Black Activists, Pushing Back

One especially keen anti-Smith Republican was Stephen Myers, the Albany reformer whose short-lived bid to organize a Black colony in Florence had so aggravated Smith in 1849. That failure had not slowed him down; like Smith, Myers looked ahead, resuming his temperance work, his work with fugitives, his lobbying for Black suffrage, and now, his promotion of this new party. In 1858, Myers put out six issues of a Black Republican campaign sheet, the Voice of the People. The pages of the one surviving issue are a revelation. Again and again, Smith’s giveaway figures as the image of a hated Black indebtedness to white patronage, with Smith the face of white paternalism. In this Black paper, Smith’s star was worse than flickering. It was dead.⁸

“What have I, what have colored people to do with Gerrit Smith’s lands, when great eternal principles are at stake?” demanded William J. Watkins in Myers’s paper. “Let the lands go to the winds, let everything else slide—but stick fast to principle. The man who tells me that I shall vote for Gerrit Smith because he has given me lands … insults me to my face, and I will tell him so before he gets through.” And not only had Watkins gone “over to the enemy” (as a gloomy Henry Garnet reported to Gerrit Smith), but he was working Smith’s own campaign trail, chasing Smith’s oratory with his own as if in cold pursuit, and winning happier reviews. “Rich, Juicy and Able!” gushed the Troy Daily Times about one of Watkins’s speeches. “His statement of the position occupied by Gerrit Smith … was a perfect crusher of that gentleman.”⁹

Smith himself was mystified. Why had this abolitionist turned on his own cause? Watkins shrugged. “I have no more changed my Rad. Abolition Principles than did the majority of Rad. Abolitionists who voted for Fremont, and who will vote for the Republican nominee in 1860,” he wrote to Smith. “It is with me a question of Policy, as well as of Principle; and I maintain that we may when a great end is sought … consult the genius of Expediency, without sacrificing one iota of Moral Principle.” Watkins’s point: he would vote for Smith if Smith were Republican, but Black voters could not afford another gestural campaign.¹⁰

Watkins was not alone. Almost every piece in Stephen Myers’s campaign sheet framed Smith and his benevolence in dark and wary terms. Warned the poet “E.B.W., ”

The Hour and the Man was Gerrit Smith’s election sheet. The allusion to the Peterboro “trickster” was as subtle as the verse.¹¹

Willis Hodges’s older brother William J. Hodges took a shot at Smith in Myers’s paper too. The pastor of an Evangelical Apostolic Baptist church, Hodges had no use for Bible politics or Smith’s charity. He implored Black men not to “embrace the pernicious doctrines of Gerrit Smith, through the agents of the Democratic party, or his Colored Land Committee, that he has made his agents to try and deceive us, and make us sell our manhood as well as our birth-right for a small quantity of land, money, or favor.” By 1858, Smith’s Land Committees had long disbanded and Smith’s agents were on to other things, but Hodges made their agenting for Smith the salient peak of their careers, and reduced Smith’s thirty-year campaign for racial justice to a twelve-year-old initiative Smith had long since disavowed.¹²

Williamsburg’s Samuel Scottron was just as tough. Why, demanded the young activist, were “some of our Gerrit Smith men” obliged to “consult the feeling of one man at the expense of 40,000 colored persons who inhabit this State”? Why would they “throw away their vote to the advantage of their most deadly enemy, or a party who has in every instance proved a most deadly foe”? The habit of Black deference was so deep, feared Scottron, that maybe Black men did not deserve the vote. “The sympathy we have for our political friends, and the dependence we put in them, is really too great, and must some day be subdued … or we will never reach … the common platform of Man’s Equality and Rights… . What credit to us if we are set free only by the exertions of the white man?” Editor Stephen Myers went further still, indicting not only Smith’s giveaways and candidacies but the reformers who supported him: “We know that [Smith] has been the champion of the oppressed ever since he has held any influence,” but “we also know he cannot be elected… . Such men as the Rev. H. H. Garnet, Dr. James McEwen [sic] Smith, and J. W. Duffin, leaders of the GERRIT SMITH faction, are recognized by us as men of intellect, deservedly beloved by all the colored men of this State.” Nonetheless, “by their example we can plainly see how easily some great intellects are deceived.”¹³

Myers’s targeting of Smith may have been inspired by more than his devotion to the Republicans. He and Smith had been at odds for decades. Was there a whiff of payback in these columns? It is easy to imagine. A decade earlier, Myers had flogged the giveaway with zeal, and modeled his own Florence colony on it too. William Hodges’s brother Willis once liked the giveaway so much that he led a band of settlers into Franklin and organized the enclave of Blacksville. Samuel Scottron’s father had a gift deed, a fact his son left unremarked. For all these writers, a close tie to the gift land was no source of pride or even something to acknowledge. By 1858, the Hodges brothers (Willis by then long back in Brooklyn) were making speeches that, according to the Brooklyn Daily Eagle, “denounced Gerrit Smith and the Abolitionists generally.” The intervening years, the promise of the Republicans, the fruitlessness of Smith’s campaigns, and the growing boldness of the Black political community had done the memory of Smith’s philanthropy no favors. A plan devised to help Black New Yorkers get the vote devolved into its opposite. For seeming to impose a debt of gratitude that stuck Black voters with a party that could not win, Smith’s “scheme of justice and benevolence” was derided as an obstacle to suffrage, a heavy, hated yoke.¹⁴

