Page:John Brown (1899).pdf/42

For that matter he was born an abolitionist. His father had been one before him. The motive-spring of John Brown's abolitionism was touched in the year 1790, when the Rev. Samuel Hopkins, of Rhode Island, a man whose opposition to negro slavery was practical and well known, and who was one of the earliest of the abolitionists, visited the Rev. Jeremiah Hallock at Canton, Connecticut. Young Owen Brown (John Brown's father), then nineteen years old, lived with Hallock, probably as a sort of privileged helper, and heard Hopkins talk against negro slavery, "denouncing it as a great sin." Hopkins was a man of native power. He made a life convert of young Owen Brown, who afterward taught his own children abolitionism at his knee. There had been a chance for the development in the boy John Brown of the bent which gave rise to the touching incident so vividly related in his own autobiograph-