at the slave might be free' they were singing
more than a record of John Brown's generous motive; it was a record of
one of God's strange counsels. 'For God chose the foolish things of
the world that He might put to shame the things that are strong, and
the base things of the world, and the things that are despised, did God
choose, yea, and the things that are not, that He might bring to nought
the things that are, that no flesh should glory before God.' Verily,
then, it might seem worth while to set the story of John Brown in such
a plain, brief form as to make it available for busy folk who have no
time to read longer accounts of him. If it sets some thinking of the
ways of God rather than admiring John Brown, that will be just what he
would have ardently wished who desired always that God should be
magnified in his body, whether in the fighting which he never loved and
never shirked, or the hanging which he often foresaw and never feared.

CHAPTER II

CHILDHOOD AND THE VOW

The birth of John Brown is recorded in the following laconic style by
his father in a little autobiography he wrote for his children in the
closing days of his life. 'In 1800, May 8, John was born one hundred
years after his great-grandfather; nothing else very uncommon.' In the
year mentioned the family were living at Torrington, Connecticut,
whence they shortly removed to Ohio, then the haunt of the Red Indian.
They were of the pioneer farming class, which has supplied so many of
the shapers of American history. The one great honour in their
pedigree was that they descended from a man of the MAYFLOWER--Peter
Brown, a working carpenter who belonged to that famous ship's company.
We might say, indeed, that the story of John Brown flows from the
events of 1620, the year of the MAYFLOWER. Two landings on the
American coast that year were destined to be memorable. In August a
Dutch vessel disembarked the first cargo of imported slaves--twenty of
them; and that day Slavery struck deep root in the new land. And in
November of that same year the MAYFLOWER, with her very different cargo
of brave freemen, dropped anchor in Cape Cod Bay. The stream of ill
results from that first landing and the stream of Puritan blood,
generous in its passion for liberty, that flowed unimpoverished from
Peter Brown through generations of sturdy ancestors--these are the
streams destined to meet turbulently and to supply us with our story.
Owen Brown, the fa