Gratitude is slippery—easy to acknowledge when you feel it, not so easy to sustain. When Smith gave land away in 1846, he never asked for gratitude. Skeptics linked the land gifts with a bid to buy votes for his beloved Liberty Party. Smith hoped for votes, but he never spelled this out. Nowhere is there evidence that he blamed a Black grantee for betraying his land gift with a vote for parties he despised. No quid pro quo or public expectation of a show of gratitude was stated. Smith held back, hoping only that these grants would help Black people farm and ease their access to the ballot—not votes for his party, but the simple right to vote.

The rapidly revealed failures of the giveaway—to make farmers out of thousands, to build a voting bloc that could swing an election to the antislavery side—tested Smith’s restraint. In 1856, his autobiographical essay glimpsed his disappointment when it pointedly omitted any mention of his land gifts to Black New Yorkers. But not until 1857, when the Tribune’s Horace Greeley prodded Smith to report the true fate of his “noble gift … whatever the facts may be,” did Smith confess his hurt.¹⁵

“Of the three thousand colored men to whom I gave land, probably less than fifty have taken and continue to hold possession of their grants. What is worse, half of the three thousand … have either sold their land, or been so careless as to allow it to be sold for taxes,” he told Greeley. True, he conceded, he had been wrong to give away land that was so difficult to farm. But the greater problem was something else: “White men who live there can support their families only by very hard work and very frugal habits. Why then, considering the character of the colored people, should we expect them to do much in such a country?”¹⁶

Smith was not the first critic of the giveaway to racialize its failure. In 1853, Winslow Watson and Frederick Douglass invoked the giveaway as proof of the unfitness of Black Northerners for husbandry. But Smith’s widely circulated verdict from the Tribune was worse. His dismissal of the land as second-rate and his judgment of his grantees as incapable of the same “very hard work and very frugal habits” as white Adirondackers would fix the script for generations. He would take credit for his initial gift of acreage, but not for his own part in his plan’s failure. He would not acknowledge the impact of his ignorance of Black impoverishment, or his blindness to the need, unmet, for startup capital, structure, oversight, or guidance. And misled by Smith’s confident indictment, subsequent accounts of the giveaway let the giver off the hook.

The trouble was, even after—and long after—Smith put the giveaway behind him (and with the same grim resolve with which he shed his romance with colonization, the Millerites, and his congressional career), the giveaway kept mattering, especially in election years when Smith was waging a campaign. In Myers’s 1858 election-year campaign paper, the very mention of Smith’s land gifts of 1846 triggered an idea of white expectations of Black gratitude. And this happened in white newspapers too. “Gerrit Smith has the fortune to experience from Abolitionists, white as well as black, a very small measure of gratitude,” opined the New York Times in October. In these pages, long opposed to equal suffrage, Black reformers were ingrates for not voting for the man who gave them land, even while the editor cheerfully observed that Smith’s party could never win. And while affecting to praise Black delegates at a recent Troy Convention for the “practical sense” they showed in endorsing the Republicans, what the Times implied was that Black activists were opportunists: “When there is money to be made, land to be given away, or Jerrys to be rescued, Mr. Smith is a man much lauded and sought after. But let him take the field for Governor, and even the black men turn their backs upon him.”¹⁷

So this was what Black voters were supposed to do—assume a posture of quixotic gratitude at the ballot box whether it helped their cause or not. Vote for Smith and prove themselves, once again, dependents. Be grateful; know their place. Be grateful; it would keep their votes from counting. Be grateful, loyal, impotent. Here was the idea.

Eppes Weighs His Options

Nothing tells us what the people of the Black Woods made of this election-year fallout between Black Republicans and Smith. But any take on the giveaway that framed it as a symbol of Black indebtedness to white beneficence could bring no comfort. To see the giveaway dismissed by Black activists, some grantees among them, as nothing but a bribe for votes, to see the settlers cast as dupes, and then, in white papers, to see Black voters mocked as ingrates for not backing Gerrit Smith’s latest party—the insults never slept. At least New York’s fall election put an end to hand-wringing about the divisive influence of the third radical abolition party (Republicans won every seat; Gerrit Smith, aiming for 50,000 ballots, got 5,470 abolition votes). But this would have no impact on the “impending crisis” between the proslavery South and the outraged North, or on the brutal skirmishes in Kansas detailed in Adirondack papers. Three of John Brown’s sons—Owen, Frederick, and Salmon—went to Kansas from Ohio in early 1855. Brown’s sons John and Jason and their families joined the others in Osawatomie that May, and Brown followed in the fall. And as news reports soon revealed, John Brown’s party, unlike Lemuel Knapp’s, did not go west to settle, farm, and vote.¹⁸

