Patriotic Treason: John Brown and the Soul of America

Full of his success and renewed notoriety, Brown expected a hero's welcome in the town of Tabor, where he had recuperated after his Kansas campaigns in the summer of 1856. But the town's residents, though solidly antislavery, were repelled by the violent circumstances of this particular slave rescue and by the lawless appropriation of property that had accompanied the relief of oppressed people. When Brown strode into the church of his friend Reverend John Todd on the Sunday after his arrival and requested that the minister offer a public thanksgiving for God's preservation of the fugitives and their liberators, the gesture seemed to many of Todd's parishioners more imperious than pious. Brown's petition was deferred until a meeting could be held to discuss it. The result was not a public thanksgiving but a public rebuke: "While we sympathize with the oppressed, and will do all that we conscientiously can to help them in their efforts for freedom, the people of Tabor formally resolved, "we have no sympathy with those who go to slave states, to entice away slaves, and take property or life when necessary to attain that end."