UNDERGROUND RAILROAD AND THE COMING OF WAR

by Matthew Pinsker


The Underground Railroad was a metaphor. Yet many textbooks treat it as an official name for a secret network that once helped escaping slaves. The more literal-minded students end up questioning whether these fixed escape routes were actually under the ground. But the phrase “Underground Railroad” is better understood as a rhetorical device that compared unlike things for the purpose of illustration. In this case, the metaphor described an array of people connected mainly by their intense desire to help other people escape from slavery. Understanding the history of the phrase changes its meaning in profound ways.

Even to begin a lesson by examining the two words “underground” and “railroad” helps provide a tighter chronological framework than usual with this topic. There could be no “underground railroad” until actual railroads became familiar to the American public–in other words, during the 1830s and 1840s. There had certainly been slave escapes before that period, but they were not described by any kind of railroad moniker. The phrase also highlights a specific geographic orientation. Antebellum railroads existed primarily in the North–home to about 70 percent of the nation’s 30,000 miles of track by 1860. Slaves fled in every direction of the compass, but the metaphor packed its greatest wallop in those communities closest to the nation’s whistle-stops.

Looking into the phrase “Underground Railroad” also suggests two essential questions: who coined the metaphor? And why would they want to compare and inextricably link a wide-ranging effort to support runaway slaves with an organized network of secret railroads?

The answers can be found in the abolitionist movement. Abolitionists, or those who agitated for the immediate destruction of slavery, wanted to publicize, and perhaps even exaggerate, the number of slave escapes and the extent of the network that existed to support those fugitives. According to the pioneering work of historian Larry Gara, abolitionist newspapers and orators were the ones who first used the term “Underground Railroad” during the early 1840s, and they did so to taunt slaveholders(1). To some participants this seemed a dangerous game. Frederick Douglass, for instance, claimed to be appalled. “I have never approved of the very public manner in which some of our western friends have conducted what they call the underground railroad,” he wrote in his Narrative in 1845, warning that “by their open declarations” these mostly Ohio-based (“western”) abolitionists were creating an “upperground railroad” (2).

Publicity about escapes and open defiance of federal law only spread in the years that followed, especially after the controversial Fugitive Slave Act of 1850. Anxious fugitives and their allies now fought back with greater ferocity. Douglass himself became more militant. In September 1851, he helped a former slave named William Parker escape to Canada after Parker had spearheaded a resistance in Christiana, Pennsylvania that left a Maryland slaveholder dead and federal authorities in disarray. The next year in a fiery speech at Pittsburgh, the famous orator stepped up the rhetorical attack, vowing, “The only way to make the Fugitive Slave Law a dead letter is to make half a dozen or more dead kidnappers” (3). This level of defiance was not uncommon in the antislavery North and soon imperiled both federal statute and national union. Between 1850 and 1861, there were only about 350 fugitive slave cases prosecuted under the notoriously tough law, and none in the abolitionist-friendly New England states after 1854 (4). White Southerners complained bitterly while abolitionists grew more emboldened.

Yet students often seem to imagine runaway slaves cowering in the shadows while ingenious “conductors” and “stationmasters” devised elaborate secret hiding places and coded messages to help spirit fugitives to freedom. They make few distinctions between North and South, often imagining that slave patrollers and their barking dogs chased terrified runaways from Mississippi to Maine. Instead, the Underground Railroad deserves to be explained in terms of sectional differences and the coming of the Civil War.

One way to grasp the Underground Railroad in its full political complexity is to look closely at the rise of abolitionism and the spread of free black vigilance committees during the 1830s. Nineteenth-century American communities employed extra-legal “vigilance” groups whenever they felt threatened. During the mid-1830s, free black residents first in New York and then across other Northern cities began organizing vigilant associations to help them guard against kidnappers. Almost immediately, however, these groups extended their protective services to runaway slaves. They also soon allied themselves with the new abolitionist organizations, such as William Lloyd Garrison’s Anti-Slavery Society. The most active vigilance committees were in Boston, Detroit, New York, and Philadelphia led by now largely forgotten figures such as Lewis Hayden, George DeBaptiste, David Ruggles, and William Still (5). Black men typically dominated these groups, but membership also included whites, such as some surprisingly feisty Quakers, and at least a few women. These vigilance groups constituted the organized core of what soon became known as the Underground Railroad. Smaller communities organized too, but did not necessarily invoke the “vigilance” label, nor integrate as easily across racial, religious and gender lines. Nonetheless, during the 1840s when William Parker formed a “mutual protection” society in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, or when John Brown created his League of Gileadites in Springfield, Massachusetts, they emulated this vigilance model.

