[43]
In 1840, he went to Hudson, Ohio, and engaged in the wool business with Captain Oviatt, of Richfield ; to which, in 1842, John Brown removed, and remained two years, when he entered into a partnership with Colonel Perkins. During his residence in Richfield, he lost four children, all of them within eleven days; and three were carried out together and interred in the same grave. “From boyhood,” writes Mr. Oviatt, “I have known him through manhood; and through life he has been distinguished for his truthfulness and integrity; he has ever been esteemed, by those who have known him, as a very conscientious man.”
It was in 1839 that he conceived the idea of becoming a Liberator of the Southern slaves. He had seen, during the twenty-five years that had elapsed since he became an Abolitionist, every right of human nature, and of the Northern States, ruthlessly trodden under the feet of the tyrannical Slave Power. He saw it blighting and blasting the manhood of the nation ; and he listened to “the voice of the poor that cried.” He heard Lafayette loudly praised; but he saw no helper of the bondman. He saw the people building the sepulchres of the fathers of ‘76, but lynching and murdering the prophets that were sent unto them. He believed that:
Who would be free, themselves must strike the blow.But the slaves, scattered; closely watched; prevented from assembling to conspire; without arms; apparently overpowered; at the mercy of every traitor; knowing the white man only as their foe; seeing, every where and always, that (as the Haytian proverb pithily expresses
