When Franklin Benjamin Sanborn was two and a half years old, a bolt of lightning struck the chimney and rattled the windows of his family’s old farmhouse in Hampton Falls, New Hampshire. His sister Sarah ran up the stairs to survey the damage and found her younger brother sitting quietly with a stick in his hand. He explained that he had made the windows shake by pounding on the floor with it. “I believed myself already capable,” he later wrote, “of making some stir in the world.”
Making a stir would remain Sanborn’s one indisputable talent. He was a mediocre poet and a worse philosopher, but he showed unfailing genius when it came to provoking others. In later years he embroiled Concord in a bitter controversy by fertilizing his garden with his own sewage. Neighbors complained of the stench; Sanborn complained of their parochialism. Lawsuits were filed; countersuits followed. When he died at age eighty-five, his life having spanned much of the nineteenth century and just enough of the twentieth for him to recognize he didn’t particularly care for it, there were few to mourn. The Concord Social Circle had unanimously voted him out of its membership, an unprecedented parliamentary move. The Massachusetts Historical Society, hoping to honor one who had contributed so much to its institution, sought to locate a sympathetic eulogist who might deliver a few favorable words at its monthly meeting—to no avail. Even Sanborn’s wife had refused to speak to him for years. He compulsively burned his bridges.
It had not always been this way. As a winsome thirteen-year-old, he had encountered a book of essays by Ralph Waldo Emerson and become a transcendentalist overnight. Only one other writer—Byron—moved Sanborn as much. Emerson’s Essays seemed to suggest the world’s rich possibilities, assuring him that reliance upon one’s inner principles was all that was necessary to leave a mark on history. Never a contemplative person—he felt most alive when doing something—Sanborn responded almost physically to the flashes of insight coursing through Emerson’s works. In 1851, when he was nineteen and at Harvard, he decided to write the author. His journals were promptly filled with details of a new and worshipful friendship. “Called at Mr E-s,” he wrote in 1855, confiding that the two had discussed the philosophies of Pascal and Thomas Carlyle. (One imagines Emerson did most of the talking.) Emerson considered Sanborn one of a “good crop of mystics at Harvard” and soon presented the young man to other transcendentalists in Concord. Alcott became a regular dining companion; Thoreau followed. On one occasion Sanborn wrote, “Tonight we had a call from Mr Thoreau, who came at eight and staid till ten.” The author of Walden, he thought, “looks eminently sagacious—like a sort of wise wild beast.”
In 1855, shortly after graduating from Harvard, Sanborn declared himself “a Theist in religion, a Transcendentalist in philosophy, an Abolitionist in politics. In a word, I am an ultra reformer on almost all points.” Emerson apparently considered these sufficient qualifications to invite him to open a private school in Concord. Sanborn’s students soon included the transcendentalist’s children, as well as those of Henry James, Sr., Horace Mann, and in the summer of 1860, Nathaniel Hawthorne. Years later Julian Hawthorne fondly recalled that “Frank Sanborn’s little schoolhouse was surrounded by the great fresh outdoors, and neighbor[ed] such abodes of felicity as the Alcotts’ house to play and dance in.” Louisa May Alcott, too old to attend the school when it opened, felt that during the tense and tumultuous years before the Civil War, Sanborn’s school “promised the greatest interest” of anything in Concord.
It was housed in a gray building near the village center, one of the first coeducational institutions in America. Sanborn’s academy offered a rigorous curriculum, room and board for out-of-town students, and a host of less conventional activities. For instance, Henry David Thoreau led students on excursions into the woods surrounding Walden Pond, where he taught them the names of plants and animals. Picnics were a regular feature. So were elaborately costumed melodramas, some of them written by Louisa May Alcott, whose younger sister May was the academy’s drawing instructor. Sanborn presided over these activities with a mixture of leadership and fun. Julian Hawthorne remembered him as a “simple and conscientious master” who unfailingly displayed “manhood, fidelity, generosity and enlightenment.”
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Sanborn had been a schoolmaster for two and a half years when he visited the baronial estate of Gerrit Smith in upstate New York. Smith was fabulously wealthy—his father had been John Jacob Astor’s business partner—and he spent much of his fortune on various philanthropic ventures, including his own ill-fated presidential campaigns. He ran repeatedly on the Liberty ticket, advocating universal suffrage and the immediate abolition of slavery. In 1846 he donated 120,000 acres in upstate New York to poor blacks in the hope of creating a self-sufficient community. It was Smith’s belief that if given the chance, African Americans could control their destiny and at the same time contribute to the larger economy. The experiment failed (like many idealists, Smith had not worked out the details, including the poor soil of the Adirondacks), but he continued to support the cause of abolition. To this end, he had invited Sanborn and several others to meet an extraordinary man who wanted to destroy slavery.
