John Brown’s Rifle

John Brown’s Gun: A Story of Abolitionist Movement in the Great-Lakes Region

On November 21, 1861, as the American Civil War began, Brigadier General James Wolfe Ripley ordered 2,500 units of the Burnside Marine Carbine rifle to arm the Union troops. [1] The Burnside Marine Carbine rifle was designed by Ambrose Burnside in 1855 and constructed in Providence, Rhode Island, by the Burnside Rifle Company.  The gun consisted of a cast steel barrel and wooden stock and it marked a significant leap in gun design, becoming  the third most popular carbine during the Civil War.[2] However, the gun model’s emancipatory legacy had begun three years earlier, in 1858, when U.S. abolitionist John Brown (1800-1859) traveled to Chatham with his own Burnside rifle as part of his tour through Canada to muster support for the abolition of slavery.

John Brown was a radical American abolitionist known for leading the Bloody Kansas conflict in the 1850s. The Bloody Kansas conflict was a prolonged series of guerrilla engagements to determine whether or not Kansas, upon gaining statehood, would prohibit slavery. However, John Brown’s abolitionist activity expanded beyond the borders of Kansas, and even the borders of the United States.

On May 8^th, 1858, Brown held a secret meeting in Chatham to discuss his plans to establish a revolutionary nation of freed slaves in the Appalachian Mountains, all of whom would have complete freedom and equality. Brown unveiled a provisional constitution for this republic, which he had written three months earlier while a guest in Frederick Douglass’s Rochester, New York home.[3] Brown’s constitution comprised 48 articles outlining the governance of this proposed nation. At the convention, Brown also shared his plan to raid the United States’ federal armoury in Harpers Ferry, Virginia. Brown wanted to steal guns to arm a revolt against the South, thereby destroying the institution of slavery and establishing his new nation.

Two goals of Brown’s tour through the Northern states and Canada were recruiting free Black men to serve as soldiers in his raid and raising funds. Brown’s plan was shrouded in secrecy since it was highly treasonous. Attendees at his Chatham meeting all swore an oath not to share any information.

One attendee of the Provisional Constitutional Convention in Chatham was James Monroe Jones (1821-1906), a local businessman and expert gunsmith. “Gunsmith Jones,” as he was known in the Chatham community, was in fact the only Black gunsmith in all of pre-Confederation Canada. Jones signed Brown’s provisional constitution but, like the vast majority of signatories, did not join Brown on his mission to Virginia over fear of leaving his life in Canada and confronting the United States military.

At the end of the convention, Jones loaned Brown $75 and Brown surrendered his Burnside Marine Carbine rifle as collateral. Judging from the cost of the units of this model that Brigadier General Ripley ordered in 1861, such a gun when brand-new was worth about $38.50, including bullet moulds and additional equipment for maintenance. A used gun would have been worth considerably less. As an expert gunsmith, James Monroe Jones would have understood the gun’s value.

It is possible that Jones’ generous loan, given the actual value of the collateral Brown offered him, was more of a donation to Brown’s cause. Having attended Brown’s convention, Jones would have recognised that Brown needed the money for his political activities. Jones’ loan made him a political agent of Brown’s initiative in his own right through his financial support of Brown.

To understand James Monroe Jones, historians need to understand him beyond his life as a Black man in Canada, by placing him in a historical context of the Great-Lake region. James Monroe Jones was born into slavery in North Carolina in 1821.[4] His father Allen spent years working evenings and nights to save enough money to purchase his own and his family’s freedom, but then the slaveholder changed the price as his sons were now able-bodied young men. As a result, Allen had to work even more years, effectively buying his family’s freedom twice. James Monroe Jones’ politicization is contextualized by his and his family’s experience of enslavement and the recent family history of unfair treatment by their previous slaveholder. The exploitation of Jones’ family likely inspired him to assist Brown’s effort.

