John Brown on the Terrorism of Slavery
Louis DeCaro Jr., Ph.D., historian and biographer of John Brown, shares what may be a previously unpublished letter Brown wrote to a Kansas abolitionist shortly before the October 1859 Harper's Ferry raid. In the letter—transcribed in abolitionist papers and not yet, according to DeCaro, in published form—Brown articulates his opposition to slavery in direct terms:
"Slavery is all of these. It steals babes in the cradle... it robs women of their chastity and men of their wives. It kills with sorrow, unshared labor, and the various forms of cruelty — more slowly, surely, but more in number than the sword."
DeCaro uses the letter to explain Brown's core conviction: that the evil of slavery was systemic, not merely individual—distinguishing Brown's analysis from biographers like Stephen Oates, who softened the institution by noting that some slaveholders "planted flowers outside the slave shacks." DeCaro connects Brown's thinking to John Wesley's description of slavery as "the mother of all villainies," and draws a line from antebellum slavery to contemporary human trafficking.
TRANSCRIPT
LOU DECARO: I found a letter that John Brown wrote, probably the last letter he wrote before he went to Harper's Ferry, and I want to read a part of it because it speaks to this. This is what he wrote to an abolitionist in Kansas:
"I was opposed to theft, robbery, murder, for slavery is all of these. It steals babes in the cradle, I might say, in the mother's womb. It robs women of their chastity and men of their wives. It kills with sorrow, unshared labor, and the various forms of cruelty, more slowly, surely, but more in number than the sword."
I don't think anyone's ever published that letter. I found it transcribed by an abolitionist in another abolitionist's papers, but it's a John Brown letter, just before the Harper's Ferry raid.
Slavery as institution, not merely individual cruelty (1:23)
This shows you how he understood it. What even a biographer like Stephen Oates did, when he wrote his biography, was to say, "Yeah, there were bad slaveholders, but there were also ones that planted flowers outside of the slave shacks." We have to understand what John Brown understood.
John Brown understood that not all slaveholders were ruthless, bloodthirsty ogres. But his point was that the institution of slavery was monstrous. It was, as John Wesley said, the mother of all villainies. It was horrendous. And this is what it did.
He went to war against slavery, not the South (2:04)
And this is why he went to war, not against the South, but against slavery. It's as simple as that. There's no reason for people to try to slice it and dice it any other way. That's how John Brown understood slavery. And he was right.
It's still right today. Human trafficking. It's the same thing. Any form of this brutal injustice. It is brutal. It is violent. These people were institutionally violent.
The humanity of John Brown (2:36)
I see my brother Brad. There's a bullet hole still on his front door in Lawrence, where they shot into that house. What kind of people shoot into houses?
Even John Brown told his men at Harper's Ferry: "Don't shoot into houses."
The humanity of this man has been completely undermined by the special interests of people who have been the gatekeepers of our history. And we need to understand that if there was anyone who was humanitarian, it was Mr. John Brown.