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

scale, and can make money better than save it.”
    Fowler wrote this in early 1847, as Brown embarked on a new and ambitious venture. A few years before, he had formed a partnership with a wealthy Akron man, to raise sheep and sell fine wool. Brown was a skilled shepherd and the partnership initially prospered. But as Fowler noted, Brown liked to think big and was very certain of his judgment. Others who knew him described this as “fixedness.”
    In this instance, Brown became fixed on the notion that textilemanufacturers were fleecing wool producers. He prevailed on his partner to establish a depot in Springfield, Massachusetts, where Brown could buy and grade wool and sell it at a better price while collecting a broker’s commission.
    He may have been right that producers were exploited. But fixedness was a trait ill suited to the wildly fluctuating wool market of the late 1840s. When prices plunged, Brown refused to sell. Wool and unpaid bills quickly piled up at the Springfield depot. Brown also gave signs of a growing ambivalence about the enterprise in which he was engaged. This was fed in part by his father’s lifelong admonitions against vanity and materialism.
    “I sometimes have dreadful reflections about having fled to go down to Tarshish,” Brown wrote his father. Tarshish was the trade port that Jonah set sail for in an attempt to escape God’s will. En route he was swallowed by a whale, then released to do the Lord’s bidding as a preacher to unbelievers.
    But if Springfield tested (and found wanting) Brown’s acumen and dedication as a businessman, it proved an excellent place to pursue the true mission he believed he had from God. The city had a large population of free blacks, many of them fugitives from slavery, and it was a regular stop on the abolitionist circuit. Among those who visited Springfield was Frederick Douglass, the escaped slave, orator, and writer who had become, alongside William Lloyd Garrison, the most prominent abolitionist in the country.
    Brown met Douglass in the winter of 1847–48 and invited him to his home, which the visitor described as extremely humble, with furnishings that “would have satisfied a Spartan.” Douglass also gave a vivid description of Brown as he appeared in his late forties. Standing about five foot ten, he was “lean, strong, and sinewy,” and “straight and symmetrical as a mountain pine.” He had a prominent chin, coarse dark hair, and eyes “full of light and fire.” The earliest surviving portrait of Brown, a studio daguerreotype, dates to the period of Douglass’s visit. Brown’s thin lips are pressed firmly together, forming a slash across his angular face. His deep-set eyes are piercing and hooded, his brow furrowed, his nose long and sharp. Dark, bristly hair crowns his forehead.
    Brown’s pose is equally striking. His right hand is raised in oath, as ifpledging allegiance to a secret fraternity. His left hand clutches a banner that bore the letters “S.P.W.” This stood for Subterranean Pass Way, shorthand for the radical scheme Brown had devised for slaves’ liberation.
    John Brown ca. 1847, daguerreotype by Augustus Washington
    He shared this nascent plan with Frederick Douglass after their dinner in Springfield. Brown pointed to a map of the Allegheny Mountains, which run diagonally from Pennsylvania into Maryland and Virginia and deep into the South. Filled with natural forts and caves, these mountains, Brown said, had been placed by God “for the emancipation of the negro race.” He planned to use the Alleghenies as a base for guerrillas, who would make lightning raids on the farm valleys below and “induce slaves to join them.” As the insurgent army grew, it “would run off the slaves in large numbers,” sending them north along the mountain chain to freedom.
    Brown’s main objective, he told Douglass, was to undermine slavery by “rendering such property insecure.” He also believed his mission would focus national