These committees functioned more or less like committees anywhere—electing officers, holding meetings, keeping records, and raising funds. They guarded their secrets, but these were not covert operatives in the manner of the French Resistance. In New York, the vigilance committee published an annual report. Detroit vigilance agents filled newspaper columns with reports about their monthly traffic. Several committees released the addresses of their officers. One enterprising figure circulated a business card that read, “Underground Railroad Agent” (6). Even sensitive material often got recorded somewhere. A surprising amount of this secret evidence is also available for classroom use. One can explore letters detailing Harriet Tubman’s comings and goings, and even a reimbursement request for her worn-out shoes by using William Still’s The Underground Railroad (1872), available online in a dozen different places, and which presents the fascinating materials he collected as head of the Philadelphia Vigilance Committee. Anyone curious about how much it cost to help runaways can access the site where social studies teacher Dean Eastman and his students at Beverly High School have transcribed and posted the account books of the Boston vigilance committee. And the list of accessible Underground Railroad material grows steadily (7).

But how did these Northern vigilance groups get away with such impudence? How could they publicize their existence and risk imprisonment by keeping records that detailed illegal activities? The answer helps move the story into the 1840s and 1850s and offers a fresh way to for teachers to explore the legal and political history of the sectional crisis with students. Those aiding fugitives often benefited from the protection of state personal liberty laws and from a general reluctance across the North to encourage federal intervention or reward Southern power. In other words, it was all about states’ rights—Northern states’ rights. As early as the 1820s, Northern states led by Pennsylvania had been experimenting with personal liberty or anti-kidnapping statutes designed to protect free black residents from kidnapping, but which also had the effect of frustrating enforcement of federal fugitive slave laws (1793 and 1850). In two landmark cases –Prigg v. Pennsylvania (1842) and Ableman v. Booth (1859)—the Supreme Court threw out these Northern personal liberty protections as unconstitutional. 

Students accustomed to equating states’ rights with South Carolina may be stunned to learn that it was the Wisconsin Supreme Court asserting the nullification doctrine in the mid-1850s. They may also be shocked to discover that a federal jury in Philadelphia had acquitted the lead defendant in the Christiana treason trial within about fifteen minutes. These Northern legislatures and juries were, for the most part, indifferent to black civil rights, but they were quite adamant about asserting their own states’ rights during the years before the Civil War. This was the popular sentiment exploited by Northern vigilance committees that helped sustain their controversial work on behalf of fugitives. 

That is also why practically none of the Underground Railroad agents in the North experienced arrest, conviction, or physical violence. No prominent Underground Railroad operative ever got killed or spent significant time in jail for helping fugitives once they crossed the Mason-Dixon Line or the Ohio River. Instead, it was agents operating across the South who endured the notorious late-night arrests, long jail sentences, torture, and sometimes even lynching that made the underground work so dangerous. In 1844, for example, a federal marshal in Florida ordered the branding of Jonathan Walker, a sea captain who had been convicted of smuggling runaways, with the mark “S.S.” (“slave-stealer”) on his hand. That kind of barbaric punishment simply did not happen in the North. 

What did happen, however, was growing rhetorical violence. The war of words spread. Threats escalated. Metaphors hardened. The results then shaped the responses the led to war. By reading and analyzing the various Southern secession documents from the winter of 1860-61, one will find that nearly all invoke the crisis over fugitives (8). The battle over fugitives and those who aided them was a primary instigator for the national conflict over slavery. Years afterward, Frederick Douglass dismissed the impact of the Underground Railroad in terms of the larger fight against slavery, comparing it to “an attempt to bail out the ocean with a teaspoon” (9). But Douglass had always been cool to the public value of the metaphor. Measured in words, however —through the antebellum newspaper articles, sermons, speeches, and resolutions generated by the crisis over fugitives—the “Underground Railroad” proved to be quite literally a metaphor that helped launch the Civil War.

