John Brown

(Born May 9, 1800 – Hanged December 2, 1859)

Tragic Prelude by John Steuart Curry. This mural is housed in the Kansas State Capitol Building in Topeka, KS.

November 29 to December 5, 2009
150 Years Later

Various Locations
Brought to you by:
The Charles Blockson Collection, The Historical Society of Pennsylvania, The Abraham Lincoln Foundation of the Union League, The National Archives at Philadelphia, The African American Museum of Philadelphia, Mother Bethel AME Church, Shiloh Baptist Church, The Library Company of Philadelphia, The School District of Philadelphia, The Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, The Atwater Kent Museum of Philadelphia, The Pennsylvania Abolition Society, The Civil War History Consortium, The Philadelphia Tribune, Cliveden of the National Trust, Drexel University, Philadelphia Quest for Freedom, The Greater Philadelphia Tourism Marketing Corporation, Constitution High School, Pennsylvania Quest for Freedom, and Millicent Sparks Productions.

Organized by the Moonstone Arts Center

Funded by: The Pennsylvania Abolition Society, The National Archives: Mid-Atlantic Region, The Abraham Lincoln Foundation of the Union League, The Pennsylvania Humanities Council and The Greater Philadelphia Tourism Marketing Corporation.

Why John Brown Matters

1847 daguerrotype taken by Augustus Washington, National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution.

There is a very special thread that runs through American history. It is the thread of people fighting for freedom and equality for everyone, regardless of race, gender, religion or sexual orientation. It started with a group of radicals in Philadelphia who inspired Tom Paine to write Common Sense in 1776. It is embodied in the lives of many individuals who we have never heard of, but who struggle daily in their communities for these ideals. Every once in a while there emerges a giant whose words and actions so inspire the people around them that they change the world. They are always controversial. They inspire great love among the oppressed and great fear and hate among the status quo. In the middle of the nineteenth century that person was John Brown.

Many people in the nineteenth century who were against slavery, also believed that the freed slaves should leave the United States for Africa or the Caribbean. Not John Brown. He believed that the Golden Rule applied to all people and that the founding document of the United States was the Declaration of Independence, which was also meant for everyone. Brown believed that slavery was such an evil that it should be ended by any means necessary. He believed that all people should be free and treated equally and with respect. Brown addressed all individuals as Mister or Miss, regardless of their race or position. He also believed that there was a point when one needed to stop talking and start taking action.

During the War of 1812, at the age of twelve, while Brown was delivering cattle to General William Hull’s army on the Detroit front, he witnessed a young slave being abused by his host. Why, he thought, am I being treated so nicely while this other young man is being mistreated? Thus began Brown’s struggle against slavery.

In 1851, Brown organized the League of Gilead in Springfield, Massachusetts, an armed group that pledged to free any person caught by slave catchers. This group was formed in response to Congress passing the Fugitive Slave Act, which gave slave owners the use of federal law enforcement powers to go into the North to seek the return of escaped slaves. However, these agents not only captured escaped slaves, but any black person who could not prove they were free.

Beyond the League of Gilead, John Brown was also active in the Underground Railroad helping escaped slaves to reach Canada. He was friends with prominent black abolitionists such as Frederick Douglass and Harriet Tubman and also many notable Philadelphia Abolitionists. In the late 1850s, he took up arms to defend Kansas as a “free state” against pro-slavery forces. This action is commemorated in John Steuart Curry’s famous mural “Tragic Prelude,” which is displayed directly across from the Governor’s office in Topeka, Kansas and depicts John Brown as “The Moses of Kansas.”

“I, John Brown, am now quite certain that the crimes of this guilty land will never be purged away but with blood.”
- John Brown’s last letter, written the day he was hanged.
December 2, 1859

As his anti-slavery commitments continued to deepen, Brown presented his plan for a provisional constitution and guerilla war against slavery to the 1858 convention in Chatham, Canada. This convention was unlike any other: organized by a white man, attended largely by blacks, and designed to raise a black army to trigger an African American revolution that would wipe out slavery. It was here that plans for the attack on the federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry were begun.

