Gerrit Smith

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FOMENTING OF RACE WAR (RATHER THAN CIVIL WAR)

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RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

GERRIT SMITH

It is clear that Henry Thoreau was not trusted with any of the secrets of the conspiracy we have come to know as the Secret “Six,” to the extent that his future editor and biographer Franklin Benjamin Sanborn confided to him nothing whatever about the ongoing meetings which he was having with the Reverend Thomas Wentworth “Charles P. Carter” Higginson, the Reverend Theodore Parker, Gerrit Smith, Dr. Samuel Gridley Howe, and George Luther Stearns. For Thoreau commented in his JOURNAL in regard to Captain John Brown, “it would seem that he had not confidence enough in me, or in anybody else that I know [my emphasis], to communicate his plans to us.” –And, Thoreau could not have believed this and could not have made such an entry in his journal had any member of the Secret Six been providing him with any clues whatever that there was something going on behind the scenes, within their own private realm of scheming! Had it been the case, that Thoreau had become aware that there was in existence another, parallel, universe of scheming, rather than writing “or in anybody else that I know,” he would most assuredly have written something more on the order of HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

(perhaps) “it would seem that they had not confidence enough in me, to provide me any insight into their plans.”

Treason being punished as what it is, why would the downtown Boston lawyer Richard Henry Dana, Jr. allow himself to become legal counsel to a “Secret Six” committee that was funding the activities of Captain John Brown, as that loose cannon prepared to raid the federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry, Virginia? He was going to be implicated as having obviously had guilty prior knowledge, and was obviously making himself of necessity a prime candidate for the noose. As the going got hot he would make himself unavailable for prosecution –by venturing on a luxury trip around the globe– but the issue is not how he might extricate himself from this, but why he would have so endangered himself.

The Reverend Thomas Wentworth “Charles P. Carter” Higginson of the Secret “Six” believed that “Never in history was there an oppressed people who were set free by others” (it was therefore up to American black people to demonstrate their courage, and their worthiness to be free — basically by getting themselves exterminated). After Harpers Ferry he would attempt to organize an expedition to raid the Charles Town lockup and rescue the accused — this was an expedition Henry Thoreau would oppose, asserting that to the contrary Captain Brown’s highest and best purpose was to be hung.

Dr. Samuel Gridley Howe and others of the Massachusetts State Kansas Committee raised $5,000 in one day, to buy enough Sharp’s rifles to arm 200 men to the teeth in “Bleeding Kansas.” He, as well as the Reverend Theodore Parker, Franklin Benjamin Sanborn, Gerrit Smith, and George Luther Stearns, fully grasped from the earliest moment the fact that the probable result of their attempt to incite a race war (black Americans against white), would be, at least initially, a defeat of the black forces of servile insurrection. These 5 of the white conspirators of the Secret “Six” finance committee clearly had been willing to sacrifice the lives of their black allies in order to foment sectional civil war between Northern and Southern white Americans.

The Reverend Theodore Parker, a stone racist, declared from his pulpit that while he ordinarily spent $1,500 a year on books, the equivalent of 4 or 5 men’s annual wages, for the time being he was going to restrict himself to spending less than one man’s annual wage on books per year, and devote the remaining moneys to the purchase of guns and ammunition for the white people going to the Kansas Territory. Sharps rifles, the very latest in deadliness, cost $25 apiece when had in sufficient quantity:

“I make all my pecuniary arrangements with the expectation of civil war.”

He would take to marking the boxes of new Sharps rifles he shipped illegally to “Bleeding Kansas” with the word BOOKS, and he would take to referring to these firearms as so many copies of RIGHTS OF THE PEOPLE as in “The right of the people to keep and to bear arms shall not be infringed.” He, as well as Dr. Samuel Gridley Howe, Franklin Benjamin Sanborn, Gerrit Smith, and George Luther Stearns of the Secret “Six”, fully grasped from the earliest moment the fact that the probable result of their attempt to incite a race war, of black Americans against white Americans, would be, at least initially, a defeat of the black forces of servile insurrection. These 5 of the white conspirators clearly had been willing to sacrifice the lives of their allies among the Northern and Southern black Americans slave and free, in order to foment a rectification of the Southern white Americans. HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

Franklin Benjamin Sanborn of Concord, as well as Dr. Samuel Gridley Howe, the Reverend Theodore Parker, Gerrit Smith, and George Luther Stearns, fully grasped from the earliest moment the fact that the probable result of their attempt to incite a race war, of black Americans against white Americans, would be, at least initially, a defeat of their black forces. These 5 of the white Secret “Six” conspirators clearly had been willing to sacrifice the lives of their black allies for servile insurrection in order to foment sectional civil war between Northern and Southern white Americans. (John Brown, who had himself buried a wife and promptly recruited another one, once commented to Sanborn, in regard to the young man’s grief over the prompt death of his young bride Ariana Walker, that he was too young to be married to a gravestone.)

The immensely wealthy “H. Ross Perot” political figure of that era was a former Millerite millennialist: Gerrit Smith. In this American’s mansion outside Syracuse, New York, standing in the center of his study, was an ornate mahogany desk. Rumor had it that this had once been the desk of the emperor Napoleon Bonaparte himself. The millennium of William Miller not having arrived on schedule, Smith had become determined to, as he put it, “make himself a colored man” –he desired to explore his inner blackness– and thus he befriended Frederick Douglass (Smith would be Douglass’s friend, that is, up to the point at which he would discover that black Americans were inherently racially inferior to white Americans and thus unworthy of consideration). He, as well as Dr. Samuel Gridley Howe, the Reverend Theodore Parker, Franklin Benjamin Sanborn, and George Luther Stearns of the Secret “Six” fully grasped from the earliest moment that the probable result of their attempt to incite a servile insurrection of black Americans against white Americans, would be, at least initially, a defeat of the black forces. These 5 of the white conspirators clearly had been willing to sacrifice the lives of their black allies, in order to disrupt relations between Northern and Southern white Americans, toward the generation of a sectional civil war.

George Luther Stearns, a Boston manufacturer of lead pipe and the secretary of the Boston Emancipation League, as well as Dr. Samuel Gridley Howe, the Reverend Theodore Parker, Franklin Benjamin Sanborn, and Gerrit Smith of the Secret “Six,” fully grasped from the earliest moment the fact that the probable result of their attempt to incite a race war, of black Americans against white Americans, would be, at least initially, a defeat of their black forces. These 5 of the white conspirators clearly had been willing to sacrifice the lives of their black allies in servile insurrection in order to foment a sectional civil war between Northern and Southern white Americans. HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

THOSE INVOLVED, ARRANGED ALPHABETICALLY

SECRET “SIX”

Person’s Name On Raid? Shot Dead? Hanged? His Function Age Race

Charles Francis Adams, Sr. No No No Finance white

Charles Francis Adams, Sr. subscribed to the racist agenda of Eli Thayer’s and Amos Lawrence’s New England Emigrant Aid Company, for the creation of an Aryan Nation in the territory then well known as “Bleeding Kansas”, to the tune of $25,000.

Jeremiah Goldsmith Anderson Yes Yes Captain or Lt. 26 white

Jeremiah Goldsmith Anderson, one of Captain Brown’s lieutenants, was born April 17, 1833, in Indiana, the son of John Anderson. His maternal grandfather, Colonel Jacob Westfall of Tygert Valley VA, had been a soldier in the revolution and a slaveholder. He went to school at Galesburg IL and Kossuth IA and worked as a peddler, farmer, and sawmill laborer before settling a mile from Fort Bain on the Little Osage in Bourbon County in “Bleeding Kansas” in August 1857. He was twice arrested by the proslavery activists, and for ten weeks was held at Fort Scott. He then became a lieutenant of Captain Montgomery and was with him in the attack on Captain Anderson’s troop of the First US Cavalry. He witnessed a murder on his own doorstep by border ruffians, of a Mr. Denton. He went with John Brown on the slave raid into Missouri and remained with him thereafter. On July 5, 1859 he wrote of his determination to continue to fight for freedom: “Millions of fellow-beings require it of us; their cries for help go out to the universe daily and hourly. Whose duty is it to help them? Is it yours? Is it mine? It is every man’s, but how few there are to help. But there are a few who dare to answer this call and dare to answer it in a manner that will make this land of liberty and equality shake to the centre.” He was killed by a bayonet-thrust of one of the Marines at Harpers Ferry. “One of the prisoners described Anderson as turning completely over against the wall [to which he was pinned by the bayonet] in his dying agony. He lived a short time, stretched on the brick walk without, where he was subjected to savage brutalities, being kicked in body and face, while one brute of an armed farmer spat a huge quid of tobacco from his vile jaws into the mouth of the dying man, which he first forced open.”

John Anderson ? ? Private < 30 of color

John Anderson, a free black youth from Boston allegedly killed at Harpers Ferry. Nothing is known as to who he was, other than that he was young, or where he came from, other than from Boston — and it is even possible that actually there had been no such person as this in John Brown’s company. (The John Anderson we do know about had an entirely different life trajectory, in Canada.)

Osborn Perry Anderson Yes No No Private 29 of color HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

Person’s Name On Raid? Shot Dead? Hanged? His Function Age Race

Osborn Perry Anderson, “O.P. Anderson, or as we used to call him Chatham Anderson,” the only participant of color to survive Harpers Ferry and elude capture, had been born free on July 27, 1830 in West Fallowfield PA. He had learned the printing trade in Canada, where he had met John Brown in 1858. He would write later of the fight at Harpers Ferry and his escape in A VOICE FROM HARPER’S FERRY: “We were together eight days before [John Edwin Cook and Albert Hazlett were] captured, which was near Chambersburg, and the next night Meriam [Francis Jackson Meriam] left us and went to Shippensburg, and there took cars for Philadelphia. After that there were but three of us left [Brown’s son Owen Brown, Barclay Coppoc, and Charles Plummer Tidd], and we kept together, until we got to Centre County, Pennsylvania, where we bought a box and packed up all heavy luggage, such as rifles, blankets, etc., and after being together three or four weeks we separated….” Anderson, Coppoc, and Meriam had journeyed separately to safe exile in the area of St. Catharines, Canada. Anderson enlisted in the US Army in 1864, becoming a noncommissioned officer, and mustered out in Washington DC at the close of the war, to die a pauper of TB and lack of care in Washington on December 13, 1872.

John Albion Andrew No white

Despite the fact that John Albion Andrew was a prominent Massachusetts politician, Franklin Benjamin Sanborn of the Secret “Six” would indicate long after the raid on Harpers Ferry, John Brown’s “general purpose of attacking slavery by force, in Missouri or elsewhere, was known in 1857-8-9” to Governor Andrew.

Henry Ward Beecher No No No Propaganda white

The Reverend Henry Ward Beecher induced the congregation of his Plymouth Church to procure a crate of 25 rifles to ship illegally to “Bleeding Kansas” and to stamp upon that crate the term of art BIBLES. The Reverend’s personal attitude toward American blacks was that although those like Frederick Douglass whose blood had become partly mingled with the blood of whites were worthy of consideration as human beings, those who yet remained of pure African stock were still in such a “low animal condition” (his category, his words) of pure blackness that such consideration as human beings would be inappropriate.

Ann Brown No No No Supporter white

Ann Brown, a daughter of Captain John Brown, was with the conspirators at the Kennedy farm until shortly before the attack upon Harpers Ferry. In the aftermath she would move to the West Coast.

Frederick Brown No No No Supporter white

Frederick Brown was fanatically religious to the extent that he attempted to sever his sexual organs when he was attracted to a young lady. He would have been 28 at the time of the Harpers Ferry raid, but in 1856 had been killed in the fighting in “Bleeding Kansas”.

Jason Brown No No No Supporter 38 white HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

Person’s Name On Raid? Shot Dead? Hanged? His Function Age Race

Jason Brown, one of the elder sons of Captain John Brown, was a gentle sort of person who actually was trying to become an inventor. He took part in the battle at Black Jack in “Bleeding Kansas”, and in the killings on the Osawatomie Creek, but was not at Harpers Ferry. He and his brother Owen Brown would become grape growers in the mountains above Pasadena, California.

John Brown Yes Multiple Yes Commander white wounds

John Brown, “Captain” John “Shubel Morgan” “Isaac Smith” Brown.

John Brown, Jr. No No No Supporter 38 white

John Brown, Jr., 38 at the time of the Harpers Ferry raid and Captain John Brown’s eldest son, had trained as a phrenologist. After the raid he would go into hiding in Ohio and, when summoned to appear before the investigatory committee of the US Senate, would refuse to appear. During the Civil War he served as Captain of Company K of the 7th Kansas Cavalry. He and his family would then find permanent safe haven on South Bass Island in Lake Erie.

Martha Brewster Brown No No No Supporter white

Martha Brewster Brown, wife of Oliver Brown and daughter-in-law of Captain John Brown, was with the conspirators at the Kennedy farm until shortly before the attack upon Harpers Ferry.

Oliver Brown Yes Yes Captain 20 white

Oliver Brown, the youngest of John Brown’s sons to reach adulthood, was born in Franklin OH on March 9, 1839. He was a bookish lad. He went to “Bleeding Kansas” in 1855, with his father, and returned to North Elba in October 1856, where he married Martha E. Brewster (Martha Brewster Brown) in 1858. She was sent back north just before the raid on Harpers Ferry and he was shot dead at the age of 20 while serving as a sentinel at the river bridge.

Owen Brown Yes No No Captain 35 white HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

Person’s Name On Raid? Shot Dead? Hanged? His Function Age Race

Owen Brown, 3d of John Brown’s sons and his stalwart aid both in “Bleeding Kansas” and at Harper’s Ferry, was born November 4, 1824, at Hudson OH. He had been attempting to make a career of writing humor articles for newspapers. He was 35 at the time of the Harpers Ferry raid. He escaped from Harpers Ferry on foot toward the northwestern part of Pennsylvania. It was due largely to his psychological grit, and physical endurance despite a withered arm, that the little group of survivors of which he was the leader did reach safety. He and Charles Plummer Tidd found work and safety under assumed names, on an oil well crew in Crawford County PA. He never married. After the civil war he would grow grapes for some time in Ohio in association with two of his brothers, before migrating to California. He was the only one of the five escaped raiders not to participate in the civil war, and was the last of the raiders when he died on January 9, 1891 near Pasadena at his mountain home “Brown’s Peak.” A marble monument marked the mountain grave until in July 2002 it mysteriously disappeared — since the site is not a registered historical landmark or cemetery, there is not going to be an investigation.

Salmon Brown No 23 white

Salmon Brown, 23 at the time of the Harpers Ferry raid, was said to have been exactly like his father, Captain John Brown, in every particular. He would once comment to a newspaper reporter that “The tannery business, farming, wool buying and the raising of blooded stock were my father’s life occupations, though all of them were subordinated to his one consuming passion — freeing the slaves.” Salmon would die in Portland, Oregon in 1919.

Watson Brown Yes Yes Captain 24 white

Watson Brown, born at Franklin OH on October 7, 1835, married Isabella M. Thompson in September 1856. His son by this marriage would live only to his 5th year but would nevertheless survive him. He was sent out by his father John Brown to negotiate and was shot down by the citizens of Harpers Ferry. He managed to crawl back to the shelter of the engine house and lived on, groaning, his head cradled in Edwin Coppoc’s lap, for a considerable period. He expired on October 18th. Recovering his body, his mother Mary Ann Day Brown eventually would be able to rebury it in the Adirondacks before heading off to her retirement in California.

John E. Cook Yes No Yes Captain 29 white HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

Person’s Name On Raid? Shot Dead? Hanged? His Function Age Race

John Edwin Cook, a well-connected 5'7" gentleman with blue eyes and long, curly blond hair, born in Summer 1830 to a well-to-do family in Haddam, Connecticut, had been a law clerk in Brooklyn and Manhattan after being expelled from Yale College for some indiscretion, and had in 1855 become a member of the guerrilla force operated out of Lawrence in “Bleeding Kansas” by Charles Lenhart and had made himself an excellent shot. He had been dispatched by John Brown to Harpers Ferry more than a year before the raid to work out the details on the ground, and had secured employment as a lock tender on the Chesapeake & Ohio Canal, as a schoolteacher, and as a bookseller. He married a Chambersburg PA woman, Mary V. Kennedy, on April 18, 1859. After having escaped by climbing into a tree and watching after Brown had sent him out to collect weapons, and after evading capture for some months, against the advice of his comrades he became reckless in his search for food, was captured on October 25th eight miles from Chambersburg PA. As an incessant and compulsive communicator he had always been considered by the Brown operatives to be indiscreet. In a confession which would be published as a pamphlet at Charles Town in the middle of November 1859 for the benefit of a man who had been crippled for life in the fighting at Harper’s Ferry (Samuel C. Young), Cook would detail for his captors all his movements from the point of his 1st meeting with Brown after the battle of Black Jack in June 1856 until after his capture. At the last moment he would seek to save his life by representing that he had been deceived through false promises. For this revelation Cook would be severely censured at the time, being termed “Judas” by the friends of Brown. Despite his confession and despite his brother-in-law A.P. Willard being the governor of Indiana, he would in the end be also hanged for the treason and murder at Harpers Ferry, one of the last, on December 16th.

John Anderson Copeland, Jr. Yes No Yes Private < 30 of color

John Anderson Copeland, Jr. was trapped along with his uncle Lewis Sheridan Leary and John Henry Kagi in “Hall’s Rifle Works” at the Harpers Ferry armory. When the three men made a run for the Shenandoah River they were trapped in a crossfire, but after Kagi had been killed and Leary had been shot several times and placed under arrest, Copeland was able to surrender without having been wounded. He refused to speak during his trial and was hanged with too short a drop and thus strangled slowly. On December 29, when a crowd of 3,000 would attend his funeral in his hometown of Oberlin, Ohio, there would be no body to bury, for after his cadaver had been temporarily interred in Charles Town it had been dug up and was in service in the instruction of students at the medical college in Winchester, Virginia. A monument was erected by the citizens of Oberlin in honor of their three fallen free citizens of color, Copeland, Leary, and Shields Green (the 8-foot marble monument would be moved to Vine Street Park in 1971). Judge Parker stated in his story of the trials (St. Louis Globe Democrat, April 8, 1888) that Copeland had been “the prisoner who impressed me best. He was a free negro. He had been educated, and there was a dignity about him that I could not help liking. He was always manly.” Andrew Hunter at the same time was quoted as saying– “Copeland was the cleverest of all the prisoners ... and behaved better than any of them. If I had had the power and could have concluded to pardon any man among them, he was the man I would have picked out.” (Paul Finkelman avers on page 49 of HIS SOUL GOES MARCHING ON: RESPONSES TO JOHN BROWN AND THE HARPERS FERRY RAID that his middle name was Anthony rather than Anderson.)

Barclay Coppoc Yes No No Private < 21 white HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

Person’s Name On Raid? Shot Dead? Hanged? His Function Age Race

Barclay Coppoc, from the Quaker settlement of Springdale, Iowa, was born in Salem OH on January 4, 1839, and had not attained his majority at the time of the raid on Harpers Ferry. This Quaker escaped, although his adopted brother Edwin Coppoc surrendered and was tried and hanged. “We were together eight days before [John Edwin Cook and Albert Hazlett were] captured, which was near Chambersburg, and the next night Meriam [Francis Jackson Meriam] left us and went to Shippensburg, and there took cars for Philadelphia. After that there were but three of us left [John Brown’s son Owen Brown, Barclay Coppoc, and Charles Plummer Tidd], and we kept together, until we got to Centre County, Pennsylvania, where we bought a box and packed up all heavy luggage, such as rifles, blankets, etc., and after being together three or four weeks we separated and I went on through with the box to Ohio on the cars.” Osborn Perry Anderson, Barclay Coppoc, and Francis Jackson Meriam would travel separately to safe exile in the area of St. Catharines, Canada. Barclay then went to his family home in Iowa, with Virginia agents in close pursuit. There a band of young men armed themselves to defend him, and the Religious Society of Friends disowned him for bearing arms. He was back in “Bleeding Kansas” in 1860, helping to run off some Missouri slaves, and nearly lost his life in a second undertaking of this kind. He became a 1st Lieutenant in Colonel Montgomery’s regiment, the 3d Kansas Infantry. Soon he was killed by the fall of a train into the Platte river from a trestle 40 feet high, the supports of which had been burned away by Confederates.

Edwin Coppoc Yes Unwounded Yes Lieutenant < 30 white

Edwin Coppoc, who had been born on June 30, 1835 and orphaned and adopted at the age of 6 into a nonresistant- abolitionist Quaker farm family first of Salem, Ohio and then of Springdale IA. On March 6, 1857 he was disowned by the Religious Society of Friends and in the spring of 1858 went to “Bleeding Kansas” as a settler — but did not take part in the fighting. It was during a visit to Springdale in the fall of 1858 that he met John Brown. He would surrender with Captain Brown in the engine house at Harpers Ferry, and would be tried by a jury of his white male peers immediately after the conclusion of the trial of Captain Brown while his still-Quaker brother Barclay Coppoc was eluding capture. He was sentenced on November 2. From prison before his hanging, he wrote his adoptive mother that he was

“sorry to say that I was ever induced to raise a gun.”

He was hung with John Edwin Cook on December 16, 1859 and a day later his brother turned up at home in Iowa (he also would soon be disowned). The body of Edwin Coppoc was buried in Winona, Iowa after a funeral attended by the entire town (later the body would be reburied in Salem, Ohio).

Richard Henry Dana, Jr. No No No Enabler white

Martin Robison Delany No No No Supporter of color HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

Person’s Name On Raid? Shot Dead? Hanged? His Function Age Race

Dr. Martin Robison Delany. At a meeting of the conspirators in Chatham in Canada West in May 1858, Doctor Delany, the Reverend William Charles Munroe of Detroit, and several other leaders of the large black expatriate community approved something termed the “Provisional Constitution and Ordinances for the people of the United States,” as the charter for the pike-wielding fugitive society of raiders which was to be created in the remote fastness of the Allegheny Mountains by Captain John Brown subsequent to his raid on the federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry, Virginia.

Frederick Douglass No No No Supporter 41 of color

Waldo Emerson urged Frederick Douglass early on, to make himself into the General Toussaint Louverture of the North American continent. When Captain John Brown made a speech offering himself as the leader for the forces of freedom in “Bleeding Kansas”, Douglass stood in the audience and endorsed Brown and his mission despite the unpleasant fact that the plan of the abolitionists was to permanently exclude all persons of color, whether free or enslaved, from that new state. When the federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry was raided, his role was intended to be the raising aloft of the sword of General George Washington and the generaling of the black forces. His involvement in this raid was acceptable to such personages as the Reverend Henry Ward Beecher only because his blood had been mixed with white it was removed to a degree from its original “low animal condition” (the Reverend’s category, the Reverend’s words) of blackness. At the very last moment Douglass perceived that the prospects of the raid were for either failure or betrayal, and fled by way of Canada to England.

Ralph Waldo Emerson No No No Supporter white

Waldo Emerson, acting as an agent provocateur of race war, recommended to Frederick Douglass in 1844 that he become the liberator of his people on the North American continent, modeling himself upon the leader of the successful Haitian revolution of the turn of the century, Toussaint Louverture. “Let me hold your coat while some white man kills you,” or something to that effect. We only know about this because Henry Thoreau rushed down to Boston right after the lecture, and had the lecture printed up as a pamphlet — after which there was no lying about the provocation that had been made and so all Emerson could do was pretend that Douglass hadn’t been present.

Hugh Forbes No No No Lieutenant white HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

Person’s Name On Raid? Shot Dead? Hanged? His Function Age Race

Captain John Brown’s scheme, which he referred to as the “Subterranean Pass Way,” was that the escaped, armed slaves were to “swarm” into and set up a center of resistance in the Alleghenies from which they could liberate Virginia and then invade Tennessee and northern Alabama. Such a scoping of the situation never met with much respect from other of the other schemers. In particular, the Scottish adventurer Hugh Forbes, Brown’s onetime principal lieutenant, regarding blacks as inherently childlike, credulous, and cowardly, believed such a scheme to be doomed to failure from its inception. The scenario preferred by Forbes would have involved the herding of the slaves together by armed bands of white men and the driving of such herds of humans up the mountain chain toward Canada, neatly disposing of America’s entire race problem — by simple relocation of it to another country. Evidently the two planners parted company over issues such as this after Forbes had functioned in Tabor, Iowa as the leader of military training for the recruits, and then Forbes attempted blackmail. When not offered a payoff, he wrote long, detailed letters to congressmen and to others, and it is one of the unresolved issues, how anyone in high office in Washington DC could have avoided knowing in advance that Brown was plotting a strike of some sort against slavery.

George B. Gill

George B. Gill had come to “Bleeding Kansas” in 1857 after whaling in the Pacific Ocean, and had there been recruited by John Brown. During the year before the raid, Captain Brown sent Gill to visit a black “mumper” (con artist) named Mr. Reynolds who persuaded Gill that he had gone through the South organizing and had brought into existence in areas of the South a militant organization of black men and women. Pointing out to Gill that Southern newspapers carried numerous references to the death of a favorite slave, he alleged that these were leaders of liberation plots who were being discovered and offed. Southern blacks were ready and needed only to be given a cue. There is evidence that several slaves from the Harpers Ferry area did participate in the raid itself, but returned hastily to their plantations when it became obvious that the raid was a failure. Several fires were set in the vicinity of Harpers Ferry in the week after the raid, probably by slaves and free Negroes. Richard Hinton estimates that $10,000,000 was lost in the sale of Virginia slaves in the year 1859. Census figures show that between 1850 and 1860 there was almost a 10% decline in blacks in the three counties surrounding Harpers Ferry while the total number of blacks in Maryland and Virginia was increasing by about 4%.

Reverend James Gloucester No Financial support of color

The Reverend James Newton Gloucester of Brooklyn.

Shields Green Yes No Yes Private < 30 of color HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

Person’s Name On Raid? Shot Dead? Hanged? His Function Age Race

Shields Green was an escapee from South Carolina who had served as clothes cleaner in Rochester, New York (his business card there declared “I make no promise that I am unable to perform”) and acted as a bodyguard for Frederick Douglass. He was known as “Emperor,” although how he obtained this nickname is not now known. He decided to go with John Brown when Douglass turned back at the stone quarry prior to the Harpers Ferry raid, saying to his boss “I believe I’ll go with the old man.” He took part in the raid and then refused to speak during his trial. At the time of his hanging he was about 23 years of age. His cadaver would be dug up and used for the instruction of students at the medical college in Winchester, Virginia. He, like John Anderson Copeland, Jr. and Lewis Sheridan Leary, had been a resident of Oberlin, Ohio. A monument was erected by the citizens of Oberlin in honor of their 3 fallen free citizens of color (the 8-foot marble monument would be moved to Vine Street Park in 1971).

James H. Harris

Lewis Hayden

Lewis Hayden, a black leader in downtown Boston whose escape from Kentucky had been aided by Delia Webster in 1844. Eight years after escaping from slavery, he raised, as an act of gratitude and duty, a sum of $650, in order to ransom the Reverend Calvin Fairbanks out of the Kentucky State Prison at Frankfort, where the Reverend had been languishing under the accusation that he had assisted 47 slaves in their escape, and had served 14 years, and had been whipped and beaten. Just before the raid on Harpers Ferry, Hayden helped recruit Francis Jackson Meriam to carry a message and cash money to the hideout of John Brown, and take part in that struggle.

Albert Hazlett Yes No Yes Capt. or Lt. < 30 white

Albert Hazlett, born in Pennsylvania on September 21, 1837, did not take part in the fight at Harpers Ferry but, with John Edwin Cook who had escaped from that fight by climbing a tree and who later identified him to the prosecutors, would be belatedly hanged. Before the raid he had worked on his brother’s farm in western Pennsylvania, and he had joined the others at Kennedy Farm in the early part of September 1859. He was arrested on October 22d in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, near Chambersburg, where he was using the name “William Harrison,” was extradited to Virginia, was tried and sentenced at the spring term of the Court, and was hanged on March 16, 1860. George B. Gill said that “I was acquainted with Hazlett well enough in Kansas, yet after all knew but little of him. He was with Montgomery considerably, and was with [Aaron D. Stevens] on the raid in which Cruise was killed. He was a good-sized, fine-looking fellow, overflowing with good nature and social feelings.... Brown got acquainted with him just before leaving “Bleeding Kansas”.” To Mrs. Rebecca B. Spring he wrote on March 15, 1860, the eve of his execution, “Your letter gave me great comfort to know that my body would be taken from this land of chains.... I am willing to die in the cause of liberty, if I had ten thousand lives I would willingly lay them all down for the same cause.”

The Reverend Thomas Went- No White worth Higginson HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

Person’s Name On Raid? Shot Dead? Hanged? His Function Age Race

Richard J. Hinton

Richard J. Hinton, abolitionist journalist whose opposition to slavery led him to transform himself into a gunslinger. Refer to: Richard J. Hinton, JOHN BROWN AND HIS MEN (NY: Funk & Wagnalls, 1894; Reprint NY: The Arno Press, 1968).

WHAT TO TAKE: Let your trunk, if you have to buy one, be of moderate size and of the strongest make. Test it by throwing it from the top of a three-storied house; if you pick it up uninjured, it will do to go to Kansas. Not otherwise. — James Redpath and Richard J. Hinton, HAND-BOOK TO KANSAS TERRITORY, 1859, as quoted on page 3

Dr. Samuel Gridley Howe

Julia Ward Howe No White

Julia Ward Howe was a racist and, because she carried out errands for her husband Dr. Samuel Gridley Howe who was on the Secret “Six” finance committee (such as having a surreptitious meeting in their home with Captain John Brown), must surely have been aware of and must surely have approved of that committee’s agendas.

