Sandra Weber’s important “John Brown in New York” “focuses on the home front (rather than battlefields) and provides a new perspective on John Brown’s inner self, moral fiber and principles.”

The very beautiful John Brown Farm in North Elba, a New York State Historic site, has become a vibrant location with educational programs, memorials and concerts, often presented by the indefatigable Martha Swan of John Brown Lives!. We learn so much while visiting the farm that sometimes an obvious question — what brought John Brown to live and be buried here? — is unasked.

Gerrit Smith prompted John Brown to move from Massachusetts to the hill near Lake Placid. In 1846, Smith, a rich abolitionist from Peterboro, New York, had a plan: grant 120,000 acres to Black men to become owners and farmers of 40- acre plots in the North Country. By becoming landowners, the new farmers could also secure the right to vote.

Of course, Smith’s dream of livelihoods and voting rights for black men faced difficulties. Many of the grantees had not farmed before, and the area itself is not the easiest agricultural landscape. John Brown’s efforts to help the new settlers who took advantage of Smith’s land grants are wonderfully explored in the aptly titled chapter “A Land of Promise and Hard Toil.”

In 1848, Brown traveled to the Adirondacks. Weber writes that he and his wife, Mary, stopped at Whitehall, and Brown then took a boat to Westport and a wagon to the area west of Keene. In May of the next year, the Brown family moved to North Elba, and in November bought the lot from Gerrit Smith where Brown will be buried in 1859 after his execution for the Harper’s Ferry raid.

Sandra Weber does more than locate John Brown geographically. She places him and his abolitionist views in the heated context of the times, with Frederick Douglass and Henry David Thoreau, for example. But Weber also searched local contemporary newspapers, and so we learn that the editor of the Elizabethtown Post wrote that freeing slaves might lead to the “annihilation of both races … produce anarchy and hatred … and dissolve the Union.”

This is a valuable addition to the many volumes about the famous abolitionist buried in the Adirondacks. Weber’s research is thorough, her bibliography and timeline welcome. In “John Brown in … the Adirondack Landscape,” Sandra Weber makes a good case that for us who live in the shadow of the Adirondacks, this complicated abolitionist is ours.