Brown had shared his master plan for a revolutionary “Subterranean Pass Way” with Eppes, Avery Hazzard, and some other Adirondackers. This alternative Underground Railroad, which he’d mulled over for years, aimed to free slaves, then arm them, train them, and build a mountain-based guerrilla army whose raids on slave-owning households would so rattle and unnerve enslavers that they would conclude the work of keeping slaves wasn’t worth the risk. “Twenty men in the Alleghanies could break slavery to pieces in two years,” he declared.¹⁹

The raid on the arsenal at Harpers Ferry, which Brown was pondering as early as midcentury, was but one piece of this elaborate project, which Brown described to Lyman Eppes at the same time he revealed it to his family. He wanted Eppes to join his war party in Kansas and points west; in fact, in April 1858, he wrote his family in North Elba, “nothing would be more encouraging to me” than if his son Watson, his neighbor Alexis Hinckley (a white North Elba farmer), and “Mr Epps,” could be persuaded “to take hold.” In May, he asked “Wife & Children every one,” to convene a family meeting specifically to encourage his son-in-law Henry Thompson, his sons John Brown Jr. and Watson Brown, and Lyman Eppes to join him.²⁰

Brown believed in Lyman Eppes. He wanted him on board. But no Black Adirondack settler would join him on his antislavery raids. And if, as his daughter Ruth Thompson recalled after his death, Brown moved to North Elba in the first place to find Black recruits for his long-range revolutionary plan, we can imagine his dismay. Some have suggested that this is why he spent little time in North Elba and gained a local reputation as “a wolfish kind of man, always coming and going on his expeditions.” North Elba’s fields, for his purposes, were barren; his recruitment drive had failed.²¹

As to Eppes’s own decision: if his precise response is lost to us, his actions spoke his mind. He knew what it would mean to join John Brown. He read the dispatches in Douglass’s paper. He knew what “Captain Brown” had taken on, the risks he ran, the deadly raids and take-no-prisoner showdowns with an enraged, prolific foe. All of the antislavery papers were full of him; Brown was becoming a celebrity. After 1856, Eppes was reminded of the stakes of this engagement each time he visited Brown’s home. When Frederick Brown was slain at the Free Soil outpost of Osawatomie, Kansas, Brown had the boy’s name etched on the back side of his grandfather’s colonial-era headstone, which he leaned against the side of his new house, a positioning that turned the house itself into a memorial to the young picket “murdered for his adherence to the cause of freedom.”²²

Nor was death the only risk. As his wife, Annie, reminded him, if Lyman cast his lot with Brown, he gambled with his family’s fate. She could not run the farm alone. She would take the family back to New York City, which would require $200. Could Lyman raise $200 to support his family in his absence? (All this his son, Lyman Jr., told a reporter in 1939.) Some years earlier, the death of the grantee James H. Henderson left his widow with five children. Overwhelmed and desperate, Jane Henderson moved the family to Manhattan—and see what became of them! Mary Brown famously went it alone when John was away (her selfless stoicism—a “Ruth,” a “Roman mother,” a “modern Penelope,” Brown’s friend and biographer, Franklin Sanborn, called her—is as much the stuff of legend as her husband’s yearning for North Elba). But Mary Brown had help. One or more of her grown children or their spouses were usually around, and she could also hire hands. Further, since April 1857, the Boston abolitionists who supported Brown’s Kansas efforts had been raising funds for John Brown’s family “in case,” Brown confided to his son John, “I never return to them.” Could Lyman Eppes hope for “the permanent assistance of … wife and family” if he took off for Kansas or Virginia and failed to return? Could any of Brown’s neighbors, white or Black?²³

Let us remember, too, the closeness of the Eppes family, three generations in one cabin, and how firmly this clan was invested in this community. Lyman Eppes was North Elba’s choirmaster, Bible teacher, and wolf slayer. He made the Baptist church ring with hymns. He, Annie, and others in the hamlet would organize a library, the first for miles around. Six of their eight children were born, reared, and schooled in the Adirondacks (but for the son who died in infancy soon after they arrived). Eppes’s daughter Albertine was so enmeshed in the community that she would marry her Black neighbor, the widower and sometime farmer William Appo of Philadelphia. Eppes’s son Lyman Jr. worked the farm with his father and would later work for a rich neighbor, and for the town (he also ran a trotter at the ice races at Lake Placid).²⁴

In 1846, the year Smith gave away his land, Charles B. Ray had claimed, “There is no life like that of the farmer, for overcoming the mere prejudice against color.” The Eppes family was making Ray’s hopeful vision an imperfect, working truth. Let Eppes take up Brown’s invitation, and all bets were off—and not just for the Eppeses. The loss of Lyman and the departure of Annie and the family would strain the walls of their community and leave a great gaping hole.²⁵

