John Cochrane to Frederick Douglass, February 18, 1878

JOHN COCHRANE TO FREDERICK DOUGLASS

New York, [N.Y.]^{1Cochrane added “P. O. Box 256” as his address.} 18 February 1878.

HON FREDK DOUGLASS.

MY DEAR FREDK DOUGLASS

I got your kind & acceptable letters^{2None of the letters Douglass sent to John Cochrane have been located.} in due course, but have not been able to acknowledge them, because of ulcerated throat, which has confined me to my bed for a number of days. I am up just now to write this to you, and to ask if you won’t write to John Brown Jun[io]r^{3On 26 February 1878, John Brown, Jr., wrote to Douglass, acknowledging receipt of a letter from him dated 20 February 1878, probably the same letter that Cochrane had requested. John Brown, Jr., to Frederick Douglass, 26 February 1878, General Correspondence File, reel 5, frames 234R–235, FD Papers, DLC.} in furtherance of <my> desire to hear from him. I wrote him immediately on receiving from you his letter explaining the situation re Horace White’s assertion, your remembrance, and asking for his. I exceedingly desire to hear from him.

I look upon John Brown & you as the combined pivot of the plans on which he was worked from <the Autumn of> ’47 when mission of capture were rejected to the autumn of 1859—11 years, when against your advice he drifted out of the adopted plan into the rejected one. But during that track of time the adopted plan underwent modifications as the exigencies of the times suggested. Change of place of operation, running off slaves to Canada or escaping into there & standing for their freedom in the mountains. Kagi’s^{4Son of a blacksmith in Bristolville, Ohio, John Henri Kagi (1835–59) witnessed slavery firsthand while a schoolteacher in Hawkinstown, Virginia; he was dismissed from that post for expressing antislavery sentiments. Kagi traveled to Nebraska in 1855 and to Kansas in 1856, where he worked irregularly as a newspaper reporter. He joined free-state militia units in Kansas and fought under James Montgomery, Aaron Stevens, and, eventually, John Brown. As an early convert to Brown’s plan to liberate slaves, Kagi accompanied him to the convention in Chatham, Canada West, and was designated secretary of war under the Provisional Constitution drawn up there. Kagi supported Brown’s decision to attack Harpers Ferry but always maintained that the raiders should afterward move off rapidly into the mountains. During the occupation of Harpers Ferry, Kagi unsuccessfully implored Brown to evacuate before becoming completely surrounded. Rather than surrender, he died while leading an isolated party of raiders in a doomed escape attempt. John H. Wayland, John Kagi and John Brown (Strasburg, Va., 1961); Oswald Garrison Villard, John Brown, 1800–1859: A Biography Fifty Years After (New York, 1943), 679; Glenn Noble, John Brown and the Jim Lane Trail (Broken Bow, Neb., 1977), 60–66, 80, 93–97; Oates, To Purge This Land, 220, 246, 266–68, 280, 290–96.} development of the plan (Redpath’s Life of John Brown)^{5James Redpath published The Public Life of Captain John Brown in 1860, only a few months after Brown’s raid at Harpers Ferry. Redpath knew Brown, and the book contains many personal conversations between the two men, along with dialogue from many others who knew Brown. Redpath discusses how John Kagi first met Brown in Kansas during the Bleeding Kansas struggles of the mid-1850s. Kagi is quoted as discussing the plans that he and Brown had developed for Harpers Ferry while they were in Kansas with a friend of Redpath. Kagi revealed to this friend that the plan was not to simply make one raid and remove any of the rallying slaves to Canada, but rather to start a war with freed slaves as fighters: “On the contrary, Kagi clearly stated, in answer to my inquiries, that the design was to make the fight in the mountains of Virginia, extending it to North Carolina and Tennessee, and also to the swamps of South Carolina if possible.” They wanted to set up an independent state where runaway slaves could join them and feel safe. James Redpath, The Public Life of Capt. John Brown (Boston, 1860), 203–05.} does not differ from your statement in its cardinal features. Major Delany^{6Born to a free mother and a slave father in Charlestown in western Virginia, Martin Robinson Delany (1812–85) was an editor, physician, and leading advocate of black emigration. In 1822, Delany and his mother moved to Chambersburg, Pennsylvania, where his father later joined them, and the young Delany attended a local school. In 1831 he moved to Pittsburgh, where he worked as a barber, attended a school run by a black Methodist minister, and studied medicine. Between 1843 and 1847, Delany was editor of the Mystery, a black newspaper in Pittsburgh. For the next two years, he served as coeditor of Douglass’s North Star and lectured extensively to gain new subscriptions for that paper. In 1850 and 1851, Delany attended Harvard Medical College, but, owing to protests from white students, the school denied him admission to the final term, which he needed to complete his medical degree. The following year, he wrote The Condition, Elevation, Emigration, and Destiny of the Colored People of the United States, Politically Considered (1852), in which he argued that emigration was the only remedy for the oppressed state of black Americans. When many black abolitionists, including Douglass, rejected Delany’s position, he organized a series of National Emigration Conventions that met in 1854, 1856, and 1858. These assemblies created a permanent National Board of Commissioners, of which Delany was president and chief propagandist. In 1856, Delany moved to Chatham, Canada West, and three years later he explored the Niger River valley in Africa, looking for possible emigration sites. His novel Blake was serialized in the Weekly Anglo-African from November 1861 through May 1862. During the Civil War, Delany served the North first as a recruiter and examining surgeon and eventually as a major of the 104th U.S. Colored Troops. From 1865 to 1868, Delany was a Freedmen’s Bureau officer in South Carolina and later was active in that state’s politics, running unsuccessfully for lieutenant governor on the Independent Republican ticket in 1874. Martin R. Delany, Blake; or, The Huts of America, ed. Floyd J. Miller (Boston, 1970), ix; Thomas Holt, Black over White: Negro Political Leadership in South Carolina during Reconstruction (Urbana, Ill., 1977), 74–75, 176–77; Dorothy Sterling, The Making of an Afro-American: Martin Robinson Delany, 1812–1885 (Garden City, N.Y., 1971); Victor Ullman, Martin R. Delany: The Beginnings of Black Nationalism (Boston, 1971); Floyd J. Miller, The Search for a Black Nationality: Black Emigration and Colonization, 1787–1863 (Champaign, Ill., 1975), 115–33, 171–83; DAB, 5: 219–20.} writes, that the convention in Canada had nothing to do with the destruction at Harpers Ferry, and that Mr. F.^{7Octavius Brooks Frothingham.} has committed a great error in supposing that Mr. Gerrit Smith was proving to lack descent. He gives me the secret history of the Canada Convention in his Life. Rollins’ Life of Major Delaney, chap 9.^{8Martin Robison Delany first encountered Frances Ann Rollin, an African American teacher, in 1865 while working in South Carolina as an agent of the Freedmen’s Bureau. Rollin had filed a lawsuit under the Civil Rights Act, and Delany provided counsel. Delany learned about Rollin’s ambitions to have a literary career and persuaded her to write his authorized biography. In 1867, Martin Robison Delany told Rollin about his conversations with John Brown. Rollin ultimately published the biography under her nickname, “Frank” A. Rollin, because the publisher was worried how a biography written by an African American woman would be perceived. According to the biography, Brown visited the home of Delany in April 1858 and sought his assistance in forming a council, which the black abolitionist fully supported. Delany provided a vivid firsthand recollection of the meeting. Frank A. Rollin, Life and Public Services of Martin R. Delany: Sub-Assistant Commissioner Bureau Relief of Refugees, Freedmen, and of Abandoned Lands, and Late Major 104th U.S. Colored Troops (Boston, 1868), 5–88; Delany, Martin R. Delany, 328–30; Willard B. Gatewood, Jr., “ ‘The Remarkable Misses Rollin’: Black Women in Reconstruction South Carolina,” Carolina Historical Magazine, 92: 177–78 (July 1991).} Browns work then was for men with whom to cultivate the field in Kansas. His previous experience there had doubtless recommended that as a place better adapted at that time to operations

