previous next

[64] never crossed their minds; and it is an extraordinary fact that when the disastrous news first came to North Elba, the family utterly refused to believe it, and were saved from suffering by that incredulity till the arrival of the next weekly mail.

A pause at the threshold.

I had left the world outside, to raise the latch of this humble door amid the mountains; and now my pen falters on the threshold, as my steps did then. This house is a home of sacred sorrow. How shall we enter it? Its inmates are bereft and ruined men and women, as the world reckons; what can we say to them? Do not shrink; you are not near the world; you are near John Brown's household. “ In the world ye shall have tribulation; but be of good cheer: they have overcome the world.”

It had been my privilege to live in the best society all my life — namely, that of abolitionists and fugitive slaves. I had seen the most eminent persons of the age: several men on whose heads tens of thousands of dollars had been set; a black woman, who, after escaping from slavery herself, had gone back secretly eight times into the jaws of death to bring out persons whom she had never seen; and a white man, who, after assisting away fugitives by the thousand, had twice been stripped of every dollar of his property in fines, and when taunted by the Court, had mildly said, “ Friend, if thee knows any poor fugitive in need of a breakfast, send him to Thomas Garrett's door.” I had known these, and such as these; but I had not known the Browns. Nothing short of knowing them can be called a liberal education. Lord Byron could not help clinging to Shelley, because he said he was the only person in whom he saw any thing like disinterested benevolence. He really believed that that man would give his life for another. Poor Byron! he might well have exchanged his wealth, his peerage, and his genius for a brief training at North Elba.

Let me pause a moment, and enumerate the members of the family. John Brown was born in 1800, and his wife in 1816, though both might have been supposed older than the ages thus indicated. He has had in all twenty children--seven being the offspring of his first wife, thirteen of his second. Four of each race are living--eight in all. The elder division of the surviving family are John and Jason, both married, and living in Ohio; Owen, unmarried, who escaped from Harper's Ferry, and Ruth, the wife of Henry Thompson, who lives on an adjoining farm at North Elba, an intelligent and noble woman. The younger division consists of Salmon, aged twenty-three, who resides with his young wife in his mother's house, and three unmarried daughters, Anne, (sixteen,) Sarah, (thirteen,) and Ellen, (five.)


Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 United States License.

An XML version of this text is available for download, with the additional restriction that you offer Perseus any modifications you make. Perseus provides credit for all accepted changes, storing new additions in a versioning system.

hide Places (automatically extracted)

View a map of the most frequently mentioned places in this document.

Sort places alphabetically, as they appear on the page, by frequency
Click on a place to search for it in this document.
Ilva (Italy) (5)
Harper's Ferry (West Virginia, United States) (2)

Download Pleiades ancient places geospacial dataset for this text.

hide People (automatically extracted)
Sort people alphabetically, as they appear on the page, by frequency
Click on a person to search for him/her in this document.
John Brown (4)
Henry Thompson (3)
Shelley (2)
Ruth (2)
Hannah Owen (2)
Jason (2)
Thomas Garrett (2)
Byron (2)
hide Dates (automatically extracted)
Sort dates alphabetically, as they appear on the page, by frequency
Click on a date to search for it in this document.
1816 AD (2)
1800 AD (2)
hide Display Preferences
Greek Display:
Arabic Display:
View by Default:
Browse Bar: