Antiques.(Captain John Brown)(Brief Article)(Column)

These men, in teaching us how to die, have at the same time taught us how to live.

Henry David Thoreau, "A Plea for Captain John Brown," 1859

This month marks the thirtieth consecutive year of Wendell Garrett's editorials in this magazine. He became our third editor in July 1972 upon the retirement of Alice Winchester, and in 1990 became our editor at large. For 360 issues his lucid and erudite prose and elegant calligraphic signature have graced this editorial page. Many readers have written of their admiration for his remarkable ability to examine an aspect of history with penetrating perspective that acts as an anchor to windward in our own turbulent times. Such milestones are not easily achieved, and the entire staff of the magazine joins me in congratulating Wendell Garrett for these eloquent and thoughtful editorials. We look forward to publishing his learned prose for many years to come.

Allison Eckardt Ledes

John Brown, who is remembered as an abolitionist and insurrectionist, was also by turns a drover, tanner, land speculator, and a dealer in sheep. Before 1855 he accumulated a record of bankruptcies and lawsuits as he drifted from place to place. The one constant in his life was his obsession with abolishing slavery.

In 1855, after assisting in the escape of several slaves, Brown and his five sons moved to Kansas just after that territory had been opened to the possible expansion of slavery by the Kansas-Nebraska Act. Brown appointed himself captain of a ragbag of antislavery forces, and, when the opposition sacked the town of Lawrence, he and his men murdered five reputedly proslavery settlers who lived along the Pottawottamie Creek.

Brown proclaimed that the massacre had been "decreed by Almighty God, ordained from Eternity" and he became a hero to the northern abolitionists. Driven out of Kansas, Brown returned east and proposed by armed intervention to provoke a black insurrection in northern Virginia. This would establish a stronghold to which escapees could flee and from which further insurrection might be initiated. Failure to achieve abolition peacefully made many abolitionists receptive to Brown's violent approach, for it was an article in his creed that "without the shedding of blood, there is no remission of sins."