It is a
matter of discussion among historians that not everything that has happened in
the past is worthy of being considered “historical.” That Alexander the Great may have spilled his
wine on a given day is not itself a point of real historical value, unless by
spilling wine, for instance, he ruined a valuable map, the lack thereof
afterward having impacted his military success in a given campaign. Not all that is past is history in this
sense. However, the seeming insignificant
details of a life remain a point of interest for the biographer, who is always somewhat
other than a historian notwithstanding s/he is nothing other than a historian.
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| Brown as he looked in the late 1840s |
First, those
insignificant details may reveal aspects of the subject of interest, aspects
that otherwise are valuable in reflecting the subject in more weighty contexts,
historically speaking. Second, the
details simply speak to that palate of colors, shapes, and textures that make
biography one of the more appetizing aspects of “history.” After all, steak on a plate may be the meal, but
who would not prefer steak on a plate garnished with small, tasty additions?
A Letter
of No Great Value
Such is
the case with a letter from John Brown, written 169 years ago this month, and
sent to an inn keeper in eastern Pennsylvania.
This letter that has nothing to do with the abolitionist’s historic
antebellum role, nor even of the less interesting aspects of his career as a wool
merchant in the mid-19th century.
The letter, written on January 25, 1849, is charged with frustration and
a desire for justice, yet has only to do with the most mundane of matters—sleeping
in at a 19th century version of a motel because the manager failed
to give him a wake-up call.
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| Owen Brown, who died in 1856 |
Nevertheless,
the letter is interesting because it provides insight into the unscrupulous
manner in which John Brown pursued justice as he perceived it, regardless of
the matter—and how, for John Brown, justice-delayed was not only justice-denied,
but a thorn in his flesh that sooner or later demanded action. Yes, slavery was the supreme thorn in the
flesh of John Brown’s moral and spiritual being; in a lesser sense, so was the
exploitation of wool growers by wealthy manufacturers in the 1840s, or the
abuse of humble settlers by elites and bureaucrats in the 1820s. But there were other thorns in his life, miscellaneous
episodes of disadvantage and disgust, just as there are in our lives—from that
unfairly given parking ticket, the overcharged bill at dinner, or the failure “to
get what I paid for.”
The Letter
as Document
Interestingly,
the only reason this letter has survived is that it was sent by Brown as a
business letter, although it most certainly was a personal complaint. At the time, he was in partnership with the
wealthy Ohio tycoon, Simon Perkins Jr., and was operating a wool commission
house in Springfield, Massachusetts.
However, neither the original letter nor a response from the addressee
have survived for history. We know about
this letter only because a handwritten copy of it exists in the letter book of
the firm of Perkins & Brown, now held in the Boyd B. Stutler Collection in
West Virginia. The handwritten copy
exists in Brown’s own hand.1
To no
surprise, the late Boyd Stutler was the only one who knew about this letter,
and likewise it was of no apparent interest to anyone else, other than perhaps
his friend and correspondent, the Reverend Clarence Gee. In 1954, Stutler wrote a two-part article
about this minor incident for a newspaper published in the town where Brown had
overslept, Bedford, Pennsylvania.2 In contextualizing the story
behind the letter, Stutler sought to find greater significance in the episode
by observing that John Brown subsequently made stops in Bedford while preparing
for the Harper’s Ferry raid in the following decade. This made interesting
reading for the Bedford Gazette in
1954, but has hardly been a point of interest since that time.
 |
| Bedford, Pa., in the 1840s |
The
Incident
In
September 1848, John Brown and his father Owen, aged seventy-eight, were
traveling together from the east to Ohio, probably after the elder had visited
his son and family in the town of Springfield, Massachusetts. The two had likely traveled by train from
Springfield down to New York City, and then purchased tickets for a long ride,
first from New York to Philadelphia by train, and then by stage coach from
Philadelphia to Pittsburgh. From there, they could pass up through the rest of
western Pennsylvania and reach home in Ohio’s Western Reserve in the northeastern
section of the state.
The trip westward
from Philadelphia by stage continued into the evening, so Brown purchased
tickets that allowed for a layover in the town of Bedford, Pennsylvania, about
two hundred miles west of Philadelphia. In
the 1848, Bedford was a small but active town (based on an 1850 description3)
with a sheriff, inns, school teachers, doctors, a printer, and two
clergymen. There were about one hundred
and forty seated lots, and a few hundred taxable inhabitants including over
sixty free black residents.
