Don Pedro, John Brown, and Black Enslavemen

The sketch below is of the "big daddy" of the sheep world in the 19th century United States, Don Pedro. Don Pedro was brought to the US by a Frenchman, E. I. DuPont de Nemours, who initially settled in New York in 1801.

Don Pedro Hagley Museum and Library

Once in New York, Du Pont arranged to have Don Pedro “tupped” (copulate with) nine ewes, and thereafter became a major influence in sheep breeding. At the time, there was a kind of "craze" among sheep farmers in the U.S. over acquiring Merino sheep, a breed (or group of breeds) that include Saxony and Rambouillet, and others. Even the slaveholder President Thomas Jefferson wanted some Merinos for his flocks in Virginia.

After a lot of breeding and even selling off of the feisty Don Pedro, DuPont reacquired him and moved the busy sheep to a new farm in Delaware, near Wilmington. To preserve and propagate the breed, he even offered Don Pedro to neighboring farmers for free, although initially few farmers valued the offer enough to use him. Eventually, however, farmers caught the Merino "fever" and Don Pedro was at it again.

At ten years old, Don Pedro was described as “very strong and active,” “stout, short, and wooly,” with large, spiraled horns, short legs, and a weight of 138 pounds, with fine fleece, 1 3/4 long, thick, and close to his body. Don Pedro died in 1811, but his pedigree lived on, well into the time when an abolitionist named John Brown was pursuing excellence in the fine sheep and wool trade.

In his 1839 sheep-buying sojourn, Brown thus purchased some of the sires of Don Pedro and mentions it in his memorandum book (I), held by the Boston Public Library (also shown).

Now, as historical detail goes, this is perhaps no more than interesting trivia, but it adds color to the John Brown story, getting beyond the standard "drive-by" biographies offered.

MORE IMPORTANTLY, let us not forget that while John Brown was buying Don Pedro's kids from farms in Connecticut in 1839, African children were being sold away like livestock in the South, African people were in general treated like living property (our nation practiced "chattel slavery," not just slavery), African men were used to "breed," African women were routinely reduced to breeders as well as raped by white masters and their family members, and black children were sexually molested and violently abused.

It's not an exaggeration to say that many African men and women, boys and girls, were treated with far less kindness than Don Pedro was treated in his busy "ovis aries" existence.

White society then, and largely today, went on with its daily business with little regard to the vast and horrible nature of black enslavement in this nation, and today many white people do not want to talk about the realities of slavery, do not want to talk about what this nation owes the descendants of African slavery in this nation, and do not want to admit that their ancestors were slaveholding thieves of stolen black labor and stolen black bodies.

Say what you want about the Germans, but they've done far better in facing the atrocities of their history than have white folks in this nation, especially the ones whose forebears benefitted from black enslavement, and even more especially among the white evangelicals with slaveholder and "Confederate" pedigrees.

As for John Brown, I'm glad that his successes as a specialist in fine sheep and wool in the 1840s are only a biographical subtext, and that, when the South was on the edge of striking out on its own as a slave republic, he made a desperate, radical effort to liberate the oppressed. And although he failed, his example and his words put a light on the true spirit of the South, and his spirit forced a minimalist Republican effort to maintain slavery into a war to end slavery, despite Lincoln's slow-minded and slow-hearted intentions in 1860.

As he waited to hang in his Virginia jail cell in 1859, I wonder if John Brown thought about the long trail that led him from Don Pedro sheep in 1839 to Harper's Ferry twenty years later, especially when he took his quill pen and marked off Revelation 18:13 in his Bible:

"And cinnamon, and odors, and ointments, and frankincense, and wine, and oil, and fine flour, and wheat, and beasts, and sheep, and horses, and chariots, and slaves, and souls of men."