John Brown: Radical Abolitionist

This is Lee Habib, and this is Our American Stories, the show where America is the star and the American people. To search for the Our American Stories podcast, go to the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Up next, the story of one of America’s most divisive figures, both of his time and perhaps ours, due to the methods he employed to aid in the destruction of slavery—or, of course, talking about John Brown. Here to tell the story is David S. Reynolds, author of John Brown Abolitionist. Let’s get into the story.

I don’t, I believe, with John Brown, and what you did as a legal cars hell, America are heard to Paul.

John Brown was a horse thief from Kansas. He started up trouble out there in the Kansas, Nebraska horse, and all he did. And he wasn’t in the majority. A majority of people maybe have the right to change the law, but a majority of twenty-one does not. A slave was a property. No man in this society today has a right to go into my house to steal my television set, to break my windows. No man in the nineteenth century had a right to go and steal another person’s property. That’s exactly what Brown intended to do.

What Brown stood Ball was wrong. He was Braley wrong. He killed. Slavery’s wrong.

I mean, we all know that. How can you do anything else but to pull a John Brown? How can you do anything else in decredibly realizing maybe that you’re sinning or that you’re doing something wrong? Four million people, human beings, not numbers, not dates, not backs and figures, not—

Words, but human beings.

He served to be free.

John Brown can be best explained by the which: one man’s freedom fighter is another person’s terrorist. I prefer to see him as kind of a good terrorist. John Brown was born in eighteen hundred in Torrington, Connecticut, and his father and mother were Calvinistic Congregationalists. Religion was very important to John Brown. His father had heard a sermon by the anti-slavery Calvinist Samuel Hopkins in Connecticut, and this kind of anti-slavery Calvinism was passed down to John Brown.

My father was so strong in his beliefs that abolition was the answer, not repatriation, that at a point in my life he actually split the church over that issue and went off and formed a whole nother church called the Free Congregational Church, and took half the congregation with him.

He didn’t, at church, in the ordinary sense. He did attentions sometimes even for a while in Pennsylvania. And in Pennsylvania he went to a church that they allowed Black people in the church, but the Black people had to sit way in the back. For example, in the wintertime, they got frozen back there; there was away from any heat or anything. So he got up and went into the back of the church and said, “Please take my seat.” He told the African Americans, “Please take my own seat.” So he was actually dismissed from that congregation. But his main thing was reading the Bible, learning the Bible.

Though I only had a very small formal education, I had worked very hard to educate myself. I read voraciously. I had memorized the entire Bible when I was very small, ten years old.

And at one point he thought of becoming a minister. That didn’t work out. He decided to, in a sense, be a practical minister by applying what he viewed as Christianity to enslave people. His father ran a tannery, and at age twelve, he was sent on a cattle drive alone by his father over the countryside.

Sent me to Detroit. That’s almost two hundred miles from where we lived, with one hundred cows and a contract with the U.S. Army. Now, remember, this is the War of Eighteen Twelve. I made that distance by myself through pretty much an untracked wilderness, kept it all together, bartered with the men at the end, sold a cattle, got my money, and for a time I lived with the man there in Detroit. Hate. A young boy about my age who was Black. He was a slave. And one day, for reasons I never quite understood, I have never, and I hope I never do, understand, the boy did something wrong and the man picked up a shovel and beat him about the head so severely that his eyes and his ears blind.

The boy was driven out with a shovel, and John Brown was invited indoors to sit at the table with the white family. John Brown said, “That’s when I devoted my entire life to abolitionism.” The injustice of that scene just never never left him.

I was outraged. I could not believe a human being could treat someone on such slim grounds so poorly. I swore at that moment that I would be the eternal enemy of slavery and put an end to this evil.

By the time he was eighteen, John Brown had personally led one slave to freedom and defiantly declared in public, did all runaways who came knocking at his door would be welcome. Brown became a radical abolitionist.

Frederick Douglass said, “My commitment to enslaved people was like a candle to John Brown’s shining sun. I could live for the slave. John Brown died a slave.” John Brown felt that the Calvinist idea of predestination applied to him. He felt chosen, really, by God to wipe out slavery. That was his mission. That was the main driving thing. Was like, slavery was, as John Brown viewed it, a war against an entire race of people. And he was very inspired by the Calvinist leader of the English Revolution of the 1640s, Oliver Cromwell, the Puritan warrior. Cromwell himself fought for freedom, but the freedom from tyrannical oppression by King Charles. He didn’t really concern himself with enslaved people. But John Brown kept the biography of Oliver Cromwell right next to his Bible on his shelf. And he became known as the Oliver Cromwell of abolitionism, the Fighter, the Fighter.

John Brown’s inspiration from religion was, in a sense, unique because he was the first person to first Christian to take up arms consistently against slavery before the Civil War.

And you’ve been listening to David S. Reynolds, author of John Brown Abolitionist. You’re also hearing some readings from John Brown by Doug Dobbs. The story of John Brown continues here on Our American Stories. Lee Habib here, the host of Our American Stories. Every day on this show, we’re bringing inspiring stories from across this great country—stories from our big cities and small towns. But we truly can’t do the show without you. Our stories are free to listen to, but they’re not free to make. If you love what you hear, go to OurAmericanStories.com and click the donate button. Give a little, give a lot. Go to OurAmericanStories.com and give. And we returned to Our American Stories and the story of Abolitionist John Brown with author David S. Reynolds.

When we last left off, John Brown had witnessed a slave—a child—beat over the head by a shovel, and had decided to dedicate his life to a mission he saw as truly holy, the destruction of slavery. Let’s return to the story.

In eighteen fifty-five, Brown went to Kansas with money and guns given to him by secret supporters in the East. This was the time of Bleeding Kansas, the frontier territory where pro-slavery and anti-slavery settlers fought their own Civil War six years before the rest of the nation.

Kansas was hanging in the balance between slavery and freedom. What was happening was very corrupt ruffians from Missouri, a neighboring state, would go across the border and terrorize the polling booths, take over the polling boots, and they elected a fraudulent pro-slavery government to try to make it a slavery state. This pro-slavery government was actually supported by President Franklin Pierce. And again, if Kansas goes to slavery, they could be like dominoes, and all the Western territories, the future states, could have tumbled into the pro-slavery camp, and the cause would be lost. So John Brown goes there with several of his sons and family members, and he says, “I’m going to fight if necessary to the death.”

And we worked and we built, and we built some cabins, and we got that through that winter, and it was an awful time. In the summer of the next year, by then, I had had formed a militia to defend ourselves, and I was given word that the town of Lawrence, north of us, was under threat from a Missouri militia. We raced north as fast.