Matthew Pinsker is Associate Professor of History and Pohanka Chair in American Civil War History at Dickinson College. He has written two books about Abraham Lincoln and currently is working on a book about the Underground Railroad.

________________

(1) Larry Gara, The Liberty Line: The Legend of the Underground Railroad (1961; Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1996), 143-4.
(2) Frederick Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass: An American Slave (Boston: Anti-Slavery Office, 1845), 101. 
(3) Frederick Douglass, “The Fugitive Slave Law: Speech to the National Free Soil Convention in Pittsburgh," Frederick Douglass' Paper (August 11, 1852).  Frederick Douglass Project (Rochester, N.Y.: University of Rochester).
(4) See the appendix in Stanley W. Campbell, The Slave Catchers: Enforcement of the Fugitive Slave Law: 1850-1860 (New York: W.W. Norton, 1970), 199-207.
(5) Out of these four notable black leaders, only David Ruggles has an adult biography available in print –and it was published this year. See Graham Russell Gao Hodges,David Ruggles: A Radical Black Abolitionist and the Underground Railroad in New York City (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010).
(6) Jermain Loguen of Syracuse, New York. See Fergus M. Bordewich, Bound for Canaan: The Underground Railroad and the War for the Soul of America (New York: HarperCollins, 2005), 410.
(7) For these materials and others, visit the Additional Resources Page (below).
(8) See secession documents online at The Avalon Project from Yale Law School.
(http://avalon.law.yale.edu/subject_menus/csapage.asp).
(9) Frederick Douglass, Life and Times of Frederick Douglass (Hartford, CT: Park Publishing, 1881), 272.

Source: “The Historian’s Perspective.”  The Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History 26 (December 2010)

JOHN BROWN'S DESCENDANT ON "ANTIQUES ROAD SHOW"

This segment was broadcast on the PBS program, "Antiques Road Show" sometime in 2005, though I'm sorry that I do not have specifics.  It features a direct descendant of John Brown who has brought two letters and a water-stained image of Brown to be appraised.  My guess is that the woman is a descendant through Salmon Brown, the son of John Brown and his second wife, Mary Day Brown.  I would very much like to obtain either a copy or a literal transcription of these letters, although one of them has been published in years past.  If she happens to read this, I hope she will get in touch with me, or with her cousin, Alice Keesey Mecoy, who keeps a wonderful blog called "John Brown Kin." If I can recover the specific information about this episode, I'll post it here.  By the way, Richard Lecky, the agent from Christie's Auctioners who is discussing the letters here, does not know or cannot say how to reach this descendant, so please don't contact him.  Mr. Lecky does a decent job here, although he mistakes the name of Brown's former Ohio business partner as "Samuel" Perkins, when it was actually Simon Perkins (Jr.).  He also has to throw in the Pottawatomie killings--without context, of course. 

Addendum: Jean Libby Writes

Thank you for posting this video from Antiques Roadshow. As always, my interest is following the photographs.  This is the first time I have seen a print inscribed by Brown on June 22, 1859.  A previous one, June 18, 1859, is in the Gilder Lehrman Center.  (It is Image 12 in Jean's Photo Chronology, which every student of John Brown should have in her/his library--LD). Villard documents Brown's movements in Ohio on June 18 and June 22 (pages 400-402).  June 18 he is at West Andover; June 22 he is in Akron, at Jason's home.  JB is picking up his son Owen, traveling with Oliver and Jeremiah Anderson.  He is documented at Pittsburgh, Bedford, and then in Hagerstown, Md. on June 30.  He signs the hotel register as Isaac Smith & Sons.  Oliver signs it too, for himself and Owen. Therefore, I believe the descendant in the video is more likely from John Jr., or Jason, than Salmon.  Another possibility is Ruth.  That is because most of the photo prints that have surfaced in the last 100 years or so have come from her and her descendants.  She had access to the photos on several occasions with her brothers, including the time she lived on Put-in-Bay (Ohio) in the 1870s. After 1863, when Salmon left for California, she did not see him again.  An 1888 reunion with JB Jr., Owen,Jason, and Ruth, also younger sisters Annie, Sarah, and Ellen, in southern California, was not attended by Salmon.  His sons were there in force, however. Perhaps he was suffering from the bad fall he had from a horse that permanently crippled him. I hope this descendant can be found.  Best regards and thank you again for your excellent blog with such treasures, Jean Libby