The actual attack took place on October 16, 1859. As a result Brown was captured, tried by the State of Virginia, and hung on December 2, 1859.

Most of Brown’s white supporters ran for cover. The South, as well as pro-slavery and southern sympathizers in the North, demonized him. On December 2, 1859, Philadelphia abolitionists and the black community honored Brown by declaring “Martyr Day.” Black homes and businesses were draped in black and two vigils were held in his honor. At National Hall (12th and Market) an abolitionists’ vigil was set upon by 20,000 “good” Philadelphia citizens who supported Virginia and the South. At Shiloh Baptist Church, a vigil was led by Rev. Jeremiah Asher, a highly vocal Brown supporter. In subsequent years, the church held other events to raise ongoing funds for Brown’s family.

John Brown’s stature among whites rose when Ralph Waldo Emerson promoted him in the lecture, Courage (delivered on November 8, 1859), noting: “John Brown is that new saint, than whom none purer or more brave was ever led by love of men into conflict and death. – the new saint waiting his martyrdom, and who, if he shall suffer, will make the gallows glorious like the cross.”

“Did John Brown fail? John Brown began the war that ended American slavery and made this a free Republic. His zeal in the cause of freedom was infinitely superior to mine. Mine was as the taper light; his was as the burning sun. I could live for the slave; John Brown could die for him.”
- Frederick Douglass

John Brown’s Body

Glory, Glory! Hallelujah!
Glory, Glory! Hallelujah!
Glory, Glory! Hallelujah!
His soul is marching on

Written in 1861, this song originated with soldiers of the Massachusetts 12th Regiment and soon spread to become the most popular anthem of Union soldiers during the Civil War. Many versions of the song exist. The Brown tune inspired Julia Ward Howe, after she heard troops sing the song while parading near Washington, to write her lyrics for the same melody, “The Battle Hymn of the Republic.”

The Moonstone Arts Center, directed by Larry Robin, is responsible for coordinating this week of events and for producing this newspaper.

John Brown’s
Philadelphia Connections
Written by V. Chapman-Smith,
Regional Administrator, National Archives at Philadelphia

2009 marks the 150th Anniversary of the Harpers Ferry Raid (October 16th) and the hanging of John Brown (December 2). This year is also the 160th Anniversary of Harriet Tubman’s flight to freedom and arrival in Philadelphia. Harriet Tubman and John Brown were both contemporaries and colleagues in the struggle to end slavery and bring equality to black people. John Brown reverently called Tubman “General,” while his men, Tubman, and others called him “Captain Brown”. Both individuals rooted their work in a strong spirituality and framed their efforts as “God’s work.” The two greatly admired each other, and if not for other circumstances, Tubman would have been with Brown at Harpers Ferry. Tubman nonetheless helped Brown with recruitment and some tactical planning. As a result of this ill-fated raid, John Brown became one of the most controversial figures of 19th Century America, viewed as a fanatic by some and a martyr by others, while Harriet Tubman was largely consecrated as a heroine in the American freedom struggle.

U.S. Marines storming the armoury at Harpers Ferry, Va. (now in West Virginia), after its capture by abolitionist John Brown on Oct. 18, 1859.

While the Harpers Ferry Raid is a landmark event, what is not always widely presented or discussed is the connection of the Raid to the larger African American experience in Philadelphia or the meaning of the Raid to black Americans and their allies in the city before the Civil War. No other white abolitionist worked as closely or as intimately with blacks as John Brown did. By the early 1850’s Brown’s credibility and relationship within the black world was solidly established. During the first fifty years of his life, Brown helped finance the publication of David Walker’s Appeal and Henry Highland’s “Call to Rebellion” speech. He gave land to fugitive slaves. He and his wife agreed to raise a black youth as one of their own. He also participated in the Underground Railroad and, in 1851, helped establish the League of Gileadites, an organization that worked to protect escaped slaves from slave catchers. In 1849, Brown moved to the black community of North Elba, New York, established with the philanthropy of Gerrit Smith, who donated tracts of at least 50 acres to black families willing to clear and farm the land. Brown, knowing that many of the families were finding life in this isolated area difficult, offered to establish his own farm there as well, to assist the developing black community.