Thaddeus Hyatt No white HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

Person’s Name On Raid? Shot Dead? Hanged? His Function Age Race

Thaddeus Hyatt was a businessman and financier involved in the preparation of “Bleeding Kansas” as a “free soil” or “Aryan Nation” enclave. Summoned to give testimony before the congressional committee investigating the raid on the federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry, he would refuse to appear — and would be imprisoned for a period but ultimately would get away with this refusal.

John Jones No Support white

John Jones was a Chicago businessman of color (John Brown stayed at his home). He and his wife Mary Richardson Jones were active abolitionists, agitating for the repeal of the Illinois Black Laws. (Not only did these laws obligate black Americans to prove that they were free in order to enter the state, but once they were in state these laws barred them not only from visiting white homes, but from owning any property or merchandise, or entering into any contracts.)

John Henry Kagi Yes Yes Secretary of War, 24 white adjutant

Although John Henry Kagi, the best educated of the raiders, was largely self-taught, his letters to the New-York Tribune, the New-York Evening Post, and the National Era testify to his grounding. A debater, public speaker, stenographer, wannabee writer, and total abstainer from alcohol, he was cold in manner and rough in appearance. A nonparticipant in organized religion, he was an able man of business. He had been born on March 15, 1835, a son of the blacksmith for Bristolville OH in a family of Swiss descent (the name originally having been Kagy). In 1854-1855 he had taught school at Hawkinstown VA but had indicated an objection to the system of slavery there and had been compelled to return to Ohio under a pledge never to return. He had gone to Nebraska City in 1856 and been admitted to the bar. He then entered Kansas with one of General James H. Lane’s parties and enlisted in Aaron D. Stevens’s (“Colonel Whipple’s”) 2d Kansas Militia. In fighting in the town of Tecumseh in “Bleeding Kansas” he proved himself by killing at least one man, who had been coming after him with a club. After being captured by US troops he had been imprisoned at Lecompton and at Tecumseh, but was finally released. On January 31, 1857 he had been struck on the head with a gold-headed cane by a proslavery judge, drew his revolver and shot the judge in the groin, but Judge Elmore got off three shots and one struck Kagi over the heart, the bullet being stopped by a memorandum-book. He was long in recovering from these wounds, with his family in Ohio, he then returned to Kansas and joined John Brown. He bore the title of Secretary of War in the provisional government and was next in command to John Brown; he was also the adjutant. When in Chambersburg as agent for the raiders, he boarded with Mrs. Mary Rittner. At Harpers Ferry he was trapped along with John Anderson Copeland, Jr. and Lewis Sheridan Leary in the armory called Hall’s Rifle Works. When the three men made a run for it, heading down to the Shenandoah River, they got themselves trapped in a crossfire and John Henry Kagi was the first killed, his body being left to float in the river. [Eyal J. Naveh in CROWN OF THORNS: POLITICAL MARTYRDOM IN AMERICA FROM ABRAHAM LINCOLN TO MARTIN LUTHER KING, JR. (NY: New York UP, 1990) described Kagi as black (Page 31: “Even though black followers of Brown, such as John Henry Kagi, were also executed in Virginia, for blacks, John Brown became the most famous martyr for their freedom.”), but this was just another of the long series of tendentious but uncontested errors which make such literature so unreliable.]

Amos Lawrence No White HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

Person’s Name On Raid? Shot Dead? Hanged? His Function Age Race

Amos Lawrence provided the large bulk of the investment capital needed by Eli Thayer’s New England Emigrant Aid Company for the purchase land in the new territory then well known as “Bleeding Kansas”, needed in order to encourage the right sort of black-despising poor white Americans to settle there as “decent antislavery” homesteaders. The idea was to send entire communities in one fell swoop, increasing the value of the properties owned by this company. If political control over this territory could be achieved, they would be able to set up a real Aryan Nation, from which slaves would of course be excluded because they were enslaved, and from which free blacks Americans would of course be excluded because as human material they were indelibly inferior.

Lewis Sheridan Leary Yes Yes Private 25 of color

Lewis Sheridan “Shad” Leary was a mulatto citizen of Oberlin, Ohio. He was descended from an Irishman, Jeremiah O’Leary, who had fought in the Revolution under General Nathanael Greene of Rhode Island, who had married a woman of mixed blood, partly African, partly of that Croatan Indian stock of North Carolina, which is believed by some to be lineally descended from the “lost colonists” left by John White on Roanoke Island in 1587. Leary was born at Fayetteville NC on March 17, 1835, and was therefore in his 25th year when killed during the raid upon the federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry. Like his father, he was a saddler and harness-maker. In 1857 he had gone to Oberlin to live, marrying there and making the acquaintance of John Brown in Cleveland. To go to Harper’s Ferry, he left his wife with a 6-month-old child at Oberlin, his wife being in ignorance of the purpose of his trip. He was given funds to go from Oberlin to Chambersburg in the company of his nephew John Anderson Copeland, Jr. He was isolated along with his nephew and John Henry Kagi in the armory called Hall’s Rifle Works. When the three men made a run for it, heading down to the Shenandoah River, they got themselves caught in a crossfire, and after Kagi had been killed and Leary shot several times, he was taken, his wounds so severe that he would die the following morning. He was able to dictate messages to his family and is reported as saying “I am ready to die.” A monument was erected by the citizens of Oberlin in honor of their three fallen free men of color, Leary, Copeland, and Shields Green (the 8-foot marble monument would be moved to Vine Street Park in 1971). The Leary child would subsequently be educated by James Redpath and Wendell Phillips.

William H. Leeman Yes Yes Captain < 21 white

William H. Leeman was born on March 20, 1839 and was recruited in Maine as a 17-year-old very impressed with John Brown. Being of a rather wild disposition, he had early left his home in Maine. Educated in the public schools of Saco and Hallowell ME, he was working in a shoe factory in Haverhill MA at the age of 14. In 1856 he entered “Bleeding Kansas” with the second Massachusetts colony of that year, and became a member of Captain Brown’s “Volunteer Regulars” on September 9, 1856. He fought well at Osawatomie when but 17 years old. Owen Brown found him hard to control at Springdale, Iowa. George B. Gill said of him that he had “a good intellect with great ingenuity.” By the raid upon Harpers Ferry he had reached the age of 20. On October 17, 1859, the youngest of the raiders, he made a mad dash out of the relative safety of the armory to swim down the Potomac River but two militiamen caught up with him and shot him down on an islet in the river. His body would be used for target practice for hours by the drunken citizenry, until the hail of bullets pushed it into the current and it was carried downstream. Mrs. Annie Brown Adams would write of him: “He was only a boy. He smoked a good deal and drank sometimes; but perhaps people would not think that so very wicked now. He was very handsome and very attractive.”

Francis Jackson Merriam Yes No No Private < 30 white HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

Person’s Name On Raid? Shot Dead? Hanged? His Function Age Race

Francis Jackson Meriam, grandson and namesake of the Garrisonian abolitionist and Boston historian Francis Jackson, was a young manic-depressive with but one good eye. He helped James Redpath collect materials in Haiti and across the American South for use in a book dedicated to John Brown and Redpath arranged for Meriam to join Brown’s guerrillas. He was not captured or killed at Harpers Ferry because he had been left in one of his fits of despair at the Kennedy farmhouse during the raid. After escaping through Shippensburg, Philadelphia, Boston, Concord, and the area of St. Catharines, Canada he served as a captain in the 3rd South Carolina Colored Infantry. Erratic and unbalanced, he urged wild schemes upon his superiors and sometimes attempt them. In an engagement under General Grant he received a serious leg wound. He died suddenly on November 28, 1865 in New-York.

Charles Moffett Yes

Charles Moffett, a drifter from Iowa about whom little is known.

Edwin Morton No

The very tall Franklin Benjamin Sanborn’s intimate college friend Edwin Morton of Plymouth, a descendant of one of the prominent Founding Fathers, was about as deeply involved in the Harpers Ferry raid as any member of the Secret “Six”. He was Gerrit Smith’s private secretary and resided with his family, and after the raid, while the congressional investigation was going on, he fled overseas and chummed around at Shrewsbury and Hodnet with Henry Thoreau’s very tall friend Thomas Cholmondeley.

Dangerfield Newby Yes Yes bridge sentinel 39 light mulatto

Dangerfield Newby, a free light mulatto, very tall and with a splendid physique, was serving as a sentinel at the Harpers Ferry bridge and was shot to death as he and the two white men with him retreated before the charge of the Jefferson Guards of Charles Town VA, coming across the Potomac from the Maryland side. He was not brought down by ball or bullet, but by a 6-inch spike being used as a musket projectile, which caught him in the throat and ripped him severely. Since neither of the two white men were shot, it appears that as a mulatto he was targeted. The body was beaten savagely, and its ears snipped off as trophies, and then a herd of hogs was driven up to root on it.

The Reverend Theodore No White Parker HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

Person’s Name On Raid? Shot Dead? Hanged? His Function Age Race

“I make all my pecuniary arrangements with the expectation of civil war.”

Luke F. Parsons

Luke F. Parsons, 22 years old and already a mercenary fighter seasoned in “Bleeding Kansas”, a petty thief in need of a paycheck and a legitimating excuse.

Richard Realf

Richard Realf was a 23-year-old Englishman, the son of a rural constable. In 1852 he had put out a collection of poetry, GUESSES AT THE BEAUTIFUL, and in 1854, after giving up being the lover of Lady Noell Byron, widow of George Gordon, Lord Byron, he was led to the United States of America by “instincts” which he characterized as “democratic and republican, or, at least, anti-monarchical.” He had been introduced to John Brown at the end of November 1857 in Lawrence in “Bleeding Kansas” while working as a correspondent for the Illinois State Gazette. It has been John Edwin Cook who had persuaded him to sign up with Brown’s god-squad.

James Redpath

James Redpath, crusading journalist out to make a buck in the best way.

G.J. Reynolds

George J. Reynolds, a light mulatto blacksmith or coppersmith of Sandusky, Ohio, from Virginia although saying he was from Vermont, with native American as well as black African heritage, age 35 at the time of the raid on the federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry, and active in the Underground Railroad. HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

Person’s Name On Raid? Shot Dead? Hanged? His Function Age Race

Richard Richardson of color

Richard Richardson, a fugitive slave from Lexington, Missouri who had joined John Brown in southern Iowa, was going through that unfortunate but now-well-understood initial period of reaction to freedom in which a former slave, accustomed to servitude and unaccustomed to self-origination, attaches himself to some authoritative white man who is able with courtesy to make use of him.

Judge Thomas Russell No White

Mary Ellen Russell visited John Brown in jail a few weeks before his execution. She said that although she had never approved of his violent methods, she admired him as a man of vision and idealism. Brown had been friends with the Russells for years, and had stayed at their home on several occasions despite the fact that Thomas Russell was a prominent member of the Massachusetts judiciary. Franklin Benjamin Sanborn of the Secret “Six” would allege long after the raid on Harpers Ferry that “Brown’s general purpose of attacking slavery by force, in Missouri or elsewhere, was known in 1857-8-9” to Judge Russell.

Franklin Benjamin Sanborn No White

Gerrit Smith No White

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

Person’s Name On Raid? Shot Dead? Hanged? His Function Age Race

Stephen Smith

Stephen Smith, lumber dealer of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

Lysander Spooner

The anarchist Boston attorney Lysander Spooner, who was well aware of John Brown’s plans for the raid on the federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry, wrote to Gerrit Smith in January 1859 warning that Brown had neither the men nor the resources to succeed. After the raid he would plot the kidnapping of Governor Henry A. Wise of Virginia, the idea being to take him at pistol point aboard a tug and hold him off the Atlantic coast, at threat of execution should Brown be executed.

George Luther Stearns

Aaron Dwight Stevens Yes Badly Yes Captain 28 white wounded

Aaron Dwight Stevens, John Brown’s drillmaster, born in Lisbon, Connecticut on March 15, 1831, had run away from home in 1847 at the age of 16 to serve with a Massachusetts volunteer regiment in Mexico. He made himself proficient with the sword. At Taos in May 1855, he received a sentence of death for “mutiny, engaging in a drunken riot, and assaulting Major George A.H. Blake” of the 1st US Dragoons. This was commuted by President Franklin Pierce to 3 years hard labor but he escaped from Fort Leavenworth in 1856, 1st finding refuge with the Delaware tribe and then joining the Kansas Free State militia of James Lane under the name “Whipple.” He became Colonel of the 2d Kansas Militia and met Brown on August 7, 1856 at the Nebraska line when Lane’s Army of the North marched into “Bleeding Kansas”. He became a devoted follower. He was a spiritualist. At Harpers Ferry, when Brown sent this middleaged man out along with his son Watson Brown to negotiate under a flag of truce, he received four bullets and was taken alive. The never-married Stevens was of old Puritan stock, and his great- grandfather had been a captain in the Revolutionary army. Because of a relationship with Rebecca B. Spring of the Eagleswood social experiment near Perth Amboy, New Jersey, after his execution on March 16th he would be buried there alongside Albert Hazlett. According to George B. Gill, writing after his death, “Stevens — how gloriously he sang! His was the noblest soul I ever knew. Though owing to his rash, hasty way, I often found occasion to quarrel with him more so than with any of the others, and though I liked [John Henry Kagi] better than any man I ever knew, our temperaments being adapted to each other, yet I can truly say that Stevens was the most noble man that I ever knew.”

Stewart Taylor Yes Yes Private 23 white HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

Person’s Name On Raid? Shot Dead? Hanged? His Function Age Race

Stewart Taylor, the only raider not of American birth, had been born on October 29, 1836 at Uxbridge in Canada. He became a wagonmaker and in 1853 he went to Iowa, where in 1858 he became acquainted with John Brown through George B. Gill. He was a spiritualist. A relative, Jacob L. Taylor of Pine Orchard, Canada West, wrote to Richard J. Hinton on April 23, 1860 that he had been “heart and soul in the anti-slavery cause. An excellent debater and very fond of studying history. He stayed at home, in Canada, for the winter of 1858-1859, and then went to Chicago, thence to Bloomington IL, and thence to Harper’s Ferry. He was a very good phonographer [stenographer], rapid and accurate. He was overcome with distress when, getting out of communication with the John Brown movement, he thought for a time that he was to be left out.”

Eli Thayer No

Eli Thayer, an entrepreneur who believed in “doing well by doing good,” formed the New England Emigrant Aid Company, to purchase land in the new territory then well known as “Bleeding Kansas” and encourage the right sort of black-despising poor white Americans to settle there by providing information, cheapening transportation, and setting up saw mills and flour mills to give work and incomes to such “decent antislavery” homesteaders. The idea was to send entire communities in one fell swoop, increasing the value of the properties owned by this company. If political control over this territory could be achieved, they would be able to set up a real Aryan Nation, from which slaves would of course be excluded because they were enslaved, and from which free blacks Americans would of course be excluded because as human material they were indelibly inferior. Thayer would comment in retrospect, about the antebellum abolitionists with whom he had been affiliated, that they had constituted “a mutual admiration society possessed by an unusual malignity towards those who did not belong to it.” He would instance that there was never “any diffidence or modesty in sounding their own praises.”

Dauphin Adolphus Thompson Yes Yes Lieutenant < 30 white

Dauphin Adolphus Thompson, brother of William Thompson and a North Elba neighbor of the family of John Brown, was born April 17, 1838. He was “very quiet, with fair, thoughtful face, curly blonde hair, and baby-blue eyes.” His sister Isabella M. Thompson married Watson Brown and his elder brother Henry Thompson married Captain Brown’s daughter Ruth. The two brothers were shot dead at Harpers Ferry.

William Thompson Yes Yes Captain? < 30 white

William Thompson was born in New Hampshire in August 1833, the son of Roswell Thompson. In Fall 1858 he married a Mary Brown who was not related to the family of John Brown. His sister Isabella M. Thompson married Watson Brown; his elder brother Henry Thompson married Captain Brown’s daughter Ruth. He had started for “Bleeding Kansas” in 1856 but upon meeting the Brown sons returned with them to North Elba. Along with his brother Dauphin Adolphus Thompson, he took part in the raid on the federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry, and the two of them were shot dead. When Captain Brown sent him out from the engine house to negotiate under flag of truce, the mob of citizens placed him under arrest, took him to the local hotel barroom, discussed what to do, dragged him into the street, executed him by shooting him in the head, and dumped his body into the Potomac River.

Henry David Thoreau No white HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

Person’s Name On Raid? Shot Dead? Hanged? His Function Age Race

When, in 1844, Waldo Emerson, acting as an agent provocateur, recommended to Frederick Douglass’s face that, modeling himself upon the leader of the successful Haitian revolution of the turn of the century, Toussaint Louverture, he fashion himself into the liberator of his people and initiate on the North American continent a servile insurrection or race war, it was Henry Thoreau who after the lecture rushed this information right down to Boston, and had a pamphlet printed up, after which there was no way to dissimulate about the provocation that had been made — and so all Emerson was able to do was pretend that Douglass hadn’t been present. (We, of course, have credited Emerson’s cover story, not because there is any corroboration for it but because ... well, he’s Mr. Emerson and wouldn’t lie to us.)

Charles Plummer Tidd Yes No No Captain 25 white

Charles Plummer Tidd was born in Palermo ME in 1834 and had emigrated to Kansas in 1856 with the party of Dr. Calvin Cutter of Worcester in search of excitement. After joining John Brown’s party at Tabor in 1857 he became one of the followers of “Shubel Morgan” who returned to “Bleeding Kansas” in 1858 to raid into Missouri. During the Winter 1857-1858 encampment of the Brown forces in the Iowa Territory, he “ruined” a Quaker girl and the other members of the team had to sneak him away from Springdale, Iowa during the night. Nevertheless, the group obtained some recruits not overly impressed with the Peace Testimony of George Fox from among the residents of this town, such as the brothers Barclay Coppoc and Edwin Coppoc. He and John E. Cook were particularly warm friends. He opposed the attack on Harpers Ferry but nevertheless took part both in the raid on the planter Washington’s home and on the federal arsenal itself, escaped, and made his way on foot toward the northwestern part of Pennsylvania. He and John Brown’s son Owen Brown would find work and safety, under assumed names, on an oil well in the vicinity of Crawford County PA. He visited Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Canada and took part in the planning for the rescue of Aaron D. Stevens and Albert Hazlett while the Mason Commission of the Congress was presuming that he had been killed in the fighting at Harpers Ferry. On July 19, 1861 he was able to enlist under the name “Charles Plummer” and would become a 1st Sergeant of the 21st Massachusetts Volunteers. On February 8, 1862 he died of fever aboard the transport Northerner during the battle of Roanoke Island. (This was a battle he had particularly wished to take part in because ex-Governor Henry A. Wise of Virginia, the nemesis of the Harpers Ferry raiders, was in command of the Confederates.) Charles Plummer Tidd’s grave is #40 in the National Cemetery in New Berne NC. THE QUAKER PEACE TESTIMONY

Harriet Tubman No of color

Harriet Tubman was negotiated with by John Brown for participation in the raid on the federal arsenal. She mistrusted these men and had persistent dreams in which Brown and his sons appeared as serpents. The attack had been scheduled to occur on the 4th of July, symbolic of national birth. At the last moment she alleged she was ill, and for this reason as well as delays in the deliveries of supplies, the attack needed to be postponed for months. On the day of the actual attack at Harpers Ferry she had a premonition that it would fail.

Henry Watson No of color HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

Person’s Name On Raid? Shot Dead? Hanged? His Function Age Race

Henry Watson, barber of Chambersburg, Pennsylvania involved both with John Brown and with Frederick Douglass.

etc. HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

GERRIT SMITH HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

1797

March 6, Monday: Peter Gerrit Smith (1768-1837) and Elizabeth Livingston Smith (1773-1818), daughter of Colonel James Livingston (1747-1832) and Elizabeth Simpson Livingston (1750-1800), engendered a son Gerrit Smith in Utica, New York. HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

1812

Hamilton College was founded in Clinton, New York and Gerrit Smith enrolled. HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

1834

The Reverend Beriah Green, a long-time friend and confidant of Gerrit Smith, having been active in the formation of the American Anti-Slavery Society, became its president. HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

In St. Michaels, Maryland, Frederick Douglass was assigned by his owner to work for a white farmer, Edward “The Snake” Covey, who had the reputation of a “nigger-breaker,” on his 150-acre rented farm some seven miles to the northwest of St. Michaels, but Mr. Covey had a spot of difficulty with this particular nigger. We notice that at no point was Douglass trying to kill Covey, something reasonable and easy, for he was trying to do something considerably more fraught, get such a person’s attention and then talk turkey to him: “I seized Covey hard by the throat…. I told him….” Strange to relate, although in this struggle Douglass drew blood from Covey and could reasonably have anticipated that as soon as order and propriety had been restored he would be tortured to death by “The Snake” and his crowd — he found that instead he was no longer being

lashed. Douglass seems to have attributed this to his master’s economic need to obtain maximum work from HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

him with minimum expenditure of effort. Consider this as bravado, in the face of the fact that the only difficulty Covey would have had in killing Douglass, other than in ordering the other laborers to dig a shallow hole in the field alongside the corpse, would have come when he had to reimburse Thomas Auld for his economic loss:

I did not hesitate to let it be known of me, that the white man who expected to succeed in whipping, must also succeed in killing me.

But one wonders whether this hopeless resistance may have inspired Thomas Covey to respect Frederick Douglass as a man and as a human. I offer that this fight in the fields of Maryland may well have been a turning-point not only in the individual life of Douglass, but also –unfortunately– in the ideology of nonresistance to evil as espoused by William Ladd, the Reverend Adin Ballou, the Reverend Henry C. Wright,

Abby Kelley, John A. Collins, the Reverend Samuel Joseph May, Edmund Quincy, John Humphrey Noyes (!),

and William Lloyd Garrison. For later on Douglass would use this memory as fuel for his breach with other antislavery advocates over Garrison’s principled nonresistance to evil and as fuel for the encouragement, by the allies of John Brown, of an indigenous uprising of the black slaves of the South, when Douglass began in 1851 to find alternate funding from the “Liberty Party” created by the intemperate wealthy white man Gerrit Smith.

Richard Hildreth’s REPORT OF A PUBLIC DISCUSSION BETWEEN THE REVS. ADIN BALLOU AND DANIEL D. SMITH; ON THE QUESTION, “DO THE HOLY SCRIPTURES TEACH THE DOCTRINE, THAT MEN WILL BE PUNISHED AND REWARDED SUBSEQUENTLY TO THIS LIFE, OR AFTER DEATH, FOR THE DEEDS DONE IN THIS LIFE?” HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

Hildreth created a pamphlet defending Abner Kneeland against a charge of blasphemy, APPEAL TO COMMON SENSE AND THE CONSTITUTION ON BEHALF OF UNLIMITED FREEDOM OF DISCUSSION.

Suffering from tuberculosis, and clinically depressed, the author and editor sold his share in Boston’s The Atlas and sought the more healthful climate of Florida. He would find lodgings on a slave plantation. During 18 months of tropical sunshine he would create the 1st American antislavery novel, THE SLAVE, OR MEMOIRS OF A FUGITIVE, while laboring toward a description of the deleterious effects on our economic and political development of the South’s racist “peculiar institution,” that would see publication in 1840 as DESPOTISM IN AMERICA. His wife, his child, his toil, his blood, his life, and everything that gives his life a value, they are not his; he holds them all but at his master’s pleasure. HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

Because the Reverend Hosea Hildreth had been exchanging services with pastors of the new Unitarian persuasion, the Essex Association expelled him as Congregationalist minister over the First Parish Church of Gloucester, Massachusetts. Until his death in the following year, the Reverend Hildreth would be serving as minister of a Unitarian congregation in Westboro, Massachusetts. HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

We see that Frederick Douglass believed he had already put what would become the doctrine of ahimsa to the ultimate test, and that he had already discovered this doctrine to be ultimately wrongheaded — and was following the path of Nehru rather than the path of Gandhiji. HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

January 1, Wednesday: A Zollverein or customs union among 18 German states, headed by Prussia, went into effect.

Frederick Douglass later reported that:

At daybreak I was ordered to get a load of wood from a forest about two miles from the house.... I had never driven oxen before.... Once the gate was opened in front of them, my oxen charged through full tilt. They caught the huge gate between the wheel and the cart body, crushing it into splinters and coming within a few inches of crushing me with it.... Covey told me that he would now teach me how to break gates and idle away my time.... [He] ordered me to take off my clothes.... “If you beat me,” I thought, “you shall do so over my clothes.” After many threats he rushed at me..., tore off the few thin clothes I had on, and proceeded to wear out on my back the heavy goads which he had cut from the gum tree.... [D]uring the first six months there I was whipped, either with sticks or a cowhide whip, every week.... I was sometimes tempted to take my life and that of Covey but was prevented by a combination of hope and fear.

“The morning of January 1, 1834, found me on the road to Covey’s. The chilling wind and pinching frost matched the winter of my own mind as I trudged along.... [Chesapeake Bay] was now white with foam raised by a heavy northwest wind.” Frederick Douglass the troublemaker who had attempted to set up a Sunday School for black children, had been contracted by his owner to Mr. Edward “The Snake” Covey’s on his 150-acre rented farm some seven miles to the northwest of St. Michaels, Maryland –where discipline was HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

by whip– to work for the first time as field rather than house slave: Frederick Douglass’s NARRATIVE

In my new employment, I found myself even more awkward than a country boy appeared to be in a large city. I had been at my new home but one week before Mr. Covey gave me a very severe whipping, cutting my back, causing the blood to run, and raising ridges on my flesh as large as my little finger. The details of this affair are as follows: Mr. Covey sent me, very early in the morning of one of our coldest days in the month of January, to the woods, to get a load of wood. He gave me a team of unbroken oxen. He told me which was the in-hand ox, and which the off-hand one. He then tied the end of a large rope around the horns of the in-hand ox, and gave me the other end of it, and told me, if the oxen started to run, that I must hold on upon the rope. I had never driven oxen before, and of course I was very awkward. I, however, succeeded in getting to the edge of the woods with little difficulty; but I had got a very few rods into the woods, when the oxen took fright, and started full tilt, carrying the cart against trees, and over stumps, in the most frightful manner. I expected every moment that my brains would be dashed out against the trees. After running thus for a considerable distance, they finally upset the cart, dashing it with great force against a tree, and threw themselves into a dense thicket. How I escaped death, I do not know. There I was, entirely alone, in a thick wood, in a place new to me. My cart was upset and shattered, my oxen were entangled among the young trees, and there was none to help me. After a long spell of effort, I succeeded in getting my cart righted, my oxen disentangled, and again yoked to the cart. I now proceeded with my team to the place where I had, the day before, been chopping wood, and loaded my cart pretty heavily, thinking in this way to tame my oxen. I then proceeded on my way home. I had now consumed one half of the day. I got out of the woods safely, and now felt out of danger. I stopped my oxen to open the woods gate; and just as I did so, before I could get hold of my ox-rope, the oxen again started, rushed through the gate, catching it between the wheel and the body of the cart, tearing it to pieces, and coming within a few inches of crushing me against the gate-post. Thus twice, in one short day, I escaped death by the merest chance. On my return, I told Mr. Covey what had happened, and how it happened. He ordered me to return to the woods again immediately. I did so, and he followed on after me. Just as I got into the woods, he came up and told me to stop my cart, and that he would teach me how to trifle away my time, and break gates. He then went to a large gum-tree, and with his axe cut three large switches, and, after trimming them up neatly with his pocketknife, he ordered me to take off my clothes. I made him no answer, but stood with my clothes on. He repeated his order. I still made him no answer, nor did I move to strip myself. Upon this he rushed at me with the fierceness of a tiger, tore off my clothes, and lashed me till he had worn out his switches, cutting me so savagely as to leave the marks visible for a long time after. This whipping was the first of a number just like it, and for similar offences.

Mr. Covey had a reputation as a “nigger-breaker,” but was going to experience considerable difficulties, even a threat to his professional standing, in his attempts to break this particular nigger.

[We will notice, however, that at no point in the struggle would Douglass try to kill Edward Covey, something reasonable and easy, for he was trying to do something considerably more fraught, get such a person’s attention and then talk turkey to him: “I seized Covey hard by the throat.... I told him....” Strange to relate, although in this struggle Douglass had drawn blood from Covey and could reasonably have anticipated that as soon as order and propriety had been restored he would be tortured to death by “The Snake” and his Christian crowd — he would find that instead he was no longer being lashed. Douglass seems to have attributed this to his HDT WHAT? INDEX

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master’s economic need to obtain maximum work from him with minimum expenditure of effort. Consider this as bravado, in the face of the fact that the only difficulty Covey would have had in killing Douglass, other than in ordering the other laborers to dig a shallow hole in the field alongside the corpse, would have come when he had to reimburse Thomas Auld for his economic loss:

I did not hesitate to let it be known of me, that the white man who expected to succeed in whipping, must also succeed in killing me.

