It Happened Here --"John Brown's Body Lies A Mouldering..."

John Brown.s body lies a mouldering in the grave,

 John Brown.s body lies a mouldering in the grave,

 John Brown.s body lies a mouldering in the grave,

 His soul is marchin' on.
        --Civil War Ballad/Marching Song

Consider what a strange and convoluted saga it is for a failed wool merchant and farmer on a little hardscrabble farm in the middle of the Adirondacks to sally forth to stage a revolution to free the slaves of the American South.  Then once he had ignited the passions of the South against the North and vice-versa, for his "martyred" body to be returned like some sacred relic (or reviled symbol), per his request, to be buried a few dozen feet from front doorway of that little farmhouse!

         John Brown's Farmhouse, North Elba, NY

           (in John Brown Rd, off of Co.Rte 73

                                                  
















                                                                             John Brown Statue



Dozens of historians from the 19th, into the 21st century  have attempted to explain the psyche of this man driven to risk everything to make a revolution to free the slaves. In more recent years some historians have argued this focus demeans the man and distracts from what he tried to achieve. Most would agree, however, that Brown was a man obsessed with his father's and grandfather's perceived accomplishments and driven to make his mark in the world that would rival theirs.
Brown saw his grandfather as a martyr who had died for the cause of  American freedom. (Captain John Brown was a revolutionary war militiaman who, mustered from his home in Connecticut, died of disease while in camp with Washington's Army opposing the British invasion of New York.) His father he saw as a financially successful patriarch who ruled and shepherded his large family of eight, and became a pioneer leader of Hudson Ohio. Repeatedly frustrated and failing in business ventures John Brown gradually shifted his attention to the plight of black men in America. As he became involved in northern abolitionist politics, Brown thought he had discovered his place in 1848 when he offered to be a model and teacher for free blacks trying to set up  independent farms in the Adirondack wilderness as part of a project by the fabulously wealthy land speculator Gerrit Smith. Smith's plan was to give away 3000 parcels of 50 acres each to blacks to enable them to become economically independent and wealthy enough to meet property requirements to vote under New York law.

Brown wrote to is father,  "I can think of no place I would sooner go then to be with these poor despised Africans, then try to encourage them, and show them as far as I am capable."

 Though nearly 2000 parcels had been given away, the plan was faltering by the time Brown became associated with it. Few blacks, recruited from Albany, Troy and Kingston, with rural roots in the South, were prepared for farming in the Adirondacks with its short growing season,  poor rocky soils, and long bitterly cold winters.  Most of those chosen were even unable to amass the $100 or so necessary to buy supplies--wagons, livestock, farm and construction equipment necessary to make the move and begin farming.  Those that were able to relocate frequently fell victims to unscrupulous white neighbors who, posing as guides, led them to poorer pieces of property, charging them exorbitant fees for their services and employing other schemes to defraud them of their property.  By the time Brown arrived, and began clearing his piece of land, to begin farming, a mere twenty two families had made the move and begun to settle in.  Bravely they banded together, calling their community "Timbucto," named for the ancient black sub-Saharan city famous as a center of learning and racial tolerance.1

In 1850 Richard Henry Dana, author of Two Years Before The Mast, stumbled upon the Brown cabin, after he and a companion had wandered for several days, lost in the Adirondack wilderness. Brown invited them in, giving them supper and provisions before sending them on their way the next day. Dana reported in his diary he was struck by the respect and deference Brown showed several black dinner companions with whom Brown and his family were sharing his dinner table that evening.

JOHN BROWN
OCCUPIED A HOUSE ON THIS
SITE IN 1848-50 WHILE                              A missing State Marker that was originally located along Co. Rte 73, 1 1/2 mi.
CLEARING THE LAND                              south of Lake Placid.
NOW KNOWN AS
JOHN BROWN'S FARM.

Had John Brown continued on this course as his life's work, he might have been remembered as a benign and salutatory figure in the struggle for black equality--a footnote in history. But this was not to be.