In the eyes of a majority of black Americans both Brown and Tubman were viewed in much the same way: as front line soldiers for freedom and equality. This was particularly true in Philadelphia. As the largest free black community in the North before the Civil War, Philadelphia became an important center for black political and social life in America, as well as a major hub in the abolition movement and the Underground Railroad. It is within this context that Brown and Tubman loomed as large figures and symbols, and their stories are connected in this region through their allies and supporters. Tubman arrived in Philadelphia from Maryland in 1840 and found allies in the abolitionist community who helped her as a conductor on the Underground Railroad. William Still’s diary even marks the day that Tubman brings members of her family to Philadelphia from one of her many trips back to the slave south. John Brown and his family also had allies and supporters among such blacks leaders and notables as Robert Purvis, William Still, Thomas J. Dorsey (caterer), David Bustill Bowser (painter), Elizabeth Greenfield (known as the Black Swan), and Shiloh Baptist’s Rev. Jeremiah Asher, as well as white abolitionists such as Unitarian minister William H. Furness, Presbyterian minister James Miller McKim (a Union League founder), and Lucretia and James Mott. Brown spent time in Philadelphia in the years between “Bleeding Kansas” and the Harpers Ferry Raid, staying in homes of black abolitionists such as painter David Bustill Bowser and engaging in discussion with individuals like William Still.

With the passage of the Kansas-Nebraska Act, the years 1856-59 became a time of great national tensions over slavery and abolition; however, following the Raid in 1859 it became an even more contentious and bad time for abolitionists, particularly in Philadelphia. Acts of compassion and support for John Brown drew the anger of pro-slavery forces and also boiled up concerns from those who abhorred the use of violence. Philadelphia’s “good” citizens, numbering over 20,000, came out to voice their solidarity with the actions of the State of Virginia and support for the South. Conversely, these actions drew the concern of abolitionists. Members of the First Unitarian Church in Philadelphia began coming to church armed with pistols out of fear of being attacked by proslavery forces during church services.

Despite the mounting dangers, the black community in Philadelphia and abolitionists, both black and white, took on honoring Brown and his men, as well as providing support for Brown’s wife, Mary. Following the failed Raid and while waiting to hear word of her husband’s fate, Mary Brown stayed in the homes of several sympathetic Philadelphians, among them Thomas Dorsey and Lucretia and John Mott. Multiple Philadelphians also attended the hanging to give support and comfort to Mary Brown and accompanied her in transporting her husband’s body via Philadelphia to New York State. Blacks in the city observed his execution day as “Martyr Day” by draping their homes and businesses in black and participating in public prayer meetings at Shiloh Baptist and Union Baptist. Black abolitionist Robert Purvis spoke in praise of Brown at a gathering at National Hall with William Furness, who had met Brown’s body at the Broad and Washington train depot along with many black Philadelphians.

In the years following, black Philadelphians and white reformers (who included former abolitionists and those supporting the Equal Rights Leagues and Reconstruction) continued to honor Brown and to give ongoing support to his family with tribute concerts, and Emancipation Day commemorations. Painter David Bustill Bowser created one of the earliest memorial portraits of Brown, which is now held by the Atwater Kent Museum of Philadelphia. Bowser’s work is among the first of a long line of black artists’ memorials to John Brown extending into the 20th Century. In 1902, Eden Cemetery created the John Brown and Harriet Tubman sections at the historic black burial ground.

These and other historical connections demonstrate that the Harpers Ferry Raid 150th Anniversary is a meaningful time for Philadelphians. It provides a moment for us to discover and explore these stories, as well as other little or unknown aspects of the defining years before the Civil War. It also offers us an important opportunity to gain greater understanding of our region’s place in the national narrative around race and slavery, the legacy of which still lingers today.

‘Yes, sir; I am the man who saved Fred. Douglass’ life when Old John Brown was captured at Harper’s Ferry. I suppressed a dispatch addressed to the sheriff of Philadelphia, instructing him to arrest Douglass, who was then in that city, as proofs of his complicity in the memorable raid were discovered when John Brown was taken into custody.’

‘At that time I was a telegraph operator located in Philadelphia,’ continued Mr. Hurn, ‘and when I received the dispatch I was frightened nearly out of my wits. As I was an ardent admirer of the great ex-slave, I resolved to warn Douglass of his impending fate, no matter what the result might be to me. The news had just been spread throughout the country of the bold action of John Brown in taking Harper’s Ferry. Everybody was excited and public feeling ran high. Before the intelligence came that Brown had been captured, the dispatch I have mentioned was sent by the sheriff of Franklin county, Penn., to the sheriff of Philadelphia, informing him that Douglass had been one of the leading conspirators, and requesting that he should be immediately apprehended.’

‘Though I knew it was illegal to do so, I quietly put the dispatch in my pocket, and, asking another operator to take my place, started on my search for Fred. Douglass…’

Frederick Douglass (photo) and statement by John White Hurn ca. 1860-1861, Philadelphia from the book by Jean Libby, which is a catalogue of the exhibit currently up at the National Archives of Phila.

“Some 1800 years ago, Christ was crucified. This morning, Captain Brown was hung. He is not Old Brown any longer; he is an angel of light.”
- Henry David Thoreau

John Brown– A Timeline View through Philadelphia

1800
May 9: John Brown is born in Torrington, CT. His father, Owen, is a strict Calvinist, who hates slavery and believes that holding humans in bondage is a sin against God.

1812
A 12-year-old John Brown travels through the Michigan wilderness to deliver a herd of cattle. He lodges with a man who owns a boy slave. While Brown is treated well, the slave is beaten before his eyes with an iron shovel. This memory forever haunts John Brown.

1837
Nov. 7: Elijah Lovejoy, publisher of an antislavery newspaper, is shot to death by a proslavery mob. During his memorial service, John Brown stands and makes a public vow to end slavery.

1847
Frederick Douglass meets Brown for the first time in Springfield, MA. Of the meeting Douglass says, that “though a white gentleman, [Brown] is in sympathy a black man, and as deeply interested in our cause, as though his own soul had been pierced by the iron of slavery.”

1849
Harriet Tubman’s flight to freedom and arrival in Philadelphia.

Brown and his family settle in a black community in North Elba founded on land donated by the Anti-Slavery campaigner Gerrit Smith. While there, Brown gradually becomes convinced that the use of force will be necessary in order to overthrow the system.

1850
The Fugitive Slave Act provides slave owners the use of federal law enforcement power to obtain the return of fugitives. The law is used to attack free black communities, as well as to seek the return of fugitives.

Brown recruits forty-four men into the U.S. League of Gileadites, an organization founded to resist slave-catchers.

1854
The Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854 is passed, sweeping aside the Missouri Compromise that previously limited the expansion of slavery. With a nod to Southern power, the federal government places the volatile issue of slavery into the hands of those settling the new territories. By popular vote, the people are to decide whether to be “free” or “slave.”

1855
June: John Brown follows his sons to Kansas to help anti-slavery forces to control the region and to protect black communities.

1856
May 22:
On the floor of the U.S. Senate, South Carolina Senator Preston Brooks clubs Massachusetts Senator Charles Sumner senseless following Sumner’s delivery of an abolitionist speech titled, “The Crime Against Kansas.” When Brown receives word of the caning, according to his son Jason, “it seemed to be the finishing, decisive touch.” Brown tells his supporters, “I am entirely tired of hearing that word ‘caution.’ It is nothing but the word of cowardice.”

