John Brown's Letter

 

John Brown's Letter By BOYD B. STUTLER

John Brown had lost his battle to superior military forces in the abortive raid on Harper's Ferry . Now , in the afternoon of November 19 , 1859 , he sat in a cell in the jail at Charles Town , then in Virginia ( but soon through the fortunes of war to be transferred to West Virginia ) , a condemned prisoner and under sentence to death . Only a few days were left to him . He had much to do for his cause , for he had set about to regain with his pen the ground that he had lost by his sword.¹

Easing his shackled legs , he turned to the rough table in the corner of the cell , piled high with letters . His captors had un wittingly placed a mighty weapon in his hand when they granted him the privilege of receiving and of freely answering the letters that kept coming in increasing numbers day after day . They were more than he could possibly answer - he had to be selective .

He read again a letter from his cousin , the Reverend Luther Humphrey , a Connecticut - born missionary who had worn him self out with forty years of carrying the Word to the remote settlements of the Western Reserve and of Upper Michigan , but who had now settled down to a quiet pastorate at Windham , Portage County , Ohio . Here was a letter that warmed his heart. It was one long expression of gentle sympathy and there was in it not a word of reproach , not a word of reproof ; it was , in fact , filled with scriptural texts in justification of

1 " I have been whipped as the saying is , but I am sure I can recover all the lost capital occasioned by that disaster by only hanging a few moments by the neck , and I feel quite determined to make the utmost possible out of a defeat . I am dayly and hourly striving to gather up what little I may from the wreck." - John Brown in letter to wife , November 10 , 1859 , in Oswald Garrison Villard's John Brown : A Biography Fifty Years After ( Boston , 1910 ) , p . 540 .

2 A great number of letters addressed to Brown were deemed improper by the authorities and were not delivered . A collection of these are filed with the John Brown papers in the Virginia State Library , Richmond .

Brown's militant anti-slavery campaign . It was just the sort of a letter that John Brown himself might write to one in a similar position . This letter called for a reply .

Drawing a sheet of paper before him he began to write slowly and painfully in his pinched , crabbed , old-man's hand : " I suppose I am the first since the landing of Peter Brown from the Mayflower that has either been sentenced to imprisonment ; or to the Gallows . But my dear old friend , let not that fact alone grieve you . You cannot have forgotten how and where our Grandfather Capt . John Brown fell in 1776 , " he began , with a reference to their common grandfather who died while commanding a company of Connecticut soldiers in the patriot army of the Revolution . The two men were of the same blood , belated Puritans of the same unbending thought in their opposition to human slavery .

Writing did not come easy for John Brown . His hand was more fitted for the plow than it was for the pen and, besides , the grievous wounds he had received in the fight in the Engine House at Harper's Ferry still ached and burned . He wrote on and on , unmindful of his physical discomforts , his mind racing ahead of the pen held in his firm hand , and his written words marshaling across the faintly ruled , light blue paper without the slightest sign of trembling or weakness . He had by that time reached a state of exaltation through self - justification , and apparently he awaited the day of his execution with the utmost composure , and without fear or dread . To all outward appearances he was as easy in his mind as if he were sitting in his own room in the little brown house at North Elba with his faithful Mary Ann and his younger children at his side .

The screed that came from his pen that afternoon deservedly ranks as one of the finest prison letters ever written . And that is perhaps why it has risen , like John Brown's soul , to go marching on through the years to plague and torment librar ians and collectors four - score and more years after that

3 The original Luther Humphrey letter is owned by Miss Mary Fablinger , Camp bell , California , who inherited it from her mother , Ellen , youngest of John Brown's twenty children . It is printed in James Redpath's Echoes of Harper's Ferry ( Boston , 1860 ) , pp . 431-32 .

4 John Brown , the grandfather , was commissioned captain by Governor Jonathan Trumbull , May 23 , 1776. He commanded the 8th Company , 18th Regiment , Connecticut Militia , under command of Colonel Jonathan Pettibone . This was the " West Simsbury Train Band " from the home town ( now Canton ) of the Brown and Humphrey families . Captain Brown died in New York on September 3 , 1776 , leaving his wife and eleven children .

November afternoon . It has had a way , like some fabulous creature , of reproducing and multiplying itself and in its several reincarnations it has managed to cover completely the country . In fact , within the past sixty years the " original " John Brown letter to Reverend Luther Humphrey has cropped up only a little less frequently than copies of the " original " Ulster County Gazette of January 4 , 1800 , with its story of the last rites for General Washington . But , unlike the multi - issued newspaper , the Brown - to - Humphrey letter has had no libro sleuth like Dr. R. W. G. Vail on its trail to track down spurious copies and set up warning signals."

With the full knowledge that at least a half dozen "originals" of this letter were held by libraries and individuals , students of the John Brown theme lifted their eyebrows quizzically when Colby College Quarterly , in its June , 1946 , number,announced that through the generosity of Mrs. B. K. Emerson , of Amherst , Massachusetts , the " original " letter written by the Harper's Ferry raider to his reverend cousin had been added to the file of distinguished literary and historical auto graphs in the Colby College Library cabinet .

