Rensselaer Gazette, Volume 3, Number 28, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 2 November 1859 — Characteristics of Ossawatomie Brown. [ARTICLE]

Characteristics of Ossawatomie Brown.

The Chicago Press and Tribune of last week says: i “In person Brown is about five feet eight inches in bight. He has short gray hair and diversities his appearance with iron gray whiskers and moustache to suit the dangerous exigencies of his situation. His appearance is that of intense peacefulness, combined with hopeless verdancy. To the casual observer, he is the most inoffensive man that could be met with in a day's} ride through Arcadia. His rural exterior bus enabled him to pass unscathed through scores ’ of perils, where his life would have paid the I forfeit of his discovery. It is believed by many of those who knew him in Kansas that the butchery of his son Frederick made him a monomaniac on the subject of slavery, and that he had made ti vow to wreak a great revenge on the system of society which had wrought so deep ti wrong on him. But Brown himself repudiated this idea, con- : tending that revenge was no part of his composition, and claiming to be guided strictly by the principles of Holy Writ, lie seems to have been laboring under a religious hallucination to the effect that he was the appointed instrument of the Almighty for putting an end to human slavery. What time he and his handful ot men in Kansas were | not marching or fighting, they were praying j and singing psalms—Brown himself passing many hours wrestling in secret prayer. His evident hallucination caused all the clear-headed men in Kansas to avoid him or ' have as little as possible to do with him. The same feeling made him dreaded by the Missourians as a supernatural being. His name inspired the same terror on the border, as the “Nick of the Woods”'among the Indians of Kentucky, or that of the Cid among the Moorish hordes of Spain. It was a name to fright children to bed with. No further evidence of his insanity could be re- \ quired by a commission de lu'natico than the ' late hair-brained movement at Harper’s Fur- j ry—an act which Win. Lloyd Garrison or Wendell Phillips would pronounce a sinful I waste of human life. These men may ap- j plaud the moral principle which led Brown j into the fatal emule, but no man in his j senses can say that it is not the most crazy development which the slave history of this country affords. The blind insurrection on the Cumberland River some three years ago becomes a well-matured conspiracy compared with this.”