June
Philadelphian Robert Purvis gives an extemporaneous and fiery speech before the American Anti-Slavery Society, declaring himself a “Disunion Abolitionist” and castigating the “abject servility of the North” in refusing to stand up to the slave-owning South.”

1857
January: Franklin Sanborn, secretary for the Massachusetts State Kansas Committee, introduces Brown to influential abolitionists in the Boston area in an effort to further the antislavery fight in Kansas.

1858
April:
Harriet Tubman meets with John Brown in her North Street home in St. Catharine’s (Ontario, Canada). Tubman commits herself to helping Brown and recruits former slaves to join him on his planned raid at Harper’s Ferry, Virginia.

May:
John Brown writes his utopian Provisional Constitution and Ordinances for the People of the United States intended to reform the existing and flawed proslavery U.S. Constitution. Brown presents this document at an antislavery convention of African-Americans in Chatham, Ontario with the hope that it will create a better society built on the concept of racial equality.

December:
Brown rides with twenty men into Verona County, Missouri, where they forcibly liberate twelve slaves from two farms and begin leading them on a successful 82-day, one thousand mile winter journey to freedom in Canada.

John Brown – The Martyr, Currier & Ives, (1870), lithograph, Library of Congress.

1859
August:
In Chambersburg, PA, Brown makes a final plea to Douglass to join the raid on Harpers Ferry. Douglass refuses, warning that the raid will fail.

Oct. 16-18:
Brown and his group of 19 men take over the Harpers Ferry arsenal. Following Brown’s capture, federal marshals issue a warrant for Frederick Douglass’s arrest as an accomplice. Douglass flees abroad. When he returns five months later to mourn the death of his youngest daughter, he finds that he has been exonerated.

Oct. 27:
Trial of John Brown by the State of Virginia begins.

Nov. 2:
Brown is found guilty.

Nov. 8:
Transcendentalist Ralph Waldo Emerson’s lecture, “Courage,” is delivered in the Music Hall in Boston. This celebratory speech begins to turn the tide of white northern public opinion in John Brown’s favor.

Nov. 16:
The Executive Committee of Pennsylvania Anti-Slavery Society calls for a meeting on the day of Brown’s execution. Similar meetings are held elsewhere as abolitionists gather together to memorialize Brown.

Nov. 28:
Wendell Phillips and George William Curtis speak in Philadelphia in a program organized by the young Isaac H. Clothier (of Strawbridge & Clothier fame). Isaac Clothier’s father, Caleb Clothier, was a member of the Pennsylvania Abolition Society and co-founder of the Pennsylvania Anti-Slavery Society.

Nov. 28:
John Brown’s wife arrives in Philadelphia and stays with the Motts, as well as the Thomas Dorsey and William Still families. James Miller McKim, a Union League founding member and a person on the receiving end of “Henry Box Brown,” attends the hanging and assists Brown’s wife in bringing his body home.

Dec. 2:
John Brown’s execution is attended by some 600 people. Six other men involved in the raid are also hanged. Artist Horace Pippin’s grandmother witnesses the hangings, as does John Wilkes Booth.

Blacks in Philadelphia observe the day as “Martyr Day,” draping their homes and businesses in black and holding public prayer meetings throughout the city.

The Anti-Slavery Meeting in Philadelphia honoring Brown is held at National Hall with James & Lucretia Mott, Unitarian minister William Furness, and Robert Purvis speaking.

At Shiloh Baptist, the Rev. Jeremiah Asher gives a passionate sermon to the more than 400 John Brown supporters in attendance.

Dec. 2:
Brown’s body passes through Philadelphia. The reception committee includes Unitarian minister William Furness and a large number of black supporters, who crowd the train depot to pay their homage.