After finally purchasing their freedom, the Joneses moved North to Ohio where James and three of his brothers attended Oberlin College, the first U.S. institution to accept Black students.[5] In 1849, James graduated with a Bachelor of Science degree. At this point, James had already distinguished himself for his intellect, becoming the fourth African American to attain the Bachelor of Science degree at Oberlin. He then moved across the border to southwestern Ontario and married Emily Francis, a woman from Howard Township in Kent County. In 1852, the couple moved to Chatham, then a bustling abolitionist community and underground railroad terminus near the Canada-United States border. In 1855 and 1857, Jones and Emily had two daughters whom they named Anna and Sophia.[6]

Considering Jones’ position as a business owner and new father in 1858, it would make sense that he did not join John Brown in his raid on Harpers Ferry. Surprisingly few people joined Brown on his raid. On October 16, 1859, when Brown seized the federal armoury, his party consisted of only twenty-two men, of whom only five were Black. [7] Brown’s failure to recruit more men suggests that many, like Frederick Douglass, regarded Brown’s raid as a suicide mission.

Only one of the twenty-two men, Osborne Perry Anderson, was from Chatham. He was also the only surviving African American member of the raid; he managed to evade capture and return to Chatham. In 1861, he wrote an account of the raid, A Voice from Harper’s Ferry, which was published by local teacher, author and editor Mary Ann Shadd Cary, whose brother Isaac had hosted John Brown’s secret convention inside his Chatham home in 1858.[8] Following the publication of his memoir, Anderson continued his abolitionist work by fighting for the Union Army during the Civil War.

Anderson had been lucky. Several other members of the party, including John Brown himself, were tried and hanged following the unsuccessful raid of Harpers Ferry,. As a result, John Brown’s loan was never repaid, and his gun never retrieved from Jones.

In many ways, John Brown’s gun is representative both of the community of abolitionists living along the Canada-United States border and of the cross-border movement of ideas and people in the Great-Lakes region.[9] Not only did the gun move between the two countries; it also took part in one of the many financial exchanges that supported the abolitionist movement. While the gun ended up remaining in Canada after Brown’s death, it was intended to be returned both to John Brown and the United States. This gun’s bidirectional movement is mirrored in the bi-directional lives of many other abolitionists, such as John Brown, James Monroe Jones, Mary Ann Shadd Cary, and Osborne Perry Anderson.

Often, Canada is depicted as a “promised land” and Chatham, in particular, seen as a “Black Mecca,” but this uni-directional narrative of history is not necessarily accurate.[10] As an underground railroad terminus, Chatham was populated by many self-emancipated peoples. Additionally, after the United States passed the Fugitive Slave Act in 1850, many free African Americans fled the United States for Canada fearing an increasingly racially hostile environment and unjust persecution. For example, Mary Ann Shadd Cary emigrated from Delaware in 1851. However, while Upper Canada was legislatively safer for Black people because of the 1793 antislavery laws, it was not free of anti-Black racism. According to William P. Newman, a formerly enslaved Baptist minister educated at Oberlin college in Ohio who settled in Chatham until 1859, “colored people can scarcely walk the streets, in very many parts of Canada, without being insulted and abused by those having a fairer skin than themselves.”[11] As a result, when legal protections for Black people were enhanced in the United States or when U.S.-based political movements needed support, people frequently left Canada. Just as the Fugitive Slave Act had brought people to Canada, the end of the Civil War and the beginning of the Reconstruction period brought many Black people back to the United States in search of their relatives and keen to return to their communities. For example, Mary Ann Shadd Cary returned to the United States in the early 1860s to support the Union Army with its recruitment. Similarly, some of James Monroe Jones’ children went to the U.S. to study: his daughter Anna went to Ohio to attend Oberlin College and in 1885, his daughter Sophia became the first Black woman to graduate from the University of Michigan’s medical school.[12] Since the social environments of the Northern states and Canada both had anti-Black racism, changes in legislation and opportunity where the primary motivators for temporary movement.

James Monroe Jones and his family are representative of a class of highly educated and skilled Black people who confronted anti-Black stereotypes. Jones was an exceptionally skilled gunsmith. In 1859, Jones was awarded a medal at the Montreal Manufacturing and Trade Fair for a pair of derringers he had made. Following this honour, Jones’ constructed a pair of derringer pistols to gift the Prince of Wales, the future King Edward VII, on his 1860 visit to Canada. The Prince, who was scheduled to arrive in Chatham to accept the gift, left without meeting Jones or receiving the gift after being informed that Jones was Black.[13] In 1864, Jones won First Prize for the best assortment of firearms at the Provincial Exhibition. According to James Gooding, publisher of the Canadian Journal of Arms Collecting, Jones was “one of six Canadian gunsmiths who had the skill…to be compared with the best in the world.”[14]

In one sense, the story of John Brown’s gun is the simple story of an item owned by John Brown and given as collateral to James Monroe Jones. However, when looked at the gun as an artifact representing the movement of goods and ideas along the US-Canada border, the story of the firearm becomes more complicated. The loan was intended to aid Brown’s violent abolitionist mission and, as a result, should be seen not solely as a loan from a small businessman, but as financial support from Jones as a free political agent.