But one wonders whether it was not precisely this hopeless resistance which may have inspired Covey to respect Douglass as a man and as a human. I offer that these fights in the fields of Maryland may well have been a turning-point not only in the individual life of Douglass, but also –unfortunately– in the ideology of nonresistance to evil as espoused by William Ladd, the Reverend Adin Ballou, the Reverend Henry C. Wright, Abby Kelley, John A. Collins, the Reverend Samuel Joseph May, Edmund Quincy, John Humphrey Noyes of the Perfectionist, and William Lloyd Garrison. For later on Douglass would use this memory as fuel for his breach with other antislavery advocates over Garrison’s principled nonresistance to evil and as fuel for the encouragement, by the allies of John Brown, of an indigenous uprising of the black slaves of the South, when Douglass began in 1851 to find alternate funding from the “Liberty Party” created by the intemperate wealthy white man Gerrit Smith. We see that Frederick Douglass believed he had already put what would become the doctrine of ahimsa to the ultimate test, and that he had already discovered this doctrine to be ultimately wrongheaded — and was following the path of Nehru rather than the path of Gandhiji.] SLAVERY

While this sturm-und-drang about becoming free from slavery was going on in Maryland, in Newport, Rhode Island, the quietist Friend Stephen Wanton Gould was writing in his journal about becoming free from sin: 4th day 1st of 1 M 1834 / I am thankful in being Able to insert today that is has been a day of some favour - a good day, wherein my soul has experienced some access to the fountain of good, & been enabled to cry in Secret Abba Father.—— Our Meeting which was silent was free from conflict which has often awaited me of late. —— I rejoice in it & most ardently have I desired for help & preservation.1 RELIGIOUS SOCIETY OF FRIENDS

1. Stephen Wanton Gould Diary, 1833-1836: The Gould family papers are stored under control number 2033 at the Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections of Cornell University Library, Box 9 Folder 15: January 1, 1833-August 28, 1836; also on microfilm, see Series 7 HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1838

In a letter from James Caleb Jackson to Gerrit Smith: “‘Come out from among them and be ye separate and touch not the unclean thing and I will receive you.’ Jesus Christ—” Clearly, these Come-Outers were purists.2 COME-OUTISM

What the “Come-Outers” believed was that slavery was a much more ubiquitous situation than had been recognized. Any social institution which frustrated the human aspiration for spontaneity or impeded the directness of the governance of God over the human individual amounted to slavery. Perhaps the ultimate example of come-outism was the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints: Joseph Smith and his people moved from Kirtland, Ohio to Far West, Missouri. During this year and the next there would be a de-facto state of war in existence between the Mormons of Far West, Missouri and the other peoples of Missouri. However, by far the greatest concentration of Come-Outers who considered themselves as Come-Outers (200-300 persons) was on Cape Cod.3

May: Samuel Ringgold Ward heard Gerrit Smith speak: Never shall I forget the first time I heard that model man speak. Standing erect, as he could stand no other way, with his large, manly frame, graceful figure and faultless mannerism, richly but plainly dressed, with a broad collar and black ribbon upon his neck (his invariable costume, whatever be the prevailing fashion), his look, with his broad intellectual face and towering forehead, was enough to charm any one not dead to all sense of the beautiful; and then, his rich, deep, flexible, musical voice, as capable of a thunder-tone as of a whisper — a voice to which words were suited, as it was suited to words; but, most of all, the words, thoughts, sentiments, truths and principles, he uttered — rendered me, and thousands more with me, unable to sit or stand in any quietness during his speech. This was in May, 1838. Mr. Smith was speaking against American Negro-hate. He is a descendant of the Dutch, who have distinguished themselves as much for their ill nature towards Negroes as for anything else. He belonged by wealth and position

2. Righteousness is a precious and limited commodity, and the way one obtains it is by taking it away from someone else. Much of the antebellum abolitionist/proslavery struggle among America’s whites was a struggle not over the quality of the lives of American black people (although that was a token in the game) but over the possession of righteousness. Northern whites sought to take possession of righteousness by denying it to Southern whites, who were painted with the pitch-pot of unrighteousness. Meanwhile, Southern whites sought to take possession of righteousness by denying it to Northern whites, who were painted with the pitch-pot of unrighteousness. Southern white painted Northern whites with the pitch-pot of unrighteousness by associating them with blackness, calling them “nigger lovers,” and “amalgamationists.” Northern whites painted Southern whites with the pitch-pot of unrighteousness by associating them with blackness, pointing out the sheer size of the Southern population of mulatto Americans, which was the result of countless semi-secret acts of amalgamation between the white slavemaster males and their female captives (such as, for one example, Sally Hemings). Equally, on both sides, in this struggle to seize the moral high ground, one’s religiosity became *defined* by one’s politics. In the north it would be considered by many white Americans to be impossible for one to be considered “religious,” unless one was against human slavery — an extreme manifestation of this was the “Come-Outers” centering on Cape Cod. Meanwhile, in the south, it would be considered by many white Americans to be impossible for one to be considered “religious,” unless one believed strongly enough in the righteousness of keeping the animal impulses under decent control by use of the tool of human enslavement. 3. These 200-300 Cape Cod Come-Outers were particularly under the influence of Jakob Böhme and Friend George Fox. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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to the very first circles of the old Dutch aristocracy; he was the constant and admired associate of the proudest Negro-haters on the face of the earth; he had for years been a member of that most unscrupulous band of organized, systematic, practical promulgators of Negro-hate, the Colonization Society: and yet, in Broadway Tabernacle, upon an antislavery platform, in the city of New York (the worst city, save Philadelphia, since the days of Sodom, on this subject), Gerrit Smith stood up before four thousand of his countrymen to denounce this their cherished, honoured, they believe Christianized vice. To mortal man it is seldom permitted to behold a sight so full of or so radiant with moral power and beauty. Among the things he said, I may attempt to recall one sentiment — he asserted that, in ordinary circumstances, a person does not and cannot know how or what the Negro, the victim of this fiendish feeling, has to endure. Englishmen coming to America at first look upon it as a species of insanity. We are not all conscious of what we are doing to our poor coloured brother. “The time was, Mr. Chairman,” said this prince of orators, “when I did not understand it; but when I came to put myself in my coloured brother’s stead — when I imagined myself in his position — when I sought to realize what he feels, and how he feels it — when, in a word, I became a COLOURED MAN — then I understood it, and learned how and why to hate it.” To enforce his personal illustration there was one great fact. Mr. Smith had read of One “who made himself of no reputation,” and he chose to imitate Him. Long, long before the anti-slavery question agitated the American mind, Mr. Smith and his excellent lady had concluded that, by whomsoever they might be visited, no coloured person should be slighted or treated with any less respect in their mansion because of his colour. Mr. and Mrs. Smith knew that they were visited by some of the first families of the land — they were such; their relatives were such; and no inconsiderable number of them were slaveholders. They knew what would be said; but they also knew what was right, and upon that principle had Mr. Smith invariably acted — scorning, spurning, and trampling upon the vile demon of Negro-hate for twenty years before he made that ever memorable speech. Such was his qualification to make such a speech, in such a presence. Now, a man of no position, a mere mechanic or artisan, who makes himself by means of his cause, and who earns his bread by his philanthropy, may talk cheaply enough about what he dares and suffers for the poor slave; but one who, in Mr. Smith’s position, gives untold wealth in lands and money, must be judged otherwise. Mr. Smith has given 120,000 acres of land to coloured people — has sacrificed his position, and, from sympathy with the coloured people, has identified himself with them. Here then we see philanthropy, real, pure, self-sacrificing — philanthropy, indeed, such as very few in any country exhibit, and fewer still in that country. But, God be praised, Gerrit Smith belongs to that few. The honour and pleasure of making that gentleman’s acquaintance was mine in 1839, at his house, in Peterborough. No honour I ever enjoyed do I esteem more highly than that I may call the Honourable Gerrit Smith my personal HDT WHAT? INDEX

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friend. Of him I say, sometimes, he is the Shaftesbury of America; and those who enjoy the pleasure of knowing both know that I honour the noble Earl in nothing more highly than in speaking of his Lordship as the Gerrit Smith of England, of Europe. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1839

Anonymous publication of Elizur Wright, Junior’s small volume LA FONTAINE; A PRESENT FOR THE YOUNG.

In this year in which in England Friend Joseph Sturge was founding the British and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society and in which in America John A. Collins was becoming general agent for the Massachusetts Anti- Slavery Society, for some reason abolitionism simply was not prospering. Those whites who had an economic investment in or social interest in or libidinal involvement in human enslavement were proving to be quite immune to, merely hardened and angered by, all the relentless propaganda. The initial idea, that first the abolitionists would convince the institutions of the North to be righteous, and then the North would bring righteous pressure on the South, had proved in application to be utterly disconnected from the reality of our condition. For instance, in eight years of agitation not a single one of the white religious denominations had separated into a northern sect opposed to human enslavement and a southern sect in favor of human enslavement, despite the standoff between their northern white congregations and their southern white congregations over this issue. Although there had been a few anti-enslavement advocates positioned in the US House of Representatives, there had also been enacted a very specific gag rule to silence them on this one central topic. The ideological and emotional commitment of a number of leaders in the struggle against practices of human enslavement, however, the ones whom I am here terming “pragmatics,” was that American democracy was basically sound, and that the flaws in American character that had led to this enslavement situation were minor and isolated flaws. A few agreements, a few insights, a few changes in the rules, and the institutions supporting the practice of human enslavement would crumble. There was no need to tamper with anyone’s soul. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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Examples of this attitude were: • Elizur Wright, Jr. • Henry Brewster Stanton • James Gillespie Birney (who wanted to establish a third political party, the “Liberty” party, which would be antislavery, and compete directly in the political process, making deals and peddling influence like the Republicans/Democrats of that era) HDT WHAT? INDEX

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In this year Gerrit Smith condemned his denomination, Presbyterianism, for its failure to denounce slavery, yet when it was proposed to him that young black men be trained in Canada and Mexico and sent into the slave states to lead revolts, he rejected that plan. SERVILE INSURRECTION

Then there were the Garrisonians. The struggle between the two abolitionist psychologies, like the struggle between the Orthodox or Evangelical Quakers and the Hicksites, was a struggle that can readily be described in terms of a binary split over a single issue. Previous analyzers of the split have attempted to conceive of a binary split between the abolitionists who wanted to mix anti-slavery with the “confounded woman question” and those who wanted to keep such issues in separate compartments, and have not been able to make a case for that analysis, or have attempted to conceive of a binary split between the abolitionists who embraced the principle of non-resistance to evil and those who regarded this principle as the pinnacle of wickedness, and have not been able to make a case for that analysis. Some have suggested that the split was not binary, that the HDT WHAT? INDEX

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struggle was between those abolitionists who wanted to be understood as “pragmatics,” and those abolitionists who wanted to be understood as “strugglers” and as “Come-outers.” COME-OUTISM

These are not the analyses that I favor. In this “Kouroo” contexture, you will find, the analysis that I have favored is that of a binary split between, on the one hand, the abolitionists who wanted a future of racial integration, “amalgamation” as it was then called, in which all God’s children could live together on God’s holy mountain (these people known as “Hicksites,” a type case of this being Friend Lucretia Mott), and, on the other hand, the abolitionists who wanted a future of apartheid, of racial segregation, of Jim Crow, in which we were equal, more or less, but existed separately (these people known as “Quietist Friends,” and as “Orthodox Friends,” and as “Evangelical Friends,” a type case of this being Friend Moses Brown).

May 15, Wednesday: Lewis Tappan urged Gerrit Smith to shun the Nonresistance Society, because nonresistance to evil was “part and parcel of a system of innovations that will, so far as they succeed, overturn all that is valuable.” The wealthy Smith’s donation to the society was the largest it would ever receive — but he never would join.

Waldo Emerson lectured at the Concord Lyceum in Concord. This was the 7th and final lecture of the current series, “Demonology.” HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1842

January: Gerrit Smith addressed the New York State Abolition Convention:4 AFFLICTED BRETHREN: The doctrine obtains almost universally, that the friends of the slave have no right to communicate with him — no right to counsel and comfort him. We have ourselves, partially at least, acquiesced in this time-hallowed delusion: and now, that God has opened our eyes to our great and guilty error, we feel impelled to make public confession of it; to vindicate publicly our duty to be your advisers, comforters, and helpers, and to enter upon the discharge of that duty without delay. Why do abolitionists concede that their labors for the slave must be expended directly upon his master; and that they are to seek to improve the condition of the one, only through favorable changes wrought in the mind of the other? Is it not because they are not yet entirely disabused of the fallacy, that slavery is a legitimate institution? that it has rights? that it creates rights in the slaveholder, and destroys rights in the slave? Were they, as they should do, to regard slavery in the light of a sheer usurpation, and none the less such for the hoariness of the abomination, they would have as little respect for the protest of the man-stealer against the direct agency of others upon his stolen property, as they would for the protest of the horse-stealer against a similar liberty with his stolen property. With a vision so clear, they would no more acknowledge a possible acquisition or loss of rights by theft in the one case, than in the other. The same rights which the slave had before he “fell among thieves,” he has now; and amongst them is his right to all the words of consolation; encouragement, and advice, which his fellow-men can convey to him. To make the abolitionist most odious, he is charged with the supposedly heinous and almost matchless offense of communicating with the slave; and the abolitionist, instead of insisting on the right to do so, and instead of publicly lamenting the great difficulties in the way of practising the right, impliedly disclaims it, by informing his accusers, that the abolition doctrine is to address the master, and not the slave. No

4. Stanley Harrold. THE RISE OF AGGRESSIVE ABOLITIONISM: ADDRESSES TO THE SLAVES. Lexington KY: UP of Kentucky, 2004:

Gerrit Smith’s “Address of the Anti-Slavery Convention of the State of New-York to the Slaves in the U. States of America” of January 1842

The Reverend Nathaniel Emmons Johnson’s “Rights of a Fugitive Slave”

William Lloyd Garrison’s “Address to the Slaves of the United States” of June 2, 1843

The Reverend Henry Highland Garnet’s “An Address to the Slaves of the United States of America” at the 7th National Convention of Colored Men in Buffalo, New York, August 16, 1843

Gerrit Smith’s “A Letter to the American Slaves from those who have fled from American Slavery” HDT WHAT? INDEX

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slaveholding sophistry and blustering could obtain such a disclaimer from Paul. That heaven-directed Apostle not only himself communicated with the slave on the subject of his slavery, but directed others to do so. He declared it to be as well the duty of Timothy and Titus, as of himself; and far was he from conditioning the duty on the consent of the master. Paul carried out, more fully and fearlessly than the modern abolitionist, the doctrine, that the slave is a man, and not a chattel. He wrote to slaves, and in doing so, implied not only that they are beings to be reasoned with, but that it is their duty and therefore right to read the Scriptures, of which his writings to them constitute a part. Indeed, he expressly commands them to read his epistles. That he did not acknowledge the rightfulness of subjecting one man absolutely to the will of another man, is manifest from his sayings to slaves: “Be not ye servants to men.” This injunction forbids their rendering any service incompatible with the claims of God; and forbids that they should suffer even their masters to invade the sacred precincts of conscience. Although much has been gained by the bold positions that abolitionists have taken, much also has been lost by their timidly hesitating to take other positions, which, if bolder, are not less truthful or advantageous. When the abolitionists first demanded that the Amistad captives should be set free, few were found to respond to the justice of a demand in which our whole nation now acquiesces. The Northern press, with few exceptions, pronounces the recent insurrection on board of the Creole to be justifiable and heroic. But had this insurrection occurred before that on board of the Amistad, scarcely any other than an abolition newspaper would have failed to denounce and stigmatize it. No less extensive conquests of public opinion will be achieved by the future instances of our intrepidity. Let abolitionists fully and solemnly utter the doctrine, that they are bound to enter into and maintain all practicable communications with the slave, and the candid and intelligent will not only respond to it, but ere they are aware, they will have been carried along by its trains of consequences and influences to the conviction, that the abolitionist has a perfect moral right to go into the South, and use his intelligence to promote the escape of ignorant and imbruted slaves from their prison house. The motto of abolitionists, as well as of our Commonwealth, should be, “HIGHER;” and they should feel, that, unless they are continually rising higher and higher in their bold and righteous claims, all the past attainments of their cause are left unsure. Having vindicated the right of abolitionists to address you, we will very briefly enumerate some of the things which they are doing for you, and also some of the things which you should do, and some of the things which you should not do for yourselves. First. We ask the God of the oppressed to have mercy on you and deliver you. Second. We ask our National and State Legislatures to exert all their respective Constitutional power for the overthrow of slavery. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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Third. We deny, that any but an anti-slavery man has a view of the Christian scheme so large and just as to fit him to be a preacher of the Gospel. Fourth. We deny, that any but an anti-slavery man is a republican, or fit to make laws for republicans. Fifth. The arguments to justify our course are to be read in the innumerable pamphlets and scores of newspapers which we publish; and are to be heard from the lips of lecturers, amongst whom are men eminent for learning, logic, and eloquence. And now with respect to your own duties. Woful as is slavery, and desirable as is liberty, we entreat you to endure the former, rather than take a violent and bloody hold of the latter. Such manifestly, was the teaching of Paul to the slaves of his time. Whatever was his, the reason for our similar teaching is, that recourse to violence and bloodshed for the termination of slavery, is very likely, in the judgment of a large proportion of us, to result in the confirmation and protraction of the evil. here are, it is true, some persons in our ranks who are opposed to the taking of human life in any circumstances; and whose doctrine it is, that, however certain might be your success, it would be sinful for you to undertake to fight your way to liberty. But the great majority of abolitionists justify their forefathers’ bloody resistance to oppression, and can, therefore, dissuade you from such resistance to a ten thousand- fold greater oppression, not on the high ground of absolute morality, but on the comparatively low one of expediency. And now, after repeating to you, that some abolitionists believe the taking of human life, under whatever provocations, to be sin, and that others are — convinced that your insurrection would result in naught but evil to yourselves, to your oppressors and the innocent ones bound up with them, we add, that it is on the condition that you shall not stain it with blood, that you will be entitled to expect that we shall continue to advocate your cause unitedly and hopefully. It is about ten years since the antislavery movement in this country began. During all this time, there has been no servile insurrection at the South. Whilst we rejoice in the strong probability, that this remarkable forbearance of the swelling numbers of the slaves is owing to their reliance on the philanthropic efforts in their behalf, we tremble, lest, discouraged by the tardy results of these efforts, they should extinguish their waning hopes in bloody despair. Do not infer, from what we have said against violent attempts to recover your freedom, that we object to your availing yourselves of any feasible, peaceable mode to accomplish it. We but concur with the great Apostle, when we say : “If thou mayest be free, use it rather.” Although to run away from slavery is, slaveholders being judges, the most black-hearted ingratitude, and although the adviser to such a requital of the unequal loving-kindness of a slaveholding master, is pronounced by the same tribunal to be indelibly disgraced and ineffably mean, we nevertheless, call on every slave who has the reasonable prospect of being able to run away from slavery, to make the experiment. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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We rejoice, with all our hearts, in the rapid multiplication of escapes from the house of bondage. There are now a thousand a year, a rate more than five times as great as that before the anti-slavery effort. The fugitive need feel little apprehension after he has entered a free State. Seven years ago, a great majority of the people in the border free States were in favor of replunging into slavery their poor, scarred, emaciated, trembling brother who had fled from its horrors. But now, under the influence of anti-slavery lessons, nineteen twentieths of them have come to be ashamed of and to revolt at such monstrous inhumanity. We add, that the fugitive slave may safely continue in some of the free States — especially in those where a jury passes on the question, whether “service or labor may be due” from a man, merely because he has had the misfortune to fall into the hands of kidnappers and be reduced to slavery. We leave him, however, to his own free choice between taking up his abode with us and in the British dominions. If he prefer the latter, we will gladly furnish him with facilities for realizing his preference. The abolitionist knows no more grateful employment than that of carrying the dog and rifle-hunted slave to Canada. It may be well to say here, that it has often occurred to us, that those inhabitants of the South who pity the slave would render him an inestimable service by supplying him with a pocket-compass. Could every slave who encounters the appalling perils of flight from bondage have access to this little and cheap but unerring guide, he might dispense with the shining of the North star. An occasional match-light to show him the needle of his compass would suffice for his direction in the darkest night. This is also the place for saying a few words to you on the subject of theft. We are aware that an almost irresistible tendency of slavery is to make thieves of its victims. But we entreat you not to steal. “Not purloining” is an apostolic injunction on slaves, as well as other servants. Let all your toil go unrequited, rather than to seek an equivalent, at the expense of trampling on conscience, and polluting the soul by violating a Divine command. Say not thou, I will recompense evil; but wait on the Lord, and he shall save thee. In your poorest estate, you will still be infinitely better off than they who “rob the poor, because he is poor;” “for the Lord will spoil the soul of those that spoiled them.” Do not, however, suppose that we forbid your innocent yieldings to necessity. We are aware of the dreadful straits to which some of you are at times reduced; and God forbid that we should tell you to starve or freeze when relief is possible. In those straits, you have the permission of Him who says that “the life is more than meat, and the body is more than raiment,” to count as your own that of which you stand in perishing need. And when, too, you are escaping from the matchlessly horrible Bastile, take all along your route, in the free as well as the slave State, so far as is absolutely essential to your escape, the horse, the boat, the food, the clothing, which you require, and feel no more compunction for the justifiable appropriation than does the drowning man for possessing himself of the plank that floats in HDT WHAT? INDEX

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his way. But we proceed to offer you our advice on another point. We do not wonder that slave-ships witness thousands of cases of suicide. We do not wonder that so many of the slaves of the South lay violent hands on themselves and on their little ones who inherit the frightful doom of slavery. But the heaviest load of life which the malignity and ingenuity of oppressors can devise, is to be borne patiently. Least of all, is it to be thrown off by the black crimes of self destruction and murder. Only trust in God, beloved brethren, and you will soon be where you will “hear not the voice of the oppressor,” and where “the wicked cease from troubling, and the weary are at rest.” Cherish no vindictive or unkind feelings toward your oppressors. Early and late, and with all possible cheerfulness, yield them your unrecompensed toil. Submit to stripes and to every exaction which you can submit to without sin. our consent to violate God’s law, let no bribes, nor menaces, nor sufferings, be able to obtain. If you would have Him who hears “the sighing of the prisoner” grant you a speedy deliverance, then pray earnestly and perseveringly to Him for yourselves and your oppressors. Have no confidence in pro-slavery preachers. Those sham ministers of the Gospel, whether at the North or South, who dare not rebuke oppression, would barter away your souls for one smile of the proud tyrants on whom they fawn. Reject their teachings with holy indignation; and God’s Spirit will supply their place with His own perfect lessons of truth. Perilous as it is, you should, nevertheless, snatch all your little opportunities to learn to read. The art of reading is an abundant recompense for the many stripes it may have cost you to acquire it. he slave who has learned to read a map, has already conquered half the difficulty in getting to Canada; and the slave, who has learned to read the Bible, can learn the way to heaven. ave no conscience against violating the inexpressibly wicked law which forbids you to read it; nor indeed against violating any other slaveholding law. Slaveholders are but pirates, and the laws which piracy enacts, whether upon land or sea, are not entitled to trammel the consciences of its victims. We shall get as many copies of this Address as we can into the hands of your white friends in the slave States. To these, as also to the few (alas, how few!) of the colored people of the South, who, some by permission, and some by stealth, have obtained the art of reading, we look to acquaint you with its contents. Communications of a similar design –that of enlightening and comforting you– will probably be made from time to time hereafter. We close the present one with a brief reference to a few of the facts which argue the speedy overthrow of slavery in the United States. There are now but two nations in all Continental America that uphold slavery. These are our own and Brazil. In the West- Indies, slavery has received its death-blow, and will expire ere the close of another five years. The literature of Europe –and especially the America-swaying literature of England– is well imbued with hostility to slavery. Texas will be speedily HDT WHAT? INDEX

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reannexed to anti-slavery Mexico, unless the favor of European nations prevent it; and that favor she will enjoy on no less condition than that of following the fashion of the times, and running up the abolition flag. The South would quickly give up slavery were she deprived of her English market for cotton, and her Northern market for sugar. But India will soon enable England to dispense with blood- stained cotton; and Northern conscience is fast coming to revolt at the consumption of blood-stained sugar. The principles of abolition have already struck their roots deep in the genial soil of the free States of our Union; and even at the South, abolitionists are multiplying rapidly. The idea that a pro-slavery man is fit to preach to Christians, and that a pro-slavery man is fit to legislate for republicans, is becoming exceedingly abhorrent and ludicrous all over the North; and this idea is too absurd to enjoy a greatly prolonged favor, even at the South. Wounded, writhing, slavery still cries: “Let me alone — let me alone.” But the people will not let it alone; and such providences as the insurrections on board of the Amistad and Creole, show that God will not let it alone. His decree has gone forth, that slavery shall continue to be tortured, even unto death. “Lift up your heads,” then, brethren, “for your redemption draweth nigh.” HDT WHAT? INDEX

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H-NET REVIEW:

JOHN CAMPBELL ON THE RISE OF AGGRESSIVE ABOLITIONISM:

ADDRESSES TO THE SLAVES

Stanley Harrold. THE RISE OF AGGRESSIVE ABOLITIONISM: ADDRESSES TO THE SLAVES. Lexington KY: UP of Kentucky, 2004 Reviewed by: John Campbell, Department of History, Winona State University. The Increasing Radicalism of Abolitionism This relatively short monograph (150 pages of interpretive text) packs a big punch, as it essentially argues that the real radicals of the antebellum abolition movement were not the provocative, socially iconoclastic, and highly prominent Garrisonians but, rather, the political “Immediatists” associated with Gerrit Smith and, by 1850, Frederick Douglass. In this book, Stanley Harrold examines three anti-slavery speeches given in the early 1840s by white abolitionists Smith and William Lloyd Garrison and by black abolitionist Henry Highland Garnet. He also assesses the impact those speeches had on abolitionist thought and tactics. Helpfully, Harrold includes the text of the speeches for readers. What makes this trio of speeches worthy of such close analysis is that, unlike the hundreds of other talks given by abolitionists, these three were addressed explicitly to slaves, rather than to northern and southern whites or northern free blacks. While Harrold’s stated purpose is to analyze the speeches in terms of both the content and the contexts in which they were given, he also uses them as a useful window through which to glimpse the evolution of the articulate, fragmented, and ever-contentious abolitionist movement, particularly in the 1840s. The very existence of these three slave-focused speeches reflected an emerging awareness among some abolitionists that the strategy of just focusing on changing the pro-slavery mentality of white people, both in the North and South, was inadequate. In addition, abolitionists needed to include the actions of slaves in their anti-slavery strategizing by establishing contacts with them and, more radically, by actively encouraging slaves to engage in actions that would help weaken slavery. While these speeches were delivered in the North, addressing them to absent slaves was no mere rhetorical exercise. As Harrold points out, the three speakers and their allies assumed that slaves would learn of the speeches’ content (p. 9), just as Lincoln assumed slaves would learn of the substance of his Emancipation Proclamation twenty years later. Indeed, giving such speeches to absent slaves was just the first in a series of tactics that some abolitionists promoted as part of their effort to actively include slaves in HDT WHAT? INDEX

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their overall strategy of subverting slavery. As Harrold usefully discusses in chapter 5, abolitionists would try to make physical contact with slaves in the border region through three means: proselytizing, buying slaves their freedom, and helping slaves to run away. While providing evidence of the latter two actions is not especially new, what is noteworthy about this discussion is Harrold’s claim that such actions were not just randomly done by free-agent abolitionists acting on their own, in a tactical vacuum. Instead, both strategies reflected activists’ efforts to implement in the South the speeches’ intellectual-political message, however dangerous such ventures would have been. For Harrold, the most provocative element that unites the three speeches is their shared ambivalence towards the issue of slaves resorting to violence to upend slavery. All three individuals broached it; all three refused to embrace it explicitly, especially if it involved collective actions by the slaves. Garrison was most tepid. Despite his violent-sounding rhetoric, his brand of abolitionism, which enjoined northerners to raise anti-slavery pressure so high as to lead to northern disunion and, eventually, to the crumbling of slavery within a weakened independent southern nation, overshadowed his nominal encouragement of slaves to resist by running off. Smith, despite his ambivalence, saw violence as more likely since he actively encouraged slaves to run off, and even said that God would permit them to “take [i.e. steal], all along your route, in the free, as well as the slave State[s], so far as is absolutely essential ... the horse, the boat, the food, the clothing, which you require” (p. 21; see also p.158). Garnet went furthest, for instead of advocating running, he advised slaves to “cease to labor for tyrants” (p. 188). Harrold calls this, perhaps a bit misleadingly, a “general strike” (p. 35). Garnet also urged slaves to demand payment and remonstrate “with them in language which they cannot misunderstand” about slavery’s “sinfulness” (p. 185). While Garnet did not explicitly call on slaves to defend themselves in the eventuality that slaveholding tyrants would refuse to pay and insist that slaves go back to work, he was pretty certain that violence would follow. Masters, for their part, would, in such a situation, “commence the work of death” (p.184); moreover, slaves would also strike out with violence. Garnet might be seen as suggesting this when he claims that slaves’ motto should be “RESISANTCE! RESISTANCE! RESISTANCE!” (p. 188). His belief in the inevitability of violence may be seen as well in the fact that when he finally did publish his speech, in 1848, it was as an appendix to his reprinting of David Walker’s Appeal, an 1829 black abolitionist tract most famous for raising the possibility of slave violence as the means for overthrowing the institution of violence. The 1850s saw a convergence of physical contact and slave action. In the face of the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, northern abolitionists became much more willing to encourage slaves to flee and more willing to physically and collectively interfere on runaways’ behalf in the North, where authorities were apt to reclaim slaves and send them southward. In perhaps the most startling point of the book, Harrold argues that by the early HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1850s many abolitionists had become so willing to engage in such direct and aggressive action with slaves, that John Brown’s actions of 1859 would have happened earlier –presumably with the comparable support of other northern abolitionists– if the Fugitive Slave Act had not siphoned off abolitionist energies for resisting authorities in the North. This normalizing of John Brown –placing his actions in terms of the broader trajectory of abolition’s increasing embrace of aggressive action– is one of the many useful nuggets in this study. Harrold is to be commended as well for highlighting the slave borderland, the focus of most abolitionist strategizing, as a discrete multi- state region with its own slavery/anti-slavery dynamic. He also does a good job of navigating the choppy, often muddy waters of abolitionist factionalism, while always conveying how smart and articulate the many abolitionists were, even if they often disagreed amongst themselves. Given the sloppy thinking endemic to today’s political debates, it is hard to believe that the anti-slavery movement sustained such intellectual vigor for thirty years. A few suggestions are in order, however. First, given the importance of addressing slaves explicitly, it would have been interesting for Harrold to speculate as to why more such speeches were not delivered in the 1840s and 1850s. Second, in discussing why abolitionists began broaching the issue of violence in 1842 and 1843, Harrold might note that the country itself was becoming saturated with slavery-related violence. Violence on behalf of the “slave power” was on the rise, as seen, most notably, with the recently- concluded seven-year old Second Seminole War (ending in 1842). This war also saw slaves, in league with the Seminole, using violence to resist white encroachment and otherwise secure their autonomy in Florida. Third, in explaining some abolitionist criticism of the three speeches and the advocacy of violence, Harrold might have usefully explored the extent to which some abolitionists’ criticism reflected their deep embrace of the expanding free labor/free market ideology of nineteenth-century capitalism. Being thus imbued with a belief in the wonders of a free market, whereby individuals bought and sold their labor power as individuals, not as workers conspiring together in unions or as strikers, northern abolitionists might have been reluctant to embrace the tactic of collective action on the part of slave laborers, such as when Garnet advocated a labor shutdown. Indeed, what made the tactic of slaves escaping eventually so enticing to mainstream abolitionists is that running away could be presented and understood as an individual act (whether this was the case or not); it could be offered as heroic evidence that squared perfectly with the emerging individual-in-the- market ethic of nineteenth-century America. Similarly, in criticizing Smith for sanctioning slave theft, other abolitionists might have been revealing less their Protestant- based code of proper moral behavior and more their deep embrace of the sanctity of the capitalistic marketplace and its celebration of private property rights. Finally, in what is the most problematic aspect of his study, Harrold discusses throughout how the three speeches were essentially addressed to HDT WHAT? INDEX

