Midnight Rising: John Brown and the Raid That Sparked the Civil War Hardcover – Bargain Price by Tony Horwitz Read Free Book Online

“shall not be sunk to the miserable level of what is little above brutishness—sunk to be like owned goods, and driven cattle!”
    Whitman’s outburst was prompted by national debate over the land grab under way during the Mexican War. Launched in 1846, under President James Polk—like Andrew Jackson, a slave-owning cotton planter—the war concluded in 1848 with the United States increasing its geographic size by a third at Mexico’s expense. That same year, the gold rush to California began. This rapid expansion brought the slavery question to a fiercer boil than ever before. Could Southerners carry their “property” into the new territories, and would these territories become free states or slave?
    After heated wrangling, Congress put off a reckoning by cutting a deal, just as it had done in 1820 over Missouri. The Compromise of 1850 carved the newly acquired land into three pieces: the free state of California and two territories, Utah and New Mexico, where the slavery question was left unresolved. In a major concession to Southerners, Congress also enacted a new and much tougher Fugitive Slave Act. Federal officials and ordinary citizens were now required to aid in the capture and return of runaways, even to the point of forming posses. In effect, every Northerner could be deputized as a slave catcher. Civil liberties were sharply curtailed, too, denying fugitive slaves the right to testify on their own behalf or to be tried before a jury.
    This noxious statute instantly roused antislavery fury in the North. Boston mobs set upon slave hunters and freed captured fugitives. InPennsylvania, armed blacks, aided by local whites, fought off an attempt to recover four runaways and shot their owner dead. The Fugitive Slave Act also led Harriet Beecher Stowe to write Uncle Tom’s Cabin, which sold three hundred thousand copies during its first year in print and brought the cruelties of slavery alive for a mainstream audience.
    The furor reenergized John Brown as well. “It now seems that the Fugitive Slave Law was to be the means of making more Abolitionists than all the lectures we have had for years,” he exulted in a letter to Mary in late 1850. Brown was back in Springfield at the time, trying to salvage what he could from his wool business. While there, he also devised a secret organization to fight slave catchers. He gave this self-defense group a telling name: the United States League of Gileadites. This referred to allies of Gideon, who guarded fords across the Jordan River and slew wicked Midianites fleeing across it.
    Brown laid out his tactics in his “Words of Advice” to the Gileadites. He counseled them to act swiftly, secretly, and decisively, like Gideon. “ Let the first blow be the signal for all to engage; and when engaged do not work by halves, but make clean work with your enemies. ” Brown also set out a stringent code of honor: never confess, never betray, never renounce the cause. “ Stand by one another, and by your friends, while a drop of blood remains; and be hanged, if you must, but tell no tales out of school. ”
    Forty-four people in Springfield, most if not all of them black, signed an agreement to form the first branch of the League of Gileadites. Little else is known of the group or of Brown’s role beyond his “Words of Advice.” But he had laid out a blueprint for future action, even to the point of anticipating his own dramatic end.
     
     
    THE FUGITIVE SLAVE ACT of 1850 was just one of a series of provocations that propelled Brown toward violent action, and the nation toward disunion and conflict. Southern cotton production boomed in the 1840s and 1850s, supplying most of the world’s demand and outstripping all other American exports combined. By the eve of the Civil War, the nation’s twelve richest counties all lay in the South, a region that constituted, on its own, the fourth largest economy in the world.
    The stereotypical “Old South” of columned mansions,