Upon
arrival in Bedford, the Browns found their way to an inn owned by John [Johan?]
Ottinger, who is listed in the same 1850 record as a “gentleman,” which seems
to mean he was a property owner in town. Given the hour and his father’s
weariness, Brown obtained a room from Ottinger, apparently on the basis that he
also “personally” agreed to awaken them in the night so they could board the first
stage to Pittsburgh, which was scheduled to arrive in Bedford before daylight.
The
Offense
Unfortunately,
the travelers were left to their slumbers while two stage coaches passed in the
night. Although he did not awaken in
time, John Brown was an early riser and awoke before Ottinger. By the time the proprietor was up and about,
Brown had already spoken to his night staff, who had informed him that they
knew nothing of Ottinger’s promise to awaken them. Much to his disgust, Brown also
learned of the two stage coaches that had passed through town, and that there
was sufficient seating had they boarded.
For Brown, this offense was compounded when Ottinger—perhaps out of
embarrassment—tried to cover his failure with a lie, telling Brown that he had
let them sleep through because the night coaches were full. But Brown had already had already conducted
his own inquiry and more than suspected that Ottinger was lying to him.
Obviously,
Brown must have been quite outraged, but his immediate concern was to escort
his father back to Ohio and attend to pressing business matters. Now, he could not leave Bedford for another
day, and to make matters worse, he had to choose between an uncertain place on
the next west-bound stage coach, or pay for a different conveyance. Brown apparently
chose the latter, which carried him and his father along some route through the
town of New Cumberland4 toward their destination. These unforeseen expenses cost Brown an
additional $20, which really became a festering issue over the next several
months. While $20 might not seem like a
reason to get steamed, one may think differently when considering the value of
this amount with an inflation calculator.
According to one online inflation calculator that allowed me to compare
the U.S. dollar in 1848 with the same in 2018, it seems these additional costs
amounted to around $600 for Brown. No
wonder he was still brooding over it in the new year of 1849!
The Letter
It is
interesting that Brown did not write this letter until four months after the
incident—as he put it in the letter, “the thing” had “lain up to this time.” Why Brown waited so long to contact Ottinger
is not known, nor does the letter suggest previous efforts were made to reach
the inn keeper with his complaint.
Perhaps Brown had told Ottinger at the time that he expected some form
of remuneration, and waited to hear from him in vain. Or it may be that Brown initially decided to
let it go, but it had increasingly bothered him until he could not remain silent
any longer. I suspect there is some unrecorded
back story that we will never know, and admittedly we do not have Ottinger’s
side of the episode either. But given
that Brown was typically honest to a fault in matters of money and business, I
am inclined to believe his account.
A Little
Intimidation?
Whatever
the case, the other interesting aspect of this episode is that Brown addressed
Ottinger with a letter from the firm, not personally from himself. Writing on behalf of the firm in regard to
Brown, he signed the letter as “Perkins & Brown,” and sent it to Ottinger
through some of his clients named Patterson and Ewing, who happened to live in the
offender’s vicinity. In the body of the letter, Brown refers to
himself in the third person, as “John Brown of this firm,” and otherwise uses
terms like “this firm” and “us.” Since
we have only his handwritten copy in the firm’s letter book, we have no idea if
he also wrote the actual letter with his own hand, or if he had an employee do
so. Regardless, the letter sent to
Ottinger was as corporate as it was intentional.
The reason
for this method is obvious enough: John Brown hoped that Ottinger would be more
likely to refund his money if intimidated by a firm rather than challenged by
an individual. “Now sir,” Brown wrote in the name of Perkins & Brown, “it happens
that this firm is extensively known in P[ennsylvania] & in other States
[and] unless you immediately refund to us the Twenty Dollars you may expect
such measures will be taken with you, & such exposure made of your
character as will possibly give you a little trouble” [my emphasis].