Did john brown boycott slave labor products? My answer on Answers.com

 There is no record of Brown participating in a formal boycott of slave labor products, although there is an incident of him personally protesting the use of certain sacks that were being used by wool manufacturers because they were produced in the South by the labor of enslaved people. As a biographer of the man, I would assume that Brown would personally refuse to patronize any business that flagrantly supported slavery or sold slave labor products. However, he was not a joiner, so if there were organized boycotts at the time, it is unlikely that one would find his name on any such movement roster. Lastly, I do not know enough about the options that consumers had in the mid-19th century in regard to vital products, and what they did if, for example, the only cotton they could purchase was produced by slave labor. Today we have alternatives and substitutes as consumers if we object to certain products. Did the Brown family have alternatives when it came to cotton, for instance; and if they didn't, does that mean they grudgingly used cotton that was produced by slave labor? I more than suspect that John Brown would have deeply resented any product of slave labor, but I do not know enough about antebellum life and culture to that extent to say what alternatives were taken at the time.

DESCENDANT OF HARPER'S FERRY RAIDER VISITS JOHN BROWN'S GRAVE

Thomas Hopkins at Brown gravesite,
Dec. 4, 2010 (Naj Wikoff photo)

Lake Placid, N.Y. - Thomas Hopkins, a descendant of Harper's Ferry raider John A. Copeland, led a wreath-laying ceremony Saturday at radical abolitionist John Brown's grave at his North Elba farm.

This year's wreath-laying, which happens every year around this time to commemorate Brown's execution and burial in 1859, came at the end of a two-day anti-slavery convention in Lake Placid, meant to highlight both the history of slavery in New York and its continued existence.

"The situation today is different than it was when my uncle went to Harper's Ferry," Hopkins said in a brief speech at the ceremony. "Today slavery is not as overt or sanctioned by law as it was the past. It is usually placed within a 'poverty' or 'under-class' context. However, the fundamental process and results are very similar - denial of fundamental human rights, exploitation and denial of the American Dream."

Copeland was a free black man and Oberlin College student who took part in the raid with his uncle, Lewis Leary.

Brown led the raid on a federal arsenal in Harper's Ferry, (now-W.) Va. in 1859, part of his plan to get weapons to arm a slave insurrection. He was hanged on Dec. 2. Brown was buried at his farm in North Elba with his two sons and what are believed to be nine other Harper's Ferry raiders, including Leary.

Source: “Descendant of John Brown raider speaks at wreath-laying.”  Adirondack Daily Enterprise (December 7, 2010)

See Oberlin College’s website for article about John A. Copeland

JOHN BROWN IN THE NEWS--

"TRUTH" STRANGER THAN FICTION?

Today (Dec. 5) and Sunday, December 12, 2010, “John Brown’s Truth,” a multi-genre, musically improvised opera is being performed at the Live Oak Theatre in Berkeley, Calif.  This opera features classical and jazz singers and musicians, dancers, and spoken-word artists.  According to the Berkeley Daily Planet (Dec. 1), it “is a radical departure from traditional opera format and, as such, is truly an opera for the 21^st Century.”  

Although its libretto is written, its music is entirely improvised in each performance, meaning each performance is “musically unique, newly recreated in the moment.” The storyline of “John Brown’s Truth” portrays incidents taking place in the last year of John Brown’s life, including his imprisonment and hanging in December 1859. However, “the libretto is a mostly fictionalized rendering of conversations John Brown might have had—and in some cases actually did have, according to historical reports—expressing his actual beliefs, intentions, and plans.”  Based upon opera cast list on the opera’s website, the role of John Brown is also rotated from scene to scene, including male and female singing the role of Brown; four people sing John Brown’s part in one scene.  “This John Brown character is a true visionary,” concludes the Daily Planet, “who sings about freedom with Harriet Tubman, Martin Luther King, and others from Brown’s past, present, and future.  “John Brown’s Truth” was performed for the sesquicentennial of Brown’s raid in 2009.  It is created and written by William Crossman and directed by Michael Lange.

