who wished to see human slavery introduced into the Territory. John Brown’s life work had begun.

THE BORDER RUFFIANS HOLD AN ELECTION

No fair-minded reader of history can doubt, in glancing over the records of that time, that the South took the first bloody and brutal offensive in their attempt to force slavery on Kansas. Later, the Free State men from the north, under leaders like John Brown, General Lane and Captain James Montgomery, took up arms, too, and defended themselves bravely; but at first, they were victims of the South’s determination to carry its point.

The Southerners began the attack by stealing the elections for the Territorial legislature. Thousands of Missourians, on horseback and in wagons, with guns, bowie-knives, revolvers and plenty of whisky, poured over the line in November, 1854, and encamped near the polling places. The ballot boxes were extravagantly, even humorously, stuffed; the elections were carried for the South. There was nothing concealed about the affair; in fact, the Missouri newspapers had gaily whipped up recruits for the raid.

Many of these men, Border Ruffians, as the North called them, were hired for the work. Others came for the fun; others because they hated Yankees; others because they were de- vout believers in Slavery.

“They wore the most savage looks and gave utterance to the most horrible imprecations and blasphemies,” said Thomas Gladstone, a relative of the great statesman of that name, who was in Kansas at the time. “In groups of drunken, bellowing, blood-thirsty demons, armed to the teeth, they crowded about the bars and shouted for drink, or made the night hideous with noise on the streets.”

Their fraudulent Pawnee legislature convened and passed a code of punishments for Free State men. Under the code, no one opposed to slavery in any manner could serve on a jury, or hold any office in Kansas.

Death itself was the penalty for advising slaves to rebel, or even supplying them with literature that would have that effect.

The mere voicing of a belief that slavery was illegal in Kansas was made a grave crime. Any person who said in public that slavery was wrong, or any person who even “introduced into the Territory, any book, paper, magazine, pamphlet or circular,” saying this, was to be punished by imprisonment at hard labor for  a term of not less than five years.

This notorious Clause 12 was obviously aimed at the New York Tribune and other anti-slavery journals, and was meant to shut off every whisper of free speech. And it did not work.

For the Free State settlers would not recognize the legality of the Legislature, and held an election of their own. And so there were two legislatures in Kansas Territory, two governors and governments. All the fighting that followed centered about this dualism, and about the mad, desperate butcheries and burnings begun by the Southerners, when they saw they could not cow the Northerners into submission.

President Pierce, who was pro-slavery, sent a message to Congress in which he sided with the fraudulent legislature and its code, declaring it legal, and threatening the Free State men, whom he called traitors, insurrectionists, and seditionists against the United States government.

In all the Kansas conflict, he threw federal troops and federal politicians against the Free State men. The South rejoiced at his stand, but the Free State men went on with their work. And John Brown and his sons took a leading position in the fight.

THE SACK OF LAWRENCE

“Yet we will continue to tar and feather, drown, lynch and hang every white-livered abolitionist who dares to pollute our soil,” said a flamboyant editorial in the Squatter Sovereign, a pro-slavery paper published at Atchison, Kansas, a Border Ruffian stronghold.

The Slaveryites lived up to this promise. The Free State men at this time had not begun to arm, but doggedly and quietly went about organizing their own government at Topeka.

Their actions infuriated the Southerners. Now began the long list of crimes that made the soil of Kansas reek with blood.

It would be impossible to give a full record here of all those crimes. The least that happened was the destruction of newspapers that protested against Southern injustice, such as the Parkville, Missouri, Luminary, which was burned down, the machinery thrown in the river, and the editors threatened with a similar fate if they indulged in further free speech. There were hundreds of abolitionists murdered in Kansas; hundreds of their wives and children were gibed at and threatened and terrified; hundreds of their cabins were burnt down, and thousands of head of cattle stolen.

One of the murders was the killing of Samuel Collins, owner of a saw-mill near Atchison, by Patrick Laughlin, a pro-slavery man. No effort was made to punish him by the authorities. But something was done by them in another case. Charles Dow, a young Free State man from Ohio, was cruelly shot down from behind by Franklin Coleman, a pro-slavery settler from Virginia.

