Page:John Brown (W. E. B. Du Bois).djvu/99

Rh town. In about a year we received a letter from good Deacon Williams, informing us that our relations with the church in Franklin were ended in accordance with a rule made by the church since we left, that 'any member being absent a year without reporting him or herself to that church should be cut off.' This was the first intimation we had of the existence of the rule. Father, on reading the letter, became white with anger. This was my first taste of the pro-slavery diabolism that had intrenched itself in the church, and I shed a few uncalled for tears over the matter, for instead I should have rejoiced in my emancipation. From that day my theological shackles were a good deal broken, and I have not worn them since (to speak of),—not even for ornament."

The years of 1837 and 1838 were the years of persecution for the Abolition cause. Lovejoy was murdered in Illinois and mobs raged in Massachusetts and Pennsylvania. Pennsylvania Hall, in Philadelphia, was burned, and Marlborough Chapel in Boston, where John Brown himself seems to have been present fighting back the people, was sacked. Indeed, as he afterward said, he had seen some of the "principal Abolition mobs."

Whatever John Brown may have wished to do at this time was frustrated by the panic, which swept away his fortune, and left him bankrupt. Yet something he must do—he must at least promise God that he and his family would eternally oppose