It was a splendid addition to the collection and it was hailed with delight by the librarians who , because no danger signals had been set up , accepted the letter for what it seemed to be . The sheet had every appearance of being true and genuine in paper , script and aging , and neither the donor nor the college librarians had any reason to doubt its authenticity . It had come into the possession of Mrs. Emerson with the effects of a former President of Amherst College and the belief that it was the veritable sheet that came from the hand of John Brown was heightened by the Humphrey association with Amherst . Dr. Heman Humphrey , elder brother of Luther , had served the college as its President for nearly a quarter of a century , but was in retirement at the time of the Harper's Ferry putsch . He , too , wrote his condemned cousin under date of November 20th , but in an entirely different tenor and in sharp contrast with the views of his brother . His letter was deemed pharisaical , and its content stung the old Kansas and & See " The Ulster County Gazette , " in Bulletin of the New York Public Library , April , 1930 , and " The Ulster County Gazette Found at Last , " April , 1931 . Reprinted in pamphlet form 1931 as The Ulster County Gazette and 

Harper's Ferry warrior to the quick - he wrote his sisters that Dr. Heman" had just sent a most doleful lamentation over my infatuation and madness." The two letters have often been confused , but for no good reason because of their wide variance of thought and theme . "

When the Colby accession was announced it seemed that the last word had been said , but an interested curiosity in the subject induced me to peep behind the curtain . A casual leaf ing through my John Brown scrapbook disclosed that , in addition to the Colby specimen , in recent years the " original " letter had been reported from St. Louis , Missouri ( undated clipping , about 1900 ) , owned by a Mrs. Rawlings , then an employee of the Treasury Department at Washington ; from Tabor , Iowa , in 1914 , “ found among the papers of T. H. Read " ; from Wichita , Kansas , in 1927 , " found among the papers of the late Theodore Morrison , librarian of the Wichita Municipal University " ; in 1923 , " printed through the courtesy of Mrs. Jane Lane Keeley , Riverdale , Maryland , who has the original in her possession , " and an undated clipping about the " original letter at the museum of the Winsted ( Connecticut ) Historical Society . " In addition , there in cold print in Oswald Garrison Villard's monumental John Brown : A Biography Fifty Years After ( Boston , 1910 ) , unchallenged for more than thirty - five years , was a quotation from the letter to Reverend Humphrey and accreditation of ownership of the original to the Messrs . Daniel R. and William G. Taylor , of Cleveland , Ohio . '

Certainly all the stories of the upcroppings of this ubiquitous letter could not be garnered by one scrapbook compiler , and it is not doubted that many other " originals " are still carefully filed away in public and private collections . That this surmise . is true has been amply proved by the number of copies uncovered since the Quarterly was distributed in midsummer of 1946. The returns , it is feared, are not all in .

Obviously there can be only one " original " to divide among so many claimants , and it seemed just as obvious at the outset of this investigation that six of the seven on the original list— perhaps all seven - held some sort of pen forgeries or litho

6 Dr. Heman Humphrey's letter and John Brown's reply are printed in Frank B. Sanborn's Life and Letters of John Brown ( Boston , 1885 ) , pp . 602-05 . 7 Villard's John Brown , quotation from letter , p . 543 ; note , location and owner ship , p . 651. MILIAWORRIS STUTLER 38

John Brown , Pencil Sketch by William M. Stutler from photograph taken by J. W. Black , Boston , May , 1859 .

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It was not until December 2 , 1863 , the fourth anniversary of the hanging , that it made its initial appearance in print in the Cleveland Herald , accompanied by some explanatory and com mendatory text by the editor . " The New York Tribune re printed it on December 12 , 1863 , and from these two sources the letter was picked up and reprinted in dozens of newspapers all over the country . The first inclusion in a book between hard covers seems to have been in Horace Greeley's American Con flict ( Hartford , 1864 , Volume 1 , at page 297 ) .

The reprinting of the letter has since run in a pattern of well - defined cycles , and it still finds an occasional place in newspapers and magazines as well as in quotations in books . The first cycle ran through 1863 and 1864 , the second starting about 1870. On August 29 , 1873 , the New York Tribune again printed the letter in its news columns with the legend " never before published , " and dignified it with mention in the editor ial column . " The letter of John Brown of Osawatomie , which

-9 Letter of Miss Florence M. Gifford , Reference Division , Cleveland Public Li brary , October 15 , 1946. Photostat furnished by library .

