John Brown’s Son Escaped to Southland

John Brown’s body lies a-moldering in the grave,

John Brown’s body lies a-moldering in the grave,

John Brown’s body lies a-moldering in the grave,

But his soul goes marching on.

--Author unknown

*

Wherever John Brown’s soul may be, his son’s body lies on an Altadena hilltop named for what may have been the most critical battle in the bloody Civil War that followed his father’s storied death.

Perched on Round Top hill with an unobstructed view of Brown Mountain in the distance is a crudely hewn tombstone that marks the resting place of Owen Brown. It is, in fact, the only memorial to a man who linked Los Angeles to two of the stormiest periods in American history. (Little Round Top at Gettysburg is the hill where a regiment of Maine men under Col. Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain and other Union soldiers held out against overwhelming odds and turned back attacking rebels.)

Although Owen Brown’s career as a San Gabriel Mountains trailblazer, tour guide and leader of Pasadena’s temperance movement lasted just five years, it was the part he played in his father’s fierce antislavery crusade far from California that helped him win a unique niche in Altadena history.

Years before the shots at Fort Sumter launched the Civil War, America’s domestic tranquillity had been shattered. There were slave rebellions, the mobbing of abolitionists, hunting of fugitive slaves, guerrilla warfare in Kansas, and John Brown’s botched and bloody raid on the federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry, Va., that left 17 dead and led to his being hanged for treason.

Born in Connecticut in 1800 and raised in Ohio, John Brown was religiously inspired by an African American preacher and vowed to consecrate his life to the destruction of slavery. His love for religion was exceeded only by his love for his family of 20 children, whom he tried and repeatedly failed to support.

Convinced that the first step to emancipation was education, he actively campaigned for African American schools. When Oberlin College in Ohio opened its doors to blacks in 1839, John Brown’s father was appointed a trustee.

Brown’s own family followed him to North Elba, N.Y., in 1846, to teach farming to a group of blacks who had been given 100,000 acres of harsh soil by a wealthy abolitionist.

But when Congress laid out the states west of the Mississippi River--establishing slavery’s boundary at the 37th parallel in 1854--five of Brown’s sons, including Owen, trekked west to Kansas.

Many of the settlers were abolitionists like themselves who came to join the crusade to make sure that Kansas entered the Union as a free state. The times were violent, and guerrilla warfare between pro-slavery and anti-slavery groups would soon win the state the nickname “Bleeding Kansas.”

Shortly after Brown joined his sons, in May 1856, about 2,000 pro-slavery Missourians surrounded Lawrence, Kan., the capital city, and killed many of the anti-slavery settlers. Then they sacked and burned half the town.

That same day, cane-wielding Sen. Preston Brooks of South Carolina badly beat Sen. Charles Sumner, an outspoken foe of slavery from Massachusetts, in the Senate chambers for telling the truth about Kansas.

In retaliation, Brown and his sons dragged five pro-slavery leaders out of their cabins at night and hacked them to death with broadswords.

After this blow, which became known as the Pottawatomie massacre, Brown and his sons returned to Virginia to execute the most daring, radical plan to free the slaves ever imagined.

Brown and his sons plotted to seize the federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry, in what is now West Virginia, and from that site issue proclamations abolishing slavery. Then they would train the recruits they believed would flock to their cause.

Trusted confidant, former slave and abolitionist leader Frederick Douglass believed in Brown but doubted that his plan would work. Though he refused to participate, Douglass would later be implicated in the conspiracy.

On Sunday, Oct. 16, 1859, Brown’s armed group of 16 whites (including three of his sons) and five blacks crossed the Potomac into Harpers Ferry. Within 36 hours, Brown was the prisoner of a company of Marines under the command of Army Col. Robert E. Lee. More than half the raiders, including two of Brown’s sons, were killed in the fighting, while he was severely wounded.

Owen, believing his father was dead, grabbed a bag of hard biscuits and 20 pounds of sugar and headed out of town with four others who escaped.

On Dec. 2, after Brown’s highly publicized trial and conviction, Thomas J. “Stonewall” Jackson and John Wilkes Booth were in the crowd that watched as Brown sat proud and erect, with his hands tied behind his back, sitting on his coffin in the back of the wagon that took him to the gallows.

After Brown was hanged, future President Abraham Lincoln said he could find no excuse for Brown’s acts of “violence, bloodshed and treason,” while Ralph Waldo Emerson eulogized him as a “new saint who will make the gallows glorious like the cross.”

Two years into the Civil War, Julia Ward Howe created “The Battle Hymn of the Republic” by adapting new lyrics to the Union soldiers’ popular ditty “John Brown’s Body.”

With a $25,000 price on his head, Owen evaded service in the Civil War and hid out in Ohio among family members. He worked as a farmer while conducting fugitive slaves to underground railroad stations across the state.

Owen finally hooked up with his brother, Jason, and sister, Ruth, when he arrived in Pasadena in the early 1880s. After building a cabin in El Prieto Canyon, the Brown brothers began to blaze a trail to the summit of Brown Mountain, named for their father.

Owen’s identity was no secret. The temperance advocate and animal lover, who neither smoked nor chewed tobacco, openly carried two Colts at his waist--even though he had only partial use of the right arm he had injured as a child.

When Owen, a confirmed bachelor, died in 1889, his funeral was one of the largest in Pasadena at the time, attracting 2,000 people. The band leading the procession played the song “John Brown’s Body.”

His tombstone reads: “Owen Brown, son of John Brown, the Liberator, died Jan. 9, 1889, aged 64 years.”

Today, this stone marker on Round Top hill, in a remote area surrounded by the Angeles National Forest, is a state historical site on private land above El Prieto Road. Nearby, the only marker that designates the site where the Brown brothers’ cabin once stood is a rusted blue car, clogged with decades worth of dirt and debris.