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

other than business. It was in the early 1830s that he first wrote of his determination to help slaves. He also showed signs of a truculent and nonconformist spirit. Brown joined the Freemasons but quickly fell out with the secret society amid accusations that Masons had murdered one of their critics in New York. Far from being cowed by the controversy, Brown openly proclaimed his opposition to the group and circulated the published statement of a Mason who claimed that he’d been selected to cut the throat of a “brother” who revealed the order’s secrets.
    “I have aroused such a feeling towards me,” Brown wrote his father in 1830, “as leads me for the present to avoid going about the streets at evening & alone.” Brown knew his father would approve of his defiance, if not of the other measure he took. Owen was a committed pacifist; his son, a warrior at heart, acquired his first gun.

CHAPTER 2
    I Consecrate My Life
     
     
     
    I n 1831, a decade after Missouri entered the Union, Jefferson’s “fire bell in the night” rang again—this time in Southampton County, Virginia, close to where the first Africans had been sold to Jamestown colonists in 1619. Late one August night, a preacher named Nat Turner led a small band of fellow slaves from farm to farm, slaughtering whites. Other slaves joined in, and Turner’s force killed about sixty people before militiamen quelled the uprising. Enraged whites then went on a rampage of their own, murdering hundreds of blacks and sticking their severed heads on roadside signposts as a warning.
    Turner hid in the woods for two months before being captured. In prison, a lawyer recorded his chillingly eloquent confession. At an early age, Turner said, he “was ordained for some great purpose in the hands of the Almighty.” Signs and visions gradually revealed what he considered his God-given mission: “I should arise and prepare myself, and slay my enemies with their own weapons.”
    Turner and his followers had done precisely that, using axes, fence rails, and captured arms to murder any whites they found, including women, schoolchildren, a baby sleeping in its cradle, and a man “who was to me a kind master,” Turner said. He claimed to have had no design apart from killing. As his guiding “Spirit” had told him, “the time was fast approaching when the first should be last and the last should be first.” At his trial, Turner pleaded not guilty, “saying to his counsel thathe did not feel so.” Six days later, he was hanged and dismembered, his body parts distributed to family of the victims.
    Illustration in an 1831 pamphlet on the Nat Turner Rebellion
    Though Turner failed to win any slaves their freedom, he stirred the deepest fear of southern whites: that blacks might at any moment rise up and slaughter them in their beds. This terror was particularly acute in plantation counties where slaves greatly outnumbered whites. That Turner was devout, and that his owners had treated him comparatively well, only made matters worse, for it upset the paternalistic fantasy that slaves were too docile and contented to revolt.
    Turner’s uprising also galvanized the newborn abolitionist movement, led by the fiery Boston editor William Lloyd Garrison. Previously, antislavery efforts in the United States had centered on the gradual emancipation of blacks and their “colonization” in Africa or the Caribbean. Jefferson and, later, Abraham Lincoln were among the adherents of thisprogram, which was based on the belief that blacks could never live as equals to whites.
    Garrison, by contrast, sought the immediate abolition of slavery and the extension of full rights to black Americans. He signaled his urgent, uncompromising stance in the inaugural issue of his abolitionist weekly, The Liberator, published just eight months before Turner’s revolt. “Tell a man whose house is on fire to give a moderate alarm,” he wrote. “I will not equivocate—I will not excuse—I