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slave men and that one of their underlying themes was the appropriate action that men had to take, in part, to manifest and secure their masculinity. Evidence from the speeches suggests that Harrold’s claim about the male-centered nature of the speeches simplifies a more complex rhetorical reality. While the three speakers do, to be sure, place a greater burden on men for leading the challenge against slavery, the three formally address themselves to all of the “slaves of the United States,” or, as Garnet adds more descriptively, “you ... THREE MILLION” (p. 188). Moreover, Garnet mentions women –as wives, sisters, daughters– repeatedly, particularly in terms of their sexual abuse by the slaveholding “tyrants,” which suggests that the fault line of gender within slavery created a certain tension within Garnet’s address over the roles of men and women. However, Garnet complicates the gender dichotomy of male protector vs. female victims when he includes “sons [who are] murdered,” too (p. 186). These concerns notwithstanding, this study constitutes a valuable addition to the ongoing historiographic enterprise of trying to make sense of America’s large and sprawling anti-slavery movement and would be useful in both survey and more specialized courses. Copyright © 2006 by H-Net, all rights reserved. H-Net permits the redistribution and reprinting of this work for nonprofit, educational purposes, with full and accurate attribution to the author, web location, date of publication, originating list, and H-Net: Humanities & Social Sciences Online. For any other proposed use, contact the Reviews editorial staff at [email protected] net.msu.edu. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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H-NET REVIEW:

W. CALEB MCDANIEL ON THE RISE OF AGGRESSIVE

ABOLITIONISM: ADDRESSES TO THE SLAVES

Stanley Harrold. THE RISE OF AGGRESSIVE ABOLITIONISM: ADDRESSES TO THE SLAVES. Lexington KY: UP of Kentucky, 2004 Reviewed by: W. Caleb McDaniel, Department of History, The Johns Hopkins University. Published by: H-SHEAR (September, 2004) Ambiguous Manifestoes In 1842 and 1843, three Northern abolitionists –William Lloyd Garrison in Boston, and Gerrit Smith and Henry Highland Garnet in New York state– delivered separate “addresses” to the slaves of the United States. Stanley Harrold’s most recent book analyzes these three addresses. Harrold deals admirably with the differences between Garrison, Smith, and Garnet, as well as the different circumstances under which each address was produced. But his main argument is that the three addresses, all of which approvingly raised the subjects of slave insurrection and escape, “each glorify slave rebelliousness” (p. 9) and together “reflect declining abolitionist commitment to peaceful persuasion directed at whites and expanding abolitionist involvement in slave escapes” (p. 2). In short, despite their differences, the addresses are presented by Harrold as signs of what he calls “the rise of aggressive abolitionism.” This book helpfully joins other recent works that have integrated abolitionist history by including white and black reformers within a single frame.[1] It will also be useful to teachers and students, not least because it includes the full texts of all three addresses and several related primary documents at the end of the book. The Rise of Aggressive Abolitionism is therefore recommended for all students of antebellum history, even as it raises particularly provocative and open questions for antislavery specialists. Harrold’s latest book is an elegantly concise entry into his larger historiographical project, which has been developed in several earlier works focusing on the relationship between abolitionists and the South. Here Harrold reiterates his view that abolitionists were consistently oriented towards the South, or that they tried by the early 1840s to effect a “reorientation of the antislavery movement” Southward (p. ix). The Rise of Aggressive Abolitionism can thus be seen in some ways as a companion volume to Harrold’s HDT WHAT? INDEX

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Subversives, published just last year, which examines interracial abolitionism in the District of Columbia.[2] Whereas Subversives provided an on-the-ground example of abolitionists in the South, this book argues that antislavery strategies like those used in the Chesapeake forced Northern leaders to reconfigure their message. The addresses were an attempt by antislavery ideologues to catch up with abolitionists in the Upper South, who, by 1842, were already pursuing aggressive types of “cooperation with slaves” — whether through direct aid to fugitives, attempts to purchase freedom for slaves, or elaborate plans to distribute Bibles to slave communities (p. 97). The speeches did not inaugurate such activities, says Harrold, but rather represent early attempts to legitimize tactics already familiar to abolitionists in border states. In describing these aggressive activities, Harrold often refers to them as evidence of an “abolitionist-slave alliance in the South’s borderlands” (p. 115) — a term also used by Merton Dillon in his 1990 book, Slavery Attacked.[3] Harrold credits Dillon at several points as an inspiration for his treatment of the addresses (pp. 2, 148). For both historians, the addresses indicate that abolitionists in the early 1840s were pursuing an active alliance between abolitionists and slaves — an alliance in which the two groups would “cooperate” (p. 3) as “partners” (p. 17). The addresses represent a desire to “bridge” the distance between slaves and reformers in the North (p. 43). And it is central to Harrold’s argument, in this book and in the larger historiographical project with which he identifies, that abolitionists succeeded, at least to an impressive extent, in constructing such a bridge. The addresses, especially those by Smith and Garnet, reveal abolitionists both “embracing slaves as allies” and emphasizing “the spiritual, if not physical, unity of northern abolitionists and southern slaves” (p. 43). Harrold also emphasizes, however, that the addresses were “ambiguous manifestoes,” to borrow the title of chapter 1. All three of the addresses allude favorably to the use of violence by slaves to resist their oppression, but they are also “highly tentative” (p. 1). All three, including Garnet’s, warn slaves against revolt, either because of moral opposition to violence (Garrison, and to a lesser degree, Smith) or because revolt was inexpedient (Smith and Garnet especially). The addresses are also suffused with abolitionists’ assumptions about the masculinity (or lack thereof) of slave men. And while each address urges slaves to act on their own initiatives to resist slavery, those by Smith and Garrison clearly adopt the role of a “wise fatherly northern philanthropist” (p. 20) and arrogate the right to counsel slaves.[4] In addition to the contradictions within each text, which took back with one hand what they gave with the other, there were a variety of conflicts among the authors of the three addresses. Smith, Garrison and Garnet differed on numerous issues — including the advisability of abolitionists going directly to the South to help slaves escape, the permissibility of slaves stealing property to aid them in their escapes, and the moral status of violent resistance. As a result, the fates of the addresses were also HDT WHAT? INDEX

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different, as Harrold shows in two chapters detailing the setting in which each address was given, and the factional politics within the movement that often determined whether the addresses were approved and circulated by the groups that heard them first. A close reading therefore reveals that Harrold’s book is also an “ambiguous manifesto.” On the one hand, it argues that the three addresses point in a clear “direction” towards more violent tactics within the antislavery movement, tactics that culminated in John Brown’s raid at Harper’s Ferry and the enlistment of African American soldiers in the Civil War (see pp. 141-147). This theme connects the addresses as dots in a line that leads from the nonresistant, moral suasion strategies of early Garrisonianism to the resistant, violent strategies of John Brown, Charles T. Torrey, Madison Washington, and the Amistad slaves. The addresses, in short, lent directionality to a previously divided movement, an evolution conveyed in the book’s title: “The Rise of Aggressive Abolitionism.” On the other hand, Harrold’s book convincingly shows how difficult it is to attach any single adjective to the noun “abolitionism,” since factional disputes and internal ambiguities combined to make the addresses multivalent. In the concluding sentence of chapter 1, the two themes of the book appear simultaneously: “Conflicted, contingent, and self-contradictory as they are, the Addresses point toward a future in which underground railroading and violent rhetoric characterized a northern abolitionism that sought contact with slaves” (p. 36). Throughout, the book oscillates between words like “conflicted,” “tentative,” “contingent,” and “ambiguous,” and more determinate tropes like “the rise of aggressive abolitionism” and the “abolitionist- slave alliance.” Harrold thus combines two traditions within antislavery historiography — one that emphasizes continuities between abolitionism and slave resistance, as well as between abolitionism and the Civil War, and the other that stresses discontinuity and indeterminacy within the movement. Although Harrold foregrounds the first of these two alternatives, he subtly defends both, making the book a provocative one that antislavery historians should read and discuss. In the hope that such a discussion might begin on this list, let me close with an ambiguous manifesto of my own. I believe the book is strongest when it stresses the ambivalence and fragility of the addresses, rather than when it posits a clear and strong alliance between abolitionists and slaves. Harrold is most convincing when he holds the addresses up like mirrors to the abolitionists, using them to reveal more about the reformers themselves — their views about violence, about masculinity, about strategy, about factional priorities, and about the “multiple audiences” that they had to address (p. 9). He is less convincing when he argues that of these “multiple audiences,” the slaves themselves were the immediate and most important of the abolitionists’ intended targets. In declaring their sympathy with slave violence, these abolitionists were surely talking as much (perhaps more) to each other, to pusillanimous Northerners, and to Southern slaveholders, as they were to their ostensible addressees. Although Harrold points out that these other audiences were HDT WHAT? INDEX

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clearly on the minds of Smith, Garrison, and Garnet, he is reluctant to emphasize them because he does not want the addresses to be dismissed as mere “rhetorical ploys” (see pp. 20, 29). Thanks in large part to Harrold’s work, it is impossible to see the addresses as merely ploys, but they still clearly demand rhetorical analysis. The book might, for instance, have compared and contrasted these speeches to other “addresses” that abolitionists produced –to Southern women, to poor Southerners, to Northern citizens, to Irish-Americans, to heads of foreign governments– and placed the addresses to the slaves more fully in the context of abolitionism’s rhetorical cadences.[5] Whether the addresses are evidence of a full-fledged “alliance” or spiritual “unity” between abolitionists and slaves also bears close examination. As Harrold points out, no evidence exists that the addresses reached any slaves, even though the authors all spoke as though they assumed the addresses would (see pp. 9, 19, 73, 101).[6] The addresses concede, in fact, that most slaves could not read. Many antislavery arguments, even Garnet’s, depended on claims that slaves were being intellectually degraded by their masters, who systematically denied them education (p. 182). Smith’s address, for instance, promises that “we shall get as many copies of this Address, as we can into the hands of your white friends in the slave States. To these, as also to the few (alas how few!) of the colored people of the South, who ... have obtained the art of reading, we look to acquaint you with its contents” (p. 160). Far from being direct partners, then, slaves would have to be secondary recipients of the address. Smith even uses the address, which he admits slaves would not be able to read, to advise the slaves to “snatch all your little opportunities to learn to read” (p. 159). One could read the speeches, then, not as clear evidence of an alliance, but as tokens of hope against hope that isolated cases of partnership, like those discussed in Subversives, might become the norm instead of the exception. In sum, one could argue that the addresses show not how normative an abolitionist-slave alliance was, but how conjectural it remained. Most cases of alliance –like the Creole incident and even John Brown’s raid– seem to have taken many abolitionists by surprise. And was anyone’s surprise greater than the Old Man’s himself, when he discovered belatedly at Harper’s Ferry that the thousands of “allies” he had counted on to rally around him failed to materialize? Such, at least, are the questions that make me wonder whether the final legacy of the addresses is not the abolitionists’ unrelenting realism, but their relentless imagination. Notes [1]. See, for example, Richard S. Newman, The Transformation of American Abolitionism: Fighting Slavery in the Early Republic (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002); John Stauffer, The Black Hearts of Men: Radical Abolitionists and the Transformation of Race (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2001); Paul Goodman, Of One Blood: Abolitionism and the Origins of Racial Equality (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998); and James Brewer Stewart, “The Emergence of Racial Modernity and the Rise of the White North, 1790-1840,” Journal of the Early Republic 18, no. 2 HDT WHAT? INDEX

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(Spring 1998): pp. 181-217. [2]. Stanley Harrold, Subversives: Antislavery Community in Washington, D.C., 1828-1865 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2003). See also Harrold, The Abolitionists and the South (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1995). [3]. Merton Dillon, Slavery Attacked: Southern Slaves and their Allies, 1619-1865 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1990), pp. 201-223. [4]. Harrold notes wryly that while Smith delivered his address to the 1842 New York Liberty Party’s gubernatorial nominating convention, a painting by Edwin W. Goodwin (created at Smith’s request) hung in the room picturing a helpless slave. The caption read: “Talk for me –Write for me –Print for me –Vote for me” (p. 44-45). [5]. Harrold points out in passing that there was a veritable “genre of abolitionist literature ... singling out specific groups to receive advice, prophecies, and calls to action” (p. 42), but he does not carry out a comparative study of these appeals. The results of his work do suggest, however, that such a study could be very useful. Much like Dickson Bruce has used abolitionist literature to explore how white authors constructed an African American “voice,” studying these addresses might shed light on how abolitionists imagined the African American “ear,” as well as other audiences defined by gender, ethnicity, or location. See Dickson D. Bruce Jr., The Origins of African American Literature, 1680-1865 (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 2001). [6]. The book notes that such a circulation of material to slaves was not impossible, since evidence exists that David Walker’s famous Appeal, published in 1829, did find its way into the South. See Peter P. Hinks, To Awaken My Afflicted Brethren: David Walker and the Problem of Antebellum Slave Resistance (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1997). But in the case of the addresses, Harrold has not been able to find evidence of similar circulation, beyond the claims within the addresses that they would be distributed to slaves. Library of Congress Call Number: E449 .H299 2004 Copyright © 2004 by H-Net, all rights reserved. H-Net permits the redistribution and reprinting of this work for nonprofit, educational purposes, with full and accurate attribution to the author, web location, date of publication, originating list, and H-Net: Humanities & Social Sciences Online. For any other proposed use, contact the Reviews editorial staff at [email protected] net.msu.edu. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1843

Gerrit Smith ceased taking communion at his local Presbyterian church, because of its failure to become “a true church of Christ” by denouncing slavery.

February: According to a comet list published in Boston in 1846, attributed to Professor Benjamin Peirce:

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At this point early in the year 1843 there were more than 50,000 white Millerites true believers, each one more credulous than any other, each one more eagerly awaiting the termination of the world as we then knew it. The 4,000 seats within the revival tent would be filled every night between March 21, 1843, and March 21, 1844, with each night the great explainer Miller displaying his chart and recalculating his numbers and producing at the end his inspiring message of doom. Of what conceivable significance to them was an end to human slavery as we knew it? HDT WHAT? INDEX

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SEEDS: Who could believe in prophecies of Daniel or of Miller that the world would end this summer, while one milkweed with faith matured its seeds? HDT WHAT? INDEX

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Among these Millerite millenialists, oh wow, was the H. Ross Perot richie-rich weirdo of that era, Gerrit Smith. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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The following, published in this year, was what so much impressed this richie-rich weirdo:

Oooooh, it all follows! (Not.)5 HDT WHAT? INDEX

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July: Frederick Douglass went on a lecture tour of western New York, Ohio, Indiana, and Pennsylvania with Charles Lenox Remond and John A. Collins. While at the National Convention of Colored Persons / Convention of Colored Citizens in Buffalo NY, they would join with William Wells Brown to defeat a resolution by the Reverend Henry Highland Garnet that American slaves should be encouraged to violent revolution:

“There can be no redemption of sin without the shedding of blood.”

In his “Address to the Slaves,” a portion of which has been several times reprinted in Black Studies anthologies during the 1960s, the Reverend Garnet called on American slaves to “Go to your lordly enslavers and tell them plainly, that you are determined to be free. Appeal to their sense of justice, and tell them that they have no more right to oppress you, than you have to enslave them.... Do this, and for ever after cease to toil for the heartless tyrants.... If they then commence the work of death, they, and not you, will be responsible for the consequences.... You had far better all die — die immediately, than live slaves.... There is not much hope of redemption without the shedding of blood.” And “Let your motto be Resistance! Resistance! Resistance! and remember that you are three millions.” According to the minutes of the convention, the eyes of those attending were “literally infused with tears” and Garnet’s conclusion was greeted with “great applause” — before Douglass began to take issue with this agenda of giving lip service to insurrection.6 He “wanted emancipation in a better way, as he expected to have it.” SERVILE INSURRECTION

5. There is one master myth which drives all our ideology. It is that there is, and that it is necessary for us to discover, the one right way, The Solution, and that if we then hew to this one right way, everything will start to work, and the world will be all set to turn out all right:

It seems, however, that although we are prepared to defend to the death our right to trust in this master myth which drives all our ideology –that there is a right way and all that is necessary is for us to discover and hew to it– this really is not so. This is simply a false description of reality. Our world, actually, is not like this, not like this at all. We’re not living on a Rubik’s Cube and ultimately, things are not going to turn out to our liking. Meanwhile, we’re going to just have to get used to our muddling along, and we’re going to just have to continue, as long as it still seems feasible, to put up with each other as we do our muddle-along thingie. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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He therefore opposed printing and distribution of the address, and with the aid of Charles Lenox Remond and William Wells Brown the day was carried, by only 19 votes over 18. They would however fail to defeat a resolution in favor of the violence advocacy of Gerrit Smith’s Liberty Party.

I think we may forgive the minister for thus reacting, under persecution. A firebrand named John Brown, who was not being persecuted but for reasons of his own needed to act as if he were, is said to have picked up on this and published and distributed the minister’s sermon at his own expense for his own purposes. (However, that story may well be one of those false stories which from time to time prove compelling, as we have no idea how Brown could at this point have paid for such publication, and as no copies of any such publication have turned up in collections.)

6. What Henry Highland Garnet was espousing, according to “LET YOUR MOTTO BE RESISTANCE”: THE LIFE AND THOUGHT OF HENRY HIGHLAND GARNET by Earl Ofari (Boston, 1972, pages 149-50), although nominally “pacifist,” was the sort of militant mass resistance-to-evil movement which not only amounted to a full and direct rejection of the scriptural injunction “Resist not evil” incumbent upon all Christians, but also amounted to something which might well be anticipated to produce reciprocated violence. I think we may forgive this minister as the fact is that he was overreacting in response to diligent persecution, forgive, at least, to the extent of getting on the case of the slavemaster well before beginning to get on his case. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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JOHN BROWN

William Wells Brown attended not only this National Convention of Colored Citizens but also the national antislavery convention held in Buffalo NY this summer, and participated in several committees.

September: At a Liberty Party convention in Canastota (which is north of Peterboro), Gerrit Smith proposed that the abolitionists honor Myron Holley by erecting a monument at his grave in Mount Hope Cemetery in Rochester (refer to HISTORY OF THE ERECTION OF THE MONUMENT ON THE GRAVE OF MYRON HOLLEY, a pamphlet that would in 1844 be published in Utica, New York by H.H. Curtiss, that would be found in Maine by Henry Thoreau and mentioned –although he would spell the name as “Holly”– in THE MAINE WOODS). HDT WHAT? INDEX

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December: Gerrit Smith joined in establishing “The Church of Peterboro,” a new antislavery church which was to have no hireling minister. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1844

In the election of 1844, the hot issues were the annexations of Texas and of the Oregon Territory. Flemming created this map of Texas:

The Democrats, putting Tweedledee James K. Polk forward for the presidency, were calling for immediate annexation of both, whereas the Whigs, putting forward Tweedledum Henry Clay, also supporting westward expansion — but somewhat more cautiously. To the left, the Liberty Party was again backing James Gillespie Birney, who had obtained merely 7,069 votes in 1840, but in this election would obtained 62,263, enough to bring about the defeat of Henry Clay. (To the left even of the Liberty Party was the Free-Soiler party, the platform of which sought to circumscribe human enslavement along the lines laid down in the Wilmot Proviso — and then there were a few who wanted to achieve even more, such as Gerrit Smith and the unreconstructed political abolitionists, and the Garrisonian immediate abolitionists.)

The Reverend Beriah Green prepared SKETCHES OF THE LIFE AND WRITINGS OF JAMES GILLESPIE BIRNEY HDT WHAT? INDEX

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(Jackson & Chaplin). JAMES GILLESPIE BIRNEY

Foreseeing the danger of Texas annexation and feeling that the Whigs would be unable to deal constructively with the question of extension of slavery, Waldo Emerson opinioned that the Democrats would be too busy with “fancy politics,” when they voted with the Whigs, to actually “go ahead” and annex this northern district of Mexico. (Remember?—before his death several years before, the Reverend William Ellery Channing had “declared for disruption of the Union rather than annexation of Texas.”) Date Right of Search Arrangements Treaty with for Joint Great Britain, Cruising with made by Great Britain, made by 1817 Portugal; Spain 1818 Netherlands 1824 Sweden 1831-33 France 1833-39 Denmark, Hanse Towns, etc. 1841 Quintuple Treaty (Austria, Russia, Prussia) 1842 United States 1844 Texas 1845 Belgium France 1862 United States

To protect the Anglo Texians against Mexico pending Senate approval of a treaty of annexation, President Tyler deployed US forces. However, this treaty of annexation was then rejected. (The President would need to defend his premature action against a Senate resolution of inquiry.) US MILITARY INTERVENTIONS

YOU HAVE TO ACCEPT EITHER THE REALITY OF TIME OVER THAT OF CHANGE, OR CHANGE OVER TIME — IT’S PARMENIDES, OR HDT WHAT? INDEX

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HERACLITUS. I HAVE GONE WITH HERACLITUS.

June 13, Thursday: Dedication of a funerary column to the deceased Myron Holley in Section G of the Mt. Hope Cemetery was attended by 6,000. The eulogy was delivered by Gerrit Smith of the Liberty Party: “He trusted in God and loved his neighbor.”

This would be followed by publication in Utica, New York of HISTORY OF THE ERECTION OF THE MONUMENT ON THE GRAVE OF MYRON HOLLEY, by H.H. Curtiss. Said 20-page pamphlet would be found in a rude logger’s cabin in Maine by Henry Thoreau and referenced –although he would spell the name as “Holly”– in THE MAINE WOODS:

Not Civil War “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project HDT WHAT? INDEX

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THE MAINE WOODS: We filed into the rude logger’s camp at this place, such as I have described, without ceremony, and the cook, at that moment the sole occupant, at once set about preparing tea for his visitors. His fireplace, which the rain had converted into a mud-puddle, was soon blazing again, and we sat down on the log benches around it to dry us. On the well-flattened and somewhat faded beds of arbor-vitae leaves, which stretched on either hand under the eaves behind us, lay an odd leaf of the Bible, some genealogical chapter out of the Old Testament; and, half buried by the leaves, we found Emerson’s Address on West India EMERSON Emancipation, which had been left here formerly by one of our company, and had made two converts to the Liberty party here, as I was told; also, an odd number of the Westminster Review, for 1834, and a pamphlet entitled History of the Erection of the Monument on the grave of Myron Holly. This was the readable, or HOLLEY reading matter, in a lumberer’s camp in the Maine woods, thirty miles from a road, which would be given up to the bears in a fortnight. These things were well thumbed and soiled. This gang was headed by one John Morrison, a good specimen of a Yankee; and was necessarily composed of men not bred to the business of dam- building, but who were Jacks-at-all-trades, handy with the axe, and other simple implements, and well skilled in wood and water craft. We had hot cakes for our supper even here, white as snow- balls, but without butter, and the never-failing sweet cakes, with which we filled our pockets, foreseeing that we should not soon meet with the like again. Such delicate puff-balls seemed a singular diet for back-woodsmen. There was also tea without milk, sweetened with molasses. And so, exchanging a word with John Morrison and his gang when we had returned to the shore, and also exchanging our batteau for a better still, we made haste to improve the little daylight that remained. This camp, exactly twenty-nine miles from Mattawamkeag Point, by the way we had come, and about one hundred from Bangor by the river, was the last human habitation of any kind in this direction. Beyond, there was no trail; and the river and lakes, by batteaux and canoes, was considered the only practicable route. We were about thirty miles by the river from the summit of Ktaadn, which was in sight, though not more than twenty, perhaps, in a straight line. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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“HE TRUSTED IN GOD AND LOVED HIS NEIGHBOR.”

FELLOW CITIZENS. — The duty of the Liberty Party of the United States to the sleeping dust of MYRON HOLLEY is now done. This solid marble will permanently mark his burial place. It will tell his friends and kindred, which of these graves is the one, that calls for their sighs. It will direct to this spot the thousands of his admirers, who, on this spot, shall experience a fresh baptism of his spirit, and a fresh kindling of their admiration. Among these admirers will be men of other climes and complexions than his own. Ere long, Liberty shall have been proclaimed “throughout all this land unto all the inhabitants thereof;” and, then, black men of the far South shall often be seen directing their pilgrim steps to the grave of one, who bore a part, so distinguished and honorable, in the great work of delivering black men from the yoke of slavery.... Our Fourth of July assemblies are also guilty of it [contempt for the slave]. Is it said, that it is proper to show honor to the dead, by Bunker Hill and Fourth of July celebrations? Let it be admitted, that is proper. Nevertheless, the honor shown to the dead, by those who refuse it to the living –even, though the humblest of the living– is no tribute to human nature. They, who care more for their dead fathers than for their living brothers, give proof therein, that they feel not the sweet bonds of a common humanity; and feel not the blessedness of a conscious HDT WHAT? INDEX

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identification with their race; and have exceedingly inadequate conceptions of the exaltation and dignity of that race. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1846

On the anniversary of West India emancipation, Gerrit Smith, an immensely wealthy landowner in New York state, offered to give 100,000 acres of wild land in the mountains of the northern part of the state to such families of color, fugitive slaves, or others as would begin to clear the land and establish 40-acre farmsteads there. There was enough land for 3,000 such families, but this was from the beginning a marginal proposal

since due to the weather conditions and topography there was no prospect of raising either wheat or maize as a cash crop. John Brown would convince himself, nevertheless, that he could be of much use to such settlers, and in 1848 or 1849 would purchase a farm from Smith and remove the younger part of his family to North Elba, where they would make their home until his death. His wife and young children would live there with the greatest frugality while he himself would often be away on antislavery enterprises, forming, for instance, at Springfield, Massachusetts, his former home, his “League of Gileadites” pledged to the rescue of fugitive slaves. (We don’t have the details of how many such 40-acre parcels would actually be signed over by this immensely wealthy white man of problematic politics, or how many black families actually would become HDT WHAT? INDEX

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involved.) HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1847

December 8, Wednesday: William Cooper Nell was given 40 acres of land in upstate New York by Gerrit Smith.7

7. Abolitionist Gerrit Smith had been scheming to sell parcels of land on a 100,000-acre plot south of Lake Placid to black farmers, but this had come to nothing due not only to lack of capital among free blacks with which to purchase such land, but also to the entire infertility of the land being presented as farmable. (Fast-forward to John Brown at North Elba.) HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1849

Captain Claude Minié introduced a conical soft-lead bullet with a hollow base, the virtue of which was that it would expand inside a rifled barrel to make a gas-tight seal with the rifling. By permitting this better fit, range and accuracy, and therefore killing power, was greatly increased, while lead fouling and jamming of barrels during rapid fire was greatly decreased. In addition, the bullet would fragment into shrapnel in a salutary manner as it made its way through your flesh, thus transforming all rather than merely a portion of its inertial moment into tissue damage. (And they say there is no such thing as progress! This invention would serve well during the period 1862-1865, a period during which a great many wrong people lived who deserved to die a horrible death. To assist even the slightly wounded in dying this horrible death, the little hollow in the base of this “Minny” was frequently contaminated by the righteous rifleman with fresh human feces.) Here is how this deadly device would be implemented in 1855 at the Harpers Ferry armory:

FIREARMS Beset by his second business failure, almost age 50, at this point John Brown made what was according to David Grimsted “his first sustained effort to help blacks,” by moving his family onto Gerrit Smith’s donation HDT WHAT? INDEX

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tract in the Adirondacks south of Lake Placid near North Elba where they could live near and give advice and counsel to black families. Grimsted charges that the folks who talk about Brown as committing his life to antislavery activism as of 1837 are placing too great emphasis upon mere pronouncements and intentions, “vague dreams” as Grimsted characterizes them — if these historians are indeed not committing the egregious error to be described as “remembering backward.” In fact although Brown had aided individuals on occasion prior to this move, and although he had opposed racial segregation in the churches attended by his family, this was the first real activism of his life.

(I don’t know whether the family of John Brown relocated to North Elba while he was still in Europe, or upon his return late in the year.) HDT WHAT? INDEX

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Fanny Kemble Butler gave Shakespeare readings to support herself during and after her divorce from her slaveowning and indolent American husband, in Boston, New-York, Chicago, Indianapolis, and Philadelphia,

slaveholding and indolent American husband and used her savings after this divorce to purchase a cottage she named “Perch,” in Lenox, Massachusetts near the Hawthorne and Melville families. She would grow increasingly eccentric and would, for instance, be seen fishing locally while attired in a man’s shirt and hat.

