What made John Brown an abolitionist, and when and why did his abolitionism take its strenuous, militant, and peculiar form? The psychology of his apostleship is a strange and interesting study. He was never in the current of the anti-slavery movement. Though we shall see that he regarded himself, and that his family regarded him, as devoted in a special way to negro emancipation, there is no documentary evidence, no proof from the man's own letters or written memoranda or acts, that the movement "took hold of him" at all actively before his fiftieth year. That he was deeply sympathetic with the enslaved blacks all his life is perfectly incontestable, and that he felt himself especially devoted to the cause of their liberation as far back as 1837 we know on the testimony of his wife and children.
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II.
