a divinity student.
He tried farming and tanning in Pennsylvania, and tanning and
speculating in real estate in Ohio. Cattle-dealing was his next
venture; from this to sheep-raising; and by a natural transition to
the business of a wool-factor in Massachusetts. This not succeeding,
he made a trip to Europe. Returning, he accepted from Gerrit Smith a
tract of mountain land in the Adirondacks, where he proposed to found
and foster colonies of free negroes. This undertaking proved abortive,
like all his others, and he once more went back to the wool business
in Ohio.

Twice married, nineteen children had been born to him, of whom eleven
were living when, in 1854, the Kansas-Nebraska bill plunged the
country into the heat of political strife. Four of his sons moved away
to the new Territory in the first rush of emigrants; several others
went later. When the Border-Ruffian hostilities broke out, John Brown
followed, with money and arms contributed in the North. With his sons
as a nucleus, he gathered a little band of fifteen to twenty
adventurers, and soon made his name a terror in the lawless guerrilla
warfare of the day. His fighting was of the prevailing type,
justifiable, if at all, only on the score of defensive retaliation,
and some of his acts were as criminal and atrocious as the worst of
those committed by the Border Ruffians.[1] His losses, one son
murdered, another wounded to the death, and a third rendered insane
from cruel treatment, are scarcely compensated by the transitory
notoriety he gathered in a few fool-hardy skirmishes.

[Sidenote] James Redpath, "Life of John Brown," p. 48.

[Sidenote] Sanborn, in the "Atlantic," April, 1872.

These varied experiences give us something of a clue to his character:
a strong will; great physical energy; sanguine, fanatical temperament;
unbounded courage and little wisdom; crude, visionary ideality; the
inspiration of biblical precepts and Old Testament hero-worship; and
ambition curbed to irritation by the hard fetters of labor, privation,
and enforced endurance. In association, habit, language, and conduct,
he was clean, but coarse; honest, but rude. In disposition he mingled
the sacrificing tenderness with the sacrificial sternness of his
prototypes in Jewish history. He could lay his own child on the altar
without a pang. The strongest element of his character was religious
fanaticism. Taught from earliest childhood to "fear God and keep his
commandments," he