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Rebel inFestation’10 or, the Neo-Confederate Version of Harper’s Ferry “Reenacted” in Texas

According to an article on the news website of KLTV in Tyler, Texas, the Civil War recently “came alive” in a reenactment of John Brown’s raid on Harper’s Ferry, which took place 151—not 150 years ago—as the article conveys.  This outdoor drama took place in Gilmer, Texas, as “part of a living history lesson by members of the sons of confederate veterans.”  

That’s right.  The Sons of Confederate Veterans have reenacted John Brown’s raid on Harper’s Ferry.  According to the reenactment “division commander,” Ray James, the purpose of the program was “to teach the public. . .and teach maybe 900 to 1000 school children.” 

Ray Walters, gray-headed, gray-bearded actor portraying Brown, opined afterward that his subject "was probably the original terrorist in the United States."   After reenacting the defeat of Brown, John Holley, the actor who portrayed Robert E. Lee, declared it “an honor to do things like this, its fun, and its good to be able to portray this time in our history, maybe they can learn something from what we did here today.” 

The Confederacy's "John Brown":
Whose History?

"History is history,” concluded the Brown portrayer.  “And if we don't teach it, if we don't tell it, it will die, it'll disappear," Waters says.  After raising $10,000-plus to fund this “learning experience,” about one thousand students from twenty-seven area schools attended the four-day event.

I wonder if these born-again rebels have any idea that many of their own ancestors were practicing real terrorism on black people, Mexicans, and Native Americans a long time before John Brown came on the scene.  While no one can argue that this reenactment was a “teaching” event, the question is whether these one thousand students were being taught the whole history.  Yes, “history is history.”  But one-sided, biased representations like this are not about teaching history.  What the Sons of the Confederacy did might more appropriately be called a four-day propaganda camp, a program intended to indoctrinate young people with the ideas and assumptions of white supremacist “history” and the fiction of the “Lost Cause” of the glorious and noble Confederacy. 

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“Who are You Calling a Terrorist?”

Who are you calling a terrorist?

“Prophet” Nat Turner? Union general William Tecumseh Sherman? Confederate general Nathan Bedford Forrest? Abolitionist John Brown? Social bandit Jesse James?

Turner, who led the largest anti-slavery revolt in the ante-bellum American South, might qualify. Born in bondage in 19th-century Virginia, the deeply religious Turner became increasingly convinced that only violence would turn the tide against slavery. The band of slaves and free black men he led killed 55 white men, women and children. Before his execution, he was quoted as saying he wanted to spread “terror and alarm” among whites, which sounds like a classic terrorist response.

But then slavery itself was a system of terror. Is that a mitigating factor in the way we perceive Turner? Does it make any difference at all?

Or consider James, for that matter. Often depicted in American legend as a kind of modern-day Robin Hood, James rode with a group of Confederate bushwhackers during the Civil War that murdered and tortured civilian Unionists. That was before he took up bank robbing as a trade.

Terrorists? The pages of American history seem chock-full of them. But, of course, that all depends on your definition.

And there’s the rub.

As recent events seem to indicate, there is no consensus definition. One person’s terrorism is another person’s principled conviction.

People have been trying to come up with a reliable, one-size-fits-all definition of terrorism at least since the 18th century when the Reign of Terror placed a deadly punctuation mark on the French Revolution. Groups from the African National Congress to the Jewish Defense League have been accused.

It’s enough to send one scurrying to a dictionary.

In mine, by the way, the definitions include “the use of violence and threats to intimidate or coerce, especially for political purposes.”

By that definition, even abolitionist Harriet Tubman might qualify. Over the course of her many raids into the ante-bellum South, when Tubman escorted more than 300 slaves to freedom, Tubman was known to use threats and coercion when it suited her purposes. On one such raid, when morale plummeted and one man spoke of returning to the plantation, Tubman is said to have pointed a gun at his head and said, “You go on and die.”

