John Brown

In this biography, Du Bois reexamines radical abolitionist John Brown's life from the perspective of Black Americans and their struggle for freedom. Du Bois argues that Brown's story is inseparable from the broader history of African slavery, slave resistance, and the organized strivings of free Black communities in America.

Du Bois opens by tracing Brown's ancestry through three European cultural currents that shaped the New World: English Puritanism, Dutch thrift, and Celtic passion for personal freedom. Born on May 9, 1800, Brown grew up on the Ohio frontier after his family migrated west around 1805. His father, Owen Brown, was a deeply religious man who became an abolitionist after witnessing a slaveholding minister try to separate an enslaved married couple. Young John received little formal schooling but developed a solitary toughness, a fierce honesty, and a religious sensibility centered on the Bible. The pivotal experience of his boyhood occurred during the War of 1812, when 12-year-old Brown drove cattle for his father and stayed at a landlord's home. There he befriended an enslaved boy whom the landlord beat with an iron shovel and left to suffer in the cold, while lavishing praise on the white John. This contrast planted a question that would define Brown's life.

Brown's young manhood was marked by economic restlessness and personal loss. After eye inflammation forced him to abandon plans for college, he worked as a tanner, married Dianthe Lusk at twenty, and began raising a large family. Dianthe died in childbirth in 1832 after bearing seven children; the following year, Brown married Mary Ann Day, who bore thirteen more. The Panic of 1837 destroyed his land speculations and forced him into bankruptcy by 1842. The deaths of multiple children deepened a brooding religious intensity; Brown agonized over whether he was worthy of a great calling.

By 1839, Brown's antipathy toward slavery had hardened into purpose. During a visit from a Black preacher named Fayette, Brown solemnly pledged his family to active warfare against slavery, binding them in a secret compact. Du Bois marks this as a turning point. Brown turned to sheep-farming in 1841 because, as Du Bois explains, the business promised to afford him the means of carrying out his principal object: the fight against slavery. In 1844, he formed the partnership of Perkins and Brown with Simon Perkins, Jr., in Akron, Ohio, and later ran a wool warehouse in Springfield, Massachusetts. The warehouse collapsed by 1851 when manufacturers boycotted him for refusing to lower prices on quality wool.

Du Bois argues that Brown's economic failures freed him spiritually. In Springfield, Brown deepened his engagement with the Black community. In 1847, Frederick Douglass, the foremost Black leader of the era, visited Brown and heard his plan for guerrilla warfare in the Alleghany Mountains: Armed bands would descend from mountain strongholds, induce enslaved people to join, and send the weak northward via the Underground Railroad. In 1849, Brown moved his family to North Elba, New York, to mentor Black settlers on land donated by the wealthy abolitionist Gerrit Smith. After the passage of the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850, which required Northern citizens to assist in capturing escaped slaves, Brown founded the League of Gileadites, a group of 44 Black men and women in Springfield who pledged to resist slave-catchers by force.

Du Bois devotes substantial attention to the history of slave resistance, tracing uprisings from Haiti's revolution under Toussaint L'Ouverture through Nat Turner's 1831 insurrection in Virginia. He argues that Brown understood the inner strivings of Black Americans better than almost any white person, drawing on personal relationships with Black leaders and direct knowledge of their community development.

The Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854 opened Kansas to the possibility of slavery by allowing territorial settlers to decide the issue, provoking a violent contest between free and slave interests. Five of Brown's sons settled near Osawatomie and wrote home for arms. Brown arrived in October 1855 with concealed weapons. The decisive crisis came in May 1856: After pro-slavery forces sacked the free state stronghold of Lawrence, Brown assembled eight men, rode to the Pottawatomie Creek, and on the night of May 24-25 killed five pro-slavery settlers with broadswords. Du Bois argues that this act forced the free state movement from passive resistance to armed struggle and was necessary to save Kansas for freedom.

Brown became a hunted outlaw but organized a disciplined guerrilla company and won a striking victory at the Battle of Black Jack. His son Frederick was killed at the Battle of Osawatomie on August 30, where Brown fought off a much larger force and earned the epithet "Osawatomie Brown." Governor Geary, arriving with orders to restore peace, arranged Brown's departure in late September 1856.

Brown turned to his long-planned strike in the East. From late 1856 through 1858, he raised funds and cultivated a secret committee of six supporters: George L. Stearns, a wealthy anti-slavery leader; Smith; Theodore Parker; Samuel Gridley Howe; Thomas Wentworth Higginson; and Franklin Sanborn. He trained his men at Springdale, Iowa, with John Henry Kagi, his intellectual lieutenant and chief strategist, serving as second-in-command. In April 1858, Brown spent a week consulting closely with Harriet Tubman, the legendary conductor of the Underground Railroad who had personally led over 300 people to freedom. In May, he convened a convention at Chatham, Ontario, where approximately 34 Black delegates and 12 white participants adopted a provisional constitution for his guerrilla government. Disclosures by Hugh Forbes, a disgruntled military trainer, forced a postponement.

Returning to Kansas, Brown led a December 1858 raid into Missouri that freed 11 enslaved people, whom he escorted on an 82-day journey to Canada. By July 1859, he had rented a farmhouse near Harper's Ferry, Virginia (now West Virginia), and assembled 22 men, including six or seven Black members. His plan was to capture the federal arsenal, a gateway to the Blue Ridge mountains, and retreat southward along the "Great Black Way," a chain of counties with large enslaved populations. A final conference with Douglass in August failed to win Douglass's participation, but Shields Green, a fugitive slave, chose to join.

On the evening of October 16, 1859, the raiders captured the arsenal, bridges, and rifle works without firing a shot. Enslaved people were brought in from surrounding plantations, and hostages were seized. But a fatal delay in moving stored arms gave citizens and militia time to surround Brown's force. By Monday noon, Brown was trapped in a small engine-house near the armory. His sons Oliver and Watson were killed; Kagi's detachment at the rifle factory was overrun. Brown refused to use his hostages as shields, hoping to negotiate. On Tuesday morning, marines under Colonel Robert E. Lee battered down the door and captured Brown alive.

Du Bois argues that the raid's true significance lay not in military success but in three effects: It aroused enslaved Virginians, gave secessionist leaders a powerful argument for disunion, and arrested national attention on the moral evil of slavery.

Brown's trial began October 27. He rejected an insanity defense and was convicted of treason, conspiracy with slaves, and murder. During his interrogation at the engine-house, Brown had invoked the Golden Rule and declared his sole object was to free the enslaved. In his final courtroom speech, he argued that had he acted on behalf of the rich rather than the despised poor, every man would have deemed it worthy of reward, and he invoked the Bible's injunction to remember those in bonds. During 40 days in prison, his letters became what Du Bois calls the mightiest abolition document America had known. On December 2, 1859, Brown was hanged. His last written words predicted that "the crimes of this guilty land will never be purged away but with blood."

Du Bois closes by arguing that Brown's core principle, that the cost of liberty is less than the price of repression, remains urgent. He challenges the Social Darwinist doctrines of racial hierarchy then gaining influence and insists that the progress of Black Americans since emancipation disproves claims of inherent inferiority. Du Bois warns that denying equal rights breeds moral corruption throughout the nation and restates Brown's warning: The question of racial justice is still to be settled, and its end is not yet.