It appears that we will never know the outcome of the Brown-Ottinger
episode. We have neither Brown’s
original letter nor any reply from Ottinger as far as the documents are
concerned. Furthermore, the episode
seems not to have been discussed or recalled by any of his family members, probably
because they were not involved, or because there proved no memorable
outcome. As noted, we have only Brown’s
side of the story, so we can only reconstruct Ottinger’s side based on what
Brown said—that he probably forgot and then tried to cover over his error by misrepresentation. However,
in the “moral vineyard,” as Stutler liked to say, it does appear Ottinger’s row
was shorter than Brown’s, and this may be why there is no known response from
the offender.
A Parallel
There is a parallel in this regard, with another “threatening” letter
that Brown wrote to a dishonest neighbor in 1841, and for which there is no
surviving response. At that time, Brown
was up to his eyes in money troubles and wrote an outraged letter to Amos
Chamberlain, whom we remember only because the abolitionist’s letter somehow
survived. In simple terms, Brown was
holding the deed of a farm and wanted to protect it from being seized in court
by a man whom he deemed wicked and unprincipled in his lawsuit. When
Brown emerged from that legal battle, he wanted the property returned by Chamberlain
in order to satisfy other debts and creditors breathing down his neck. He was shocked, however, when he realized that
Chamberlain had decided to keep the property for himself—something that Brown
felt was an infuriating betrayal. Like
the letter to Ottinger, it took months before Brown chose to write to
Chamberlain, months after the incident.
In writing to Chamberlain, Brown crafted a four-page letter, comprised
partially of appeals to friendship and partially of threats of legal “war,” along
with references involving the judgments of their mutual neighbors.5 In the
end, it does not appear that Chamberlain ever responded to Brown, although his
children spoke harshly of Brown in later years.
At least from Brown’s side of these stories, both men had taken
advantage of him by breaking trust, albeit not the law. In both cases, neither is there any reason to
think that Brown’s demand for justice was ever satisfied, or even answered for
that matter.
A Small Window
Like the Chamberlain letter of 1841, the letter to Ottinger in 1849
provides a small window into Brown’s life, one with a view that fully
complements what we know of the man from other narrative details. The first is that whether in regard to
matters of business and industry or human rights, Brown was heavy-handed in his
quest for justice. Generally speaking,
John Brown neither cheated nor lied, nor did he have moral patience with men
who did.
Second, he could be longsuffering, or at least he could be overly
ponderous and reflective to a fault in dealing with opponents. In this case, as in the 1841 incident with
Amos Chamberlain, Brown waited months to address the issue on “final”
terms. Although it would seem that he
lost in both cases, he did not do so without a fight. As Stutler concluded of the incident, “it is
highly probable that” John Brown “got only the satisfaction of letting off
steam,” although he may have “caused the landlord some uneasiness” at best.6
Finally, Brown believed in the power—both morally and legally—of the
written word. In his youth and business
years, he naturally engaged in the practice of writing contracts, certificates,
and other documents. As his antislavery
views evolved from passive to militant abolition, he documented covenants,
declarations, constitutions and organizational documents, always invoking a
moral foundation. Even at Harper’s
Ferry, witnesses attested that he endeavored to secure agreement and signatures
with slaveholders as part of his efforts to exchange prisoners for enslaved
people—a fixation that may in part have cost him his tactical advantage and led
to his defeat and demise.
John Brown believed that words were the first recourse in battling
injustice. He was never a writer,
properly speaking, nor did he leave a legacy of literary political discourse. Yet even the most mundane record of his life reveals
his belief in the power of words in the pursuit of truth and equity.
1 See Perkins & Brown to J.
Ottinger, Jan. 25, 1849, MS03-0152, in
Boyd B. Stutler John Brown Collection, West Virginia State Archives.
2 See Boyd B. Stutler. “Old John Brown,” The Bedford [Pa.] Gazette, September 13
& 17, 1954.
3 Excerpt from Ch. XXIV, “Borough of
Bedford,” in History off Bedford, Somerset And Fulton
Counties, Pennsylvania (Chicago: Waterman, Watkins & Co., 1884).
4 Brown wrote “Cumberland,” but I
assume he was referring to the town of New Cumberland, which was settled in the
early 1830s. If any Pennsylvania reader
happens to know more details about this point, I’d be pleased to hear from you.
5 Stutler, “Old Brown.”
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6 Brown’s letter to Amos Chamberlain
is found in the John Brown – Oswald Garrison Villard Papers, Columbia
University, Rare Book and Manuscript Collection, New York, N.Y.
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