---

[1] Purchase of arms, House Documents, 1861, P. 140.

[2] Smithsonian Institution. “Burnside Carbine.” Smithsonian Institution. Accessed March 11, 2022. http://www.civilwar.si.edu/weapons_burnside.html.

[3] Louis A. DeCaro, “Fire from the Midst of You” a Religious Life of John Brown, (New York, NY: New York University Press, 2002) 244.

John Brown, “Provisional Constitution and Ordinances for the People of the United States” 1858; Records of the Adjutant General’s Office, Record Group 94. Online Version, https://www.docsteach.org/documents/document/provisional-constitution-and-ordinances-for-the-people-of-the-united-states-written-by-john-brown.

[4] Don Robinet, “’Gunsmith’ Jones Saw Opportunity in Chatham.” Chatham-Kent This Week, February 13, 2014. https://www.chathamthisweek.com/2014/02/13/gunsmith-jones-saw-opportunity-in-chatham.

[5] Karen Paton-Evans, “Gunsmith James Jones.” The Miller Times. Miller & Miller Actions LTD., September 24, 2021. https://millerandmillerauctions.squarespace.com/stories/2021/9/23/james-jones-gunsmith.

[6] Oberlin College Archives. “Anna H. Jones.” Oberlin College Archives. Oberlin College. Accessed March 5, 2022. https://ohio5.contentdm.oclc.org/digital/collection/photos/id/360.

[7] Zoe Trodd and John Stauffer, Meteor of War: The John Brown Story. (Maplecrest, NY: Brandywine Press, 2005).

[8] The apostrophe is incorrect but present in the publication. National Parks Service. “Aboard the Underground Railroad: Mary Ann Shadd Cary House.” National Parks Service. U.S. Department of the Interior, n.d.. https://www.nps.gov/nr/travel/underground/dc2.htm.

[9] Nina Reid-Maroney, “Possibilities for African Canadian Intellectual History: The Case of 19th‐century Upper Canada/Canada West.” History Compass, vol. 15, no. 12, 2017.

[10] Nina Reid-Maroney, “History and Historiography in the ‘Promised Land’”, in Reid-Maroney, Handel Kashope Wright, Boulou Ébanda de B’béri, eds.  The Promised Land: History and Historiography of the Black Experience in Chatham-Kent’s Settlements and Beyond. (Toronto, Canada: University of Toronto Press, 2014).

[11] Carmen Poole, “Conspicuous Peripheries: Black Identity, Memory, and Community in Chatham, ON, 1860–1980.” Dissertation, ProQuest Dissertations Publishing, 2015. 39.

[12] Don Robinet, “’Gunsmith’ Jones Saw Opportunity in Chatham.” Chatham-Kent This Week. Chatham-Kent This Week, February 13, 2014. https://www.chathamthisweek.com/2014/02/13/gunsmith-jones-saw-opportunity-in-chatham; Nina Reid-Maroney, “African Canadian Women and New World Diaspora, Circa 1865.” Canadian Woman Studies, vol. 23, no. 2, Canadian Woman Studies, 2004, 94.

[13] F Riehl, “One of the Best Old World Gunsmiths, You’ve Never Heard Of.” AmmoLand.com. AmmoLand Shoot Sports News, January 4, 2019. https://www.ammoland.com/2018/12/gunsmith-james-monroe-gunsmith-jones/#axzz7Nq8kEp3d.

[14] Karen Paton-Evans, “Gunsmith James Jones.” The Miller Times. Miller & Miller Actions LTD., September 24, 2021. https://millerandmillerauctions.squarespace.com/stories/2021/9/23/james-jones-gunsmith.