(Presumably it would have been during this period that she, Gerrit Smith of the Secret “Six”, and Frederick Douglass would attend a dinner party at the home of Friends James and Lucretia Mott in Philadelphia.)

Richard Henry Dana, Sr. gave a highly successful lecture series in Philadelphia. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1850

At the beginning of this decade Gerrit Smith offered to add to his offer to donate 40 acres of land to each of 3,000 American black men, heads of families, an additional offer to make an equivalent donation to 500 selected white men.8

At some time during Fillmore’s presidency Elizabeth Gerrit Smith, the wife of this immensely wealthy white man of problematic politics, showed up one day in Seneca Falls NY on a visit to her cousin Elizabeth Cady Stanton, attired in a pair of full, long Turkish trousers done in black broadcloth topped by a tunic that reached to just below the knee.

8. It is uncertain how much Smith would actually give, or how many families black or white actually benefited. For a balanced evaluation of the dubious “Liberty Party” nature of Smith’s politics, see Ralph V. Harlow’s GARRET SMITH: PHILANTHROPIST AND REFORMER (NY, 1939). HDT WHAT? INDEX

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It is not known that President Fillmore had an opinion, but a local friend named Amelia Bloomer was impressed by this costume and for a time would herself don a version of it, before relapsing under great pressure into a more conventional attire. Thus “bloomers.”

FEMINISM

August 21, Thursday/22, Friday: A Fugitive Slave Law Convention was held in the orchard of Grace Wilson’s School, on Sullivan Street in Cazenovia, New York. Attending were Mary Edmondson and Emily Edmondson, who had been among 14 siblings born into slavery in Washington DC because their mother (not their father) was enslaved. In 1848 they, with their brothers Samuel Edmondson and Richard Edmondson and 73 others, had attempted to flee aboard the schooner Pearl. When that ship was intercepted, the girls had been carried by a slavetrader to New Orleans to serve as “fancy girls,” but their father Paul Edmondson had however gone to New-York to petition the New York Anti-Slavery Society, and the Reverend Henry Ward Beecher and the congregation of his Plymouth Church had raised a sum of money to purchase his daughters. Harriet Beecher Stowe having undertaken responsibility for their education, Emily Edmondson and Mary Edmondson would in 1852 enroll in Oberlin’s Preparatory Department with the intention of becoming missionaries to American blacks who were escaping to Canada. Mary Edmondson was, however, suffering from phthisis, and would HDT WHAT? INDEX

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become progressively weaker throughout her first year at Oberlin College and die on May 18, 1853. Emily Edmundson would, until her marriage, assist at Myrtilla Miner’s school for black girls in the District of Columbia. She would, with the sponsorship of Frederick Douglass, armed with her manumission papers, go to the deep South and buy one of her brothers out of slavery. On this Daguerreotype plate exposed by local photographer Ezra Greenleaf Weld, Mary Edmondson is wearing a shawl, at the elbow of Frederick Douglass. Gerrit Smith, whose home was in nearby Peterboro, is gesturing behind Douglass, and the figure at center is presumably Abby Kelley Foster, with Emily Edmundson behind her in a bonnet. The Reverend Samuel Joseph May is standing behind the man who is taking notes. Theodore Dwight Weld, recognizable by his miss-shapen skull, is in front of Douglass. We suspect therefore that the diminutive figure between Emily Edmundson and the Reverend May would be Angelina Emily Grimké Weld. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1851

May: Frederick Douglass was beginning to obtain funding from this “Liberty Party,” a front for the wealthy, indignant, impatient Gerrit Smith, and renamed his paper Frederick Douglass’s Paper.9

Douglass has made an expedient conversion to save his newspaper. The North Star merged with a Syracuse [New York] Liberty [Party] sheet underwritten by Smith to form a new weekly to be called Frederick Douglass’s Paper. Smith and Douglass had wooed each other for months.... The new partners had closed the deal for two years of monthly subsidies shortly before the AAS meeting. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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June 26, Thursday: Frederick Douglass, accepting a subsidy from the “Liberty Party” of Gerrit Smith, the wealthy anti- Garrisonian political activist, changed the name of his newspaper to Frederick Douglass’ Paper.

From this point he would “assume fully the right and dignity of an Editor — a Mr. Editor if you please!”

9. It would have been wrong, to have titled this Gerrit Smith’s Paper. That would have exposed, unnecessarily, what was going down; such a name would have been a dead giveaway. As always –we learned this during Watergate– to connect the dots you need to follow the money. –But gosh, you’re way ahead of me on this. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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and no longer identify his editorials with “F.D.”

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“Brilliant generalship in itself is a frightening thing — the very idea that the thought processes of a single brain of a Hannibal or a Scipio can play themselves out in the destruction of thousands of young men in an afternoon.” — Victor Davis Hanson, CARNAGE AND CULTURE: LANDMARK BATTLES IN THE RISE OF WESTERN POWER (NY: Doubleday, 2001) HDT WHAT? INDEX

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In Mitre Court Chambers, Temple, London, England, Sir Edward Shepherd Creasy dotted the final “i” and crossed the final “t” of his Eurocentric-supremacist and entirely unabashed glorification of our human tragicomedy, to be known to teenage males and others fascinated by the pornography of violence, ever after, as THE FIFTEEN DECISIVE BATTLES OF THE WORLD FROM MARATHON TO WATERLOO (London: Macmillan & Company, 1851): It is an honorable characteristic of the Spirit of this Age, that projects of violence and warfare are regarded among civilized states with gradually increasing aversion. The Universal Peace Society certainly does not, and probably never will, enrol the majority of statesmen among its members. But even those who look upon the Appeal of Battle as occasionally unavoidable in international controversies, concur in thinking it a deplorable necessity, only to be resorted to when all peaceful modes of arrangement have been vainly tried; and when the law of self-defense justifies a State, like an individual, in using force to protect itself from imminent and serious injury. For a writer, therefore, of the present day to choose battles for his favorite topic, merely because they were battles; merely because so many myriad’s of troops were arrayed in them, and so many hundreds or thousands of human beings stabbed, hewed, or shot each other to death during them, would argue strange weakness or depravity of mind. Yet it cannot be denied that a fearful and wonderful interest is attached to these scenes of carriage. There is undeniable greatness in the disciplined courage, and in the love of honor, which make the combatants confront agony and destruction. And the powers of the human intellect are rarely more strongly displayed than they are in the Commander, who regulates, arrays, and wields at his will these masses of armed disputants; who, cool yet daring, in the midst of peril, reflects on all, and provides for all, ever ready with fresh resources and designs, as the vicissitudes of the storm of slaughter require. But these qualities, however high they may appear, are to be found in the basest as well as in the noblest of mankind. Catiline was as brave a soldier as Leonidas, and a much better officer. Alva surpassed the Prince of Orange in the field; and Suwarrow was the military superior of Kosciusko. To adopt the emphatic words of Byron:— “’Tis the Cause makes all, Degrades or hallows courage in its fall”

There are some battles, also, which claim our attention, independently of the moral worth of the combatants, on account of their enduring importance, and by reason of the practical influence on our own social and political condition, which we can trace up to the results of those engagements. They have for us an abiding and actual interest, both while we investigate the chain of causes and effects, by which they have helped to make us what we are; and also while we speculate on what we probably should have been, if any one of those battles had come to a different termination. Hallam has admirably expressed this in his remarks on the victory gained by Charles Martel, between HDT WHAT? INDEX

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Tours and Poictiers, over the invading Saracens.

He says of it, that “it may justly be reckoned among those few battles of which a contrary event would have essentially varied the drama of the world in an its subsequent scenes: with Marathon, Arbela, the Metaurus, Chalons, and Leipsic.” It was the perusal of this note of Hallam’s that first led me to the consideration of my present subject. I certainly differ from that great historian as to the comparative importance of some of the battles which he thus enumerates, and also of some which he omits. It is probable, indeed, that no two historical inquirers would entirely agree in their lists of the Decisive Battles of the World. Different minds will naturally vary in the impressions which particular events make on them; and in the degree of interest with which they watch the career, and reflect on the importance of different historical personages. But our concurrence in our catalogues is of little moment, provided we learn to look on these great historical events in the spirit which Hallam’s observations indicate. Those remarks should teach us to watch how the interests of many states are often involved in the collisions between a few; and how the effect of those collisions is not limited to a single age, but may give an impulse which will sway the fortunes of successive generations of mankind, Most valuable also is the mental discipline which is thus acquired, and by which we are trained not only to observe what has been, and what is, but also to ponder on what might have been. We thus learn not to judge of the wisdom of measures too exclusively by the results. We learn to apply the juster standard of seeing what the circumstances and the probabilities were that surrounded a statesman or a general at the time when he decided on his plan: we value him not by his fortune, but by his [unknown Greek word] to adopt the expressive Greek word, for HDT WHAT? INDEX

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which our language gives no equivalent. The reasons why each of the following Fifteen Battles has been selected will, I trust, appear when it is described. But it may be well to premise a few remarks on the negative tests which have led me to reject others, which at first sight may appear equal in magnitude and importance to the chosen Fifteen. I need hardly remark that it is not the number of killed and wounded in a battle that determines its general historical importance. It is not because only a few hundreds fell in the battle by which Joan of Are captured the Tourelles and raised the siege of Orleans, that the effect of that crisis is to be judged: nor would a full belief in the largest number which Eastern historians state to have been slaughtered in any of the numerous conflicts between Asiatic rulers, make me regard the engagement in which they fell, as one of paramount importance to mankind. But, besides battles of this kind, there are many of great consequence, and attended with circumstances which powerfully excite our feelings, and rivet our attention, and yet which appear to me of mere secondary rank, inasmuch as either their effects were limited in area, or they themselves merely confirmed some great tendency or bias which an earlier battle had originated. For example, the encounters between the Creeks and Persians, which followed Marathon, seem to me not to have been phenomena of primary impulse. Creek superiority had been already asserted, Asiatic ambition had already been checked, before Salamis and Plataea confirmed the superiority of European Gee states over Oriental despotism. So, Ægos-Potamos, which finally crushed the maritime power of Athens, seems to me inferior in interest to the defeat before Syracuse, where Athens received her first fatal check, and after which she only struggled to retard her downfall. I think similarly of Zama with respect to Carthage, as compared with the Metaurus: and, on the same principle, the subsequent great battles of the Revolutionary war appear to me inferior in their importance to Valmy, which first determined the military character and career of the French Revolution. I am aware that a little activity of imagination, and a slight exercise of metaphysical ingenuity, may amuse us, by showing how the chain of circumstances is so linked together, that the smallest skirmish, or the slightest occurrence of any kind, that ever occurred, may be said to have been essential, in its actual termination, to the whole order of subsequent events. But when I speak of Causes and Effects, I speak of the obvious and important agency of one fact upon another, and not of remote and fancifully infinitesimal influences. I am aware that, on the other hand, the reproach of Fatalism is justly incurred by those, who, like the writers of a certain school in a neighboring country, recognize in history nothing more than a series of necessary phenomena, which follow inevitably one upon the other. But when, in this work, I speak of probabilities, I speak of human probabilities only. When I speak of Cause and Effect, I speak of those general laws only, by which we perceive the sequence of human affairs to be usually regulated; and in which we recognize emphatically the wisdom and power of the Supreme HDT WHAT? INDEX

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Lawgiver, the design of The Designer. • The Battle of Marathon, 490 BCE • Defeat of the Athenians at Syracuse, 413 BCE • The Battle of Arbela, 331 BCE • The Battle of the Metaurus, 207 BCE • Victory of Arminius over the Roman Legions under Varus, 9 CE • The Battle of Châlons, 451 CE • The Battle of Tours, 732 CE • The Battle of Hastings, 1066 CE • Joan of Arc’s Victory over the English at Orléans, 1429 CE • The Defeat of the Spanish Armada, 1588 CE • The Battle of Blenheim, 1704 CE • The Battle of Pultowa, 1709 CE • Victory of the Americans over Burgoyne at Saratoga, 1777 CE • The Battle of Valmy, 1792 CE • The Battle of Waterloo, 1815 CE

June 26, Thursday: —— The slight reddish toppd grass (red-top?) now gives a reddish tinge to some fields like sorrel. Visited a menagerie this afternoon I am always surprised to see the same spots & stripes on wild beasts from Africa & asia. & also from South America –on the Brazilian tiger and the African Leopard, and their general similarity. All these wild animals –Lions tigers –chetas –Leopards &c Have one hue tawny & commonly spotted or striped– What you may call pard color. A color & marking which I had not associated with America These are wild animals (beasts) What constitutes the difference between a wild beast & a tame one? How much more human the one than the other!– Growling scratching roaring –with whatever beauty & gracefulness still untameable this Royal Bengal tiger or this leopard. They have the character & the importance of another order of men. The majestic lion –the King of beasts –he must retain his title. I was struck by the gem-like changeable greenish reflections from the eyes of the grizzley bear– So glassy that you never saw the surface of the eye– They quite demonic. Its claws though extremely large & long look weak & made for digging or pawing earth & leaves. It is unavoidable the idea of transmigration not merely a fancy of the poets –but an instinct of the race. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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October 6, Monday: Colonel Winthrop Emerson Faulkner of Acton was selected to be Marshal and the Reverend Barzillai Frost of Concord was selected to be Chaplain during the ceremony of dedication of the Davis Monument on Acton Common.

With aid from the Underground Railroad stationmaster of Rochester, New York, Frederick Douglass, Jerry McHenry was taken from his cover in the home of the supposedly anti-abolitionist butcher (perfect cover) of Syracuse, in a wagon to Oswego, where he crossed Lake Ontario along with two other such fugitives to Canada and exile/freedom.10

October 6, Monday: 12 M to Bedford line to set a stone by river on Bedford line. The portion of the river between Bedford and Carlisle seen from a distance in the road today as formerly has a singularly etherial celestial, or elysian look. It is of a light sky-blue alternating with smoother white streaks, where the surface reflects the light differently–like a milk-pan full of the milk of Valhalla partially skimmed more gloriously & heavenly fair & pure than the sky itself. It is something more celestial than the sky above it. I never saw any water look so celestial. I have often noticed it. I believe I have seen this reach from the hill in the middle of Lincoln. We have names for the rivers of hell but none for the rivers of heaven, unless the milky way be one. It is such a smooth & shining blue–like a panoply of sky-blue plates– Our dark & muddy river has such a tint in this case as I might expect Walden or White Pond to exhibit if they could be seen under similar circumstances–but Walden seen from Fair Haven is if I remember–of a deep blue color tinged with green. Cerulian? Such water as that river reach appears to me of quite incalculable value, and the man who would blot that out of his prospect for a sum of money–does not otherwise than to sell heaven. Geo. Thatcher, having searched an hour in vain this morning to find a frog–caught a pickerel with a mullein leaf. The White ash near our house which the other day was purple or mulberry color is now much more red. 1 4 11 7 /2 PM to Fair Haven Pond by boat. the moon /5 full, not a cloud in the sky. paddling all the way. The water perfectly still & the air almost–the former gleaming like oil in the moonlight. with the moon’s disk reflected in it. When we started saw some fishermen kindling their fire for spearing by the river side. It was a lurid reddish blaze, contrasting with the white light of the moon, with a dense volumes of black smoke from the burning pitch pine roots, rolling upward in the form of an inverted pyramid. The blaze reflected in the water almost as distinct as the substance. It looked like tarring a ship on the shore of the styx or Coceytus. For it is still and dark notwithstanding the moon–and no sound but the crackling of the fire. The fishermen can be seen only near at hand though their fire is visible far away and then they appear as dusky fuliginous figures, half enveloped in smoke, seen only by their enlightened sides–like devils they look–clad in old coats to defend themselves from the fogs–one standing up forward holding the spear ready to dart while the smoke & flames are blown in his face–the other paddling the boat slowly & silently along close to the shore with almost imperceptible motion. The river appears indefinitely wide–there is a mist rising from the water which increases the indefiniteness. A high bank or moon-lit hill rises at a distance over the meadow on the bank–with its sandy gullies & clam shells exposed where the Indians feasted– The shore line though close is removed by the eye to the side of the hill– It is at high water mark– It is continued till it meets the hill. Now the fisherman’s fire left behind acquires some thick rays in the distance and becomes a star–as surely as sun light falling through an irregular chink

10. Indictments would be returned against 19 rescuers, not including Gerrit Smith or the Reverend Samuel Joseph May, who later both would publicly acknowledge that they had been involved. Church Elder Jermain Wesley Loguen would be among those taken to Auburn, New York for arraignment. The accused were bailed out by, among others, William H. Seward, currently a US Senator from New York after having served as that state’s Governor. The proceedings would drag on for a couple of years but would eventuate in the conviction of only one of the rescuers –a black man of course– named Enoch Reed. This one conviction would be appealed, but this one fall guy would die before the appeal on his behalf could be processed. Such indeterminate prosecution would not, however, bring this story to its conclusion. President Millard Fillmore would be presented with the shackles that had been cut off of Jerry, nicely boxed. Judge Lawrence would be presented with “30 pieces of silver” by a group of ladies of Syracuse (the pieces of silver used for this nice gesture were 3-cent coins.). Gerrit Smith and others would obtain an indictment against Marshall Allen for kidnapping, in order to manufacture an occasion for arguing against the constitutionality of the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850. The federal marshall would, it goes without saying, be acquitted. Over the succeeding anniversaries of the dramatic event, Jerry Rescue commemorations would be attracting crowds to hear speakers such as the Reverends Thomas Wentworth Higginson and Samuel Joseph May, Friend Lucretia Mott, William Lloyd Garrison, and of course the helpful Rochester NY Underground Railroad stationmaster Frederick Douglass. The main address at such annual self-celebrations would typically be delivered by the millionaire backer and some of these addresses have been preserved among the Gerrit Smith Papers at Syracuse University. 11. The full moon would be on the night of the 8th. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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makes a round figure on the opposite wall so the blaze at a distance appears a star. Such is the effect of the atmosphere. The bright sheen of the moon is constantly travelling with us & is seen at the same angle in front on the surface of the pads–and the reflection of its disk in the rippled water by our boatside appears like bright gold pieces falling on the river’s counter.– This coin is incessantly poured forth as from some unseen horn of plenty at our side (I hear a lark singing this morn Oct 7th and yesterday saw them in the meadows. Both larks [Eastern Meadowlark Sturnella magna] & blackbirds are heard again now occasionally seemingly after a short absence, as if come to bid farewell) I do not know but the weirdness of the gleaming oily surface is enhanced by the thin fog. A few water bugs are seen glancing in our course. I shout like a farmer to his oxen–and instantly the woods on the eastern shore take it up & the western hills a little up the stream, and so it appears to rebound from one side the river valley to the other till at length I hear a farmer call to his team far up as Fair Haven bay whither we are bound. We pass through reaches where there is no fog–perhaps where a little air is stirring– Our clothes are almost wet through with the mist–as if we sat in water. Some portions of the river are much warmer than others. In one instance it was warmer in the midst of the fog–than in a clear reach. In the middle of the Pond we tried the echo again 1st the hill on the right took it up; then further up the stream on the left; and then after a long pause when we had almost given it up–and the longer expected the more in one sense unexpected & surprising it was we heard a farmer shout to his team in a distant valley far up on the opposite side of the stream much louder than the previous echo–and even after this we heard one shout faintly in some neighboring town. The 3d echo seemed more loud and distinct than the second. But why I asked do the echoes always travel up the stream– I turned about and shouted again–and then I found that they all appeared equally to travel down the stream, or perchance I heard only those that did so. As we rowed to Fair Havens eastern shore a moon-lit hill covered with shrub oaks–we could form no opinion of our progress toward it, not seeing the water line where it met the hill–until we saw the weeds & sandy shore & the tall bullrushes rising above the shallow water the masts of large vessels in a haven. The moon was so high that the angle of excidence did not permit of our seeing her reflection in the pond. As we paddled down the stream with our backs to the moon, we saw the reflection–of every wood & hill on both sides distinctly These answering reflections–shadow to substance,–impress the voyager with a sense of harmony & symmetry–as when you fold a blotted paper & produce a regular figure.– a dualism which nature loves. What you commonly see is but half. As we paddle up or down we see the cabins of muskrats faintly rising from amid the weeds–and the strong odor of musk is borne to us from particular parts of the shore. also the odor of a skunk is wafted from over the meadows or fields. The fog appears in some places gathered into a little pyramid or squad by itself–on the surface of the water. Where the shore is very low the actual & reflected trees appear to stand foot to foot–& it is but a line that separates them & the water & the sky almost flow into one another–& the shore seems to float. Home at 10. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1852

October 1, Friday: In Syracuse, New York, the 1st annual “Jerry Celebration” honoring the freeing of Jerry McHenry from the federal marshals seeking to “return” him to his “owner” on October 1, 1851. Although the assembly was denied the use of all public facilities, some 5,000 people were able to hear orations by Frederick Douglass, William Lloyd Garrison, Friend Lucretia Mott, Gerrit Smith, and Lucy Stone in the engine rotunda of the Syracuse Railroad, 150 feet from side to side, made available by John Wilkinson.12

The Reverend Samuel Joseph May’s annual “Jerry Celebrations” would continue undaunted until, finally, civil war would break out in America.

The old, slow cargo vessel that had rescued Alfred Russel Wallace from off the face of the waters had finally docked in England –after a passage of some eighty days and after several times nearly foundering in a series of storms– and so he made his way back to London without his specimens. From this point until March 1854, he would work primarily out of the metropolis.

Henry Thoreau surveyed, for James F. Chafrin, a couple of pieces of Lincoln woodlot being sold for taxes to Frances Westhall (the 1st piece belonged to the heirs of K. Rice of Lincoln, the 2d, of 2 acres, to Charles Bartlett).

12. Not the same John Wilkinson who was buried in a cast-iron coffin of his own design. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1853

April 29, Friday: It was reported that when Gerrit Smith had been elected to Congress, he had been advised by Henry C. Wright not to associate with congressmen who held slaves. Instead, Wright had urged, demand that Congress expel these men. And if it fail so to do, resign and return home. But Smith and his wife had come from slaveholding families, and Smith’s brother currently held slaves, and these slaveholding Congressmen were welcomed into Smith’s home although he of course made it very clear to such guests that he was boycotting all commodities produced through the labor of enslaved persons. This came as no surprise to Wright, who had commented on April 15, 1840 that “Bro. Smith is influenced — it may be unconsciously.... His conscience and reason are with nonresistance, but his circumstances battle against it.”

The Junta Cubana of New-York called on a former associate of Narciso López, General John A. Quitman, to lead yet another American invasion of Cuba, proposing that as his reward for success he would become “exclusive chief of our revolution, not only in its military, but also in its civil sense.”

April 29: Return to Concord. At Natural History Rooms in Boston. Have I seen the least bittern? It is so brown above and yellowish, woolly, white beneath. The American goshawk is slate above, gray beneath; the young spotted dark and white beneath, and brown above. Fish hawk, white beneath. Young of marsh hawk, reddish-brown above, iron-rusty beneath. Summer duck with a crest. Dusky duck, not black, but rather dark brown. The velvet ducks I saw, hardly large enough for this. My whiter ducks may be the Merganser castor, or the red-breasted. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1856

March 21, Friday: William Lloyd Garrison wrote to the Reverend Samuel Joseph May: “You see that such men as Gerrit Smith, Ward Beecher [the Reverend Henry Ward Beecher], and [the Reverend] Theodore Parker are finding in Sharp’s rifles more than in the peaceful Gospel of Christ to aid the cause of right and freedom!”

SWEETS March 21, 1856: Had a dispute with Father about the use of my making this sugar when I ... might have bought sugar cheaper at Holden’s. He said it took me from my studies. I said I made it my study; I felt as if I WITHOUT had been to a university. SLAVERY HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1857

New Years: According to Utagawa Hiroshige, foxes had gathered at an old hackberry tree in homage to the rice field god, for whom the fox serves as messenger, just before the New Year. The foxes had set a number of foxfires, which the rice farmers could count in order to anticipate their upcoming harvest: HDT WHAT? INDEX

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A few days after New Year’s in 1857 on a windy, bitter cold afternoon in Boston, a somber-faced man named John Brown appeared at the offices of the Massachusetts Kansas Committee. The gray-haired, fifty-six- year-old abolitionist had recently returned from the Kansas Territory, where for over a year he had helped lead the struggle against slavery. Brown believed that armed force had to be used to prevent a proslavery takeover in Kansas, and he had come east seeking funds to further free- state military efforts. After introducing himself and presenting this references, he was welcomed by the committee’s newly appointed secretary, young Franklin Benjamin Sanborn.

Their meeting began a three-year relationship, during which Sanborn and five prominent abolitionists —the Reverend Theodore Parker, Dr. Samuel Gridley Howe, the Reverend Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Gerrit Smith, and George Luther Stearns— would not only help Brown collect funds for Kansas, but would also form a secret committee to subsidize his Harpers Ferry raid. By March 1858, these six men had become engaged in a conspiracy to provide the cash, arms, and equipment for Brown’s violent thrust at slavery. They supported Brown’s plan to “make a dash” south, incite a slave uprising, and retreat into the mountains of Virginia, where a fortress would be established and other similar attacks prepared. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1858

During this year the Reverend Thomas Wentworth Higginson wrote “Saints and Their Bodies,” the 1st of his many essays for The Atlantic Monthly. He wrote the 1st of his many nature essays, this one entitled “Water Lilies.” He collaborated with Lucy Stone on the Woman’s Rights Almanac.

He met with John Brown and agreed to provide financial support for his cause.

Pages 476-7 of Henry Mayer’s ALL ON FIRE: Brown spent the balance of the year [1858] recruiting soldiers, including an adventurer named Hugh Forbes who had fought with Garibaldi in Italy. With Kansas embroiled in political combat rather than open warfare, however, the captain brooded more and more upon the idea of “troubling Israel” with raids in the South and asked his eastern friends to help him raise money “for secret service, and no questions asked.” At the end of January 1858, Brown came east to meld his black and white supporters into a revolutionary conspiracy. With magnetic fervor he sketched for Frederick Douglass the latest version of his plan to build a guerrilla strike force, and although Douglass had some tactical criticism, he agreed to help Brown raise some money and find recruits. From Douglass’s house, Brown wrote manipulative letters to his best Boston prospects, making each out to be his more trustworthy friend, with news that he had “perfected arrangements for carrying out an important measure, in which the world has a deep interest,” that lacked only money from people willing to given “practical shape” to their abolition theories. “Do you think any of my Garrisonian friends either at Boston, Worcester, or in any other place, can be induced to supply a little ‘straw,’ if I will absolutely make ‘bricks’?” Brown asked [the Reverend Theodore Parker]. While awaiting replies, Brown went on to Peterboro and persuaded his old patron Gerrit Smith to support the idea, which had now metamorphosed from a slave- running operation (“railroad business on a somewhat extended scale,” he called it) into provocation of a full-fledged slave insurrection and establishment —under a constitution he had drafted at Douglass’s— of a provisional mountain republic of liberated slaves and freedom fighters. There is absolutely no evidence that Parker or anyone else approached William Lloyd Garrison about Brown’s latest scheme, but Sanborn, Higginson, Howe, and Stearns all manifested interest, and in the first week HDT WHAT? INDEX

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of March 1858, the mysterious “Nelson Hawins” from somewhere in Iowa or perhaps Ohio registered at the American Hotel for a few days of conferences with his business associates. [Henry Mayer indicates that this material is a synthesis of material in Oswald Garrison Villard’s JOHN BROWN 1800-1859: A BIOGRAPHY FIFTY YEARS AFTER (Boston, 1910), Stephen B. Oates’s TO PURGE THIS LAND WITH BLOOD: A BIOGRAPHY OF JOHN BROWN (NY, 1970), Franklin Benjamin Sanborn’s LIFE AND LETTERS OF JOHN BROWN (Concord MA, 1885), and Edward J. Renehan, Jr.’s THE SECRET SIX: THE TRUE TALE OF THE MEN WHO CONSPIRED WITH JOHN BROWN (NY, 1995).] HDT WHAT? INDEX

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Gerrit Smith wrote a letter to the New-York Tribune stating that “the mass of the blacks are ignorant and shiftless” (with rich friends like him, who needs rich enemies?).

Here is an example of an ignorant and shiftless black man who would soon die of tuberculosis, one whom the Supreme Court had declared to have no rights that any white man such as Mr. Smith was bound to respect: HDT WHAT? INDEX

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May 24, Monday: Gerrit Smith arrived at the Revere House on Hanover Street in Boston, then being used as a tavern offering private meeting rooms, to meet with his co-conspirators to figure out what to do about a Hugh Forbes character, at one time Captain Brown’s principal lieutenant, who had evidently begun to contemplate possibilities of blackmail. To make Forbes’s revelations of their scheming appear to be inventive, the group decided to postpone for a year their planned fomenting of a race war in the state of Virginia. Beyond this, the group of conspirators decided that they had allowed themselves to become too intimate with the details of John Brown’s planning, and implemented a new “blind” arrangement to preserve deniability, by which their commander in chief was instructed not to “burden” them any longer with “knowledge” which could prove to be “both needless and inconvenient.”13

13. As President Richard Milhouse Nixon would say, “Do I need to know about this?” Would this Hugh Forbes have been a relative of John Murray Forbes? Captain Brown’s scheme, which he referred to as the “Subterranean Pass Way,” was that the escaped, armed slaves were to “swarm” into and set up a center of resistance in the Alleghenies from which they could liberate Virginia and then invade Tennessee and northern Alabama. Such a scoping of the situation never met with much respect from other of the other schemers. In particular Forbes, regarding blacks as inherently childlike, credulous, and cowardly, believed such a scheme to be doomed to failure from its inception. The scenario preferred by Forbes would have involved the herding of the slaves together by armed bands of white men and the driving of such herds of humans up the mountain chain toward Canada, neatly disposing of America’s entire race problem — by simple relocation of it to another country. Evidently the two planners had parted company over issues such as this. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1859

January: Lysander Spooner, who was well aware of John Brown’s plans for the raid on the federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry, wrote to Gerrit Smith warning that Brown had neither the men nor the resources to succeed.

