Whenever, I'm at the Quadrangle, I check out the statue. My brother convinced me: The bushy eyebrows, the chiseled features and the dominant nose belong to John Brown.
CHICOPEE — In my column on Nov. 13, I wrote about the family of Deacon Samuel Chapin. The Chapins were the original settlers of Chicopee. I wrote that Deacon Chapin's memory is forever green.
"In 1882, sculptor Augustus Saint-Gaudens created the statue of 'The Puritan,' which is a purely imaginary figure of Chapin." The statue was donated to Springfield by Chester W. Chapin, of Chicopee, a wealthy descendant of the deacon.
My brother Richard is a retired mechanical engineer who lives in Salem. He and his wife, Pam, live on Hamilton Street in the city's National Historic District. Both are active in community affairs - Pam at Hamilton Hall, and Dick as a long time trustee and president of the Salem Athenaeum.
Whenever we get together, the chief topics are usually the history of Chicopee and Richard's extraordinary knowledge of his adopted hometown on the North Shore.
He quickly pointed out that my "purely imaginary" observation about the statue was incorrect.
The statue depicts a resolute, stalwart figure who is carrying a staff, and is dressed in a Puritan costume, with his head and shoulders directed front, but his eyes look down. The right arm is extended, with the hand grasping the head of his staff, and the left arm is flexed with the hand supporting a book that is probably the Bible.
My brother said that during a visit to the Saint-Gaudens National Historic Site in Cornish, N.H., he was told that a portrait of Chester W. Chapin served as the model for the head of the figure of his ancestor.
The figure was modeled from life, with the Chapin family participating in the design of the costume from their research of 17th-century woodblock prints. A professional model named Van Ortzen posed for the figure in costume.
That's the basic history of the statue, but there may be more to "The Puritan's" identity.
My brother lent me a copy of David S. Reynolds' 2005 book, "John Brown Abolitionist." The book is considered the definitive biography of a man whom Reynolds constantly refers to as the "The Puritan."
Sir Author Evans, author of "The American Century," writes that "David Reynolds dazzlingly rescues John Brown from misreadings in American history. Reynolds' scholarly, but vivid life is truly thrilling in the way it peels away the over painting of 150 years to reveal the old-style Puritan whose soul went marching on into the Civil War and the end of slavery."
John Brown's paternal ancestry goes back to 1620. Genealogists believe he was descended from the carpenter Peter Brown, who arrived in America on the Mayflower.
Augustus Saint-Gaudens in his Paris studio in 1898 with the cast for his statue, "The Puritan," behind him. We know that his father, Owen Brown, was a pious Calvinist, who was an abolitionist long before abolitionist organizations existed. John Brown was born on May 9, 1800, in Torrington, Conn.
Both John Brown's friends and enemies considered him a dyed-in-the-wool Puritan. They were right. Reynolds wrote "that he was a Calvinist who admired the works of Jonathan Edwards. He was proud of his family's roots in New England Puritanism. He patterned himself after Puritan warrior Oliver Cromwell," who led the Puritan forces in England's civil war in the 17th century.
Like Cromwell before him, Brown came to have a notably divided reputation. Some saw him as a bloodthirsty terrorist, while others considered him a saintly liberator.
Like Cromwell, he was both. John Brown was a terrorist because of his own interpretation of Calvinism. Far from enforcing tame conformity, Puritanism was a form of militant individualism which carried out warfare against institutions. Brown believed he could single-handedly free America's 4 million slaves, a quest that ended with the ill-fated raid on the federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry in 1859.
On Dec. 2, 1859, in Charles Town, Va., "Old Brown" was executed for his role in the raid. The state of Virginia called Brown's raid treason for planning and carrying out a violent slave rebellion. But in Reynolds' biography, Brown was the man who killed slavery, sparked the Civil War and planted the seeds of civil rights.
When the Civil War ended, the future of African-Americans looked bright, thanks to the Fifteenth Amendment of the Constitution and increasing political participation during the later 1860s and early 1870s. But Reconstruction ended in 1876, starting eight decades of segregation and violence against blacks.
It is not surprising that the reputation of the white man who died for the cause of racial equality would be a target of revisionist historians. Leading white historians — many of whom sympathized with the south — claimed that John Brown was criminally insane. The results were an endless series of negative portraits of the man between 1880 and 1950.
Although Brown's legacy remained safe in the intellectual communities of New England, the nation's newspapers and the man in the street weren't interested in civil liberties.
Augustus Saint-Gaudens was an admirer of the violent abolitionist. "The Puritan," was unveiled on Nov. 24, 1887, in Springfield's Stearns Square. Twelve years later it was moved to Merrick Park at Chestnut and State Streets adjacent to the Quadrangle.
For years, experts have debated the possibility that Saint-Gaudens' image of one of Springfield's Founding Fathers was in fact a muted tribute to the 19th-century Puritan who changed America forever.
Whenever, I'm at the Quadrangle, I check out the statue. My brother convinced me: The bushy eyebrows, the chiseled features and the dominant nose belong to John Brown.
Stephen R. Jendrysik, a retired history teacher, is Chicopee city historian, a member of the Chicopee Historical Society's board of directors and president of the Edward Bellamy Memorial Association.