Midnight Rising: John Brown and the Raid That Sparked the Civil War Hardcover – Bargain Price Read Online Free

Five-year-old Ruth muddied her shoes while gathering pussy willows and then fibbed about how she’d gotten wet. Her father “switched me with the willow that had caused my sin,” she recalled.
    Corporal punishment was common at the time, but Brown dispensed the rod with especial vigor. He was determined to root out sin, not only in his offspring but also in himself and others. When he was a young man, this compulsion to punish wrongs was primarily manifest in small acts of moral policing. Brown apprehended two men he encountered on the road who were stealing apples, and smashed a neighbor’s whiskey jug after taking a few sips and deciding the liquor had dangerous powers.
    Despite his severity, Brown was beloved by his children, who also recalled his many acts of tenderness. He sang hymns to them at bedtime, recited maxims from Aesop and Benjamin Franklin (“Diligence is the mother of good luck”), cared for his “little folks” when they were ill, and was gentle with animals: he warmed frozen lambs in the family washtub.
    Brown nursed his wife as well. Dianthe came from a family with a history of mental illness, and not long after her marriage she began to exhibit signs of what relatives called “strangeness.” She also faltered physically, suffering from “a difficulty about her heart,” Brown wrote.
    Though the nature of her affliction isn’t clear, it probably wasn’t helped by bearing six children in nine years, one of whom, a son, died atthe age of four. A year after his death, Dianthe went into labor a seventh time; the child, another boy, was stillborn and had to be extracted “with instruments,” Brown wrote. After three days of “great bodily pain & distress,” Dianthe also died, at the age of thirty-one. Brown buried her beside their unnamed son, beneath a tombstone bearing Dianthe’s final words: “Farewell Earth.”
     
     
    THIS LOSS, WHICH ECHOED his mother’s death in childbirth, appears to have sent Brown into shock. “I have been growing numb for a good while,” he wrote a business partner. He also complained of vague physical symptoms. “Getting more & more unfit for any thing.”
    Brown and his five children—the youngest was not yet two—briefly moved in with another family. Upon returning to his own home, he hired a housekeeper, whose sixteen-year-old sister, Mary Day, often came along to help. Several months later, Brown proposed to Mary by letter. They married in July 1833, less than a year after Dianthe’s death.
    A tall, sturdy teenager of modest education, Mary was half her husband’s age and only four years older than his eldest child. She would bear him thirteen more children and endure great economic hardship. Brown was a tireless worker and skilled at diverse trades: tanning, surveying, farming, cattle breeding, sheepherding. He won prizes for his fine wool, published articles about livestock (“Remedy for Bots or Grubs, in the heads of Sheep”), and filled a pocket diary with practical tips, such as rules for measuring hay in a barn and a farm lady’s advice on making butter. (“In summer add plenty of cold water to the milk before churning. The slower the churning the better.”)
    But Brown’s diligence and work ethic were repeatedly undone by his inability to manage money. This was a leitmotif of his earliest surviving letters, mostly to a partner in his tanning and cattle business. “I am running low for cash again,” Brown wrote Seth Thompson in 1828. “I was unable to raise any cash towards the bank debt,” he wrote in 1832. Then, later that year: “Unable to send you money as I intended.” And in 1834, again: “I have been uterly unable to raise any money for you as yet.” In these and many other letters, Brown expressed regret for his financialstraits—and blamed them on forces beyond his control: the weather, ill health, the monetary policies of President Andrew Jackson.
    Brown may also have been distracted by his budding concern for affairs