So we can see what the Black Woods stood to lose if Lyman joined his neighbor and left home. The trickier question may be what he felt he might gain. In hindsight, it looks obvious: a hero’s luster if all went well, lasting martyrdom if it didn’t, and, either way, an opportunity to beat back “Satan and his legions” on the ground. But here, hindsight might be hindrance. What needs to be considered is how Brown’s plan—how Brown himself—struck his friends and neighbors before, not after, Harpers Ferry. We know that Black families in North Elba liked and respected Brown. We have some idea, too (we’ll never know the whole), of what Brown did for his Black neighbors. A brief recap: in that first winter of 1849, the food Brown shipped the grantees may have meant the difference between survival and starvation, and he organized a search party when the grantee Josiah Hasbrook got lost in the snow. In the summer, he helped set up the Jefferson brothers and James Henderson with a shared lot for their farming. He righted grantees’ lot lines, got them settled on their acres, and furnished fabric when their clothes were thin and frayed. In their cabins and a schoolhouse, he preached Bible politics; he had them to his house for dinner, and hired them in his fields. With the grantee Willis Hodges as his proxy, he mentored them on dealing with white neighbors. Several women from the Black settlement (a Mrs. Reed, a Mrs. Dickson, and an “excellent colored woman,” never named) found work on his farm. Samuel Jefferson was the family teamster. Eliza Carasaw sewed dresses for the girls. Lyman Eppes taught the children music.²⁶

These dealings were prolific, and in Brown’s biographies they are cinched as tightly as I’ve bundled them above. But the Brown family’s correspondence reveals that in real time his encounters with the Black community were scattered over months and years and only rarely noted in his letters. And while he surely meant to make the grantees’ progress on the land his priority when he first wrote Smith in 1848, this was not what happened. He could not be an on-site mentor with a steady, guiding hand. For the ten years Brown called North Elba home, from the year he moved his family to their first Adirondack farm to the winter of his hanging in 1859, Brown was at North Elba for no more than eighteen months, a sojourn chopped into hurried visits, most no longer than a fortnight. And this took a toll. It meant that, “on his flying visits to his farm” (Thomas Wentworth Higginson’s description), “every moment was used,” and that Brown’s focus was, of necessity, on his farm and family. It also meant that his letters home allude to specific Black settlers only rarely and to the Black settlements almost never.²⁷

This was not from any lack of sympathy. The letters Brown wrote Hodges, almost all of them destroyed, would have surely demonstrated his interest in the grantees. He admired his Black neighbors and valued their advice. He worried about the comfort of the family housekeeper, Mrs. Dickson, and “grieved,” his daughter Ruth reported, “over the sad fate of … Mr. Henderson,” who froze to death in 1852: “Mr. Henderson was an intelligent and good man, and was very industrious, and father thought much of him.” Writing from North Elba, Brown gave his wife, then traveling, a thumbnail report on “the colored families’ ” progress: they “appear to be doing well, and to feel encouraged. They all send much love to you. They have constant preaching on the sabbath; and in intelligence, morality, and religion appear to be all on the advance.” But references like these were fewer every year. Were the boys feeding the cows too many potatoes? Cleaning out the mess vats? Making sure the cattle had fresh bedding and didn’t wallow in the muck? How were Ellen’s table manners? These were the concerns that consumed the homesick Brown in his letters home until his death.²⁸

Nor would Brown’s family evince much interest in the grantees’ progress overall. The letters that flew thick and fast among Brown family members make clear that they had their hands full on the farm. Subsistence agriculture was every shoulder to the wheel, all seasons, dark and sunny. Victories were local, hard gathered, and infinitely precious—four acres of rye sown and sprouting, a croupy baby healing up, a bumper crop of spring peas. Crises and losses exploded out of nowhere. A wildfire scarfed up Brown’s son-in-law’s grain, grass, and fences. A rooster froze to death, a calf choked on a potato, Watson battled typhoid, the girls needed shoes. Ruth Brown spent her first winter in North Elba bent over a needle: overcoats, frocks, pillowcases, pantaloons. Her mother and her brothers tapped the sugar bush and made maple cakes and syrup. The warm seasons turned every child who could toddle into a berry picker, each harvest in its turn, spring for wild strawberries, then raspberries, and pails full of blackberries and blueberries, and August sticky-sweet with wild grapes, with high bush cranberries still to come, and only sweeter after the first frost. Rueful musings on the suitability of North Elba as a place to live are frequent. Some of Brown’s children warned against it; others liked it “middling well.” Ruminations about Gerrit Smith’s intentional community of Black pioneers are absent. Ruth and her husband, Henry Thompson, boarded Simeon Hasbrook for a while. The grantees were the Browns’ neighbors, well known to them from church, school, and work parties. Occasional allusions crop up here and there: Simeon Hasbrook climbed Mt. Whiteface with the Brown children and the Thompsons… . Mr. and Mrs. Eppes lost one of the twins. But nobody was dwelling on Timbuctoo’s symbolic value in the larger fight for voting rights for Blacks.²⁹

The girls need shoes.

“To Benefit the Colored People on the Whole”

When John Brown first approached Gerrit Smith in 1848, he hoped to join a highly localized, slow-working agrarian experiment that might stand as an example to the region, even the nation. He dared to dream—as Abraham Lincoln had put it just before the Civil War—of an “easier triumph.” But the antislavery movement in the 1850s endured a beating as relentless as an enslaver’s caning of the abolitionist Charles Sumner on the Senate floor. To merely list the blows—the stunning laws, the overlapping crises—cannot convey the cumulative devastation. There was, as Brown stressed in his constitution for his Subterranean Pass Way, a war on, undeclared. An easier triumph would not deliver slavery’s abolition. And from Brown’s wide-angle vantage, the way to justice was as clear and rushing as a river, and North Elba was an eddy. He would not be diverted. Not even by the Black neighbors’ vote he solicited himself.³⁰

Brown put the question to those neighbors in the fall of 1854. At this point all his family but Henry and Ruth Brown Thompson, his son-in-law and daughter, had been away from North Elba for three years. Brown himself intended to return; on a farm lot in North Elba, Henry Thompson was getting up a house for him (the clapboard home that stands today). Brown’s sons Owen, Frederick, Salmon, Jason, and John Jr. were on their way to Kansas, along with thousands of other Free Soilers on the move, aiming to take down the proslavery cohort with new farms, numbers, votes, and guns (their brother Oliver, in Illinois, would join them later in the summer). Mary Brown and others in the family were staying put in the rented Akron farmhouse of Brown’s old partner, the wool dealer Simon Perkins. Brown himself was caught up in a weary shuttle between courtrooms and lawyers’ offices in Springfield, Boston, New York City, Troy, and Vernon, New York, trying gamely, unavailingly, to salvage the good name of his and Perkins’s battered wool business and reverse their epic losses in an unforgiving market. It wouldn’t happen; the partnership dissolved, and by the end, Brown was nearly destitute. But there was liberation in worldly failure. In his sights now, nothing to block the view, was his lifelong enemy, more confident than ever, and Brown was going to war.³¹

The question was, which battlefield would bring the greater victory? On September 30, 1854, Brown wrote his North Elba family,

After being hard pressed to go with my family to Kansas as more likely to benefit the colored people on the whole than to return with them to North Elba; I have consulted to ask for your advice & feeling in the matter; & also to ask you to learn from Mr. Epps and all the colored people (so far as you can) how they would wish, & advise me to act in the case, all things considered. As I volunteered in their service (or the service of the colored people); they have a right to vote, as to the course I take.

Brown also solicited advice from Gerrit Smith, Frederick Douglass, and James McCune Smith. How the latter two responded is not known. Gerrit Smith hoped Brown would resume his perennially interrupted work in the Black Woods, and Brown’s family expected this as well, because that November, when Brown was home on a visit, Ruth Brown Thompson wrote about her father, “We are rejoiced to hear that he has given up the idea of going to Kansas, but will move here this winter, if he can get feed for his cattle.” As it happened, the poverty that followed the failure of Brown and Simon Perkins’s wool business, made worse by the drought that ravaged his Ohio crops, stalled Brown’s move home for months. But in late May he was back, settling into the new frame house with its wide view of the High Peaks. Then, in July, Brown left for Kansas, and he would return to North Elba only a few times before the last ride home in a coffin on a drenched December day.³²

In 1910, Brown’s eminent biographer Oswald Garrison Villard chalked up Brown’s change of heart about sticking with North Elba to that chronic, helpless “restlessness [that] left him no peace.” Louis Ruchames (A John Brown Reader, 1959) offered only that Brown was “touched by the contagion that had already seized his sons.” Richard O. Boyer (The Legend of John Brown, 1973) stressed the galvanizing impact of the letter Brown got from his son John Jr. in May, which sang the praises of the Kansas Territory as eloquently as it foretold the bloody fate of the Free Staters if they weren’t prepared, and soon, to meet the enemy with guns. It was this letter that steadied Brown’s resolve and put him “for the first time in years … at one with himself.” Inviting a vote from his Black North Elban neighbors, according to Boyer, revealed weakness; broke and weary, Brown had lost faith in his own judgment. His son’s appeal revived his sense of usefulness and called him back to his great mission.³³

But Brown knew his mission before he asked the grantees for their thoughts. However they might vote, he was going to do what would “benefit the colored people on the whole.” That meant Kansas, and the fact that he was inviting his Black neighbors to advise his course of action in terms of “the whole” was their pointed cue to take the long view, too, and privilege the dire crisis of their brethren in bonds over their own needs. They had “a right to vote,” and he would listen, but the silent votes of that greater “whole”—a majority of enslaved millions—would need to win the day. This is not to say that his interest in hearing out his neighbors was disingenuous. On the contrary, as David Reynolds notes, it was proof of an egalitarianism close to freakish in its time, and of an interest in a distributive justice that favored all opinions with respect. If, however, Brown’s request for a vote is noteworthy, so is the uneasy fact that we do not know what followed the request. Did the grantees suggest he stay or encourage him to go? Nobody took minutes. All we know for sure is, vote or no vote, Brown would not betray his conscience, or his reading of God’s will.³⁴

Beautiful Dreams

Years before, Brown had promised to be “a sort of father” to the grantees. In truth, he could not help being fatherly—it came as easily to him as prayer. But as the antislavery struggle grew more militant, the object of his paternalism changed. In addition to his far-flung family and the grantees, Brown would also be a father—confidante, morale booster, mentor—to forty-four Black men he met in Springfield, Massachusetts, after the passage of the Fugitive Slave Act. Many of these men were doing racial justice work before he met them; Brown was not their organizer. But his passion surely thrilled them, especially when he gave their group a name, the League of Gileadites, and articulated their goal—to fight slave catchers—in terms as confident as they were plain. Black Northerners, free or fugitive, ought not only to resist the law’s enforcers, but to strike preemptively, and should “not do [their] work by halves, but make clean work with your enemies.” A white man urging Blacks to armed, organized resistance—some activists in this new club would have surely caught the backbeat of Henry Highland Garnet’s furious “Call to Rebellion” of 1843 and the Black militant David Walker’s earlier appeal of 1829.³⁵

