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John Brown's Ghost

© Catherine Mezensky

Sometimes when tourists walk down the streets of Harpers Ferry, West Virginia they meet up with a wild haired, white bearded, emaciated looking older man. He has been mistaken for a living history actor and photographed. However, the film never develops properly, for these visitors have encountered the ghost of John Brown.

It is the consequences of Brown’s raid on Harpers Ferry that are often cited as what led the country to civil war. Brown was an ardent abolitionist. The man that was responsible for quelling the raid was to later become Confederate General Robert E. Lee.

Born on May 9, 1800, Brown was raised in a family that stressed the Bible and the equality of all men. At age 12, young John drove a herd of cattle from Oho to Michigan on his own. Once there, he lodged with a man who owned a slave boy. John never forgot how the man treated him, a Caucasian child, with kindness. He also always remembered how the man beat the African-American boy unmercifully with an iron shovel.

As John grew older, he met with success. Having worked in the family tannery most of his life, he started his own competing business at age 17. A few years later he married and started a family. He had 5 children with Dianthe Brown before her early demise. The following year he wed Mary Day and continued to expand his family. In total, Brown was the father of 20 children.

Brown was a stern, but loving father. He once made his eldest son keep an account book of all of the punishments he had to be given. Yet, in letters he often advised his children that family should be the center of life. The Brown siblings later fondly recalled how their father used to sing to them every evening.

In 1835 Brown moved his family to Hudson, Ohio, where he became a stationmaster on the Underground Railroad.

In November of 1837 an Illinois abolitionist named Elijah Lovejoy was killed when a mob destroyed the offices of his newspaper. In Hudson, the local anti-slavery group held a memorial service. There, Brown stood and said his first public words against slavery.

“Here before God, in the presence of these witnesses, I consecrate my life to the destruction of slavery.”

1837 had not been a good year for John Brown. He had lost much of the money that he had invested during the panic of that year. Ventures such as sheep breeding, cattle, and another tannery only proved failures. His life became a struggle between his desire to help the slaves and the need to feed his large family.

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