I fear failure, for God has given me a difficult task.
Concord, Massachusetts, March 1857
In our campaign to win significant support from abolitionists, young Harvard grad Franklin Sanborn arranged my meeting with Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau, two famous and well-connected men who publicly supported the abolition of slavery. Intense hope for these meetings animated me. I wanted inspired and fearless companions in the fight. I needed substantive help in moving toward our great goal. I had no patience for idle well-wishers or dream-spinners. But I knew by this time to temper my hopes. I had matured painfully in my quest and become accustomed to disappointment. Even my best allies flinched from the true path. Everyone in our troubled country, it seemed, had accumulated reasons to dither and delay.
I arrived at Emerson’s grand Concord home by hired sleigh in late morning. Henry Thoreau welcomed me into the house. “Delighted to meet you in person,” Henry said.
I shook Henry’s firm hand and properly indicated my own pleasure in the meeting. Henry gazed at me intently with his great doe eyes above his huge bramble of beard. I was clean-shaven at this time. “Come in,” he said. “Ralph is in town on a veterinary errand concerning his horses. He should be back shortly.”
We entered a front room with a lively fire. A white male servant brought us tea and biscuits. Emerson’s wife and children were about in the house but I was not immediately introduced. I accepted that Thoreau and Emerson might see me as a rough specimen. They might assume—incorrectly, of course—I was not suitable for close contact with the female and the young.
“We read a lot about you in the newspapers,” Henry said.
“Ah. Some small parts of what you find there might be true,” I said.
Henry smiled and nodded. “I am left with great curiosity.”
I laughed.
Since the first violence last summer, I had grown used to the wild overstatements of the newspaper writers. The “John Brown” who appeared in accounts of the fighting in Kansas Territory was generally either saintly daredevil or demonic madman. People sometimes addressed the newspaper John Brown when they were talking to me, seeming to have little interest in the striving, suffering, living and breathing creature I was.
“Tell me, how did such moral clarity on the question of slavery first come to you?”
I sighed mightily. Many people had asked me this weighty question, usually in less polite terms, and usually because they were eager to explain to me the error of my ways. What self-understanding I had achieved had come slowly over the years and remained, even now, clouded and incomplete. “I have borne the weight for forty-five years,” I told Henry.
“Was there a trigger, an early experience which set you on this path?”
I told Henry this story:
In 1812, my father had work feeding General William Hull’s army, who was fighting the English near Detroit. We drove beef cattle hundreds of miles northwest around Lake Erie and up into Michigan into Hull’s camp. On one of these cattle drives, while my father was occupied with some other business, he had me stay with the herd on a ranch for several days with a gentleman. I don’t recall his name. A slim, black-haired, mustached man with a notable scar beneath his right ear, the gentleman was eager to show off his self-satisfaction and especially his domination of his slave boy, Sim. I was twelve years old and Sim was about my age. I had no work to do and a full day free. Sim and I became friendly together. Sim did me many favors, cleaning my boots unasked, leading me to drink from a sweet spring in the nearby woods, and even giving me a piece of honeycomb to suck.
In the evening, the gentleman called me to the table to eat with the men, which I welcomed as a sign of privilege and respect. He introduced me to a dinner guest, the portly, vested town doctor.
“His father has sent young John droving cattle on his own,” the gentleman said to the doctor. “And how many cows are you driving?”
“Forty-eight, sir,” I said.
“Isn’t that impressive?”
“Terrific,” agreed the doctor, who was avid in his eating and spoke around a mouthful of pork.
The gentleman’s hand hovered over me, then tousled my hair. I was surprised by the pressure of his boney fingers. I was unused to being touched, especially by a stranger, and I greatly enjoyed this clear sign of favor.
After dinner, I was directed to sit on a sofa with the doctor by the fire. The gentleman went outside. Soon, I heard yelling in the yard and followed out the front door. The gentleman was beating Sim down to the ground with a shovel.
That night, as I slept in the comfort of a fine bed, the shovel striking Sim and the knowledge that Sim was sleeping on the barn floor brought me an ugly dream. The gentleman tugged me from my horse, then fell upon me with a great knife and carved my body as he had carved our dinner meat. My chest parted with a terrible rip and stink. Bone cracked. Fluids spilled. His hand passed inside. I felt his fingers move about.
The enemy hand emerged holding my still-beating heart.
I awoke sweat-soaked and leaped up. Inside my chest, I felt the carved-out hollow where the knife blade had done its strange and terrible work.