Preaching to an ad hoc vigilante group of activists in Springfield was not like “fathering” a widely scattered, underpopulated flock of Adirondack farmers, but it satisfied the same need to inspire and to lead, and it reminded Brown, as the slower-working Black Woods could not, that he was good at this. He had a gift. And Brown would exercise this gift through the remainder of the decade. In Kansas, August Bondi remarked on Brown’s expressions of “the most affectionate care for each of us. We were united as a band of brothers by the love and affection toward the man who with tender words and wise counsel … prepared a handful of young men.” The prisoners he seized in 1858 were invited to join daily prayers, and any taunting of them by his men was forbidden. And when he asked “all [his] family to imagine themselves in the same dreadful condition” as the Springfield Blacks at risk of arrest under the Fugitive Slave Act, he meant not to alarm them but to refresh their memory of his ability to calm. While I am gone, imagine me still at home in my actions, still fathering and succoring those in need, and if you can imagine how they feel, if you can be them in your minds, so may I succor you.³⁶

The imagination! Brown’s faith in its transformative power was boundless. How often had he written Mary of how he imagined her, their children, their home. In 1847 or 1848, Brown’s imagination nerved this white wool merchant to write an essay for the Ram’s Horn, Willis Hodges’s city paper, from the vantage of a Black reformer. It let him claim a plain-faced farmhouse he visited only rarely as his heart’s home; helped him elaborate his scheme to rescue enslaved Blacks; and gave him license to envision his death as an event that might spur the antislavery world to action (and of his martyrdom, Brown was certain; it was virtually encoded in his plan, right down to the “poor, little, dirty, ragged, bare-headed and barefooted Slave Boys; and Girls, led by some old grey-headed Slave Mother” he imagined bearing witness to his hanging).³⁷

Fifty years after Harpers Ferry, Katherine Mayo, a Boston friend, put it thoughtfully: “He could form beautiful dreams of things, as they should occur, and forthwith go into action on the basis of those dreams, making no sufficient allowance for some things occurring as they should not.” What overrode Brown’s “beautiful dream” of his role in the Black Woods was another dream, a vision close to holy, and as far as we know, no Black Adirondack settler ever wished he’d made another choice. But they would not make it theirs.³⁸

Brown’s biographer Richard Boyer attributed their noninvolvement to their advanced years; these old men, he indicated, were “demoralized by the hardships of Essex County.” In fact, the 1855 North Elba census reported thirteen Black settlers from their late teens into their early fifties, nine of them between the ages of twenty and forty-six. The Hazzard household in St. Armand held three able-bodied twenty-year-old Black farmers. And in five of six Black Franklin households in 1860, the census revealed men of age to take up arms with Captain Brown.³⁹

Assuming that able-bodied, slavery-despising Adirondack farmers like Lyman Eppes, the Hazzard men, and John Thomas were welcome in John Brown’s ranks, why would they spurn a chance to serve with Brown’s guerrilla band? Worcester’s Thomas Wentworth Higginson believed he knew the answer (other chroniclers never thought to ask the question, assuming as they did that the Black settlement was dead). In his eulogy for Brown, Higginson, Brown’s boldest backer in the “Secret Six,” claimed that Brown planned all along to find his fighters among grantees (“Where should he find his men? He came to the Adirondacks to look for them.”) but gave up that expectation when he realized that “such men as he needed are not to be found ordinarily; they must be reared. John Brown did not merely look for men, therefore; he reared them in his sons.” Higginson meant to underscore the extraordinary courage of Brown’s family, not to denigrate the grantees. (Alone among Brown’s memorialists, he blamed the failure of Smith’s giveaway not on the grantees’ ineptitude but on the corrosive impact of local racism.) All the same, Higginson’s comparison—ordinary mortals versus heroes—suggested that the Black settlers let Brown down. Brown’s from-the-cradle rearing of his children in the principles of justice had “given them a wider perspective than the Adirondacks.” The Black grantees, by contrast, were stuck. They couldn’t give Brown what he needed—they didn’t have the vision, the martyr’s holy zeal, to back their own best friend. In the end, Higginson declared, it would be other Blacks, “freed slaves and fugitives,” who “repaid” Brown “for his early friendship to these New York colored men.”⁴⁰

Repaid! So, the Black farmers of the Adirondacks had shirked their duty and revealed themselves to be (compared with Brown’s own vigilantes) provincial and ungrateful. Whether the Black settlers were condemned for being unsoldierly, too old for the job, or “demoralized” by the rigors of the frontier, their noninvolvement in Brown’s guerrilla war and his assault on Harpers Ferry always seemed to evidence some lack. That they did not join Brown because of their own ideas about his prospects, track record, or goals was not addressed. The choice to stick with what they had started, honor a commitment to their farms and families, was racialized, emasculated: they were weak, fearful, and unfit. Such was the hagiography that exalted the redeemer by discounting Black agency and self-determination.

In this context, the biographer David Reynolds’s stern summary of John Brown’s career bears repeating: “Few successful people in history have failed so miserably in so many different pursuits as John Brown. He failed as a tanner, a shepherd, a cattle trader, a horse breeder, a lumber dealer, a real estate speculator, and a wool distributor.” There were credit conflicts that defied enumeration, and overall, a track record of reversal revealing something worse than just bad luck. It showed a pattern of poor judgment and mismanagement that would have registered with Lyman Eppes and the grantees as surely as the insolvency so chronic that Brown once had to borrow money from his hired hand, the fugitive Cyrus Thomas. Then there were Brown’s absences, and his family’s long disappearance. From 1851 to 1854, all the Browns except Ruth Brown Thompson were nowhere near the Black Woods.⁴¹

Nor would it be lost on Eppes and the grantees that only the abolitionist Thompsons, one family among Brown’s white neighbors, took his side, though many others were aware of his plans and might have joined him. “Brown was at North Elba during a large part of last summer, engaged everywhere in disseminating his opinions,” a North Country cattleman told the Utica Observer after Brown’s arrest. In Vergennes, Vermont, where Brown often sojourned, he remained “a man of mystery,” yet “rumors … concerning Brown’s activities” blew around the town like pollen, the Springfield Republican reported. In North Elba, Brown’s plans were more than rumored. “Reliable hearsay is that Brown gave others in the community a chance to share the fate of his three sons and two of the Thompson boys at Harpers Ferry—and thus share in the praise of Emerson, Thoreau, Wendell Phillips, and Victor Hugo. But no more there than elsewhere was the call to martyrdom an appealing one,” recalled Judge O. Byron Brewster in 1952. In 1902 Judge Brewster’s aunt, Adaline Brown, would be described in an obituary as “an intimate and confidential friend of John Brown” who “knew of Brown’s plans and purposes before he started on his desperate mission.” Yet no male Brewsters joined the Browns, and neither would young Alexis Hinckley, though Brown hoped he might, and Hinckley had told him he was “ready to move at a moment’s warning.”⁴²

Abe Sherman heard Brown talk about his plans at the old Holstead House in Westport. Brown’s neighbor William Peacock was privy to them too. An English immigrant who settled in North Elba a year before the Browns arrived, Peacock and his boy Thomas learned all about the abolitionist’s plans at a meeting at Brown’s home. Later, Peacock was one of the first North Elbans to answer Lincoln’s call for volunteers; he served for three years and all his life cherished his friendship with John Brown. But though able-bodied and for the slave, he would not go to Harpers Ferry. At this he drew a line.⁴³

The Franklin County pioneer James Wardner went one better: he and his white neighbors tried to “persuade John Brown to give up his foolish notion of trying to liberate the slaves through an uprising.” The Wardners were first-vintage Adirondackers, a tight clan of Vermont-bred farmers, innkeepers, and guides. Wardner himself met John Brown on a squall-tossed steamer bound for Plattsburgh in 1857 (Brown helped him calm his horse). Wardner’s unpublished memoir, conveyed in old age to his son Charles and transcribed by his grandson Walter, has its starry flourishes (he calls Brown “a tall, broad shouldered and heavy bearded giant”), but there is news here nonetheless. Wardner liked the abolitionist; he and Brown always hoped they might go fishing. But about Gerrit Smith’s bid to get up a farm colony for Black people he had misgivings. Nor would he go for Brown’s suggestion that he secrete escaping slaves in haystacks built especially for the purpose. A “disgusted” Brown told Wardner he “was not much of an abolitionist. However, we remained friends.”⁴⁴

On his visit to Brown’s North Elba farm, Wardner and his friends each “took a turn at trying to make him see the futility of [a raid at Harpers Ferry],” Wardner recalled. “ ‘Jawn,’ Nokes [John Nokes, from Franklin] said, ‘you’re going to get yer damn neck stretched down there. You try to seize a government arsenal and they’ll hang ye for a traitor. Won’t ye give it up?’ ‘No! I will not!’ he thundered. ‘I know I am going to be a martyr. I want my body to be brought back and buried right by that rock.’ ” And then, said Wardner, Brown not only showed his visitors the massive boulder he hoped would flank his grave, but carved his initials into it, then and there.

A bit thick, this. Hideaways tucked into haystacks from a man who openly housed a fugitive in his North Elba home? Initials chiseled, just like that? The boulder that Brown adored is hard as schist. But these fine points matter less, finally, than Wardner’s need to partake of an Adirondack rite of passage—laying a postbellum claim on a corner of the John Brown story even while justifying his remove from it. If radical abolitionism, in his self-exonerating reading, meant cockamamie schemes to turn haystacks into hideaways, then no, Wardner was not much of an abolitionist. And he would offer no apology or second-guessing about not joining Brown on a suicidal mission. Wardner acknowledged “the earnest efforts of those who desire … reforms,” but he would not join their pioneering ranks.⁴⁵

