watched with growing rage—a rage he could not then articulate—
as a Michigan innkeeper beat a slave boy with an iron fire shovel.
In addition to his intense religious convictions, slavery violated
Brown's secular views as well: his passionate commitment to the
nuclear family (he had read about the inhuman breakup of slave
families), his belief in the right of all men to enjoy the fruits of
their labor and to raise themselves above the condition of their
birth. Yet, instead of eradicating slavery, the United States had
institutionalized that cruel institution, surrounding it with a net-
work of legal and political safeguards quite as though the Declara-
tion of Independence did not exist. Such hypocrisy enraged Brown.
How could Americans sanction slavery and yet proclaim theirs
the freest and most enlightened nation in the world? By 1859 he
thought it impossible to remove slavery through regular political
channels. For Southerners and their Northern allies dominated the
crucial branches of the federal government and were using these
agencies not only to preserve and perpetuate slavery, but also to
extend it into the Western territories as well. Moreover, the United
States Supreme Court, controlled by Southern Democrats, had
denied Negroes the right of United States citizenship and had for-
bidden Congress to exclude slavery from the public lands. And in
Brown's opinion few Northerners seemed to care. Northern Demo-
crats, he declared, were all "doughfaces" who enjoyed licking up
"Southern spittle." Republicans were too "wishy-washy" about
slavery to do anything about that institution. And the bona fide
abolitionists were "milk-and-water" pacifists who preferred talk
to action. By the late 1850s, Brown asserted, slavery had become
too entrenched in American life ever to be expunged except by
revolutionary violence—and by the extermination of this entire
generation of men, women, and children, if that were the will of
Almighty God. Such statements had electrified New England hu-
manitarians like Ralph Waldo Emerson—who thought Brown was
speaking symbolically—and had won him the outright support
of six influential Northern reformers, who organized a secret
committee to raise guns and money for his projected Virginia
invasion.

On the eve of the attack, one or two of Brown's backers began
to doubt the wisdom of the operation, but the old man was un-
daunted. He was convinced that Northern free blacks and South-
ern slaves would rally to his standard. He was equally certain that

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