 Five of Brown's grown sons, who shared his views about race and slavery, but not his personal mission, had moved to the Kansas frontier.  In 1854 the Kansas-Nebraska Act was passed, dodging the slavery question by requiring the settlers of the territories, themselves, to decide if they would become "free" or "slave-owning" states.  As tensions rose between pro and anti-slavery forces, a small army of pro-slavery "Border Ruffians" from Missouri flooded across the state border to intimidate "free soil" advocates and skew the vote. John Brown's sons wrote him asking for assistance
and begging him to bring weapons to enable them and their companions to defend themselves.  Soon Brown was in Kansas, fully involved in a guerrilla war as pro and anti-slavery communities went up in flames. John Brown gained fame for his role in defending the settlement of Osawatamie, against a Border Riffian force seven times as large as his. He also gained notoriety for his suspected role in a midnight raid against pro-slavery supporters, in which five settlers were taken from their homes in Pottawatamie Kansas and brutally hacked to death with homemade broad swords. (In recent years, some historians have attempted to understand Brown by applying the model of  'terrorist' to him and comparing his actions and psyche to the likes of Timothy McVeigh and Osama Bin Ladin.)

Before the issue of slavery was finally democratically decided in Kansas, Brown and his surviving four sons had left the state, but John Brown had become committed to waging war against Southern Slave Power, through militant actions. Brown began to travel in New York and New England, speaking to abolitionist groups and supporters, attempting to raise money for arms and recruit followers for what he called a "Subterranean Pass-Way," a kind of militant underground railroad  that would operate from the Appalachian wilderness to swoop down to raid towns and plantations to forcibly free their slaves who could either continue on to sanctuary in Canada or join Brown's army to fight to destroy slavery, piecemeal.

In 1857, on a fundraising swing  through Connecticut, Brown found his grandfather's grave site. He had his tombstone shipped to North Elba and erected in front of his house. He had it inscribed on the back, in memory of Frederick, his son who had been killed in Kansas. A week later he let it be known he wanted it inscribed with his own name if he should not return from one of his operations.

 
The gravestone John Brown brought from his grandfather's grave in Connecticut. The inscription reads "In memory of  Capt. John Brown
Who died in New York. September ye 3, 1776, in ye 48th year of his age"

to which the inscription requested by John Brown was added
"John Brown, Born May 9, 1800, was Executed at Charles
-ton Va., Dec 2, 1859"

and his son's inscription "Oliver Brown, Born Mar 9, 1839, was
killed at Harper's Ferry, Oct 15, 1859,"

On the other side is an inscription for Frederick Brown, killed in Kansas.














John Brown's grave is set in front of the second set of trees on the right.




By the beginning of 1859, Brown's thoughts had evolved to where he  no longer talked about the "Subterranean Pass-Way". Instead he began to dwell (mostly privately) on schemes to facilitate a black revolution. To that end he ordered 1000 pikes to be made by a Connecticut blacksmith and he began making plans to capture arms from the arsenal at Harper's Ferry, Virginia.
 

Twelve months later, John Brown was dead,  executed for "Treason against the State of Virginia" and as an accomplice in the murders of four men in Harper's Ferry.  Ten of his co-conspirators were also dead and two more would die by hanging.²

Between the time of his capture and his execution, Brown, through his trial testimony, letters to supporters and his pronouncements from prison would ignite a firestorm of controversy.  To Northern liberals he became a hero and a martyr.  Ralph Waldo Emerson compared him to Jesus Christ.  To Southern slaveholders he had become the symbol of the palpable threat to their way of life; the vanguard of unknown numbers of radicals ready to ignite a racial war.  Increasingly it had become clear to them that their only option was to secede from  the nation that had become hostile to them.

The last chapter in the Brown saga was one that eerily mimicked one that would occur six years later, to another "emancipator".  Brown's backers arranged for a special train to bring Brown's body home to be buried, and supporters lined the tracks to see his train pass. Then, a guard of local citizens met the ferry that brought Brown's body across Lake Champlain from the Vermont rail-head, and, as the NYSHM says,
guarded it at the local court house in Elizabethtown, before it continued on to its final resting place in the front yard of the Brown Homestead.3



Marker of the Week -- Re-purposed (Again!)  There are just too many examples of buildings that have gone through a succession of uses not to return to this topic.

Beginning life as a jail, it became the City Hall of Hudson, before it became a theater and then the home for many years to the Register-Star  Hudson's paper.  After some years vacant it is undergoing a face lift and presumably a new future.










1 By 1860, only one Black family was left in North Elba.

2 The raid on Harper's Ferry has been written about extensively. A good, readable account of the raid is Tony Horowitz' book, Midnight Rising, published in 2011.

3 Mary Brown, John Brown's stoic and long suffering wife, only lived at the farm until 1863 when, perhaps overwhelmed by the continuing painful reminders of the past sold the farm and moved to California.