Others held back too. Mary Brown chose not to join her spouse, figuring she could do more good at home with her young children and a new granddaughter than with her husband and his band. Her beloved son-in-law Henry Thompson, a veteran of Pottawatomie, would not go to Harpers Ferry. To join Brown now, he felt, was suicide, and he could not justify the risk of leaving his wife a widow, his children fatherless. Salmon and Jason declined too. Brown’s son John Jr. had offered to participate, but when the raid occurred, he was in Canada—and this may not have been accidental. The trauma he experienced when he was captured, tortured, and beaten by proslavery vigilantes in 1857 never wholly eased its grip.⁴⁶

Lyman Eppes and the Black grantees knew some who went. But they knew so many more who didn’t—and from no lack of abolitionist conviction (Henry Thompson was not just a radical abolitionist but a husband, son, and brother of abolitionists as well). The grantees would have sensed the skepticism with which Brown’s subversive plans were viewed by his white neighbors. His erratic track record as a businessman was no secret, and farmers as observant as Eppes had good reason to suppose that Brown’s plan for the seizure of a federal arsenal might end as badly as other high-reaching schemes he had driven into the ground.

Then there was Eppes’s faith. Did he want to kill? Brown’s plans for Harpers Ferry may have been semisecret, but his bloody exploits in the antislavery struggle out West were widely covered in the Republican and abolition newspapers. Frontline columns in Greeley’s syndicated Tribune pulsed with news of the undeclared war between “Free Staters” and Missouri emigrants, and here the name “Old Brown” loomed. For Adirondackers, their John Brown of North Elba, ribbon winner at the county fair, always talking slavery, always with a plan, was the local link, the connector. He made the far-off intimate. He brought the struggle home.⁴⁷

He was also, by 1859, a wanted man with a price on his head. The Pottawatomie slayings were widely (if imperfectly) reported in many eastern newspapers, and in some reports had been described as outright murderous. How did violations of the sixth commandment resonate with Brown’s Black neighbors? Brown, while a believer, was a tepid churchman unless the preaching was his own. Not so his Black friends. The Eppeses, Carasaws, Jeffersons, Hazzards, and Hendersons were devout. Eppes cofounded two congregations in North Elba. So let us suppose that divine law held at least as much meaning for him as it did, say, for Brown’s pacifist son Jason. Let us not assume that Eppes and the other grantees, simply because they were Black, automatically condoned Brown’s bloody actions or shared his justifying vision of a higher morality. If Brown was disappointed when Eppes declined to join his war party, the disappointment may have worked both ways. Eppes may have been distressed by Brown’s disregard for his own first promises, unhappy with a brand of antislavery violence that violated Eppes’s spiritual convictions, and uneasy about Brown’s long legacy of worldly failure.⁴⁸

A Yes as Resonant as His No

The fact that Brown was unable to get one Black settler in Essex or Franklin Counties to join him has never been linked to his subsequent, better-chronicled failure to win the spontaneous, militant support of Black people living around Harpers Ferry. It should be. North Elba was the proverbial miner’s canary, a portent of the debacle of 1859. Brown hoped Eppes would join his ranks for the same reason he expected Black Virginians, free or enslaved, to flock en masse to his defense. Eppes would do it because Eppes was a Black American of conscience, and as such would embrace the opportunity to battle slave owners and the proslavery government that enabled them. How could he not? “In [Brown’s] view,” David Reynolds explains, “slaves needed no special circumstances to motivate them to rebellion. By definition, they longed to rebel as a result of their oppressed condition.” Brown had studied slave revolts; he knew how these things worked. While Eppes was no slave, surely his skin color ensured that his identification with the slave’s plight would be, “by definition,” at least as great as Brown’s.⁴⁹

It is a pity that the Christian vision that let Brown embrace Black Americans as equals did not translate into a keen appreciation of human nature in its particularity. Black people, as it happened, did not act or answer “by definition.” If there were “two thousand distinct forms of oppression scattered among the hundred and seventy-six thousand free colored people in the free States,” as James McCune Smith wearily observed, there were as many ways that those “forms of oppression” might be fought. Lyman Eppes and the Black Woods enacted one modest, localized approach. Harpers Ferry offered another. Eppes didn’t want a martyr’s glory in Captain Brown’s war; he was captaining his own integrationist campaign at home. And if Eppes’s decision was bad news for Brown, it was very good news for Eppes’s family and community and for the idea of this community, an idea of Black and white people living peaceably on the frontier, drawn into a shared vision less by a scheme of justice than by good sense. It was, that is, as meaningful a yes as it was a no, as significant a validation as it was a disavowal.⁵⁰

But this was not what was remembered. Eppes’s obituaries in 1897 would mostly not extol the church-loving citizen who helped bind a smattering of homesteads into a lightly knit community. They would not recall the wolves he shot, the library he cofounded, the conservationists and sportsmen he guided, the trails he cut, or the four ministers who spoke at his funeral. Posterity buried his biography as a pioneer, saving only John Brown’s friend and neighbor, the silver-voiced colored man who sang “Blow Ye the Trumpets, Blow” at Brown’s funeral. The Connecticut-born Eppes, the New York Times obituary reported, was “one of the negroes brought from the South by John Brown.” For a century, that’s how it stood.⁵¹