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

liberty, no less—pushed abolitionist fury to the bursting point. “My thoughts are murder to the state,” Henry David Thoreau wrote in his journal, no longer able to reflect on nature during his long walks. A few weeks later, William Lloyd Garrison commemorated July 4 by publicly burning a copy of the U.S. Constitution, branding it “a covenant with death, and an agreement with hell.” As the document went up in flames, he proclaimed, “So perish all compromises with tyranny!”
    Abolitionists were still a small minority in the North, often mocked as cranks, scolds, and “ultras” or extremists, well outside the mainstream. But the Kansas-Nebraska Act, more than any previous event, gave substance to the specter of an insatiable “Slave Power,” intent on devouring the liberties of all Americans. As a group of leading antislavery congressmen warned in a widely circulated appeal to the nation, the bill was “an atrocious plot,” designed “to exclude from a vast unoccupied region, emigrants from the Old World and free laborers from our own States, and convert it into a dreary region of despotism, inhabited by masters and slaves.”
    In the wake of the Kansas-Nebraska debate, opponents of slavery’s extension formed a new political coalition: the Republican Party. Societies also sprang up to recruit and assist emigrants to Kansas. Since the territory’s status would be determined by popular vote, antislavery activists—and their proslavery counterparts—sought to fill Kansas with settlers sympathetic to their cause. In doing so, partisans on both sides resorted to scare tactics and crude stereotypes. Southerners conjured a tide of “grasping, skin-flint nigger stealing Yankees” washing over Kansas, while Northerners caricatured southern pioneers as “Pukes”—illiterate backwoodsmen with whiskey-red eyes, tobacco-stained teeth, and bowie knives.
     
     
    IN THE SUMMER OF 1854, Kansas fever took hold in drought-stricken Ohio, where John Brown’s grown sons owned farms and orchards. John junior told his father that he’d decided to sell out and move west. Brown approved, expressing praise of any family member “disposed to go toKansas or Nebraska, with a view to help defeat SATAN and his legions.” But he was unable to join in this laudable mission. “ I feel committed to operate in another part of the field, ” he wrote John junior on August 21.
    At the time, Brown was living in Akron, where he’d moved his wife and younger children in 1851 while contesting legal claims and wrapping up his wool partnership. He now planned to return with his family to North Elba, to resume work with black farmers in upstate New York, the “part of the field” he referred to in his letter. Also, Mary Brown was eight months pregnant and eager to settle after years of near nomadism. This was no time for her fifty-four-year-old husband to set off on a western adventure.
    But the notion of going to Kansas clearly tempted Brown. “If I were not so committed,” he wrote John junior that August, “I would be on my way this fall.” In the autumn of 1854, his commitment wavered. By this point, five of his sons had decided to head west, and they wanted their father to join them. Brown acknowledged in a letter that going to Kansas seemed “more likely to benefit the colored people on the whole. ” But he still felt obliged to work with the black settlers in North Elba, having “volunteered in their service.”
    That winter, his older sons trekked west with their families and livestock. In the spring of 1855, they staked claims near the Kansas hamlet of Osawatomie, where Brown’s half sister, Florella, had settled with her missionary husband a few months before. The Brown sons plowed, planted, and wrote long letters to their father about the dire political situation in the territory.
    “Every Slaveholding State,” John junior wrote in May, “is furnishing men and money to fasten Slavery upon this glorious land, by