1858 (53 page)

Over the next few days, Ambrose and his father-in-law brought food and clothing to the runaways and raiders in Severn’s cabin. The runaways fixed the cabin, patched the holes between the hickory poles with dirt and grass, built a chimney and created a doorway that they covered over with a quilt. Ambrose rode regularly to the cabin at night with supplies and to warn the runaways if there was too much smoke coming out of the chimney that could be seen. He said, “I would...caution them about the great danger of being discovered.”

He was determined to help the freed slaves, but worried about himself, too, just as Rev. Adair had. “I felt a great anxiety about it. I was born in a slave state and knew the cursed spirit of slavery, and knew full well that if they were discovered so close to my habitation, all the hounds in the proslavery kennel would be turned loose upon me, under the law of the dark ages, the fugitive slave law.”

Ambrose and anyone else involved in Brown’s raid had good reason to worry. The proslavery forces in Kansas and Missouri were determined to hunt down and execute anyone involved in an effort to liberate slaves. U.S. Senator David Atchison, of Missouri, wrote a heated letter to Senator Jefferson Davis explaining, “In a public speech…I advised the squatters in Kansas and the people of Missouri to give a horse thief, robber or [murderer] a fair trial, but to hang a Negro thief and abolitionist, without judge or jury. This sentiment met with almost universal applause.”
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One of the freed women was pregnant. She gave birth to a baby boy that she and her husband Jim immediately named John Brown out of gratitude to their liberator. The slaves had no time to gather up clothing, especially a baby’s clothing, when they fled and the baby had no clothes. Mrs. Felton rode to Mrs. Ambrose’s home and the two women made a toddler’s suit and brought it, along with a gown and some blankets, to the Severn cabin, where the new mother thanked them profusely.

Mother and child, and the others, did not feel safe, though. The antislavery men in the area volunteered to spend nights in the Ambrose cabin keeping watch, rifles in their arms. They included Dr. Rufus Gillpatrick, Martin Ayers, David Harsha, Samuel Mack, James Fitton, Felton, and Ambrose. Two men deemed too old to engage in a gun battle if it broke out, James Blunt and Poindexter Maners, served as suppliers of food and clothing to the fugitives.

The slaves remained there for a month. None of the proslavery men in the area found them, but there were two close calls. Once Ambrose saw a well known pro-slaver walking past his home on a direct line toward the Severn cabin. Ambrose rushed outside to ask him where he was going.

“John Blunt’s,” he said.

Thinking quickly, Ambrose told him that he was on his way past Blunt’s on an errand and he would drive him there in his wagon. The man said he could walk, but Ambrose insisted. The man jumped into his wagon and they drove off, taking a wide path away from the Severn cabin and then a long three miles to Blunt’s.

On another occasion several of the men guarding the fugitives were with a proslavery man several miles from the Severn cabin. The pro-slaver was looking around the plains with a field glass and noticed a black man near the cabin.

“Who’s that darky near the Severn place?” he asked no one in particular, putting the field glass down.

One of the guards, acting surprised, said, “Give me that field glass.”

He then looked, saw the man, and handed the field glass to another, telling all, “I saw nothing.”

The guards then passed the field glass back and forth and then, when the slave had disappeared into the cabin, handed it back to the pro-slaver, who looked through it again and saw no one. He shrugged his shoulders, put the field glass down and went about his business.
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These incidents, and the need to get the refugees to Canada, persuaded Brown, who visited the fugitives from time to time, to leave Kansas. He knew from conversations with his friends there, that even some of them objected to the murder of Cruise and the plundering. They would not support him. To them, he scoffed, “It is no pleasure to me, an old man, to be living in the saddle, away from home and family, exposing my life, and if the Free State men of Kansas feel that they no longer need me, I will be glad to go.”
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Finally, on January 20, 1859, a month after the rescue, ready to depart, Brown rode to the Ambrose cabin and thanked the farmer for protecting the slaves. Ambrose told him it was his pleasure. “God bless you,” he said to Brown. That last night was a magical moment for Ambrose. He was to describe him, “His gray hair and long, snow white beard gave him a venerable appearance and the tone of voice indicated that whosoever at tempted to stop him would have to fight.”

Ambrose proceeded to join Brown’s raiders for the ride to the border. There, a grateful Brown told Ambrose that he no longer needed a local guide. He knew the roads out of the Osawatomie area to Lawrence, Kansas, and then to Iowa, his next stop on the road to Canada. Ambrose wrote proudly of his assistance to Brown, “Such a length of time in such weather may make the weak in the faith of the access of any enterprise that they might take hold of doubt; but no such Doubting Thomas has ever had anything to do with the work of the underground railroad, or they would not express such doubts.”
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Officials of both Missouri and Kansas were livid. The Missouri General Assembly condemned Brown and the new governor of Kansas called the raid contemptible. Newspapers in both states criticized his actions and those throughout the Southern states demanded that federal, state, and local authorities join forces to capture and imprison him.

That was to be expected. What Brown was looking for was applause from the antislavery movement. To engender that response, he courted the press. To win press coverage of the raid, he invited a regional correspondent for the
New York Tribune
, William Hutchinson, to meet him at the Wattles home, in Moneka, Kansas, where he was hiding. He talked to Hutchinson in lengthy interviews that covered two days, December 30 and 31. The shrewd abolitionist leader then permitted the reporter to sit in on one of his “war councils” so he could observe Brown and the other raiders discussing their plans and, importantly, so he could see that they did not desire violence, just the liberation of slaves. Brown was so intent on garnering favorable coverage in the influential
Tribune
that at one point he turned to Hutchinson and asked what he thought the raiders should do. The young reporter, flattered, suggested more peaceful talks and no violence. The men agreed.

