' In the year mentioned the family were
living at Torrington, Connecticut, whence they shortly removed to
Ohio, then the haunt of the Red Indian. They were of the pioneer
farming class, which has supplied so many of the shapers of
American history. The one great honour in their pedigree was
that they descended from a man of the MAYFLOWER--Peter Brown, a
working carpenter who belonged to that famous ship's company. We
might say, indeed, that the story of John Brown flows from the
events of 1620, the year of the MAYFLOWER. Two landings on the
American coast that year were destined to be memorable. In
August a Dutch vessel disembarked the first cargo of imported
slaves--twenty of them; and that day Slavery struck deep root in
the new land. And in November of that same year the MAYFLOWER,
with her very different cargo of brave freemen, dropped anchor in
Cape Cod Bay. The stream of ill results from that first landing
and the stream of Puritan blood, generous in its passion for
liberty, that flowed unimpoverished from Peter Brown through
generations of sturdy ancestors--these are the streams destined
to meet turbulently and to supply us with our story. Owen Brown,
the father of John, thus testifies to his own fidelity to the
tradition of liberty.
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