I never recovered from the dream. My mother and father had spoken to me about slavery as an offense against God. Their words now took on full meaning for me. Until that night, I had been free to believe in a just world. Such complacency was no longer possible. The task was plain, though very daunting. True rest was forever denied me.
As I told my story, Henry held his fingers pointed upward before his face. When I completed relating the nightmare which still plagued me, Henry was kissing the steeple made of his own fingers.
After some time of reflection, Henry said, “Ralph and I feel it is very right and just that you bring the issue of slavery forcibly to the fore.”
“Forcibly?” The tantalizing word aroused my hope for worldly help from these men, known, as they were, more for writing and talking than for specific concrete action.
“We must set aside the human-constructed absurdity of the ownership of one person by another.”
“Just so,” I agreed.
I tried to envision gentle, earnest Henry Thoreau leveling a pistol at an opponent who subscribed to a conflicting ideology based on a “human-constructed absurdity.” No suitable mental image formed.
Henry had by this time given up his cabin at the shore of Walden Pond. He kept a room here in Emerson’s house. He talked glowingly about his experience living in the cabin and appeared to assume I was familiar with his book Walden, an impression I did not disabuse him of. I was meaning to read the book. Franklin Sanborn had given me a copy which I kept in my bag bundled among my spare clothing.
“Before Ralph gets back, I want to show you the pond,” Henry said. “The beauty is all-powerful.”
I took silent exception to this statement and felt my distance from Henry increase. Beauty, whether natural or contrived, was a worldly phenomenon and ought not be compared to that which was genuinely all-powerful. But I held my tongue. I was here to curry favor and support, not to lecture and preach. Thoreau and Emerson were called Transcendentalists, but I already saw for Henry this label was not accurate. He was proudly rooted in this world.
* * *
Five inches of fresh snow lay on the ground. No grass showed. Only the taller twigs of shrubs and the trees were visible above the white sheet. The day was clear, cold and breezy and—as Henry kept exclaiming—stunningly beautiful. Bundled up in overcoat, scarf, hat and gloves, we walked by a broad open field, our eyes shielded with our fingers against the glare of the snow. As wind whirled about and chilled my now bare neck and chin, I saw distinct advantage in Henry’s dense thicket of beard.
Cattle lowed in distant barns. “In other seasons, cows graze here,” Henry said. “Now, they stay home and eat hay brought from up country.” He pointed out a group of bushes weighed down in white. “Blueberries,” he said. “Come visit us again in the warm months and you’ll have a treat.”
We walked to water’s edge. Steep hills and thick high pine woods formed the shores of Walden Pond. Earlier in my life, when I walked more definitely on the common earth, I might have drawn as much sweet pleasure from these natural phenomena as Henry clearly did. But the urgency of the great task God had given me threw a weighty shadow backward in time, bending my spine, tightening my jaw, and preventing my fully indulging in such pleasures. The steep slopes and the amphitheater shape surrounding the dark water of the pond brought into my mind not peace and the tranquility of a rural reflective life as they did for Henry, but the cliffs and hills surrounding Harpers Ferry in Virginia, where we would, with God’s continuing facilitation, soon attack the Enemy with the utmost force and ferocity.
A train whistle blew, startlingly loud. Henry winced and turned his back on the intrusion. We could not see the train, but we heard the chug and screech of the locomotive. Smoke puffed upward into view overhead. The stink soon reached us.
Henry was explaining his observations of the progression of oaks and maples over the years in the forest. I dutifully pretended to listen while I privately savored God’s unmasked glory. I clearly saw myself race with my well-armed fighters across the Potomac bridge to the federal arsenal.
Behind my eyes and between my ears, guns fired. Enemy fell. My small but potent army passed rifles and knife-tipped poles into the arms of hundreds of new fighters who were now freed, no longer slaves. I grinned, then moderated my grin and tried to show courteous attention to my earnest companion.
Henry proudly showed me the cabin he had lived in for two years. I was meant to admire his austerity but I could not. He considered the cabin small and his living there an act of austere self-purification. But I had spent many nights this last year in far more modest accommodations, often sleeping on the rocks and soil. I said nothing to disturb Henry’s self-comforting notions.
On our leisurely walk back, Henry pointed out a male Northern Cardinal atop a fencepost, bright red with black around his face, red crest, and beak. We stopped for a long while to admire the enchanting bird. A female flapped into view beside him with her sharp brown crest, red highlights, and red beak.