“I met with Brown and his boys about noon that day, Thursday,” Hutchinson wrote. “We went to Wattles that night together and we were together all night and the next day, talking much with him and Wattles and others who called on us. They took special pains to have a war council on my account and appeared to have great confidence in ‘the man from Lawrence,’ as some termed me. I am so vain as to think my advice did have some good effect.”

The reporter for the
Tribune
was one of the few people in the press to spend time with Brown during the raid and the liberators’ eleven-hundred-mile trek to Canada. He remained with Brown at the Wattles home for nearly a week and observed Brown’s intensity, writing that the raider was so fired up that he could barely sleep. Hutchinson wrote, “Our bed was a mattress made of hay, laid upon the floor of the second story. Sleep seemed to be a secondary matter with him. I am sure he talked on that night ’til the small hours, and his all-absorbing theme was ‘my work,’ ‘my great duty,’ ‘my mission,’ etc., meaning, of course, the liberation of the slaves. He seemed to have no other object in life, no other hope or ambition. The utmost sincerity pervaded his every thought and word.”
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Writing in the
Tribune
, Hutchinson wrote that the raids were justifiable as retaliation for slave catchers stealing former slaves from their homes in the North. The
Tribune
story was balanced, but sympathetic to Brown. “Some bad may have grown out of the movement, but I have yet to see what it is. Much good has come of it. The bluster of Missouri has lessened. While hundreds of the non-slaveholding whites express great indignation at the invasion of their state, and boil over with patriotism in public, they privately laugh at the idea of their defending a species of property that is a curse to them, and rejoice that certain lordly slaveholders have ‘come down to their level.’”
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Just before the raid, Brown had met with William Phillips, another Kansas reporter for the
New York Tribune
. Eager to alert the country to his mission through the press, Brown told Phillips (of slavery), “And now we have reached a point where nothing but war can settle the question. Had they [slavers] succeeded in Kansas, they would have gained a power that would have given them permanently the upper hand, and it would have been the death-knell of republicanism in America.”

Brown told the reporter, too, that violence was necessary. “We are on the eve of one of the greatest wars in history… I drew my sword in Kansas when they attacked us, and I will never sheathe it until this war is over,” he told Phillips in one of three meetings. He responded to the journalist’s contention that the government had made up its mind about slavery, “I will remedy that.”

All of this gave Phillips, and Hutchinson, too, a view of Brown as a man who accomplished his goals. Phillips wrote, “While others passed resolutions, he acted on them… The part of the evangelist that seemed to impress him most was the occasion of our Savior with whips of cords [driving] the money changers from the temple.”
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Pleased with his success in persuading Hutchinson and Phillips to look favorably upon the Missouri raid and the harboring of the eleven fugitives, plus the newborn baby, Brown decided to conduct a press offensive to ensure the safety of his party. He needed all of the large city newspapers to approve of his work, not just the
New York Tribune
. To do that he decided to write a manifesto, called the
Parallels
, and mail it to the editors of the most important newspapers in the country, especially those in the Northeast, where he was not only seeking approval, but funds to further the cause.

In the
Parallels
, Brown argued that since proslavery men had murdered slaves and free men in Kansas, and slave catchers had snatched black freed-men in Kansas and in several Northern states, his Missouri raid was a “parallel” action. He cited an instance in which proslavery raiders killed eleven antislavery Kansas residents and compared that event to his Missouri raid. He wrote, “Now for a comparison. Eleven persons are forcibly restored to their natural, and inalienable rights, with but one man killed and all ‘hell I stirred from beneath.’ The marshal of Kansas is said to be collecting a posse of Missouri [not Kansas] men at West Point in Missouri a little town about ten miles distant, to ‘enforce the laws’ and all proslavery conservative Free-State, and Administration are filled with holy horror. Consider the two cases, and the action of the Administration party.”
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His parallel analogy made sense to many in the North, and even in Missouri, where legislators demanded the cessation of all violence in Kansas, on both sides, for fear that “an eye for an eye” reprisals would continue. Many newspapers ran stories quoting the
Parallels
and Brown became a much-debated national figure as people wondered whether the elusive raider would make it to Canada.

There was some favorable reaction to the press coverage of Brown and his raiders. Montgomery, tired of the Kansas wars, surrendered himself on January 18 to authorities in Lawrence, who freed him on $4,000 bail pending his trial concerning the raid on the community. On January 20, Montgomery addressed an overflow crowd of three thousand at the Lawrence Congregational Church, speaking for three hours on the border strife and calling for an end to it. At the conclusion of his speech, as expected, there was applause for Montgomery. Then, completely unexpected, someone asked for a cheer for “Old John Brown” and the crowd erupted into frenzied applause and shouting.
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There was much opposition to Brown’s raid in Kansas and Missouri, though. Farmers in Kansas feared yet more retaliation from Missourians for the attacks. One man told Brown that it was the residents of Kansas who would have to pay a heavy price if that happened, not Brown, who would disappear, as he always did. Even Wattles and Montgomery were angry with him because of the murder of Cruise. Brown did not understand their criticism. He argued that he had done precisely what he knew would cause freedom loving men everywhere to rise up. In fact, Brown told the pair, he had heard that farmers in western Missouri, hearing of the attacks, and fearing him, had fled into neighboring Arkansas.

Besides, he swore to them as he swore to everyone, he had not unjustly murdered anyone, in Missouri or in the Kansas wars of 1855 and 1856, as so many had charged, including eyewitnesses to the Pottawatomie massacre. His view had always been that the defenders of slavery were expendable. “I killed no innocent men,” he told critics.
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