than was Harpers Ferry. He became sure of his merely holding an open not “a quiet” convention^{9Brown secretly arranged to meet with other militant abolitionists in Chatham, Canada West (a town known for its large population of escaped slaves) in the spring of 1858. The constitution that Brown presented at the Chatham convention sought to ensure the rights of everyone in the proposed nation to the “eternal and self-evident truths set forth in our Declaration of Independence.” As Redpath reported it, Brown and Kagi intended the constitution to be “the framework of organization among the emancipationists,” which would not only help give leaders control over the situation and prevent anarchy, but also “alarm the Oligarchy by discipline and the show of organization. In their terror they would imagine the whole North was upon them pell-mell, as well as all their slaves.” The convention went so far as to begin appointing officers for the new government: John Brown, commander in chief; J. H. Kagi, secretary of war; and Richard Realf, secretary of state. Redpath, Public Life of John Brown, 231–33; Oates, To Purge This Land, 242–47.} & gathering their signatures to “the paper”—the proposed organization of his provisional government. Major Delany was the Key of the convention. After that, doubtless Brown found cause to abandon Kansas & fall back to the plan with Harpers Ferry for the initiate. Having done this, he subsequently, and perhaps influenced by Kagi, <and his military instincts [illegible] in Kansas> went further to discard <altogether> the plan of fleeing to the mountains from Harpers Ferry and adopt that of the capture of Harpers Ferry. He says that his better judgment was overruled (see letters & conversations in his [illegible]). But just how & just at what point it is difficult to tell. You alone gave to me a connected, far reaching narrative which makes it clear that John Brown worked systematically upon the plan of fleeing with Slaves to the mountains, [illegible] without change, [illegible] he [illegible] a[t] Chambersburgh in 1859 to the place of capture which you & he rejected in 1847, and had not thought of since.

Then read his dying words in his speech in answer to the question why sentence should not be pronounced against him.^{10John Brown’s last words in the courtroom at the time of his sentencing were full of insistence that while he had intended to take “slaves without the snapping of a gun on either side” and move them to Canada, he had never planned on the murder and treason that occurred at Harpers Ferry. He acknowledged that the case against him had been “fairly proved” by the witnesses’ “truthfulness and candor,” but argued that had he acted in the same way on behalf of the rich or the powerful, he would be deemed a hero rather than a criminal. Claiming that he had intended only to do as the Bible commanded and “remember them that are in bonds as bound with them” (Heb. 13:3), he was ready to mingle his blood with the “blood of millions in the slave country whose rights are disregarded by the wicked.” He maintained that he had induced no one to join him in the raid but that all partook willingly and of their own accord. Redpath, Public Life of John Brown, 340–43.} Man must be secular indeed who won’t believe pious words, and how, if truthful, could therefore Gerrit Smith have been privy to an intention of John Brown which John Brown himself as he passed through his transfiguration claimed he never entertained. Do get John Brown Jun[ior] to say or write something to you or me—to both of us

Sincerely,

Your Friend

JOHN COCHRANE

ALS: General Correspondence File, reel 3, frames 232–34, FD Papers, DLC.

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