* * *
“John Brown,” Ralph Waldo Emerson said. I smiled, tight-lipped. I thought it best to conceal, if I could, the sweeping immensity of my hope for this meeting. I meant to present myself as clear-eyed, reliable, and a likely effective leader in the terrible action we must soon take. It wouldn’t do for the great Emerson to think John Brown was prone to spiritual intoxication, though, clearly, that argument could be made.
Clean-shaven, beak-nosed Emerson was tremorous, a first disturbance in my idealized notion of the man. His habitually raised wrist moved subtly side-to-side. His eyes were set deeply beneath prominent brows. He wore long not particularly full sideburns. He was notably pale. He had an angular jaw, not unlike my own, and conspicuous ears, again, not unlike my own.
We gazed at one another in silence a good part of a minute. I began to worry Ralph was making too much of my gawky features. I reddened and felt small. I became aware of the tatters at my yellowed shirt cuffs. Ralph’s jacket was of a superior wool. He patronized a better-quality tailor than I.
“Osawatomie Brown,” Ralph said, lips curling with evident pleasure in mouthing this newspaper writers’ name for me. Last August, afflicted by what I now saw as an episode of questionable judgement, I had presented myself at the battlefront in coattails wielding two revolvers and briefly sustained the illusion of a fearless hero fighting the proslavery maniacs, then fled while the Enemy proceeded to destroy the town of Osawatomie in Kansas. Newspaper readers loved a valiant loser. A strange lesson there.
Ralph continued to drink me in with his eyes, then insisted I indulge in his fine rocking chair, while he took an armchair and Henry a place on a blue sofa arranged about a low table. I faced a wall of books, on their spines some names I recognized: Cicero, Seneca, Rousseau, Locke. A finely worked silver inkpot and a blue and white ceramic water jug graced the table. A book in Latin by Cato lay open.
“We hear great things from Kansas,” Ralph said, tugging his lower lip and drilling me again with his curious gaze.
“Great and terrible,” I said.
He laughed, slapped one knee, and showed his teeth. I regretted my remark. I did not want to be taken as a funny man. I would curtail my wit and, I hoped, minimize misunderstanding on the issue of my seriousness.
“Certainly, there will be setbacks,” he said.
“Many setbacks,” I said. “Many casualties. Many deaths.” That brought an end to all levity. Did Emerson know I had already lost one son to a bullet and federal soldiers had tortured another to insanity? It was less likely that he could intuit my more all-consuming sacrifice, the hollowing of my spirit, reshaped for cold combat.
“Would you be willing to speak at the town hall?” Emerson asked. “Many people are eager to hear firsthand of the events in Kansas.”
I agreed to this.
“Do you expect a general civil war?” Emerson asked.
“You are very direct in your question,” I said. I was still unsure of my audience. Emerson presented me with a by-now familiar dilemma. News of the bloody struggle which lay ahead for our divided nation was not to be brought into focus casually. Making oneself messenger of the unbearable was rarely wise. But my Truth was appearing unavoidable.
I said, “Enlightening the population through argument and example does not appear workable.”
He nodded gravely. “It appears President Buchanan and Chief Justice Taney are bent on turning us away from all possibility of peaceful resolution. Yet, victory against slavery, I feel, is inevitable.”
“I want to believe so. I do believe so.”
“And the great question for us is how can we help? How can we move the process forward?”
I took the leap. “The enslaved people of our nation are a mighty force,” I said. “Given the means, they will lead the reckoning.”
Ralph’s fore-thrust brows bunched. He bowed and looked downward, as though tapping a reservoir of wisdom which he stored beneath the fine carpet on his study floor.
“Blacks have souls as we do, I am sure,” he said. “But do they have the wit to fight for their own cause? If so, I have not observed it.”
In that instant, my hope for finding a spiritual peer and soul-companion in Ralph Emerson flickered out. I saw this “great man” was afflicted by the stupidity, ignorance, and blindness that blighted the minds of so many in our time. My chest shrank around the hollow where my heart had once been. My throat became a dead branch. Despair touched me.
I rallied enough to carry on desultory conversation for a few minutes more, then I begged for time alone.
* * *
“This heart now beats for one purpose only,” I told the several dozen townspeople facing me in the Concord Town Hall. I raised and twisted my hands in the air before me. “These hands have one use only . . . to manifest the Divine force that will move our nation toward justice and decency.”
Patchy applause rippled through the hall. Several rows from the front, a small girl in a yellow dress stood before her mother’s chair, watching me and tugging at her long straight hair. This girl became my audience and my judge. She would live on after the coming war had swallowed me and extinguished my earthly consciousness. I wanted to give this girl and all young people of our nation the blessed future they deserved.