But history also characterizes Tubman as a humanitarian. Humanitarian, hero and terrorist, all in one? Is such a thing possible?

We find ourselves at a crossroads. Condemnations this past week have been raining down on WikiLeaks following the media organization’s release of more than a quarter-million diplomatic cables. The cables, which provide revelations about the U.S. government’s impressions of numerous world leaders, are embarrassing, yes. But the government says their release also threatens national security.

Now the T-word has surfaced.

One of the problems involves perspective. In post 9/11 America, the very word has taken on new meaning. Once upon a time, it carried a very specific connotation — a kind of scatter-shot violence carried out especially against noncombatant targets.

But now, more and more, it seems to mean simply “people who oppose us.”

Here lies both the power and peril of language. Words grow increasingly elastic. They stretch and expand to cover every need. That makes them ever more convenient, but in the process, they also sag and droop. They lose their grip, their meaning.

So who are we calling a terrorist these days? This is about more than just the fate of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, who is already being sought by authorities in Sweden to answer accusations of rape and sexual harassment — real terror, from my point of view.

It is also about our understanding of acceptable human behavior. We live, after all, in a world where, even among the “good guys,” violence tends to be a tool of first resort. Such a world demands a delicate balancing act.

Who are the terrorists? And where does terrorism begin?

Source: Clayton Hardiman, “Do We See Terrorists in the Mirror?” Muskegon Chronicle [Muskegon, Mich.], 5 December 2010

Clayton Hardiman is a professional journalist as well as a published poet and writer of short fiction. A Michigan native and graduate of Western Michigan University, he was a reporter, columnist and editor at the Muskegon Chronicle for nearly 35 years. He continues to write for the newspaper on a free-lance basis and serves on its editorial board. His writing has earned numerous awards, including citations from the National Society of Newspaper Columnists and the National Association of Black Journalists. His work has appeared in the Poynter Institute’s “Best Newspaper Writing,” an anthology of outstanding writing from daily newspapers across the United States. Hardiman is the father of three and grandfather of seven. He and his wife, Emmajean, live in Muskegon, where he is currently working on a novel. Tweet: www.twitter/MuskegonChron

In Years Past: 1910

The year 1910 marked the 51^st year after John Brown’s raid.  Although a half-century is a life time, there were still a good many people alive at that time who were children or young adults at the time of John Brown’s raid.  Despite its flaws and biases, the biography of Brown by Oswald Garrison Villard, which was published in 1910, was fortuitous for our study beyond the intention of the author because the research behind it far exceeded Villard's use.  It has thus proven a great resource for a number of biographers subsequently, including yours truly.  Many readers know that Villard, the son of magnate Henry Villard, was also the grandson of William Lloyd Garrison (his mother was Frances Garrison).  Villard, a graduate of Harvard University and the heir to his father’s ownership of two prominent publications, The New York Evening Post and The Nation, was determined to prepare a scholarly work on Brown in commemoration of the half-century mark since the Harper’s Ferry raid. 

Oswald Garrison Villard (Library of Congress) -
His bio is a better resource book than an interpretation

In 1909, while Villard was preparing his book, W. E. B. DuBois, the eminent black scholar (and also Harvard graduate) published his book on John Brown in the 50^th year after the raid, thus crossing the finish line before Villard. Although the biographers were associates in the early civil rights movement, Villard used his newspaper connections to harshly review the DuBois biography.  The latter protested, but his demands for an opportunity to respond were met with condescending rejection.  In turn, Villard’s book was published the following year to great success.  The story behind the DuBois-Villard friendship/falling out is a fascinating chapter for a number of reasons, but it certainly touches the theme of white liberal racism as well as professional and ideological bias.  (Readers with an interest in this theme may wish to check out my chapter in The Afterlife of John Brown (Palgrave Macmillan.)

W. E. B. DuBois, Biographer
of John Brown (National Park
Service) - despite its flaws,
his bio of Brown remains in print 
as a classic interpretation

Villard’s biography of Brown was premised on the claim of being an objective, factual work.  Of course, in many respects it was a thoroughly researched and "definitive" work for a new century.  On the other hand, despite his lofty claim to objectivity, Villard seems to have had two unacknowledged motivations in writing his book.  First, as the proud grandson of William Lloyd Garrison, he intended to revise the older, heroic view of Brown by painting a sympathetic but diminished treatment of the man.  Although he could not entirely compensate for the “stolen thunder” his grandfather Garrison had lost after Brown's famous martyrdom, it must have given him some satisfaction to publicly disqualify Brown from historical sainthood based upon his version of the Pottawatomie killings.  In private communication Villard gloated that at least his grandfather had not “murdered” people.  He also took out his extreme pacifist resentments upon Brown, whose use of force in any sense rendered him guilty in Villard's eyes.  In fact, he actually was an extreme pacifist, not just a non-resistant in political terms; his bias in this regard definitely shaped how he viewed John Brown. Villard could not have written his book had he not been wealthy and privileged to some degree.  Yet despite the fact that his work reflects a measure of snobbery and entitlement, the fact that he could afford to do the research has served later generations well.  It is also a point of criticism of Villard that he lambasted DuBois for using hackneyed, older sources in his John Brown 1909 biography.  DuBois was an activist and educator, not a wealthy, privileged white liberal, and he did not have the time or resources that Villard possessed.  Fortunately, history has proven more kindly to the DuBois biography, which continues to be published and read in new editions.  DuBois outlived Villard, and must have taken great comfort in seeing a 1962 edition of his biography published in honor of the Emancipation Proclamation centennial.  In contrast, the Villard biography has not enjoyed wide readership and is known mainly by students and scholars despite its largely negative impact upon later writing on Brown in the 20th century.

Katherine Mayo (in later

life) - her research on

Brown is memorable

More importantly, however, Villard had a very effective researcher (and upcoming writer) in the person of Katherine Mayo.  In 1908-09, Mayo scoured the country looking for John Brown letters, doing primary and secondary level interviews, transcribing holographs, collecting articles, and otherwise building a body of research material unprecedented in any work on Brown.  Notably, Mayo interviewed Brown’s surviving children, old Kansas settlers, and others whose voices might have been lost had it not been for her strenuous efforts to make a substantial record of their words.  Mayo is thus the unsung hero on the positive side of the Villard story: her extensive research, meticulous transcriptions, and exhaustive documentation provided Villard with great scholarly substance.  When I worked in the Villard papers a decade ago, I recall looking through a series of little memorandum/date books.  As I leafed through them, I realized that these were how Mayo constructed the first (partial) chronology of Brown (1855-59), included as flanking material in Villard’s book.  Mayo was not only a researcher, but published a number of articles on Brown at the time, thus cutting her teeth as a professional writer.  Her research—substantially representing most of what is entailed in the Columbia University John Brown-Oswald Garrison Villard Collection—remains a wonderful resource for researchers, following the great archives of the state of West Virginia and the Hudson (Ohio) Library and Historical Society which hold the papers of Boyd B. Stutler and Clarence S. Gee, respectively, as well as the archives of the Kansas State Historical Society.

Truly, the Villard project is a substantial link in the chain of John Brown historiography, and the link between 19^th century writers and the monumental documentary research of Boyd B. Stutler, who carried the baton into the later 20^th century.  In fact, Stutler became such an aficionado on John Brown that by the 1940s, he even helped Villard revise and correct his biography for a later edition.  From the work of Gee and Stutler (which had wound down by 1970), we then have Jean Libby, Palo Alto, Calif. in the field doing research on Brown’s raid and black involvement in Jefferson County in the later 1970s and onward.  Worthy mention should also be made of the extensive work on Brown’s raiders by N. Scott Wolfe, Galena, Ill.  Libby has since prepared the first and most extensive documentation on the photographic images of Brown. --LD [revised]

Another moment in 1910. . .