Dec. 13:
“Union Meeting” held in Philadelphia to assure Virginia and the south that Lucretia Mott and others like her do not represent the views of Pennsylvanians. The meeting (reported by one to be attended by 20,000) elects to send a large American flag to Viginia Go. Henry Wise as a show of solidarity.

1860
In Philadelphia, some 60 black leaders and activists from a host of religions, fraternal, and cultural associations sponsor a “Complimentary Concert” with Mary L. Brown (a local classical singer) and Elizabeth Greenfield (the “Black Swan”) leading the evening’s entertainment. Money raised by the concert goes to aid John Brown’s family.

Artist David Bustill Bowser, a personal friend to John Brown, completes a portrait of him.

Frederick Douglass writes his lecture on John Brown as a tribute to “a hero and martyr to the cause of liberty.”

1870
April:
In celebration of Pennsylvania’s passage of the franchise for blacks, the Union League of Philadelphia presents a silk banner to Octavius V. Catto, founder of the PA State Equal Rights League. With a huge procession behind him, Catto marches through the streets of the city and out to Horticultural Hall, where tribute is paid to the “martyrs and apostles of liberty, among them John Brown and Abraham Lincoln.”

1902
Eden Cemetery opens in Philadelphia. Burial sections are dedicated to John Brown, Harriet Tubman, and David Bustill Bowser.

Special thanks to Christopher Densmore, Friends Historical Library, Swarthmore College for his assistance in creating the time line.

“Whereas, Slavery, throughout its entire existence in the United States is none other than a most barbarous, unprovoked, and unjustifiable War of one portion of its citizens upon another portion; the only conditions of which are perpetual imprisonment, and hopeless servitude or absolute extermination; in utter disregard and violation of those eternal and self-evident truths set forth in our Declaration of Independence.”
- John Brown

From John Brown’s Address to the Virginia Court at Charles Town, Virginia on November 2, 1859:

“[...] I have another objection; and that is, it is unjust that I should suffer such a penalty. Had I interfered in the manner which I admit, and which I admit has been fairly proved (for I admire the truthfulness and candor of the greater portion of the witnesses who have testified in this case), had I so interfered in behalf of the rich, the powerful, the intelligent, the so-called great, or in behalf of any of their friends, either father, mother, brother, sister, wife, or children, or any of that class, and suffered and sacrificed what I have in this interference, it would have been all right; and every man in this court would have deemed it an act worthy of reward rather than punishment.

This court acknowledges, as I suppose, the validity of the law of God. I see a book kissed here which I suppose to be the Bible, or at least the New Testament. That teaches me that all things whatsoever I would that men should do to me, I should do even so to them. It teaches me, further, to “remember them that are in bonds, as bound with them.” I endeavored to act up to that instruction. I say, I am yet too young to understand that God is any respecter of persons. I believe that to have interfered as I have done as I have always freely admitted I have done in behalf of His despised poor, was not wrong, but right. Now, if it is deemed necessary that I should forfeit my life for the furtherance of the ends of justice, and mingle my blood further with the blood of my children and with the blood of millions in this slave country whose rights are disregarded by wicked, cruel, and unjust enactments, I submit; so let it be done!“

“An enthusiast broods over the oppression of a people until he fancies himself commissioned by Heaven to liberate them. He ventures the attempt which ends in little else than his own execution.”
- Abraham Lincoln

“I have no doubt that our seeming disaster will ultimately result in the most glorious success. I have been whipped, but I am sure I can recover all the lost capital by only hanging a few moments by the neck.”
- John Brown

David Bustill Bowser, John Brown, oil, 1860, Historical Society of Pennsylvania. African American, Philadelphia artist, Bowser executed this sympathetic portrait of Brown the year after he was executed. Bowser’s portrait was used by many others who showed Brown, alternately, as a crazed agitator bent on ruining the country or a sainted martyr defending the nation’s most fundamental principles.