John Brown’s actions raised especially difficult questions for Quaker abolitionists, who as pacifists did not support violence. A Quaker woman (E.B.) from Newport, Rhode Island, wrote Brown on October 27, expressing her admiration for his motives even though she opposed the means he employed. John Brown replied, offering a religious rationale for his raid. He also urged this letter writer, and many others, to worry less about him and more about his wife Mary, his daughters-in-law, and other widows of those who died during the raid. Although Brown’s family received financial assistance, they found it difficult to escape the notoriety of Harpers Ferry and eventually resettled in California.
CHARLESTOWN, JEFFERSON COUNTY, VA., NOV. 1, 1859
My dear Friend E.B. of R.I.,
Your most cheering letter of the 27th of October is received; and may the Lord reward you a thousandfold for the kind feeling you express toward me; but more especially for your fidelity to the “poor that cry, and those that have no help.” For this I am a prisoner in bonds. It is solely my own fault, in a military point of view, that we met with our disaster. I mean that I mingled with our prisoners and so far sympathized with them and their families that I neglected my duty in other respects. But God’s will, not mine, be done.
You know that Christ once armed Peter. So also in my case I think he put a sword into my hand, and there continued it so long as he saw best, and then kindly took it from me. I mean when I first went to Kansas. I wish you could know with what cheerfulness I am now wielding the “sword of the Spirit” on the right hand and on the left. I bless God that it proves “mighty to the pulling down of strongholds.” I always loved my Quaker friends, and I commend to their kind regard my poor bereaved widowed wife and my daughters and daughters-in-law, whose husbands fell at my side. One is a mother and the other likely to become so soon. They, as well as my own sorrow-stricken daughters, are left very poor, and have much greater need of sympathy than I, who, through Infinite Grace and the kindness of strangers, am “joyful in all my tribulations.”
Dear sister, write them at North Elba, Essex County, N.Y., to comfort their sad hearts. Direct to Mary A. Brown, wife of John Brown. There is also another—a widow, wife of Thompson, who fell with my poor boys in the affair at Harper’s Ferry—at the same place.
I do not feel conscious of guilt in taking up arms; and had it been in behalf of the rich and powerful, the intelligent, the great (as men count greatness), or those who form enactments to suit themselves and corrupt others, or some of their friends, that I interfered, suffered, sacrificed, and fell, it would have been doing very well. But enough of this. These light afflictions, which endure for a moment, shall but work for me “a far more exceeding and eternal weight of glory.” I would be very grateful for another letter from you. My wounds are healing. Farewell. God will surely attend to his own cause in the best possible way and time, and he will not forget the work of his own hands.
Your friend,
John Brown
Source: F. B. Sanborn, The Life and Letters of John Brown (Boston: Roberts Brothers, 1891), 582–83.