Don't worry--they're facsimiles, not the real thing. Tons of these things--pikes, real ones--still exist because John Brown, abolitionist John Brown, ordered 900 of them, 900 pikes. They were intended to be an instrument of war, a formidable weapon. Brown somehow assumed that if he'd covertly spread them around among Southern slave families, pikes could become a bloody defense against weapons slave-holders created for subjugation. Why pretty it up with a word like subjugation?--a pike, Brown thought, would mitigate the whips, the leg-irons, the chains of slavery, the pure evil of slavery.
Charles Blair, a Connecticut forge master, told John Brown he could turn out a bunch for a dollar a pike. Brown, historians say, didn't hesitate for a minute. At a buck a shot he must have smelled a bargain. That he didn't have the money was not a consideration for him; he was, after all, called by Creator of Heaven and Earth to free the slaves, an dangerous role to be sure, but considering the source of his inspiration, no particular burden. "Make me 900," Brown must have said, which explains why, today, the honest-to-goodness John Brown pikes aren't exactly rare. Exactly how many of the 900 he ordered are still around, I don't know; but unlike Brown himself, his pikes never quite made it to war.
Because there was wholesale men on the battlefield, because there were a score of casualties and some death, because the battle pitted partisans from both sides of the issue of slavery, what happened at Black Jack, Kansas, in 1856 is often considered the very first battle of the Civil War, the Civil War. The pro-slavery "border ruffians" were led by Charles Pate, who brought his Bowie knife to the action and gave it up, in a gentlemanly fashion, to John Brown, once the smoke cleared.
Brown liked it, a battle trophy, but he wasn't alone. The Bowie knife, a title whose specifics varied widely back then and still do. The Bowie knife got its name from Jim Bowie, one of those Davy-Crockett types whose name and regard and big knife grew into legend. A Bowie knife, even back then, was simply a BIG knife--a double-edged, cross hilted, clip-pointed weapon, a real toad-stabber you wore at your side or slid from your boot. For a time in American history, the Bowie knife was so popular that Southern gentlemen, even some from the U. S. House and Senate, made sure there was one in their boots, if you can imagine.
They were menacing things, their horror created by their immensity. Charles Pate's Bowie ended up in the hands of John Brown. Having one apparently put him in mind of what might be done on Southern plantations should he get them, wooden handled, to slave families. Even though swords as weapons of war had lost their importance by the early 19th century, Brown was greatly taken by the idea of pikes slicing up slave-holders, creating bloody scenes that would certainly hurry along the whole movement to free the slaves.
"How about this?" he must have said to himself. "How about we put them on six-foot wooden poles?" Mr. Charles Blair must have said he could do that, and did. Hence, the John Brown pikes, many of them in museums yet today.
You may have noticed the white whale behind the image of John Brown above. It's hard not to think of Melville's Captain Ahab as a Brown-type figure, someone so obsessed with his mission as to be totally unable to separate himself from the urgency. Monomania, some call it. Then again, some say it was insanity.
But Brown wouldn't let anyone call what went down at Harpers Ferry insanity. At his trial, some abolitionists wanted him to plead that way and thereby save himself from the noose. He refused. To him, his God-ordained, moral crusade was anything but insane. And he was hanged for it.
Credit him or bury him with this: he put everything, even his family, even his children, on the line for work he believed the Lord of heaven and earth called him personally to, to free the slaves.
Paragon of virtue or hideous, insane zealot, John Brown may be a character in American history whose profile will never, ever fade into obscurity.
There's still a lot of pikes around.
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