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3 NOT BURIED BUT PLANTED Cultivating the Legend of John Brown Although John Brown’s invasion of Virginia generated much confusion, some grasped the man and his mission immediately. John Zittle, captain of one of the first military companies to arrive at Harpers Ferry, wrote that Brown’s raid “was the signal gun of the great war.”1 Zittle, a native Virginian , was not the first, or the last, to assign such importance to the invasion . More than just a portent of America’s Civil War, Harpers Ferry became the launching pad for Brown’s immortality. Following Brown from Charles Sumner’s cloakroom to a Charlestown scaffold highlights the abolitionist ’s path to martyrdom and the origins of his enigmatic place in American memory. Brown’s brief time as an abolitionist celebrity, the result of his adventures in Kansas, carried him to the small town of Harpers Ferry in 1859. In particular, Brown’s tenacious desire to lead the revolution for black freedom convinced him that both God and the Founding Fathers authorized ever greater attacks on slavery. After Brown proved his revolutionary credentials in Kansas’s territorial conflict, particularly after the brutal murders of the five proslavery settlers in Pottawatomie, he became known across the country . Brown did not merely rest on his Kansan laurels, he aggressively sought new ventures designed to threaten the institution of slavery. Brown stoked the flames of his burgeoning reputation, especially among African Americans , by returning to Kansas in 1858. Once there, he led a dramatic rescue of eleven slaves in Missouri, escorting them twenty-five hundred miles to Canada after “reparation” was “made for the wrongs that had been done.”2 Brown’s friend Redpath wrote admiringly of the incident: “What [Brown] We are abolitionists from the North, come to take and release your slaves; our organization is large and must succeed. I suffered much in Kansas, and expect to suffer here, in the cause of human freedom. Slaveholders I regard as robbers and murderers; and I have sworn to abolish slavery and liberate my fellow-men. —John Brown to the master of the Harpers Ferry Armory, October 16, 1859 Not Buried but Planted 33 believed, he practiced.” After asking the slaves “how much their services had been worth,” the abolitionist “proceeded to take property to the amount thus due to the negroes,” further infuriating their former masters.3 Brown himself wrote to the New York Tribune to celebrate his exploit. After explaining that his actions were partly in response to the senseless murder of “eleven quiet citizens” for the crime of “being Free-State men,” Brown recalled a “negro man called Jim” coming to visit his cabin.4 After Jim explained that his family was about to be sold, Brown “liberated” them, some nearby slaves, and other property. “Now for a comparison,” Brown wrote. “Eleven persons are forcibly restored to their natural and inalienable rights, with but one man killed, and all ‘hell is stirred from beneath.’ . . . Consider the two cases.”5 The incident, with Redpath running public relations, bolstered Brown’s reputation even further. Black Americans began contacting Brown to express their appreciation and support. Here, for the first time, was a white abolitionist willing to take up arms for the cause. One admirer, James Newton Gloucester, a wealthy free black in Philadelphia, wrote to Brown to applaud his “very commendable measures to deliver the slave.” Blacks, Gloucester warned, “suffer for the want of intelligence” and are “at sea without a commander or rudder.”6 Perhaps Brown was the man to give them that guidance. In another letter, Gloucester edged toward Brown’s extremism. Regardless of circumstances, Gloucester argued, no black Americans were truly free. “There is in truth no black man, north or south of Mason and Dixon line—a freeman whatever be his wealth, position or worth to the world.” Thus, Gloucester wrote, we must “now use these means that God and nature have placed within our power . . . and join with you in holy energy and combat against the all damnable foe.”7 Gloucester’s assessment captured Brown’s peculiar magnetism. John Brown was “the man who most clearly saw the real crux of the conflict,” W. E. B. Du Bois wrote of this period, “a man whose leadership lay not in his office, wealth or influence, but in the white flame of his utter devotion to an ideal.”8 On Brown’s tours of the Northeast, many noted the broad appeal of that devotion. In 1858, the eccentric...

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