#23 (p.11)

JOHN BROWN'S LETTER 11

we publish today , is a remarkable document , " says the editor ial . “ Though he writes under the very shadow of the gallows , there is little excitement and no despair in his words . Haw thorne once said that he deserved to be hanged for making an atrocious miscalculation of probabilities , but it cannot be de nied that however he may have failed as an organizer of a campaign , there are few men who ever lived who understood better how to die . "

Another cycle ran its course in late 1897 and through the Spanish - American War period the following years . This one had its start in the New York World in December , 1897 , whose local reporter at New Hartford , Connecticut , " discovered " the letter and added a bit of color of his own imagining or in advertently through ignorance of his subject . " Rev. Luther Humphrey , a cousin of the famous abolitionist , John Brown , died here recently , " said the reporter . " Among his effects has been found a letter written by John Brown during his in carceration at Charles Town , Virginia , after his raid on Har per's Ferry . It is claimed that it has never been published before . "

Picked up for reprint by the Morning Star ( Boston ) , on December 30 , the letter again started the rounds of the press . And it was this published report , relying altogether too much on the printed word , that started this investigator off on the wrong foot in the New England area . Also , it might be said that the locale from which the story originated , Litchfield County which had mothered both John Brown and Harriet Beecher Stowe , lent considerable credence to the claims of both the Winchester Historical Society copy at Winsted , and to the Amherst - Colby copy . Winsted is only a few miles from New Hartford , in the same county , and the Humphrey asso ciation with Amherst has already been noted .

A closer examination of the newspaper story brought reali zation that there was something very fishy about it . Had Luther Humphrey lived until 1897 he would have been 114 years old , a truly patriarchal age . A little digging into the family records revealed that at the date the World reporter scored his beat the old missionary had been resting quietly and comfortably in his grave at Windham for more than a quarter of a century . The reporter had unquestionably found

#24 (p.12)

12 WEST VIRGINIA HISTORY

one of the lithographed facsimiles which could have been , and probably were , very common in that part of Connecticut at that time .

The last cycle started in 1927 when on January 20 the Wichita ( Kansas ) Beacon in a full page feature by Bliss Iseley and a column - long editorial by Elmer Peterson an nounced the discovery of another " original " among the papers of the late Theodore Morrison , librarian of the Wichita Munici pal University . This copy was found in an envelope addressed to Mr. Morrison's father , Dr. N. J. Morrison , Olivet , Michigan , postmarked Brooklyn , New York , March 2 , 1864. Dr. Morrison was well known as an abolitionist and had had Ohio connec tions as a student at Oberlin College in 1854-1857 ( Owen Brown served a dozen years as a trustee of this institution in its earlier days ) , and later as Professor of Philosophy at Marietta College.10 At the time of the postmark date he was President of Olivet College , which he had helped to reorganize in 1859. The envelope and its single content was no doubt car ried with him when he went to Wichita in 1895 to develop Fair mount Academy into what is now Wichita University .

The New York Times of February 6 , 1927 , ran a feature story about the discovery of the letter , which , amazingly enough , it said was " hitherto unpublished , it is believed . " This statement seemed to call for some correction , and on February 13 the Times published my letter calling attention to at least a dozen times the document had appeared in print . It must be acknowledged that at the time of the Wichita discovery I did not know of the lithographed facsimiles , though I was fully aware of Mr. Villard's accreditation of own ership of the original to the Taylor brothers at Cleveland .

Through correspondence that followed with Miss Flora Clough , then head of the English Department of Wichita Uni versity , I was more than half convinced by circumstantial evidence ( I had no opportunity to examine the document ) that the original had been resting untouched for years in the Wich ita files . But I was more than a little annoyed when one of my letters was given to a Beacon reporter for a follow - up story and after twenty years this seems to be as good a place as any to correct a piece of irresponsible reporting .

10 Biographical sketch in Who Was Who in America ( Chicago , 1942 ) , p . 869 .

" Brown Letter Very Valuable Says Authority , " was the Beacon's triple-deck headline on February 18 , followed by a garbled quotation from the letter which , evidently , was too restrained to make a good story . " A letter received by Miss Clough today from Boyd B. Stutler , of Charleston , W. Va . , bears information that the letter is John Brown's best known letter and that it has been lost for many years . He says it is worth thousands of dollars , " etc.

What I did write under date of February 15 - and kept a carbon copy - was : " It is a great find ; the letter not only has an historic interest but has a very great monetary value . " No reference was made to the letter having been lost , but I did call attention to Mr. Villard's statement and suggested that there might be some confusion of the letter to Reverend Luther Humphrey , dated November 19 , 1859 , and that to his brother , Dr. Heman Humphrey , written on November 25. In a later letter , dated March 14 , 1927 , when pressed for an esti mate of its cash value I leaned over to the conservative side and opined that if put up at auction " it should not bring less than $ 200 , and perhaps a great deal more . "

There the matter rested until July 12 , 1946 , when Downing P. O'Harra , University Librarian , wrote me that the letter was being safely kept in the strong box , and that no one there had any reason to doubt its validity . A further estimate of complete confidence in the genuineness of the sheet was expressed by President H. W. Foght in a letter dated July 28 , 1932 , now in the files of the Kansas Historical Society :

" This letter is perhaps the greatest treasure in our somewhat limited historical archives today"