What the authorities did in this case was to arrest Jacob Branson, with whom the dead man had lived. A pro-slavery sheriff charged Branson with having made threats to revenge his friend. Branson was rescued by a group of his friends with rifles, and taken to Lawrence for protection, Lawrence being entirely settled by the Free State men.

The Sheriff called on the Governor, and the Governor called on the militia, and with the aid of Missouri citizens, about twelve hundred armed men marched on Lawrence, to “put down the rebellion.”

The men of Lawrence sent out a call to all Northerners; and John Brown and his men were among those who responded. There were five hundred settlers in Lawrence, and they feverishly fortified the town with embankments; but the whole affair ended by a compromise; there was no fighting; only two men were killed in a light skirmish.

The Southerners left, weak with all the whisky they had drunk on the expedition, according to reliable observers, and angered that they had not been given the chance to burn Lawrence down.

For Lawrence was a sore spot to the pro- slavery men. It was the largest Free State town in Kansas, and the center of all the political activities of that group. It published a newspaper, and its Free State Hotel was the headquarters of the Northerner’s government.

There were other murders, despite the treaty signed at this time. And then in February, as Free State men were holding another of their elections, they were assaulted at Leavenworth, and many of them forced to flee to Lawrence.

One of the leaders of the Free State men, as he was returning from Leavenworth after the election, was captured by a company of Border Ruffian militia. Wounded and defenceless though he was, they literally hacked the unfortunate foe of slavery into pieces with their hatchets and knives. Not an effort was made to punish these murderers, though their names were known by everyone. Some of the slavery journals even praised the deed, and called for more. Said the Kansas Pioneer of Kickapoo:

“Sound the bugle of war over the length and breadth of the land, and leave not an Abolitionist in the Territory to relate their treacherous and contaminating deeds. Strike your piercing rifle balls and your glittering steel to their black and poisonous hearts.”

And in May of that year, after further alarms and disturbances, Sheriff Jones returned with an army of 750 “swearing, whisky-drinking ruffians,” armed with rifles, and even two pieces of artillery. This time the Free State men were unprepared. John Brown was not there, nor any other real leader. The Free State men still believed in peace, and legality. And they saw their Free State Hotel go up in flames, their newspaper plant destroyed, and an orgy of drunken destruction let loose among their homes.

“Let Yankees tremble, Abolitionists fall, Our Motto is, Give Southern Rights to All.” This was the inscription on one of the banners of the invading army. Lawrence was the first city to receive these rights. Thereafter Free State men knew what to expect; they began forming companies of riflemen and guerrilla fighters to protect their communities against Southern rights.

THE LIBERTY GUARDS

One of these companies was the Liberty Guards, as commander of which John Brown first received his historic title of Captain. Besides four of Brown’s stalwart sons, there were fourteen other Free State settlers in the company, and they were present at the first at- tempted raid on Lawrence, which had resulted in a compromise and an abortive “treaty.”

Captain John Brown had gathered his men, and was on the way to Lawrence for the second time when they were informed by a messenger that Lawrence had already been destroyed. The Border Ruffians had captured the town without meeting any resistance, and had razed it to the ground, the breathless courier reported. This startling news was received in a bitter silence by the little company. They pushed on, nevertheless, and encamped near Prairie City, hearing from passing stragglers further reports of burnings, killings and drunken threats of the Southern invaders.

It was a period of great excitement. The Kansans felt as if war had commenced in earnest on them, and that they were to be wiped out. Some of the men who lived on the Pottawotamie Creek, near Dutch’s Crossing, heard reports that their women had been threatened by a group of the toughest pro-slavery ruffians who lived there.

“We expect to be butchered, every Free State settler in our region,” one of these men told John Brown.

Here was a story John Brown heard a few days before from the lips of a pretty young girl named Mary Grant, a settler’s daughter in the region:

“Dutch Bill arrived at our house, horribly drunk, with a whisky bottle with a corncob stopper, and an immense butcher knife in his belt. Mr. Grant, my father, was sick in bed, but when they told him that Bill Sherman was coming, he had a shot gun put by his side. ‘Old woman,’ said the ruffian to my mother. ‘you and I are pretty good friends, but damn your daughter, I’ll drink her heart’s blood.’ My little brother Charley succeeded in cajoling the drunken man away.”