(Since this man was not a member of the Secret “Six”, but was what we would ordinarily identify instead as a philosophical anarchist, obviously the secret held by the group was not that much of a secret!)

It was, for instance, no secret to the American business community, and had not been since his bankruptcy in 1842, that John Brown’s “wherewithal” was scanty: A failed surveyor, farmer, speculator, schoolteacher, tanner, and cattleman, he showed up as a wool dealer in an 1848 credit report: “his condition is questionable.” Winter 1849: “may or may not be good.” Summer 1850: “his means are equally obscure.” HDT WHAT? INDEX

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Still in his forties, he looked sixty to credit reporters. The agency lost him when he switched lines of work yet again, only to fail yet again. Like many another misfit who pushed a doomed venture too far, he quit when he had no other choice. Having grown whiskers for the first time, his craggy face looked still more ancient. Everyone had an opinion of this broken man. “Served him right.” Overhearing such comments, Thoreau said he felt proud even to know him and questioned why people “talk as if a man’s death were a failure, and his continued life, be it of whatever character, were a success.” The bankrupt court had restored this loser’s freedom in 1842. Now it was 1859, and no earthly court could save John Brown after his failure at Harpers Ferry. HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

July 7, Thursday: The Reverend Thomas Wentworth Higginson of the Secret “Six” conspiracy wrote to Gerrit Smith that “I could not live with myself if I thought I were knowingly sending Brown [!] in the way of certain death.”14

Eventually the slavecatchers from Kentucky and from Columbus who had trapped the fugitive John Price had been arrested by Ohio officials and charged with kidnapping and, in return for that charge being dropped, had agreed to drop their charges against the rescuers, including Professor Henry C. Peck of Oberlin College. Thus,

on this day, everyone except Simeon Bushnell, who was still serving out his 60-day sentence, was able to return to Oberlin, Ohio. There they were the guests of honor at a great celebration. Bonfires lined the streets that led to the church in which this celebration was held. Even their Cleveland jailer got introduced during the celebrations, and was able to go on about how he had been acting as the prisoners’ “postmaster.” All sang the “Marseillaise.” (When Simeon Bushnell also would be released and would be able to return on July 11, 1859,

14. Later, with the benefit of hindsight and with the benefit of self-legitimation, it would become clear to Higginson that his co- conspirators Dr. Samuel Gridley Howe, the Reverend Theodore Parker, Franklin Benjamin Sanborn, Gerrit Smith, and George Luther Stearns of the Secret “Six” conspiracy had, unlike him, fully grasped from the earliest moment the fact that the probable result of their attempt to incite a race war, of black Americans against white Americans, would be, at least initially, a defeat of their black forces. These other five of the white conspirators clearly had been willing to sacrifice the lives of their black allies in order to foment civil war between Northern and Southern white Americans. But not him, he believed in the light of his Monday-morning quarterbacking, and he dug out this old letter to Smith to prove how unaware he himself had been of the outcome to be anticipated for the raid on the federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry. (However, if you look carefully at this quoted letter, you see that Higginson was not agonizing over the fate to which he had unknowingly subjected a number of anonymous black men, but was, rather, agonizing over the fate to which he had unknowingly subjected one particular named white friend: “…if I thought I were knowingly sending Brown in the way of certain death.”) HDT WHAT? INDEX

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he also would be greeted by a hailing crowd of his fellow citizens.)15

July 7: P.M.–To Great Meadows. P. Hutchinson says he once found a wood duck’s nest in a hollow maple by Heywood’s meadow (now by railroad), and tried to get the young as soon as hatched, but they were gone too soon for him. On the first, or westerly, part of the Great Meadows, i. e. the firmer parts and the bank, I find, mixed with sedges of different kinds, much red-top (coloring the surface extensively), fowl-meadow (just begun to bloom and of a purplish lead-color, taller than the red-top), the slender purple-spiked panic, Agrostis (perennans? or scabra??). In the wet, or main, part, beside various other sedges,–as [CAREX] stellulata, lanuginosa, stricta, etc., etc.,–wool-grass, now in flower, a sedge (apparently C. ampullacea var. utriculata toward Holbrook’s) thicker-culmed than wool-grass, but softer and not round, with fertile spikes often three inches long, and slender. A great part of the meadow is covered with, I think, either this or wood grass (not in flower). I am not certain which prevails, but I think wool-grass, which does not flower. Also, mixed with these and lower, dulichium, Eleocharis palustris, etc., etc. [Vide back, June 16th.] First notice pontederia out; also tephrosia, how long? The note of the bobolink has begun to sound rare?

15. We know definitely that Oberlin College preparatory student John Anderson Copeland, Jr. did not go to jail with the other rescuers. The rumor was that he had escorted John Price to Canada and was staying there with his adopted sister. HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

Do not young nighthawks run pretty soon after being hatched? I hear of their being gone very soon. Bathing at Barrett’s Bay, I find it to be composed in good part of sawdust, mixed with sand. There is a narrow channel on each side, deepest on the south. The potamogeton is eight feet long there in eighteen inches of water. I learn from measuring on Baldwin’s second map that the river (i. e. speaking of that part below Framingham) is much the straightest in the lower part of its course, or from Ball’s Hill to the Dam. It winds most in the broad meadows. The greatest meander is in the Sudbury meadows. From upper end of Sudbury Canal to Sherman’s Bridge direct is 558 rods (1 mile 238 rods); by thread of river, 1000 rods (3 miles 40 rods), or nearly twice as far. But, though meandering, it is straighter in its general course than would be believed. These nearly twenty-three miles in length (or 16+ direct) are contained within a breadth of two miles twenty-six rods; i. e., so much it takes to meander in. It can be plotted by the scale of one thousand feet to an inch on a sheet of paper seven feet one and one quarter inches long by eleven inches wide. The deep and lake-like are the straightest reaches. The straightest reach within these limits above Ball’s Hill is from Fair Haven Pond to Clamshell Hill. I observed in Maine that the dam at the outlet of Chesuncook Lake, some twenty miles off, had raised the water so as to kill the larches on the Umbazookskus extensively. They were at least four or five miles up the Umbazookskus. HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

August 27, Saturday: Edward Sherman Hoar, the pregnant Elizabeth Hallett Prichard Hoar, and Elizabeth Sherman Hoar sailed from Liverpool for Boston aboard the Europa.

Since whale oil for lamps had begun to be scarce in the 1850s, Canadians had been converting seeping ground oil into kerosene and using this substance in their lamps. Seeping ground oil had been noticed, by white people such as George Bissell, to be present near the ground surface at a place called “Oil Creek” near Titusville in Venango County, Pennsylvania.16 On this day Bissell’s employee Edwin Laurentine Drake began drilling what was to become the 1st successful oil well.

Gerrit Smith delivered a printed letter to John Thomas,

chairman of the Jerry Rescue Committee, declining to participate in the 1859 annual celebration of the rescue of Syracuse’s Jerry McHenry. In this writing the millionaire expressed frustration with the abolitionist movement and forecast that because the mere words of the abolitionists had failed to persuade their countrymen, “For insurrections then we may look any year, any month, any day.”

August 27. A little more rain last night. What were those insects, some winged, with short backs and say half an inch long, others wingless and shorter, like little coils of brass wire (so marked), in dense droves together on trees and fences,–apparently harmless,– especially a week or ten days ago? I was telling Jonas Potter of my lameness yesterday, whereat he says that he “broke” both his feet when he was young,–I imagined how they looked through his wrinkled cowhides,–and he did not get over it for four years, nay, even now he sometimes felt pains in them before a storm. All our life, i. e. the living part of it, is a persistent dreaming awake. The boy does not camp in his father’s yard. That would not be adventurous enough, there are too many sights and sounds to disturb the illusion; so he marches off twenty or thirty miles and there pitches his tent, where stranger inhabitants are tamely sleeping in their beds just like his father at home, and camps in their yard, perchance. But then he dreams uninterruptedly that he is anywhere but where he is. I often see yarrow with a delicate pink tint, very distinct from the common pure-white ones. What is often called poverty, but which is a simpler and truer relation to nature, gives a peculiar relish to life,

16. There were, however, at this point, any number of pre-existing human-dug pits along Oil Creek, lined with decaying wood. Carbon testing of some of the wood from some of these pits indicate that native Americans had been well aware of the oil in this vicinity, and had been systematically collecting it, since at least 510 years ago, which is to say, since at least the Year of Our Lord 1487 before the sailing of Christopher Columbus. It is speculated that native American uses for the oil included use for ointment, use for medication, and use for waterproofing. HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

just as to be kept short gives us an appetite for food. Vilfa vaginaflora (?) well out. The first notice I have that grapes are ripening is by the rich scent at evening from my own native vine against the house, when I go to the pump, though I thought there were none on it. The children have done bringing huckleberries to sell for nearly a week. They are suspected to have berries [SIC] in them. On the 23d I gathered perfectly fresh and large low blackberries, peculiarly sweet and soft, in the shade of the pines at Thrush Alley, long after they are done in open fields. They seem like a different variety from the common, they are so much sweeter, tenderer, and larger. They do not grow densely but sparingly, now resting on the ground in the shade of their leaves, perfectly ripe. These that have ripened slowly and perfectly in the shade are the sweetest and tenderest, have the least of the bramble berry about them. Elder-berry clusters swell and become heavy and therefore droop, bending the bushes down, just in proportion as they ripen. Hence you see the green cymes perfectly erect, the half-ripe drooping, and the perfectly ripe hanging straight down on the same bush. I think that some summer squashes had turned yellow in our yard a fortnight or more ago. There are various ways in which you can tell if a watermelon is ripe. If you have had your eye on the patch much from the first, and so know which formed first, you may-presume that these will ripen soonest; or else you may incline to those which lie nearest the centre of the hill or root, as the oldest. Next the dull dead color and want of bloom are as good signs as any. Some look green and livid and have a very fog or mildew of bloom on them, like a fungus. These are as green as a leek through and through, and you’ll find yourself in a pickle if you open one. Others have a dead dark greenness, the circulations being less rapid in their cuticles and their blooming period passed, and these you may safely bet on. If the vine is quite green and lively, the death of the quirl at the root of the stem is almost a sure sign. For fear we should not discover it before, this is placed for a sign that there is redness and ripeness (if not mealiness) within. Of two otherwise similar, take that which yields the lowest tone when struck with your knuckles, i. e., which is hollowest. The old or ripe ones sing base; the young, tenor or falsetto. Some use the violent method of pressing to hear if they crack within, but this is not to be allowed. Above all no tapping on the vine is to be tolerated, suggestive of a greediness which defeats its own purpose. It is very childish. One man told me that he couldn’t raise melons because his children would cut them all up. I thought that he convicted himself out of his own mouth, and was not fit to be the ruler of a country according to Confucius’ standard, that at any rate he could not raise children in the way they should go. I once saw one of his boys astride of my earliest watermelon, which grew near a broken paling, and brandishing a case- knife over it, but I instantly blowed him off with my voice from a neighboring window before serious damage was done, and made such an ado about [IT] as convinced him that he was not in his father’s dominions, at any rate. This melon, though it lost some of its bloom then, grew to be a remarkably large and sweet one, though it bore to the last a triangular scar of the tap which the thief had designed on it. I served my apprenticeship and have since done considerable journey-work in the huckleberry-field, though I never paid for my schooling and clothing in that way. It was itself some of the best schooling I got, and paid for itself. Occasionally in still summer forenoons, when perhaps a mantua-maker was to be dined, and a huckleberry pudding had been decided on, I, a lad of ten, was dispatched to the huckleberry hills, all alone. My scholastic education could be thus far tampered with and an excuse might be found. No matter how few and scarce the berries on the near hills, the exact number necessary for a huckleberry pudding could surely be collected by 11 o’clock. My rule in such cases was never to eat one till my dish was full. At other times when I had companions, some used to bring such curiously shaped dishes that I was often curious to see how the berries disposed of themselves in them. Some brought a coffee-pot to the huckleberry-field, and such a vessel possessed this advantage at least, that if a greedy boy had skimmed off a handful or two on his way home, he had only to close the lid and give his vessel a shake to have it full again. This was done all round when we got as far homeward as the Dutch house. This can probably be done with any vessel that has much side to it. I once met with a whole family–father and mother and children–ravaging a huckleberry-field in this wise: they cut up the bushes, and, as they went, beat them over the edge of a bushel basket, till they had it full of berries, ripe and green, leaves, sticks, etc., and so they passed along out of my sight like wild men. See Veratrum viride completely withered and brown from top to bottom, probably as early as skunk-cabbage.

October 6, Thursday, night: Another piece of evidence that this conspiracy among an inordinately large group of bunglers and amateurs, that we now obtusely term the Secret “Six” rather than the “Secret 600,” could not conceivably have been escaping the surveillance of our government: Though all of the committee did not know all of the details of the attack (for instance, they were shocked when John Brown was HDT WHAT? INDEX

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trapped inside the Harpers Ferry arsenal, since he had assured them that his primary objective was to strike the arsenal quickly and capture the weapons housed there), at least 4 — Franklin Benjamin Sanborn, George Luther Stearns, Gerrit Smith,

and Thomas Wentworth Higginson— certainly knew when, where, and how Brown intended to start his violent work. Ten days before the October assault, Sanborn, Stearns, and Lewis Hayden,

a leader of Boston’s black community (who was not a formal member of the secret group but undoubtedly had intimate knowledge of its proceedings), stayed awake all night outlining the proposal to Francis Jackson Meriam, a young man who soon HDT WHAT? INDEX

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afterward joined Brown’s insurrectionary cadre. In short, the factual record of the conspiracy can be accurately reconstructed despite the destruction of some sources.... Sanborn continued to search for funds. On October 6, the search ended when Sanborn met and interviewed young Meriam, the emotionally erratic nephew of the distinguished Boston abolitionist, Francis Jackson. Meriam was obsessed with the thought of joining Brown and asked Sanborn to give him specific information about Brown’s plans. He already knew a great deal about the scheme because of his friendship with James Redpath. At first Sanborn balked. However, when Meriam offered to contribute $600 [in gold] to the plan if he were allowed to participate in it, the committee secretary quickly reconsidered. Sanborn summoned Stearns and Hayden to Concord to assist him in making the decision. During the evening of October 6 and the early morning hours of October 7, all three men rigorously questioned Meriam about his motives for wanting to join with Brown and the personal qualifications he had for assisting the proposed raid. Meriam said he had traveled with Redpath in 1857 and 1858 as the journalist gathered information for his book TALKS WITH SLAVES. But in spite of these experiences, neither Sanborn, Stearns, nor Hayden was impressed with the unstable youth. Still, all of them knew of Brown’s desperate need for cash. Meriam might not be qualified for the project, but the money he could contribute insured execution of the plan. Eventually, they all decided to send him to Chambersburg.... Within a few days Sanborn [would receive] a note from Meriam indicating that he had joined Brown, turned over the $600, and was patiently awaiting the “business operation” that was soon to commence. Sanborn was excited.... There was absolutely no reason to doubt Brown. The secretary met the Reverend Higginson’s criticism of Meriam with a highly matured cynicism. Meriam had not been chosen because of any “great passion for Redpath” or belief in the youth’s personal capacity. Sanborn agreed that Meriam was about “as fit to be in the enterprise as the Devil to keep a powder house.” Meriam had been selected only because of the money he could contribute to the project. Sanborn reminded Higginson that “everything had its use and must be put to it if possible.” Then, after informing Higginson that news could soon be expected from the site of Brown’s activity, the secretary concluded his letter with a brief lecture on one of the most important lessons he had learned in the past few years. Sanborn told Higginson that he never expected much from anybody but believed there was “a grain of use in all persons and things.” When “a plum” dropped in one’s mouth, one shouldn’t refuse to eat it because it wasn’t “a peach or a pumpkin.” Meriam might not be “Divine property,” but he was a “plum” and had his use. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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October 19, Wednesday: Wilhelm Tempel discovered a diffuse nebula around the Pleid star Merope.

John Brown was being taken from Harpers Ferry to the nearby Charles Town jail. (Brown’s white jailer there, John Avis, it seems, had been a childhood friend of Dr. Martin Robison Delany.) Full reports of the event at Harpers Ferry were appearing in this day’s newspapers.

Henry Thoreau and Bronson Alcott were visiting Waldo Emerson when the news was brought in, of Captain John Brown’s raid at Harpers Ferry. Thoreau immediately began working over his materials about Brown.

“If Christ should appear on earth he would on all hands be denounced as a mistaken, misguided man, insane and crazed.” –Thoreau, October 19, 1859

JOURNAL: Here comes Jesus again

mistaken, misguided

insane and crazed

When Julia Ward Howe read in the Boston Transcript about the raid upon the federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry, Virginia, her husband Dr. Samuel Gridley Howe would casually remarked to her “Brown has got to work.” The newspapers were beginning to carry an account of an intriguing set of papers that had been discovered where Brown had unaccountably left them behind, when he had gone off on the morning of the 16th to launch his raid on the Harpers Ferry arsenal. Among the papers, in addition to an envelope from Dr. Howe incriminatingly addressed to Brown, were a note from Gerrit Smith and two letters from Franklin Benjamin Sanborn. The Reverend Thomas Wentworth Higginson began to plan a rescue of Brown from the jail cell in Charles Town. He actually would succeed in raising aid for the Brown family. He would opinion, much later in life, after having had a chance to compare and contrast his ineffectiveness as a member of the Secret “Six” with the effectiveness of the revolutionary terror organized by the Communist Party in Russia, that: The Russian revolutionists, who were so efficient in making the tyrant Tsar Alexander II explode, have much to teach us about practical terror. Thoreau was being written to by Theophilus Brown in Worcester. Worcester Oct 19 Friend Thoreau— The book came duly to hand, and as it was not for me, you I intend to send ^ the money HDT WHAT? INDEX

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for it in this note— Blake must speak for him -self and not for me when speaking of that mountain walk of ours. I enjoyed it well enough, and aught to be ashamed of myself that I did, perhaps, since it yielded me so little. Our Cape Cod walk salts down better with me, & yet there was’nt much salt in that,—enough to save it perhaps, but not ^enough of the sea & sand & sky. The good things I got in it were rather HDT WHAT? INDEX

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incidental—[&]did not belong to the sea. But I did get

Page 2 some glimpses of the sea. I remember a smoke we had on a little ^barren knoll where we heard the plover, in North Dennis, in the twilight after a long & hot days walk. We heard the pounding of the surf against a shore twenty miles off[,—(]so said the man at whose house we passed the night,—)—and we were expecting to arrive there the next day. I have been in the habit of thinking our journey culmin -ated in that smoke, if it did’nt end there, for, though we arrived at the beach the next day according to programme & found the thirty miles stretch of it, with its accompaniments too large to complain of, yet—our anticipations were immense. But now

Page 3 in thinking of it the actual sea & sky loom up larger, while our smoke & dreams —hold their own pretty well— Your friend Theo’s Brown HDT WHAT? INDEX

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November 7, Monday: According to Caleb Calkins, Gerrit Smith’s clerk, Smith allowed himself to be coaxed by his friends into an insane asylum in Utica, New York on the supposition that they were taking him to join Captain Brown in Charles Town, Virginia to suffer hanging there with him. Smith’s physician would supply a letter according to which the rich man of the Secret “Six” conspiracy had become “quite deranged, intellectually as well as morally; and he is also feeble physically.” The newspapers would loyally report that the local rich man’s mind had become “considerably disordered” and that his present situation was “one of decided lunacy.” Rich men don’t hang, they are cared for; it is poor men, who cannot afford to be declared insane, who are allowed to dangle and swing and kick and strangle. (But you knew that, right?)

Mary Jennie Tappan wrote to Henry Thoreau in Concord from Bradford, New Hampshire, introducing herself by noting that “to me you are not so much a stranger as I to you,” in order to thank him for his “brave and true” remarks about John Brown. So who was Mary Jennie Tappan? Bradford, N.H. Nov. 7. ’59 I wish to thank you for the utterance of those brave, true words in [behalf] of the noble Saint and self-forgetting hero of Harpers Fer- ry; just the words I so longed to have some living voice speak, loud, so that the world might hear— In the quiet of my home among the hills I read them [tonight] and feel that my thought has found a glorified expression and I am satisfied, and through the distance I reach forth my hand to thank you —bless you— I hope you will not think this note, born of this moments impulse an unpardonable intrusion— I believe you will not—you are not so bound by conventionalisms— to me you are not so much a stranger as I to you.— God keep you!— Mary Jennie Tappan. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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Thoreau checked out, from Harvard Library, the first two volumes of a translation from the High Dutch of Missionary Brother David Crantz’s THE HISTORY OF GREENLAND; INCLUDING AN ACCOUNT OF THE MISSION CARRIED ON BY THE UNITED BRETHREN IN THAT COUNTRY (1820).

Was it on November 7, 1850 or November 7, 1860 that Thoreau checked out Thomas Jefferson’s NOTES ON THE STATE OF VIRGINIA. WITH AN APPENDIX (8th American edition; Boston: Printed by David Carlisle, for Thomas & Andrews, J. West, West & Greenleaf, J. White & Co., E. & S. Larkin, J. Nancrede, Manning & Loring, Boston, Thomas & Thomas, Walpole, N.H., and B.B. Macanulty, Salem. 1801)? — a volume in which, incidentally, the author had had a few things to say about the town and geography of Harpers Ferry, Virginia. THOMAS JEFFERSON’S NOTES

Bronson Alcott wrote to Friend Daniel Ricketson:17 Thoreau has just come back from reading to Parker’s company a revolutionary Lecture on Osawatomie [John] Brown, a hero and martyr after his own heart and style of manliness. It was received here by our Concord folks with great favor, and by the Worcester friends of his. I wish the towns might be his auditors throughout the length and breadth of states and country. He thinks of printing it in pamphlet and spreading it far and wide, North and South.

17. Anna Ricketson and Walton Ricketson, editors, DANIEL RICKETSON: AUTOBIOGRAPHIC AND MISCELLANEOUS (New Bedford MA: Anthony, 1910, pages 130-1) HDT WHAT? INDEX

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Governor Henry A. Wise sent a telegram to Andrew Hunter, his special prosecutor of the case against Captain Brown and his co-conspirators at Charles Town, urging he bring indictments also against former New York congressman Gerrit Smith and against famous black newspaperman Frederick Douglass. He assured Hunter confidentially that as governor he would “not reprieve or pardon one man” of those whom Hunter managed to convict.

[THOREAU MADE NO ENTRY IN HIS JOURNAL FOR NOVEMBER 7th]

Shortly before Christmas: Having been excused from having to respond to the summons of the Special Investigatory Committee of the US Senate headed by Senator James Mason of Virginia on the grounds of illness, Gerrit Smith was able to be released from the insane asylum in which he had found refuge:18 All the members of the Secret “Six”, Thomas Wentworth Higginson included, must have breathed a sigh of relief when Smith was finally not required to appear. Smith and the committee would not have been a good combination. Smith knew as much about John Brown’s plans as anyone. On his best day, without undue pressure, he was loudly self-righteous, hotheaded, unstable, and unpredictable. He could lose his demeanor quite easily. Cool heads, such as Dr. Samuel Gridley Howe and George Luther Stearns, would fare better and reveal less under the unimaginative questioning of the committee. Armed with what Smith might have given away, the committee’s questions for Howe and Stearns might have been that much more targeted.

18. Senator Jefferson Davis of Mississippi, the principal inquisitorial agent of this committee, was livid, since he was convinced with good reason that this rich man would have been the key to uncovering the extent of the treasonous Secret “Six” conspiracy to create race war in America. Very likely cooler heads in Washington were bearing in mind that they really didn’t want to find out the true extent of this conspiracy, since it was perfectly likely that any number of members of the federal government had been privy to it from its very inception. What was needed was the pretense of an investigation, with a likelihood of no great success. Joel Silbey has contended, in “The Civil War Synthesis in American History,” that postbellum American historians have been misconstruing antebellum American politics by viewing them in conjunction with our knowledge of the bloodbath that followed. It is only after the fact that we can “know” that the US Civil War amounted to a sectional dispute, North versus South. We avoid learning that before the fact, it was undecided whether this conflict was going to shape up as a race conflict, a class conflict, or a sectional conflict. We avoid knowing that the raid on Harpers Ferry might have resulted in a race war, in which peoples of color would be exterminated in order to create an all-white America, or might have resulted in a class war, in which the laboring classes might have first destroyed the plantation owners’ equity by killing his slaves, and then gone on to purge the nation of the white plantation owners themselves, with their privileged-class endowments. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1860

January 11, Wednesday: Richard Henry Dana, Jr. sailed off across the Pacific Ocean, bound for the Orient.

AND NOW, FOR SOMETHING ENTIRELY DIFFERENT, A REPORT FROM OUR SAILOR: On the morning of the 11th January, 1860, I passed, for the eighth time, through the Golden Gate, on my way across the delightful Pacific to the Oriental world, with its civilization three thousand years older than that I was leaving behind. As the shores of California faded in the distance, and the summits of the Coast Range sank under the blue horizon, I bade farewell– yes, I do not doubt, forever– to those scenes which, however changed or unchanged, must always possess an ineffable interest for me. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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Senator James Mason’s committee to investigate the raid upon the federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry issued summonses for the Secret “Six” conspirators Franklin Benjamin Sanborn, Dr. Samuel Gridley Howe, and Gerrit Smith. A summons for their co-conspirator George Luther Stearns was overlooked but would follow in due course. The committee would learn that Stearns and Dr. Howe, like Boston attorney Richard Henry Dana, Jr., had fled to California, but eventually the Reverend Stearns would appear and testify that he believed John Brown to be the representative man of this century as George Washington had been of the previous one.

On this date Bronson Alcott made the following entry in his journal: Emerson, Alcott, Thoreau, Channing, Wasson, Sanborn, and Hawthorn, which comes to 7 persons. Opened once a week for conversations, without form, and from 7 to 10 HDT WHAT? INDEX

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in the evening, at private houses. WALDO EMERSON HENRY THOREAU ELLERY CHANNING NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE

[THOREAU MADE NO ENTRY IN HIS JOURNAL FOR JANUARY 11th] HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1863

January: At his mansion in Medford, Massachusetts, George Luther Stearns of the Secret “Six” conspiracy staged an unveiling ceremony for a heroic bust of Captain John Brown which he had commissioned from the sculptor Edwin Brackett to place in the corner of his elaborately decorated Victorian foyer. Waldo Emerson recited his “The Boston Hymn” poem and Julia Ward Howe recited her “Battle Hymn of the Republic” poem. The Reverend Thomas Wentworth Higginson, who had become a Colonel in command of a black regiment, was of course understandably unable to be present. The New York millionaire Gerrit Smith had not responded to the formal invitation, made no appearance, and offered no explanation. In addition to Stearns and Brackett as providers, and Emerson and Mrs. Howe as performers, the ceremony was attended by John Murray Forbes, Dr. Samuel Gridley Howe, Wendell Phillips, and Franklin Benjamin Sanborn. The ceremony was catered by a black caterer who, when he saw who it was who was being honored, attempted to refuse payment and had to have a note jammed into his pocket.

Louisa May Alcott contracted the cholera at Army Hospital and was administered massive doses of calomel, a mercury-based emetic.19 While lying desperately ill, Louisa May Alcott received $100.00 for her first “lurid” piece for Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper, a piece titled “Pauline’s Passion and Punishment” published under the pseudonym “A.M. Barnard.” But she was thinking of Henry Thoreau, and writing a poem about him. The poem would be published in The Atlantic Monthly, in the summer of 1863, as “Thoreau’s flute.”

19. She would suffer for the remainder of her life from this systemic poisoning. Under such a regimen it was common for the hair and teeth of the patient to fall out, and for their tongues to protrude until they lost their voices and could scarcely swallow. In fact, if the patient’s reaction were not sufficiently severe, the physician of that era was likely to increase the dosage. (In May 1863, too late for Louisa May, the Surgeon General of the United States would proscribe this use of the calomel emetic.) HDT WHAT? INDEX

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As I shall forget the strange fancies that haunted me I shall amuse myself with recording some of them. The most vivid & enduring was a conviction that I had married a stout, handsome Spaniard dressed in black US CIVIL WAR velvet with very soft hands & a voice that was continually saying, “Lie still, my dear.” This was mother, I suspect, but with all the comfort I often found in her presence there was blended an awful fear of the Spanish spouse who was always coming after me, appearing out of closets, in at windows, or threatening me dreadfully all night long. I appealed to the Pope & really got up & made a touching plea in something I meant for Latin they tell me. Once I went to heaven & found it a twilight place with people darting thro the air in a queer way. All very busy & dismal & ordinary. Miss Dix, W.H. Channig [sic] & other people were there but I thought it dark & “slow” & wished I hadn’t come. A mob at Baltimore breaking down the door to get me; being hung for a witch, burned, stoned & otherwise maltreated were some of my fancies. Also being tempted to join Dr. W. & two of the nurses in worshipping the Devil. Also tended millions of sick men who never died or got well. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1867

May 13, Monday: Counsel for former Confederate President Jefferson Davis had obtained a writ of habeas corpus under which the released prisoner was to be produced before Judge John C. Underwood on this day. When Davis appeared the judge set his bail at $100,000. To “deafening applause” that bond was provided by Horace Greeley, Gerrit Smith, a representative of Cornelius Vanderbilt, and a coalition of 10 Richmond, Virginia businessmen. After 2 years of close confinement in a cell in Fortress Monroe, the prisoner was able to meet Greeley for the 1st time. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1869

Gerrit Smith published his address to a temperance convention in Chicago, and a letter to prohibition foe John Stuart Mill. A national Prohibition Party was founded. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1873

February: A heavy flood at Trap Cot on St. Helena carried away a house and its 9 occupants, 7 of whom perished (as we are all aware, steep hillsides stripped bare of all vegetation will do this sort of thing to you).

