JOHN BROWN¹Born in Torrington, Connecticut, John Brown (1790–1859) grew up in Hudson, Ohio. After receiving a rudimentary education, he attempted, but failed at, careers as a tanner, wool dealer, and farmer. Long a supporter of emancipation, Brown became more militant in his antislavery activities after passage of the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850. In 1855 Brown followed four of his sons to Kansas, where he became a leader of the armed opposition to the admission of the territory as a slave state. His participation in the massacre of proslavery settlers at Pottawatomie Creek in May 1856 made him a nationally known figure. In 1857 Brown secretly began to recruit men and raise funds for a plan to establish a base in the southern Appalachian Mountains from which to raid plantations and free slaves. Brown’s plotting culminated in the unsuccessful attack by a small band on the federal armory at Harpers Ferry, Virginia, in October 1859. Captured and tried for treason under Virginia law, he was executed on 2 December 1859 and immediately became a martyr to many northerners. Stephen Oates, To Purge This Land with Blood: A Biography of John Brown (New York, 1970); Richard O. Boyer, The Legend of John Brown: A Biography and a History (New York, 1972); ACAB, 1:404–07; NCAB, 2:307–08; DAB, 3:131–34. TO FREDERICK DOUGLASS

Troy [N.Y.] 15 Dec[ember] 1851.

FREDERICK DOUGLASS:

DEAR SIR:—

Whatever you may think of the course taken in this country by Louis Kossuth,²Louis Kossuth (1802–94), a lawyer, politician, and Magyar nationalist, led the 1848 revolution for Hungarian independence from Hapsburg rule. A member of the Hungarian Diet when the revolution began, Kossuth served as president of the Committee of National Defense before becoming governor of the short-lived Hungarian Republic in April 1849. When Austrian and Russian forces broke the back of Hungarian resistance in August 1849, Kossuth fled into exile and subsequent confinement in Turkey. The Hungarian leader’s plight aroused widespread sympathy in the United States, and after his release by Turkish officials in 1851, Kossuth boarded a U.S. warship, which took him as far as Gibraltar on the first leg of a journey to America by way of England. Arriving in New York on 5 December 1851, he spent the next seven months in a triumphal tour of the United States. Abolitionists identified Kossuth with the cause of freedom and the rights of oppressed minorities and hoped to enlist his aid in the antislavery struggle. They were disappointed and irritated, however, when Kossuth chose to concentrate on the issue of Hungarian independence and flatly refused to “meddle with any domestic concerns of the United States.” After leaving America in July 1852, Kossuth spent some eight years in England before settling in Italy, where he remained until his death. John H. Komlos, Louis Kossuth in America, 1851–1852 (Buffalo, N.Y., 1973), 13–52; Donald S. Spencer, Louis Kossuth and Young America: A Study in Sectionalism and Foreign Policy, 1848–1852 (Columbia, Mo., 1977), 65–81; J. O. Thorne, ed., Chambers Biographical Dictionary, rev. ed. (Edinburgh, Scot., 1969), 746. (I have not seen your paper for some weeks,) I make no doubt you discover, in what is going on, the most abundant proof of the soundness of the ground you have taken. What is it that captivates both bad and good in that man so wonderfully? What, with all his talents as a speaker and writer, is it that gives him one particle of advantage over Frederick Douglass? It is not the color of his skin. If he have any, it is that he has had an opportunity to prove to the wide world that he has in his possession the true Philosopher’s Stone,³The philosopher’s stone was a mythical chemical that alchemists believed could transform base metals into gold. Trevor H. Levere, Transforming Matter: A History of Chemistry from Alchemy to the Buckyball (Baltimore, 2001), 1, 5–8. and that he will, if opportunity occur, make a most thorough and a most practical use of it. I think that, notwithstanding policy prevents his opening all his batteries direct upon our accursed hypocrisy, aristocratic feeling, injustice, God-insulting, provoking ingratitude, and most abominable cruelty and oppression, he is doing more to instruct our young people and to indoctrinate them in the true republican principle, than any man has done since the revolution. I therefore rejoice, and will rejoice, and let none of my colored friends “faint and grow weary of in well-doing, for in due time we shall reap if we faint not.”⁴Gal. 6:9, paraphrased. “The Lord our God shall raise up for us a deliverer” in the very best possible time;⁵A reference to Judg. 3:15. and who shall pretend to prove that he is not even now born. Moses was born at the very time that the bitter cup of Egyptian bondage was pouring out to Israel to its very dregs. No! let no man’s heart fail him;⁶A paraphrase of 1 Sam. 17:32. “but let us resolutely trust in God, and keep our powder dry.[”]⁷As his regiment prepared to cross a river to attack the enemy at the battle of Edgehill on 23 October 1642, Oliver Cromwell told his troops, “Put your trust in God, but mind to keep your powder dry.” Stevenson, Book of Proverbs, 1857. I send you, as before stated, one new subscriber,