An old settler named Morse was hung and let down again by this same group of ruffians. Then they threatened to kill him with an axe, but his little boys set up a terrible wailing, and begged for his life. The ruffians spared him, but gave him until sundown to leave the community. He wandered in the brush for two or three days with his children, frightened to death, and finally died of the excitement.

There were other such tales, including one horrible story of a similar attack on a woman in childbirth. The ruffians had also put up a notice, advising every Free State settler to leave the community in thirty days or have his throat cut.

John Brown and his men discussed this matter, and grimly decided to “do something to show these barbarians we have some rights.” They moved down that night on the Pottawatomie, and calling out the five men who had done most of the killing, threatening, and burning down of houses in the region, executed them as a measure of self-defense.

It was a bloody, stern act, but it proceeded out of the same inflamed spirit with which the miners at Herrin recently shot down the armed strikebreakers who had been brought into their section. Many, including some sympathetic historians like Oswald Garrison Villard, have condemned this brutal deed, and have called it a stain on John Brown’s life. Murder is murder, and it cannot be defended on ethical or logical grounds. But when a thug assails one with a gun, or threatens one’s wife and children, is one to practice non-resistance on him? Is his life more valuable than one’s own? In such moments men do not think, they act as nature tells them to; even a Villard would refuse to yield up his life to a thug; he would forget logic and ethics, and defend himself. And that was what John Brown did; his act was a stern and immediate answer to the long-continued murders and threats against the Free State men of Kansas. It shook the Territory to its foundations, and it made of John Brown a hunted outlaw. Thereafter he grew no more corn and built no more cabins for his family; he was a guerrilla captain in the field.

AFTER POTTAWATOMIE

John Brown, Jr., and Jason Brown, two of the fighter’s sons, were captured by Missourians and suffered incredible tortures after the Pottawatomie affair. Both men were burning with fever, but they were dragged at the ends of ropes for two or three days, beaten, hung up and then let down, and then chained to oxcarts in the wind and rain. John Jr., always of a nervous temperament, went temporarily insane under this treatment, but his captors had no mercy. Though he shrieked wildly, and though his brother Jason begged that the Southerns have pity, their hearts were hard as flint.

The following scene is described by Jason: “Captain Wood said to me: ‘Keep that man still.’ ‘I can’t keep an insane man still,’ said I. ‘He is no more insane than you are. you don’t keep him still, we’ll do it for you.’ I tried my best, but John had not a glimmer of reason and could not understand anything. He went on yelling. Three troopers came in. One struck him a terrible blow on the jaw with his fist, throwing him on his side. A second knelt on him and pounded him with his fist. The third stood off and kicked him with all his force in the back of the neck. ‘Don’t kill a crazy man!’ cried I. ‘No more crazy than you are, but we’ll fetch it out of him.’ After that John lay unconscious for three or four hours. We camped about one and a half miles southeast of the Adairs. There we stayed about two weeks. Then we were ordered to move again. They drove us on foot, all the prisoners, chained two and two. At Ottawa ford young Kilbourne dropped of a sun-stroke.'”

The men were later released, for they had done nothing that could be prosecuted in the court where the pro-slavery government “troops” had driven them. This was the sort of thing John Brown was fighting; it was life and death, and no mercy could be expected from the Southerners. Mr. Villard and other timorous friends of John Brown do not seem to understand the nature of the battle; and they do not understand what giant faith and courage it must have taken for an old farmer of fifty-five to continue fighting in such an atmosphere.

John Brown did not flinch. Another son, Frederick, was shot down in cold blood on the steps of the family home at Osawatomie, but the old fighter, shedding a silent tear for the loss, for he deeply loved his children, went on his stern path.

The spuriously-elected slavery governor offered a reward of $3,000 for John Brown, and the President of the United States a reward of $250. Federal troops scoured the territory for him. For months he and his men slept out in the fields, flitting from place to place, and fighting in many battles.

With only nine men he fought off a troop of twenty-three Southerners at the “battle of Black Jack,” and forced them to surrender. In August, 250 men moved on Osawatomie, to destroy it as they had destroyed Lawrence. John Brown gathered about forty men to resist the Southerners, and a hot battle was fought, in which, of course, Brown had to retreat. The town was thoroughly wiped out, and also granted “Southern rights.”