Nathan Johnson wrote from 21 Seventh St. in New Bedford to Gerrit Smith, in part to plead with that rich man for “a loose, unappropriated greenback, to help me through the present year; if I should tarry longer things will grow better for me, and 78 years tells me I need but little here.” I know you do not remember of having seen me, and there are but few living that could tell you anything about me.... To our Labouring friend F. Douglass I cannot refer you, for a fellow townsman was at Washington, not long since, where he conversed with him, and mention’d me to him, and he said he did not know me; but I will refer you to his Narrative, in which you will see the name, Nathan Johnson. (Clearly, Frederick Douglass, once reminded, was able to recover a memory of the man who had assigned to him his new free name, and who had been the president of a national convention which he had attended, for prior to his death in 1880 he would on several occasions visit him in New Bedford.)

In Spain, José Martí’s LA REPÚBLICA ESPAÑOLA ANTE LA REVOLUCIÓN CUBANA (THE SPANISH REPUBLIC BEFORE THE CUBAN REVOLUTION). HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1878

Lydia Maria Child had Roberts Brothers of Boston print her own “eclectic Bible” of quotations from the world’s religions, ASPIRATIONS OF THE WORLD: A CHAIN OF OPALS, her motive being stated as: “to do all I can to enlarge and strengthen the hand of human brotherhood.” ASPIRATIONS OF THE WORLD

The Virginia supreme court, in Kinney v. Commonwealth, 71 Virginia 858, 869, considered it the state’s duty to protect the moral welfare of both races by banning any and all sorts of interracial mingling: “The purity of public morals, the moral and physical development of both races, and the highest advancement of our cherished southern civilization, under which two distinct races are to work out and accomplish the destiny to which the Almighty has assigned them on this continent — all require that they should be kept distinct and separate, and that connections and alliances so unnatural that God and nature seem to forbid them, should be prohibited by positive law, and be subject to no evasion.” Folks, let’s not go there.

NARRATIVE OF SOJOURNER TRUTH; A BONDSWOMAN OF OLDEN TIME, EMANCIPATED BY THE NEW YORK LEGISLATURE IN THE EARLY PART OF THE PRESENT CENTURY; WITH A HISTORY OF HER LABORS AND HDT WHAT? INDEX

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20 CORRESPONDENCE DRAWN FROM HER “BOOK OF LIFE.” SOJOURNER TRUTH NORTHAMPTON MA ASSOCIATION OF INDUSTRY AND EDUCATION

20. You will notice that I do not have here an illustration of the correct edition. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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You do know that Sojourner kept an autograph collection, don’t you? Here are some of her specimens:21

21. William Lloyd Garrison President Abraham Lincoln Parker Pillsbury Gilbert Haven Susan B. Anthony Calvin Fairbanks Wendell Phillips Harriet Beecher Stowe Charles S. White Friend Lucretia Mott Lydia Maria Child George Thompson Gerrit Smith Captain Jonathan Walker R.S. Griffing Reverend Samuel Joseph May O.O. Howard Rowland Johnson Lydia Mott Friend Amy Post HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1883

July: Antonio Maceo resigned his posts in Honduras and declared,

Our enslaved Cuba demands that its sons fight for its freedom.

Franklin Benjamin Sanborn’s “Comment by a radical Abolitionist” appeared in the Century Magazine, commenting upon the article immediately preceding it, by Alexander R. Boteler, entitled “Recollections of the John Brown Raid by a Virginian Who Witnessed the Fight” (Volume 26, pages 411-15, 399-411): It is hard –nay, impossible– to carry the reader of these pages in 1883 back in memory to that period of our country’s history when John Brown captured the town and arsenal at Harpers Ferry, or make real to ourselves the despotism which a few slaveholders then exercised over the rest of mankind in this country. Though a meager minority in their own South, they absolutely controlled there not only four millions of slaves, but six millions of white people, nominally free, while they directed the policy and the opinions of more than half the free people of the non- slaveholding States. They had dictated the nomination and secured the election of James Buchanan as President, — the most complete servant of the slave power who ever held that office; they had not only refused to terminate the slave-trade (as by treaty we were bound to assist in doing), but they had induced the importation of a few cargoes of slaves into Carolina and Georgia; they had broken down the Missouri compromise of 1820 (imposed by themselves on the unwilling North), and had done their best to extend slavery over the new territories of the nation, and to legalize its existence in all the Free States. Through the mouth of Chief-Justice Roger Brooke Taney, who simply uttered the decrees of the slave-holding oligarchy, they had made the Supreme Court declare that four million Americans, of African descent, had practically “no rights which a white man was bound to respect”; and they exerted themselves in every way to give due effect to that dictum. The Dred Scott decision was given by Taney in 1857, and it led at once to the execution of John Brown’s long-cherished purpose of striking a blow at slavery in its own Virginian stronghold. That decision flashed into the minds of Northern men the conviction which John Quincy Adams had long before formulated and expressed — that “the preservation, propagation, and perpetuation of slavery was the vital and animating spirit of the national Government.” It was this conviction that led to the election of Abraham Lincoln in 1860, as it had led John Brown and his small band of followers HDT WHAT? INDEX

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to form their conspiracy and begin their campaign in 1858-’59. While the unpaid labor of the slaves was believed by the slaveholders to be the real source of our national prosperity, it was the merit and the fate of John Brown first to see and act upon the sad knowledge that slavery and our national existence were incompatible. Thirty years before he died for the blacks in Virginia, he chose the side of the nation against slavery; and in less than ten years after his death the whole people followed in the path he had marked out — the straight and thorny road of emancipation by force. It is in this broad way that the Harpers Ferry raid must be looked at, — not as a midnight foray of robbers and murderers. It was an act of war, and was accepted by the South as a sure omen that war was at hand. Brown told the slave-holders this in his famous conversation with James Mason of Virginia and Vallandigham of Ohio. “I claim to be here,” he said, “carrying out a measure I believe to be perfectly justifiable, and not to be acting the part of an incendiary or ruffian; on the contrary, I am here to aid those suffering under a great wrong. I wish to say, furthermore, that you had better —all you people of the South— prepare yourselves for a settlement of this question. It must come up for settlement sooner than you are prepared for it, and the sooner you commence that preparation the better for you. You may dispose of me very easily. I am nearly disposed of now. But this question is still to be settled; this negro question, I mean. The end of that is not yet.” This was a veritable “Thus saith the Lord” — as his hearers and the whole world soon found out. But to such as then doubted the message of the prophet Brown condescended to verify his credentials in that wonderfully eloquent speech to the court that sentenced him to the gallows: 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 unto 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. There was John Brown’s authority for the capture of Harpers Ferry, — the same which Ethan Allen alleged, with less reason, a Ticonderoga, where he commanded surrender “in the name of the great Jehovah.” Brown “had gone to be a soldier in the army of the Lord” long before his death, and the song of the people marching to avenge that death were but the public proclamation of his commission from above. Since the details of that strange conversation with Mason of Virginia have faded from the popular memory, let me quote another passage in which Brown pursues the HDT WHAT? INDEX

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same line of reasoning he afterward held in court. SENATOR MASON: How do you justify your acts? CAPTAIN BROWN: I think, my friend, you are guilty of a great wrong against God and humanity –I say it without wishing to be offensive,– and it would be perfectly right for any one to interfere with you so far as to free those you willfully and wickedly hold in bondage. I do not say this insultingly. SENATOR MASON: I understand that. CAPTAIN BROWN: I think I did right, and that others will do right who interfere with you, at any time, and all times. I hold that the golden rule, “Do unto others as you would that others should do unto you,” applies to all who would help others to gain their liberty. LIEUTENANT STUART: But you don’t believe in the BIBLE? CAPTAIN BROWN: Certainly I do. * * * I want you to understand, gentlemen, that I respect the rights of the poorest and weakest of the colored people, oppressed by the slave system, just as much as I do those of the most wealthy and powerful. That is the idea that has moved me, and that alone. We expected no reward except the satisfaction of endeavoring to do for those in distress –the greatly oppressed– as we would be done by. The cry of distress of the oppressed is my reason, and the only thing that prompted me to come here. Brown’s plan of action in Virginia was wholly his own, as he more than once declared; and it was not until he had long formed and matured it that he made it known (so far as an attack on slavery in Virginia was concerned) to the few friends who shared his confidence in that matter. I cannot say how numerous these were; but beyond his own family and the armed followers who accompanied him, I have never supposed that his Virginia plan was known to fifty persons. Even to those few it was not fully communicated, though they knew that he meant to fortify himself somewhere in the mountains of Virginia or Tennessee, and from that fastness, with his band of soldiers, sally out and liberate slaves by force. His plan to this extent was known, early in 1858, by Frederick Douglass, Gerrit Smith (at whose house and in whose presence I first heard Brown declare it), Theodore Parker, Dr. Samuel Gridley Howe, George Luther Stearns, Thomas Wentworth Higginson, and myself, and we all raised money to aid Brown in carrying this plan forward. I know this, because some of the money and nearly all the correspondence relating to the contributions passed through my hands in 1858-9. I talked more than once in those years with all the persons above named, concerning Brown’s Virginia plans and had letters from all except Douglass in regard to it. Brown’s general purpose of attacking slavery by force, in Missouri or elsewhere, was known in 1857-8-9 to Waldo Emerson, A. Bronson Alcott, Henry Thoreau, Wendell Phillips, Thomas Russell, John HDT WHAT? INDEX

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Albion Andrew, and others of the anti-slavery men of Massachusetts, none of whom discountenanced it, while most of them, in my hearing, distinctly approved it, generally, however, as a last resort or a measure of retaliation for the outrages of the slave-holders and their allies. Had these gentlemen known of the Virginia plan, most of them would have strongly disapproved it as premature or impracticable. Such, also, it seemed at first, and generally afterward, to those of us who contributed money to aid Brown in it. I speak particularly of Gerrit Smith, Theodore Parker, George L. Stearns, Dr. Howe, Col. Higginson, and myself. But we all felt, as Governor Andrew afterward said, that whatever the old worthy might plan or do, “John Brown himself was right,” and upon that feeling we acted, in spite of doubts and many misgivings. The end has justified our instinctive sentiment; and it has more than justified, it has glorified Brown. I do not wonder that Virginians cannot all see this yet; but the world sees it, and Brown has become, to the world in general, one of the immortal champions of liberty —historical or mythical— among whom we reckon Leonidas, Maccabeus, Tell, Winkelried, Wallace, Hofer, and Marco Bozzaris. I knew John Brown well. He was often a my house and at the houses of my friends and I traveled with him for days. He was what all his speeches, letters, and actions avouch him — a simple, brave, heroic person incapable of anything selfish or base. The higher elements of his character are well seen in the portrait which accompanies these pages There were darker and sterner traits which fitted him for the grim work he had to do and which are better shown in his bearded portraits, and in some which I possess, taken in the year 1857. But the face that here looks out upon us bespeaks that warm love for God’s despised poor which was his deepest trait, and that noble disregard of everything but justice which distinguished his every action But above and beyond these personal qualities he was what we may best term a historic character; that is, he had, like Cromwell and Spartacus, a certain predestined relation to the political crisis of his time, for which his character fitted him and which, had he striven against it, he could not avoid. Like Cromwell and all the great Calvinists, he was an unquestioning believer in God’s fore-ordination and the divine guidance of human affairs; but he was free from the taint of guile that disfigured Cromwell’s greatness. Of course, he could not rank with Cromwell or with many inferior men in leadership; but in this God- appointed, inflexible devotion to his object in life he was inferior to no man, and he rose in fame far above more gifted persons because of this very fixedness and simplicity of character. His renown is secure, and the artless (I must think prejudiced) narrative of Mr. Boteler does but increase it for those who read understandingly. As Tennyson said of the great Duke, we may say of Brown: Whatever record leap to light, He never shall be shamed. Young men never knew, perhaps, and some old men have forgotten, that we once had statesmen (so called) who loudly declared that HDT WHAT? INDEX

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negro slavery was the basis not only of our national greatness, but of the white man’s freedom. This groveling doctrine found favor in Virginia in John Brown’s time, and it was his work, as much as any man’s, to overthrow it. A hundred years ago one of the great Virginians, a statesman indeed by nature and by training, said: With what execration should that statesman be loaded who, permitting one-half the citizens to trample on the rights of the other, transforms those into despots and these into enemies? Can the liberties of a nation be deemed secure when we have removed their only firm basis — a conviction in the minds of the people that these liberties are the gift of God, that they are not to be violated without his wrath? Indeed, I tremble for my country (Virginia) when I reflect that God is just, that His justice cannot sleep forever; that, considering numbers, nature, and natural means only, a revolution of the wheel of fortune is among possible events; that it may become probable by supernatural interference. The Almighty has no attribute that can take sides with us in such a contest. This was the language of Jefferson in his “Notes on Virginia,” written in 1783, and it was in the county of Jefferson that Brown made his foray in 1859. He harbored in the county of Washington, in Maryland, for three months. He descended upon Jefferson County in Virginia at the end of that time; and when the astonished successors of Washington and Jefferson saw him first, he held in his hand Washington’s sword, and was enacting Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence in favor of the slaves of Colonel Washington, — that the Scriptures might be fulfilled. And they were fulfilled to the utmost in the years of war and ruin that followed. At the critical period of that Civil War when its issue was still undecided save in the councils of heaven, — at the close of the year 1862 Abraham Lincoln put forth his first edict of emancipation, and followed it up, January 1, 1863, with the final proclamation that the slaves in the rebellious States were from that day free. John Brown had been in his woodland grave among the Adirondack Mountains but little more than three years when we saw this triumph of his hopes, this crown of his toil and martyrdom. His friends gathered to celebrate so happy an event at the house of one of the most faithful and active of his supporters in the Virginia campaign, George Stearns, of Medford, in Massachusetts. It was one of the last of those meetings in which the old anti-slavery men and women came together with hearts united, and rejoiced together face to face. Garrison and Phillips were there, Waldo Emerson and Bronson Alcott (Thoreau had died eight months before), Dr. Samuel Gridley Howe and his poetic wife, Mrs. Child, Moncure Conway, Martin Conway of Kansas, and many others now dead or widely sundered. The host and his wife, Mrs. Mary Stearns, who also had been an enthusiastic friend of John Brown, could give their guests not only the graceful hospitalities of a house always open to the HDT WHAT? INDEX

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friends of freedom, but what was then a new sight, Brackett’s marble bust of Brown, standing crowned with flowers in the wide hall. This is the only bust of Brown for which the sculptor studied the hero’s own features, and it was made after a visit by Brackett to Brown in prison at Charlestown. Though not, in all respects, a portrait, it has the air of Brown, with a majesty that made Charles Sumner exclaim, when he first saw it: “This is like the Moses of Michael Angelo.” And when a sibylline negress, a fugitive from Maryland, saw it in my house, she went into an ecstasy of grief and adoration, declaring that Brown was not a mere man, but the Messiah of her people. “In a great age,” says Cousin, speaking of Pascal, “everything is great.” John Brown came to prominence in an age by no means grand or noble; but such was his own heroic character that he conferred importance on events in themselves trivial. His petty conflicts in Kansas and the details of his two days’ campaign in Virginia will be remembered when a hundred battles of our Civil War are forgotten. He was one of ten thousand, and, as Thoreau said, could not be tried by a jury of his peers, because his peers did not exist; yet so much was he in accord with what is best in the American character that he will stand in history for one type of our people, as Franklin and Lincoln do, but with a difference. He embodied the distinctive qualities of the Puritan, but with a strong tincture of the more humane sentiments of later times. No man could be more sincere in his faith toward God, more earnest in love for man; his belief in fore-ordination was absolute, his courage not less so. The emotion of fear seemed to be quite unknown to him, except in the form of diffidence, — if that were not rather a sort of pride. He was diffident of his power in speech or writing, yet who, of all his countrymen, has uttered more effective or immortal words? Part of the service he rendered to his country was by this heroic impersonation of traits that all mankind recognize as noble. The cause of the poor slave had need of all the charm that romantic courage could give it; his defenders were treated with the contempt which attached to himself. They were looked upon with aversion by patriots; they were odious to trade, distasteful to fashion and learning, impious in the sight of the Church. At the single stroke of Brown, all this was changed; the cause that had been despised suddenly became hated, feared, and respected; and out of this new fear and hatred our national safety was born. Ten years more of disgraceful security, and the nation might have been lost; but the rash and frantic efforts of the South to defend its barbarous system brought on the revolution that has regenerated us politically. No doubt the affair at Harpers Ferry hastened our political crisis by at least ten years, — and what fatal years they might have been but for John Brown! One evening in January, 1860, as I sat in Emerson’s study at Concord, talking of this old friend of ours, for whose widow and HDT WHAT? INDEX

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orphans we were then raising a fund, I spoke to Emerson about a

speech of his at Salem, a few weeks earlier, in which the poet- philosopher had renewed his homage to the memory of Brown. He went to one of the cabinets in which his manuscripts were kept, took out the half-dozen pages on which his remarks had been written down, and gave them to me for publication. I have ever since cherished the manuscript, in which, with bold strokes of his quill, Emerson had written these words at the close: It would be nearer the truth to say that all people, in proportion to their sensibility and self-respect, sympathize with John Brown. For it is impossible to see courage and disinterestedness and the love that casts out fear, without sympathy. All gentlemen, of course are on his side. I do not mean by “gentlemen” people of scented hair and perfumed handkerchiefs, but men of gentle blood and generosity, “fulfilled with all nobleness”; who, like the Cid, give the outcast leper a share of their bed — like the dying Sidney, pass the cup of cold water to the wounded soldier who needs it more. For what is the oath of gentle blood and knighthood? What but to protect the weak and lowly against the strong oppressor? * * * Who makes the abolitionist? The slave-holder. The sentiment of mercy is the natural recoil which the laws of the universe provide to protect mankind from destruction by savage passions. The arch-abolitionist, older than Brown, and older than the Shenandoah Mountains, is Love, whose other name is Justice, — which was before Alfred, before Lycurgus, before Slavery and will be after it. The generous, immortal traits which these words portray in Brown and bespeak in Emerson, are those which the artist has caught in the remarkable engraving of my old friend in this number of THE CENTURY. F.B. Sanborn SECRET “SIX” HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1909

October 17, Sunday: It was the 50th anniversary of John Brown’s raid on Harpers Ferry, and the survivors of that scheme met in the riverside brick mansion of Franklin Benjamin Sanborn, on Elm Street in Concord.

When the 77-year-old Sanborn took Colonel Thomas Wentworth Higginson’s elbow to lead his 86-year-old friend into the sitting room, the Colonel pulled his arm away — despite the fact that the Reverend was now walking by use of a cane. In the siting room, a circle of six chairs had been set out, one chair for each of the original Secret “Six”: The Reverend Theodore Parker, Gerrit Smith, George Luther Stearns, Dr. Samuel Gridley Howe, Colonel Higginson, and Sanborn, despite the fact that Parker, Smith, Stearns, and Howe had by this point deceased. The chair for Dr. Howe was occupied by 90-year-old Julia Ward Howe, who remained seated when the others entered, with a shawl around her shoulders. Julia had her ear trumpet with her so that she would not need to miss any of the conversation. Also in the room was a young reporter, Katherine Mayo, who had been detailed to take copious notes by a grandson of William Lloyd Garrison, the author Oswald Garrison Villard. Villard was then wrapping up work on a study of Captain Brown that hopefully would be an improvement on Sanborn’s botched 1885 attempt at a biography. Colonel Higginson needed to make certain that Miss Mayo clearly understood, so that she could convey this information to Villard, that he and the other members of this 6-member finance committee had been entirely aware of John Brown’s intent to incite a slave rebellion in Virginia, and that they’d been quite as prepared that Brown’s raid would turn into a disaster for him and his little band as they had been prepared that it might prove against all odds to be a success. SERVILE INSURRECTION HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1986

Fall: Milton C. Sernett’s COMMON CAUSE: THE ANTISLAVERY ALLIANCE OF GERRIT SMITH AND BERIAH GREEN (Syracuse University Library Associates Courier, Volume XXI. Number 2): The Gerrit Smith Papers in the manuscript collections of the George Arents Research Library at Syracuse University are an indispensable resource for scholars interested in American social reform. Given to the University in 1928 by Gerrit Smith Miller, a grandson, the collection reveals that the abolition of slavery dominated the Madison County philanthropist’s reform interests from the mid-1830s to the Civil War. Of Gerrit Smith’s numerous antislavery correspondents, including such prominent reformers as William Lloyd Garrison, Wendell Phillips, and Theodore Dwight Weld, none maintained a more regular and extensive epistolary relationship than Beriah Green, upstate New York’s most radical and complex abolitionist. The Syracuse University collection contains 206 letters from Green to Smith, dated from 1834 through 1872. Smith’s outgoing correspondence, partially recorded in two letter copybooks, is less extensive and therefore less helpful in revealing the dynamics of the Smith-Green relationship. Fortunately, Green’s letters to Smith frequently make reference to Smith’s missing correspondence. An examination of these letters, supplemented by other primary sources, makes possible an interesting case study of the partnership formed by two of upstate New York’s most important antislavery crusaders. They were an ill-matched pair. Contemporaries knew Gerrit Smith as majestic in personal appearance. “Tall, magnificently built and proportioned, his large head [was] superbly set upon his shoulders [so that] he might have served as a model for a Greek God in the days when men deified beauty and worshipped it.”22 By contrast, Beriah Green was a “man of not more than middling stature, earnestly stooping forward [with] a strongly marked, nervous, decided face.”23 Smith was widely respected for his disarmingly gracious temperament and affectionate disposition, the epitome of the earnest Christian. Green, who had been born in Connecticut in 1795 and trained at Andover Seminary, struck some as severe and craggy, like the rocks of his native New England. A New England abolitionist visiting her aunt in Oneida County reported that she found the president of Oneida Institute “ugly and clerical.”24 Smith had inherited his father’s business empire, possessed enough land to be embarrassed by it, and had the wherewithal to be the benefactor to a host of charitable causes, including Green’s school and family. As to mental powers, Green was an academic, a scholar of sacred literature and moral philosophy. Smith admitted to being a reader of

22. Mary S. Bull, “Gerrit Smith,” Good Company 6 (November 1880): 241. 23. [Elizur Wright, Jr.], “Finding a Man,” Model Worker, 11 August 1848. 24. Ann W. Weston to M. Weston, 16 May 1839, Anti-Slavery Papers, Boston Public Library. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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newspapers and tracts, more adept as a publicist of reform causes than as a reader of books or an original thinker.25 Though oddly matched in these and other ways, Gerrit Smith and Beriah Green were yoked in common cause for over four decades. Their relationship, intimate yet stormy, throws light upon the inner workings of the abolitionist enterprise in central and western New York. Historian Lawrence J. Friedman has called the circle of abolitionists led by Smith “voluntarists,” for these immediatists of the Burned-over District (a section in upstate New York of intensive religious revivals) predicated reform upon the notion that democratic change could only come through the binding together of free individuals who were on intimate terms and shared common values.26 This ideological approach brought Green and Smith into a friendship that surpassed mere conventionality but eventually put severe pressures on the ties of brotherhood each freely expressed. We can best see this by examining several circles of intimacy shared by Green and Smith. “GIVE US YOUR HEART AND YOUR HAND” In 1834 Green began corresponding with the “patron” of the village of Peterboro, Madison County, on the subject of black education. Green was then president of Oneida Institute, a manual labor and literary school located just east of Whitesboro, about four miles from Utica. It had been founded by the Reverend George Gale in 1827 in order to prepare recruits from the Finney revivals for mission work in the West. When Green was selected as Gale’s successor in 1833, he already had a reputation as an uncompromising foe of the American Colonization Society and an ardent advocate of immediate emancipation. While on the faculty of Western Reserve College, Hudson, Ohio, he had created a firestorm with four sermons attacking the scheme to export blacks to Liberia. Green accepted the presidency of Oneida Institute on the condition that he would be allowed to do more for the cause of black freedom in central New York than he had previously been allowed to do by Western Reserve’s conservative trustees. “I am assured,” Green wrote Elizur Wright, Jr., “that Africa shall lose nothing in the exchange of stations I am urged to venture on. I am even assured that the Trustees [of Oneida Institute] will help me in my efforts to strike the chains from colored limbs, etc.”27 Green aimed to transform the Institute from a Presbyterian-dominated manual labor school into an interracial abolitionist training ground. For the benefit of “poor suffering humanity,” his young enthusiasts were to unite manual labor on the school’s farm and in its workshops with a revolutionary practical education that stressed study of biblical Greek and

25. Octavius Brooks Frothingham, Gerrit Smith (New York: Putnam’s Sons, 1878), 362-65. This highly sympathetic biography by a contemporary admirer received the approval of the Smith family. Frothingham had access to Smith’s private journals, which unfortunately have been lost. Smith’s Peterboro mansion was destroyed by fire in 1930. 26. Lawrence J. Friedman, Gregarious Saints: Self and Community in American Abolitionism, 1830-1870 (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1982), Chapter 4. 27. Green to Elizur Wright, Jr., 25 April/3 May 1833, Wright Papers, Library of Congress. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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Hebrew rather than the Greek and Roman classics. Gerrit Smith also had an interest in educating “colored youth.” As early as 1827, he proposed to establish a school in Peterboro to prepare blacks to exercise the Gospel ministry under the auspices of the American Colonization Society. He seems to have abandoned the plan without public explanation, but tried again in early 1834.28 Green protested the concept of a separate manual labor school for blacks. Thus, addressing Smith as “My Dear Sir,” Oneida Institute’s president began four decades of correspondence on a note of discord. “For one I am from principle opposed to charity which excludes either color; I am opposed to the cord of caste wherever it may appear. Away with caste! It has strangled its thousands.... Till we have white and black together in our schools, the cord of caste will remain.29 Smith proceeded over Green’s objections and brought a handful of Afro- American youth to Peterboro for the rudiments of a classical education in a manual labor setting. “I hope my first class ... will have members who will go to Africa with a sound education of head and heart,” Smith wrote colonizationist leader Leonard Bacon.30 The Peterboro Manual Labor School had but one instructor, was solely dependent upon Smith’s charity, and lasted only until late summer 1836. Six students petitioned their benefactor to keep the school open, pleading “we have just begun to drink fully of the fountain of knowledge.”31 Land rich but cash poor, as the country headed for the fiscal Panic of 1837, Smith had to abandon his school. Green unsuccessfully urged him to merge it with the preparatory department of Oneida Institute. Only one of Smith’s students, Elymas P. Rogers, transferred to the Institute, which is now known to have enrolled more Afro-Americans than any other American college in the 1830s and 1840s.32 Green and Smith differed over the necessity for integrated higher education in the early 1830s because Smith still maintained cordial relationships with the leaders of the American Colonization Society and gave generously to its support. As late as March 1834, he complained of the “violent, bitter and fanatical” denunciations of the colonizationists by the immediatists. He confided in his journal a few months later, “I think I cannot join the Antislavery Society as long as the War is kept up between it and the American Colonization Society — a war, however, for which the Colonization Society is as much to blame as the other Society.”33 Did this portend a change of heart? Elizur Wright, Jr., thought

28. Smith to editors of Freedom’s Journal, 31 March 1827, Letter Book 1, Gerrit Smith Papers, Syracuse University. Smith’s proposal for the Peterboro Manual Labor School appeared in The African Repository and Colonial Journal 10 (December 1834): 312-13. 29. Green to Smith, 25 March 1834. Unless otherwise noted, all future citations of the Green-Smith correspondence draw upon the Gerrit Smith Papers at Syracuse University. 30. Smith to Leonard Bacon, 31 March 1834, Smith Papers. 31. “Petition,” 1836, Smith Papers. 32. See Milton C. Sernett, “First Honor: Oneida Institute’s Role in the Fight Against Racism and Slavery,” New York History 66 (April 1985): 101-22. 33. Smith to Leonard Bacon, 31 March 1834, Smith Papers. Smith, Journal, 12 July 1834, quoted in Frothingham, Gerrit Smith, 163-64. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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so, for he wrote Green that the Peterboro philanthropist was “about making his last effort to reform the poor old colonization hobby. It is the creation of his imagination he clings to — not the odious reality.” 34 Green needed coadjutors in order to transform Oneida Institute into a model biracial community where young men could work on the farm and in the shops while being schooled in the principles of practical reform. The school’s debts were heavier than Gale had led Green to believe. Some of the trustees were balking at Green’s plans to enroll pious youth without regard to color or family background. Because of his philanthropic reputation and proximity to the Institute, Gerrit Smith was an obvious potential supporter. Green knew, however, that Smith was a trustee of Hamilton College, the Institute’s conservative rival, and was giving liberally to the American Colonization Society. He attempted to win Smith over to immediatism by speaking of the plight of the slaves in Peterboro and through private appeals on behalf of the victims of the “peculiar institution,” a contemporary circumlocution for chattel slavery. Smith sent the Institute small donations, but as of spring 1835 he had not yet broken with the colonizationists. External events often bring individuals to make ideological commitments when personal persuasion fails. Such was the case with Smith in October 1835. Green had urged him to attend the organizational meeting in Utica of a proposed state antislavery society. Addressing Smith as “My Dear Brother,” Green wrote in September, “I feel a confidence, which my heart refuses to let go, that you will, sometime or other, give us your heart and your hand.”35 Smith made no commitment at the time. However, he happened to be in Utica in October. He and his wife were passing through en route to Schenectady for a visit with Peter Smith, Gerrit’s father, who had started the family fortune in the fur trade with John Jacob Astor. More out of curiosity than conviction, Gerrit was present at the opening session of the New York Anti-Slavery Convention, held at the Bleecker Street Presbyterian Church. He had barely taken his seat when a mob of about eighty commercial and professional men disrupted the meeting with cries of “Open the way! Break down the doors! Damn the fanatics! Stop your damn stuff!” As the assembly scattered in confusion, so an observer recalled, Smith’s “resonant and persuasive voice” could be heard above the uproar. Smith appealed for fairness and free speech, though he declared himself “no abolitionist.” Some four hundred delegates accepted his offer to reconvene in the safety of his Peterboro mansion house, some fourteen miles southwest of Utica.36 Smith assumed a prominent role in the deliberations of the reassembled state society on the day following the Utica riot. He declared himself in opposition to all those who would muzzle the moral reformer.

