Admiration and Ambivalence: Frederick Douglass and John Brown | by David W. Blight

John Brown did not make it easy for people to love him—until he died on the gallows.  Frederick Douglass, from his first meeting with Brown in 1847, through a testy but  important relationship in the late 1850s, had long viewed the visionary abolitionist with a  combination of admiration and ambivalence. In this remarkable letter to Maria Webb—a  friend in Dublin, Ireland, whom he had met in 1846–1847 and who raised money to  help launch his newspaper, the North Star—Douglass defends both himself and Brown,  “that brave and I believe good man.” 1 Brown’s militancy and violence against slavery had  greatly influenced Douglass’s own evolving radicalism in the 1850s. However, the secrecy  and strategic ineptness of the warrior from Bleeding Kansas left Douglass wary at the moment  of truth when Brown had all but begged him to join the Harpers Ferry raid.  

In late January 1858, Brown arrived at Douglass’s home in Rochester, New York,  and stayed for a month. Living those winter days secluded in an upstairs room, Brown  composed his “provisional constitution” for the state of Virginia, which he hoped to overthrow  with his raid on the federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry. It is likely that Brown told  his host more details about his revolutionary plans than perhaps Douglass ever admitted.  But the great orator-editor, who did indeed hope that Brown’s schemes might foment a  successful Union-breaking assault on slavery, never found Brown’s plans, nor his leadership,  convincing. Douglass did not attend Brown’s “convention” in Chatham, Ontario,  on May 8, 1858, where the guerrilla leader tried to recruit African Americans to his  cause. Douglass twice met Hugh Forbes, an Englishman whom Brown hired as his military  strategist, when the soldier of fortune passed through Rochester in 1857–1858. Here  again, Douglass was much intrigued with these clandestine plotters against slavery, but he  found Forbes to be unreliable with both money and personal trust. John Brown and his  plans were rays of hope and fascination, but he was hard to love. ‘

In early fall 1859, as Brown made final preparations for his raid, Douglass, driven by  curiosity and hope, paid a visit to the “old man” in Chambersburg, Pennsylvania. They  met secretly in an old stone quarry, Douglass accompanied by a fugitive slave named Shields Green, whom he had brought along as a possible recruit for Brown’s band of rebels.  They sat down on large rocks and discussed Brown’s plans. Brown beseeched Douglass  to join his rather pathetically small band of willing warriors. “I want you for a special purpose,”  Douglass remembered Brown saying to him. “When I strike, the bees will begin to  swarm, and I shall want you to help hive them.” Douglass was dismayed; he had earlier  understood that Brown really intended to liberate slaves in Virginia and funnel them into  hideaways in the Appalachian Mountains. Now, Brown appeared obsessed with attacking  the federal arsenal, a desperate mistake, in Douglass’s judgment. The former fugitive  slave told the Kansas captain that he was “going into a perfect steel trap, and that once  in he would not get out alive.” Douglass said no to Brown’s pleas, but let Shields Green  decide his own fate. According to Douglass, Green said “I b’leve I’ll go wid de ole man”;  he would die at Harpers Ferry.2

Meanwhile, Douglass headed north to anxiously await word of what was to come.  News of an attack on October 16, 1859, against the federal arsenal at the confluence of  the Potomac and Shenandoah Rivers by a band of abolitionists electrified the nation.  Among the documents seized from Brown in the wake of his arrest was a brief letter to  the old warrior from Douglass written in 1857. Thus, Douglass could legally be construed  by outraged Virginians to have been a co-conspirator in Brown’s deeds. Douglass was in  Philadelphia lecturing as news came of the raid, and he hastily took the train home to  Rochester. If caught and sent to Virginia, this black abolitionist who had spent twenty  years in slavery assumed that he would be killed “for my being Frederick Douglass.” In  the dark of night on October 22, with a warrant out for his arrest and federal marshals  soon to arrive in his upstate New York hometown, Douglass took a ferry across Lake  Ontario, the same route on which he had himself ushered many a runaway slave. Anxious  and without options, he sailed for England in early November on a lecture trip he had  already planned, but not under these circumstances. Douglass’s letter to Webb was written  just two days before the dramatic hanging of Brown in a field outside Charlestown,  Virginia, on December 2, 1859. He had been convicted of treason, murder, and inciting  slave insurrection.

The “Mr. Cook” referred to in this letter is the twenty-seven-year-old John E. Cook,  one of Brown’s men who, captured and jailed, denounced Douglass in the press for allegedly  abandoning his promises to join the raid. Under this cloud of suspicion, Douglass,  living in the home of his old friend Julia Griffiths Crofts and her husband, the Rev. H.  O. Crofts, in Halifax, Yorkshire, felt compelled to defend himself against the accusations  both of treason and of betrayal of his friends. Before leaving Canada, Douglass  wrote a public letter (referred to in the letter to Maria Webb), published in the Rochester  Democrat, October 31, 1859. Sharply rejecting Cook’s denunciation, Douglass declared  that he “never made a promise” to join the raid, and that the “taking of Harpers Ferry  was a measure never encouraged by my word or by my vote. . . . My field of labor for the  abolition of slavery has not extended to an attack on the United States Arsenal.” But as he  made a case for his legal innocence, he also embraced violence and declared himself very  much John Brown’s moral ally.