There were many other skirmishes; the name of Captain John Brown, old Brown of Osawatomie, became a legend in Kansas. He became a sort of Pancho Villa figure to the South; a hundred times he was reported dead or captured; a hundred times he was blamed for wild deeds he had never done.

Here are two contemporary pictures of John Brown in the field. The first is written by August Bondi, a brave and able young Austrian Jew, who put himself under Brown’s leadership after the Pottawatomie affair:

“We stayed here up to the morning of Sunday, June 1st, and during those few days I fully succeeded in understanding the exalted character of my old friend, John Brown. He exhibited at all times the most affectionate care for each of us. He also attended to the cooking. We had two meals daily, consisting of bread, baked in skillets; this was washed down with creek water, mixed with a little ginger and a spoon of molasses to each pint. Nevertheless, we kept in excellent spirits; we considered ourselves as one family, allied to one another by the consciousness that it was our duty to undergo all these privations for the good cause. We were determined to share any danger with one another, that victory or death might find us together; and we were united, as a band of brothers, by the love and affection toward the man who with tender words and wise counsel, in the depth of the wilderness of Ottawa creek, prepared a handful of young men for the work of laying the foundation of a free commonwealth.

“His words have ever remained firmly engraved in my mind. Many and various were the instructions he gave during the days of our compulsory leisure in this camp. He expressed himself to us that we should never allow ourselves to be tempted by any consideration to acknowledge laws and institutions to exist if our conscience and reason condemned them.

“He admonished us not to care whether a majority, no matter how large, opposed our principles and opinions. The largest majorities were sometimes only organized mobs, whose howlings never changed black to white or night into day. A minority convinced of its rights, based on moral principles, would, under a republican government, sooner or later become the majority.”

The other description is that of William A. Phillips, then a correspondent of the New York Tribune, and later a Colonel in the Civil War. Brown, still an outlaw, was on his way to Topeka, to be on hand at whatever crisis might arise at the opening of the legislature elected by the Free State settlers. Phillips met him on the way.

His account is important, for it shows that John Brown saw much farther than his own times. He knew that there were many other things wrong with the social system in America besides slavery. There are plain indications here, as in other accounts, that John Brown was one of those early American Socialists, such as Horace Greeley, Albert Brisbane, father of Arthur Brisbane, Bronson Alcott, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and others, who felt that the abolition of slavery was only the first step toward a free America. Wendell Phillips, for instance, one of this abolitionist band, became after the Civil War one of the leading champions of the rights of workingmen in their battle against the capitalists.

But here is Colonel Phillips giving his charming picture, in the Atlantic Monthly for December, 1879, of that night ride and the conversation he had with Brown as they lay bivouacking in the open beneath the stars:

“He seemed as little disposed to sleep as I was, and we talked; or rather, he did, for I said little. I found that he was a thorough astronomer; he pointed out the different con- stellations and their movements. ‘Now,’ he said, ‘it is midnight,’ as he pointed to the fin- ger marks of his great clock in the sky. The whispering of the wind in the prairies was full of voices to him, and the stars as they shone in the firmament of God seemed to inspire him. ‘How admirable is the symmetry of the heavens; how grand and beautiful! Everything moves in sublime harmony in the government of God. Not so with us poor creatures. If one star is more brilliant than others, it is continually shooting in some erratic way into space.

“He criticized both parties in Kansas. Of the pro-slavery men he said that slavery be- sotted everything, and made men more brutal and coarse; nor did the Free State men escape his sharp censure. He said we had many true and noble men, but too many broken down politicians from the older states, who would rather pass resolutions than act, and who criticized all who did real work.

“A professional politician, he went on, you could never trust; for even if he had convictions, he was always ready to sacrifice his principles for his advantage.

“One of the most interesting things in Captain Brown’s conversation that night, and one that marked him as a thinker, was his treatment of our forms of social and political life. He thought society ought to be reorganized on a less selfish basis; for while material interests gained by competition for bread, men and women lost much by it. from condemned the sale of land as a chattel, and thought there was an infinite number of wrongs to right before society would be what it should be, but that in our country slavery was the sum of all villainies, and its abolition the first essential work.”

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