Bibliography

Anderson, Osborne P. A Voice from Harper’s Ferry: A Narrative of Events at Harper’s Ferry. Chatham, Ontario: The Liberator, 1861. https://docs.google.com/viewerng/viewer?url=https://omeka.coloredconventions.org/files/original/9405e1eb44a30ef0cb2d983e0aed2173.pdf

Bonhams . “A Very Rare Silver-and-Gold-Mounted Philadelphia-Style Percussion Derringer by James Monroe Jones.” Bonhams, November 10, 2014. https://www.bonhams.com/auctions/21653/lot/1013/?category=list.

Brown, John, “Provisional Constitution and Ordinances for the People of the United States” 1858; Records of the Adjutant General’s Office, Record Group 94. Online Version, https://www.docsteach.org/documents/document/provisional-constitution-and-ordinances-for-the-people-of-the-united-states-written-by-john-brown.

Comminey, Shawn C. “National Black Conventions and the Quest for African American Freedom and Progress, 1847-1867.” International Social Science Review 91, no. 1 (2015): 1–18.

DeCaro, Louis A. “Fire from the Midst of You” a Religious Life of John Brown. New York, NY: New York University Press, 2002.

Horwitz, Tony. Midnight Rising: John Brown and the Raid That Sparked the Civil War. New York, NY: Henry Holt and Company, 2011.

National Parks Service. “Aboard the Underground Railroad: Mary Ann Shadd Cary House.” National Parks Service. U.S. Department of the Interior, n.d.. https://www.nps.gov/nr/travel/underground/dc2.htm.

Oberlin College Archives. “Anna H. Jones.” Oberlin College Archives. Oberlin College. Accessed March 5, 2022. https://ohio5.contentdm.oclc.org/digital/collection/photos/id/360.

Paton-Evans, Karen. “Gunsmith James Jones.” The Miller Times. Miller & Miller Actions LTD., September 24, 2021. https://millerandmillerauctions.squarespace.com/stories/2021/9/23/james-jones-gunsmith.

Paul, Heike. “Out of Chatham: Abolitionism on the Canadian Frontier.” Atlantic Studies 8, no. 2 (2011): 165–88.

Poole, Carmen. “Conspicuous Peripheries: Black Identity, Memory, and Community in Chatham, ON, 1860–1980.” Dissertation, ProQuest Dissertations Publishing, 2015.

Prince, Shannon. Buxton National Historic Site & Museum. Accessed November 23, 2021. http://www.buxtonmuseum.com/.

Reid-Maroney, Nina, Handel Kashope Wright, Boulou Ébanda de B’béri, and Afua Cooper. The Promised Land: History and Historiography of the Black Experience in Chatham-Kent’s Settlements and Beyond. Toronto, Canada: University of Toronto Press, 2014.

Riehl, F. “One of the Best Old World Gunsmiths, You’ve Never Heard Of.” AmmoLand.com. AmmoLand Shoot Sports News, January 4, 2019. https://www.ammoland.com/2018/12/gunsmith-james-monroe-gunsmith-jones/#axzz7Nq8kEp3d.

Robinet, Don. “’Gunsmith’ Jones Saw Opportunity in Chatham.” Chatham-Kent This Week. Chatham-Kent This Week, February 13, 2014. https://www.chathamthisweek.com/2014/02/13/gunsmith-jones-saw-opportunity-in-chatham.

Simser, Guy. “The Prince & The Pistols.” Canada’s History, February 6, 2018. https://www.canadashistory.ca/explore/politics-law/the-prince-the-pistols.

Smithsonian Institution. “Burnside Carbine.” Smithsonian Institution. Accessed March 11, 2022. http://www.civilwar.si.edu/weapons_burnside.html.

Trodd, Zoe and John Stauffer. Meteor of War: The John Brown Story. Maplecrest, NY: Brandywine Press, 2005.

Tsai, Robert L. “John Brown’s Constitution.” Boston College Law Review 51 (January 28, 2010): 151–207.

United States Congress. House Documents, Otherwise Published as Executive Documents: 13th Congress, 2d Session-49th Congress, 1st Session. 5. Vol. 5. Part 1. Washington, DC: United States Congress, 1862. Online Version, https://books.google.ca/books?id=NJoFAAAAQAAJ&pg=PA140&redir_esc=y#v=onepage&q&f=false.