At the end of the first row of chairs, a newspaper reporter’s head bobbed . . . taking notes. From his seat by Ralph Emerson, a few rows from the front, Henry Thoreau’s huge eyes dwelled firmly upon me.
Spiritual flame rose within me and crowded out all possibility of falseness. I knew then I would speak plainly to this attentive crowd. As human, I was a mass of discomforts, confusions, and vain impulses. But as a herald, I was blessed.
I swelled my chest to the point of the sweetest pain. The Glory occupied me in fullness. “Our Truth is speaking the Truth,” I said. “The pride of Satan maintains personal empires peopled by slaves.” Audience members leaned forward. The girl in the yellow dress stopped plaiting her hair and frowned. “We will cut the scourge of slavery from our land.”
A terrible cramp constricted my left side from buttock to neck. I threw my head back in my attempt to relieve the pain. The ceiling was then shorn away and I saw the broadest daylight in heaven: full blue sky and blazing sunlight. There, a great ivory crucifix flew. Five beams of red light mixed with yellow light poured forth from the four points and the center of the crucifix. The beams struck and burned me, hands and ankles and side.
“What’s wrong with him?” the girl asked. The newspaper reporter lowered his pen and observed along with the others.
“Everything!” I answered the girl explosively. “Everything is wrong with me.”
A father and mother gathered their three children and left out the rear door. I raced down the side of the room, pushed past a few standees, and followed them. I would apologize to the family. Explain myself. “No need to run away,” I would say. The second part I still knew I must not speak aloud: I am the answer. I am the Knowledge.
Outside, the young family had vanished in the darkness. I looked upward but saw only the piercing, crying stars.
Henry gripped my forearm. “Come back inside. They need you.”
I gaped at Henry. Could I gather up the scattered pieces of my disordered self?
A better person might say divine inspiration eased this panic. Or Henry’s well-meaning reassurances which then spilled from his lips. That would be a good explanation, too. But what brought me back to my human self was fear of freezing. I had left my overcoat inside hanging on a peg.
I resumed my place at the front of the room. I was inhabited by worms. I would open my mouth. Anything could squirm out.
I applied full effort to composing myself.
Somehow, I found these words.
“Our stricken hearts ache for the better future. We know our world cannot go on in such benighted condition. We see the distant shore where justice rules. The path of righteous action lies open before us. But we stiffen and slow. We falter. Why?
“The crisis looms. The need to act is urgent and plain to see. Why do we hang back? What in our human nature prevents us from doing what we know must be done? It is not lack of courage. Courage is abundant. We are brave, fearless, in fact, when the need to set aside fear becomes apparent. The problem is simpler, easier than that. We are trapped by lazy habit. We somehow prefer to believe what has been in the past must always be. But this is utterly false. Have we always had fine rifles? Have we always ridden on railroads? Have we always communicated through wires by telegraph? No, my friends. The world advances. Civilization improves. Foremost among these improvements will be the elimination of human subjugation in the system of enslavement.”
“Impossible,” the high-voiced man tending the fire opined. His jaw was marked with soot.
“So, what do you want us to do?” another deeper-voiced man near the back called.
There was for me a breathless pause. Preparing my words was like inserting a bullet into the firing chamber of a long rifle.
“We arm the oppressed,” I said. “We place the tools of war in the hands of those who will use them to best purpose.”
The fingers of the reporter flew over his notepad.
A bearded fellow came to his feet and pointed at me. His voice had oceanic depth. “You are mad,” the man declared.
“You can question me,” I said. “But you cannot question . . . you cannot question . . .”
My mouth hung open. No more words would come to me. I was an empty vessel.
Henry gripped my forearm. “Let us go. Quickly,” he said. He urged me toward the exit. A shrieking woman pulled and tore a handful of my shirt. A young man fell to his knees and raised his hands as though praying to me. “Hurry,” Henry said. Someone I couldn’t see clutched my hand. When I tugged my palm free, blood ran.
We walked quickly in the snow toward Emerson’s home. I wanted only to hide from the world, to retreat into myself.
Henry said, “Congratulations.”
“For what?” I was a walking talking mistake. A human error with chilly hands and feet.
“You won them over,” Henry said.
“No,” I said.
“You did. You have won converts. Supporters. Maybe even volunteers for the fight.”
“I have not done this,” I said. “No, not I.” I was only the messenger. And only just barely that.