Sanborn had already volunteered for the Massachusetts State Kansas Committee, where he helped funnel financial aid and contraband weapons to freedom fighters determined to keep slavery out of that battleground state. Now Smith introduced him to someone who had actually fought in Kansas, a rawboned man in a battered corduroy suit. John Brown fixed Sanborn with “piercing gray eyes” and shook his hand. Then, without indulging in small talk, he announced that he needed money to purchase rifles, pistols, and cutlasses. Sanborn was impressed. “He was, in truth,” he later recalled, “a Calvinistic Puritan, born a century or two after the fashion had changed.” Sanborn might not have known about the incidents at Pottawatomie Creek, where Brown and his men hacked five men to death with broadswords, but if he did, he rationalized the violence. Brown, he wrote, “saw with unusual clearness the mischievous relation to republican institutions of negro slavery, and made up his fixed mind that it must be abolished.”
John Brown had already drawn up a constitution for the government he planned to create in the newly freed South. (He read it aloud to Smith and Sanborn.) He described his plan to instigate a slave rebellion and asked for eight hundred dollars. Sanborn tried to poke holes in the scheme. It was too expensive, he argued. Even if enough weapons could be purchased, there was no guarantee that a slave population would risk certain execution for a white man’s crusade. But Brown swatted these objections aside.
At some point Smith and Sanborn excused themselves to discuss the matter alone. They agreed the venture had little chance of success. They also admitted they respected Brown. “You see how it is,” Smith told Sanborn; “our dear friend has made up his mind to this course, and cannot be turned from it.” Together they helped form the Secret Six, a group of wealthy and well-connected radical abolitionists who agreed to supply Brown’s small army with rifles, pikes, and matériel. The other members of the group included Thomas Wentworth Higginson, the popular nature writer for the Atlantic; Theodore Parker, a firebrand minister who led one of the largest congregations in the country; Samuel Gridley Howe, a physician in Boston and the husband of Julia Ward Howe, who would soon write the popular “Battle Hymn of the Republic”; and George Luther Stearns, an industrialist who had made a fortune fabricating lead pipes.
For the next year and a half the Secret Six funneled money to Brown without knowing precisely when he intended to strike. In June 1859 Sanborn believed that the insurrectionist “means to be on the ground as soon as he can, perhaps so as to begin by the 4th of July.” But the attack was postponed. Then on a bright sunny Tuesday in October 1859, as he sat in his schoolroom making plans for the “annual chestnutting excursion,” he learned that Brown had been captured at Harpers Ferry. Details of the failed raid soon appeared in newspapers, which reported that a trunk of Brown’s correspondence had been seized as evidence from the farmhouse he used as headquarters. Sanborn’s letters were among them. That night the schoolmaster stayed up late burning all papers that “might compromise other persons,” and later in the week, as he sent his pupils and teachers on the annual picnic, he hired a chaise and traveled to Boston, where he consulted with a lawyer, John A. Andrew, who offered a sobering assessment of his situation. Lending material support to Brown made Sanborn guilty of treason—a crime punishable by death. He “might be suddenly arrested and hurried out of the protection of Massachusetts law.”
Sanborn bolted to Quebec. “The whole matter was so uncertain,” he later explained, “and the action to be taken by the national authorities, and by the mass of the people was so much in the dark, that it was impossible to say what might be the best course.” Apparently he had overreacted; no federal marshals arrived in Concord to arrest him. Within a week he was back in town, where he tried to put on a brave front. “If summoned as a witness I shall refuse to obey,” he wrote Theodore Parker that winter. He took to carrying a pistol, boasting that he would tell any arresting officer “he does it at his peril for I will certainly shoot him if I can. . . . I shall resist to the uttermost, and probably kill or wound my captor!”
This was his frame of mind on New Year’s Day, when he hosted Charles Loring Brace.
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In later years Sanborn routinely tossed out Darwin’s name as shorthand for a materialist philosophy that valued physical processes over spiritual truths. But in 1860 he was too rattled by the Brown affair to fully appreciate the significance of On the Origin of Species. If he did not grasp the theory in its entirety, he did understand that Darwin’s book seemed to describe the world he inhabited. The depiction of constant struggle and endless competition in the Origin of Species perfectly captured what it felt like to live in America in 1860.
Sectional tensions over slavery had simmered for decades. Sanborn had grown up during a period when North and South viewed each other with mutual suspicion, even hostility. “The Carolinian is widely different from the Yankee,” declared the New-England Magazine; the New Orleans–based DeBow’s Review mockingly suggested how easy it was to tell “the genuine Yankee from the rest of his species as if he were an oran-outang, or a South Sea Islander.” America was split between two distinct cultures, two separate and utterly incompatible types of people. As the New-York Tribune put it, “We are not one people. We are two peoples. We are a people for Freedom and a people for Slavery.” The Charleston Mercury concurred: “On the subject of slavery, the North and South . . . are not only two Peoples, but they are rival, hostile Peoples.”