William H. Hickman (d. 1928)
Methodist minister,  Civil War
Veteran, and Chancellor of
DePauw University
Indiana GenWeb Project

"December 2 marked the 51st anniversary of the execution of John Brown at Charlestown, Virginia. In commemoration of the event, Rev. Dr. William H. Hickman of Pennville, Indiana gave a lecture in the First Congregational Church of Jamestown on John Brown as the John the Baptist of the Civil War--a lecture which was a masterpiece of its class and the equal of which had seldom if ever been heard from a Jamestown platform. While the audience was being seated, Miss Anna Knowlton played a selection on the organ, peculiarly appropriate to a gathering of this character in that it was an arrangement of patriotic airs."

Source: “In Past Years.”  The Post-Journal [Jamestown, N.Y.], 4 December 2010

Jean Libby Writes-

Mary Brown's Ordeal Remembered

Retracing the trail of John Brown's
funeral cortege, December 1859

The story of Mary Brown's journey to see her husband on the day before his execution in Virginia (December 2, 1859) and bring his body home to the Adirondack Mountains of New York is often told but seldom documented. At the 150th anniversary of the John Brown raid in 2009, a lovely self-guided tour, On the Trail of John Brown: What Mary Brown Saw, was published in a pamphlet and online (pdf) by the Essex County Historical Society and Adirondack Architectural Heritage.

On the Trail of John Brown is based upon what Mary Brown saw as the funeral cortege of her husband, John Brown the abolitionist, traveled from the train depot in Vergennes, Vermont to the family farm in North Elba, New York. We will look at the buildings that still exist along the route of the funeral cortege and describe the landscapes that they would have passed over. Of particular note are the sites relevant to the life of John Brown, the anti-slavery movement, and/or sites mentioned by members of the funeral cortege in 1859. It took two days for the cortege to travel this relatively short distance [67 miles], leaving the train depot early Tuesday morning, December 6, and arriving in North Elba on Wednesday evening, December 7, 1859.

Mary was at the exhaustive conclusion of traveling since hearing the news of John Brown's sentence of death on November 1, 1859. Moving southward through Boston and Brooklyn escorted by Thomas Wentworth Higginson, the party was stopped in Baltimore and subjected to considerable hostility. Mary retreated to Philadelphia, staying at the home of William Still, the African American often called the father of the Underground Railroad. John Brown learned of the failure of her mission from his attorney, George Hoyt, and wrote to her from prison in Charlestown on November 10, pleading that she not come but wait until "after Virginia has applied to the picture already made of me ... [if] you can afford to meet the expence and trouble of coming on here to gather up the bones of our beloved sons & your husband, and if the people here will suffer you to do so; I should be entirely willing." The full letter is published from a typescript in the Oswald Garrison Villard Collection by Louis A. DeCaro, Jr., in John Brown, the Cost of Freedom: Selections from his Life and Letters (International Publishers: 2007:149-151).

Mary Brown, from a family
portrait, early 1850s

Mary wrote to Governor Henry A. Wise to claim the bodies on November 21, receiving his affirmative response on November 27. The two original letters were in the possession of her only surviving son, Salmon, until 1893, when they were acquired by the Historical Society of Pennsylvania (HSP). Languishing there with many other original documents which were used in John Brown's trial, the exchange was published by HSP in 2009.

By Thanksgiving, Mary had received the consent of John Brown to visit him while still alive, and prepared for the journey at the home of Lucretia Mott in Philadelphia. At services presided by Rev. William Furness, she received the warm support of women in the congregation and traveled to Harpers Ferry with Mr. and Mrs. J. Miller McKim and Hector Tyndale as escort. The party was met by William Taliaferro, who was in charge of the martial law order in Charlestown. Her request to receive the bodies of Oliver and Watson was refused, but Mary was allowed to come along to the prison for a last meeting with her husband on December 1.

Collegial sharing of a scanned copy of The New York Daily Tribune of December 3, 1859 by Karl Gridley of Kansas allowed me to transcribe the interview with Mary Brown published on that day, which is published online.

A new collegial sharing is occurring in December 2010, with the December 3, 1859 account of Mary Brown's experience in Harpers Ferry through the execution and accompanying his coffin forwarded to Philadelphia in the National Anti-Slavery Standard, written by J. Miller McKim. Thanks to Warren F. Broderick, an historian in New York, I will be able to transcribe this document and put it online with her interview for use by everyone.

Jean Libby, Allies for Freedom, Palo Alto, California (3 December 2010)