ssss1

“And there were in the same country shepherds abiding in the field, keeping watch over their flock by night.

“And, lo, the angel of the Lord came upon them, and the glory of the Lord shone round about them; and they were sore afraid.”

The vastest physical fact in the life of John Brown was the Alleghany Mountains—that beautiful mass of hill and crag which guards the sombre majesty of the Maine coast, crumples the rivers on the rocky soil of New England, and rolls and leaps down through busy Pennsylvania to the misty peaks of Carolina and the red foothills of Georgia. In the Alleghanies John Brown was all but born; their forests were his boyhood wonderland; in their villages he married his wives and begot his clan. On the sides of the Alleghanies, he tended his sheep and dreamed of his terrible dream. It was the mystic, awful voice of the mountains that lured him to liberty, death and martyrdom within their wildest fastness, and in their bosom he sleeps his last sleep.

So, too, in the development of the United States from the War of 1812 to the Civil War, it was the Alleghanies that formed the industrial centre of the land and lured young men to their waters and mines, valleys and factories, as they lured John Brown. His life from 1805 to 1854 was almost wholly spent on the western slope of the Alleghanies in a small area of Ohio and Pennsylvania, beginning eighty miles north of Pittsburg and ending twenty-five miles southeast of Cleveland. Here in a half-dozen small towns, but chiefly in Hudson, O., he worked in his young manhood to support his growing family. From 1819 to 1825, he was a tanner at Hudson. Then he moved seventy miles westward toward the crests of the Alleghanies in Pennsylvania, where he set up his tannery again and became a man of importance in the town. John Quincy Adams made him postmaster, the village school was held at his log house and the new feverish prosperity of the post-bellum period began to stir him as it stirred this whole western world. Indeed, the economic history of the land from the War of 1812 to the Civil War covers a period of extraordinary developments—so much so that no man’s life which fell in these years may be written without knowledge of and allowance for the battling of gigantic social forces and welding of material, out of which the present United States was designed.