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From the Archives:
Biographies:
John Brown
1800-1859
John Brown
believed it was his duty to lead enslaved Africans to freedom.
He would carry his crusade against slavery across a dozen states
and ultimately to its violent end at
Harper's Ferry, but not before he spent ten whole
years in one place, deep in the Pennsylvania woods at Randolph,
about 12 miles northeast of Meadville.
John Brown came to
northwestern Pennsylvania from Hudson, Ohio where his father was a
minister and his family preserved animal hides for a living.
Ambitious and strong-willed, Brown decided to strike out on his own,
proving he could be a successful businessman in his own right.
On a trip through
northwestern Pennsylvania, he came across a stand of the finest oak
and hemlock he had ever seen. He knew the bark from these trees could
be used in tanning animal hides. He went back home, sold his property
in 1825, and moved with his wife and three young sons to Crawford
County, where he purchased 200 acres. Within one year he had
established a tannery and had 15 men working for him.
One of the men who
came with him from Ohio, James Foreman, said Brown was always of one
mind when it came to the subject of slavery. “He looked upon it as a
great sin against God and a menace to the morals of the country.”
As a 12-year-old
boy, Brown had witnessed the brutal beating of a slave his own age
with an iron shovel, and from then on he vowed it was his duty to help
the slaves escape. In 1825, shortly before he left Ohio for
Pennsylvania, he got his chance.
His son, John
Brown Jr., later described the incident:
"There came one
night a fugitive slave and his wife to father's door, sent, perhaps by
some townsman who knew John Brown's compassion for such wayfarers,
then but few. They were the first colored people I had seen. Mother
gave the poor creatures some supper; but they thought themselves
pursued, and were uneasy. Presently, father heard the trampling of
horses crossing a bridge on one of the main roads, half a mile off; so
he took his guests out the back door and down into the swamp near the
brook, to hide, giving them arms to defend themselves. It proved a
false alarm. Father then brought them into the house again, sheltered
them awhile and sent them on their way."
John Brown was a
take-charge kind of man. In 1828, President John Quincy Adams
appointed him postmaster of Richmond Township, a position he held for
seven years. An experienced surveyor, Brown laid out new roads,
introduced pure-bred cattle and established the township's first
school in his home, sharing responsibilities with his closest
neighbors, Thomas and Martha Delamater, who shared his anti-slavery
views. He held church services on the second floor of his tannery.
John Brown made
regular trips to
Jamestown,
New York,
and to Meadville, a small frontier community along the banks of French
Creek, where he met up with other anti-slavery men.
Jane Kennedy, a
step-granddaughter of Meadville’s John Reynolds, recalled that on one
occasion “John Brown went to Mr. Reynolds and told him that he had
seven or eight more runaways than he could accommodate and that he
wanted to send word to Taylor Randolph to send up a team and get them.
Fearing to arouse suspicion by going himself or having a man, they
sent an informant, then a school girl of twelve, and thus avoided any
detection."
Brown had survived
the death of his wife, Dianthe, and two of his children in the
Pennsylvania wilderness. Mary Ann Day, the half-sister of his friend
Martha Delamater, became his second wife.
Despite his
personal grief and enormous responsibilities, he began talking with
Mary Ann about adopting a black child and urged his brother Frederick
to help him establish a school for blacks in Crawford County.
Pennsylvania’s laws were favorable to opening new schools, he said,
and the people of New Richmond were not as prejudiced as those in
Ohio. Brown believed education was a powerful weapon in helping
slaves gain their freedom.
“If the young
blacks of our country could once become enlightened, it would most
assuredly operate on slavery like firing powder confined in rock, and
all slaveholders know it well. Witness their heaven daring laws
against teaching blacks. If once the Christians in the free States
would set to work in earnest in teaching the blacks, the people of the
slaveholding States would find themselves constitutionally driven to
set about the work of emancipation immediately,” he wrote in a
letter to his brother in
1834.
The school would
never materialize and he would never adopt a black child. A series
of business failures forced his return to Ohio in 1836.
Still, John Brown
would not be deterred. In 1837, a year after leaving Crawford County,
he openly consecrated his life to the destruction of slavery. His
pronouncement came after the murder of an abolitionist newspaperman,
Elijah Lovejoy, by a proslavery mob in Illinois.
Brown’s activities
grew increasingly violent in the 1850s.
In 1856 John Brown
joined his sons in a clash with pro-slavery settlers in Kansas and
directed the murder of five men at Pottawatomie Creek. In a battle
over an abolitionist stronghold at Osawatomie, Brown and his men were
primary targets. The first to be killed was his son Frederick.
Emboldened with rage, in 1958, Brown attacked two Missouri homesteads
and liberated 11 slaves, delivering them to Canada.
In 1859 he
returned to Chambersburg, Pennsylvania for a secret meeting with his
friend Frederick Douglass and a number of prominent abolitionists. In
an old stone quarry that was used to hide runaway slaves, he disclosed
his plans for his attack on Harper’s Ferry.
On one of his
visits to Crawford County, Brown told his friend George McFadden of
his plans to strike a blow against slavery. McFadden replied, “If you
do you will hang for it.” “Well then,” said John Brown. “I will
hang.” And that is exactly what happened.
Read what others had to say about
John Brown
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Brown Tannery and Museum
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