34. Wright to Amos G. Phelps, 27 October 1834, Wright Papers. 35. Green to Smith, 24 September 1835. 36. Howard Alexander Morrison, “Gentlemen of Proper Understanding: A Closer Look at Utica’s Anti-Abolitionist Mob,” New York History 62 (January 1981): 61. Frothingham, Gerrit Smith, 165. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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The enormous and insolent demands of the South, sustained, I am deeply ashamed to say, by craven and mercenary spirits at the North, manifest beyond all dispute, that the question now is not merely, nor mainly, whether the blacks of the South shall remain slaves-but whether the whites at the North shall become slaves also.37 Smith later wrote in his journal that the mobbing in Utica had been an “instructive providence.”38 Nevertheless, he demurred from joining the American Anti-Slavery Society, the national organization over whose constituting assembly Green had presided in December 1833. Smith’s eventual conversion to this society was motivated by concern for free speech rather than heartfelt antagonism to the American Colonization Society. Green, elected as corresponding secretary of the New York Anti- Slavery Society, continued to pressure Smith to make a clean break. The philanthropist did so in a letter, dated 24 November 1835, in which he informed Ralph Gurley, secretary of the American Colonization Society: It is proper for me to say that I am brought to this determination, earlier than I expected to be, by the recent increase of my interest in the American Anti- Slavery Society. Since the late alarming attacks in the persons of its [the Colonization Society] members on the right of discussion, I have looked to it [the Anti-Slavery Society], as being the rallying point of the friends of this right.39 Shortly after Smith converted, Green wrote him, “I rejoice to know that your thoughts and heart are so much with the oppressed.”40 Now that this unlikely pair was fully yoked in common cause, Green pressed the needs of Oneida Institute upon his friend. He argued that the Institute should be “a special object of solicitude and of patronage,” because the abolitionist cause would itself be embarrassed should the school fail. President Green wanted water power for the Institute’s workshops, new equipment for chemistry and physics, and an endowment so that the manual labor experiment might receive a fair trial. Green told Smith that his school deserved more patronage than Hamilton because it alone was dedicated to “subserve the glory of our Savior and the interests of His Kingdom.”41 Smith gave generously until the Panic of 1837 caused him to plead an “extreme scarcity of money.” Even then he borrowed funds and proposed to give three thousand dollars to Green’s school and family. “Because of the simple, straight-forward honesty inculcated in it,” Smith declared, “it [Oneida Institute] is dearer to my heart than any School with which I am acquainted.”42 “REMEMBER ME TO YOUR DEAR CIRCLE”

37. “Speech of Mr. Gerrit Smith,” in Proceedings of the New York Anti-Slavery Convention, Held at Utica, October 21, and the New York Anti-Slavery Society, Held at Peterboro, October 22, 1835 (Utica: Standard and Democrat, 1835), 21. 38. Smith, Journal, 25 October 1835, quoted in Frothingham, Gerrit Smith, 166. 39. Letter, Smith to R. R. Gurley, 24 November 1835, African Repository and Colonial Journal 12 (January 1836): 36. 40. Green to Smith, 11 December 1835. 41. Green to Smith, 24 December 1835. 42. Smith to Green, 14 August 1837, Letter Book 1. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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In addition to Green, the circle of voluntarists in the Burned- over District that gathered around Smith included such abolitionists as William Chapin, William Goodell, Alvan Stewart, and Myron Holley. But the Green-Smith relationship was the most intense. Had it not been for Smith’s magnanimity and personal affection for Oneida Institute’s president, Green would have broken with the others sooner than he did. As it was, the two maintained a strong but stormy friendship that survived the break-up of the Smith reform circle in the late 1840s in part because of another area of intimacy. From about 1838 onwards, Green customarily concluded his letters to Smith with “Remember Me to Your Dear Circle” — a sign that their friendship extended beyond their abolition interests to their respective households.

There were many domestic connections between the two men. Green and his family frequently visited Peterboro, and the Green children, notably Samuel, often spent long vacations at the Smith estate. Smith’s business obligations rarely afforded him opportunity to lodge at the “Old Hive,” as Green affectionately called his Whitesboro home, noteworthy as the first frame house in Oneida County. Ann Green and Elizabeth Smith were kindred spirits, sharing the joys and trials of growing up. Smith honored his friend by naming a newborn son after him. “Green Smith was born 1/2 past 2 p.m. this day [14 April 1842]. Who is Green Smith?, you will ask. He is my only son, named after my beloved brother Beriah Green.”43 Immensely pleased, Beriah took special interest over the years in the welfare, both physical and spiritual, of his namesake. Even while caught in the confusion of abolitionist schisms and ideological debates, Green and Smith counseled and consoled each other on personal and family matters. As with Timothy Dwight Weld and Angelina Grimké, concern for the plight of the slave had brought these two disparate personalities together and set the orbits of their lives into intersecting and dependent patterns. In 1837 Smith consented to serve on Oneida Institute’s board of trustees, thereby further drawing himself into Green’s life. When Green reported that his own salary had gone unpaid due to the school’s debts, Smith forwarded money for Green’s family and offered to employ some of the children on his Peterboro estate. Green expressed irritation that Smith should miss so many board meetings and jealousy that the philanthropist opened his purse to other petitioners. Indeed, there is a didactic tone to much of Green’s correspondence with Smith. He lectured his friend not only on Smith’s responsibilities as a trustee but also about abolition politics, family matters, diet, the proper ritual for taking a bath, the dangers of utopianism and spiritualism, and the need for regular physical exercise. Green’s need for support from Smith increased after the Panic of 1837 brought cries of alarm from Oneida Institute’s long- suffering treasurer, Reuben Hough. Smith donated 3,800 acres of

43. Smith to Green 14 April 1842, Letter Book 1. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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new land in Vermont to the school, but even at two dollars an acre few buyers came forward. Short of cash himself, Smith moved out of his mansion and resorted to employing his wife and daughter in his land office. Oneida Institute struggled along until February 1844 when its buildings and grounds were sold to a group of Free Will Baptists. In September 1843 a fire had destroyed many of Green’s personal effects and much of his library. The Green family was forced to take up residence in one of the Institute’s dormitories. Thus, Green was on campus when the end came. His anger and despair at being unable to forestall the inevitable fill his letters to Smith during the last years of the Institute. Green felt “odious in the eyes of the religionists” and betrayed by the education societies that had withdrawn support from his students.44 He also complained to Smith that the Institute had never had the wholehearted support of some in Smith’s reform circle, especially Alvan Stewart, the Utica lawyer, whose growing influence in the New York Anti- Slavery Society Green resented.45 Oneida Institute’s financial collapse was partly due to the failure of the Society to pay the school for printing the Friend of Man and other abolitionist literature. Because Green eventually severed ties with Stewart and others in Smith’s reform circle, his relationship with Smith himself had to bear an intensified emotional and ideological load. ENGAGEMENT WITH THE POWERS From the beginning of their alliance as co-workers for black freedom, Smith and Green had shared a remarkably similar vision of an America transformed into a Christian republic with liberty and justice for all. Smith had far greater means at his disposal for influencing fellow citizens toward this end. His wealth enabled him to publish and disseminate more than fifty circular letters on slavery alone. He was widely noted as an excellent public speaker, gifted with a melodious voice and an attractive presence. A “devil of uneasiness,” to use his biographer’s description, drew Smith into so many good causes, so many entangling business and personal relationships that he risked weakening the impress of his abolitionism.46 Green also supported many reform efforts, such as temperance, land reform, the redemption of prostitutes, and Christian missions. But he viewed the fight against slavery as the archetype of the whole Christian enterprise to remake America. A man of small means, Green’s weapons were his voice and pen. Smith boasted that his friend’s “intellect is not surpassed in the whole range of my acquaintance.”47 Green’s natural

44. Green to Smith, 25 September 1843. Green to Amos Phelps, 3 November 1843, Phelps Papers. 45. Green to Smith, 15 September 1842; 24 February 1843. 46. Ralph V. Harlow, Gerrit Smith (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1939), 17. Harlow’s biography of Smith is rich in detail and thoroughly grounded in the valuable Smith Papers at Syracuse University. Unfortunately, it is marred by an excessively negative bias toward Gerrit Smith’s religious sentiments and reform enthusiasms. Historical scholarship badly needs a more sympathetic biography of Smith, whose stature among important figures in American reform is now being acknowledged. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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disposition inclined more to the scholar’s study than the public platform. He drew strength from manual labor in the solitude of the woodpile and field. In technical matters of theology and moral philosophy, Smith deferred to Green and took to calling him “the superior Metaphysician.”48 Despite contrasting habits of the mind, this pair shared a common religious disposition. Their commitment to immediate emancipation was grounded on an awakening to the evils of colonization akin to the experience of conversion common to American evangelicals. Slavery was a sin to be immediately repented of. It was, as Smith wrote, “an audacious usurpation of the divine prerogative ... a presumptuous transgression of all the holy commandments.”49 Once converted to abolition at Western Reserve, Green made the cause of the slave his sacred vocation. He initially shared Smith’s optimism that moral suasion would convert the American public. They both held steadfastly to a genuinely radical vision of a purified nation, albeit a Protestant one, in which white and black supped together at the table of peace and prosperity. As organized abolitionism spread throughout the Burned-over District, Smith and Green found themselves agreeing on the need to convert the white, northern religious establishment. Both accepted the principle that moral reform must begin in those circles of intimacy to which they belonged. Green attempted to radicalize the churches in Oneida County, especially Whitesboro’s prestigious First Presbyterian, which many of Oneida Institute’s faculty and students attended. Rebuffed by David Ogden, First Presbyterian’s conservative pastor, Green departed with approximately seventy members in 1838 to form an abolitionist-minded Congregational society. The Oneida Presbytery eventually refused to recognize Green’s ministerial credentials, denied the legitimacy of his abolitionist church, and regarded him as a “troubler of Israel.” Green then became active in the Union Church movement, a loose confederation of Christian abolitionists in central and western New York who insisted that Christians should separate from all those blind to the sin of slavery.50 Embittered by the ecclesiastical establishment’s lackluster antislavery stance and consequent refusal to support Oneida Institute, Green began to question orthodox theology itself. He warred with his New England theological mentors and the “sober

47. Smith to Judge Jones, 27 February 1843, Letter Book 1. James Birney shared Smith’s admiration for the president of Oneida Institute, recording in his diary, “... of all my friends in the abolition ranks — and they certainly contain a great deal of talent — Beriah Green’s arguments strike me as most forcible and convincing.” Letters of James Gillespie Birney, ed. Dwight L. Dumond, 2 vols. (New York: Appleton-Century, 1938), 1:252. 48. Smith, circular letter addressed to “President Green, Whitesboro,” 4 April 1849, Smith Papers. 49. Smith to Rev. Charles Stuart, 10 April 1835, Smith Papers. For Green’s antislavery views, see The Chattel Principle, the Abhorrence of Jesus Christ and the Apostles; or, No Refuge for American Slavery m the New Testament (New York: American Anti-Slavery Society, 1839). 50. The controversy within First Presbyterian can be followed in the Records of the Session of the Presbyterian Church in Whitesboro (New York), Vol. 111, November 10-December 28, 1837, in possession of the congregation. Green defended the “comeouters” in his Reply of the Congregational Church in Whitesboro to a Question of the Oneida Presbytery (Whitesboro: Oneida Institute Press, 1839). HDT WHAT? INDEX

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and scholarly” northern churchmen who hid behind the skirts of traditional doctrine when confronted by abolitionist demands. Though much less disenchanted with the organized church than the New England abolitionist, William Lloyd Garrison, whose anti- clericalism rankled him, Green broke rank with the orthodox on such doctrines as the atonement of Christ. His radical abolitionist convictions eventually brought him perilously close to the notion that true Christianity was to be demonstrated not by adherence to orthodox doctrine but by participation with “poor, suffering humanity,” according to the model provided by Jesus. Indeed, one can find in Green’s sermons and essays, from about 1840 on, themes similar to those of the liberation theologians of the contemporary period.51 Gerrit Smith’s break with orthodoxy also followed upon the heels of his abolitionism. Having joined the Presbyterian Church in 1826, Smith attended services and revivals regularly. He was by temperament more broad-minded than many of his co-religionists and had an abiding dislike for the sectarians who claimed to have a monopoly on divine truth. Yet Smith’s abolitionism eventually led him to separate from the church of his youth as well as from all those connections that were silent on the sin of slavery. In 1842 Smith wrote William Goodell, “I speak against Presbyterian General Assemblies and Methodist conferences, as I do against National Whig and Democratic Conventions — as I do against Masonic fraternities. They are all unfit for Christians to belong to — and no one of them is any more a church than the others.”52 Smith had been sympathetic and supportive in Green’s struggle with the Reverend David Ogden of Whitesboro and the other conservative clergy of Oneida County, for he was himself in ill-repute with the cautious clergy of Madison County after having called them “proslavery ministers.”53 In 1843 he withdrew from the Presbyterians in Peterboro and organized his own Church of Peterboro on abolitionist principles. Like Green, Smith became active in the “come-outer” movement, wherein Christian abolitionists in central and western New York organized their own congregations. Smith also found solace in the religion of reason, a blend of evangelical piety, humanism, and rationalism.54 As in ecclesiastical affairs, Smith and Green followed a common path in abolition politics. They moved in tandem from the Garrison-dominated American Anti-Slavery Society to the American and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society after the split in 1840 over, in part, the question of political means. Following the division, they devoted most of their time and energies to reform circles in upstate New York, where they initially urged voters to support only candidates whose abolitionism could be authenticated. Except for local offices, this tactic failed. Whigs by convention more than conviction, Smith and Green, like

51. For an example of Green’s unorthodox views, see his Thoughts on the Atonement (Whitesboro: Oneida Institute Press, 1842). 52. Smith to Goodell, 22 January 1842, Letter Book 1. 53. Smith, circular letter “To the Proslavery Ministers of the County of Madison,” 1843, Smith Papers. 54. On Smith’s “Religion of Reason” see his Sermons and Speeches (New York: Ross and Tousey, 1861), 1-80 and 121-42. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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Garrison, had never placed much confidence in the major political parties. Smith feared that “political instrumentalities” would taint an essentially moral crusade. Green expressed like sentiments, writing Smith in early 1840: “How to maintain in the common a Human Rights party without involving ourselves in the same evils as now stare so frightfully upon us from the ranks of the existing parties — that is the problem which demands for its solution more wisdom than most men are gifted for.”55 Several members of Smith’s circle of voluntary immediatists, notably Alvan Stewart and Myron Holley, a Rochester abolitionist, called for united political action in the late 1830s. Stewart argued that an independent party was “the only hope for the redemption of the slave.”56 Holley urged fellow abolitionists to “purify political life” as it was the nation’s “most potent source of social control.”57 Gerrit Smith’s reservations about the dangers of “political instrumentalities” withered away in the face of repeated failure to work within the established political parties. Green, too, set aside his almost congenital disgust and joined the Liberty Party, the upstate New York venture into Bible politics. Both reformers supported the candidacy of James G. Birney for president on the Liberty Party ticket in 1840 and were principals in the post-election debate on whether to expand the Liberty Party’s objectives beyond the immediate end of slavery. Green wrote a campaign biography of Birney for the 1844 presidential election.58 A staunch admirer of the ex-slaveholder from Kentucky, Green much preferred Birney to William H. Seward, the Auburn resident and ex-New York governor, whose candidacy Smith sought for 1848 in the wake of the Liberty Party’s dismal showing at the polls in 1840 and 1844.59 Smith and Green did see eye-to-eye on the need to rethink the tactics of political abolitionism and the wisdom of a single- issue party. Both helped to organize the Liberty League in 1847 as a pressure group to expand the platform of the Liberty Party, but the Liberty Leaguers failed to convince most members of the Liberty Party of the need for abandoning “One-Ideaism” in favor of universal reform. Green was particularly adamant that abolitionists should prepare themselves to assume the obligations of government rather than serve merely as a goad to the Whigs and Democrats on the single issue of slavery. In 1848 Smith led a rump faction out of the Liberty Party under the banner of the National Liberty Party, while other Libertymen allied themselves with the Free Soilers. Green shared Smith’s

55. Green to Smith, 26 March 1840. 56. Emancipator, 6 February 1840. 57. “Speech of Myron Holley at Perry [New York], July 4, 1839", Friend of Man, 14 August 1839. 58. Beriah Green, Sketch of the Life and Writings of James Gillespie Birney (Utica: Jackson and Chaplin, 1844). 59. For a concise analysis of the Liberty Party’s rise and fall, see Alan M. Kraut, “The Forgotten Reformers: A Profile of Third Party Abolitionists in Antebellum New York,” in Anti-slavery Reconsidered: New Perspectives on the Abolitionists, edited by Lewis Perry (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State Univ. Press, 1979), 119-45. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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abhorrence of the defection of Libertymen to the Free Soil Party and initially supported Smith’s endeavors to construct a political coalition of reformers pledged to all the obligations of civil government. But, by 1850, these two incompatible friends had parted company. OLD FRIENDS AT ODDS The Green-Smith reform partnership dissolved in the early 1850s principally because of fundamental disagreements over the nature of civil government and the goals of political abolitionism. Their friendship had been severely tested by Beriah’s depression and bitterness over the closing of Oneida Institute in 1844. His letters to Smith contain accusations that the Peterboro philanthropist might have done more to save the school from financial ruin, that he should have opposed Alvan Stewart’s efforts to gain control of the state society, and that he could do more to assist in relocating Green and his family to a more congenial environment than Whitesboro.60 Smith tolerated all of this with remarkable patience and understanding, for he knew how much Green had suffered on behalf of his abolitionist principles. With the possible exceptions of James Birney and Elizur Wright, Jr., a colleague during the Western Reserve controversy, Green had no more supportive friends than Smith during his last troubled years at Oneida Institute. But the venture into Bible politics beginning with the Liberty Party gradually drew Smith and Green into conflict. While Smith placed more and more confidence in the democratic process, Green had less and less respect for the ability of the American electorate to vote into office candidates committed to the principles of righteous government. Since first discovering the anti- democratic writings of Thomas Carlyle in 1838, Green had tried to persuade his abolitionist colleagues that the Scottish essayist’s views on civil government and human nature squared with experience. He told Smith that Carlyle had exerted a “powerful influence” on him with the proposition that since character is everything, the wise should rule the masses.61 Some of Carlyle’s ideas must have struck a respondent chord in Smith — the falseness of materialism, the reality of spirit, the need for leaders to live by spiritual values, the importance of duty, and the sacredness of work. But Carlyle’s philosophy of government and authority ran counter to Smith’s democratic nature and Jeffersonian faith in the rights of the individual as opposed to governmental authority. Smith abhorred all aristocracies, whether they were composed of fools or the wise. He still believed in the potential of a voluntaristic democracy to conform to Christian principles. He even stood for elective office and served in Congress from 1852 to 1854 as the representative of Madison and Oswego counties. By contrast, Green’s overriding concern with the evils of Jacksonian America, notably slavery, led him to conclude that

60. Green to Smith, 23 April 1844. 61. Green to Smith, 2 August 1838. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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democracy was itself at fault. To James Birney, he wrote, “Alas, to a frightful extent, our poor countrymen cannot — at any rate do not, — distinguish between a conspiracy and a government.”62 With obvious allusion to Carlyle’s views, Green grumbled: A greater delusion was never hatched from any cockatrice’s egg, than what is commonly boasted of as the Democratic principle. The thing has neither Truth nor Decency. We must insist upon the control of Wisdom. The wisest and the strongest we must seek out and welcome to their proper places.63 Green’s preference for “heaven-anointed rulers” — that is, individuals distinguished not by popular election but by their character, integrity, wisdom, and magnanimity — entailed contempt for universal suffrage, indeed for the democratic political process itself. Green admitted to Smith that his “God-the-only Potentate” theory of civil government had made him appear “an amazing novelty” and “radically unlike” those with whom he had worked in the abolitionist enterprise. He hoped, however, that Smith would understand that all genuine friendships had their basis in agreement on principles.64 Green seems to have been genuinely surprised and shocked when Smith went public in 1849 over their differences on civil government. In a printed circular addressed to “President Green, Whitesboro,” Smith summarized his own views along the following lines. Just as impiety did not cancel the right or obligation of a man to pray, so a man’s injustice could not deny him the right or obligation to vote. Green’s theory that God-appointed rulers were somehow to be innately recognized and then obeyed by the general populace was “impractible” [sic] and “perilous.” Green, Smith contended, would have government present in all departments of conduct rather than merely protecting individual rights. “You have none,” Smith told his friend, “while I have the utmost confidence in the masses to care for themselves.”65 Smith had actually voiced his concerns earlier in letters printed in the Model Worker, a newspaper published by Samuel Green as a vehicle for his father’s views on the evils of democracy.66 But the circular letter of 1849 was the unbearable insult, in part because Smith had it disseminated among the membership of Green’s “come-outer” congregation in Whitesboro. Green now concluded that cooperation with Smith was no longer possible. He retreated further into isolation, even describing himself as a “misanthrope.” His misanthropy was, Green claimed, born of an intense hatred of all who in the least way supported slavery or gave credence to a political system which tolerated it.67 Smith attempted to mollify Green and keep him from abandoning all ties to abolitionist circles. “You may cast me off, but I shall never cast you off,” he wrote in February 1850.68 Green did not reply. Smith reluctantly acknowledged the

62. Green to Birney, 23 September 1846, Letters of Birney, 2:1028. 63. Green to Birney, 23 April/5 May 1847, Letters of Birney, 2:1067. 64. Green to Smith, 26 December 1849. 65. Smith, circular letter to “President Green.” 66. Smith to Green, 1 August 1848, Model Worker, 11 August 1848. 67. Beriah Green, “A Voice in the Wilderness,” Model Worker, 21 July 1848. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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painful separation. But he continued to care about Beriah and even tried to mediate a dispute between Green and his missionary brother Jonathan. Writing from the Sandwich Islands, Jonathan, an abolitionist in his own right, had inquired concerning his elder brother’s “strange state of mind.” Jonathan wondered whether Beriah’s drift toward becoming a faction of one was not due to some kind of nervous breakdown. Smith confessed to be equally concerned, but he could only report on his own difficulty in trying to comprehend Beriah’s habit of cutting ties of intimacy over real or imagined differences in ideological views.69 By 1854 Green appeared ready to renew the bonds of intimacy with Smith. He applauded Smith’s resignation from Congress and once again asked him for financial assistance in relocating, this time to a small farm on the outskirts of Whitesboro.70 Smith welcomed the renewal of contact, though he described Green’s love for him as a kind of “meat-axe affection.”71 Smith was now involved in the Radical Abolition Party and tried to persuade Green to stand for elective office under its banner. Though he had lost confidence in Carlyle because of Carlyle’s refusal to condemn British oppression in India, Green still viewed human government as “a stupid, grim, malignant conspiracy.”72 He shared Smith’s outrage following the passage of the Kansas- Nebraska Act and looked with an approving eye upon John Brown’s raid upon Harper’s Ferry. Smith’s involvement with Brown caused him such nervous prostration that he had to be placed in the Utica mental asylum for eight weeks following Brown’s capture. Green does not seem to have had prior knowledge of Brown’s intentions, but, after the tragic climax of the events of 1859, he praised Brown as a true hero and martyr for righteousness, despite his violent means.73 When the Civil War started, Smith quickly sided with the Federal government. He saw the war question as the slave question. He hoped that abolitionists and anti-abolitionists would join hands to put down the rebellion and petition President Lincoln to proclaim the liberty of the slaves.74 By contrast, Green’s displeasure with the Republicans waxed ever more vehement as the war progressed. He called them a set of “sworn kidnappers” and wished the Lincoln government “bad luck” in its efforts to preserve the Union at the expense of black freedom. Green described Lincoln as “the presiding bloodhound of the nation.”75 Smith hoped that black freedom could be won on the battlefield. Green’s despair was such that he could only hope that a political phoenix would rise from the ashes of

68. Smith to Green, 23 February 1850, Letter Book 2. 69. Smith to.Jonathan S. Green, 5 March 1853, Smith Papers. 70. Green to Smith 30 March 1854. 71. Green wrote Smith, “Remember me affectionately — I can’t help it if you call it a kind of meat-axe affection. I think it is a genial tender affection — to your cherished circle.” Green to Smith, 30 September 1857. 72. Green to Smith, 2 February 1858. 73. Beriah Green, “Thoughts on Treason,” Liberator, 19 April 1861. Letter, Green to Wendell Phillips, 29 December 1859, Emerson Collection, Houghton L.ibrary, Harvard University. 74. Smith to Hon. Owen Lovejoy, M. C., 12 July 1861. Miscellaneous Abolitionist Autographs, New-York Historical Society. 75. Green to Smith, 21 August 1862. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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a bloody Armageddon to usher in the millennial age. By the end of the Civil War, Green and Smith were both in poor health due to the effects of old age and were more absorbed in personal rather than public affairs. Green characteristically had less confidence in Reconstruction politics than Smith did, but he did not press his differences. After nearly four decades of stormy intimacy, the Green-Smith relationship mellowed. Both reformers realized that their course had been run. Another generation would have to struggle with the demands of righteousness. Green’s last letters to Smith are filled with musings about youth, old age, various health regimes, and family matters. “I feel a special interest in hoary heads,” Green told Smith. “We are nearing the goal.”76 Beriah Green reached his on 5 May 1874, nine months prior to Smith. He collapsed while delivering a temperance lecture in Whitesboro’s town hall and died almost immediately. Smith passed away in more peaceful circumstances during the Christmas holidays while visiting a nephew in New York City. For nearly half a century, these oddly matched friends wrestled with the demands of their consciences within a world they deemed worth saving. One saw shadows everywhere, even in the countenances of compatriots. The other preferred to walk in the light, confident that those yoked in common cause could remain congenial even when disagreeing over questions of ends and means. Abolitionism brought Beriah Green and Gerrit Smith together. It also drove them apart as the abolitionist campaign moved from moral suasion to political means. In retrospect, Green had good cause to despair of democracy’s ability to solve the problem of slavery. As Frederick Douglass once put it, “Liberty came to the freedmen ... not in mercy, but in wrath, not by moral choice, but by military necessity, not by the generous action of the people among whom they were to live, ... but by strangers, foreigners, invaders, trespassers, aliens and enemies.”77 Thus, Smith’s pragmatic optimism balanced Green’s absolutism and pessimism. Green’s understanding of the need for institutionalizing abolitionism in Oneida Institute provided the crusaders against slavery with a model of what the country might look like were their principles put into practice. Despite differences in personality, social status, intellectual interests, and views about the validity of civil or human government, these two antebellum reformers complemented one another. Had they been identical in temperament and character, the history of American abolitionism would be far less interesting and less revealing of the interplay of the personal, domestic, and public lives of the individuals who joined the crusade for black freedom.

76. Green to Smith, 23 May 1872. 77. Frederick Douglass’ Paper, 16 November 1855. 56. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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COPYRIGHT NOTICE: In addition to the property of others, such as extensive quotations and reproductions of images, this “read-only” computer file contains a great deal of special work product of Austin Meredith, copyright 2016. Access to these interim materials will eventually be offered for a fee in order to recoup some of the costs of preparation. My hypercontext button invention which, instead of creating a hypertext leap through hyperspace —resulting in navigation problems— allows for an utter alteration of the context within which one is experiencing a specific content already being viewed, is claimed as proprietary to Austin Meredith — and therefore freely available for use by all. Limited permission to copy such files, or any material from such files, must be obtained in advance in writing from the “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project, 833 Berkeley St., Durham NC 27705. Please contact the project at .

“It’s all now you see. Yesterday won’t be over until tomorrow and tomorrow began ten thousand years ago.” – Remark by character “Garin Stevens” in William Faulkner’s INTRUDER IN THE DUST

Prepared: August 4, 2016 HDT WHAT? INDEX

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ARRGH AUTOMATED RESEARCH REPORT

GENERATION HOTLINE

This stuff presumably looks to you as if it were generated by a human. Such is not the case. Instead, someone has requested that we pull it out of the hat of a pirate who has grown out of the shoulder of our pet parrot “Laura” (as above). What these chronological lists are: they are research reports compiled by ARRGH algorithms out of a database of modules which we term the Kouroo Contexture (this is data mining). To respond to such a request for information we merely push a button. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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Commonly, the first output of the algorithm has obvious deficiencies and we need to go back into the modules stored in the contexture and do a minor amount of tweaking, and then we need to punch that button again and recompile the chronology — but there is nothing here that remotely resembles the ordinary “writerly” process you know and love. As the contents of this originating contexture improve, and as the programming improves, and as funding becomes available (to date no funding whatever has been needed in the creation of this facility, the entire operation being run out of pocket change) we expect a diminished need to do such tweaking and recompiling, and we fully expect to achieve a simulation of a generous and untiring robotic research librarian. Onward and upward in this brave new world.

First come first serve. There is no charge. Place requests with . Arrgh.