Darwinian theory suggested that competition was always most fierce between two closely allied species. The organism best adapted to its circumstances invariably won out over competitors—even competitors that were nearly identical. Sanborn seems to have intuitively seized upon this element of Darwin’s argument and to have translated it in terms of the national debate over slavery’s expansion and continued existence. Shortly after his New Year’s dinner party, he wrote a friend, the geologist Benjamin Smith Lyman, informing him that “Mr Brace brought a book here of Darwin the English botanist [sic], advocating the principle of ‘Natural Selection,’ as he calls it.” That principle fascinated Sanborn because it insisted that survival and progress were fueled by endless combat, by struggles to the death. Applied to the ongoing contest between pro- and antislavery forces, Darwin’s theory could be used to justify Sanborn’s participation in funding the attack on Harpers Ferry. After all, he and the rest of the Secret Six believed that John Brown was pushing the nation closer to the “irrepressible conflict” predicted a decade earlier by New York senator William E. Seward. By encouraging racial conflict, Brown and his supporters hoped to complete the revolution begun almost ninety years earlier with the battles of Concord and Lexington.
If Sanborn considered Brown’s attack a salvo in the struggle for national survival, many others believed it signaled an America on the verge of extinction. The poet Walt Whitman later described the period between John Brown’s arrest and the start of the Civil War as a “year of meteors! brooding year!” It was a time “all mottled with evil and good,” a “year of forebodings!” marked by partisanship and anxiety for the future of the world’s only democracy. In Whitman’s poem about this uneasy period, the central image is a meteor shower, a harbinger of the coming war. John Brown is presented as “cool and indifferent” on the scaffold, certain that his efforts to foment slave revolt are righteous and will be vindicated in heaven. Juxtaposed against Brown’s firm conviction are the “comets and meteors transient and strange” that streak overhead. These “balls of unearthly light” may portend the end of slavery or the end of the nation—they resist easy interpretation—but they certainly resemble the cannon fire that would soon produce the unspeakable slaughter of the Civil War.
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Interest in Harpers Ferry did not end with Brown’s execution on December 2. The insurrection remained front-page news well into the new year as a congressional committee headed by John Mason of Virginia subpoenaed witnesses suspected of conspiring with Brown. Thomas Wentworth Higginson was convinced that “no one who stands his ground will be molested . . . Mason does not wish to have John Brown heartily defended before the committee & the country—nor does he wish to cause [a riot], either in Massachusetts or Washington. He wishes simply to say that he tried for evidence & it was refused him. If his witnesses go to Canada or Europe, he is freed from all responsibility.” It was Higginson’s distinct impression that to flee the country before being summoned was the equivalent of declaring one’s guilt. Moreover, it was cowardly. “Sanborn,” he scolded the young schoolteacher after he dashed off to Montreal in late October, “is there no such thing as Honor among confederates?”
But on January 16 Sanborn’s worst fears were realized. Walking to the post office in Moses Prichard’s general store in Concord, he heard a strange voice call his name. Sanborn turned and said, “How do you do?” In response the stranger handed him a summons. The slip of paper announced that his appearance before Senator Mason’s committee was scheduled for eight days hence, on January 24. Sanborn wrote back to Mason, proposing to testify in Massachusetts, “through fear of lack of protection in Washington.” Mason assured him he would personally vouch for the young man’s safety. “I was not so much concerned for that,” Sanborn sniffed, “as resolved never to testify before slaveholders in regard to my friends.”
When the Senate voted a few days later to arrest Sanborn, he left town once more, heading to Canada for a second time and “choosing [not] to be seized,” as he put it, “before I was quite ready.” He tried to justify his actions. Abolition was a holy cause, a crusade for justice. To fight for that cause—even to die—was noble. But to fight was necessary. There were those who felt that Brown’s actions at Harpers Ferry were grossly immoral. Did slavery’s wrongs justify the deaths of soldiers and innocent bystanders? Was the widespread violence Brown wished to provoke defensible? Sanborn believed the answer to these questions was yes. After all, pro-slavery fighters in Kansas had used violence to perpetuate a system that was itself founded upon the most extreme forms of brutality. How many mutilations and murders had been perpetrated by slave owners in the past two hundred years? How many women raped, how many children sold from their families? Politics had failed to solve the crisis, as had efforts to abolish slavery through moral suasion. But if fighting was necessary, what was Sanborn doing in Canada? The struggle to survive surely couldn’t be won in retreat. Sanborn argued that he was saving himself for the greater fight that seemed just on the horizon. As he told Higginson somewhat defensively, “there are a thousand better ways of spending a year in warfare against slavery than by being in a Washington prison.”