James Redpath, The Public Life of Captain John Brown

[71] And they have no money. When I say this I do not merely mean that they have no superfluous cash to go shopping with, but I mean almost literally that they have none. For nearly a whole winter, Mrs. Brown said, they had no money with which to pay postage, except a tiny treasury which the younger girls had earned for that express object, during the previous summer, by picking berries for a neighbor three miles off.

The reason of these privations simply was, that it cost money to live in Kansas in “ adherence to the cause of freedom,” (see the tombstone inscription again,) but not so much to live at North Elba; and therefore the women must stint themselves that the men might continue their Kansas work. But when the father came upon his visits, he never came empty-handed, but brought a little money, some plain household stores, flour, sugar, rice, salt fish; tea and coffee they do not use. But what their standard of expense is may be seen from the fact that Mrs. Brown seemed to speak as if her youngest widowed daughter were not totally and absolutely destitute, because her husband had left a property of five sheep, which would belong to her. These sheep, I found on inquiry, were worth, at that place and season, two dollars apiece: a child of sixteen, left a widow in the world, with an estate amounting to ten dollars! The immediate financial anxieties of Mrs. Brown herself seemed chiefly to relate to a certain formidable tax bill, due at New Year's time; if they could only weather that, all was clear for the immediate future. How much was it, I asked, rather surprised that that wild country should produce a high rate of taxation. It was from eight to ten dollars, she gravely said; and she had put by ten dollars for the purpose, but had had occasion to lend most of it to a poor black woman, with no great hope of repayment. And one of the first things done by her husband, on recovering his money in Virginia, was to send her, through me, fifteen dollars, to make sure of that tax bill.

I see, on looking back, how bare and inexpressive this hasty narrative is; but I could not bear to suffer such a privilege as this visit to pass away unrecorded. I spent but one night at the house, and drove away with Mrs. Brown, in the early frosty morning, from that breezy mountain home, which her husband loved (as one of them told me) “because he seemed to think there was something romantic in that kind of scenery.” There was, indeed, always a sort of thrill in John Brown's voice when he spoke of mountains. I never shall forget the quiet way in which he once told me that “ God had established the Alleghany Mountains from the foundation of the world that they might one day be a refuge for fugitive slaves.” I did not then know that his own home was among the Adirondacks.