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himself rarely stayed in North Elba for long. Soon after moving his family to upstate New York, he undertook a desperate scheme to wind up his wool business in Springfield. Rather than sell to domestic buyers at low prices, he shipped tons of his firm’s finest wool to Great Britain, convinced he could break the American cartel.
    Yet again, Brown’s business instincts proved poor. British buyers scorned the American wool, forcing him to ship most of it back home, at great expense, for sale at ruinously low prices. His already troubled business collapsed, and Brown found himself mired in debt and lawsuits, just as he’d been a decade before. He would spend much of the next five years shuttling from court to court, contesting legal claims that “ if lost will leave me nice and flat .”
    Meanwhile, Mary Brown had been left overseeing a cash-strapped household, in a land so harsh that snow still lay in the fields in late May. Since the loss of four children in 1843, Brown’s wife had given birth to three more; two of them died as infants. Her frequently absent husband acknowledged the hardships she endured in an unusually tender letter in 1847, noting his “follies,” “the verry considerable difference in our age,” and the fact that “I sometimes chide you severely.” The toll was evident to Richard Dana when he visited the Browns’ Adirondack home; he described Mary, then just thirty-three, as “rather an invalid.”
    Later that summer, as Brown sailed for Britain, Mary decided “she must do something, at once, or she would not live but a little while,” John junior wrote his father overseas. Leaving her stepdaughter Ruth in charge of her young children, Mary left North Elba for a “Water-Cure Infirmary” in Northampton, Massachusetts, where she was diagnosed as suffering from a nervous disorder and “a Scrofulous humour seated in her glands.”
    Mary Brown with daughters Annie and Sarah, ca. 1851
    Mary wrote John junior complaining that his father “never believed there was any dissease about me,” and had left her very little money. To extend her treatment (“plunge, douche, drenches, and spray baths”) she pleaded with her stepson: “If you can send me twenty or twenty five dollars I should like it.” Mary also mentioned a lecture by Lucy Stone, an abolitionist and suffragist. “I went to hear for the first time that I ever heard a Woman speak,” she wrote, and she “liked her very well.”
    After her water cure, Mary recovered somewhat, bore another son, (who died aged three weeks), and gave birth a thirteenth and final time when she was thirty-eight. The one surviving photograph of her during her marriage shows a woman with strong cheekbones, severe hair, and downturned lips, seated between two bilious-looking girls.
     
     
    AT MIDCENTURY, AS BROWN struggled to settle his family and finances, the fragile concord between free and slave states that had prevailed for three decades began to unravel. In the years since the Missouri Compromise, a new euphemism for slavery had emerged: “the peculiar institution.”In the early nineteenth century, this phrase connoted that slavery was “peculiar” or distinctive to the South. As long as it remained so, most Northerners chose to tolerate or ignore it. “It is an existing evil, for which we are not responsible,” President Millard Fillmore said in 1850, expressing a common view. “We must endure it, and give it such protection as is guaranteed by the Constitution.”
    But Northerners recoiled whenever slavery threatened to bleed outside its existing boundaries. Their fear had much more to do with self-interest than with sympathy for blacks—indeed, the latter was so scarce that several northern states passed laws to exclude black immigrants altogether. At bottom, whites didn’t want to compete with slave labor and see their own status and prospects diminished. “The workingmen of the north, east, and west,” Walt Whitman wrote in 1847,