This became a common position among many abolitionists, and even some Republican Party politicians. “I am ever ready to write, speak, publish, organize, combine, and even to  conspire against slavery,” said Douglass, “when there is a reasonable hope of success. Men  who live by robbing their fellow-men of their labor and liberty have . . . voluntarily placed  themselves beyond the laws of justice and honor, and have become only fitted for companionship  with thieves and pirates.” Douglass wanted it widely known that he objected  only to Brown’s particular means and tactics, not his ultimate ends or his justification.  Even Harriet Beecher Stowe had demonstrated in Uncle Tom’s Cabin that lawlessness was  the abolitionists’ necessary weapon. The Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 had made virtually all  radical abolitionists law-breakers. Douglass was willing to be lawless, willing to kill “pirates.”  But he knew that such acts against slavery and its national police power in America  required more than courage and justification; it would take extraordinary cunning, skill,  mobilization, and military prowess.

Douglass returned to America from England in early summer 1860, drawn home  by the news that his beloved daughter Annie had died that spring at age eleven. As the  election year intensified, the federal government ceased its pursuit of Brown’s alleged accomplices  among abolitionists. Douglass came back to a grief-stricken family and a nation  on the brink of disunion. In his personal arsenal of rhetorical weapons against slavery,  and soon the Confederacy, would always be John Brown’s dead body. Hard to love in  life, Brown was of enormous value in death. Douglass saw Brown’s enduring worth to  the cause of black freedom, and he never ceased to eulogize the martyr, the classical hero,  whose sacrifice made his gallows as sacred as the Christian cross.  

In an 1881 speech at Storer College, in Harpers Ferry, West Virginia, Douglass declared  that the hour of Brown’s “defeat was the hour of his triumph,” his “capture” the  “victory of his life.” As though remembering his own ambivalence about Brown’s plans in  1859, but also the power of his symbol in the wake of the execution, Douglass summed up  the old warrior’s significance. “With the Allegheny mountains for his pulpit, the country  for his church and the whole civilized world for his audience,” announced Douglass, “he  was a thousand times more effective as a preacher than as a warrior.” 3 Brown had used revolutionary  violence, however ineptly, to foment a larger revolution in America. For that,  Douglass would forever honor him as the greatest abolitionist hero. At some of Douglass’s  speeches recruiting black soldiers during 1863, he broke into “John Brown’s Body,” singing  as he called young men forward in the fight to destroy slavery. Brown had become  not only lovable, but a “soul” that kept a cause alive and marching in dark times to come.  

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Transcript of a letter from

Frederick Douglass to Maria Webb, November 30, 1859

Salem Parsonage. Halifax. Yorkshire-

November 30th 1859

My dear Friend: I am not unmindful of your kind note received just before leaving America - in whh you kindly welcomed me to your dear home when it may be my good fortune to come to Dublin, as I certainly hope it will be. You have of course heard of the circumstances under which I was left no alternative but to leave the states or be implicated with John Brown - and perhaps, share his fate. I find here, as in America, some misapprehension as to my relation to that brave and I believe good man. My letter, published in reply to the sayings of Mr. Cook, published in the American papers Did much to set me right before the American people and I have no doubt will do much in the same direction here.

You will have probably met with this letter– and will, I am sure, be glad that I am able to deny any part of the charges brought against me in connection with the Harpers Ferry Affair. I went to Canada after the troubles at Harpers Ferry, because I had reason to know that measures were in progress to carry me into Virginia– And even if the courts of that slave state should acquit me, as they would not have been very likely to do, I could never hope to get out of that state alive. If they did not kill me for being concerned with Dear Old Brown they would have done so - for my being Frederick Douglas.

My friends here are doing their utmost to counteract the influence of the false statements of Cook which have found their way into some of the English papers– and to bring me well before the people of Yorkshire. What constant trouble do I give my friends? I hope to justify their kind solicitude in the end. My good friends Mrs Crofts– and the Doctor have made me welcome to a home with them while I stay in the Country. Julia is the same zealous, active and untiring worker that she ever was– and you may well suppose that our meeting was a joyous one. I am to lecture here next Wednesday night– under the auspices of the Halifax Ladies Anti Slavery Soc: James Stansfield M.P. is to take the chair. Hoping to see you ere many months– I am, with love to your Dear Husband and household

Your ever grateful friend

Frederick Douglass