Remembering the Man Who Lived

CELEBRATING JOHN BROWN'S WAR ON SLAVERY

     One hundred-forty-nine years after John Brown famous raid on Harper's Ferry in 1859, his great-great-great granddaughter Alice Keesey Mecoy came to New York City to meet with John Brown authors and scholars. As the family representative, she was on her way to take part in Brown's induction in the National Abolitionist Hall of Fame at Morrisville State College, Morrisville, N.Y. on October 25. She also planned a visit to Brown's farm and grave in Lake Placid, N.Y.
     In New York City on October 22nd, Mecoy and her husband were welcomed at a luncheon organized by author Louis DeCaro Jr. and leading John Brown authorities. DeCaro is the author of two biographies of John Brown, “Fire from the Midst of You”: A Religious Life of John Brown (NYU Press, 2002) and John Brown-The Cost of Freedom (International Publishers, 2007), and a collection of essays, John Brown Remembered (Lulu, 2009). Others who greeted Mrs. Mecoy were William Loren Katz, author of Black Indians among his forty books on African American and Native American history; Larry Lawrence, founder and chairman of the “John Brown Society,” which celebrates the legacy of Brown's armed battle against slavery and racism; and Norman Marshall, actor and playwright, famous for his portrayal of the fiery abolitionist in his acclaimed one-man play, John Brown: Trumpet of Freedom.
     In 1859 John Brown led a small army of daring Black and white men to seize the federal armory at Harper's Ferry, [West] Virginia. They then planned to find a headquarters in the mountains, arm nearby enslaved people and gradually destabilize the slave system throughout the South. At sixteen-years-old, Alice Mecoy did not know any of this--or that she was a direct descendant of the famous abolitionist. It was a family secret that her grandmother, Beatrice Cook Keesey, suddenly revealed to her. In her blog, Alice -- now a married woman and mother of two grown sons -- tells how her grandmother--who herself was John Brown's granddaughter--revealed a long-suppressed family story.
     The Keeseys are directly related to Brown through the abolitionist's daughter Anne (“Annie”), who died in 1926 at the age of eighty-three. Annie was sixteen-years-old in 1859 when her father and brothers tried to capture Harper's Ferry. Young Annie supported his efforts by acting as his cook and housekeeper at Brown's headquarters in Maryland in the summer and early fall of 1859. During the Civil War, Anne and her siblings migrated westward with their widowed mother and settled in California. As she grew older, Annie deeply resented how many history books and most of white society called her father a criminal and outlaw.
     After the decline of Reconstruction, many white writers in the North and South disdained Brown's willingness as a white man to die in fighting to free African Americans. Increasingly it was concluded that he suffered from insanity, favored anarchy, and was homicidal. Annie dealt with hurtful prejudice and hostility against her father by suppressing her family's relation to him. As one scholar wrote, Annie “shut the past away, even from her own thought, kept no picture of her father, or connected with the past, around her house, and had so little spoken with her children of the old days that they had not even known what Browns they were for many years.”
     Finally in the 1970s, when teenage Alice Keesey heard her grandmother “admit” to being a direct descendant of John Brown, she welcomed this dramatic break in the family's story with a measure of youthful interest. But when she told her history teacher of her family connection to Brown, she responded: “'You mean that crazy guy that was hung for treason?' I stopped telling people that I was related,” she recalls. Only after she relocated to Texas, married, reared two sons, and began to meet a stream of enthusiastic researchers of John Brown's heroic story did Alice pursue her ancestor. “I studied John Brown harder than I have ever studied anything before in my life. I mapped his travels, I made chronological charts of events in his life, I delved into his family and home life and I entered thousands of pieces of data into my family tree program.”
     In recent years, Alice has become the Brown family's living link to the past and an inspiration to John Brown scholars. Last May, she toured Brown's battle ground in Kansas, and was an honored guest at the premier performance of composer Kirke Mechem's “John Brown” at the Lyric Opera of Kansas City. And she is still on Brown's trail.
     At the New York luncheon she swapped stories with the John Brown scholars that celebrated this white man who fought and died to end slavery. Though Brown was hanged for treason against Virginia, only eighteeen months later Union soldiers were marching into battle singing of John Brown, “his truth goes marching on.” Indeed, more than 200,000 Black Union soldiers took part in the war that finally ended slavery--a task that Brown and his small band first undertook in 1859.
     More than just exploring her family's long genealogy, she is on a tireless quest to rediscover his complete life and legacy. Without denial or apology, the great-great-great granddaughter of John Brown is also marching on.